Why are productions cropping up now? What started as a response to a Trump presidency now seems to speak to our times in many ways, with a plot that intertwines an ethically compromised antihero, political extremism, corruption, environmental activism and a lack of accountability for the destruction of a town.

“An Enemy of the People” was dashed off by Ibsen as something of a response to the scandalized reception of his previous “Ghosts,” which was about the taboo subject of syphilis. He wanted to strike back at the liberal press, which he thought was hypocritical for panning his play while claiming to support free speech and progress.

The play features a divisive, punitive protagonist and whistle-blower, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who tries to warn his town about contaminated water polluting the spa that keeps the town solvent. His brother, Peter, is the mayor, who, concerned about the economic impact of this crusade, wants to suppress Thomas’s exposé.

Stockmann is able to persuade his friends, including the editor of the newspaper, that telling the truth about the water is important, but his environmental campaign falters. He lurches politically from the left to the right, and by the fourth act, Stockmann, outraged by the mob’s resistance to his campaign, becomes a zealot and is demonized as the enemy of the people. He winds up defeated, but not before indicting the town in its own tragedy.

Ibsen’s dark, realistic drama about “how the hero cannot win” resonates in our era, said Tore Rem, a literature professor at the University of Oslo and the general editor of a new set of Penguin Classics editions of Ibsen plays. But Ibsen, Mr. Rem said, “makes it impossible to sympathize with Stockmann completely,” because he is self-aggrandizing and elitist.

At the Guthrie Theater, the British team that is staging “Enemy” feels the play carries global weight. “I’m living through a time when it’s impossible to be a hero,” said the director, Lyndsey Turner.

And the playwright Brad Birch, who set the Guthrie’s pared-down adaptation in contemporary Norway, was particularly moved by the heightened political tensions in Britain over Brexit. “We wanted to challenge how being a liberal means being egalitarian but also it involves being quite righteous,” he said. There seems to be a sense, he said, that those who voted for Brexit got what they deserved.