In “Ibsen's Warning” (1989), Arthur Miller notes that the environmental implications of his 1950 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1882 play An Enemy of the People resonated far more in the 1980s than in the 1880s, more even than its political premises resonated in the 1950s. The play presents the dilemma of an idealistic scientist/physician who is ostracized as an enemy of the people for insisting on publicizing that local spa waters, the town's economic life blood, are toxic. Our nature-despoiling societies are far worse than late nineteenth-century capitalism, as raw as Ibsen knew it to be, Miller says, but the poisoning of the public water system by greedy business interests is the play's occasion. Its theme is the crushing of the dissenting spirit by the majority, and the right and obligation of such a free spirit to exist at all. In his preface to the printed text of his adaptation...

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