By Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Apart from Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, perhaps, the play with the most sustained dramatic and intellectual power now playing in New York is The Doctor, at the Park Avenue Armory. This is a “very freely adapted” version by British director Robert Icke of Austrian playwright (and doctor) Arthur Schnitzler’s (1862-1931) drama, Professor Bernhardi. It has been seen in New York since 1914 in several German productions but never in English, although London saw one in 1938.
Interestingly, Schnitzler’s 1912 play, which premiered in Berlin but is set in Vienna (where censorship kept it off the stage until 1918), takes place only a few years after the first act in Leopoldstadt, also set in Vienna and also dealing with antisemitism (among other themes). However, in its depiction of a morally courageous doctor standing up for what he thinks is right in the face of social and professional disapproval, the play it most quickly brings to mind—despite obvious differences—is Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (scheduled for a Broadway production later in the season).
In Icke’s version, an import from London starring the impeccable Juliet Stevenson, the doctor, a self-described “cultural” Jew who is otherwise atheistic (“it’s not about believing anything”), is a woman, Ruth Wolff, who prefers the title “professor”; the time has been updated to contemporary England. Schnitzler’s essential plot has been maintained, but also greatly supplemented to allow for an array of topical issues.
At the foundation is what happens when Dr. Wolff, founding head of an institution studying Alzheimer’s, has a 14-year-old patient dying from sepsis after a self-inflicted abortion. A Catholic priest, Father Jacob (John Mackay), wants to provide the girl with her last rites. Wolff refuses, on the grounds that, with the girl unable to say whether or not she wants to receive the sacraments (her parents are away, unable to be reached), making her aware of her imminent death might prove too upsetting, preventing the girl from dying peacefully. When Wolff and the priest violently disagree, she touches him in a way whose relative degree of aggression creates additional controversy.
As expected, the girl dies and the repercussions of Wolff’s behavior lead to multiple arguments for and against it from colleagues and bureaucrats. Did the doctor’s Jewish religious beliefs play a part in the decision? The priest was Black, so did she act out of racial bias? (Note: Father Jacob is played by a white man, with no hint of his race until later, part of Icke’s concept of seeking to highlight issues of identity by casting various roles in opposition to the actors’ race or gender.)
The incident metastasizes on social media, but Wolff refuses to give an inch in the stern conviction of her righteousness as a scientist to whom everything is “crystal clear.” Attempts to contain the situation fall apart, and, with many thousands signing an online petition, it becomes a cause célèbre, both within the hospital bureaucracy, where people are jockeying for position, and outside, because of the hospital’s dependence on funding. Ultimately, Wolff’s future is on the line.
A televised public hearing, in which Wolff is grilled, pits her against articulate representatives of various socially sensitive viewpoints, each aired in sharply etched rhetoric, liberal and conservative, that forces you to consider and reconsider the ethical validity of Wolff’s position. Making things even more problematic is her own rigidity and unbending confidence in her rightness, characteristics that tend to deflate our sympathy for her, much as we may wish to acknowledge the validity of her opinions.
Abortion, wokeness, science vs. religion, antisemitism, identity politics, and so on are among the issues discussed, always in scintillating discourse, making incisive points but never persuasive one way or the other. All of it is artfully communicated by actors with perfect diction, understanding, and cogency. There are times when the argumentative intensity continues with at a fever pitch for so long you begin to hope for an easing of the tension, but, despite the production’s two and three-quarter hours, it remains continually riveting.
The Doctor is performed on the Armory’s large stage within a neutral set of a pale, semicircular, wooden wall with a door at either side, and double doors up center. This sterile setting by Hildegard Bechtler (who also did the spot-on costumes) vaguely suggests an operating room, its only furnishings being a long metal and wood conference-type table and four similarly made benches. Natasha Chivers crafts subtle effects with lighting that makes use of an overhead bank of fluorescents. A percussionist (Hannah Ledwige when I attended), perched above the center, underscores much of the action with mood-establishing beats (sound design and composition by Tom Gibbons), while a revolving stage, moving so slowly you might not notice it, keeps shifting the actors about.
Under Icke’s imaginatively perceptive direction, the superb company plays with commanding strength, making each line count as they do verbal battle with one another. John Mackay as both the regionally-accented (Scottish?) Father Jacobs and—with a radically different accent—the dead girl’s father, is exceptional. The forthright, imposing performance by Juliet Stevenson of the quarrelsome professor demonstrates her well-deserved position as one of the UK’s most treasured senior actresses. Her interpretative intelligence seeps through her every word, while the impressiveness or her physical prowess is evident in a scene requiring her to run around the vast stage several times at full speed. Most actors of her age (66) might not be up to it, but Stevenson seemed barely winded.
After all the sturm and drang, The Doctor concludes in a more elegiac mood as the priest visits the doctor, shortly after punishment for her behavior has been announced. Over cups of tea, the pair look back over the affair in a mesmerizing discussion of their individual motives in what transpired. They talk about death, faith, responsibility, the nature of the self, medicine, religion, unconscious racism, the last rites, suicide, and, among other subjects, Alzheimer’s. This latter Wolff describes via a devastatingly evocative image of how the disease burns memory away, and how it affected her late partner, Charley (Juliet Garricks), in its final stages.
Their talk, which helps bridge the gap between doctor and priest, seems more like a coda than an integral part of what went before. It’s also a bit too long. However, as gorgeously portrayed by Stevenson and Mackay, it’s a deeply moving way to conclude this fascinating dramatic experience.
The Doctor. Through August 19 at the Wade Thompson Drill Hall/Park Avenue Armory (643 Park Avenue, between East 66th and 67th Streets). www.armoryonpark.org
Photos: Stephanie Berger
