Enemy of the People

YOU MIGHT BE A REDNECK IF ...you’re doing Ibsen on patio furniture.

Photo: James Palmer

In adapting Ibsen’s 1882 polemical drama, playwright Oakes has moved the whole kit and caboodle from late-19th-century Norway to early-21st-century rural America. Oakes never names a specific state, but James Ogden’s spare set design and big-sky-country projections suggest the Great Plains. Though the hero is now a heroine and the dialogue is entirely Oakes’s, the plot remains largely intact: A respected, idealistic scientist discovers that the new spa on which her town has built its future as a resort destination is, in fact, polluted. She promptly files a report with the mayor (who happens to be her brother), fully confident that he—along with the press, homeowners’ association and chamber of commerce—will support her ambitious and staggeringly expensive proposal for removing the contamination.

She is, of course, dead wrong. Faced with the choice between bankruptcy and poisoning the town, the civic leaders decide they’ll take their chances with the poison, and the townspeople are easily convinced that the scientist is a nut.

Oakes deserves credit for finding useful contemporary reference points (looming environmental disaster, the Bush administration’s contempt for science, the current economic straits of many towns) and for bringing a compelling ambiguity to the issue of right and wrong. Yet the play isn’t as moving or upsetting as it should be, mostly due to the principal characters’ lack of a rich emotional life—rendering, for example, the heroine’s climactic breakdown entirely unconvincing. Palmer’s solid, intermittently inventive staging boasts strong supporting performances, but Courtney Bennett further alienates us from the protagonist by playing her as a hectoring motormouth.

• More theater reviews
• More Theater articles