UCI Drama presents: An Enemy of the People

The future is looking bright in Dr. Stockmann’s hometown on the coast of southern Norway. At his urging, the town has built therapeutic Baths, which will invite tourists and their dollars. However, trouble arrives when the Doctor discovers that the water of the Baths is teeming with bacteria, guaranteed to make everyone sick. Ridiculed and persecuted by the townsfolk for his honesty, he is declared an “enemy of the people.” This classic Ibsen text explores the intersection of standing alone to tell an uncomfortable truth versus bowing to the corruption of a complacent majority. It also questions whether there is even such a thing as absolute truth; in Ibsen’s words, “A normally constituted truth lives—let us say—as a rule, seventeen or eighteen years, at the outside twenty, very seldom more. And truths so patriarchal as that are always shockingly emaciated.”