INFUSORIA
Whole sections could have been slashed from this play with no damage to the story. Why, for example, do we have to sit through a whole scene in which a couple of construction workers (played rather well by Gregg Mierow and Gordon Gillespie) do nothing but try to gross each other out with increasingly graphic stories about accidents? The fact that they are working on the site where Stockmann claims to have discovered “superconcentrated mutagens and carcinogens” is a poor excuse for such an aimless, time-consuming scene. And how can we worry about whether these workers will die of cancer 25 or 30 years from now when we don’t care about them now?
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That does not seem to have been Bullard’s plan. Rather it seems the accidental result of the chaos Bullard allows the play to fall into. Clearly it doesn’t help that the only other environmentalist in the story, Gunter, president of the Friends of the Globe, is a publicity-hungry kook. Nor does it help that we end up learning both the flaws and strengths of Stockmann but only the strengths of Veritas.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jennifer Girard.
