An Enemy of the People @Circle in the Square Theatre

May 14

Adapted and reconceptualized by couple Amy Herzog (playwright) and Sam Gold (theater director), Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s classic 1882 play is a visceral, emotional and honest look at how society deals with politically inconvenient truths and community pressure. The play concerns Dr. Thomas Stockmann (Jeremy Strong), a widowed physician who has moved back to his hometown with his daughter Petra (Victoria Pedretti) as appointed medical director of the new Baths which are set to open in warmer weather as a booming business for the town. After discovering through secretly carried out tests that the water supply for the baths is polluted by the runoff from local tanneries and is teaming with bacteria, he feels a duty to public safety and his hometown to inform before it’s too late. When he notifies the local newspaper, its editor Hovstad and local printer Aslaksen who are representative of the town’s middle class and majority of voters, initially appreciate the doctor’s noble discovery and laude him a local hero before eagerly agreeing to publish the truth in The People’s Messenger. However, when his brother Peter Stockmann (Michael Imperioli), the Mayor and Chairman of the Baths, gets wind of the news he is enraged with his brother for not consulting him first and seeks to keep this information suppressed.

He as well as stockholders would inevitably be blamed for the oversight, as well as the exorbitant cost and time it would take to repair and restore. Though initially supportive of Dr. Stockmann’s urgency to inform the town about the upcoming health crisis, the Mayor quickly turns Hovstad and Aslaksen against the doctor when he threatens that the town will have to pay to fix the mistakes of the baths’ design through taxes. It will take at least three years to change the water supply too, during which time baths will have to be shut down, completely destroying what was set to be prosperous enterprise for the town. In that moment, the doctor turned whistleblower goes from hero to pariah, deemed an “enemy of the people” for his truth. Strong and Imperioli (also in his Broadway debut) are well-matched. Their flashes of youthful brotherly antagonism are quite fun, giving the play some solid laughs.

Several changes were made to the original play, modernizing the language, removing characters and reducing others to a mention, toning down Dr. Stockmann’s manic-depressive episodes, and most notably combining key characters Katherine and Petra into one. Petra’s character comes across stronger this way, a progressive thinker willing to defend her father while still trapped in her limited choices. This adaptation resonates today, since it reminds us of the nature of people and how they often disregard the common good for their own welfare. Individualism, self-interest, and mob mentality have always been popular. Politics then as politics now.

Circle in the Square theater is a small, intimate venue with an oblong stage in the center, running the length and width of the floor. Interludes set the tone and mood, characters singing Norwegian songs with changes of scenes, props removed and pieces set directly before us. The subtle stage lighting enhanced by natural candles and lamps periodically lit and put out again, pulling the audience toward the stage, focusing your attention.

Midway through the play, a full bar is lowered from the ceiling inviting the audience to come to the stage for a free shot of Aquavit. Lines formed between aisles as the crowd mingled with the cast on stage and chatted amongst one another while listening to Norwegian folk music (sung beautifully by Katie Broad) — characters spontaneously weaving the action into an exciting town hall scene.

As the play suggests and the theater works to prove, the space between performers and spectators is quickly, assertively blurred. All of us are in this together, always, regardless of whether we choose to acknowledge the fact.

Herzog chose to deviate from Ibsen’s original iconic ending when Dr. Stockmann declares “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone” to a less individualistic message, conscious of the limits of personal strength and signaling hope for a future that blossoms after devastation. His last words echoing the present day we live in, “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued. We just have to imagine.”