[Carnegie Mellon Press; 2025]
Last May, I took the train down to New York City to see a play I have been obsessed with since I first saw it in 2017: Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, this time in a new translation by the playwright Amy Herzog. It’s a play about the stories we tell about science, and who gets to be believed.
An Enemy of the People follows the rise and fall of Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a doctor in a small resort town in Norway. The town’s income comes almost entirely from visitors to their mineral baths; such baths were broadly believed at the time to have healing properties. Dr. Stockmann realizes that the healing waters of the bath are actually full of harmful bacteria. He speaks to his brother, who happens to be the mayor, urging that the baths be closed for the two years it will take to remediate them. Dr. Stockmann expects to be praised for revealing this danger and, at first, it seems he will. But the expense of the project, and the loss of the town’s sole source of revenue, are too much for the mayor and his fellow officials. Dr. Stockmann is cast not as a hero, but as “an enemy of the people.” He is all but driven out of town. Ibsen’s play seems to position the scientist as a Cassandra, doomed to speak truth to politically deafened ears.
A new collection out last month is both an heir to this kind of theater and a rejoinder to some of its assumptions. Aristotle’s Wife: 6 Plays About Women in Science comprises six stand-alone scenes by the playwright Claudia Barnett, a professor of playwriting at Middle Tennessee State University. Aristotle’s Wife moves chronologically, from the first, titular scene between Aristotle and his wife Pythias in the fourth century CE, to one between cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock and her (fictional) editor in the 1950s. Along the way, we visit with scientific illustrator Susanna Lister (daughter of naturalist Martin Lister) in 1695, astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in 1924, physicist Lise Meitner in 1947, and husband and wife biologists Joshua and Esther Lederberg in 1950. These scenes set themselves the heavy task of providing historical information, entertainment, and social commentary in a mere ten pages a piece. Every scene dramatizes science itself: the writing up or drawing of scientific observations (Pythias, Susanna Lister), the question of credit (Lise Meitner, Esther Lederberg), or the wonder of scientific exploration (Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Barbara McClintock). Each play also, in various but invariably heavy-handed ways, addresses itself to sexism and its injustices.
It is hard to speak about the success or failure of these plays. Not only are they so drastically short, but their form explicitly invites reflection on what a play like this is for, and therefore how its success should be decided. Barnett’s work is partly framed in opposition to the myth of the lone genius (a myth Dr. Stockmann clearly endorses), by illuminating the work of daughters, wives, and underappreciated colleagues or amateurs whose work made scientific progress possible. But in this very framing, Barnett’s plays also entrench genius narratives. They are didactic: not only do they inform us of events, they dictate our moral position on those events. As classroom tools for a feminist revisionist history, they seem poised for success. (It is worth noting that Barnett is not a historian, but a teacher and a playwright, one whose plays have long focused on lifting up the stories of historical women.) I am personally invested in Barnett’s revisionist project, as a historian and as a feminist. I want to see the women—and for that matter, every person marginalized from history, whether that’s on the basis of sex, gender, race, class, or whatever else—who have been major parts of historical change given their due. But as plays to be staged for wide audience appeal, I’m not sure they succeed. Didactic art often emphasizes argument at the expense of artistry.
Take the fourth play, “Mother of the Bomb.” Like each of these plays, it has just two characters: in this case, Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jewish physicist who helped discover nuclear fission, and her friend the geneticist Elisabeth Schiemann. The overall arc of the scene is emotionally compelling. Now that the Second World War is over, Elisabeth has come to Sweden to see her friend and entice her back to Berlin. But Elisabeth is rebuffed by Lise’s understandably aggrieved stance towards Germany. (Lise is Jewish, and fled Berlin in 1938.) Lise is written as a pillar of morality, staunch in her championing of right. Those who stayed in Germany, like Elisabeth, Lise judges as complicit. Reading the scene, one feels sorry for Elisabeth, frustrated at Lise’s coldness towards her friend, and yet sympathetic towards Lise’s frustration that “No one takes responsibility for what was wrong.” But the scene’s brevity is in conflict with Barnett’s aims, and her dialogue often sacrifices believability for unnecessary exposition.
ELISABETH
I remember when I first met you—on the way to class on the city train. I was studying botany; you, physics. We became close so quickly. You “came and went in my parents’ house like a sister.” We took excursions to the countryside on Sundays. We traveled with rucksacks to the mountains and climbed the Zugspitze. We attended the annual meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians in Vienna. That was 1913.
LISE
This is 1947.
No one speaks this way. I am reminded of David Ball’s diagnosis in his still-assigned manual for writing and reading plays in 1983: “These are words forced into a character’s mouth that have to do with the playwright’s want (conveying information to the audience) instead of the character’s want.” We may reminisce with our friends, but these constructions (“We traveled with rucksacks to the mountains”; “We attended the annual meeting”) feel firmly directed to the audience, as does the exchange of dates. The phrases from historical sources in each of the plays, as indicated by the quotation marks above, may provide a momentary fetishistic thrill. But in this case, at least, they are an obstacle to making the characters feel real and present in the room with each other.
And it is not clear we even need this information for the success of the play as a play. One can show the lost closeness in more affecting ways, as the lines immediately following the exchange above begin to do:
ELISABETH
You are my oldest friend. Let’s start over. Let’s talk about science. Show me your laboratory.
LISE
It’s not open to the public.
ELISABETH
I’m not the public. I’m a scientist. I’m your friend.
Here, “I’m your friend” lands as something one might say, following as it does Lise’s dismissive “It’s not open to the public.” The reader feels, in the moments like these that are successful, the tension between the emotional story Barnett wants to convey as a playwright—of Lise’s bitterness, of a lost friendship marred by war—and the historical information she feels moved to resurface as a feminist teacher. This tension might have been better managed had Barnett given herself more space to explore each of these stories. They are fascinating not only for their historical content, but also for the emotional stakes Barnett has laid out, whether historical or of her own invention. It is a pity not to explore them fully.
Relationships and emotional stakes are most effectively treated in the stories of Susanna Lister (“Mirror Image With Seashells”) and Esther Lederberg (“Velveteen”), both of which involve men who seem incapable of realizing how they limit their wives and daughters. In “Velveteen,” Esther and Joshua are preparing to go out to dinner to celebrate Esther earning her PhD. Joshua teases her affectionately for buying herself some expensive fabric, which he imagines is to be for a dress. Instead, Esther has used the velveteen to line petri dishes; its tiny, spike-like features can be used to streamline the process of inoculating plates with bacteria.
Their banter is friendly, but Joshua is oddly condescending. At first it seems fairly small, even accidental:
ESTHER
From now on, we’re both Dr. Lederberg. Won’t that be confusing for the assistants!
JOSHUA
They’re not gonna call you that, Esther. They’ll still call you Mrs. Lederberg, of course.
ESTHER
Of course.
But the dynamic becomes more pronounced as the scene develops.
ESTHER
They could function as tiny needles. Tiny. Inoculating. Needles.
JOSHUA
(grabbing the petri dish)
Just like I hypothesized!
ESTHER
Just like we talked about.
[ . . . ]
JOSHUA
It’s brilliantly simple.
ESTHER
Or simply brilliant.
JOSHUA
Thank you.
ESTHER
You’re . . . welcome.
[ . . . ]
JOSHUA
“Lederberg” will become a household name.
ESTHER
You’re getting carried away, Josh. Most people don’t even know what a petri dish is. Households aren’t gonna be discussing replica plating.
JOSHUA
I know what we’ll call it: replica plating.
ESTHER
Brilliant.
Initially, we might assume Joshua is merely getting carried away in his enthusiasm. But he ignores Esther’s contributions with a consistency that leads to an almost slapstick humor, even as it invites our feminist ire. Disconcertingly, Esther participates in her own erasure, from her “you’re . . . welcome” after his implicit appropriation of her idea, to her “brilliant” after he claims the term replica plating.
Part of the disconnect between them, we’re encouraged to understand, has to do with how they value the scientific project. Joshua dreams of prizes and recognition. Esther is motivated by science itself:
ESTHER
I’ll be forgotten within decades, but my work won’t. Not if it matters.
JOSHUA
Do you really believe that?
ESTHER
Don’t you?
JOSHUA
No. I want to win the Nobel Prize. And I might. For replica plating.
The arc of this scene has a tightness and balance missing from several of the others. Barnett pulls off a formally beautiful reversal: the dinner and celebratory mood that began as a recognition of Esther’s brilliance becomes, through Esther’s brilliance and Joshua’s appropriation of her discovery, an imagined celebration of Joshua’s future Nobel Prize win (which he does, in historical fact, receive, although not for replica plating). The scene opens with the couple waltzing around the lab in celebration of Esther; it ends with Joshua inviting Esther to dance, imagining his prize and flippantly promising to buy her a nice velvet dress for it. Esther pauses only briefly, before asking, in the last line of the play, “Will you at least thank me in your acceptance speech?” What cruelty! And yet, they are also affectionate; he has organized a dinner in her honor, calls her “fearless” in the course of their conversation, commends her scientific skills. Esther seems eager to contribute to his success. The scene has the satisfying feel of a sprung trap.
It may also be something of a trap for the audience. Clearly, we are on Esther’s side. We are watching as, obliviously or nefariously, Joshua takes credit for her inventions and diminishes her success. Yet it’s a little too neat. Esther is not only the unjustly uncredited innovator, but a loving wife (to a fault), and the perfect scientist, one who pursues science for its own sake and never for gain or recognition.
This idea of science as a pure and separated sphere, divorced from politics and social dynamics, is a longstanding myth. It is a myth, along with the myth of the lone genius, that historians of science have long worked to complicate. Science is a social activity and scientists are embedded in societies. This means that both scientists and sciences have politics; it also means that discoveries are usually far more collaborative and temporally protracted than the trope of a eureka moment in a lab. Barnett’s plays are partly aimed at illuminating the latter point, reminding us of the scores of silent women behind the famous scientific men of the history books. But she is less attentive to the former. By staging Esther’s dismissal of prizes, or Lise Meitner’s refusal to work at an institute tainted by Nazi history, Barnett portrays science as a pure pursuit disconnected from vanity, monetary gain, or political power.
In reality, however, scientific practice is full of such “impurities.” In the history of science as much as in literature, “who gets to be believed” comes down to consensus and immediate context more than any universal truth. The plot of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People seems to be a story of tragic heroism: a man of science unjustly reviled and eventually driven from the town, all for speaking truth to power. Media coverage of its run around the country in 2016/2017, and again in 2024, certainly focused on this reading. But it is more complicated than this. In the public meeting at the top of Act IV, frustrated with arguments about what “the majority in our community” want, Dr. Stockmann goes on a tirade about the idiocy of the majority. He begins in a kind of aristocratic register, asserting that there are more stupid people than smart ones at any given time, and therefore “the minority is always in the right.” He is insulting towards his opponents, calling them not only stupid but “puny, narrow-chested, short-winded.” And then it gets worse. “The common people are nothing more than the raw material of which a People is made,” he says.
Think first of an ordinary common cur—I mean one of the horrible, coarse-haired, low-bred curs that do nothing but run about the streets and befoul the walls of the houses. Compare one of these curs with a poodle whose sires for many generations have been bred in a gentleman’s house, where they have had the best of food and had the opportunity of hearing soft voices and music. Do you not think that the poodle’s brain is developed to quite a different degree from that of the cur?
Our scientist for the people is not only an aristocrat, but a eugenicist. Reading this tirade today, with its comparison of purebred poodles to “low-bred curs,” one can’t help but recoil, thinking of the Nazi uses of eugenic language to conduct genocide. For all that we may appreciate Dr. Stockmann’s position in telling the scientific truth to those obsessed with short-term gain, his social and biological elitism sours our affections. Dr. Stockmann’s last line in the play is pure intellectual self-aggrandizement: he tells his wife and daughter that he has made a new discovery “that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” This pronouncement is visibly ironic when staged, as he is at that moment speaking to his wife and daughter, as well as Captain Horster, who has sided with him, and his two children Ejlif and Morten.
If Esther Lederberg, Barnett’s velveteen-wielding microbiologist, is the voice of science for science’s sake in Aristotle’s Wife, then Dr. Thomas Stockmann, Ibsen’s scapegoated Medical Officer of the Baths, is a good reminder that what has counted as good science, and as morally defensible in social life, has a history. Eugenics is a rightfully demonized word today. It is associated with Naziism, ableism, anti-Blackness, and all manner of horrible, indefensible treatment of others, from sterilizations to genocide. So it can be hard to remember that, in the early twentieth century, eugenics was mainstream, “good” science, according to the consensus of the scientific community and the broader society. It was framed as both methodologically and morally virtuous: wasn’t it good to make humanity better adapted, smarter, more beautiful? It is possible that, writing in 1882, Ibsen didn’t intend for the audience to recoil as violently as most of us do today. But his other characters do recoil, and it seems that the revelation of Dr. Stockmann’s arrogance is meant as a jolt for the audience as much as the characters. We begin allied with the lone voice of truth: the scientist who just wants the science to win out, the concerned citizen who only has the best interests of everyone at heart. We end chastised by the downsides of such a narrative, of how “the truth” and what’s best for the many can be complicated by both politics and personality.
Amy Herzog’s 2024 adaptation of Ibsen’s play trimmed some of the offensive language from the back and forth of the town hall, particularly softening some of the eugenic overtones in Dr. Stockmann’s speech. She also rewrote the ending. Dr. Stockmann’s commentary that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone,” revealing his character as a man certain of his biological and intellectual superiority, is transformed into the much more palatable banality that “we just have to imagine” a better world. I certainly understand Herzog’s impulse to remove such offensive opinions, just as I understand Barnett’s desires to return credit and bestow virtue on these impressive historical women. But I think Dr. Stockmann’s bigotry is a valuable lesson in ambiguity and discomfort. And a valuable reminder about the place of science in history, as well.
An Enemy of the People continues to be relevant because it refuses us clean and easy answers. It makes us uncomfortable, especially those of us on the side of science and medicine in the face of the wildly damaging decisions of RFK, Jr. and the Trump administration. Surely, when it comes to the importance of vaccines and herd immunity, or the function of trade deficits in a healthy economy, many of us (at least among the educated, liberal elite) place our trust in a minority of experts, and not in the opinions of the majority. We may find ourselves agreeing with Dr. Stockmann’s assertion that the expert knows best. And then, with his slurs ringing in our ears, we might ask ourselves if we are too eager to call our opponents “the common folk, the ignorant and incomplete element in the community” with our Norwegian scientist. Of course, there is a world of difference between the respect of educated expertise and avowed eugenics. But Ibsen reminds us how slippery the slope of self-satisfaction can be. An Enemy of the People asks us to think carefully about why science is important, and to remember why people are important, too—in short, to remember that science is always, inescapably, embedded in society.
Barnett’s collection aims for such a reminder, showing how familial and marital expectations on women have been integral to their erasure. But these plays are missing ambiguity, that ability to get under your skin and into your head. I can’t stop thinking about An Enemy of the People—in part because the author’s intent is not entirely transparent, and in part because I both agree and disagree so strongly with its morally complicated protagonist. Maybe moral grayness is out and clear moral stances are in these days. Too much ambiguity feels like it got us climate denial and alternative facts, after all. But I don’t think the answer to a disingenuous power grab is to abandon the complexity of our moral lives. I know what Barnett wants me to think and feel. I even agree with it, for the most part. But I’m not sure I’ll be thinking about it a year from now.
Caitlin Kossmann is a writer, editor, and historian from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She currently works for The Yale Review.
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