Small town B.C. the backdrop for Ibsen play
Play examines how doctor becomes a pariah after speaking out about pollution at park
According to the Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo, North American productions of An Enemy of the People jumped from two productions in 2015 to eight last year.
Now, with The Enemy, Firehall Arts Centre artistic producer Donna Spencer is putting her stamp on the 1882 Henrik Ibsen play. Transposing the action to small-town British Columbia, The Enemy features Jenn Griffin as Dr. Stockman, a local who becomes a pariah when she starts speaking out about pollution in the local spa and water park. We talked to Spencer about the production.
Q
Since the 2016 American election, a lot of companies have been doing this play, and putting their own twists on it. What does having a woman in the role of the doctor (originally written for a man) do?
A
It addresses some gender equity roles in terms of lead roles on stages. But I didn’t choose to do this play because a lot of other companies were doing it, I chose to do it because of the content. I also felt adapting the role for a woman actually broadened what we could do with the piece. We could comment without making it obvious how women in powerful positions are often treated. When they get emotional they’re
called “hysterical,” where if a man gets emotional he’s often called “passionate.”
Q
Whether or not the majority is always right is one of the themes of the play. Do you think that lines like “The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom are the majority” challenge liberal ideas of democracy? A Certainly there’s a discussion of this in a town-hall meeting in the play.
In our version, she (Dr. Stockman) doesn’t challenge them as liberals but challenges the people at the meeting to think about whether the majority is right. Was the majority right when they allowed so many Jews to be executed during the Second World War? Was the majority right when Indigenous children were taken from their homes and put in residential schools?
Essentially, the majority didn’t do anything to stop that from happening. I tried to put that into the context of what people need to think about now in terms of we tend to show apathy about. It doesn’t change what Ibsen wanted to say, it is just applied to a more contemporary setting. That’s my goal, anyway.
Q
Did setting the story in a small town in B.C. require a lot of tweaks to the original play?
A
I did kind of tweak things. With small-town newspapers ceasing to exist in many cases, I determined we would be dealing with a digital media site. There’s a daily posting/ blog, where people post what’s going on in the community. And I wanted to bring in the fact that people are so reliant on cellphones now, and the effect of social media.
I think the biggest challenge is making sure I was able to say the same thing as Ibsen without sounding like the language is from a different era. Even the Arthur Miller version from the 1950s is overwritten. We don’t talk like that anymore. And Ibsen went on forever. People didn’t have television, so they were not considering that they were sitting in a play for three or three-and-a-half hours.
Even in the ’50s, for Miller’s adaptation, people weren’t looking for sound bites. They weren’t driven in the same way by time as we are now. You didn’t get all your news in a social media blast and go, “OK, now I know what’s going on, even though it only took me 10 seconds to read it.” It was a whole different way of using language.