An Enemy of the People

Or: The Mass of Men

For Yale Repertory Theater’s timely production of An Enemy of the People composer Matthew Suttor has put together a score dashed off by a bouncing string quartet: all up and go and ferrety energy. It’s both disconcerting and oddly pleasant and makes sense for a production that has turned Henrik Ibsen’s political drama into a Marx brother’s play (minus Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo, and plus one Buster Keaton). Set in a cube of Ikea-esque modernity with a vast expanse of fjord behind it (courtesy of Emona Stoykova), we watch the actors charge through curtains, spring from their seats as they sit Out Town-like off stage, and go through various approximations of dances (sometimes amusing, less so when a mob is literally “hopping mad.”)

Ibsen seems to have tailor made his story of a small 19th Century Norwegian town for the current climate. We tackle the fickle rule of populism, the public welfare when confronted with private cost, outrageous responses to “fake news,” and the problem of, what Dr. King called the moderate populace that “is more devoted to order than to justice.” The tale of a small town reaping the rewards of a health spa, where the esteemed local Doctor Thomas Stockmann (Reg Rogers) discovers the waters in fact threaten lives that they ought to cure. His brother, the fussy mayor Peter Stockmann (Enrico Colantoni), furious that his sibling would go behind his back to stub out the towns chief resource, manipulates the good Doctor’s supporters against him.

With the manner of Groucho Marx and the voice of Bob Dylan, Rogers swoops his way through the play, turning what might have been a passionate struggle full of bellowing and overturned chairs into a witty farce, the absent minded and razor tongued doctor whittling his opponents down to size. Of course our backing of him takes a serious dent when he starts rubbing shoulders with Ayn Rand and the Social Darwinists, but Rodgers (and translator Tom Walsh) keeps on, giving his scales and flitting about the set. He finds a perfect match in the subdued but sanctimonious Colantoni: Claude Frollo meets Winnie the Pooh. The actors have leaned into the fact that Peter and Thomas are so obviously siblings, locked in a glorious war of rivalry that has finally left the atmosphere of the petty and rocketed into dangerous space. Both often take mirrored posses like a pair of bookends and whatever farcical swashbuckling Rodgers indulges, Colantoni is always game to give the push to his pinch. Other first rate performances include Catherine (Joey Parsons) the doctor’s wife, who’s worked in a good deal more for the character by the inarticulate gestures of marriage than Ibsen ever gave her, and Aslaksen (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson) the dyed in the wool bourgeois printer who’s every third word is, “Moderation.”

There’s no strum and drang to be found here, apart from the hopping. The quartet carries a furious energy that vibrates through the performance but there’s no fury in it. What is highlighted instead, besides more laughs than you’re likely ever to harvest at Ibsen’s door, is a sense of the complacent hypocrisy. Of course we suspect the fickle sunshine supporters of looking out for their own interests, allowing themselves to be swayed by the mayor rather than lead by the nose, but in the final act, Dr. Stockmann receives an ultimatum from his father-in-law cantankerous Morten Kiil (Jarlath Conroy). The devilish offer is given without menace, without any pointed pause, without so much as a scrap of villainy. And that is unaccountably frightening.