The Danger Zone of Heightened Sensitivity

Roger Berkowitz
There are many criticisms of identity politics. Perhaps the most damning is the one simply follows through the logic of identity politics to its ultimate dystopian endpoint. If we all are essentially who we most closely identify with, then the ever-more-specific refinements of our identities spell the end of the idea of humanity and the possibility of a shared and common world. Identity politics begins with the claim that I, as a Jew, as white, as Black, as an American, have a life particular experience that sets me apart from others. But Orthodox Jews differ from Conservative and Reform Jews. And all religious Jews are distinct from cultural Jews. There are, of course, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. There are rich and poor Jews, educated and uneducated Jews, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. There are heterosexual, gay, trans, and pan-sexual Jews. There are Black Jews. The ever-more-specific refinement of Jewish identity can go on and on. In the end, if I am to identify with that group association most specific to my life experience, there is nothing left really of being a Jew, let alone of being American or being human. This worry about the profoundly anti-human impact of identity politics is at the hear of “The Doctor,”  Robert Icke’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play “Professor Bernhardi” that is currently running at the Armory in New York City. Jesse Green reviews the play and offers a thoughtful critique of identity politics. 

After attempting an abortion at home, a 14-year-old girl lies dying of sepsis at the Elizabeth Institute. No one questions her treatment there; by the time she was admitted, it was too late to save her. But when Ruth Wolff, the Institute’s head doctor, refuses to let a priest perform last rites because it would cause “an unpeaceful death,” ignorance amplified by social media turns a medical decision into a maelstrom. Soon the web is saying Wolff assaulted the priest and killed the girl.

Yet it is not simply a question of tweets and misinformation. Wolff is a Jew.

So far, the plot of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s adaptation of the 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” by Arthur Schnitzler, aligns closely with the original, except that Bernhardi is a Viennese man in 1900 and Wolff a British woman today. Yet ultimately the two works could not be more different. The production that opened on Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, directed by Icke and starring Juliet Stevenson, is less the exercise in Shavian moral argument that Schnitzler rather airily called a comedy than a tragic thought experiment about the failure of identity politics.
The thought experiment runs like this: If everyone represents only the group they belong to, instead of an overarching humanity, and if those groups get sliced finer and finer, what hope can there be for a common language, let alone a common achievement? Wolff’s medical ethics are gibberish to a person of faith, as a politician’s equivocation is nonsense to her. When an online petition states that “Christian patients need Christian doctors” it comes close to suggesting a system in which no one can be a doctor at all — and indeed, soon enough, Wolff is forced to resign….

Icke develops the idea very cleverly. His casting across race and gender ensures that you will be forced to re-evaluate your reactions when you discover, quite belatedly in some cases, that the characters are not as they may look. Is the interaction between a Jewish doctor and a priest with a Scottish accent different when you assume the priest to be white (because the actor is) than when you later learn he is Black? Does it matter whether Wolff’s partner, named Charlie and dressed indeterminately, is a man or woman?

Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation. Perhaps he goes too far in stacking the deck: Though some of Wolff’s antagonists, especially the girl’s yahoo of a father, make clearly antisemitic remarks, Wolff herself is almost worse. Not merely complacently sure of herself, like Bernhardi, she is, in Stevenson’s unflinching performance, a completely unsympathetic blowhard. However well done, the success of that interpretation backfires: As she howls, insults and snaps her fingers at underlings so relentlessly you begin to wonder whether her enemies are right, even if for the wrong reason.