The title character of An Enemy of the People, the 1882 drama by the towering Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, isn’t the news media. Rather, it’s a doctor in a village that depends on tourists drawn to its celebrated health spa to bathe and drink water from a mountain-fed river. A rise in illnesses prompts the doctor to have the water tested. Behold, the river’s contaminated by run-off from an upstream factory that provides the village with its second source of income. The health spa must be closed until the problem is solved, says the doctor to the powers-that-be. A solution will be costly, the leadership replies; better to label the problem fake and blame the messenger. Will the townsfolk agree?
Ibsen spent his life developing the style we now call modern realism. When Mark Anderson suggested to his wife and artist-partner, Isabelle Kralj, last year that she adapt this play for their Theatre Gigante, Kralj felt distant from Ibsen’s style. “I mean, it’s a play,” she said at the start of our conversation, referencing its five long acts of dialogue. “I just felt that there were too many ideas in it to be able to adapt it to our style.” Instead, she adapted Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis, selecting all the things she found important and devising Gigante-style ways to stage them. That success brought her back to Ibsen’s play.
“When Mark and I first talked about it, we related it to Flint, Michigan,” she said. “But, once the water issue fades in the play and the political issues rise up, it’s so timely it’s just breathtaking. So I’m glad we’re doing it. Jason Powell wrote six songs for us. They’re hilarious and perfect. There’s lots of stylistic variability. Different elements play into it, including Frank Paul’s Toy Band. The whole cast sings and Ben Yela plays guitar. It takes you on a little roller coaster of stylization.”
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Kralj has spent her life developing the Theatre Gigante style, a hybrid of dance, drama and music. “We always say, it’s got to be seamless,” she said. “It’s got to flow from text to song to movement, just to continue the story.”
That work began in 1987, when she founded Milwaukee Dance Theatre. In the late ’90s, when she teamed with her soon-to-be husband Mark Anderson, a successful writer and performance artist, the style became a central focus. What was emerging was so new the two couldn’t name it until, in 2008, tongues in cheek, they called it Theatre Gigante. They explored, experimented and sharpened it through one original piece after another. The driving vision behind most of the shows was Kralj’s, Anderson said. Last winter’s Metamorphosis was her first solo adaptation. This winter’s An Enemy of the People is her second, although she asked Anderson to write two important monologues, she said, to keep it theirs.
I’ve read the script and find it brilliant. Ibsen’s full story is told, pared but not simplified, inescapably relevant, the more so because it’s so entertaining. “Reading up on Ibsen,” Kralj continued, “I learned that he’d written his publisher that he didn’t know whether to call the play a comedy or not. I read that after I’d already written the adaptation and I was very happy because we’d chosen the route of laughter.”
It’s probable that Ibsen identified with his protagonist, the crusading doctor, ultimately spurned. In fact, it’s believed he wrote the play in response to the public outcry over his previous play, Ghosts. He certainly doesn’t compliment his townsfolk. I suspect that Kralj, however, identifies with Yela’s guitar player, a character entirely of her invention. “He’s a very everyday character,” she said. “The sanity, the balance, the one that offers neither black nor white but just a kind of smarts, in the few lines that he has.”
Even more than the original, Kralj’s adaptation reminds me that democracy means we’re free to argue publicly with power, even if it leaves us isolated. Dictatorships silence opposition.
Kralj’s script has two named characters, the doctor—played by Emmett Morgan—and his chief antagonist, the mayor played by David Flores. In addition to Yela, a cast of five performers serves as townsfolk, business people, civic leaders, family members and, yes, a newspaper reporter, in scenes that sometimes last just seconds. Those five are Hannah Klapperich-Mueller, Katie Gesell, Leslie Fitzwater, Mark Bucher and Ron Scot Fry.
Kralj is directing. “They’re a wonderful group that jumps into improvisational moments with great energy,” she said. “They were assigned to come up with gestures and flowing movement mirroring behavior at a meeting, for example, and together we sculpted a movement meeting. I don’t think I work in dance anymore. But there’s an emotional world that exists that I see and understand in movement. I think it can express onstage something that words can’t.”
Feb. 8-16 at Kenilworth 508 Theater, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For tickets and more information, visit theatregigante.org or call 800-838-3006.
