Ibsen, Henrik

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    Review: Ibsen’s ‘Enemy of the People,’ Starring Jeremy Strong

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    The “Succession” star headlines a Broadway revival of Ibsen’s play about a lifesaving doctor and the town that hates him.Dissent is necessary to democracy, sure. But how much does it cost?That’s the fundamental question posed by Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” — and, in highly dramatic fashion, by the preview I attended of its latest Broadway revival.At that performance, on Thursday, just as the play reached its climax in a raucous town meeting — and as Jeremy Strong, as the town’s crusading doctor, was trying to warn his community about an environmental disaster — members of a climate protest group secreted in the audience at Circle in the Square interrupted the action with dissent of their own.What exactly were they dissenting from?Surely not the Ibsen, which aligns closely with their views and is a distant source of them. (The play was first performed, as “En Folkefiende,” in 1883.) Nor does it make sense that they would object to Sam Gold’s crackling and persuasive production, which drove those views home despite having to regroup once the protesters were ejected.After all, “An Enemy of the People,” adapted and sharpened by the playwright Amy Herzog, and starring Strong as Dr. Thomas Stockmann, is a protest already: a bitter satire of local politics that soon reveals itself as a slow-boil tragedy of human complacency.How the satire becomes the tragedy is central to the power of Ibsen’s dramatic construction, overriding its occasional plot contrivances. To emphasize the transition, Gold begins with the warmth of gaslight and candlelight camaraderie. (The superb and varied lighting is by Isabella Byrd.) Dr. Stockmann’s home (by the design collective called dots) looks like a low-walled barge on smooth water, decorated with Norwegian blue-plate patterns. Before anyone speaks, a folk song is sung and a maid sleeps at her sewing.With modesty and steadiness as the givens of this world, the doctor naturally does not expect to be heralded as a hero when he determines that the water supply to the town’s new spa is polluted with potentially fatal pathogens. But he does expect to be heeded.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Amy Herzog on Adapting Ibsen’s ‘An Enemy of the People’ for Broadway

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      At a rehearsal for “An Enemy of the People,” a Broadway revival of the 1882 play, the actor Jeremy Strong paced around an auditorium, wearing pants that were damp from kneeling in ice.As Thomas Stockmann, a doctor who tries in vain to warn his Norwegian coastal community about contamination in the town’s springs, Strong looked shaken, but hopeful. “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” said Strong, known for playing the fragile yet ruthless media executive Kendall Roy on four seasons of “Succession.” “We just have to imagine.”To anyone intimately familiar with “An Enemy of the People,” written by Henrik Ibsen, those lines might sound slightly off key. Ibsen ended the play on a more defiant note, with the doctor boasting that he is the strongest man in the world, because the strongest are those who stand alone.“That didn’t resonate with me at all,” said Amy Herzog, who wrote the new adaptation, which is scheduled to begin performances on Tuesday.Herzog watches a rehearsal of “An Enemy of the People,” which stars Jeremy Strong, right, opposite Michael Imperioli, left.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesInstead of ending with Ibsen’s image of a lonely, heroic truth-teller, she changed it. And it isn’t the first time she’s boldly revamped his work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Doll’s House’ Review: Jessica Chastain Plots an Escape

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      Jamie Lloyd’s compelling, surgically precise revival of Ibsen’s 1879 drama throbs like an episode of “CSI: Norway.”Many plays end with a breathtaking coup, but Jamie Lloyd’s incisive Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” which opened on Thursday at the Hudson Theater, also begins with one. After all, it’s not every day you find Jessica Chastain rotating on a turntable like an angry bird in a giant cuckoo clock.Yet there she is for 20 minutes as you take your seat and peel off your coat. Nor is she alone: The five other cast members gradually join her, seated on plain wooden chairs nearby. You can’t help seeing them through her steely gaze as she circulates from one to another, her blazing red hair pulled back and her arms and legs crossed as if sizing up suspects.Clearly, this “Doll’s House” is going to be a procedural. The forbidding, throbbing music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto suggests an episode of “CSI: Norway.”But pay attention to something else as you enter: the year 1879 projected on the back wall of the stage. Without it you might forget that’s when Ibsen wrote the play, and never imagine that’s when this production, using a script adapted by Amy Herzog, is set. With one big exception, “A Doll’s House” is that modern.Certainly it’s chic and visually minimal in the manner of Lloyd’s bucket-of-tears “Betrayal” starring Tom Hiddleston and his rapturous “Cyrano de Bergerac” starring James McAvoy. The black and midnight blue costumes by Soutra Gilmour and Enver Chakartash might be worn on 44th Street today, with Chastain in knitwear and kicky zip boots.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.And don’t look for props. Even when specific objects are mentioned — a cookie, a wedding band — no effort is made to mime them or acknowledge their absence. Indeed, except for the chairs, the stage is utterly empty; the set (also by Gilmour) depends on light rails descending ominously from the flies to suggest the contours, and pressures, of a home.The home in question is of course the dollhouse of the title: the place where Nora Helmer (Chastain) is kept as a plaything for her husband, Torvald (Arian Moayed). Even as she tries to understand how she got trapped there, and how she’ll get out, Ibsen’s ingenious plot demonstrates that marriage is not the only cage. Any woman who dares to venture beyond the security of the place society has made for her — who tries to discover herself as a full human — will meet with disaster.Except for wooden chairs, the stage is empty. Instead, Soutra Gilmour’s set depends on light rails descending from the flies to suggest the contours of a home.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s what happened to Anne-Marie (Tasha Lawrence), who left her own child years ago to become Nora’s nanny, and is now the nanny of Nora’s three children. And that’s what happened to Nora’s schoolmate Kristine Linde (Jesmille Darbouze), who shows up at the Helmer home at Christmastime, widowed and in need of a job.Nora’s disaster has been less visible. To the outside eye she has lacked for little, and with Torvald about to become the manager of a bank, she will soon lack for nothing. But unknown to him, that security has come at a terrible price, with more yet to be paid. Having borrowed money secretly to save his life during a health crisis, she finds herself under a new threat from the lender, the disreputable Nils Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan).Deprived of any independent vision of the world, she can imagine only three solutions. One is to tell Torvald the truth, hoping he will offer to do “the most beautiful thing” — take the blame. Another is to ask their best friend, Dr. Rank (Michael Patrick Thornton), who has long been in love with her, to pay Krogstad off. But the first would be to defer again to the supposedly greater moral fortitude of men, and the second to make herself not just Torvald’s doll but Rank’s. The third is suicide.That we see these options so starkly is because everything else is pared away. Herzog’s dialogue, pruning the social floweriness and conversational whorls of Ibsen’s naturalism, gets right to the point of every line, leaving the text raw and red, as if exfoliated. What the first English translation of the play, by William Archer in 1889, rendered as “You see, it is very difficult to keep an account of a business matter of that kind” becomes, for Herzog, “It’s impossible to keep track” — five words instead of 17. The play, usually nosing past three hours, comes in shy of two.But in cutting and modernizing the language, Herzog does not make the mistake of trashing the social conventions that create the drama in the first place. She doesn’t need to; most of them are still too familiar. In Torvald’s presence, Nora remains a recognizable type, the strategically chirpy songbird pursing her lips and cooing in baby talk. Yet in her superb scenes with Kristine and Rank, the only two people she is not afraid of, we see her other side: calculating, callous and kind when she can afford it.Chastain puts this all across beautifully. As Nora begins to understand the cracks in the stories she’s been told about the world, we feel the cold air of knowledge shivering her. Sharply, she asks Torvald why only mothers are blamed when children turn out badly. Outraged, she wonders how a law that punishes a wife for saving her husband can be moral. And when her options shrink almost to none, she short-circuits; the seductive tarantella she dances to keep Torvald from reading a fateful letter becomes a kind of seizure.Jesmille Darbouze, left, as Nora’s schoolmate Kristine Linde, a widow seeking employment. Darbouze and Chastain’s scenes together are superb, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe staging enhances that interiority at every turn. The children are mere voices. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design makes the dialogue sound as if it’s piped direct from the hypothalamus. In rotating each new scene toward Nora on the turntable, Lloyd highlights the transfer of information from character to character as if it were a shuttlecock — or contraband.Exhilarating as the approach is in vindicating Nora, this modern take on “A Doll’s House” does hit a wall with Krogstad and, crucially, Torvald. Casting Onaodowan, a Black actor, as the play’s most obvious villain, and then underlighting him for scary, shadowy effects (the lighting is by Jon Clark), may be a way of provoking and then subverting a racist response. And it’s true that the character is greatly softened here in Onaodowan’s ultimately sympathetic performance.But Moayed, a daring actor, has less leeway with Torvald. If the other characters feel comfortably at home in 2023, his insufferable, inexcusable paternalism leaves him utterly behind, a relic of 1879.It’s worth noting that linguists generally translate Ibsen’s title — “Et dukkehjem” — as “A Dollhouse” instead of “A Doll’s House.” The prison isn’t just Nora’s; she and Torvald are equally trapped in it. My only real quibble with this compelling, surgically precise revival is that it doesn’t seem to be interested in preserving that unity: in keeping our sympathy for both characters as balanced as Ibsen evidently intended. When the astonishing curtain coup finally comes, you should feel his loss no less than her liberation.A Doll’s HouseThrough June 10 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; adollshousebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour and 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Hedda Gabler’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’: 2 Takes That Shout Subtext

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      Irreverence can be illuminating. But Bedlam’s energetic productions of classics by Ibsen and Shakespeare lose insight in the process.Forgoing subtlety onstage has its advantages. Exaggeration leaves little room for doubt, obvious feelings burn hot, and in-your-face humor doesn’t‌ risk flying over your head. At least, that’s the idea. But in the Bedlam theater company’s productions of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” now playing in repertory at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, subtlety isn’t just dead, it’s the devil in need of exorcis‌ing.Take the newlywed Hedda Tessman, sunk low in a chair, coolly lighted at center stage as the 1891 play that bears her maiden name begins. Portrayed with viscous, palpable disaffection by Susannah Millonzi, she is a woman so unsuited to domesticity that her chair is leopard print. And when Hedda greets her doting, unrefined aunt (“Visiting us so early — that’s so very… kind of you”) her expression of good manners, which Ibsen soaked with subtext, becomes overtly sarcastic, subverting the play’s careful attention to the ways people use language to hide or reveal themselves.Bedlam, now in its 10th anniversary season, has built a reputation for reinterpreting classic texts, like “Sense & Sensibility” and “The Crucible,” with stripped-down, energetic stagings and a modern touch. Under the direction of the artistic director Eric Tucker, many of these revivals have sought to expose the essential bones of familiar works. Here, Tucker, who directs and acts in both productions, seems to be reacting against received ideas about the texts, resisting what’s expected of these classics with an exceptionally playful hand. But it’s a tricky gesture that, in each case, tends to obscure more than it illuminates.Using a colloquial adaptation of “Hedda Gabler” by Jon Robin Baitz, the production recasts the drama of betrayal in captivity as a daffy but dour comedy that happens to end in death. If Ibsen is known for his design of psychological interiors and subconscious intentions, here every room is turned inside-out, with feelings and attitudes sprung in the open. Rag-tag vintage furniture is pressed against the periphery of the stage (set design is by John McDermott), suggesting the drawing-room realism that Ibsen fathered has been deliberately cast aside.With a Hedda this sour and cunning from the start, her union with Tucker’s chipper, oblivious Tessman can only come off as a farce, its absurdity radiating outward. Line readings defy logic; one moment Tessman is shouting to Hedda as if she’s on the roof, the next he’s surprised to find her right beside him. Innuendo turns literal, as when Judge Brack (Ryan Quinn) all but humps the legs of Hedda’s chair. Dialogue and action are mismatched, as when Hedda claws meat off a roast chicken in the fridge, though she purports to be reading a letter. (She’s a woman of appetite, remember?) ‌‌The consequence of so much funny business is that there’s not much to ponder about the characters’ inner lives, which makes Ibsen far less interesting to watch. And the lighting (by Carolina Ortiz) and sound (by Jane Shaw) are heavy handed, indicating when the mood turns serious and sincere. With Hedda’s misery so loud and clear upfront, modulation also becomes a problem. By the time her foul deeds come to a head, she is throwing up, slapping the walls and hollering in a way that seems unsuited to a woman averse to public scandal.Lisa Birnbaum as Hermione and Eric Tucker as Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale,” the most unwieldy of Shakespeare’s plays, with a bear attack and a statue that comes to life.Ashley GarrettThe transgression of social bonds — between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, leaders and citizens — links the repertory pairing and seems to make Bedlam’s case for its resonance in the present.Suspicion of infidelity kicks off “The Winter’s Tale,” in which Tucker’s volatile, and obtuse, patriarch Leontes rules over a frat party-style royal court. With its swing from apparent tragedy to roving rom-com, and its grab bag of devices (a bear attack, a 16-year time jump, a statue that comes to life), Shakespeare’s play is an unwieldy beast to wrangle onstage, and one of the most amenable to bold and wacky interpretations. ‌‌Leontes and the neighboring king Polixenes (Elan Zafir) start out demonstrating their brotherly affection by slapping each other across the face with flour tortillas between shots of cheap liquor. But when Leontes suspects the queen Hermione (Lisa Birnbaum) is pregnant by Polixenes instead of him, the jig is up in a flurry of banishments and deaths that leaves him without his wife, child and friend.A cast of seven (some of whom appear in both productions) double and triple up roles in “The Winter’s Tale,” with only slight changes in the ’80s thrift-store costumes by Daniele Tyler Mathews to help viewers distinguish between them. The most impressive juggling act comes from Zafir, who plays both father and son in a confrontation at the altar of young love. Karen Alvarado, as faithful servant Camillo (and the ardent, naïve Thea in “Hedda Gabler”) is a standout in both, a rare anchor of earnestness and ease. But not everyone is as comfortable, especially with Shakespeare’s verse; under Tucker’s direction, some of the actors fall into the trap of gesturing at rather than conveying the meaning of words.There is something to be said for a company clearly having a blast — several, including Tucker, broke character cracking up at Mike Labbadia’s Clown (modeled after his pop culture moniker Chad, or loathsome alpha male), a laugh that might have been more fun were everyone in on the joke.Improvised bits of modern dialogue and a variety of acting styles give the productions a sense of a particularly collaborative rehearsal process. Challenging the form and style of revered material is what keeps them alive. But neither revival makes easy work of identifying cohesive or incisive arguments about the texts while also allowing the audience to follow along.If less can be more, as previous Bedlam productions have shown, “Hedda Gabler” and “The Winter’s Tale” suggest that more can also be too much. So much exuberance can demonstrate a breach of trust in the material, and the audience’s ability to understand it. As Ibsen and Shakespeare both point out, underestimating people comes at a cost.Hedda GablerThrough Nov. 19 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.The Winter’s TaleThrough Nov. 20 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      Dark Clouds Over London Stages

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      Productions of “John Gabriel Borkman” and “Blues for an Alabama Sky” conjure bleak atmospheres in two playhouses.LONDON — Loss and defeat hang heavy over two recent London theater openings: They are entirely different in content but share an emphasis on despair.In “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” the American play from Pearl Cleage now in a revelatory production at the National Theater, inhabitants of 1930s New York yearn for a better, kinder life elsewhere. (The show runs through Nov. 5.) The Bridge Theater revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman,” on view until Nov. 26, gives us a title character who speaks excitedly of the “new life” he seeks, though his attempts to forge a fresh start lead only to death.Of the two shows, “Blues” is especially powerful, in what must be the staging of a playwright’s dreams: a starry production at a prestigious playhouse from a director, the fast-rising Lynette Linton, fully attuned to the work’s soulful rhythms. Premiered in Atlanta in 1995 and revived there in 2015, the play focuses on three people sharing adjacent Harlem apartments in a building that, in Frankie Bradshaw’s expansive design, reaches the full height of the auditorium.The neediest of the trio is Angel (Samira Wiley), a nightclub singer who has lost her job and her boyfriend, and has taken seriously to the bottle. “What kind of dreams am I going to have?” she asks her roommate, Guy (Giles Terera), a gay costume designer whom Angel calls “Big Daddy.” (The play often recalls Tennessee Williams, and you can easily see Angel as a Black variant on Maggie the Cat and also Blanche DuBois.)Guy’s response is to look toward Paris, a city that is home to the expatriate Black entertainer Josephine Baker: If that legendary American-born performer can find her way in Europe, so can Guy. Early on, he raises a champagne glass from Manhattan to the new career that surely awaits him designing for the Folies Bergère. That events don’t necessarily turn out as people hope is a given. Fate deals Angel an entirely separate hand, and Guy’s reveries about La Bakaire, as he refers to Baker, are pulled up short by racism and homophobia closer to home.Adekoluejo’s character in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” is on the front line of a nascent American abortion rights movement.Marc BrennerAcross the hall from Angel and Guy lives the more practical Delia (the wonderful Ronke Adekoluejo), who offers to teach Angel to type: Secretarial skills will provide useful employment while Angel, reeling from her dismissal from her nighttime job, gets back on her feet.As sensible and focused as her neighbors are mercurial, Delia, in her indrawn way, is a pioneer. She is on the front line of a nascent American abortion rights movement and is working to open a clinic nearby. “I’m not trying to make a revolution,” she says. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”Complicating matters are the men who come into these women’s lives. Delia enters into a relationship with Sam (a warmhearted Sule Rimi), a doctor who supports her quest for female empowerment but would really rather take her out for a night on the town. Angel, in turn, catches the eye of the churchgoing Leland (Osy Ikhile), an Alabama native who offers care and comfort but doesn’t have much time for the flamboyant effeminacy of Angel’s beloved Guy.Will Angel forsake her deep friendship for romance? Wiley, a Juilliard-trained actress and established TV name, expertly catches the shifting moods of a restless soul who is of two minds about the virtues of domesticity; she also lends a terrific singing voice to those snatches of the blues that punctuate the production. Terera is in full command as the changeable Guy, a dreamer who is flighty one minute, fully alert the next, and who knows all too well that his sexuality is viewed as an “abomination.”Guy sees the world around him as “tawdry and tainted” and can’t wait to sail first-class to freedom in France, although we never find out if his wishes are fulfilled. We’re left wishing a gentler future for the play’s central characters, whose openheartedness may, with luck, see them through the obstacles that lie in their way.It’s difficult to think quite so generously about John Gabriel Borkman, the disgraced former bank chief executive who gives Ibsen’s 1896 play its title. But Lucinda Coxon’s vigorous new version, presented without intermission in a fleet staging by Nicholas Hytner, invests the title character with a fantasy life that borders on madness. Back home after serving a five-year prison sentence for fraud, he spends his time rehearsing past grievances and rhapsodizing about rebuilding his life.Simon Russell Beale and Lia Williams in “John Gabriel Borkman” at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanIt’s possible in the production’s spartan contemporary setting — Borkman’s wife, Gunhild (a blistering Clare Higgins), is watching daytime TV as the play begins — to see the title character as a Nordic variant of Bernie Madoff, or other moneymen who met a grievous end. Rich in rhetoric, Borkman compares himself to “a great wounded eagle watching the vultures scavenge my plans.”In fact, as the character is played by the great Simon Russell Beale (a Tony winner in June for “The Lehman Trilogy”), I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Lear, a onetime role for Beale. There’s a Shakespearean grandeur to the deluded Borkman as he staggers shaggy-haired into the snow, speechifying to the night sky like Lear cast out into the storm.And just as Lear recognizes too late the depth of his youngest daughter’s love, Borkman comes belatedly to an awareness that it was his sister-in-law Ella (a coolly furious Lia Williams) who loved him fully. The two face off in the upper floor of the Borkman house in a prolonged confrontation that is the highlight of the play. “You killed love in me. Can you even understand what I’m saying to you?” Ella says in an emotional outburst that Borkman dismisses as “hysterics.”The Borkmans’ son, Erhart (Sebastian de Souza), is a student who has taken up with a flamboyantly dressed older woman, Fanny (Ony Uhiara), much to the chagrin of his family. Fanny speaks of whisking the young man off to Rome with the same enthusiasm that Guy, in “Blues,” speaks tantalizingly of Paris: Anything, you get the feeling, would be preferable to the wintry drear that is their daily lot.“Be happy!” Ella says when she wishes Erhart farewell, “as happy as you can!” In Ibsen’s compellingly grim world, that’s probably not very happy at all.Blues for an Alabama Sky. Directed by Lynette Linton. National Theater, through Nov. 5.John Gabriel Borkman. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Nov. 26. More

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      Review: ‘Gnit’ Seeks Itself in a Mist of Magic and Mischief

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      Will Eno’s inward-looking incarnation of “Peer Gynt” steps out of Ibsen’s shadow just as Ibsen shrugged off elements of the original fairy tale.We know the formula of the fairy tale: There is often a youth, sometimes a journey and always a touch of the fantastical to convey a moral or theme. Since we know the classic tropes from our childhood bedtime stories — don’t deviate from the path, be wary of witches, fear trolls — to contemporize a fairy tale is to shade these narrative standbys, coloring in the context of the time, updating the tone and plot to challenge our expectations.In 1867 Henrik Ibsen did just that, putting his own experimental, modernist spin on the Norwegian story of Peer Gynt to create a timeless narrative of self-discovery — in the form of a five-act play in verse, no less. In Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” the title character is a lazy, selfish liar who is a headache to his poor, sick mother. When he goes to a wedding to steal away the bride — an old flame — only to fall instantly in love with another woman at the wedding, the town turns against him for his troublemaking. So he flees, and his meanderings lead him to odd characters and even odder situations — encounters with magical beings, thieves and asylum patients.The playwright Will Eno puts his own stamp on Ibsen’s version in “Gnit,” which opened at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn on Sunday night. Portraying the protagonist as a listless young man on a search for self, Eno ends up with a funny story that is myopic in scope — a self-aware and sometimes cloyingly precocious thought experiment in individualism and identity.In “Gnit,” which originally premiered in the Actors Theater of Louisville in 2013, Eno translates Peer Gynt to Peter Gnit (that’s pronounced “Guh-nit”; you’re welcome) and consolidates many of the other characters so that a cast of six can represent a whole town. That’s one of the tricky parts of Ibsen’s text — the long list of characters, the insistent verse, the constant setting shifts, the frequent and abrupt dips into the absurd and surreal.Eno’s text takes a route of calculated whimsy: Ibsen’s trolls are changed to real estate agents, characters make knowing references to the original story and the dialogue is tuned to a cheeky deadpan. Playing off Eno’s heightened sense of language and pacing, Oliver Butler opts for comically stylized direction in this production by the Theater for a New Audience. The actors’ movement and intonation are stiff and curiously robotic, and the lines move with the rapid Ping-Pong tempo of the dialogue in an episode of “Gilmore Girls.”Joe Curnutte and Deborah Hedwall in the Theater for a New Audience production.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m on a journey to discover, to uncover, the authentic self,” Peter tells his mother.Her stone-dry response: “Yeah? Get some milk while you’re out.” Which isn’t to say it’s not funny — in fact, the work is genuinely hilarious, the turns are unpredictable and the performers, especially the priceless Deborah Hedwall as Mother Gynt, Jordan Bellow as several different characters, and of course Joe Curnutte in the lead role, seem to effortlessly hit their cues. (David Shih, who plays various townspeople at once, and spends most of the show in conversation with himself like a mini one-man show within the show, struggles to convey the multitude of tones and personalities and accents, and the novelty of the joke quickly wears off.)But Eno’s self-consciously idiosyncratic, academic style eventually gets old somewhere between the nuptial kidnapping and a trip to Egypt. Offbeat, Beckett-esque ruminations and existential querying are common in Eno’s works — including the poignant “Wakey, Wakey” and his popular Pulitzer Prize finalist, “Thom Pain (based on nothing).” So his adaptation brings out the big-picture questions Ibsen had in his original, about the ways we form, and own up to, our “authentic self.” Eno’s narrow and incessant philosophizing, however, quickly limits the play from exploring other themes that may have otherwise proved more fruitful.Ibsen’s incarnation of the fairy tale, for example, also works as a social satire of a community set at odds with its individuals and that emphasizes status over human empathy. Though the skeleton of that satire is visible in Eno’s version, “Gnit” does little to examine or expand it from Ibsen’s time to the present. Likewise, there could be a dissection of gender, a critique of class hierarchies, a sendup of this genre of storytelling itself.There’s magic in Kimie Nishikawa’s set of verdant rolling hills with a valley in the center, and periodically the facades of little cottages descend from the ceiling. Nishikawa’s hills, which the cast members travel among, through and around as they enter and exit scenes, draw the eyes to the pastoral scene and also provide a sense of Peter’s extensive journeying.This isn’t Norway, though. And it doesn’t seem to be the 19th century either. In fact, everything about the setting and characters is vague, which leads us yet again to the question of what Eno is trying to achieve with his adaptation?“There is a limit to the magic powers of language,” Peter says as he tells a story to his dying mother. The lesson, that cleverness can fail when wordplay and chin-stroking ruminations distract, is one that Eno himself could have taken to heart. “Gnit” is brainy and full of rhetorical magic, but with more dimension and greater relevance it could be spellbinding.GnitThrough Nov. 21 at the Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Enemy of the People,’ Water and Democracy Are Poisoned

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      Ann Dowd stars in a contemporary rewrite of Ibsen’s play that forces a community, played by the audience, to make a series of fateful choices.Elections in Weston Springs are so simple. When a question comes before the townspeople, they confer in small groups, reach a consensus, press a button marked “X” or “O” and get the result, all within a minute. To a New Yorker, that sounds nice right about now.But alas, Weston Springs, with its world-famous hot-water baths and grass-roots democracy, isn’t real. It’s the invented setting for “Enemy of the People,” Robert Icke’s enjoyable if gimmicky rewrite of the 1882 Ibsen drama originally called “En Folkefiende.” That play, structured traditionally in five acts, had 11 speaking roles and heaps of extras; Icke’s 95-minute version, which opened Wednesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, is a shiny one-woman show starring the formidable Ann Dowd as everyone.Well, not quite everyone. For the occasion, the Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall has been set up as a kind of laboratory of democracy, with a map of Weston Springs painted on the floor and 45 tables, seating two to five citizens each, deployed at different “addresses.” My pod of four was at Table 16, otherwise known as 16 Waivers Way.So the audience plays the extras, each table getting one vote. As Dowd explains in a brief prologue, the results of the five “elections” that take place during the performance will affect the direction and even the content of the play, and help us answer its overriding question: “What does this community think?”I’m not sure that goal was ever achieved. True, we voted on issues raised by the plot, which involves a public health crisis that butts up against an economic one when Professor Joan Stockman, chief scientific officer of the Weston baths, discovers lead in the water at levels even higher than the levels found in Flint, Mich., in 2015. (In the Ibsen version, the pollutant was apparently salmonella, which caused typhoid.) Surely the thing to do, Joan assumes, is to shut down the joint until new pipes can be laid, regardless of cost.But the mayor — who, as it happens, is Joan’s older brother, Peter — doesn’t see it that way, or can’t afford to. The baths are not merely successful in themselves but have brought prosperity to the town as a whole. Since the complex was refurbished, tourism has increased ninefold, drawing people to its pools and potations while also creating an ancillary industry of high-end hotels and candle shops. When Peter learns that remediating the problem will take at least five years, and untold millions, he conveniently begins to suspect that the science is wrong.The formidable Ann Dowd plays all of the characters, including the two opposing siblings at the heart of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat both siblings are played by Dowd is a problem, and a plus. The plus is that Dowd is, as fans of “The Leftovers” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” know, an endlessly and effortlessly compelling actor, apparently unafraid of any extreme of human depravity. Her baseline naturalism — just looking at her face, taking in her posture, you believe that whomever she’s playing exists — allows for some terrifying flights into surreal psychology.That’s the problem, too. Ibsen already loaded the deck in creating the contrasting siblings: Thomas — as Joan was originally known — was candid but excitable and arrogant; Peter, devious but phlegmatic and cordial. Because Dowd is playing both, and because she is a tiny figure on Hildegard Bechtler’s giant catwalk of a stage as it branches out amid the tables, she must push both characterizations to extremes.So Peter, as projected live on jumbo screens, is no longer a worm but a snake, making arguments that (it seemed to me) were utterly transparent in their hypocrisy. And Joan, in return, is a mad fury instead of a mere idealist. As she bullies her brother, she undermines her positions by making them seem personal or even pathological. (She’s nasty to her husband, too, as Ibsen’s character never was to his wife.) Far from receiving the gratitude she expects for saving lives, she manages to make a mayor who is willing to sacrifice people for profit seem almost prudent and reasonable.I suppose that isn’t so extreme. We have only to look at Flint — or at Covid-19 or the building collapse in Surfside, Fla. — to see how often, in real life, the advice of experts may be perverted by political or even democratic means. (Condominium boards, no less than municipal officials, are elected.) Biologists, virologists and engineers are just some of the modern-day scientists who become “enemies of the people” by trying to save them.But neither Ibsen’s Thomas nor Icke’s Joan is able to stop at advancing a lifesaving crusade; both extend their arguments into weird, troubling territory. Enraged, Joan shouts that “molecules are not subject to majorities” and “facts are not a democracy” — viewpoints that soon merge into a profoundly elitist and even eugenicist worldview. In a properly organized society, she suggests, only experts would be allowed to vote. Or maybe only her.In writing Joan this way, Icke, the director of the acclaimed Andrew Scott “Hamlet” in London and the excessively brutal “1984” on Broadway, puts an even heavier thumb on the scales than Ibsen, never a light touch, did. Clearly the attempt is to balance the arguments, or at least to balance our antipathy toward them. The voting likewise forces our hands, as the ballot issues are worded tendentiously. The last of them — “Who is the enemy of the people?” — requires you to choose between Peter and Joan, as if that were how democracy worked or was even, at least at Table 16, a question.In Robert Icke’s version of the Ibsen classic, the audience is forced to consider whether democracy is the same as consensus, and their votes determine the direction of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe voting concept is further trivialized by the doomy “quiz” music that plays as you deliberate, and, more fatally, by the outcome’s barely altering the experience of the play. Apparently, Dowd performs different scenes at two points, depending on the tally; on Wednesday, we met a local physician and the mayor’s public relations chief, whereas other audiences may spend time with Joan’s husband and a newspaper editor. But any one audience can only know the one sequence it sees, so the dramatic value of the gimmick is moot.Which is not to say that “Enemy of the People” is too. Though it has stripped away most of the detail that Ibsen uses to dramatize the way civic crises arise from (and filter back down to) domestic ones, it offers a compensatory challenge. Icke asks us to dramatize these issues for ourselves, at our own tables. Communally, we are forced to consider: Is democracy the same as consensus? Is the ballot the best guarantor of good policy?I ask because the four residents of 16 Waivers Way, split 2-2 on a key issue and unable to decide how to decide, ran out of time without hitting “X” or “O.” Ranked voting, anyone?Enemy of the PeopleThrough Aug. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; 212-933-5812, armoryonpark.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More