Freak No More

By T. E. Kalem

THE ELEPHANT MAN by Bernard Pomerance

Plays about historical figures rarely cast new light upon the figures or ourselves. Bernard Pomerance, an American living in London, has written a drama about a historical freak that movingly does both.

John Merrick (1863-90) was so monstrously deformed that beside him Caliban might seem shapely. His head had the circumference of a normal man's waist, and the bone structure occluded one eye and twisted his mouth into a slobbering aperture. A spongy cauliflower-shaped mass on the back of his head and other body growths gave off an odious suppuration. His hip was deformed, and he could scarcely walk. Only his left arm and his genitals were unmarred. So grotesque was Merrick's body, in fact, that he was banned from appearing in sideshows, for a time his only means of livelihood.

Quite by happenstance, Merrick then came to the benign attention of Dr. Frederick Treves, a gifted anatomist at London Hospital who eventually became personal surgeon to Queen Victoria. Private quarters were set aside for Merrick at the hospital, and with infinite patience but genteel reserve, Treves embarked on a process of Victorian social engineering. In a sense it is the education of a noble savage, but here an ironic ambiguity begins to bite into the play. For who, precisely, is noble and who is savage? At one point, when two hospital orderlies are sacked for gaping at Merrick, he asks Treves with a saintly innocence: "If your mercy is so cruel, what is your justice like?"

In his last years Merrick became the mini-pet of the haut monde. The Princess of Wales visited him, the Prince of Wales sent him venison, and an actress, Mrs. Kendal, was solicitously tender. At the point in the play where she reaches out to take Merrick's hideously gnarled right hand in hers, the emotionally charged impact equals the scene in The Miracle Worker where Helen Keller first comprehends the sign for water. Longing to sleep "like other people," Merrick, who could only achieve rest by lowering his huge head on his knees, lay down one night in 1890, broke his neck and died.

Playwright Pomerance has been scrupulously conscientious about the facts. Even so, The Elephant Man is more than docudrama. It is lofted on poetic wings and nests in the human heart. The production, in the off-Broadway Theater of St. Peter's Church (in Manhattan's Citicorp Building), is done with impeccable taste and graced with skilled key performances that equal or surpass anything to be seen at present in the New York theater. Displaying no cosmetically applied malignancies, Philip Anglim 's Merrick is like some sort of simple, twisted saint.

Kevin Conway paints a psychograph of Treves, each brush stroke subtler than the last, the kindest of healers plagued with the darkest of self-doubts. And Carole Shelley's Mrs. Kendal -- curious, amused, emotionally generous -- is a womanly oasis, and like the play itself, no mirage in a parched season. -- T. E. Kalem

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