Two Emmy-winning generations of Peak HBO are sparring in a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People on Broadway. In this corner: Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy, Succession) as Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who had crusaded for putting potentially lucrative baths in his homey Norwegian town, and is now counseling against this given distressing scientific findings regarding typhoid-causing bacteria. And in this corner: His brother, Mayor Peter Stockmann (Christopher Moltisanti, The Sopranos), who can’t understand all the fuss about “invisible animals” in the water and seeks to turn the populace against him. It’s 1882…but if it all sounds a bit like 2020, with COVID “going away by Easter” and horse dewormer promoted as a cure by a certain former (and future?) president, well, that’s fine by adapter Amy Herzog and director Sam Gold, who want you to see the parallels.
This is a strength, and a weakness, of this revival. The last time Enemy was seen on Broadway, in 2012, was a sober, foursquare staging, with Boyd Gaines as the doctor and Richard Thomas as his brother. Collaborating for the first time Gold and Herzog, who are married, have made theirs a polite society cage match, performed in the round on a functional, unexciting period set close to the audience. The fireworks are meant to come from the language (brought up to date with a few “shits” and “fucks” and other colloquialisms) and the charged situation. This was Ibsen’s High Noon, or Jaws, with the doctor, left more or less alone except for his wife and daughter (the former eliminated from this production) when the lure of the windfall trumps common sense, has to square off against the town father (or, rather, brother) and the bastions of community who were initially allied to his cause. Besides Peter the obstacles include Thomas’ former father-in-law Morten Kiil (David Patrick Kelly), whose tannery is the source of the pollution, and the town elder Aslaksen (Thomas Jay Ryan), the old guard whose sympathies are at best fungible. Matters build to a brief pause in the production, during which audience members are allowed to come up, mingle with the actors, drink Aquavit, and stick around for a de facto hearing, with the house lights up high. Here Thomas must confront the bitter truth–faced with financial facts (concealing threats) by Peter, the two left-leaning journalists who were on the doctor’s side, Hovstad (Caleb Eberhardt) and Billing (Matthew August Jeffers), urge him to play ball and suspend his campaign. Things get ugly.
Gold’s gambit worked all too well in one preview performance, whose high-spirited time out was disrupted by a passionate environmental plea. Ask for audience participation, get audience participation, and I think this speaks well of the production’s rabble-rousing aims. Strong, so affecting as the vacillating, cringey, borderline-sane Kendall, is an excellent choice for the doctor, and is particularly good during the hearing–he seems to be reading the findings as if they were new to him, improvising straight from the heart. Entering the Sam Jaffe phase of his career Imperioli is a worthy opponent, wielding a velvet rather than an iron fist. Sweetening of a kind comes from streaming performer Victoria Pedretti, as Stockmann’s progressive-minded daughter Petra, and Alan Trong as a sympathetic ship captain. “In America we won’t have to worry about any of this,” the doctor counsels after his prospects are gutted and departure is considered.
The line gets a laugh–to the detriment of the material. (I have to admit I was more bemused by Stockmann’s barroom humiliation, which appeared to be an ice bucket challenge.) It’s too on the nose, too cognizant of COVID, poisoned water, and chemical mishaps. Ibsen saw the tragicomedy in Thomas, who is something of a holy fool as he zigs and zags, trying to hold ground that’s forever shifting. But Gold and Herzog, fixated on Thomas as a contemporary hero, have underlined An Enemy of the People‘s relevance with heavy markers. Some of what they’ve done works, but it speaks for itself without the Aquavit.
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