TRUTH OR DARE

A new production of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People."

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

I don't know if I'll ever forgive myself - for missing the Thursday, March 14th, preview performance of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," published in 1882 and revived at Circle in the Square, in a new version by Amy Herzog, under Sam Gold's deceptively simple direction.

At the climax of the play, there's a town meeting in a raucous bar, the whole place fit to explode with civic tension and protoFascist violence. The theatre lights are up, as if to indicate that the audience is also attending the meeting, and Jeremy Strong, playing Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a scientist armed with the truth but lonely in its defense, is standing atop the bar, trying to get his point across.

At that moment of high drama, one environmental protester in the audience after another got to their feet and began to fulminate about the climate. "I am very, very sorry to interrupt your night and this amazing performance!" one shouted. "The oceans are acidifying! The oceans are rising and will swallow this city and this entire theatre whole!"

The protest action, with its references to science and to government inertia, and with its tightrope walking along the boundaries of free speech, perfectly matched the tone and the content of the play. Many people in attendance thought (wrongly) that it was a contemporizing gaga possibly corny play at relevance planned by Gold. The truth can be an off-putting distraction. It changes trajectories; slows down the blithe, fleet motion of progress; makes your big night out at the theatre a weird and confusing ordeal.

Thomas Stockmann is a proud, sad, bombastic, socially clumsy, utterly sincere doctor working as the medical director of the baths in a cloistered Norwegian town in the late nineteenth century. He's a widower who has become passionate about doing what's right. His brother Peter (Michael Imperioli) is the mayor and therefore, quite awkwardly, his domineering boss.