More Reasons to Love the Sounders, Soccer
John Oliver Makes No Apologies
Isabella Rossellini Brings Green Porno to Benaroya
Hugo House Presents Visiting Hours
We Pronounce Blogsgiving 2009 a Success
John Merrick (MJ Sieber, top), Mrs. Kendal (Alexandra Tavares, center), and Dr. Treves (David Pichette, bottom). Photos: Erik Stuhaug
Not knowing much about the play, we went because we saw the cast included David Pichette, MJ Sieber, and Alexandra Tavares, who consistently bring a snap, crackle, and pop (respectively) to whatever they're in. The show is an hour and forty minutes with no intermission--the audience last night was glued to the stage the whole time.
We recommend you glue yourself there, too--The Elephant Man (through August 9; tickets: $25, Thursdays $10!) makes a point of how Merrick became a mirror for those who met him, but that's not where the reflections end. Knowing one's place, polite society's hunger for sensation, upper-crust financial scandals, and the conflicts of faith and reason all infiltrate the space and surprise you with the fact that, even if the times have, life hasn't changed that much.
Bernard Pomerance wrote his play in the late 1970s, it was a hit, and it became the basis of a tearjerking, John-Hurt-starring movie, which we to this day have not seen because we're a messy crier. Here, David Pichette plays Dr. Frederick Treves, an upward-bound surgeon, who finds in Merrick a diagnostic puzzle, and in time, a friend. Pichette has a caustic side that leavens both Treves' do-gooderism and Merrick's naivete.
When Treves meets Merrick, he's a sideshow attraction, the "capital investment" of Ross (Rob Burgess, whose greasy, fast-talking grifter will later break your heart with his raw, aching need), and Treves, on a whim, ducks behind the hanging muslin and finds a medical mystery.
MJ Sieber, as Merrick, is un-prostheticized, but his gasps, slurps, and stutters, dangling arm and limping effort are more than enough to keep his disorder's life-warping effects in mind. Sieber adds to Merrick's sweetness a questioning tenacity that sparks his conversational studies with Treves about the ways of the world, and the costs of succeeding in it.
Part of Treves' course in social niceties is taught by an actress, Mrs. Kendal (the sphinxy Alexandra Tavares, looking like she can't decide whether to take flight or eat the tiny mortal in front of her), whom Treves commissions because he thinks she can pretend her way past Merrick's disturbing appearance.
As the play has it, Merrick and Kendal very quickly establish a meeting of the minds, discussing Romeo & Juliet, and its through her that Merrick becomes a social celebrity. Tavares, with upswept hair and bustle, varies a poker face with a wide but confrontational smile, but its her voice that gains in vibrancy as she senses in Merrick a kindred spirit, someone who's always modulating for the audience.
One of the play's notions is that Merrick's "inhumanity" meant people had to connect with his personality, rather than his looks. At first, they're almost giddy about finding this monster is somehow like them, and later they discover their own pain and shame, through his example. In particular, the play sketches parallels between Merrick and Treves--Merrick is exploited by his manager Ross, Treves by an aristocrat with an investment scheme. Like a real-life Dorian Gray's portrait, Merrick keeps displaying to Treves his blind conformity and encroaching mortality.
Treves, in the grip of his own mid-life celebrity crisis, muses about how Merrick's dependency and desperation to belong created his all-things-to-everyone mystique, and left him trapped in it. Who would Merrick have wanted to be if Treves had not so impressed upon him the proper attitude of a philanthropic beneficiary?
While the play seems on one hand to fly by, the direction by Julie Beckman sets the pace of life back to the late 1880s. The characters have time to breath, to think, to converse, and not just engage in rapid repartee. At times she interpolates characters as scenery--at one point in a Pichette scene, hospital administrator Gomm (Jim Dean, as a raging bull of science) walks down the hall with a nurse, and that small moment creates a whole world going on outside Treves' office.
Greg Carter's multi-functional set keeps conjuring up new scenery, from a hospital's corridors, to a sideshow tent, to the steam from a train at the station--it's a perfect match for a play whose doors open in all directions. Musical scenery is provided by Don Darryl Rivera, who has created a subtle piano score that is just as evocative as the steam that suggests a train just offstage.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Post a comment (Comment Policy)