If you think newspaper editors are more worried about upholding the reputations of their communities than sales, attention, and awards, and will therefore try their damnedest to quash muckraking tales because they might harm major local corporations, you’re the naif to whom Henrik Ibsen is pitching An Enemy of the People (at the Circle in the Square through June 16), which has been capably rewritten and smartly condensed for modern ears by Amy Herzog. Alas, Enemy is grandstanding pretending to be drama. The matter of why it is still performed is as worthy of consideration as its self-evident defects.

What is always true of the piece is that the critics claim it is timelier than ever, ripped from today’s headlines, an urgent lesson we ignore at our peril. The current production, directed by Herzog’s husband, Sam Gold, and starring the hbo veterans Jeremy Strong, of Succession, and Michael Imperioli, of The White Lotus and The Sopranos, is “the 19th century drama that still resonates with our pandemic-scarred society” (Los Angeles Times). It’s “bold and necessary” because its “themes of truth and misinformation ring timelier than ever” (USA Today). The New York Times declared:

Its issues and ours are not similar but identical. And not just its issues. Its characters, too, are contemporary: doppelgängers of our own vicious demagogues, cowed editors, greasy both-sides-ists and defanged idealists.

The Times thinks that, as played by Strong, Ibsen’s determined voice of reason Dr.