Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will make his Broadway debut in the 2017–18 season with a new translation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. The production, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, premiered at Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in 2013 and featured a German adaptation by Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer.
Dates and a theatre, as well as casting and a design team, will be announced at a later time. Tony winner David Binder produces the Broadway engagement.
Read: Why You Need to Know the Name Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Jacobs-Jenkins’ work was most recently seen on the New York stage in Signature Theatre’s presentation of Everybody. His 2015 play Gloria was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His additional credits include Appropriate and An Octoroon—both of which won him Obie Awards—War, and Neighbors. In 2016, Jacobs-Jenkins was named a MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient.
Watch the trailer for the Schaubühne production below:
Following its world premiere in Berlin, Ostermeier and Borchmeyer’s adaptation of An Enemy of the People went on to play Brooklyn Academy of Music and London’s Barbican Centre, as well as engagements in Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Melbourne, Oslo, Paris, Seoul, and Venice.
Ostermeier—a resident director of the Schaubühne since 1999—and Borchmeyer have collaborated previously on a number of productions, including Schaubühne’s presentations of The Little Foxes, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Richard III, Bella Figura, and Professor Bernhardi.
An Enemy of the People explores the moral quandaries of whistleblowing and follows the clash between Dr. Stockmann, who discovers that water from the town’s municipal baths is contaminated, and Peter Stockmann, his brother and mayor of the town, who fiercely opposes the publication of this information as it could be detrimental to the town’s tourism industry.
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