Henrik Ibsen

As I entered the lobby of Circle in the Square Theatre, now showing Broadway’s hottest ticket, An Enemy of the People, staff were upselling booze. “Do you want to buy a shot?” offered one enthusiastic barman, waving a bottle of bracing Linie aquavit. He added, grinning: “It’s what the actors drink on stage.” Sam Gold’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s didactic and stuffy morality play aims to draw direct comparisons between past and present, including what alcohol we consume (more on that later). In late nineteenth-century Norway, a town finds itself prosperous by selling access to the local spa baths, which supposedly have curative properties. When Dr.

The difference between a divorce and a funeral seems lost on the director Jamie Lloyd; ditto for bird cages and prisons and, in the end, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and a sanatorium. Lloyd’s new, minimalist production on Broadway is so stripped of ornament, so unremittingly rote, that this reviewer nearly handed his valuables to an usher and asked for a padded room. At the play’s close, the director has the embattled housewife, Jessica Chastain’s Nora Helmer, make her defiant exit through the back wall of the theater upstage; a garage door opens and she strides onto the rain-soaked pavement, probably to be harassed by tweakers or shoved into oncoming traffic. Peals of laughter erupted in the audience — here was our chance!