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. CONT’D