‘An Enemy of the People’ Review: Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli Set Off Sparks in Visceral Distillation of 1882 Ibsen Drama
In a clever trick that pulls us into the community about to witness the spectacular downfall of the public figure crusading for truth at the center of An Enemy of the People, a bar descends from above during the pause between acts, with theatergoers filing onto the stage to be served shots of aquavit while musicians and singers perform traditional Norwegian songs. Several audience members stay seated around the periphery when the action resumes. The house lights also remain up, giving us no escape from our complicity as town physician Dr. Thomas Stockmann, played with bristling intensity by Jeremy Strong, is pilloried with ridicule that escalates into physical violence.
Sam Gold’s crackling production up to that point has been deceptively traditional, handsomely staged in the round at the Circle in the Square, with a first act that sets the scene for festering conflict in the warmth and cozy domesticity of Stockmann’s home, lit by oil lamps and trafficked by a steady flow of drop-in dinner guests. Unlike some of Gold’s revivals that have staged classic texts in modern dress, the setting here remains a small town in late 19th century Norway. But the issues stirred up by Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama have queasy echoes in contemporary America.
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The heavily condensed adaptation is by Amy Herzog, who straddled the centuries last year in her bruising update of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which starred a transfixing Jessica Chastain in Jamie Lloyd’s knockout revival on Broadway. Herzog’s sharp dialogue is fluid and identifiably American in vernacular but not littered with anachronisms.
Without ever hammering this play’s uncanny modern-day relevance, the new production deftly underscores the parallels of our current ugly political divide; the risks of being a whistleblower; distrust in science by people whose ignorance is manipulated by those in power; trial by public opinion; and a conflict between environmental and economic concerns, all of which will be familiar to 21st century American audiences.
The drama follows Stockmann’s attempts to spread the word about dangerous bacterial contamination in the waters of a spa resort that is the town’s lifeblood. The plotline calls to mind everything from the 2016 water crisis in Flint, Michigan, to the COVID denialism that spread during the pandemic, even as the national death toll soared beyond one million. A laugh that’s both knowing and nervous ripples through the audience when the disillusioned Stockmann considers fleeing the country: “In America, we won’t have to worry about any of this.”
Part of what keeps it interesting is the play’s refusal to let liberals off the hook for attitudes ranging from naivete to belligerent superiority. Strong’s Stockmann is a flawed man, as compelling for his intransigent arrogance as for his righteous indignation.
Working together for the first time, husband and wife Gold and Herzog compress the original five-act structure into a tight two hours broken only by that boozy pause — shorter by half than the usual Broadway intermission.
Some choices are not entirely beneficial to the play, such as the too-abrupt reversal of left-leaning young anti-authoritarian newspaper editor Hovstad (Caleb Eberhardt), who turns from an eager Stockmann supporter into a vehement detractor. But there are also smart changes like the removal of Stockmann’s wife, making her a composite character with his schoolteacher daughter, Petra (Victoria Pedretti), and giving the doctor the lingering sadness of a recently widowed man.
Stockmann at first is both validated and alarmed when university lab reports come back confirming his suspicions that the spa, where he serves as resident physician, has been contaminated by industrial pollutants, the majority coming from a tannery owned by his crusty father-in-law, Morten Kiil (David Patrick Kelly).
He has no trouble getting Hovstad and the latter’s quasi-radical colleague Billing (a very droll Matthew August Jeffers) on board to publish the findings in The People’s Messenger, a name that morphs from symbolic to bitterly ironic as the play unfolds. Hovstad has long been impatient for a changing of the guard, with the rich old men of the town council overdue to be nudged aside for new blood with more progressive ideas. He thinks the disaster of the resort and the investors’ cost-cutting plumbing will be enough to discredit them.
Even the more conservative printer who bankrolls the publication, Aslaksen (Thomas Jay Ryan), is in Stockmann’s corner, promising to use his considerable influence to get the tradesmen and property owners associations behind him. But Aslaksen shows enough indications of being an ingratiating weasel that his about-face comes as no surprise.
The person whose opposition Stockmann least expects is his brother Peter (Michael Imperioli), the town’s self-important mayor, which shows how little the two men understand each other. Hints of longtime sibling rivalry fuel Peter’s umbrage as he accuses Thomas of irresponsibility in threatening to go public with speculative findings that will bring exorbitant costs, closing the spa for three years or more and likely causing the town’s tourist-driven economy to crash.
Thomas remains intractable in his conviction that the health of the population and the high risk of disease or death are of greater importance than any financial concern. But his supercilious brother works swiftly to undermine him. There’s no warmth in the siblings’ relationship, but at the same time, the willingness of Peter — played with icy composure and blithe insincerity by Imperioli in top form — to destroy Thomas is breathtaking.
Denied an official outlet to publish his report, Thomas declares his intention to speak directly to the people at a town meeting. That assembly is an increasingly raucous affair, and anyone who has ever rankled at bureaucratic obstructionism will wince at the insidious efficiency of Peter and Aslaksen, working in tandem to keep Thomas from speaking. The scene is played as a grim crescendo, its outcome chilling.
Through all this, Strong builds from calm certainty to febrile outrage; until numb resignation — and, later, an odd optimism for future vindication — sets in, he’s so tightly wound he makes his Succession character, Kendall Roy, look chill.
The role of Thomas Stockmann feels tailor-made for the actor’s dangerous energy. But he’s no simplistic martyr in a post-truth world. Herzog has chosen to retain one of Ibsen’s thorniest speeches, a diatribe about social evolution in which Stockmann talks of the difference between mongrel dogs and pedigree breeds as an analogy for the uneducated masses and the elite intelligentsia.
It’s a screed that veers into eugenics, suddenly showing the character in an unsympathetic light. The fact that he can never remember the name of the family’s housemaid, Randine (Katie Broad), also calls into question his regard for the servant class.
Strong has never been an actor to shy away from an abrasive edge, but he maintains sufficient balance to keep us in Thomas’ corner. The startling image of his total physical submission after the brutality of the meeting also gives the character’s treatment by the townsfolk real pathos. If Herzog’s Chekhovian adjustments to the play’s ending feel less sure-footed, it still leaves us with a sick feeling of moral rot and the isolation of those who speak out against it in a corrupted society.
While Gold’s revivals of the classics have tended to be less consistent than his incisive work on new plays — the ensembles of his King Lear and Hamlet both seemed at times to be all acting in different productions — his uniformly excellent cast here is very much on the same page, many of them doubling as singers and musicians in the scene transitions.
In addition to Strong and Imperioli, standouts include Ryan, the epitome of slippery sanctimoniousness as Aslaksen; Kelly as mean-to-the-core old drunk Kiil; Eberhardt as the turncoat editor, whose opportunism costs him any romantic headway he had made with Petra; and Pedretti in the latter role, a young woman with as much spine as her father but perhaps more clear-sighted vision. Alan Trong also makes an impression as Captain Horster, a seafarer alone in his loyalty to Thomas’ family.
Sets by the design collective known as “dots” make resourceful use of the staging in the round to guide us into a 19th century parlor and dining room or the offices of The People’s Messenger, with remarkably authentic-looking furnishings. (Scandinavian design fans will salivate over a handsome carved wooden rocking chair.) Isabella Byrd’s lighting and David Zinn’s finely detailed costumes evoke the period, while Gold audaciously jars us back into our contemporary world with his ingenious solution for the town meeting. What could have been a gimmick instead serves as a bridge between then and now.
It’s far from the first time Ibsen — and this work in particular — has been dragged into the present, but it’s urgent and effective. Ultimately one of the key strengths of this bracing revival is that it presents a classic drama as a play for our time.
Venue: Circle in the Square, New York
Cast: Jeremy Strong, Michael Imperioli, Victoria Pedretti, Caleb Eberhardt, Thomas Jay Ryan, Matthew August Jeffers, Alan Trono, David Patrick Kelly, Katie Broad, Bill Buell, David Mattar Merten, Max Roll
Director: Sam Gold
Playwright: Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Amy Herzog
Scenic designer: dots
Costume designer: David Zinn
Lighting designer: Isabella Byrd
Sound designer: Mikaal Sulaiman
Presented by Seaview, Patrick Catullo, Plan B, Roth-Manella Productions, Eric & Marsi Gardiner, John Gore Organization, James L. Nederlander, Jon B. Platt, Atekwana Hutton, Bob Boyett, Chris & Ashlee Clarke, Cohen-Demar Productions, Andrew Diamond, GI6 Productions, Sony Music Masterworks, Triptyk Studios, Trunfio Ryan, Kate Cannova, DJL Productions
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