Bradley Cooper in 'The Elephant Man' on Broadway
O.K. already, can we just go ahead and pull back that curtain?
A current of electric impatience runs through the audience during the opening scenes of the sturdy revival of Bernard Pomerance's 'The Elephant Man,' which opened on Sunday night at the Booth Theater. That's because the only glimpse we've been allowed so far of the title character - and more important, of the man playing him - has been as a shadow behind a thin but view-obstructing curtain.
There has been much discussion of the astonishing reality attached to this silhouette. A carnival barker type assures us that this exotic creature - who 'exposes himself to crowds who gape and yawp' - looks like nobody else on the planet.
Technically, the carny is describing the grotesquely deformed John Merrick, who makes his living as a sideshow attraction in Victorian England. But for much of the audience, the reference might as well be to the guy People magazine once crowned 'the Sexiest Man Alive,' the movie star Bradley Cooper.
Not to worry, dear theatergoers and film fans. Soon enough, Mr. Cooper is on full-frontal, clinical display, wearing nothing but a pair of period-appropriate underpants and a face as neutral as a death mask. Feast your eyes upon this image while you can, and perhaps be so good as to feel a little guilty for doing so.
Within a few moments, Mr. Cooper - without makeup or prosthetics - will have slowly and painstakingly distorted his form and features beyond recognition. From then on, he is not Bradley Cooper, or even someone in the mold of one of the finely detailed neurotics he has portrayed so compellingly in films like 'Silver Linings Playbook' or 'American Hustle.'
Instead, what this actor has become is a big blank slate onto which others may project whatever they choose. One imagines that someone as famous as Mr. Cooper has ample experience of what this feels like.
Symbolic heft, worn with anonymous grace under considerable physical stress, is what's required of anyone playing the title character in Mr. Pomerance's carefully arranged, instructive drama, which has been directed by Scott Ellis and also stars Patricia Clarkson and an excellent Alessandro Nivola. Though the part of Merrick made a one-season wonder of Philip Anglim when he originated the role on Broadway in 1979 - and has since attracted the likes of David Bowie (one of Mr. Anglim's replacements) and Billy Crudup (who appeared in the 2002 revival) - it doesn't allow for radical variation or nuance.
It is a strenuous role, for sure, demanding a hunched, muscle-taxing posture for the play's duration. (In the printed script, Mr. Pomerance cautions, 'No one with any history of back trouble should attempt the part of Merrick as contorted.') But once that pose is struck, much of the actor's work is done.
The play retells the real-life story of Merrick's 'rehabilitation' under the tutelage of the rising young surgeon Frederick Treves (Mr. Nivola), who transports his unlikely protégé from sideshow squalor to upper-class gentility. But the script's arc is shaped not so much by Merrick's transformation as by the reactions to it. In the show's elegant centerpiece scene, a succession of people - including Treves, the celebrated actress Mrs. Kendal (Ms. Clarkson), a hospital head (Henry Stram) and a stately bishop (Anthony Heald) - all speak of how much Merrick is 'like me.'
It is Mr. Pomerance's firmly underlined point that, whether he is the object of ridicule among street mobs or of fawning praise among aristocrats, Merrick is always a mirror to a flawed and frightened society. This thesis was delivered most baldly in Sean Mathias's 2002 production with Mr. Crudup, which used Brechtian supertitles. But the point registers quite clearly, thank you, even in a less openly didactic interpretation like this one, which was previously staged at the Williamstown Theater Festival.
Designed by Timothy R. Mackabee, Mr. Ellis's 'The Elephant Man' makes discreetly poetic use of sliding curtains to echo imagery about illusion and concealment. The staging doesn't hit you over the head with implicit metaphors or sermonizing, which is just as well, since the script sometimes does.
Ensconced in a private hospital suite and attired like a Victorian gentleman (Clint Ramos did the costumes), Merrick says that perhaps his head is so big because it is so full of dreams. 'Before I spoke with people,' he says, 'I did not think of all these things, because there was no one to bother to think them for. Now, things just come out of my mouth which are true.' These include implicit, gentle rebukes of the moralistic and hypocritical code that governs imperial Britain.
What psychological insight 'The Elephant Man' provides is generated less by Merrick than by the response to him of others - or to be exact, one other. The epigrammatic and empathetic Mrs. Kendal, who knows from striking poses and being gawped at, is a scene-stealing showboat. But like Merrick, she is more a notion in motion than a full character.
Ms. Clarkson, one of the canniest actresses working, would seem to be trying to avoid stereotype by portraying Mrs. Kendal as a hazy, trans-Atlantic eccentric who speaks as if in a dream. But her interpretation throws off the rhythms of the dialogue and denies us the more basic satisfactions of Mrs. Kendal's artful, parrying wit.
In this version, it is Treves to whom we look for emotional complexity. And Mr. Nivola delivers it beautifully. (So, for the record, did Rupert Graves, who played opposite Mr. Crudup.) Reflected by Mr. Nivola in liquid eyes that are at odds with his rigid stance, Treves's conflict between rule-bound propriety and inner unease summons the soul-shaking crises of faith memorably described by eminent Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill.
But it is Mr. Cooper whom most ticket buyers have come to see. In interviews, he has said that he has been fascinated by Merrick's story since he was a boy. But what he brings to this production is the weight of years of being stared at as an adult, and he is the first star of his stature to take on the part in our post-Warhol world of celebrity obsession.
It seems fitting that Mr. Cooper is broader and more conspicuously muscular than his best-known, relatively lithe-bodied predecessors in the role. Even if you can't identify the man onstage as the one who starred in the blockbuster 'Hangover' film franchise, you're always aware of the sheer, looming presence of him. He is, as he should be, the elephant in the room.
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