Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory
Caroline Aherne’s masterfully subversive comic creation Mrs. Merton used to cheerily encourage her audience to “have a heated debate.” That instruction—uttered twinkly as a parodic nod to the fiery, oxygen-hogging uselessness of all-sides debates on TV—kept occurring to this critic watching The Doctor (Park Avenue Armory, to Aug. 19), “freely adapted” and directed by Robert Icke after Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 play Professor Bernhardi.
The play, performed on a stark stage at the Park Avenue Armory, with just a table and benches as décor, is one long, heated, borderline hysterical debate saved by the presence and power of Juliet Stevenson, who gives a commanding central performance as Dr. Ruth Wolff, whose career falls apart after she prevents a Black Catholic priest (John Mackay) from seeing a dying girl, the unseen Emily.
From this moment of discord springs forth a 2-hour, 45-minute debate about medical authority, hubris, identities, bias, racism, and faith versus science. To underscore its points, white actors and actors of color play racially and gender-fluid parts (an intriguing idea that ultimately doesn’t extend into anything deeper beyond a theatrical conceit that jolts the first time, then becomes familiar).