The Doctor makes a confused diagnosis of our social pathologies

“FOR A DOCTOR, language is specific – a diagnosis must be specific,” remarks Ruth Wolff, a secular Jewish physician in Robert Icke’s book. The doctor. Played with refractory aplomb by Juliet Stevenson, she fingers the words for hidden biases, chafes at the use of ecclesiastical terms like “development” in place of the more honest “asking people for money,” and angers whenever someone confuses “who” for “which” and “literally” for “figuratively” (and vice versa). An oddity, then, that her name merges the all-too-appropriate “wolf” with the benevolent “ruth.” The onomastic irony is lost on Wolff’s colleagues, most of whom only refer to him by his last name, or as “the BB” (short for Big Bad). It’s only with his partner (Juliet Garricks) and a teenage trans girl (Matilda Tucker) that Wolff takes under his wing that Wolff allows himself to be remotely vulnerable, to be human.

Following acclaimed appearances at the Almeida Theater in London and the Ambassador Theater Group Productions in the West End, this winding-up of a “moral thriller”, “very loosely adapted” from Professor Bernhardi by modernist Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, opened at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City earlier this month. Icke’s version, set in the present day, builds on the bones of Schnitzler’s somewhat obscure 1912 play, which dramatized the downfall of a Jewish doctor who championed the principles of universal humanism against Catholic dogma, and adds the value of a material seminar. Along with a conflict between science and faith, the play depicts the vicissitudes of navigating identity as a trans teenager, the mob mentality of “cancel culture”, the erosion of principles by currents of political opportunism, the misogyny and racism of modern medicine, and the difficulty of separating professional and personal life.

The doctor revolves around the death of Emily, a fourteen-year-old girl who contracts sepsis after a self-administered abortion. Wolff, the founder of an Alzheimer institute, welcomes Emily and tries to treat her, in vain. Minutes before her death, a Catholic priest (John McKay) materializes at the hospital, apparently at the request of Emily’s absent parents, to administer the last rites. Wolff flatly refuses on the principle that Emily did not explicitly request the sacraments and that bringing her out of her sedated state would result in “an unpeaceful death”. “You walk in there like the grim reaper and there’s no way she, in her current state, could die without panic and distress,” she told him. In the aftermath of Emily’s death (which occurs offstage), news spreads quickly about the priest being fired by Wolff. Soon, a petition goes around the web to claim “that Christian patients need Christian doctors”. The signatures gradually increase from tens to a little less than a hundred to more than fifty thousand; Wolff finds himself the proverbial frog being slowly boiled alive. (As a study of an austere, professionally accomplished queer woman who is toppled from a position of power, the piece is reminiscent of the film Tar.)

On Hildegard Bechtler’s curved, paneled set — bare save for a long table, sofa, and a few benches — a group of Wolff’s peers and a press secretary gather in the inner sanctum of the hospital to deliberate. Should Wolff publicly apologize and nip the PR crisis in the bud? Circulating a statement to the hospital board in an attempt to preempt a vocal contingent of anti-abortion activists? Invite an external investigation to demonstrate transparency? All of these extra-medical concerns are anathema to Wolff’s conception of her role as a doctor – she thinks it demeaning to exercise her humanity before a jury of her inferiors – but other members of the executive committee believe that the problems deserve to be fully exposed. For some time there has been more than the usual intramural bickering over the appointment of a new department head, and the overworked committee has split. (The turntable perhaps adds an unintended resonance to the phrase “turning in circles.”) It’s no surprise that Hardiman (a steely Naomi Wirthner), Ruth’s main opponent at the institute, proposes a motion of no confidence in its founder. Despite this blow, Wolff manages to remain unbiased and unbiased. When she later discovers that someone has damaged her car, she thinks: “Do you think the swastika is a reference to my Jewish roots, or does it denote my so-called fascism more generally?

In Schnitzler’s play, the girl’s death results in a trial, after which the male doctor is imprisoned for two months and banned from practicing medicine. Icke hangs around Schnitzler’s footprints for a while before getting rid of his main ropes; his modernized version climaxes when Wolff gets dragged in front of a talk show during which five axe-crushing guests, including an academic specializing in postcolonialism and a historian of Jewish culture, hurl questions at him, chipping away at his veneer of neutrality. . Drummer Hannah Ledwidge, suspended directly above the stage, punctuates the cliffside moments with a propulsive beat (Tom Gibbons provided sound design and composition) while close-up projections of Stevenson’s face during the inquisition reveal every twinge of doubt, every nostril twinge of indignation.

The televised debate also marks a turning point in the play. So far, almost every actor (except Stevenson) has played characters of different genders and ethnicities than their own. As Icke explains in the script, the move aims to get the audience to “reconsider the characters once some aspect of their identity is revealed through the play.” The maneuver appears superfluous at best and obscure at worst. The contingency of identity is, after all, already crystallized by Ruth when she asks, “Thought experiment: If I were a man, do you think you would treat this differently?” Later, a panelist on the talk show returns the question: “If the priest had been white, would you have acted in the same way? The priest, played by a white man, gradually reveals himself to be black, while Hardiman, nicknamed “him”, is played by a woman. It is not known for what purpose these identity matrices are modified. What exactly are we being asked to “reconsider”?

You don’t have to be a Freudian to believe that the human psyche has both male and female components, and therefore to think that the play is, in part, about the repression of what doctors called “the psychic hermaphroditism”. But the question of race pulls the piece in a different direction and shows the limits of Icke’s lava lamp ontology. Sometimes racial gaslighting seems like nothing more than a Socratic exercise. Other times, casting across race seems to assert the privileges that come with overcoming, such as when one of Wolff’s colleagues (played by a white actor) protests, “I’m a black man!” My grandmother was born in Kenya,” only to be told by another doctor that “it’s a slightly different story when you look completely white.” It’s telling, however, that when the televised debate climaxes, it’s a researcher played by a black actor who criticizes Wolff for using racist language like “uppity” and for thinking the words can be neutral in terms of value. As she puts it, “It amazes me that you reject the whole idea of ​​labels or titles or names”, and, twisting the knife further, “Language is the first step, because some of us have to step back before they can choose, select how we are portrayed On the page, the ideas may seem unoriginal, but this saves the scene from sinking into a satire of every implicit bias/justice training workshop race is the mundane fact of her identity: a black woman saying these words corrects the astigmatism of the room with regard to identity and makes things “smooth”, as Wolff would say. But only for a moment the last moments of the play see another encounter between Wolff and the priest, and, without saying too much about the play, one can wonder at the end if we have been dropped off where we started.

One is tempted to say that Icke could have gone further in taking risks. What might the play have looked like if the roles had been chosen by the actors each night? Would the lines make more sense when spoken by an array of different performers? Would our understanding of the characters change? It’s an impossible question, of course, even leaving aside whether audience members would be willing to attend multiple three-hour performances to see actors play different characters. Theater, like therapy, has its uses for forms terminable and interminable. But a single visit may be enough.

— Rhode Feng

The doctor takes place at the Park Avenue Armory in New York until August 19.