theater
BY RICK LEVIN
Dude, Don’t Drink the Water
VLT’s An Enemy of the People swings into the ’70s
I
n a small provincial town in the 1970s
lurks an unspeakable evil — an evil
all the more horrible for its relative
invisibility. Please understand that the place
is hardly a backwater; in fact, it is exactly
the town’s healthful waters that connect
it with the wider world, both in terms of
tourism dollars and the progressive ideas
carted in by visitors arriving to enjoy a
rejuvenating spritz. The last thing this town
needs is some wide-eyed whistleblower
come to spoil the party by pointing out
the capital-T truth: That those celebrated
waters hide a monster that might just be
killing people.
I’m speaking, of course, about Jaws,
the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie that set
the precedent for all future Hollywood
blockbusters. Jaws — with its Freudian
behemoth of mute, savage nature literalized
by an erect gray shark’s fi n slicing the ocean
waves — tapped into something primal in
the collective psyche of American culture,
which was reeling from the Vietnam War,
Watergate, Kent State and ever-looming
fears of nuclear holocaust.
But let’s jump back a few years —
to 1882, precisely, the year Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen unleashed An
Enemy of the People. This archetypal
drama, about a lone individual pitted
against all of society in his fi ght to reveal
the truth (substitute polluted waters for
shark), is about as open to interpretation as
a play can get. Ibsen was grappling with
the earth-rattling ideas unleashed by the
collapse of Renaissance thinking: atheism
and the death of God, existential solitude
and the madness of crowds, the individual
versus the “herd” mentality. And so the
play takes aim at simply everything, and
it does so in a loose-cannon manner, with
a spray of vitriol that doesn’t give a shit
about collateral damage. Everyone and
everything is fair game. This may explain
the strange endurance of An Enemy of
the People, which seems to pop up like a
carnival whack-a-mole every few years. It’s
a funhouse fop of open-ended adaptation.
Very Little Theatre’s production,
directed by James Aday, sets Ibsen’s socio-
political potboiler in the Northwest of the
1970s, where — just like in Jaws — the
music is bad, the clothes are worse and,
in general, middle-class progressives and
conservatives alike are still shaking off
their Summer of Love hangovers. The
play opens to the strains of Johnny Nash’s
“I Can See Clearly Now” (as in, “It’s
gonna be a bright, bright, bright sunshiny
day”), thereby setting an ominously ironic
tone that, unfortunately, the rest of the
production never quite lives up to.
Some of the problems can be laid at the
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feet of Ibsen. The play is at
once unsubtle and uncertain,
a wicked combination. This
very indecisiveness calls
for a strong hand to make
the play work — to grab
it by the scruff and shove
it in one direction or the other. Aday, who
also designed the sets, dresses everything
up in the vaguest trappings of ’70s stuff,
but somehow fails to nail any of the big
signifi ers of the era: Gonzo, ganja, disco,
decadence, Nixonian politics, etc. Bell
bottoms do not a decade make. And so the
era of the Eagles and key parties is reduced
to a Brady Bunch reunion.
This failed grasp for surface-level
authenticity extends to the mechanics of the
play itself. Bruce Lundy is miscast as Dr.
Thomas Stockman. Lundy — who appears
more eager to please than persecute — comes
across as a kind of addled Jimmy Stewart
character, forever trapped between a hem and
a haw. Don Aday, as Mayor Peter Stockman,
is perfectly pompous as the bottom-line
bureaucrat who treats his crusading brother
with a combination of condescension,
contempt and mealy concern, and Steven
Mandell is delightful as the ink-stained
printer Aslaksen, who touts moderation in
all things. There are some very nice turns
by minor characters, but they are lost in the
ambient miasma of a production that never
really fi nds its footing on the slippery slope
of Ibsen’s demagoguery.
What Aday should have done is take
the whole shooting match right over the
top into madcap satire and slapstick. The
time is ripe. After all, we are living in a
crazy kaleidoscope age of Tea Baggers,
talking heads and turd brains souring the
political landscape. Instead of that Johnny
Nash song, the play could open with, say,
John William’s theme to Jaws (da da, da
da, DA, DA…), and take off from there into
utter absurdity: sequined jumpsuits, disco
balls, tube tops, pointless pontifi cating and
lots of Elton John. Can’t you just see it?
The Stockman family waking up at home
in the fi nal act, their house trashed by angry
mobs, while in the background “Rocket
Man” plays like an ode to the good doctor’s
self-infl icted isolation. Might have been
fun and funny, instead of just fl at.
ew
An Enemy of the People plays Thursday through Saturday this
week and next week, with a matinee 2 pm Sunday, Jan. 23, at
Very Little Theatre, 2350 Hilyard St. $15 ($10 senior matinees
& Thrifty Thursdays), tickets at www.TheVLT.com or 344-7751.
EUGENE WEEKLY JANUARY 20, 2011 25