FREE THE ELEPHANT MAN: A PLAY PDF Bernard Pomerance | 71 pages | 19 Jan 1994 | Grove Press | 9780802130419 | English | Chicago, United States Joseph Merrick | Biography | Britannica The play ran for over performances in New York, an impressive number for a nonmusical. In later years, his left and right arms began to grow significant differences and both feet were enlarged. To add to his troubles, during his childhood he fell and suffered an injury to his hip which left him permanently lame. Despite his physical appearance, the boy and his mother were close. A former housemaid, she was also handicapped and had three additional children, two of whom died at a young age. She herself passed away in of pneumonia. Her death devastated young Joseph. Not only did he lose his closest friend, but his father, now working as a haberdasher, soon married the strict widow Emma Wood Antill who had two children of her own and demanded young Merrick leave school and earn his living. Amazingly, despite his growing abnormalities, he found employment at a cigar shop, but his right hand soon became too large to manage the delicate work of rolling cigars. But his appearance frightened prospective customers and his sales were dismal. Joseph Senior would often beat his son if he came home empty- handed and the stepmother would deny him full meals unless he had earned enough to pay for them. As result he ran away—or rather walked away—from home more than once. After two years, his license to sell was revoked on the grounds he was terrifying the community. With no other resource, The Elephant Man: A Play went into the Leicester workhouse system, a Victorian institution for the poor and destitute marked by cruelty. He was 17 at the time, not three as the fictional Ross claims in the play. With the exception of a brief attempt to find work outside, Merrick remained in the workhouse for five years. He saw only one way out of his miserable existence. Strangers had always stared at him, so why not get them to pay for the privilege? He contacted music-hall showman and performer Sam Torr who eventually sold his interest in Merrick to exhibitor Tom Norman. Showing himself as a terrifying oddity was his only means of financial support and it was probably not a The Elephant Man: A Play way to earn his keep, but, unlike the prayed-upon wretch of the play, Merrick was the one who contacted his manager The Elephant Man: A Play the other way around. Further, Norman disputed his depiction by Treves as a drunken bully, but claimed he treated Merrick fairly and kindly, unlike the brutal Ross. After Treves examined Merrick and took photographs, the latter returned to his sideshow, having to move on to Belgium after England made his show illegal. The Belgians were no more hospitable and his Austrian manager again not the fictional Ross absconded with his funds and sent him back to his home country. Merrick found his way to the London Hospital and Treves took him in. In the play The Elephant Man: A Play film, Merrick meets the actress Madge Kendal, the first woman to shake his hand and the first outside his mother to treat him with kindness. In reality, the two probably never met. But her husband, W. Kendal, an actor and former medical student, did visit Merrick in his early days at the London Hospital. Leila Maturin. As in the play, the Princess of Wales did meet with Merrick and sent him a Christmas card every year. One of his chief hobbies was building models of famous sites. His miniature reproduction of Mainz Cathedral, which figures prominently in the play, is on exhibit at the Hospital today. The weight of his head, which would have crushed his windpipe, prevented him from sleeping normally so he had to get his rest sitting up. The death was ruled an accident and Treves concluded that Merrick was experimenting with sleeping. He died trying to be like others. Tags: bradley cooper broadway Elephant Man frederick treves joseph merrick. July 17, July 23, December 6, Z word and their equivalents in all global The Elephant Man: A Play and dialects. Joseph Merrick was photographed for a carte de visite circa Photo: Wikicommons. The mask Joseph Merrick wore to cover his facial deformity in public is The Elephant Man: A Play display at the Royal London Hospital museum. Photo: Wikipedia. A miniature church reproduction, built by Joseph Merrick, is also on exhibit at the Royal London Hospital museum. Post Views: 1, Popular Recent Comments. Prevent Misleading The Elephant Man: A Play — a lack of solid statistics can be dangerous. The Elephant Man | Performing Arts Review | Chicago Reader Sign up for The Elephant Man: A Play newsletters Subscribe. Looking for a little metaphor? Got just the thing The Elephant Man: A Play you. The Elephant Man--it's full of 'em. Metaphors come two a penny in Bernard Pomerance's drama of a decade ago. Hell, the hero himself is a metaphor- -never mind what happens to him. In John Merrick, the hideously deformed freak-show attraction of Victorian London who The Elephant Man: A Play a brief fling as a cause celebre before his tragic early death, playwright Pomerance found a symbol of human mortality and aspiration. Of course, the nice thing about metaphor is that it's often easier to take than The Elephant Man: A Play truth. So instead of the ugly reality of Merrick--with his grotesquely oversized head, his twisted trunk of a right arm, and the revolting masses of flesh and funguslike growth hanging from his face and body--we are confronted with a slim, attractive, nearly nude young actor conscientiously twisting his face and form to suggest the misshapen "Elephant Man. Here's Merrick the master builder, erecting a scale model of a great church-the symbol of human ugliness creating the symbol of divine beauty. Here's Merrick in his race against death, growing better educated and more socially graceful even as his physical state declines--he was ultimately killed by the sheer weight of his own head. Here, for that matter, is the head: oversized, Merrick half-playfully suggests, because it's "so full of dreams. Kendal, the actress called in to befriend him: two actors, two illusionists, comparing how their oft-exhibited exteriors hers on the stage, his in a freak show conceal more The Elephant Man: A Play they The Elephant Man: A Play. Taking that ironic conceit to its extreme--as this play does so often with its many ironic conceits--here's Mrs. Kendal stripping naked before Merrick, showing him her breasts and her heart with equal vulnerability, until she is interrupted by the untimely entrance of the doctor who's taken charge The Elephant Man: A Play Merrick's care. The Elephant Man is jam-packed with patly constructed, "hey look at me" moments like these. That's why it's so hard to take seriously as drama or philosophy. Like Peter Shaffer's Equus--another drama based on a true case of abnormality--The Elephant Man betrays its basic lack of compassion for the real suffering of its protagonist by its studious emphasis on life's little lessons. Pomerance and Shaffer purported to be exploring the big questions; but, like the hypnotic lights and thudding beat of the disco music popular in the The Elephant Man: A Play period, these quintessentially s dramas mean a whole lot less than they seem to. Which leaves us with the issue of theatricality. Again like Equus, The Elephant Man drew attention with its appropriation of techniques pioneered in the avant-garde--specifically, in the case of The Elephant Man, the use of pantomime and visual abstraction in the character of Merrick. It was that emphasis on theatrical technique--the ability of an actor to twist his shape for The Elephant Man: A Play extended period, and to restrict his facial expressiveness so completely that only his voice also restricted could be used to convey emotion--that made The Elephant Man a coveted acting vehicle in the 70s, when performers like Philip Anglim and David Bowie played the role. Wayne Kneeland, the lead in A. He strikes a responsive chord in the audience in his first scene, when, like an artist's model, he steps onstage clad only in a loincloth and systematically assumes the almost cubist physical distortions of Merrick; but he can't sustain the illusion for very long. All too soon, his shoulders relax slightly toward their normal carriage, his eyebrows start twitching to drive home the meanings of his lines, and his voice reverts from its early constrictedness to a sing-songy stutter that, to these ears, sounded weirdly like Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster. Still, as flawed as Kneeland's performance is in this admittedly challenging role, it's far superior to the work around it. Scott Lynch-Giddings is woefully inadequate in the key role of Frederick Treves, the anatomist whose interest in Merrick's condition leads him to become the Elephant Man's protector; in Lynch-Giddings's portrayal Treves's eventual spiritual despair comes off as mere petulance. Marcia Riegel conveys a sincere warmth as Mrs. Kendal, but her carriage and handling of language are wholly unconvincing for a theatrical celebrity of Victorian London. The rest of the cast register a negligible presence either positively or negatively; they are just background, like the rambling piano playing by Lucinda Burkhardt that functions as musical accompaniment to the play.