Michael Imperioli Knows Art Can’t Save Us

Michael Imperioli was onstage last week when a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” in which he stars, was interrupted by protesters. “I wasn’t sure if the director kind of planted them there,” he told me not long afterward. The play was written by Henrik Ibsen nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, but it has echoes of the current climate crisis. In the new revival, Jeremy Strong plays a physician, Thomas Stockmann, who learns that lucrative mineral springs in his small Norwegian town are contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria. Imperioli plays the doctor’s brother, Mayor Peter Stockmann—a man who, fearing the town’s economic ruin, plots to turn its residents against the facts.