Ibsen in Gowanus?

First I see myself in the paper, now I see myself onstage

Victoria Pedretti as Petra, Caleb Eberhardt as Hovstad, and Jeremy Strong as Doctor Thomas Stockmann in An Enemy of the People. Photo by Emilio Madrid.

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I just saw the current Broadway production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, adapted by Amy Herzog, directed by Sam Gold, and starring Jeremy Strong as Dr. Thomas Stockmann (a performance for which he just won a Tony Award) and Michael Imperioli as his brother, Mayor Peter Stockmann, and I found myself thinking, after the show, about my last post. I was pretty blithe, in that post, about what appears to be a potentially serious problem with toxic fumes, the subject of the original news story that featured my photo. My only comment was to snark that building market-rate housing on a Superfund site (instead of warehousing poorer people there) could be construed as a blow for environmental equity. I’m clearly a cheerleader for the development on economic grounds. Does that make me no better than the mayor in Ibsen’s play?

Maybe not—but then again, I always thought that the mayor had real points to make, and that his characterization of his brother the doctor in the play wasn’t entirely wrong. And to the extent that I had a problem with the current production—which I greatly enjoyed—it’s that we don’t sufficiently feel power of the mayor’s arguments, and therefore too easily assume we would dismiss them in real life.

I should probably recap the plot a bit. Dr. Stockmann lives in a small seaside town in Norway which has recently built a resort around mineral baths which, everyone hopes, will ensure the town’s future prosperity. The doctor works for the resort which his brother, the mayor, effectively controls. The previous season, there was a typhoid outbreak which led the doctor to suspect that something might be wrong with the water supply to the baths. He investigated, and near the beginning of the play discovers that his worst fears are correct: the baths are contaminated. They must be shuttered and the entire thing reengineered and rebuilt before they can be reopened.

Initially, the doctor’s liberal-minded friends are thrilled that he discovered the problem in time, and are eager to stick it to the conservative mayor. But when the mayor makes them realize that the cost of dealing with the problem will be borne by the taxpayers, that the baths will have to be closed for years while their plumbing is torn out and rebuilt—putting all the employees out of a job and ending the tourist trade upon which the town increasingly depends—and that the tourist trade might in fact never come back, but might well migrate to other resorts—well, after all that they one by one change their minds and turn on the good doctor whom they previously supported.

At this point, the doctor tries to bring his case to the people at large via a town meeting, but is hamstrung by the mayor’s and his own former supporters’ efforts to silence him. He ultimately lashes out at the public for being idiots who refuse to hear the truth, and is branded the enemy of the people in the title.

Herzog’s version is streamlined and effective, the language familiarly contemporary without being obtrusively so. She’s killed off Dr. Stockmann’s wife, and she’s followed Arthur Miller and other adapters in toning down the elitism of his outraged peroration in the town meeting, in which Ibsen has him proclaim the need for a eugenic program to breed a race of people capable of facing reality. I enjoyed the Norwegian folk songs that Gold decided to add as interstitial material. The cast as a whole is strong, albeit they’re mostly playing one-dimensional characters, and the two leads ably embody their two opposing principles. But it isn’t a remotely fair contest. In part because the deck is stacked so high against Dr. Stockmann in the town’s politics, it’s stacked precisely the other way from the audience’s perspective. But the production goes further than the text, and makes it far too easy for the audience to conclude that we would never side with the townspeople against Dr. Stockmann, the voice both of science and of morality. That’s not only false—in reality, most of us would be right there with the doctor’s accusers—but in failing to help us see where and who we would be in those circumstances, the play fails Ibsen, and us.

I should be clear that when I say the mayor “had real points to make,” that’s not to excuse what he does. He tries to get his brother to suppress his scientific findings, then rallies the town against him, then effectively incites a mob to attack him. Most egregiously, he’s clearly willing to knowingly poison visitors to the town. And he’s not only doing this to save the town’s economy, but to save his own hide; there’s no way he’d survive in office if he closed the baths. The mayor’s stance is morally appalling and also deeply self-interested.

But Dr. Stockmann’s elitist contempt for the people in the speech Ibsen gives him at that town meeting, a contempt that is substantially softened in this production, is there for a reason. The doctor isn’t just standing for what’s right. Because he believes he is right, he is blithe to the consequences to the point of being insulting to the people he ought to be trying to persuade. He is proposing to throw much of the town out of work, to shutter their businesses; he is, quite plausibly, heralding the town’s doom. On that much, the mayor is correct. Yet he never shows the slightest recognition that, from a certain perspective, these catastrophes are his fault, because he—on his own recognizances—sought out the evidence that made them inevitable.

As he sees it, the fault lies entirely with the tanneries that caused the pollution (one of them owned by his father-in-law, a nice irony that bites him in the ass toward the end of the play), and with his brother and the rest of the board of the baths who disdained his advice about how to avoid the contamination in the first place. That’s morally correct: he didn’t create the problem, he just discovered it. But if he discovered one of his patients had terminal cancer, would he prance around expecting to be hailed as a hero by the patient’s family? I would hope that he would show some compassion, would even understand anger at having brought them a death sentence, even if he wasn’t the author of it. Dr. Stockmann shows little of that feeling, and that’s an essential part of his character that partly explains why he is destroyed.

An Enemy of the People is, as I read it, a version of Antigone, less a struggle between absolute right and absolute wrong than a conflict between a stubborn personality who stands on an absolute (and correct) principle, and a political personality who stands for another, more utilitarian set of values which is also, in many ways, correct, though corrupted. Antigone is determined to bury her brother, Polynices, because that is his due by right and her inviolable duty as his sister. Creon forbids this, for the sake of peace (Polynices had just waged war on the city, ruled by a third sibling, Eteocles, a war in which both brothers were killed), which he holds as a higher value than upholding the demands of family honor. Audiences always side with Antigone, because she stands for principle, but it’s not at all obvious that Creon’s value system is entirely wrong and Antigone’s entirely right. I think Sophocles knew that and expected us to feel the tragedy that these two people and the values they stand for could not possibly be reconciled.

I think the same is true of An Enemy of the People. On one level, it’s a brutal investigation of how self-interested people are, and how willing we are to refuse to see reality when our self-interest depends on our not seeing it, to the point of being willing to expose our guests to potentially deadly illness. On that level, Dr. Stockmann is simply right. But on another level, it’s an investigation of the kind of person who would, on his own initiative, discover what Dr. Stockmann discovers, and how difficult it is to assimilate such a person into the body politic. That’s what makes it a tragedy, and why we shouldn’t comfortably applaud Dr. Stockmann, but should recognize that, if it were our town, we’d be with the townspeople stoning him.

If you want evidence, consider that on the night that New York Times theater critic Jesse Green attended the show, protestors from Extinction Rebellion disrupted the performance, shouting slogans like “No Theater on a Dead Planet!” Green thought that, if it had been planned as part of the production, their interruption would have been brilliant, but that as protest it was “self-canceling” since they were shouting down a play that was on their side. But doesn’t his reaction prove my point? When someone actually comes along and screams “all this must go for the good of the environment!” we aren’t receptive; we want them to behave more moderately, to accept that there will have to be compromises—even to accept that a great many people are going to die because we are not, as a civilization, just going to turn out the lights (and even if we were willing to, China and India won’t). Isn’t that a global version of exactly what Mayor Stockmann says in the play? If the kids who throw paint on Stonehenge are wrong—and they are wrong—then shouldn’t that affect how we perceive Stockmann as well? Isn’t that what makes Ibsen’s play a tragedy rather than a lecture?

So what about Gowanus? Well, look, if it turns out the air in Gowanus is truly toxic, then a bunch of developers are likely to lose their shirts—and the public is going to have to pay for a proper cleanup. New York City is, fortunately, not a small town, and we have political mechanisms for spreading costs like these across a larger tax base in both space and time. Self-interest is still playing a huge role—as I understand it, one reason it’s taking so long to assess the toxicity of the air is that a lot of sites wouldn’t let inspectors in—and if it comes out that regulators also turned a blind eye for a while, well, I hope there are political consequences for that too. But the only solutions to these kinds of problems are political ones, which is to ones that reckon with self-interest rather than denying its validity.

The challenge is how to integrate an appreciation for inconvenient truths into that political matrix, not to use those truths as a sledgehammer to shatter the matrix entirely, because the latter is generally impossible (and quite often pernicious even when possible), and therefore trying to do it is usually counterproductive. The tragedy is that the very personality traits that impel someone to become the discoverer and amplifier of such inconvenient truths are the ones that make such people difficult to integrate into the political matrix. Which is why those rare individuals who manage it really are heroes.