The new, buzzworthy revival of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People features a key scene that takes place at a town meeting, in which a reformed doctor played by Jeremy Strong warns the community about an impending public health crisis. During the play's press preview over the weekend, three protesters disrupted the performance with impassioned pleas about another looming catastrophe: the climate crisis that is causing global warming.
Activists, including 35-year-old theater actor Nate Smith, stopped the show three times, yelling phrases like “No theater on a dead planet” before one of the stars, Michael Imperioli, began (without breaking character) pushing them towards the exits.
The protest, organized by a group called Extinction Rebellion, attracted a lot of media attention over the weekend, in part because the show's stars were unwittingly at the center of the disruption, and because their message resonated with the environmental themes of Ibsen's work. It's no coincidence that many in the preview audience were members of the press. Some of these critics slammed the protesters for disrupting a work that so closely aligned with their own views.
However, Smith was quick to clarify that the disruption was not to protest the play itself, but simply to draw attention to the climate crisis.
“The reaction is, ‘Why don’t you do this to the people in charge?’ We do it all the time. all “That was the case then. But how many of those stories have you heard in the New York Times?” Smith says. variety“Of all the work I've done, from handing out flyers in parks to disrupting politicians' speeches, the vast majority of it never gets any media coverage.”
Indeed, Smith, who is also a theatre actor, sympathizes with the experiences of the production's cast and crew: “It really breaks my heart to learn about the personal experiences of the artists who worked on this production and the impact it had on them. It doesn't matter at all.”
The protest was particularly effective because it took place during a scene where many of the actors were sitting in the audience, making it initially unclear whether the demonstration was scripted.
“That was completely intentional,” says Smith, who “loves the play” and first read Arthur Miller's script years ago. “The script is pretty faithful to the other version, and we all knew that version, so we did our homework and interwoven what I said at the beginning with lines in the play, with the intention of confusing the audience as to what was going on.”
Smith adds that he knew Strong, a method actor, would stay in character during the protests — which is why he referred to him as his character's name, Dr. Stockman, when he first spoke to him. But Smith didn't expect the actors would end up chasing protesters out of the theater. “But it's amazing how powerful they are,” he says. “They were doing their job.”
As for the reaction to the protests, Smith is well aware and even understands the criticism, but he argues that the backlash is exactly the problem.
“There's a clear difference between a movement being liked and a movement being effective,” he says. “The reaction is, 'I don't like this, it pisses me off what they're doing,' so what they're doing isn't working, because I don't like this. But that's the reaction every movement gets to everything they do,” he says, listing a long list of successful historical movements, including the suffragettes' first March on Washington and the first picketing of the White House. “People hated it and thought they should go home and stay home.”
“And if you try to have a conversation about climate change at the dinner table, you'll see the same thing happen,” he continues. “People get quiet, people get angry, people think you're holier-than-thou, people get really scared, and we can't really talk about it. But the vast majority of people are still very ignorant, very willfully ignorant.”
What's important to him is that people are talking about climate. “That's all I want,” he says. “More talk about climate.”
