Enemy of the People

About the Authors: Jean H. Klein holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Her plays have been produced at numerous theaters throughout the country and have won awards. Over the past 20 years, she has taught playwriting and creative writing at Lindenwood College, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Old Dominion University. She currently teaches poetry and fiction writing in the Master of Arts in Creative Writing program at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, PA. David Klein was a college professor, playwright, and linguist who spoke Hebrew, Classical Latin and Greek, German, Italian, French, and a little Norwegian. Although he has written extensively on 18th Century literature, his real gift lay in telling stories and cultivating the gifts of students.

Here is the Ibsen you haven’t seen—Ibsen at his comedic best. In a biting comedy that might have been written for our time, Ibsen pillories everyone from government officials, to small town bureaucrats, to the indolent and avaricious common man. A new look at an old classic, this volume includes excerpts from Ibsen’s letters relating to the play and a critical analysis by the author

Book Excerpt (Copyrighted Material) :

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Although there have been some recent contemporary productions of Enemy of the People as a comedy, few people today understand this Ibsen play as Ibsen intended it, especially in translation. What I would like to offer here is An Enemy of the People that most audiences have never seen—the play that Ibsen briefly but clearly discusses in his letters and journals. Rather than as a political diatribe, he describes it as a darkly comic play with intriguing psychological relationships that have become obscured by productions that have allowed political agendas to overshadow the true complexity of the play.

Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People has too long been regarded, at least in the English speaking world, as a dark and heavy political drama. If we are to believe Ibsen’s letters and journals, however, he would have been appalled at such an interpretation. In his letters and journals, he refers to the play as a comedy. And certainly there are overtly comic scenes: Dr. Stockmann chases Aslaksen and crew out of a window with an umbrella; Morten Kiil is a flawless caricature of selective mental density and acuity; Aslaksen is a veritable Uriah Heep with his droning about moderation The comic timing of the dramatic beats in the town meeting scene could have informed many a vaudeville act.

To be sure, An Enemy of the People is a dark comedy, but a traditional one nonetheless. Although the protagonist, Dr. Stockmann, fails in his battle with the powers-that-be, he is clearly a victor, at least in his own mind, over some malevolent forces of the universe. What makes the play ultimately interesting today is not the clash of good and evil in this world; it is its shades of gray.

Jean Klein