At numerous factors in “An Enemy of the Individuals,” the Jeremy Sturdy-led manufacturing of Henrik Ibsen’s basic, the best leisure comes from watching the faces reverse you. That’s not a critique of director Sam Gold’s work. It’s onerous to consider a present that would put to higher use the distinctive in-the-round construction of Circle within the Sq. Theatre than this one. Within the story, society closes in on and consumes an harmless man; within the staging, we the viewers are society.

Sturdy performs Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a widower who’s landed again house in what’s supposed to be a comfy sinecure, appearing because the chief doctor for the city’s newly-opened spa. (As tailored by playwright Amy Herzog, the script has been considerably altered; Ibsen’s unique Thomas, as an example, is married.) Each man and city have seen higher days, however each, too, are buoyed by optimism: the physician, along with his daughter Petra (a luminous Victoria Pedretti), opens his house to the city’s strata of younger and open-minded folks to take his thoughts off of issues. And everyone seems to be hopeful that the spa will herald vacationers, and their cash.

These early moments of flickering risk are conjured properly, and a pointy distinction is established between Thomas’ heedless self-belief and the shrewd pragmatism of his brother, the city’s mayor. As performed by Michael Imperioli, Peter Stockmann has a set jaw and a majestically tufted head of hair; having come to prominence as a younger man finally too naive and impulsive for the mob on “The Sopranos,” Imperioli has aged into the suavity, and the assured menace, of a don. 

The excellence between them is rapidly heightened by the outcomes of scientific checks that Thomas has commissioned. The water within the spa is contaminated with bacterial runoff. Thomas feels one thing like pleasure to have his suspicions confirmed — for, figuring out this, motion might be taken to reroute the water away from the contaminant and save lives. And Peter sees each a risk (shutting down the spa will permit different close by cities the time to construct their very own baths) and, in Thomas’ outsider standing and inherent vulnerabilities, a gap. 

It’s a duel that pits earnestness in opposition to shamelessness — and if the result to that faceoff appears predictable from numerous examples in our personal world, it’s no much less partaking to look at. The group’s flip in opposition to Thomas has the logic of a nightmare; the newspaper’s editor (Caleb Eberhardt) is raring to publish Thomas’ findings, till he all of the sudden isn’t. (Eberhardt does a spectacular job promoting either side of this difficult flip.) The friends who noshed on Thomas’ roast beef and guzzled his liquor all of the sudden are so much much less convivial. And the veneer of fraternal understanding between Thomas and Peter melts away. 

The brothers symbolize the 2 poles of the manufacturing, and are performed in implausible counterpoint: Sturdy performs Thomas’ continued misunderstanding of the mess he’s in much less as delusion than tragedy, by no means permitting the character’s dignity to slide at the same time as he’s bodily attacked. And Imperioli has a sharklike intuition, an apex predator’s capacity to seek out the weak spot and go for it. (In his efficiency, too, lies a thrum of frustration: Had his brother merely accepted his place in society, Peter wouldn’t have needed to destroy him.) Their battle involves a head in a shocking trial sequence (already identified from an internet video of a latest interruption of a efficiency interrupted by local weather change protestors). With the lights up, a city assembly shifts gears right into a trial of types — one through which Thomas, who had sought to guard his fellow man, should defend himself, and doesn’t understand how, if the reality is just not sufficient. 

The spare stage doesn’t simply grant us a transparent view of our fellow townspeople — those that are, like us, watching Thomas flail. (The final manufacturing I noticed at Circle within the Sq., the 2022 revival of “American Buffalo,” had a purposefully cluttered stage, a lot in order that my eyes by no means traveled to the seats reverse.) It gives Sturdy alternatives to stomp righteously, at one level through the trial traversing a bar with a view to fairly actually have the excessive floor. On the first act break, the actor poses in a highlight for an extended second, seemingly basking within the data that his resolution is right; his again was to my part of the theater, so all I noticed had been rectitudinously squared shoulders, after which the shadow they forged. 

He was to not stay as bodily regular. Final season’s Ibsen, “A Doll’s Home” (additionally tailored by Herzog), dwarfed its stars on the stage and stored lead performer Jessica Chastain largely immobile, a hanging touch upon Nora Helmer’s emotions of helplessness and captivity. Chastain, mic’d, spoke in a whisper. However Sturdy conveys his personal lack of energy by thrashing in opposition to his limitations. It’s an enormous bodily efficiency by an actor finest identified for a efficiency (as Kendall Roy on “Succession”) that was buttoned-up till it wasn’t, exploding into tears and rage. He accomplishes one thing related right here, with a efficiency that’s massive however well-calibrated. One second through which Sturdy emerges, late within the present, took my breath away, and but in reminiscence doesn’t really feel like a stunt.  

A part of what makes the efficiency work, on this context, is that we really feel for him — even because it’s us, notionally, who’ve put him there. The script takes pains to emphasise the up to date nature of Thomas and Peter’s battle; late within the story, considering a possible escape throughout the Atlantic, Thomas declares that “in America, we received’t have to fret about” weaponized ignorance. It’s amusing line, in fact. 

And it’s us, right here in America, watching each incremental second of Thomas’ lack of popularity. On the efficiency I attended, one onstage “juror,” introduced up from the viewers, couldn’t comprise her amusement at the place she’d discovered herself, flicking her gaze between Sturdy and Imperioli as if she had been watching tennis. Her avidity added some dimension to Gold’s imaginative and prescient of a world through which justice is meted out to those that communicate most eloquently and energy redounds to those that are already highly effective. Imperioli performed the smoother speaker, so he received the battle of consideration. 

As entertaining because it was, although, to look at ourselves, and as thematically wealthy because it appears to be implicated in one thing, there’s a component of the variation that lets all concerned off the hook. Thomas is plainly right, however he additionally pleads his case in sympathetic and heat phrases, with a view to win over these viewers members who might not wish to watch not only one however two unlikable brothers. It’s solely as soon as the battle is clearly slipping away from him that he begins to lose it. 

An “Enemy” through which Sturdy had the ethical benefit however was, say, annoying about it, or brusque, or purposefully alienating, can be one which’s extra intriguingly unsettled, and would depart you staring into the seats throughout the stage a bit extra urgently. This manufacturing has a lot to suggest it, and Sturdy particularly ought to return to the stage as typically as he can. However it’s onerous to not really feel as if this “Enemy of the Individuals,” through which as rootable as attainable a hero is floor down by the forces of evil, ended up presenting a chance for the viewers to place themselves on trial, after which, with a sigh of reduction, exonerate themselves.