Enemy of the People Wants You to Choose Your Own Misadventure

Isn’t it fun to pick a future with limited information? Doesn’t all that individual choice make you feel informed and optimistic? At various moments in Enemy of the People, audience members seated at scattered tables are asked to choose between two options by hitting a big X button or a big O button.

It starts with a steak that has gone cold, simultaneously a realistic touch manages to rally the people to his side by demonizing his sibling at a public meeting.

Icke’s text is part story theater, part enactment, meaning the actress is sometimes narrating what happened and sometimes showing it to us, as when she plays both sides in an escalating argument.

Its cool wooden hugeness always seems like a special effect; how can you walk through a Manhattan door and find this? It is impossible to feel crowded there, and, since the show requires proof of vaccination, most audience members are comfortable enough to take off their masks.

As Dowd walks around the elevated boardwalk, she sometimes uses screen prompters to help with the lines — the interactive structure must make it difficult to keep track of the text’s branching paths.

But as much as the original is in need of some rough treatment , Icke’s rewrite — which includes a character who literally says, “The problem in Weston hadn’t only been with water … but with people” — manages to keep the original’s tendentiousness while losing its spark and vigor.

There’s a vogue for this sort of thing in British theater: A director takes a famous play in a foreign language, boils the plot’s bones, and refleshes them with a very different story, written in the current vernacular.

Yet while Icke’s text disappointed me on two fronts And over and over again, we demonstrated how democracy produces bad results — through unseriousness and dog-in-the-manger-ism and haste.

As in-person theater combat-crawls its way out of its restrictions, the theaterati have been wondering, What will COVID-era drama be about? Will artists deal with the disease? Or will they try to cheer us up? Enemy does try to do both.

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