‘The Doctor’ Off Broadway Review: Juliet Stevenson Gives Woke a Workout

Robert Icke wrote “The Doctor” because Tom Stoppard didn’t. As with the old grand master of British theater who just picked up his fifth Tony Award on Sunday, Icke has loaded his new play with tons of ideas, lots of speeches and, possibly, one character. Loosely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 play, “Professor Bernhardt,” Icke’s “The Doctor” opened Wednesday at the Armory after engagements at the Almeida Theatre and the in London’s West End.

What sets off all the speeches in Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” is the Holocaust. In “The Doctor,” it is a Jewish female doctor (Juliet Stevenson) who refuses to allow a Black Catholic priest (John Mackay) to administer the last rites to her dying patient. Ickes works overtime to set up a bizarre network of circumstances to turn this issue into a controversy big enough to bring down not only the doctor but, possibly, the hospital itself.

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Here are a few of those circumstances: The patient is a 14-year-old girl who has sepsis after a botched, self-induced medical abortion. The girl has left no notification with the hospital about her religious beliefs or wishes. Her parents are Catholic, but they can’t be contacted because they’re up in an airplane somewhere. Even though no one can contact them, the parents have gotten ahold of their local priest so that he can perform the last rites. When the priest arrives, he is denied admission to the patient’s room because his presence might upset her, causing the teenager to die. An altercation breaks out between the doctor and the priest, and before a lawsuit can be threatened, the girl has died. In many speeches to come, Ickes tells us that the doctor did “the only thing she could.”

I had a real problem right there. When people are that close to death, they aren’t often lucid. The girl likely wouldn’t even have known the priest was in the room. Of course, that’s not what “The Doctor” is all about. What it’s really about is political correctness and woke and unconscious bias and how people nowadays are put into groups (Black, Catholic, Jewish, LGTBQ, etc.) that they must defend at all costs.

Some big shots at the hospital want the doctor to apologize; she will not, and suddenly the hospital’s new building is jeopardized due to lacking of donations from a pissed-off public.

That plot point was pretty hoary back when Tennessee Williams used it in “Suddenly, Last Summer.” In “The Doctor,” it inspires more power speeches than the last season of “Succession.” Doctors are at each other’s throats just like those fictional media tycoons, and all the screaming has a numbing effect after a while.

Having exhausted the conference room as a place for his characters to argue with each other, Ickes makes a TV show debate the centerpiece of his second act. It comes complete with an unctuous host (Chris Osikanlu Colquhoun, also double cast as a doctor) — and what a tacky TV show it is! Even the music (by Tom Gibbons) is reminiscent of those ominous chords whenever a cable network announces “breaking news.” In this TV show, a panel of experts oozing moral superiority grill the doctor (her back to us, her face projected in close up on the upstage wall). The effect is supposed to make us question cultural biases. Instead, you might find yourself thinking for the first time ever, “Ron DeSantis could have a point.”

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Wandering around the edges of “The Doctor” are the doctor’s partner, Charlie (Juliet Garricks), and a teenage friend, Sami (Matilda Tucker), who visits the doctor at her home. Charlie and Sami are masculine names but have been used by women, too. That little subtlety is the point here. Ickes directs his own play, and his use of nontraditional casting with regard to race and gender turns “The Doctor” into a real puzzle for the audience. Does the doctor not introduce her “partner” to her medical colleagues because she is a Black lesbian? Or is that “partner” really a Caucasian man? Even more bizarre is the character(s) of the Father (Mackay). Are the other characters talking about the priest or the dead patient’s father, and, by the way, is he Caucasian or Black?

Icke has directed his cast to scream their lines whenever possible. In between scene changes, the audio level remains cover-your-ears high thanks to a drummer (Hannah Ledwidge) placed high in the rafters upstage to keep the suspense going with lots of deafening percussive interludes.

In the title role, Stevenson rarely leaves the stage, and that includes the 20-minute intermission of this nearly three-hour play. She introduces her character to us by screaming, and among all the screamers on stage, her lungs are definitely the most powerful. Icke has written her a few quiet moments, most of those are performed with Garricks, who presents a modicum of restraint for reasons that you will guess before her big secret has been revealed.

After all the Sturm und Drang and Catholic-bashing of the first act, Icke ends “The Doctor” with a very long and surprisingly subdued sit-down talk between the doctor and the Father (that is, the priest), who suddenly emerges as the voice of reason. Someone has to play that role, finally.

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