AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
I became aware of Mendelsohn’s rebellion when my first son was born and we started shopping for a doctor. As a baby-boom baby, I’d had the penicillin-for-everything rule shoved at me with a vengeance. I didn’t trust the medical priesthood, with its tendency to give plenty of prescriptions but no reasons. And then, too, Mendelsohn’s contention that shots are unnecessarily intrusive made a kind of meta-ecological sense.
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Directed by Kyle Donnelly to extend out into the audience–placing us among the lamebrained townsfolk, forcing us to pick a side–Stockman’s smarting-off scene is every bit as electric as it’s supposed to be. Unfortunately, a lot of what goes on around it lacks the same clear spark. The play opens on a fairly naturalistic note, with Stockman, his family, and friends and enemies evincing something like the arch sincerity of melodrama. As the play goes on, however, the acting turns toward comic, pseudo-Brechtian caricature. Gerry Becker’s Stockman careens from his early, cornball complacency to a laughable fatuousness when he thinks the town’s ready to give him a ticker-tape parade to a Saint Joan-like gravity once he’s been through the wringer. Christopher Pieczynski’s editor and David Alan Novak’s community leader start out, meanwhile, as people–but end up offering us a vision of Fagin as Siamese twins.
In my March 1 review of Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love it says Robert McCaskill plays Robert. That’s wrong. McCaskill plays Bernie. Sorry for the error.
