If you think newspaper editors are more worried about upholding the reputations of their communities than sales, attention, and awards, and will therefore try their damnedest to quash muckraking tales because they might harm major local corporations, you’re the naif to whom Henrik Ibsen is pitching An Enemy of the People (at the Circle in the Square through June 16), which has been capably rewritten and smartly condensed for modern ears by Amy Herzog. Alas, Enemy is grandstanding pretending to be drama. The matter of why it is still performed is as worthy of consideration as its self-evident defects.
What is always true of the piece is that the critics claim it is timelier than ever, ripped from today’s headlines, an urgent lesson we ignore at our peril. The current production, directed by Herzog’s husband, Sam Gold, and starring the hbo veterans Jeremy Strong, of Succession, and Michael Imperioli, of The White Lotus and The Sopranos, is “the 19th century drama that still resonates with our pandemic-scarred society” (Los Angeles Times). It’s “bold and necessary” because its “themes of truth and misinformation ring timelier than ever” (USA Today). The New York Times declared:
Its issues and ours are not similar but identical. And not just its issues. Its characters, too, are contemporary: doppelgängers of our own vicious demagogues, cowed editors, greasy both-sides-ists and defanged idealists.
The Times thinks that, as played by Strong, Ibsen’s determined voice of reason Dr. Thomas Stockmann is remarkably like Dr. Anthony Fauci. So Dr. Stockmann, who is right about everything and reviled for it, is somehow a precursor to Dr. Lockdown, who was wrong about everything and yet treated as a secular saint.
The action of the play is as follows: after the noble doctor discovers bacteria in the water supply feeding the baths, his town’s major tourist attraction and economic engine, the mayor notes that shutting things down and obtaining a clean source of water would be expensive and damaging. Yes, but no one in the play considers the obvious follow-up question: compared to what? How expensive and reputationally damaging might it be to do nothing—knowingly to allow customers to get sick and die because the water is being routed through what Dr. Stockmann bluntly calls “a pile of shit” left by tanneries upstream? Ibsen is so eager to bloviate that he forgets the most elementary details of human interaction, such as our propensity for sharing information, particularly bad news. It would not take long for the various people sickened by the waters to learn what they all have in common.
True, the endlessly litigious society, and the insatiable regulatory state, had not yet come into being when Ibsen was writing, but today? The fear of lawsuits, including personal liability for engaging in a cover-up, would make any mayor shudder. He’d have no choice but to shut down the baths and order repairs. That’s why the play is less relevant than ever—implausible bordering on laughable.
The politician, played entirely unconvincingly by Imperioli, wins over the burghers at a raucous town meeting by noting that their property values are at stake (yes, but they’d be even more damaged by letting the area turn into a Norwegian Love Canal) and the middle and working classes by telling them, absurdly, that the repair costs would be borne by the taxpayer because the corporation that owns the baths would simply refuse to pay for them. In the twenty-first century, these developments read like science-fiction. Today we know the doctor would blow the whistle to the press, editors who love to tear apart business would eagerly join the crusade, regulators would swarm in from every angle, and the corporation’s reluctance to pay would be no match for governmental insistence.
Yet there is hardly any entity as gullible as a Manhattan theater audience, which on the night I attended was unusually heavy on people under forty—evidently fans of Strong’s passive aggression on Succession. The play is divided into two acts by a break during which the audience is invited up on the set (a long, narrow deck with low walls suggesting a boxcar) to mingle at a bar dropped from the rafters to dispense paper cups of aquavit. Some patrons are invited to remain onstage to blend in as the play resumes with the townsfolk turning frighteningly against Dr. Stockmann. Strong, who gets denounced as though at a witch trial while standing on top of the bar, winds up in a gap in the center of it, retreating below our line of sight while the other actors shout the title of the play at him and pelt him with ice. Hang on: if this many people know about the doctor’s findings, isn’t the main point of the scene—that the forces of evil are conspiring in a cover-up—defeated? Yes, and we learn minutes later that the price of shares in the baths has plummeted. Word has indeed gotten around. The town is therefore ruined anyway; no one is going to patronize these baths now that the bacterial invader is public knowledge. Stripped of his job and rendered an outcast, Dr. Stockmann (played as a hapless victim by Strong) prepares to flee Norway. “In America,” he says, “we won’t have to worry about anything like this!” It’s the signature line of Herzog’s adaptation and generates big laughs with its wicked irony.
But what he’s saying is literally true: in today’s America, the institutional power lies almost entirely on his side. Far from being cowed by corporations, or worried about job loss, the regulatory state will take on any entity it calls a threat to the people, however indirect, attenuated, or imaginary. As I write these words, the U.S. government is suing the world’s second-most-valuable corporation, Apple Inc., for the same reason it earlier sued the world’s most valuable one, Microsoft: a sketchy claim of alleged harm to consumers derived from products that became so popular as to dominate their markets. I wonder whether Apple will respond that its shareholders have decided not to pay any fines and therefore the public must bear the burden of any judgment against it. An Enemy of the People, as designed to reflect contemporary concerns, which is the only reason to stage it today, counts on an audience too stupid to recall that the epa exists, or 60 Minutes, or The New York Times, or indeed tabloid papers.
The play lacks even a basic sense of how events progress. The very end, when the mayor and a team of blackmailers try to talk the ruined Dr. Stockmann into recanting, is completely pointless. Even if the doctor could be threatened or bribed into changing his story, it would raise suspicion and lead to demands that the water be retested, at which point the bacteria’s presence would be reconfirmed. Once the lab report Stockmann commissioned becomes public knowledge, he is made irrelevant, yet Ibsen would have us believe his personality is the key to how everything unfolds.
What remains striking about the play is its meta-relevance. That it is still a core element of the theater canon (this is the eleventh time it has been produced on Broadway) tells us something important about the theater world, and the audience. In the real world, whistleblowers, and the journalists who amplify their findings, become folk heroes. Even fake whistleblowers are often celebrated, until their mendacity becomes too well-documented to ignore. Only those who dig up dirt on prominent Democrats can expect anything approaching the harsh treatment meted out on Dr. Stockmann, but today’s Ibsen epigones would never acknowledge this.
If Ibsen gets humanity wrong, he modeled an idea more relevant and profitable to him: the progressive persecution complex. As was true of the playwright himself, today’s prototypical socially conscious liberal thinks of himself as a brave truth-teller who stands forever at risk of being stoned to atoms by greedy capitalists, filthy populists, the mindless lotus-eaters of the complacent middle class, or (as in the play) all three. Never mind that most mobs are composed of angry leftists; progressives fancy themselves lonely, embattled outsiders who stand up to the rabble. The point was hilariously illustrated when a gang of climate activists interrupted the March 14 performance of the play, one of them crying out “I object to the silencing of scientists” while watching a dramatized objection to the silencing of scientists. For the terminally unhappy progressive, the coherence or persuasiveness of the message is less important than the joy of the tantrum.
A dozen new musical productions, including three revivals, arrived in a jumble on Broadway between March 14 and April 25. The template is to start with a story the audience already knows from another medium and try to make it fresh with some stage magic and a dump of new songs. This last element, seemingly critical to the musical, almost invariably seems like an afterthought, or even filler, and today’s most talented composers are not working in the musical theater anyway. Yet such is the demand among producers to light their money on fire in exchange for being part of show business that songwriters whose talents might charitably be described as modest keep getting hired to create disposable musicals. First up was The Notebook (at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre), from a 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel of the kind that used to be called a drugstore romance, back when there was still enough demand for books for them to be sold alongside deodorant. Sparks writes simple, formulaic weepies about nice, good-looking people facing contrived problems. Although several of his books have been made into movies, the reason The Notebook was his one notable big-screen success, in 2004, had little to do with the author: the lead actors Rachel McAdams and especially Ryan Gosling lit up the screen and executed a kiss that aficionados declared monumental.
To replace this combustible pair, the Broadway show offers us three iterations of them as the story skips around in time. One is Noah and Allie at their first meeting, and for a month afterwards, in their late teens. They are effervescently played by John Cardoza and Jordan Tyson, respectively. Driven apart, they nevertheless meet up again a decade later, played by Ryan Vasquez and Joy Woods. Forty or so years after that, the pair have been married for most of their lives, but while their health declines in an old-folks’ home, Allie (Maryann Plunkett) has dementia and no longer recognizes her husband (Dorian Harewood), who nevertheless devotes himself to trying to revive some of her memories by reading passages from her sometimes-racy journal, the titular notebook. All three couples sing, sometimes jointly, but though the songs (music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson) are pretty, they’re also forgettable.
The appeal of the show therefore rests almost entirely on the story, though the audience already knows the secret. In the novel and the movie, that the old people in the nursing home were the same people as the young lovers was presented as a twist, although most readers or viewers would have figured it out along the way. The show doesn’t bother to try to work up any suspense over this. Instead, the unanswered questions are what separated the couple after they immediately fell for one another, what brought them back together, and will the foggy memory of nursing-home Allie clear up so that she and her husband can, in a sense, be reunited once more before they die?
Although the book, by Bekah Brunstetter, is reasonably lively in its dialogue, its inflection points are weak; Allie and Noah are pulled apart by her disapproving parents, but since the youngsters don’t much care about what the adults think, the motivation is insufficient for him to become so distraught that he runs off to join the army and fight in Vietnam. He writes to her every day, but she doesn’t know this because the letters are intercepted by her family, so she feels abandoned and, as years go by, resolves to marry another man. The pair get back together when she sees his picture in the paper after he buys and restores the dream house they used to fantasize about living in. These developments are hardly spellbinding, which is why the story is broken up and told out of sequence, with details tantalizingly withheld.
Though the show is proudly mawkish throughout, Harewood’s gentle, patient performance does give the late-stage scenes some poignance (even as his counterpart, Plunkett, overplays her role). Moreover, the actors playing young Allie and Noah are adorable. Mid-period Noah and Allie are, however, not nearly as appealing: his brooding is charmless, and she seems flighty. All six performances are weighed down by a casting scheme so aggressively “inclusive” as to be utterly bizarre. Young Allie is biracial; middle Allie is black; old Allie is white. Young and middle Noah are white, but old Noah is black. No wonder the elderly Allie is so confused. She and her husband have changed races.
The Notebook is literally splashy (there’s a pool on stage, which gives the young leads a pretext to get their clothes damp and clingy in imitation of the signature scene from the movie), but the circus melodrama Water for Elephants (at the Imperial Theatre) is figuratively so. Critics who dub it the spectacle of the season are politely drawing attention away from its characters and storyline, which are dull, and the musical compositions, which are such limp and errant note-sequences that it seems too generous to refer to them as songs. The show (based on the 2006 novel by Sara Gruen, which was adapted into an instantly forgotten movie in 2011) is about the backstage trickery of a 1930s traveling circus. Its principal, indeed sole, attractions are acrobatic dancing and the puppets who stand in for the beasts, from a lapdog to a pachyderm. Are we meant to go home humming the puppetry?
The hype from critics who declared themselves dazzled left me in disbelief. That’s it? Dancers slithering up and down ropes, or imitating horses, or flipping around on cloth trapezes, or managing to keep four or five hula hoops spinning at once? Dimly I remember an era when television variety shows featured such acts, but they more or less died out in the early 1970s, when being wholesomely dull went out of style.
As in The Notebook, the story is framed by the recollections of an elderly person living in a care home, in this case the kindly, chatty Jacob Jankowski (Gregg Edelman), who was studying veterinary science decades earlier, in 1931, when a family tragedy impelled him to join the freaks, carnies, and animal abusers of the Benzini Brothers’ big-top show. The sleazy owner and ringmaster, August (Paul Alexander Nolan is so abrasive his voice could scrape the fur off one of his orangutans), introduces the newcomer, and the audience, to the secrets of the trade. For instance, Augie tricks the young Jacob (Grant Gustin) into putting his hand in the mouth of a lion, but the unfortunate cat’s teeth have been removed. The book, by Rick Elice, occasionally interjects some jolly carnival jargon, but mainly the story is a tediously slow-developing love triangle in which the two men (one generous and loving, the other cynical and heartless) tangle for the affections of Augie’s wife, the pretty but tiresomely bland circus performer Marlena (Isabelle McCalla). In a contrived climax, a stampede is triggered by a circus worker. But since no one we care about is killed, and the event merely brings an end to a shady business, it has no value except as spectacle. As directed by Jessica Stone, the actors play it as an earnest variant of a lighthearted toddlers’ game (Lights on! Lights out! Hey, everyone moved while we couldn’t see them!). Like every other attempt at generating awe, the scene is a yawn. In short, the show consists of nonentities drifting through a bare excuse for a plot sprinkled with dire musical numbers (credited to a seven-man indie rock band cum theater group called PigPen Theatre Co.). Any critic who steers unsuspecting ticket buyers to Water for Elephants should be sentenced to five years of reviewing cruise-ship entertainment.