Everyone works very hard in the world premiere production of Robert Icke’s Enemy of the People, all-too-freely adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s similarly titled 1882 classic: The ever-enterprising folks at the Park Avenue Armory, who have transformed the cavernous, 55,000 feet venue into a socially distanced space in which audience members, carefully screened to make sure they’re fully vaccinated, sit with their own “pods” at widely separated tables; veteran actress Ann Dowd, who not only plays multiple roles in the play but also serves as narrator and de facto game show host; and, to no lesser degree, the audience, who not only watch the play but also vote about which direction its action will take at key moments.
It’s all a little exhausting, frankly. I’ve seen multiple productions of Ibsen’s play over the years, as well as various film and television adaptations (Steve McQueen, of all people, played the lead role in a 1978 movie, which didn’t turn out nearly as badly as you’d expect). And while I’ve almost always found the work engrossing, I never once had the urge to weigh in while it was being performed. In this version, the audience is supposed to represent the play’s townspeople, and it’s hard not to think that we’ve been miscast.
The play, which has been given the same sort of “reimagining” that the acclaimed British writer/director has previously applied to such classics as the Oresteia, Uncle Vanya, Hamlet, and Mary Stuart, among others (he’s also responsible for the graphically violent adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 seen on Broadway in 2017), feels more relevant than ever. If anything, this tale about a doctor—here a woman, Joan, instead of the original’s Thomas—desperately trying to warn her fellow citizens about the dangers of the town’s lead-contaminated natural hot springs is almost too on the nose. We should probably be grateful that Icke hasn’t changed the setting to Flint, Michigan or renamed its lead character Dr. Fauci.
Instead, he’s remained just faithful enough to the original to remind us how powerful it can be if done right, while making the sort of jarring updates that remind us that he, not Ibsen, is the true author. The setting has been transformed into a modern American town and the text is littered with references to such things as coffee makers, movies, and microwave ovens, the last providing the opportunity for Joan to demonstrate that she can be both overzealous and condescending. “It is baked in radiation,” she tells her brother Peter, the town’s mayor, refusing to eat the food he’s heated up. “And I am the only one in this room who understands what radiation is.”
Actually, the doctor in this rendition is so consistently abrasive that we find ourselves feeling sympathetically about the beleaguered mayor, who, much like the one in Jaws, is determined to downplay the danger in order to not damage the local economy. At one point in the evening, we’re invited to vote (via large pushbuttons on each table) on whether Joan or Peter is the true “enemy of the people,” and, for once, it was a tough decision.
That, presumably, was the point, to make us think about the nature of collective responsibility in a supposedly free society. At each decision point, we’re supposed to engage in friendly debate with our fellow pod mates about how to vote as a group, and we’re given all of one minute to do so. This helps keep the running time down to a fleet 90 minutes and also serves as an ironic reminder that it represents the same brief amount of time allotted by too many people before making important decisions at the ballot box.
The net effect is ultimately more gimmicky than thought-provoking. The play supposedly moves in different directions depending on how we vote, but we have to take the creators’ word for it since we only see one version. And anyway, this sort of thing feels more suitable for something like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch than an examination of the moral complexities of whistleblowing.
Dowd, who’s inserted herself into the cultural zeitgeist with her superb turns in HBO’s The Leftovers and as the villainous Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale, performs valiantly but has an impossible task. She must constantly traverse numerous elevated walkways throughout the giant space, covering nearly as much ground as Mick Jagger during a Rolling Stones concert. She not only plays several different characters but also serves as narrator, making it hard for us to keep track of who she is at any given moment. And the dialogue she’s forced to utter is not exactly subtle: “Science and politics do not mix well,” Joan fervently argues at one point, as if to make sure we understand what the play is all about.
As with so many theater pieces developed during the pandemic, Enemy of the People is more memorable as an experience than drama. The physically expansive production, with its billboard-sized projections and expert video and sound design (we listen to Dowd through headphones), somehow manages to feel both epic and intimate at the same time. Unfortunately, it’s far more effective at engaging our senses than our hearts or minds.
Enemy of the People opened June 30, 2021, at the Park Avenue Armory and closed on July 10. Information and tickets: armoryonpark.org
