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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

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      A Complicated Collaboration for a New ‘Enemy of the People’

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      Without seeing a script, Ann Dowd jumped at the chance to work with Robert Icke on his solo adaptation of the Ibsen classic. Then the debates began.You are an established stage and screen actress, an Emmy winner with pivotal roles in two of the most critically acclaimed series of the past decade. One day, a young theatermaker rings with an offer you should refuse: a drastic remix of the Henrik Ibsen play “An Enemy of the People” as a solo show in which you would play all the parts. Oh, and he hasn’t written it yet.Ann Dowd (the cult leader Patti Levin in “The Leftovers” and the brutal enforcer Aunt Lydia in “The Handmaid’s Tale”) did not hesitate. “I knew on that first call that I would trust him completely,” she said.That bond was evident during a recent chat with Dowd, 65, and her new collaborator, the British writer and director Robert Icke, 34, at the Park Avenue Armory, which commissioned and is presenting their show from June 22 through Aug. 8. Sitting on an overstuffed maroon couch upstairs at the Armory, the pair batted around ideas, arguing affectionately but spiritedly, and dryly teasing each other.In the original play, Dr. Thomas Stockmann discovers that the waters feeding his town’s popular spa baths are contaminated. For the sake of public health, he wants to disclose his findings and close the baths; this pits him against his own brother, Peter, who happens to be the mayor and fears a fatal blow to the local economy.Icke (pronounced Ike) kept that mainframe, which feels prescient in the light of debates surrounding Covid-19, then changed … a lot. For starters, Thomas is now Professor Joan Stockman, the town has become Weston Springs and there are references to pizza delivery and TV. More importantly, the audience gets to influence the outcome by voting at key points of the story.“Rob rewrites classics to bring them closer to us,” said Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director. “Not by trivializing them, but by going straight to the complexity of why they are great plays. He’s categorical about being able to understand why a play needs to be done, why it’s a story we want to tell now.”Icke’s only other New York credit, “1984,” received mixed reviews when it ran on Broadway in 2017 but in his native Britain he is celebrated for daring, bracing productions that strip the rust and barnacles off familiar material. Dowd — whose stage career includes a 2008 Broadway production of “The Seagull” opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and Peter Sarsgaard — is not shy about disagreeing about some of Icke’s aesthetic choices. But these differences appear to fuel their artistic collaboration, not hamper it. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was your starting point when you decided to rethink Ibsen’s play?ROBERT ICKE All I really had was the notion that it was interesting but maybe there was a different route through the story that might make a social-distanced environment feel natural rather than pragmatic. And it relied on me finding somebody I felt 100 percent confident I could write for.ANN DOWD Were you sure it would be a woman?ICKE Yes.DOWD How come?ICKE Good question. I don’t know. There’s just something about this show with a man that is completely uninteresting to me.Dowd in rehearsal with her director Robert Icke. They are fond collaborators — except when it comes to their respective takes on Chekhov.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesAnn, how did the project reach you?DOWD My very wonderful agent and manager said, “You have an offer to do a one-person show based on ‘Enemy of the People’ with Rob Icke” — Robert Icke, I think they said. Block your ears — can’t compliment him, I mean, truly, don’t even try. I could tell from the sound of their voice that it was an extraordinary honor to be asked. I didn’t know Rob’s work — I don’t really know anything about a lot of things [stage whisper] you can just cut that part — but at any rate they educated me. Part of me was thinking, “Give me a reason to say no, please, let me avoid this walk up Everest.” I say “walk” because there’ll be no climbing. Then we spoke and I thought, “Who would ever turn this man down?”ICKE Oh, it’s happened.Were you familiar with his work?DOWD My sister is a casting director in London and said, “Rob Icke? Oh, my God, I saw his ‘Vanya,’ I was riveted and when it was finished it had been four hours.” [Actually, about three and a half.] I said, “Wait a minute — whaaaat?” She was just so in the story.ICKE Chekhov said he wants that play to feel like real life so sometimes it was just like, “I just want to watch you all live for a minute, so you just tune your guitar and you maybe look at your phone for a second and then you put it back.”DOWD Well, that irritates me: What is a phone doing in “Vanya”?ICKE We do differ about this. What is our experience of being in the country in the modern age? [He pretends to hold a cellphone up in the air.] “Have I got any bars?” So there’s that idea that wherever they are, there’s no phone signal, just a rusty landline somewhere in the house.DOWD My pushback was: “No, no, it’s called imagination.” Having played Sonya [in a 1986 production] and loving her — lo-ving her — I said, “I’ll trick you: I want to be in ‘Vanya’ and I’m going to play Sonya.” But he said he would never cast me in a role I’ve played before.ICKE But there would be something interesting in asking where Sonya is when she’s your age. Like, what happened?DOWD Yeah, write that play! But let me wear the damn clothes that I wore in Russia and don’t change my name. And don’t take out a cellphone!ICKE Unfortunately if you’re doing Chekhov with me, you’re wearing contemporary clothes. There will be no samovar, there will be no parasols.How did you approach the central character of Joan? She has become a distinct person, not just Thomas Stockmann in a dress. And she can be aggressively intransigent, bordering on zealotry.ICKE It’s both simple and incredibly complicated: the genius of this lady [pointing to Dowd] is that the characters are like real people. I came in one day with a rewrite of a section. She looked at me with a genuine hurt and said, “I just don’t think that’s fair on Joan.” Joan was now a real person who existed inside the actor.DOWD If you track her early years, I think she was probably shut down quite a bit: “Lower your voice, let your older brother” — mother taking you aside — “Joan, he’s the shy one, don’t bully him.” So just learning: “I’m not going to be listened to so might as well just yell it out. And [expletive] every one of you!” I imagine one or two women have experienced that in their lives.The play now introduces an interactive element with the audience votes: The majority’s decision has an impact on what happens in the town and in the play, and it might not be to everybody’s liking.ICKE I think the same thing is true of Trump because he was democratically elected: He won a fair and free election. Whether any of us like that or not, there’s a horrible dichotomy to wrestle with.DOWD How does that excuse —ICKE It doesn’t excuse anything. But that’s the big bind: the process that put him there is the process we all claim to like and the one we signed up to. The British equivalent of that is Brexit.Audience members at this “Enemy” will be asked to respond to plot points by voting from their seats.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesDOWD If Peter [the mayor] had said, “Look, we are going to have to close down the baths, we’re going to figure it out together. We will find a way to get help. You are not alone.” Real leadership.ICKE Isn’t real leadership to just get it done quietly: shut the baths, give a vague reason?DOWD No, people deserve to know the truth about their lives.ICKE But does it help us? Sometimes I wonder whether we’d all be happier if we knew a bit less. I sometimes think we’re all so flooded with information, it’s more than we can take in.DOWD This is slightly off topic, sorry, but you think about the people who knew what Trump knew [about Covid-19] and stayed quiet. What is that? Your job is more important than your integrity?Ann, how do you burrow into the heads of these tough characters? Of course Aunt Lydia comes to mind.DOWD I was a pre-med student for four years and the way you get through it is that you study to the point of insanity. Then I realized, You know what? Let’s go to acting school! But I applied those same rigorous studies to acting for a very long time. That’s misery because you’re not letting anything in around you. All the doors shut, except for the one you choose to go through.The other thing, and this is big: It’s playing. People ask, “How do you ever play Lydia?” I can’t get to her fast enough. It’s make believe — not to diminish the intensity — but if it wasn’t, emotionally, you’d go home, put a pillow over your head and end it all! Just chill a little bit: It’s a play, there is supposed to be fun in it.Have you reached the fun stage on this one yet?ICKE We had fun on Sunday, when you did all of it.DOWD I was in a state of shock!ICKE I’ve got the WhatsApps to prove it.DOWD [resigned] OK. The point is, that’s the goal. I’ll get there.Enemy of the PeoplePerformances June 22-Aug. 8; armoryonpark.org More

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      Review: A ‘Party in the Bardo’ for a City in Transition

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, Laurie Anderson and Jason Moran gathered fellow artists to conjure a sonic environment haunted by the pandemic.New York City is in a liminal state: partially vaccinated while still in the grip of Covid-19; beckoning cautiously masked people outside with the blossoming spring; and reopening indoor performance venues at last, but with caveats that color every show with reminders of the continuing pandemic.This moment of in-betweenness is like “that scene in the movie when the prisoner wakes up, and the jail door has swung open and no one’s around,” the polymathic artist Laurie Anderson said on Friday during “Party in the Bardo,” her collaboration with the jazz luminary Jason Moran at the Park Avenue Armory. “So … what’s happening next? Can I just go?”Anderson supplied violin and vocals in between sections of poetic spoken word.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesFacing Anderson from the opposite side of the room was Moran at the piano.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThere’s another fitting metaphor, the one that gives Anderson and Moran’s project its title: the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist transition between death and rebirth that has been described as a 49-day process during which energy prepares to take on a new life. It’s a long-held preoccupation of Anderson’s, the theme of her poetic 2015 film, “Heart of a Dog,” and the namesake of a late-night radio show she hosted last year as part of a Wesleyan University residency — also called “Party in the Bardo,” whose guests included Moran.“Party in the Bardo” — the version at the Armory, presented to an audience of a little more than 100 in its 55,000-square-foot drill hall — is, like many projects by both Anderson and Moran, difficult to label. It would be too limiting to call it a performance or an elegy. Or an installation, though it included one in the form of “Lou Reed: Drones,” a sound-bathlike work assembled from Reed’s guitars by his former technician Stewart Hurwood. (Reed, who died in 2013, was Anderson’s partner for the last two decades of his life.)Lou Reed’s guitars resounded in “Lou Reed: Drones,” assembled by his former technician, Stewart Hurwood.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe tai chi master Ren GuangYi continuously practiced under a spotlight.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesMore than anything, “Party in the Bardo” is a vibe — an hourlong immersion into an environment that is both intensely visual, with continuous tai chi by Ren GuangYi and Haobo Zhao, and a large mirror ball kinetically reflecting lights on every surface of the drill hall; and chaotically musical, with Anderson, Moran and a small group of fellow artists in a series of structured, often simultaneous improvisations layered atop “Drones.” Those of us in the audience were given cardboard mats, to feel it all through the floor if we wanted. I spent a good 20 minutes lying in savasana, vibing.Spread throughout the space, the players — Louie Belogenis and Stan Harrison on saxophone, Susie Ibarra on percussion and Vernon Reid on guitar, in addition to Moran on piano and Anderson on violin and vocals — were not unlike the ethereal, chattering personalities in the colloquy-as-novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders. There were distinct notes, distinct voices, but they were only fleeting, coming and going as quickly as the lights on the floor.Vermon Reid offered structured improvisations on guitar.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesAnd Stan Harrison played saxophone, along with Louie Belogenis.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe clearest sounds came in moments of transition: at the start, Anderson bowing the lowest string of her violin while Moran rumbled the piano’s deepest registers as if building a foundation; and at a later ebb, when the drones were pierced by painfully human wails coming from the saxophones at opposite ends of the room.Two readers, Afrika Davis and Lucille Vasquez, spoke text I couldn’t make out until I realized, near the end, that it was a list of the pandemic’s victims. How many, of the nearly 33,000 in New York City alone, could have been named in an hour? To do them justice would require mourning on a mass scale — bigger than Friday’s artistic expression of grief for a privileged few.Members of the audience were provided with cardboard mats to lie on and feel the music’s vibrations through the floor.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesWith the worldwide death toll continuing to inch higher by the day, it will take time to truly process the tragedies of the past year. It will take time, too, for live performances to resume comfortably. During the curtain call at the Armory, the artists bowed with their arms out but their hands at a safe distance — a reminder that we may have spent an hour partying in the bardo, but we are still very much in it.Party in the BardoThrough Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      New York to Allow Limited Live Performances to Resume in April

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew York to Allow Limited Live Performances to Resume in AprilThe state will allow plays, concerts and other performances to start again April 2 for audiences of up to 100 people indoors, or 200 outdoors.New York State is relaxing coronavirus restrictions and allowing venues to reopen next month to limited audiences. The musicians Jon Batiste and Endea Owens performed at a pop-up concert last month at the Javits Center.Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMarch 3, 2021Updated 5:32 p.m. ETPlays, concerts and other performances can resume in New York starting next month — but with sharply reduced capacity limits — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Wednesday.Mr. Cuomo, speaking at a news conference in Albany, said that arts, entertainment and events venues can reopen April 2 at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or 200 people outdoors, and a requirement that all attendees wear masks and be socially distanced. Those limits would be increased — to 150 people indoors or 500 people outdoors — if all attendees test negative before entering.A handful of venues immediately said they would begin holding live performances, which, with a handful of exceptions, have not taken place in New York since Broadway shut down last March 12.The producers Scott Rudin and Jane Rosenthal said they expected some of the earliest performances would take place with pop-up programs inside Broadway theaters, as well as with programming at nonprofit venues that have flexible spaces, including the Apollo Theater, the Park Avenue Armory, St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Shed, Harlem Stage, La MaMa and the National Black Theater.“That communion of audience and performer, which we’ve craved for a year, we can finally realize,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director and chief executive of the Shed, which plans to begin indoor performances for limited-capacity audiences in early April.The new rules will not affect commercial productions of Broadway plays and musicals, which are still most likely to open after Labor Day, according to Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League.“For a traditional Broadway show, the financial model just doesn’t work,” she said. “How do we know that? Because shows that get that kind of attendance close.”Mr. Cuomo announced his plan to ease restrictions as New York, along with New Jersey, has been adding new coronavirus cases at the highest rates in the country over the last week: both reported 38 new cases per 100,000 people. (The nation as a whole is averaging 20 per 100,000 people.) And New York City is currently adding cases at a per capita rate roughly three times higher than that of Los Angeles County.The labor union Actors’ Equity responded by calling on Mr. Cuomo to “prioritize getting members of the arts sector vaccinated.”Many nonprofit leaders welcomed the new rules as a sign of hope and a first step toward recovery. “We have suffered immense loss and there’s a way to go,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, “but this policy change signals that we are turning a corner on the worst crisis the American theater has ever experienced.”Lincoln Center and the Glimmerglass Festival have already announced plans to perform outdoors this year, and the new rules clarify how many people can attend.“We welcome the new guidelines and want to serve as many people on our campus as is safe,” said Isabel Sinistore, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center, which is planning to open 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal spaces on April 7.For many New York music venues, operating at 33 percent capacity still may not be enough to make reopening economically feasible, give the costs of running the venues and paying performers.“It doesn’t make financial sense for the Blue Note to open with only 66 seats for shows,” said Steven Bensusan, the president of the Blue Note Entertainment Group, whose flagship jazz club is in Greenwich Village.Smaller music venues, which are among the eligible recipients of $15 billion in federal aid, have been anxiously awaiting permission to reopen. But even with growing vaccination numbers and New York’s latest rule change, it may still take months for the touring industry to resume, and even then venues say they will need help.The Blue Note, along with some other jazz spots that serve food, had reopened last fall for dinner performances, allowing them to put on some shows without running afoul of state regulations that had banned anything but “incidental” music. (Some venues, and musicians, had filed lawsuits challenging those rules.) Then the city shut down indoor dining again, and some clubs did not reopen when it was allowed to resume last month.Michael Swier, the owner of the Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge, two of New York’s best-known rock clubs, said that the state’s order that venues require social distancing and mask-wearing means that the true capacity at many spaces may be much lower.“Given that social distancing is still part of the metric, it brings us back down to an approximate 20 percent capacity, which is untenable,” Mr. Swier said.Several promoters and venue operators said they were holding out to reopen at 100 percent capacity, which many hope can happen this summer.But some small nonprofits immediately expressed interest. At the Tank, a Midtown Manhattan arts venue with a 98-seat theater, Meghan Finn, its artistic director, said that within hours of the governor’s announcement she started hearing from comedians eager to resume indoor performance.“Having the ability to use our space is not something we will pass up,” Ms. Finn said.The Joyce Theater in Manhattan had been expecting to bring audiences back to see live dance in September, but Linda Shelton, its executive director, said that she and her team had “hard work” to do in the coming days, as they assess whether staging a performance in the near term makes financial sense and can be done safely.“We’ve got a few things that we could present pretty quickly,” she said.Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, home to the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, the site of a respected music festival each summer, called the moves a “welcome first step.”“One hundred is a good beginning number,” Mr. Botstein said. “That’s April’s number. Let’s hope June’s number is larger.”A variety of nonprofit theaters said they found the news encouraging.Paige Evans, the artistic director of Signature Theater, said that she had already commissioned the playwright Lynn Nottage and the director Miranda Haymon to create a multimedia performance installation in the theater’s capacious lobby this summer, and that the new rules should allow for audiences to attend.Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of the Park Avenue Armory, said she, too, is eager to welcome people back. “To have live audiences responding to the work is going to be thrilling,” she said.Other organizations said the relaxed rules would allow them to imagine new programming. El Museo del Barrio said it would seek to develop outdoor work for parks, on streets, or in borrowed spaces.“Finally,” said Leonard Jacobs, interim executive director of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning in southeast Queens, “we have good guidance from the state to help us take the first steps back to normal life.”Ben Sisario and Matt Stevens contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More