ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT: THEATER REVIEW
TimeLine's 'Tesla' tough going, but winning and potent
Among the many reasons to be
heartsick at the state of the Chicago Transit Authority is its
continued reliance on direct-current motors to drive its trains. As the
CTA has been saying for years, it needs to convert to the
alternating-current propulsion system used in New York and Washington.
Nimble AC trumps dogmatic DC every time. But what, you're surely
thinking, do the myriad woes of the CTA have to do with "Tesla's
Letters," a play by Jeffrey Stanley at Chicago's TimeLine Theatre about
the eccentric Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla?
Plenty. Tesla was the father of that superior AC current. But when he
tried to push his work in the United States, he ran into the existing
brand name in electricity invention, one Thomas Edison, who wasn't
about to share that glory. Edison did his best to discredit Tesla, at
one point even turning him into a digger of ditches for the then
DC-driven Edison Co.
That's worth a play in itself. But
Stanley went further in his 1999 drama, seeing America's shabby
treatment of the Croatian-born but proudly Serbian Tesla as a metaphor
for its lack of interest in the genocidal conflict of the 1990s that
ripped apart Yugoslavia and resulted in the deaths of more than a
million people.
He imagines Daisy, an earnest but naive American
graduate student headed to Belgrade to conduct research at the Tesla
Museum. But on arrival, she finds the staffers preoccupied with matters
of survival, desperate to use Tesla as a symbol of the need for peace,
and obsessed with getting America to take notice. And thus Stanley's
awakening heroine must decide whether to join a fight that has nothing
and everything to do with her Tesla.
The early sections of "Tesla's Letters" are tough going, not least
because of extensive exposition about as subtle as Edison's execution
of dogs and cats to demonstrate the "dangers" of AC power. Moreover,
the sense I was watching a dramatic vessel that was not quite up to
carrying all that its creator wanted never fully left me at Sunday's
performance. But even though it is sometimes shrill, predictable and
overly cinematic, "Tesla's Letters" eventually wins you over by the
soundness of its conceit and the human weight of its arguments.
The show's undeniably potent impact at TimeLine is very much due to an
earnest, credibly naive performance from Tien Doman in the central
role. The supporting cast of interconnected Serbs, played by Janet
Ulrich Brooks, Joel Stanley Huff and Jason Karasev, lurches back and
forth between archetype and credibility, but the group pulls off all
the important emotional moments, under the astute direction of Nick
Bowling.
To his great credit, Bowling gives this play a zippy, freewheeling
staging that's sufficiently fresh and counterintuitive to smooth most
of the creaks in the script. You're right there with Daisy, forlornly
hoping her beloved Tesla was part of a rippling current of peace.
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cjones5@tribune.com
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"Tesla's Letters"
When: Through Dec. 23
Where: TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Tickets: $25-30 at 773-281-8463
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune