The ‘Enemy’ Multiplies In the Age of Trump
Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, “An Enemy of the People,” is suddenly as timely as a tweet.
The political drama — about a scientist who tries to save his town from water pollution, only to wind up as a scapegoat — is being revived in several new productions across the United States.
Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, decided to stage the play after the election. “I needed to do something about our sudden/current/ soon- to- be ongoing horrific life under Trump and majority Republican rule,” he said in an email.
Little did he know that President Donald J. Trump would use the phrase “enemy of the people” to pillory the news media in a Twitter post the month after taking office.
The production at the Goodman, which last staged the play in 1980, began previews this month. In Minneapolis, the Guthrie Theater, which has not produced the play since 1976, will stage it in April. In the fall, there will be a Broadway adaptation by Branden Jacobs- Jenkins, directed by Thomas Ostermeier of the Schaubühne Theater in Berlin.
According to IbsenStage, a digital map of plays at the University of Oslo, the number of North American productions of “An Enemy of the People” rose to eight in 2017, from two in 2015.
Why are productions cropping up now? What started as a response to a Trump presidency seems to speak to our times with a plot that intertwines an ethically compromised antihero, political extremism, corruption, environmental activism and a lack of ac- countability for the destruction of a town.
“An Enemy of the People” features a divisive, punitive protagonist and whistle- blower, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who tries to warn his town about contaminated water polluting the spa that keeps the town solvent. But his environmental campaign falters. By the fourth act, Stockmann, outraged by resistance, becomes a zealot and is demonized as the enemy of the people.
At the Guthrie Theater, the British team that is staging “Enemy” feels the play carries global weight. The playwright Brad Birch, who set the adaptation in contemporary Norway, was moved by the heightened political tensions in Britain over Brexit. “We wanted to challenge how being a liberal means being egalitarian but also it involves being quite righteous,” he said.
If anything, the play seems endlessly adaptable to fit the political times.
In his anti- communism- era adaptation in 1950, Arthur Miller softened Stockmann’s harshest language in the town hall speech in Act IV, in which he advances the idea that some people are biologically superior to others. “The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom are the majority!” Stockmann yells.
Mr. Falls’s adaptation, based on a 19th- century translation by Eleanor Marx, a daughter of Karl Marx, focuses on places in Ibsen’s script where the doctor defended education as a way to change minds. “He believes people could be transformed, be made better,” Mr. Falls said.
But Stockmann’s Act IV speech can also be seen as a chilling reminder of how both ends of the political spectrum bear fault for some of our biggest political nightmares.
Neena Arndt, the dramaturge working on the Goodman production, said that some of Stockmann’s most egregious lines could be compared to “Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment, or other comments that people — perhaps audience members themselves — have made that imply that those they disagree with are inferior.”