The dramatic heart of The Elephant Man—Bernard Pomerance's 1979 play that won a bushel and a peck of awards—comes in the 19th scene, when the good physician Treves has a meltdown in front of a bishop.

Years earlier, Treves had scooped the Elephant Man from the freak-show circuit and brought him to London Hospital, where he was called by his proper name (Joseph Merrick) and treated like a human being for the first time in his life. Merrick requested to live in a hospital for the blind where he might find love, but had to settle for London Hospital, where he became a celebrity and a pal to Queen Victoria. (And, Pomerance's play suggests, at least one woman—an actress—let him look at her naked body.)

But as Merrick's fame rises and his condition worsens, the good doctor (played by a dignified, if restless, David Pichette) works himself into an existential lather: "It is just—it is the overarc of things, quite inescapable that as he's achieved greater and greater normality, his condition's edged him closer to the grave. So—a parable of growing up? To become more normal is to die? More accepted to worsen? He—it is just a mockery of everything we live by."

The doctor is right: He's a Victorian scientist, living in the dream of the infinitely perfectible human. (He also treats women with "grotesque ailments" caused by corsets.) As a production, The Elephant Man's greatest moments happen when Alexandra Tavares—as the actress hired by Treves to accustom Merrick to female company—walks onstage. In part, because the play gives her some of the best lines (on seeing a photo of the Elephant Man: "He reminds me of an audience I played Cleopatra for in Brighton once. All huge grim head and grimace and utterly unable to clap"). But Tavares brings a crackle to the stage that the other actors—with director Julie Beckman—can't muster.

MJ Sieber is competent as Merrick (played without crazy stage makeup, the way the playwright intended) and watching Pichette's descent into hand-wringing doubt is, in the end, affecting. If his breakdown to the bishop is the dramatic heart of The Elephant Man, Tavares's lightness and wit and her humane friendship with Merrick—not for scientific gain, nor regal curiosity—is its tender emotional heart. Sadly, we don't get to see enough of it.