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.
recommended

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

One reply on “Spoiler Alert: He Dies at the End”

  1. Nothing as garish as The Elephant Man can be good news. I’d be going in there expecting self-important bullshit. Indeed, the only real thing I’d go there to see is probably the Elephant Man himself, which either makes me one of the villains of the play itself or simply someone who isn’t going simply to hear about how normality kills. Such an idea is itself an intrinsic part of the Elephant Man, both in theory and in the Elephant Man himself, his whole being, and so does not need to be so damned overdone. We get it, we get it, now entertain us.

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