An Ibsen for Our Time

It should come as no surprise that Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is having a moment, with new adaptations currently playing in both New York and London. Written over a hundred years ago, the play explores an issue of profound relevance, the potentially fatal consequences when townspeople willfully reject a scientific discovery that threatens their economic interests and entrenched beliefs.

Unlike the disappointingly generic Uncle Vanya also playing now in New York, this production of An Enemy of the People is clearly set in the past, in 19th century Norway, and, just as clearly, gives room for us to imagine its contemporary resonance. 

A few of the things I loved about this new production at Circle in the Square:

• Jeremy Strong, leaving behind his persona as anxious, power-driven Kendall Roy to become something closer to Anthony Fauci—a naïve doctor unable to imagine the political forces that will rise up against him.
• Michael Imperioli, no longer the impulsive Christopher Moltisanti of The Sopranos, but the savvy and menacing mayor of the town who engineers the doctor’s downfall.
• Amy Herzog’s brisk and thoughtful new adaptation.
• The atmospheric Norwegian folk music played by actors and extras during scene changes, as well as the wonderfully specific Norwegian set, complete with rosemaling and nearly a dozen oil lamps casting a cozy light.
• And not least, the bar that magically descends to the stage during the brief interval, along with an invitation to audience members to come join the cast for a shot of aquavit. 

The last play I attended at Circle in the Square was Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma. There was no bar at intermission, but we were invited down to the stage for chili and cornbread. Is this a thing at this venue? In Fish’s dark vision of the classic musical, we were welcomed into Oklahoma Territory and then made to feel complicit in the peculiarly American form of frontier justice that ends the show.

Being welcomed and fed is pleasant, of course, but sometimes we may find ourselves belonging to a community that does things we prefer not to think about. As with Oklahoma, our participation in the town meeting that declares Dr. Stockmann an enemy of the people also suggests our complicity in the reactionary violence that will suppress the town’s truthteller. The bar we have happily visited during the pause becomes the site of a shocking attack on Stockmann, an attack whose disturbingly realistic violence left me stunned.

Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann, abrasive and arrogant, is difficult to like. It’s no wonder he can’t convince the townspeople that the waters in their spa town are dangerously contaminated and that the baths, source of the town’s prosperity, must be shut down. When the political forces align against him and prevent him from reading his scientific paper at the town meeting—the town meeting that follows our drinks at the bar—he unleashes his contempt for those he sees as inferior to himself.

Herzog cuts some of this contemptuous speech, and the production could have made us a bit more uncomfortable if it had leaned more into this arrogant side of Stockmann. It might be salutary to recognize in ourselves, and not just in the reactionary townspeople, a resistance to siding with an unpleasant truthteller. Instead, Herzog has given us a gentler doctor, one we can more readily identify as the unmistakable good guy in this morality play.

Still, she has retained some of Stockmann’s arrogance. When the chairman of the public meeting tries to silence him, the doctor asserts his superiority over his ignorant fellow citizens. He never quite calls them a basket of deplorables, but he comes close as he makes clear his belief that political decisions should only be made by those with superior intelligence. He may be right in this case, but he is completely out of his depth when trying to convince those who are unwilling to cede to his expertise. 

He becomes, in fact, a completely believable avatar for our age. Does he not foreshadow a certain medical advisor to the President, a doctor of our own time some have considered an enemy of the people? The play feels so of the moment not just because it deals with a reluctance to put clean water over economic self-interest. It also shows us how our political discourse can be as irretrievably contaminated as our natural environment. 

As Stockmann’s life falls apart—he loses his medical practice, his freethinking daughter is fired from her job as a schoolteacher, their landlord asks them to leave—he contemplates fleeing the country. “In America, we won’t have to worry about things like this,” he tells his daughter, to rueful laughter from the audience.

But he eventually decides to remain and continue his battle. In Ibsen’s original, Stockmann expresses his defiance at the end, making the quasi-Nietzschean claim that “the strongest man is he who who stands most alone.” Herzog gives us a softer, less abrasive ending. Stockmann sits with his daughter and, in a voice with little conviction, tries to picture a better future: “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued. We just have to imagine…”

We in the audience, of course, are living in the future he is imagining. Not having yet found our way to an uncontaminated natural world, much less an uncontaminated political world, we leave the theater chastened and sobered. Herzog’s rewritten ending makes perfect, if melancholy, sense in our current times.