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At a rehearsal for “An Enemy of the People,” a Broadway revival of the 1882 play, the actor Jeremy Strong paced around an auditorium, wearing pants that were damp from kneeling in ice.
As Thomas Stockmann, a doctor who tries in vain to warn his Norwegian coastal community about contamination in the town’s springs, Strong looked shaken, but hopeful. “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” said Strong, known for playing the fragile yet ruthless media executive Kendall Roy on four seasons of “Succession.” “We just have to imagine.”
To anyone intimately familiar with “An Enemy of the People,” written by Henrik Ibsen, those lines might sound slightly off key. Ibsen ended the play on a more defiant note, with the doctor boasting that he is the strongest man in the world, because the strongest are those who stand alone.
“That didn’t resonate with me at all,” said Amy Herzog, who wrote the new adaptation, which is scheduled to begin performances on Tuesday.
Instead of ending with Ibsen’s image of a lonely, heroic truth-teller, she changed it. And it isn’t the first time she’s boldly revamped his work.
Herzog’s version — directed by her husband, Sam Gold, in their first stage collaboration — cements her reputation as something of a contemporary Ibsen whisperer. Last year, her pared-down, propulsive adaptation of “A Doll’s House,” starring Jessica Chastain, drew ecstatic reviews and six Tony nominations, including best revival of a play.
“What Amy did brought you back to the deep radicalism of ‘A Doll’s House,’” the playwright Tony Kushner said. “It’s completely and recognizably Ibsen’s play, but the language is really electrifying and alive.”
With “An Enemy of the People,” Herzog is once again taking on the monumental job of reimagining the language of a revered playwright, someone whose work has had a profound impact on her own. This time, she’s going even further, not just streamlining the language as she did in “A Doll’s House,” but eliminating and rewriting characters, cutting whole passages, discarding some of Ibsen’s ideas and amplifying others.
In the process, her relationship to Ibsen has become less linear and more circular. Not only has Ibsen influenced her work, she is now, in a way, leaving her mark on his.
Asked if she felt any loyalty toward Ibsen, Herzog seemed slightly surprised to hear herself say ‘no.’ “I’m never dutifully translating something because it’s what’s there; it’s because I believe it should be there,” she said during an interview at a coffee shop near her home in Brooklyn.
“On ‘A Doll’s House,’ I was mostly trying to channel him, and on this I felt like I was trying to channel him, but also having an argument with him,” she continued. “I felt like, you haven’t given me what I need here, so I’m going to have to make some things up.”
Herzog feels as though Ibsen has given her permission to stray. She cited a passage from “An Enemy of the People” — one that she cut, but it stuck with her — when the doctor says that even the ideas people cling to as fundamental truths eventually grow stale.
“To me, that’s license that Ibsen gave me to rethink some things,” Herzog said.
On the surface, there might not seem to be much shared dramatic DNA between Herzog and Ibsen, a revolutionary Norwegian playwright who’s been called the father of modern drama. Ibsen is known for his big plot twists and provocative sociopolitical arguments; Herzog’s intimate plays often hinge on subtle psychological shifts.
Her 2012 play “4000 Miles,” about a wayward grandson landing on his feisty grandmother’s couch, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; “Belleville,” an unsettling domestic thriller about a young married couple in Paris from 2013, was a subtle homage to “A Doll’s House.”
“She sort of writes in miniature, and Ibsen takes big swings,” said Gold, a celebrated director who has taken on classics like Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” and Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”
Those contrasts are what makes Herzog’s version of Ibsen so thrilling, he added: “There’s something about taking the scaffolding of the Ibsen, and then drawing it in miniature, that is very satisfying.”
Kushner, a fan of both Ibsen and Herzog, sees overlap in the way each of their plays demand and reward close attention.
“With Ibsen, it’s a kind of playwriting that asks you to come to it as much as it’s going to come to you, and I think that’s true in her work as well,” Kushner said. “There’s a quietness in her work. You know from the beginning that you’re going to need to focus and pay attention, because there’s nothing wasted, there’s nothing meaningless.”
‘Constant miniature epiphanies’
Herzog’s playwriting career took off seemingly out of the gate, with her acclaimed 2010 debut, “After the Revolution,” about an idealistic woman who learns her Marxist grandfather was spying for the Soviet Union — a story Herzog based on her own grandfather.
She delivered more plays in quick succession. As her career was accelerating, she and Gold, who met in theater circles in 2002, married, and soon they started a family. The eldest of their two daughters was diagnosed with a rare muscular disorder, nemaline myopathy, which required intense medical care. Last year, at age 11, she died from complications related to the disease.
Herzog wrote about the experience of caring for a chronically ill child and navigating the byzantine health care system in her 2017 play “Mary Jane,” which critics embraced as a quiet masterpiece. This spring, the play is being staged on Broadway, with the actress Rachel McAdams playing Mary Jane, a single mother whose young son is gravely ill. The production — the first of her five plays to appear on Broadway — will be directed by Anne Kauffman, a longtime collaborator who said Herzog’s Broadway moment is overdue.
“She’s not a flashy writer, she kind of flies under the radar,” said Kauffman, who also directed the Off Broadway production of “Mary Jane” in 2017. “You have these constant miniature epiphanies as you’re moving through her world.”
Herzog said she is gratified that “Mary Jane” will reach a wider audience. But she also worries that, after her family’s recent loss, some might misread the play’s message.
“The play wasn’t written at all from a place of grief for the death of the child,” she said. “My fear is that people are going to want to come to this play and cry about how the writer lost her child, and that will totally obscure what the play’s really about, which is caregivers, who are this enormous part of our society who are underrecognized and ignored and not valued, and also about how what they do is joyful and extraordinary and full of deep connection.”
‘Am I nuts, or does this not actually work?’
For Herzog, burrowing into Ibsen in recent years has been both challenging and comforting, offering her freedom from the anxiety produced by a blank page.
Shortly after the closing of “A Doll’s House,” she was “itching to do another Ibsen.” It was Gold who fixated on “An Enemy of the People,” after he grabbed an edition of Ibsen’s collected plays from Herzog’s desk.
Gold was stunned by the parallels to contemporary America in the play, which centers on a doctor who discovers pollution in the public hot springs, and is accused of trying to sabotage the town’s economy when he shares his findings. It seemed like a natural Ibsen to stage right now, with its prophetic messages about the dangers of political polarization, the way disinformation spreads like disease, and our inability to confront the threat of environmental catastrophe.
Gold immediately thought of Jeremy Strong, a friend of his and Herzog’s for more than two decades, for the lead, and texted him about the play. As soon as he read it, Strong was on board. Michael Imperioli (“The Sopranos,” “The White Lotus”) later joined.
When Gold told Herzog he wanted to direct it, she jokingly asked, “do you have a translator in mind?”
In early drafts, Herzog tried to hew to the original, which the literary translator Charlotte Barslund had rendered into English. She quickly ran into problems.
“It was a little frightening to encounter sections where I thought, am I nuts, or does this not actually work?” Herzog said.
Unlike “A Doll’s House,” with its finely drawn characters and nuanced portrait of a marriage, “An Enemy of the People” felt clunky and didactic in places, like Ibsen was lecturing his audience.
He wrote it partly as a rebuke to criticism of his play “Ghosts,” which shocked audience with its frank discussion of incest, euthanasia and sexually transmitted diseases. After facing widespread condemnation, Ibsen produced a morality tale about how easily the masses can be manipulated into believing lies.
“This play is written from this font of rage that I find really interesting, but it also tips into pettiness sometimes,” Herzog said. “He’s so angry at these people who betrayed him that he’s not given them full humanity.”
‘Deceptively simple but incredibly rigorous’
She eventually cut Dr. Stockmann’s wife, who mainly served as a shrill foil for the doctor to rail against. “I felt a lot of weird feminist guilt about that, but I felt it was doing more of a disservice to women to have her there,” she said.
Herzog fleshed out other secondary characters. She cut some of the doctor’s pontificating and discarded language that felt “cluttered and distracting,” shaving off about 40 percent of the original. In the final act, she downplayed Ibsen’s portrayal of the doctor as an undaunted truth-teller in a corrupt society and instead highlighted another idea that felt more current: the way political and civil discourse gets corroded by tribalistic rancor.
“I see it in myself, over the last 10 years, feeling gradually poisoned by the politics that I once was so passionate about,” she said.
During the rehearsal earlier this month, Herzog and Strong talked over his lines in a scene when the doctor must choose between lying about the condition of the water to protect his job and family, or telling the truth and losing everything.
At the center of the room was a tarp covered with pieces of ice from an earlier scene, which were being repurposed as rocks that were thrown through the doctor’s windows by an angry mob.
“I feel like I’m missing something, maybe because I advocated for trimming,” he said. Strong asked Herzog if they should restore a line; Herzog wasn’t sure they needed it, and noted that his character was reeling from the weight of his mounting losses.
“It’s just the litany of things that are getting you,” she said.
Strong and Herzog met when they were undergraduates at Yale, and he last appeared onstage in her 2012 play “The Great God Pan.” In an interview, he said a month into rehearsals for “Enemy,” he was still uncovering new layers in Herzog’s script.
“I don’t know how she does it,” he said, “but her writing has an ease and aliveness to it that is deceptively simple but incredibly rigorous.”
After this production, Herzog plans to take a break from Ibsen to focus on her own plays, though she hopes to adapt “Hedda Gabler” or “Ghosts” one day, or maybe “The Wild Duck,” which she described as “really weird and hard.”
It’s a trade-off, reviving classics instead of writing something new, Herzog said. But she’s convinced that Ibsen will feed into her own work somehow, just as he has in the past.
“I have a semireligious faith,” she said, “that it will bear fruit in some way.”
