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"Getting used to things we have no business getting used to"

Brett Groehler/UMD

The renaissance of Henrik Ibsen's play "The Enemy of the People" over the last few years has been so pronounced even the New York Times took note of it.

The 1882 script is a tale of what director Tom Isbell calls "the fractious intersection between self-interest and the common good" - or more specifically, between the environment and jobs.

With that in mind, it would have been easy to remake the script into a hyper-local look at these intersections in our own community.  But Isbell, who wrote the adaptation to update the language and create a more even distribution of the story between male and female characters ("Ibsen, writing in the late 19th century, gave the men all the good stuff to do"), deliberately chose to move the script away from "regional specificity" and more toward timelessness.

Credit Brett Groehler/UMD
Rachel Williams as Petra Stockmann and Addison Sim as Dr. Thomas Stockmann

Lisa Johnson started her broadcast career anchoring the television news at her high school and spinning country music at KWWK/KOLM Radio in Rochester, Minnesota. She was a reporter and news anchor at KTHI in Fargo, ND (not to mention the host of a children's program called "Lisa's Lane") and a radio reporter and anchor in Moorhead, Bismarck, Wahpeton and Fergus Falls.Since 1991, she has hosted Northland Morning on KUMD. One of the best parts of her job includes "paying it forward" by mentoring upcoming journalists and broadcasters on the student news team that helps produce Northland Morning. She also loves introducing the different people she meets in her job to one another, helping to forge new "community connections" and partnerships.Lisa has amassed a book collection weighing over two tons, and she enjoys reading, photography, volunteering with Animal Allies Humane Society and fantasizing about farmland. She goes to bed at 8pm, long before her daughter, two cats, or three dogs.
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