Reviewed by Jerry Kraft
A
story about the 1895 discovery of the X-ray and its introduction at a late 19th
Century World's Fair may seem like a real sideshow idea for a play, and Deborah
Stein has made “Bone
Portraits” into
exactly that. From our introduction by Thomas Edison, inventor, carnival
barker, visionary and flimflam man, it's clear that we are about to about see
history as vaudeville; a little drama, some song and dance, cheesy laughter and
sentimental romance, all for a modest ticket price and right this way.
Meghan
Arnette hits
exactly the right tone for this show and directs an excellent cast to a
continually entertaining, intriguing, well-balanced show that flies through its
75 minute length. The modest stage at Live Girls, with an inner stage behind a
cheap draw-curtain is exactly right; it keeps us up close to the action and
allows the performers just the right scale for their performance. The script
uses the obvious metaphor of X-ray as a device to see inside people, to see who
they really are, but is never heavy-handed or pretentious. We see the real
character of these people not through pictures of their bones, but by what they
do, the technology of drama.
Roy
Stanton makes
Edison powerful and just a little crazy, an entrepreneur who exploits the work
of others because it is necessary to maintain his own stature, and to bring his
“advancement” to the masses. Stanton has terrific presence and creates the
centrifugal center for the rest of this play to revolve around. Once he
purloins the accidental discovery of the hapless and hopelessly inept Wilhelm
Roentgen it's a short hop to his laboratory in Menlo Park. There, he explores
the new invention with the help of his devoted assistant, Clarence Dally. Adam
Davis gives
Dally a simple decency and modest curiosity that makes him sympathetic, and
worthy of his lovely wife, Josephine.
We
first meet her with her friend, Nana, at the World's Fair, magically lit by
electric lights and displaying a world of the future that is transporting. LaChrista
Borgers is
wonderfully successful at making Josephine's discovery of the incandescent
world feel extraordinary and seductive. She is also elegant and demure, just
right for a Victorian lady enduring the invasion of the Twentieth Century into
her drawing room. Those qualities also give her the class and dimension to
portray Madame Curie, after she has been widowed by this unknown phenomena of
radiation that comes with the new kind of light. Josephine will also lose her
husband to that radiation attending Edison's ambition and his own curiosity,
and her loss adds dimension to the unseen cost of progress.
As
Nana and Roentgen's wife, Berta, Shawnmarie Stanton somehow creates a woman just a
generation behind, and does it without exaggeration or pretense. Again, it is a
very restrained characterization, but not without a certain awareness that the
world is going to change whether she likes it or not. In the vaudeville skits
she is energetic and endearing, show-bizzy in just the right way.
Nobody
goes as far into the show-bizzy as Jason Franklin, who in addition to doing
Roentgen, Bert and a two-bit Medium, hams up his vaudeville bits in truly
hilarious ways. His rendering of a falsetto “I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now”
was as funny as anything I've seen in a long time. Again, I think the director
gets credit for keeping all this nonsense from getting out of hand, pushing
everything right to the outside limit of razzmatazz, but not beyond. Of course,
what all this limelight shtick does is to reinforce the play's notion that this
curiosity, this silly little invention so seemingly unimportant, such a trivial
novelty, would not only reveal the world inside the body, but would also change
the world outside for everyone who encounters it.
“Bone
Portraits” is a fascinating, very entertaining and smart piece of playwriting
and Live Girls has given it an excellent production. This is one sideshow that
doesn't disappoint or deceive, but delivers a revealing view of one small
element of history in a personal, engaging way. This invention works.