Spring Preview: With An Enemy of the People, Michael Imperioli Prepares for a Broadway Debut 40 Years in the Making

When it comes to researching his roles, Michael Imperioli doesn’t do things by half measures. To prepare to play a former major league catcher in the TV movie For One More Day, he hung out with Yankees catcher Jorge Posada. In order to portray Andrew Cuomo in Escape at Dannemora, he spent one-on-one time with the governor in his office. Even Imperioli’s performance as Tony Soprano’s nephew Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos was based on his study of someone with mob ties. (A real-life mobster also offered to teach Imperioli how to properly strangle someone with piano wire. In that case, he demurred.)

So when Imperioli was welcomed into the cast of a new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People—the actor’s Broadway debut—he immediately paid a visit to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to familiarize himself with the history of the play. In the new production, Imperioli plays Peter Stockmann, the conservative mayor of a Norwegian spa town, who is in conflict with his physician brother Thomas (played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong).

“They’ve been doing this play on Broadway for over 100 years,” Imperioli told Tamsen Fadal on The Broadway Show, speaking at Scarlet Lounge, the Upper West Side cocktail bar he recently opened with his wife Victoria. “It was interesting going through the other productions, or other Ibsen productions over the last 100 years here in New York. There was something very inspiring to me. It’s like, now you’re part of this lineage.” (The New York Times raved about an 1893 production in Paris, even before it arrived stateside: “[S]uch noise, such cries, such applause, such discussion, pro and con, have seldom been heard in any theater.”)

Imperioli also wanted to get to know the space. Soon after being cast, he took a tour of the Circle in the Square Theatre. A little after that, he enquired if he could pay another visit with nobody else around. “Just give me a half hour,” he asked, “just to hear myself and hear how it sounds.” As Imperioli explained to Fadal, “There's something very inspiring about being in an empty theater that has a tradition and history of such great actors.”

Circle in the Square Theatre opened at 235 West 50th Street in 1972. Uniquely for a Broadway theater, it boasts a horseshoe stage, surrounded by seats on three sides. Scenery is necessarily minimal and the front row of the audience is at stage level. (An Enemy of the People will have an extra row of seats on the stage itself.)

It’s “a theater that actors love,” said Imperioli. “Al Pacino's done a ton there. George C. Scott played there.” (Pacino: Salome, Hughie; Scott: Death of a Salesman; Present Laughter.) “I mean, it's got such a great history of really good actors. They love it. It's very intimate. It's kind of like a little arena.”

(Strong also has a personal connection to the room: He attended the production of True West, starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, five or six times there. “I still, to this day, remember the feeling of the lights going down, and the anticipation, and the flutter of programs, and a great wish of mine to one day get to be an actor, and get to do a play maybe here,” he said at a recent press conference for the show.)

Imperioli grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y. In high school, he joined class trips to Manhattan to see Broadway musicals. Seeing Patti LuPone in Evita and Glenn Close and Jim Dale in Barnum ignited something in him. “Even though I didn't want to be in musical theater—I didn't have a talent for that—being in the theater and just seeing these great actors, I think that kind of really pushed me towards being an actor.” He never wanted those class trips to end. “I remember getting on the bus with my class and I was so depressed. I didn't want to leave the City. I didn't want to leave Broadway.”

At 17, Imperioli was living downtown and studying method acting at an offshoot of the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. The theater he saw at the time made an indelible impression: American Buffalo, starring Pacino (“That just blew the doors open”); Balm in Gilead, starring Laurie Metcalf and Gary Sinise, directed by John Malkovich; Death of a Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman, also directed by Malkovich. “I mean, if you want to be an actor and you see those things, you’re sold.”

When the Malkovich-directed Arms and the Man, starring Kevin Kline and Raul Julia, was in previews at Circle in the Square in 1985, Imperioli was there, not yet 20, waiting patiently at the stage door in order to grab Malkovich’s autograph before he entered the theater.

Nearly forty years later, there’s no place Imperioli would rather be making his Broadway debut. “There’s something really meaningful to me to be there.”

The Broadway Show Credits: Directed by Zack R. Smith | Producers: Paul Wontorek and Beth Stevens | Senior Producers: Caitlin Moynihan and Lindsey Sullivan | Videographers: Born in Brooklyn, Luis Ferrá, Nick Shakra

Photo Credits: Photography by Luis Ferrá | Location: Scarlet