Tesla's Letters

Jeffrey Stanley’s 1999 play appears at first blush to be a biography-by-proxy of Nikola Tesla, the Croatian-born Serb (pay attention, that bit will be on the quiz) inventor and scientist who emigrated to the U.S. to work for, and later against, Thomas Edison. Tesla is a fascinating figure, and indeed we learn much about him in Stanley’s lectures disguised as Socratic dialogues, but he’s only a gateway to the play’s true focus.

Letters centers on an American grad student who travels to Belgrade in 1997, with ethnic tensions still high after the breakup of Yugoslavia, to research Tesla’s life. Daisy (Doman) arrives at Belgrade’s Tesla Museum believing she’ll be allowed to peruse Tesla’s private correspondence; the museum’s manager, Dragan (Huff), instead presents her with a heroic task she must first complete: Travel to Tesla’s Croatian birthplace—where Dragan, a Serb, cannot go—and assess the post-war condition of the buildings and monuments that tie Tesla to the former Yugoslavia.

Stanley’s real target, then, is American complacency, our proclivity to dismiss the world’s atrocities as more bad news from elsewhere. He doesn’t take a side in the Eastern European conflict, deftly illustrating that there are too many sides, and the conflicts too many centuries old, for any one to be right. His point, it seems, is that attention must be paid. The play of ideas is rescued from the weight of its didacticism by Bowling’s strong direction and its four skillful actors, who succeed in putting a human face on man’s inhumanity to man.