| ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE - this rainy afternoon | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 05:50 pm EST 03/09/24 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 05:39 pm EST 03/09/24 | |
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| A friend had an extra ticket so I was able to see this today. I was glad I was able to see it. I enjoyed it. I found the production to be satisfyingly traditional in its presentation of the Ibsen play. Sam Gold's direction tends to speed through the dialogue in the first half. And I could see the audience who had, I assume, largely come to see the star of Succession getting antsy. At midpoint, Gold pulls out an appealing bag of interactive tricks and sets them off one by one. They are tricks but they are clever, well chosen and well aligned with the dramatic needs of the play. And from the midpoint on the production crackles with tension and drama. Out of all the performances I would say that at present the weakest link is Mr. Strong. He's not bad at all and has an appealing and sympathetic presence on stage but his Dr. Stockmann remained somewhat of a cypher for me. The secondary characters are well cast. It was great to see Thomas Jay Ryan as the weaselly Aslaskan and the delightfully weird David Patrick Kelly as the patriarch Morten Kiil. The younger actors were also strong, particularly Victoria Pedretti. I also enjoyed watching Michael Imperioli as the oily mayor of the town. He leans into predictably Trumpian gestures a bit too much towards the end but at least he has found his inner-troll. He is presented here as the main villain of this tale of social gaslighting. But the problem is that it is not just one populist mayor gaslighting the town. It is an entire social network helping each other to gaslight themselves and each other... a troll's holiday. And this is where I think the production fails Ibsen's play. What is being presented is Ibsen the progressive humanist taught in college courses, not Ibsen the poet. Remove the dark poetry which exists in this play with its under layer of the grotesque and mythic and you also remove the humor. And this is a rather humorless production. Yet it is also an amiable production. Herzog's adaptation gives the dialogue an accessible American vernacular flow to it that allows us to get up close to the characters. Some of her adjustments as in the merging of the mother and the daughter characters are shrewd and successful. She and Gold also expand on the rather thwarted romantic relationships of the daughter and her suitors. The ending is changed, it is almost a paraphrase of Olga's speech at the end of The Three Sisters. The original ending is a complete rejection of the social and an ambiguous endorsement of individual. Herzog's ending emphasizes a hope for society that felt false to me. But so what, this was Ibsen's play on stage this afternoon and certainly the best production I've seen of it but then it's only the second one I've ever seen. |
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