Call it crossed wires, or call it kismet. Either way, those messages zapping back and forth between friends planted a seed—and in terrifically short order, the current production was mustered. It helped that Herzog, fresh off A Doll’s House, already knew how to shake the dust off an Ibsen classic and that the principal creative trio share deep bonds: Herzog and Strong met as undergraduates at Yale; Strong and Gold began collaborating early in their theater careers, teaming up for a 2010 off-Broadway production of the 18th-century play The Coward; Gold and Herzog are, as previously noted, married. (Remarkably, An Enemy of the People marks the spouses’ first production together.)
“I’ve never had the stars align this way,” comments Gold. “Like, right after Jeremy said he wanted to do it, I called Circle in the Square, and the theater was available for the exact dates he had free.” Circle in the Square presents work in the round, and that 360-degree view is vital, Gold explains, for a play about competing perspectives. There’s the truth of fact, Stockmann’s truth, but there are other truths too. The town’s economy would be hard hit by the baths’ closure. Jobs will be lost. And what about the polluting tanneries? Must they be shut down? Forever?
Herzog gives such complexities airtime. It was important to her, for example, that the character of Peter, the mayor, not come across as a straw man or a totally cynical operator. Rather, he’s the political exponent of the collective will to unknow, when knowing threatens to unravel the fabric of society. “His arguments have to carry weight,” Herzog explains. “He has to believe in the thing he’s protecting.”
“If you think back to when Ibsen was writing, this science was new; it was like, What’s a microbe?” explains Sopranos and White Lotus star Michael Imperioli, who plays the role of Peter. “He’s asking, ‘You want me to stake the future of this town on some invisible bugs?’ In that light, his position is pretty reasonable.”
“It’s tricky, though,” says Strong. “Because at the end of the day, Stockmann is right. It’s not that he wants to bring this information forward; he feels like he has to.” But how do you do that, Strong goes on to ask, at a moment like our own, when the whole concept of “truth” is up for grabs? Gold, Herzog, and Strong all bring up Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, in which the author launches herself into the orbit of anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and election conspiracy theorists. “History keeps repeating itself,” says Gold. “This dynamic Ibsen lays out, it recurs again and again. These ways we get polarized. And all the reasons people will look at someone armed with a set of cold, hard facts, and say, ‘Well, that’s what you believe. I believe something else.’ ”