Strawberry Theatre Workshop's presentation of Arthur Miller's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People has almost no flaws. Here we get to see the simplicity of a good play being performed by good actors. And it seems such an easy fit (good writing, good direction, good acting) that one wonders why it doesn't happen more often in the theater world. Why isn't it ordinary, instead of exceptional, that plays rich in poetic and social insights are directed and acted by persons who have the muscle and imagination to bring the elements of the writing to life? What more is needed for the stage than that realization?

It's well known that An Enemy of the People is, at one level, about the way the public attacked Ibsen in 1881 for his play Ghosts, which brought to the theater of his time (the late-Victorian moment) unwholesome subject matters like infidelity, children born out of wedlock, and venereal diseases—in short, the content of real life as it was then and as it is now. The public's rejection of the playwright's honesty corresponds with the fictional account of a doctor, Thomas Stockmann, who is attacked by the people and press of his town for doing nothing else except telling the truth. The truth (a dirty little truth) concerns a health spa on which the town's economic future depends. The spa's main investor and supporter is the doctor's elder brother, Peter Stockmann, a capitalist and the mayor of the town. The struggle of the brothers represents the larger social struggle between the state/commercial complex and scientific/progressive ethos. The former supports the latter only if the findings that the latter produces promote the former's commercial interests. Many of the social conflicts that dominate the headlines and economy of our times have their earliest expressions in Ibsen's plays.

In Miller's adaptation of An Enemy of the People (1950), as with the original, Dr. Thomas Stockmann is a man. In STW's version, which is directed by Greg Carter, the doctor is not the husband but the wife, Katherine (played to near perfection by Amy Fleetwood). This direction is pure dynamite. It explodes all sorts of unexpected rewards out of the rock of Ibsen's (and Miller's) initial intentions.

The brother-against-brother conflict has a much weaker blast than the brother-against-sister conflict, not only because the latter confrontation introduces the theme of feminism (and therefore the expanding humanist project that defines much of the 19th century—the abolition of slavery, the establishment of factory laws, the emergence of public education, and so on) but also because the antagonism between capitalism and science has historical force (in the Marxist sense) when detonated by a gender charge. The will to capital is masculine; the will to knowledge is feminine. One is private, the other public. One is the master, the other the servant. One is the exploiter, the other the exploited. But the master depends on the slave's work, and the slave, through work, through research and the accumulation of knowledge, becomes independent. In the end, STW's An Enemy of the People is about a slave revolt.

The usual reading of the play draws on the Nietzschean theme of Ăśbermensch, the hero who is alone, who is gifted, who is rare, and who stands out against the dumb masses. The play ends with the doctor making this ultimate Ăśbermensch statement: "Let me tell you... the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone." A Nietzschean, indeed Heraclitean (if we want to get to the bottom of Ibsen's/Miller's position), reading of the play is correct if the doctor remains a male. But the minute the doctor becomes a woman, then a Hegelian reading provides the best results, the deepest understanding. The play has less to do with the problems of democracy, the problems of public opinion, and the problematic rise of the "last man" in mass society, and much more to do with the slave of the modern age: scientific knowledge.

charles@thestranger.com