The Brooklyn Rail

Winston Churchill never actually said “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” But indifferent to misattribution, the quotation has zipped around the internet for decades anyway, a cynical proverb for citizens who experience majority rule as an endurance sport rather than a rewarding civic exercise.

Dr. Stockmann, the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People, is one such citizen. Upon discovering harmful bacteria in his town’s water supply, Stockmann falls afoul of public opinion when he advises a full scale shutdown of the town’s newly-built municipal baths. At a town hall to discuss the matter, Stockmann is shocked to find that the majority of townsfolk would rather the baths stay open. Incensed, he accuses them of clinging to an “old marrowless truth”—that majorities have the same capacity to govern as minority experts.

In 2024, Stockmann’s critique of unfettered democracy cannot play without some conscientious caveats. Now playing at Circle in the Square, Amy Herzog’s rendition of Stockmann (a donnish Jeremy Strong) never uses the term “majority” disparagingly (instead, he refers to his opponents as a “mob.”) Like Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation of Ibsen’s play, Herzog’s version also dials down Stockmann’s foray into eugenics; to temper the “problematic” lines that Herzog keeps (in which Stockmann analogizes uneducated citizens to stray dogs), one actor retorts, “This is offensive, dangerous rhetoric, and I’ve heard enough.”

It’s understandable that Herzog might course-correct Stockmann’s most pungent departures from political correctness as a right of adaptation: other language in the script, too, has undergone a contemporary treatment, though director Sam Gold keeps the setting—illuminated by candlelight and punctuated by Norwegian folk song—intimately Old World. But in the process of updating Enemy for our times, Herzog also bowdlerizes the political conclusion that Stockmann draws from his ordeal: that is, his vehement rejection of mainstream party politics.

At the conclusion of Ibsen’s original script, Stockmann’s message to his countrymen is crystal clear: he states that he wants “to drum into the heads of these curs the fact that the liberals are the most insidious enemies of freedom—that party programmes strangle every young and vigorous truth.” From here, he utters a final axiom that might delight Ayn Rand: “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” Stockmann’s refusal to abandon the truth expands into an almost anarchist sensibility—if the government and media won’t listen, then screw ’em. He’ll preach from street corners, he’ll start his own school.

In 2024, such rhetoric might make centrist liberal viewers uneasy. While it’s commonplace among centrists and liberals to acknowledge in general terms that the decay of democracy is disturbing, it feels less permissible in our contemporary climate to platform an irrevocably jaded attitude towards mainstream institutions and party politics. Stockmann is supposed to be a lone voice of reason amidst a maddening mob—embracing environmentalism, Strong’s Stockmann evokes a spurned climate scientist (in one scene, the “mob” showers him with ice, and he lies onstage shivering like a stranded polar bear). But for Broadway-going liberals to claim him in 2024, it is imperative that Ibsen’s protagonist must not only oppose ignorance and populism, but must possess some optimism that these social ills—and, in turn, the environmental threat—will dissipate by mainstream democratic processes.

Herzog’s version courts this view by ending on a note of empathy. “I keep having this terrible thought… that they deserve what comes to them,” admits Stockmann’s daughter Petra (an earnest Victoria Pedretti) in the final lines of Herzog’s adaptation.

“We must try not to think that way,” Stockmann replies with grave nobility. “In ten years, or fifty… it will matter that we did what’s right.” He stops just short of declaring that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Such a conclusion is predictable, blandly uplifting, and a missed opportunity. By softening Stockmann’s violent disillusionment with party politics into a weak statement of bleak hope, the Enemy revival downplays one of the most provocative and timely propositions of Ibsen’s original text: that an ignorant citizenry is the intentionally constructed outcome of any party system that encourages adherence to fixed programs over the cultivation of one’s independent moral and political values.

Both Ibsen’s original script and Herzog’s adaptation thrillingly illustrate the insidious role that politicians play in weaponizing citizen attention. The town’s mayor (Michael Imperioli) frames Stockmann’s proposals to address the water crisis as encroachments on the liberty and property rights of his town’s constituents—in doing so, he recasts a public health issue as an economic concern to safeguard his own party, who greenlit the baths. Here, there are echoes of the culture-war politics of mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

People become unwitting enemies to themselves when politicians manipulate them to act against their own long-term flourishing: this is Ibsen’s essential conclusion. How such a stubbornly manipulated public will ultimately realize their unfortunate condition is the question facing the frustrated Stockmann at the end of Enemy. In Ibsen’s Enemy, Stockmann envisions the path to civic and scientific enlightenment as an ongoing battle waged in the public arena—in addition to founding an alternative school to rear young minds, Stockmann plans to keep preaching truth until “they will have to listen.”

“I am going to sharpen my pen til they can feel its point,” he says. “I shall dip it in venom and gall; I shall hurl my inkpot at their heads!” But in Herzog’s adaptation, it’s unclear how a sea change might come. Converting ignorance to reason by resisting party politics is not a practical proposal in the new Enemy; the restoration of democracy is instead a vague, utopian undertaking situated in a far-off political imaginary. “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” says Stockmann in the final line of the new adaptation. “We just have to imagine…”

We also had to imagine that American citizens wouldn’t deny the existence of COVID-19 while literally dying from the virus—but they did. We also imagined that Donald Trump’s first, disastrous presidency would deter citizens from supporting him again—but check the polls. Previously unimaginable levels of denial, no doubt animated by partisanship, plague America. And while utopian political imagination is a powerful and necessary tool for envisioning the future of democracy, citizens concerned about the effect of this denial must also think up tangible action plans to resist, persuade, and mobilize against illiberal and ignorant ideologies that partisanship helps propagate in our imperfect present.

Many other productions of Enemy have used the theater as a forum to solicit democratic ideas from audience members; in fact, audience participation is so common in contemporary stagings of Enemy’s town hall scene that when climate protestors interrupted a recent preview performance, many in the crowd assumed that their cries of “No theater on a dead planet!” were part of the show. This interruption was not received well; New York Times critic Jesse Green described the outburst as “self-canceling.” “In disrupting work that champions a common cause,” he wrote in his review of the production, “people who mean to do good risk making enemies of the wrong people.”

Without changing a word, Green could also be describing the attitude of cautious centrist liberals towards leftists seriously considering alternatives to two-party politics in 2024. Nowadays, leftists who support third party candidates risk being deemed “enemies of the people” by centrists quick to scapegoat independently-oriented voters. The potent danger posed by Trump in 2024 looms rightfully large in the minds of those who implore independent-minded voters not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. But Ibsen’s lesson is that democracy as a greater system is likewise endangered whenever citizens are goaded into compromising independently developed values, convictions, and political goals for a party program. In the extraordinarily precarious short term, adherence to party politics for strategy’s sake may be a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. But in the long term, more expansive imagination is necessary to stitch the wound closed—and for many young people, this imaginative act includes democracy beyond the two-party system.

In toning down Stockmann’s disillusionment with party politics, and the political vigor that such disillusionment ignites in him, this revival misses the chance to reach audience members who feel similarly disgusted with mainstream politics, and feel similarly inspired by their disgust to dream something new. In ten years, or fifty, these may be the citizens on whom democracy depends.