Non-Broadway theater finally got going again in late spring, although as of mid-summer the only Broadway show playing was a Bruce Springsteen concert. None of the new productions I was able to see before my deadline is still playing in September, but some of them are interesting enough that they may be re-mounted again in the future.

I hadn’t set foot in a theater since March 9, 2020, until I presented myself at the Park Avenue Armory on July 1 to see a clever rethinking of Ibsen’s 1882 chestnut The Enemy of the People, rewritten in a contemporary idiom by Robert Icke, an Englishman who has carved out a niche in theater by adapting classic texts such as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and Schiller’s Mary Stuart. This summer, Icke directed Ann Dowd in a one-woman performance of Ibsen’s play that was staged at the cavernous Armory all too briefly before the show closed abruptly when Dowd departed to deal with a family emergency. Here’s hoping audiences get another chance to see this slyly effective update.

Ticket holders (who had to prove that they were vaccinated against covid-19 upon entry) were seated at distanced library tables laid out on a floor painted to look like a giant map of the town in which the action takes place. Each table was equipped with a video screen and two large buttons marked X and O. The purpose of the two buttons was to allow