People keep saying it’s a shame schools these days are no longer teaching civics—the analysis of the rights and duties of citizenship.
Oddly, one of the best illustrations of “these days” is a play written in the 1880s: Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. A 2024 adaptation runs Feb. 5–March 2 at San Jose Stage Company, which expects civic engagement to inflame its audiences and perhaps get them out of duck-and-cover mode.
The play is about a scientist who discovers an environmental problem that figures to cripple his town’s most important industry, and the political forces that overpower his efforts to do the right thing.
The environmental angle rang true during the 1970s, even leading to a film starring Steve McQueen. Shifted to this day and age, Ibsen’s themes have never been more relevant.
Several issues Ibsen’s play raises have become prominent during the past 10 years.
A teacher complains she isn’t allowed to teach the truth. There are references to fake news, the extinction of reporting in journalism, cover-ups of an epidemic and accusations that scientists are money-grubbing charlatans.
“Theater,” says Randall King, the Stage’s longtime artistic director, “makes you interested in history.”
It’s no coincidence this production closely follows the second inauguration of Donald Trump and the sense of anxiety among his many adversaries bordering beyond dread.
“Now,” King says, “it feels like a negligence [yes, he said “a negligence”] not to do it.”
The title alone intrigues King. “Every few years the syntax of this title resonates in another way,” he says. “It’s been buried in my rolodex psyche for almost 50 years. It bubbles up periodically.
“‘Enemy of the people,’” King says, “was first declared by the Roman Senate against Marc Antony, later weaponized by Robespierre during the French Revolution, and subsequently used by Lenin, Stalin and Hitler to mislead and manipulate.
“It went into our populist vernacular about eight years ago.”
Those years have put King in spread-the-word mode about the state of the union, and beyond. “We’ve been watching him swing his leg over the pony for nine years,” King says, and now he’s noticing ominous suppression. “When did they take over the arts? When did the censorship we’re already feeling begin?”
He cites the REM song “It’s End of the World (As We Know It)” and says its meaning is clearer now. “I’ve come to realize what ‘ignorance is bliss’ means.”
It’s difficult to remain passive in the presence of such passion. Prepare to be engaged.
How directly engaged is not clear. The script of the Thomas Ostermeier/Florian Borchmeyer adaptation, which the Stage permitted Metro to view, follows Ibsen’s original five-act structure, with Act IV consisting of a climactic town meeting.
The script is ambiguous about whether the audience in that scene extends beyond townspeople/actors. King declined to elaborate.
But there’s no denying there’s a civic engagement angle built into the production, and that seems topmost in director Kenneth Kelleher’s mind.
“Does the individual have a duty to safeguard the majority’s interests,” Kelleher asks, “even when their actions are deemed dangerous, subversive, or at odds with the will of the people? Can we trust the individual’s motives, or should we rely on the competence of our officials and media? Ostermeier’s adaptation of Ibsen’s play deepens this inquiry.”
It does so in today’s terms. The sleepy dialogue that permeates many early 20th-century translations of Ibsen is much spicier in this one. King’s role, of the scientist’s father-in-law who owns the polluting industry, is augmented in the adaptation, and his dialogue is full of vulgarities not usually associated with Ibsen.
Coleton Schmitto portrays the idealistic scientist Thomas Stockmann and Johnny Moreno plays Peter Stockmann, the pragmatic older brother/mayor whose opposition to the expense of fixing the deadly environmental problem sets off the maelstrom that ensues.
“Now I think the play is about your moral choice,” King, 73, concludes. “It’s a choice between profit, money, greed and a choice of moral integrity.”
The setting for the Town Hall, featuring a drab blackboard full of talking points, has set an Orwellian tone at rehearsals that zeroes in on that widespread dread and might even make it useful.
San Jose Stage Company’s production of An Enemy of the People runs Feb 5–Mar 2. Tickets: $17+. thestage.org.
