Christopher Lane, Jeffries Thaiss, and Tim Getman
By Alexander C. Kafka
“You have an inveterate tendency to go your own way,” says Peter Stockman, the mayor of a small coastal Norwegian town to his physician brother, Thomas, early on in An Enemy of the People. “… Someday you’re going to pay for it.”
Someday soon, it turns out, in this classic dissection of righteousness amid parochial hypocrisy and treachery. The town’s on the verge of becoming a tourist center, thanks to its new spa baths, and Thomas has unfortunately discovered that the water system is full of “reeking waste from the mill,” a veritable breeding ground for gastritis- and typhoid- generating bacteria.
The way the townsfolk treat him and this information still makes, in this centennial year of Ibsen’s death, for powerful drama, particularly in the masterful hands of this committed troupe and its director, Jim Petosa.
It’s a timeless play but an unsentimental one, and as complicated politically as it is dramatically. For Thomas, though heroic, is also a megalomaniac, and becomes elitist and not a little unhinged. He starts off terribly naïve, figuring that once he presents his irrefutable evidence of the pollution, the town will simply “see things right” and re-lay the whole water system higher up. He counts on the backing of Hovstad, publisher of The Courier, the local newspaper, a muckraker who decides the polluted baths are the perfect wedge issue with which to overthrow the town’s establishment. “A journalist of my radicalist leanings can’t let an opportunity like this pass by,” Hovstad explains cunningly to Thomas.
Thomas also counts on the support of Aslaksen, the printer and leader of the local small businessmen. Though moderate in approach, he is nonetheless keen to see the bath problem fixed to secure the long-term prosperity of the merchant class.
Thomas also enjoys the warm encouragement of his wife, Katherine, daughter, Petra, and sons, Morten and Ejlif.
“It’ll all go smoothly,” he assures Hovstad. “We’ll see,” says the latter, his nose crinkling condescendingly.
Of course, instead, it all goes to hell. Peter, whose relations with his brother are obviously strained to begin with, threatens Thomas, who, as the bath corporation’s physician, technically answers to Peter as the corporation’s head. The consummate two-faced machine pol, Peter explains that re-laying the water system would take two years and cost “several hundred thousand crowns.” Bath-caused illnesses can be quietly seen to by Thomas, he implies, adding that this stance is “for the good of the town,” rather than to save his own reputation as leader of the spa's construction.
Thomas has right on his side. But getting back at his bullying brother would feel good too. And his righteous indignation—“I want the opportunity to look my boys in the eye,” he says sympathetically—soon turns to a less healthy kind of feverish martyrdom. Once he’s decided to fight the powers that be, he’s discouraging Hovstad from allowing the townspeople to organize a parade in his honor and equating himself, literally, with truth. “Whatever I do will be in the name of truth,” he declares. He also starts equating all his foes with the invisible filth of the waters, prescribing that “it is the whole society that has to be purged and disinfected.”
Sadly, once Peter explains to Aslaksen the trouncing that local commerce would take were the water system to be redone, Aslaksen, who’s already articulated his fear of going up against local authorities, turns into a veritable Norwegian Grover Norquist. Seeing which way the wind’s blowing, Hovstad, too, deserts Thomas, as does Hovstad’s exuberant right hand, Billing, a would-be Marxist who also has one eye on a cozy little position in the town clerk’s office. Soon, Thomas, so recently the man of the hour, is an utter outcast, his family too paying a terrible price for his singleminded quest to do the right thing. Not only does Thomas lose his job, but so does daughter Petra, a teacher, and their one staunch ally, Captain Horster. Thomas loses his house lease too. All this, it’s repeatedly said, not because their employers and landlord and friends really think ill of them, mind you, but because these decent folk “don’t dare not to” ostracize Dr. Stockmann and his family.
One only needs to read the headlines to see that this is heady and timely stuff—thus its inclusion in Olney’s summer Potomac Theatre Festival, which emphasizes classic scripts with contemporary resonance. It’s also a hellishly demanding role for Thomas—the thespian equivalent of an endurance sport—and Christopher Lane is superb in it. He inhabits Thomas’s being right down to his vocal hem-and-haw ticks and burns through the character’s enormous tirades without losing his momentum or his focus (or his voice, even though it seemed Lane was fighting a nasty cold and hoarseness Tuesday night).
Jeffries Thaiss as Hovstad is also top-notch. “Lay snares for your readers?” says Petra to Hovstad in reference to some subpar romantic fiction he wants to publish as sugar to make the medicine of his radical political content go down a little more smoothly. “You’re not a spider,” she tells him. Oh, but he is, and both she and her father are caught in his silky but ungiving web. The character’s every creepy calculation glints from Thaiss’s lively eyes. James Slaughter is a frighteningly convincing Peter, too. There’s something so square and cocksure about him that you know he’s crooked and desperate to his civic-minded bones.
Other standouts are Kip Pierson as Billing, who practically jumps out of his skin in anticipation of either violent revolution or that tidy civil-service job, whichever comes first; and Tim Getman as Aslaksen, as decent-seeming and completely untrustworthy as any shady chamber-of-commerce president you’d ever run into. Richard Pilcher, as Thomas’s father-in-law, is a little over the top, but in a welcome way given the play’s oh-so-sober context. He has fine comic timing and, in his stage-aged cackle, a real way with lines like, “Make monkeys out of them, I say.” Julie-Ann Elliott and Lindsey Haynes, as Katherine and Petra, have thankless peripheral roles, but carry them off with sweetness and dignity, and a hint of feminist indignation that nicely suits Ibsen’s views and this production.
James Kronzer’s clever set combines grand, oversized wooden doorways with screens that serve as abstract wallpaper or newspaper headlines, depending how they’re back- and floor-lit by Daniel MacLean Wagner. Costume designer Howard Vincent Kurtz and costumiere Jeanne Bland have handsomely outfitted their charges with fine period suits, coats, dresses, and work clothes.
This isn’t fun date-night kind of entertainment. Enemy is brilliant, but it’s also hectoring, and smug, like its protagonist. For all that, it’s too relevant to the big lies of, yes, ours but also every other era. It should be seen and mulled over and discussed, and its insights taken deeply to heart.
Why? Because we don’t dare not to.
