Our CalArts rendering of the masterwork An Enemy of the People aims to revive the urgency of Ibsen’s original critique of capitalism and the inherent violence it exerts on the health of our social fabric. The adaptation I have chosen is by another genius playwright, Arthur Miller. He, too, saw the relevance of this play to his own time; McCarthy’s assault on American democracy iterated the themes Ibsen was investigating in the late 19th century, including the suppression of truth for economic gain, the easy corruption of power, and the dangers of the manipulation of popular opinion to create a mob mentality and compact majority rule. Here we are again, finding unfortunate relevance in this play in our own timewhere even the natural world is under assault as a result of the mechanisms of late capitalism and its insatiable need for ever-increasing profit maximization with no concern for the greater social good.
With gorgeous design by the talented CalArts student artists, we aim to braid the original historical period with a sense of the “now.” We are exacting small ‘disturbances’ on the playing of the play, Brechtian gestures, which aim to underscore Ibsen’s warning. Rather than deliver a naturalistic production that says more about our own way of making American theater these last 75 or so than it does about the original text and its historical context, here we strive to make audible Ibsen’s and Miller’s Arguments, so brilliantly embedded in the archetypal characters and textual strategies The catastrophic challenges that befall a small community in Norway in the 1880s continue to be our own and yet, coming together in this artistic collaboration with the beautiful and rigorous CalArts community is a perfect creative antidote to the bleakness of the times. We hope you can take succor and experience the great hope that this amazing creative coming-together offers to all of us.
