The Elephant Man

Once you’ve seen a few iterations of Pomerance’s 1979 drama, which brought back to prominence the case of Joseph (or, here, John) Merrick, one thing becomes clear: The playwright never stops telling you how you should feel. Merrick, the real-life figure whose mysterious medical condition gave him severe deformities, went from the workhouse to the freak show to the toast of English society in the late 1800s. But in Elephant Man, as perhaps in his own life, Merrick serves only as a mirror to reflect what those who view him want to see.

That’s deliberate in the text, of course, but Pomerance never lets us forget it, even in spite of an outstanding effort by Tepeli, who creates subtleties where the playwright left none. As written, Merrick is physically twisted in three painful dimensions but intellectually as flat as a poster-board angel, a projection screen for Pomerance’s themes of Victorian hypocrisy and self-interest. Tepeli mercifully provides his character with gnarly truths both physical and emotional. O’Connell, as his conflicted physician and caretaker, and Feagin, as an actress who’s hired to befriend Merrick but becomes genuinely fond of him, provide worthy backup. Eubanks’s staging is otherwise simply adequate, and sometimes obtuse; the conceit of live Foley sound effects, relied upon heavily in early scenes, soon falls away and becomes more distracting than enhancing on its occasional return.

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