Jeremy Sturdy was once status on a bartop, a self-righteous-rebel posture no longer unfamiliar to “Succession” scion Kendall Roy, whose notoriety has helped flip Henrik Ibsen’s relatively stiff 1882 morality story right into a sizzling Broadway price tag. Sturdy’s personality, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, was once about to earn his identify moniker, the use of a town-hall-style assembly to sentence the soon-to-open native baths for spewing poisoned water.
Cue the local weather activists: Affiliated with a bunch referred to as Extinction Insurrection, they drew an specific connection between the small-town Norwegian drama and an pressing international disaster, shouting “the oceans are emerging and can swallow this town” and “no theater on a useless planet!” Some actors howled again in personality whilst team of workers scrambled to finish the interruption. Watch the movies and also you’ll see that just about no person within the target market, together with myself, appeared shocked.
That’s as a result of Amy Herzog’s new model of the textual content, and this in-the-round staging through her husband Sam Gold, was once already aiming to blur distinctions between previous and provide. (Buyers had simply been invited onstage totally free photographs of Linie Aquavit, all through a short lived intermission that gave the impression of sponcon for Norway.)
The boldfaced topics of Ibsen’s parable — the delicacy of fact within the face of mob mentality, the unfold of incorrect information through the clicking, the prizing of cash on the expense of nature — rarely want updating.
However Herzog, who tailored final season’s acclaimed revival of “A Doll’s Area,” additionally refashions Ibsen’s tale with a streamlined, fresh vernacular. In crisp, plain-spoken discussion, the motion clocks in at just below two hours, with some characters excised — Thomas is now a widower — and others beefed up, maximum significantly his daughter Petra (an interesting Victoria Pedretti), whose heat and integrity lend the complaints some center.
There’s just a modest degree of interest to the temporary relationship of Petra through the newspaper editor Hovstad (a forged Caleb Eberhardt), who flips from her father’s most powerful best friend to his maximum outspoken foe, refusing to submit Thomas’s water-contamination find out about as soon as it turns into transparent the inside track may just result in the city’s monetary spoil.
However the manufacturing’s puzzling loss of hearth (in spite of stunning, lantern-rich lights design through Isabella Byrd) originates with the nice physician himself. Sturdy carries Thomas’s convictions like a free hand on a briefcase, keeping up a placid composure at the same time as he makes a dangerous discovery after which will get battered through betrayals seeking to reveal it. Well-known for his extreme-sport performing manner, Sturdy turns out alive to each second onstage however no longer totally implicated of their penalties — even if the latter depart him curled up at the flooring.
The gears of Ibsen’s good judgment flip at a modest tempo — how does Thomas no longer straight away get that solving the water downside could be dear? — permitting audiences to leap forward and watch the characters catch up. Dramatizing the not on time epiphanies of a supposedly good guy is hard, and Sturdy takes an understated manner. Ditto to his offended oration calling his haters an ignorant and complacent horde. After the blazing cries of actual protesters, Sturdy’s supply appeared all of the extra subdued.
The pairing of Sturdy reverse Michael Imperioli, making his Broadway debut as Peter, Thomas’s brother and the mayor who leads the price towards him, lends the revival a definite cable-drama status. However “The White Lotus” superstar’s bottled-storm-cloud depth spreads skinny onstage, and the fraught fraternity between the rival siblings is best intermittently plausible.
Gold’s consideration to texture and tactile element asks audiences to lean in; the play’s early scenes foster an engrossing intimacy later blasted aside through civic controversy. From the sophisticated border on Petra’s woolen scarf (costumes are through David Zinn) to the Rosemaling patterns painted at the white set (through the design collective Dots), the manufacturing creates a seductive and convincing global within the realm of the senses. However it took a startling ambush to jolt the ethical of the tale into the instant.
An Enemy of the Other folks, via June 16 at Circle within the Sq. Theatre in New York. 2 hours. anenemyofthepeopleplay.com.