Review: An Enemy of the People by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
My favorite line in Ibsen's 1882 The Enemy of the People is never spoken in this production. After angry confrontations in a town meeting, a mob chases Dr. Thomas Stockmann through the streets. As Act V begins, we see him collecting rocks that have been thrown through the windows of his home, and Stockmann shows his wife Ingrid that the mob has torn his trousers in the pursuit. She laments that those are his best pair, and the dotor replies, "You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth!"
In the lobby at its 2006 production, the Shakespeare Theater of Washington DC offered a black t-shirt featuring Stockmann's rueful comment. I bought it as a gift for my daughter, who has worn it regularly ever since. That motto captured captured Ibsen's irony in a story that showed town leaders eager to suppress Stockmann's proof that the newly construced, highly successful town spa was being poisoned by pollution. Their refusal to acknowledge the potentially lethal bacteria in the waters or to discuss remediation infuriates the protagonist, particularly when a formal town meeting votes to declare him "an enemy of the people."
It's probably a coincidence, but Austin has seen two productions in the past month featuring that plot element. The University of Texas just produced Dürrenmatt's The Visit, in which the town condemns and executes a citizen at the behest of a billionaire, and now St. Ed's Mary Moody Northen Theatre gives us The Enemy of the People. One key difference: in contrast to the drab shopkeeper Anton Shill of The Visit, Dr. Thomas Stockmann is a hero. He insists on scientific proof, he denounces those who seek to preserve their livelihoods by peddling poison to the public, and he goes on a rage against the malleability of "the people" manipulated and misled by their leaders. Stockmann shouts that since "the people" are gullible and uninformed and since experts and ethics are rare, inevitably the minority is always right.
No wonder his trousers get torn and his house gets stoned.
MMNT credits director Kasey RT Graham for the adaptation, a slimmed-down, somewhat regendered script that seems to locate the action in the United States in some rural northern countryside. Perhaps Wisconsin or Minnesota? My daughter imagined it might be in the wilds outside Duluth.
I'm not too bothered by Graham's deletion of my favorite line, but as a literary translator, I'm not pleased that the program omits a translator's credit. This unintentionally implies that director Graham put it into English. Distinctive phrases left here and there indicate almost certainly that the point of departure was the 1911 translation by British academic R. Farquarson Sharp. I raise the point out of professional solidarity, not merely because Sharp, like Ibsen, isn't around to do so. Like Ibsen, he's not only merely dead, he's really most sincerely dead, as Munchkin Harry Stanton sings in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
MMNT's production of this classic moves fast and empoys ingenious platforms that become tables with a quick shake and are easy to rearrange. All cast members are confident with their speeches. And yet . . . we had the impression that many were proclaiming those lines rather than thinking them. Action surges. There's virtually none of the nuance or irony inherent in that vanished favorite line of mine.
Kameron Callahan as protagonist Dr. Thomas Stockmann is entirely in command of his lines but appears to determine to shout his way through the script, no matter to whom he's talking. This works best in the confrontation in the town hall where the doctor scorns and scolds those present.
Chloe Nichols is controlled as Stockmann's sister the no-nonsense mayor—too controlled, probably by director Graham, which was unfortunate. Her role has rich possibilities, for the mayor isn't necessarily the stone-faced bad guy we see here. A mayor must handle complex politics as well as the delicate assignments of conveying, explaining, and negotiating. In September in her dual role in She Kills Monsters Nichols deftly demonstrated greater range.
Cast members notable for their grasp of meaning beyond the literal text were Jake McDonald, Ava Baker, and Victoria Turner.
The two Actors Equity artists who appear only late in the action are thoroughly convincing in their characters: Patrick Lawlor as the taciturn, throughtful Captain Horster, the seafarer ready to help Stockmann in his campaign, and Damien Boykin, who plays the unscrupulous businessman who is Stockmann's father-in-law.
Director Kasey RT Graham's bio features a lot of contemporary musical theater, a genre that is necessarily emphatic and demonstrative, not ironic (Sondheim being the exception that proves the rule). No classic or classical drama is cited; there's nothing written outside the United States except The Phantom of the Opera.
Perhaps the director's unknowing intent was to make Ibsen a musical. Without the music.
EXTRA
Click to view the MMNT program for An Enemy of the People
An Enemy of the People
by Henrik Ibsen
Mary Moody Northen Theatre
November 5 - 15, 2026
Mary Moody Theatre, St. Edward's University, Austin