Enemy of the People Is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure for Our Climate Change Era

Given its socially distant but fully vaccinated, masks-optional requirements, Robert Icke’s Enemy of the People already feels like a historical staging, an artifact of the late pandemic era. Will they restage plays in the future with audiences far away from each other in order to study the theatrical strangeness of 2021, much like Shakespeare’s Globe in London sometimes offers original practice productions by corset and candlelight?

Here, audience members sit at tables of five, spread far apart across the Park Avenue Armory’s sprawling space, its floor reimagined as a street map, while Ann Dowd, playing all the parts, traverses a series of walkways, her face projected live on giant billboards. Each member of the audience wears headphones, and when Dowd nears a table, there’s a slight echo effect, her voice coming first from right in front of you and then through the sound system.

I first encountered Icke’s work through his staging of Hamlet starring Andrew Scott at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2017, a production that often felt reinventive for the sake of reinvention. Here, though, through a full-bodied, choose-your-own-adventure adaptation, Icke has more thoughtfully migrated Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama (originally called En Folkefiende) to a contemporary American setting, homing in on the elements that make the story resonate as a discomfiting eco-tragedy in which we’re all to be held accountable.

That doesn’t mean the adaptation, also directed by Icke, is exactly faithful, as it’s up to the audience how much the performance veers from the path that Ibsen imagined. At key points throughout the story, each table gets one minute to deliberate and then cast one unified vote, and those choices will shape, more or less, the fate of the fictional Weston Springs, a town known for its restorative hot springs that draw droves of tourists seeking rejuvenation.

Weston Springs’s Mayor Peter Stockman receives a shock from his estranged scientist sister when he sees her email with its terrifying subject line: “POISON IN THE WATER.” Dr. Joan Stockman has made a game-changing discovery. In Ibsen’s original play, waste from a tannery was polluting the town’s baths, but in Icke’s adaptation it’s lead poisoning. Either way, the debate at the play’s center—whether to come clean about how dirty the water really is, even if it risks financial ruin for the town, or whether to stay silent while profiting (and poisoning visitors)—is a potent parable for our current climate crisis.

Of course, Dr. Joan wouldn’t call it a debate at all: Opinions shouldn’t matter when science offers indisputable facts. “Molecules aren’t subject to majorities,” she insists, scoffing at the idea that the town’s residents, who don’t hold two PhDs like she does, should get to decide the fate of the baths. Icke somewhat complicates matters by making the self-righteous, self-aggrandizing doctor very difficult to like, even if we know she has science on her side. In the minutes leading up to the audience’s final vote that determines the play’s ending, Joan loses her temper grandiloquently, in a public dressing-down of the town’s residents in which she calls them—that is, us—all “witless morons” and suggests mass sterilization. “Enemy” of the people may be a little strong, but she utterly despises the folks she’s fighting so hard to save.

If Ibsen’s play is about one man (named Thomas, not Joan) finding power in being a lone voice for truth in the midst of a corrupt community, Icke’s adaptation concerns itself more squarely with the sibling relationship between Joan and the morally wobbly mayor. That’s, perhaps, to grant Dowd some more meaty, tour-de-force arguments with herself, which she handles with canny stillness: When she plays two characters in conversation, the actress faces forward while the camera angles projecting on screens above her shift swiftly, creating an instant cinematic dialogue that’s a convincing tool for amplifying the multi-role performance.

But these scenes, despite their technological flair (Tal Yarden did the nimble projection and video design) and Dowd’s consistent fervor, play out with an increasing sense of circularity. Joan and Peter retread the same territory, both unwilling to flinch from their opposing positions, in almost every exchange, and the questions put to the audience for deliberation and voting are all variations on the same theme: Do we tell the truth about the water or cover it up? Dowd’s an impressive storyteller but not an impressionist, so there’s limited variety beyond volume in her characterizations. And since much of Icke’s script consists of unemotional, third-person narration, there’s a general placidity that tiptoes toward dullness and distracts from the urgency of the story and the audience’s complicity in telling it.

“You don’t have to hold an opinion like it’s a weapon,” Joan’s husband warns their daughter in a scene you may or may not see, depending on how you vote. “An opinion can be held gently.” Though Icke tries, lightly, to undermine his own democracy gimmick, mainly through Joan’s ferocious monologue attacking the validity of a vote conducted by people who know very little about the issues at stake, it’s not entirely clear how much we’re meant to see the audience’s power to change the story through Joan’s cynical eyes. Given that our opportunities to weigh in are the production’s main delights, Enemy of the People could do more to challenge the assumption that majority votes work the way they’re supposed to. Arguing over ethical dilemmas with unmasked strangers may not be the pinnacle of the live performance experience we’ve so missed, but wielding power in the theater, if not necessarily corrupting, turns out to be pretty fun. Who’s up for ranked-choice Hedda Gabler?

Enemy of the People is now running at the Park Avenue Armory.