'The Great Divide,' Shotgun
Players: review
The stakes are a lot higher
and the action more concentrated in Adam Chanzit's "The Great
Divide" than in its source, Henrik Ibsen's classic "An
Enemy of the People." The dramatic payoff isn't as potent,
but the mostly engrossing "Divide" drills into its personal
and social issues with an intensity that's inescapable.
Ibsen meets fracking in
the Shotgun Players' world premiere that opened Friday. Where
Ibsen's crusading Dr. Tomas Stockmann discovers that his Norwegian
coastal town's prized health spa is heavily polluted, Chanzit's
Dr. Katherine Stockmann is confronted with evidence that her remote
Colorado community's new economic lifeline, hydraulic fracturing
for natural gas, is poisoning its air and water.
The central conflict, between
human lives and their livelihood, remains the same, though many
more lives are at risk in "Divide." So is the health
of the planet, a peril that Chanzit makes all the more present
through careful understatement.
Some elements of that bio-economic
conflict are less well developed than others, though director
Mina Morita's sure-handed stagings generate urgency with a breathy
harmonica soundtrack and oil-rig work crews making swift alterations
in Martin Flynn's rustic set. Some of the psychological drama
is less compelling than Ibsen's and some is more nuanced, though
the uneven cast doesn't always do it justice.
In the most striking departure
from Ibsen, Chanzit's Dr. Stockmann is a reluctant crusader, a
medical activist who's returned to her old family homestead -
husband and two children in tow - to retire from the many years
she's spent fighting human rights battles in Brazil, Ecuador and
elsewhere. Heather Robison commands focus with her delicate delineation
of the degrees of Katherine's exhaustion, conflicted realization
of the need for her to act and clear-headed, steely dedication
to the cause.
As in Ibsen, the forces
of commercial expediency - at any human cost - are led by the
doctor's elder brother Peter, painfully aware that despite his
position as mayor, he lives in the shadow of his more accomplished
younger sibling. Scott Phillips invests the role's wheeler-dealing
machinations, threats, bullying, cronyism and skillful demagoguery
with enlivening if somewhat monochromatic energy.
Much of the town will be
on his side, and he's literally in bed with the oil company -
or its local agent, Rita (Sarita Ocón). Katherine's principal
ally is her college-age daughter Petra (a sincere Luisa Frasconi).
A supposedly crusading journalist (Ryan Tasker) gets cold feet
in an underdeveloped subplot. A potentially intriguing wrinkle
is introduced by Katherine and Peter's mother - played with tart,
enigmatic terseness by Michaela Greeley - but it goes nowhere.
Arguments for the economic
benefits, even necessity of the fracking are made with some force,
though they might carry more weight against Ibsen's arrogantly
self-righteous Dr. Stockmann. Chanzit's attempt to complicate
Katherine's goodness by showing its cost to her family are undercut
by her palpable sincerity, despite the appealing fragility of
Samuel Berston as her young son.
But such defects only detract
from "Divide" sporadically. Most of its conflicts are
compelling. Morita paces it like a breaking news story, peppered
with sharp cameos by Joe Estlack, Sabrina De Mio, Rebecca Pingree
and Hugo E. Carbajal. And its fracking subject matter couldn't
be more timely.
