Cincinnati Shakespeare has long conjured magic on its stage by making The Bard’s 500-year-old plays relevant for modern audiences and current times. This fall a 140-year-old Henrik Ibsen play becomes the company’s latest “ripped from the headlines” effort at presenting a classic story.
Amy Herzog’s adaptation of An Enemy of the People, running September 5-20, features Brent Vimtrup (above) as Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who discovers a serious problem with his hometown’s water supply and battles local leaders, including his brother, to expose the truth. The show was a Broadway sensation last year, starring Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli.
“I saw it in New York and immediately thought Brent could drive the story for us,” says Cincy Shakes Producing Artistic Director and CEO Brian Isaac Phillips, who is directing the show. A longtime resident actor for Cincy Shakes, Vimtrup now works in the medical field but appears on local stages once or twice a year.
Phillips says he’ll present Enemy in the round, as was done on Broadway. “The lead character is surrounded at all times by people he thought were his friends and were on his side,” he says. “The audience’s changing relationship with him is crucial to the story.”
Phillips says one of his goals in organizing a Cincy Shakes season is to converse with audiences about issues of the day—in this case, standing up for truth in the face of political pressure. “It’s special to see that we’re wrestling with the same issues as they were 100, 200, 500 years ago. There’s also comfort in knowing we survived those bad times.”
[Photograph by Mikki Schaffner]
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