The Poison Drips Through

Ibsen with Imperioli, Strong, and drinks on the house.

MIDWAY THROUGH THE new version of An Enemy of the People adapted and directed respectively by the power couple Amy Herzog and Sam Gold, a full bar is lowered from the ceiling. The delights of this moment are manifold: We’ve had no hint that the compact, alley-style set—with its real candles and oil lamps and rustic furnishings suggesting a late-1800s Norwegian home—is hiding anything. Then the houselights pop up, a couple of bartenders enter the stage, and the actors start beckoning audience members up for a drink. The show has no official intermission, but during this informal “pause,” we’re invited to line up for free aquavit, mingle with the cast, chat with our neighbors, listen to some Norwegian folk music, and perhaps even stay on the set as the show continues.

Henrik Ibsen’s play, by that moment, is headed into its fourth act, in which its besieged hero attempts to share a devastating discovery with his fellow citizens. In Herzog and Gold’s retelling, it emerges organically out of the genial disorder of roughly 700 people jumping at the chance for free drinks. The space between performers and spectators is permanently blurred, and the gesture is as profound as it is pleasurable. We are all, always, in this together, but we’re not always made to recognize that fact. Ibsen was a writer of deep moral indignation, but his plays have the potential to become stuffy melodrama: women in long skirts and men in frock coats howling about syphilis and scandal. Herzog and Gold have cleared away all of that to draw out Enemy’s inherent muscularity.

Their two leads are also a real asset here, and not for their names. As the brothers locking horns at the play’s center—the principled Dr. Thomas Stockmann and the political animal Mayor Peter Stockmann— Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli both bring a vigorous contemporary affect to the material. You can feel the toughness and tension of their more modern characters flexing within David Zinn’s costumes, which land us softly in the 1880s without feeling rigid. The actors’ American tone, rather than creating dissonance, only

highlights the play’s fundamental solidity. There’s a casual quality to Imperioli’s performance that becomes more and more insidious as the show goes on. His Peter Stockmann wears power quietly and with confidence—he’ll shift and evade instinctively, nimbly, like a rodent or an insect, in order to maintain and increase it.

By contrast, the most striking element of Strong’s Dr. Stockmann is, perhaps surprisingly, not his forcefulness but his guilelessness. This isn’t a man who drives onto the stage in a bullheaded fury, already prepared to fight to the death for what’s right. This is an earnest, grounded, goodhearted scientist—a guy who loves his kids, is still grieving his beloved wife, and starts from a place of trust. “What is there to say?” he asks his houseguests after revealing his discovery. The people, he’s confident, will “be glad to know the truth.”

What Dr. Stockmann has discovered is that their town’s much-celebrated public baths—a health resort that forms the basis of the local economy—are “utterly contaminated.” Pollution from nearby tanneries is flooding the baths with harmful bacteria. “It’s a massive health risk,” says the doctor, who intends to share the news with his neighbors—after which, naturally, the right steps will be taken. But he soon finds himself receiving his own brutal education in just how easily the truth can be beaten, tortured, and buried when it threatens those with money, power, and position. Even the seemingly radical Hovstad (Caleb Eberhardt) and Billing (Matthew August Jeffers), who publish the local liberal newspaper, quickly curdle toward him like cream left in the sun.

Dr. Stockmann’s tragedy is that of the accidental activist. If his story had been written in the 1940s, its author would have been Frank Capra and its star Jimmy Stewart. “You know I don’t like to get involved in politics,” Dr. Stockmann tells Hovstad early on, showing much more diffidence than the fiery, sarcastic editor. Later, his brother looks at him with a kind of confused disgust: “You have no political instincts at all,” says Peter. He’s right. Dr. Stockmann’s instinct is simply to identify what’s right and to cling to it. “I apologize for my brother, Mr. Hovstad,” says Peter, his voice weary with sanctimony. “He’s always been incapable of nuance.” Later on, in the public forum of the play’s fourth act, Herzog’s rendering of Ibsen becomes particularly searing. During a motion to deny his brother the right even to present his findings, the mayor says: “This is not a decision I took lightly. The freedom to speak your mind is sacrosanct in our town. But when the community is under threat, when words can cause real harm, then we must use what power we have to keep these dangerous ideas from spreading.” Herzog deserves a mini-prize for working in such a zinging use of harm—a word that feels, in our moment, either flogged into meaninglessness or inflated into parody. But what’s on display isn’t just an excoriation of liberal piousness; it’s the way authoritarianism co-opts liberal diction and sets up false equivalences in order to paint something as obviously fascistic as open censorship in seemingly reasonable terms.

As the town meeting descends into rageful rabidity, Gold stages a stark and extreme burst of violence toward Dr. Stockmann. I won’t spoil the details, but in the wake of this horrible, theatrically thrilling sequence, both Strong and Victoria Pedretti, as the doctor’s daughter, Petra, shine anew. Herzog takes some of her greatest liberties with Ibsen’s script during their aching dénouement: Gone is Ibsen’s original ending, in which Dr. Stockmann declares that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” Instead, we’re given something much more tender and much less individualistic. For Herzog and Gold, Dr. Stockmann’s devastation becomes the kind of fertile terrain that exists after a forest fire: a wrecked landscape in which the seeds of possibility can and must be sowed. In the words of Captain Horster (Alan Trong), the only friend who sticks by the doctor and his daughter throughout, “There’s something to be said for … being at the very bottom. You know where the ground is.” ■

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE BY HENRIK IBSEN. ADAPTED BY AMY HERZOG. DIRECTED BY SAM GOLD. CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE. THROUGH JUNE 16.