DETAILS
THE ELEPHANT MAN
Directed by Michael Peng. Written by Bernard Pomerance. Starring Frank Zotter and George Szilagyi. May 15-24. Timms Centre for the Arts (University of Alberta). Tickets available through TIX on the Square (420-1757/tixonthesquare.ca).
As I sit down with director Michael Peng at a university coffee shop to talk about his production of Bernard Pomerance’s 1978 play The Elephant Man, we’re joined by Frederick Treves, the 19th-century doctor and saviour/exploiter of the hideously deformed John Merrick.
Well, not literally by Treves, of course, but by George Szilagyi, the actor playing him, who sits quietly off to the side, observing us from behind a daily paper. Peng then supplies me with a handy segue by noting that observation—audiences gawking at freaks, doctors observing their patients—is one of the play’s key motifs.
“I wanted to examine the way people look at someone as a function before they see them as a human being,” says Peng, who has chosen The Elephant Man as his M.F.A. thesis production. “Getting beyond the skin is a major theme in the play.”
That theme will be built right into Frank Zotter’s lead performance as Merrick. Unlike John Hurt in David Lynch’s 1980 film based on Merrick’s life, Zotter (whom Edmonton audiences will recall from his solo turn earlier this season in Stuck for Workshop West) will not be wearing any makeup or special prosthetics, and will instead be conveying Merrick’s deformities through body language and other characters’ reactions to him. Not an easy task. “Frank is a good-looking guy,” Peng says, “and the cast needed to respond to him with a combination of repulsiveness and fascination... I reminded the cast of what they were seeing. We used visual aids—searching YouTube, you find modern equivalents.”
For Peng, allowing Zotter to look “normal” onstage was in keeping with his goal of making the play a personal experience. “It forces the audience to use their imagination,” he says. “Which is good—it will remind them of people they have met or seen that are different from themselves, instead of just seeing Merrick, ‘The Elephant Man.’ It creates a more personal connection with the story.”
If Peng and Lynch’s approaches to the material intersect, it’s in their fascination with the Victorian era, the sense of a physically repressed society existing within an increasingly industrialized city. Peng’s eyes light up as he shuffles through his production binder, which is stuffed to overflowing with notes, medical sketches, and period X-rays. He lingers over an X-ray of a woman squeezed into a traditional steel-framed corset.
Some of those period diagrams and medical sketches will be incorporated into the show as video imagery, but Peng stops short of describing The Elephant Man as a “mixed media” production. The intent, Peng says, is more to “evoke a sense of the Victorian era without realism—to modernize it.”
And indeed, the central question of the play—is Treves taking advantage of Merrick’s deformity for his own gain, or is he the unfortunate man’s saviour?—feels newly relevant in this era of exploitative pop culture.
“Treves’ career was made on [Merrick’s] case,” Peng notes, “and I was playing with how deliberate that was. Treves’ journey in the play is that he learns to be compassionate; he isn’t at the start, but at the end he is.”
