Joan Marcus Photos
Colantoni and Rogers.
Early in the first act of the Yale Repertory’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Dr. Thomas Stockmann (Reg Rogers) has just had a confrontation with his brother, Peter Stockmann (Enrico Colantoni), who happens to be the mayor of the town where they both live. The mayor has asked his brother to keep an unpleasant discovery under wraps. The doctor agonizes over what to do, then settles on defiance.
“I’ll never bow my neck under their yoke,” he says. He will not be silent.
The night I saw it, one audience member burst into strong applause at that point. A few others in the audience followed, not as strong. It was an early burst of conviction that the play, under the direction of James Bundy, slowly undermines, often to comedic and, in time, moving effect — a testament to how a good production can revive a classic.
The plays runs through Oct. 28.
In An Enemy of the People, Dr. Thomas Stockmann is the physician and seemingly only scientist in a small coastal town in Norway. The town relies on tourism to survive, and particularly its baths, which it touts as good for the health thanks to the water that fuels them. Problem is, Thomas discovers that the water is poisonous, and has already started to make people sick. He naively assumes that when his brother, Peter, the mayor, learns about the problem, then he will direct the town to fix it. But Peter has other plans. Fixing it is too expensive, and the town can’t survive a ruined tourist season. He tells Thomas to keep what he has found a secret. Instead, Thomas goes to the editor of the local paper, Mr. Hovstad (Bobby Roman) who seems eager to publish the results, until Peter gets to him, and suddenly he isn’t. The situation escalates, drawing in various townspeople and the rest of Thomas’s family — his wife Catherine (Joey Parsons) and their three children — as the personal battle between two brothers who never seem to have quite gotten along also becomes a seething meditation on the ability of politics, power, and money to corrupt all it touches, even in the face of a menace it can’t control.
It’s easy to imagine how Ibsen’s 1882 play, in lesser hands, would fall flat. Ibsen intended An Enemy of the People to be at least partly comedic, but if the comedy weren’t served, the story’s revelations could seem obvious, its characters unbearable, its plot predetermined, its speeches — and there are quite a few of them — overly preachy.
The good news is that with Bundy’s able direction and a uniformly talented cast, Enemy hits the right tone to turn the play into a nimble farce. Rogers plays his doctor as a smart man who knows he has the truth, but is also too prideful to know how to win over the rest of the town with what he knows. Colantoni’s mayor, likewise, is a competent mayor who can’t seem to think big enough to fully grasp the problem his brother has uncovered. Together they bring out a sense of a shared and contentious history. Parsons gives Catherine a shrewd intelligence that can encompass the internal tension between wanting to support her husband and needing to protect her children. Roman’s newspaper editor is both a staunch ideologue and a slippery operator who tends to agree with the most recent person he talks to.
In the first act, the dynamics among these characters and others — particularly the staunch moderate Aslaksen (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson), who runs the printing press — make for fleet, biting, and very timely political comedy in which no position, liberal, moderate, or conservative, is safe. The second act is more challenging. It centers around a long speech by the doctor at a town hall meeting in which he essentially tries to convince his neighbors that he’s right partly by trying to get them to admit to themselves that they’re idiots. Philosophically nihilistic, socially elitist, and politically naïve, it all but seals his fate and lays the ground for the destructive action that follows. Throughout, the actors still find the comedy that keeps the play from tilting over into preachiness, but Ibsen doesn’t make it easy.
What the comedy can’t do, however, is create a solution to the overall political and social problems the play on the page poses, which makes An Enemy of the People a lot of fun to talk about afterward but in a deeper sense not as useful as it sometimes promises to be. Nihilism can be like that. Here, though, an ingenious piece of scenic design (by Emona Stoykova) gives the audience a chance to dig a little deeper. During the doctor’s speech, in which he’s excoriating his fellow townspeople and they’re shouting back at him, the wall behind him begins to drip with black water. Dark stripes run from top to bottom, get thicker, join with other stripes. It’s a creeping reminder that — amid all the words being thrown around, the people trying to tear each other down over abstract ideas about who’s smarter or more in touch — there are certain facts that you can’t reason with or argue against. The water’s still poisoned, whether anyone wants it to be or not. And sooner or later, someone’s going to have to stop calling people out, or cover things up, and do something about it.
Yale Repertory’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, translation by Paul Walsh, runs at University Theater, 222 York St., through Oct. 28. Click here for tickets and more information.