Jason Franklin and Shawnmarie Stanton in "Bone Portraits" at Live Girls! Theatre. Photo by Meghan Arnette.
"We inventors, you know what we keep in mind?" Thomas Edison asks his idealistic young assistant in Live Girls! Theatre's Bone Portraits (through Nov. 14, tickets $5-$15). "The good of the people?" the assistant dutifully responds, only to be cackled at by the nefarious showman-inventor. Edison doesn't really need to answer his own question—the audience already knows he's in it for the money.
School children are no doubt still taught the happy version of Thomas Edison's life, as an quintessentially American story of success through sheer pluck and ingenuity, but a more sophisticated and complex (and adult) portrait has been emerging on Seattle stages this fall. In this version, Edison is emblematic of the excesses and callous short-sightedness of the era of progress, when industrialization and technological advancement in the late-nineteenth century began reshaping the social order. He was part of the back-story to the Balagan's The Elephant's Graveyard last month, which touched on his brutal electrocution of a Coney Island elephant as a publicity stunt. Bone Portraits goes further, taking aim at the man himself, and the human cost of his ruthless business practices.
Told as a vaudeville sideshow hosted by an Edison who's by turns contrite and self-justifying, the story centers on Clarence Dally. A glassblower (here recast as an electrical engineer), Dally worked for Edison on developing x-ray technology. After years of self-exposure, he became the first American known to have died of radiation-related illness after a gruesome fight with degenerative cancer, in 1904. Dally's story unfolds within the greater context of the era's achievements: Tesla's lighting of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays, the lives and deaths of Marie and Pierre Curie, and finally the Spiritualist movement the arose as a response to the social and cultural destabilization caused by modernization.
The production is functional and engaging, a cut above the work you see at most small theatres with their smaller budgets, but the success of the show rests mostly on several great casting choices. Roy Stanton's Thomas Edison isn't so much a real person as he is a caricature, a ringmaster keeping the show moving along. Stanton lets some human ambivalence slip through when required, but mostly he's there to keep things racing, and insofar as that's the case, he does an admirable job.
The real stand-out, for my money, is Shawnmarie Stanton, who plays a trio of supporting roles. Stanton has the radiant stage presence of a classic musical theatre actress: she sings, she dances, she elegantly mugs. In one scene, she's doing a vaudevillean song-and-dance routine, in the next she's playing a Chicago society doyenne, with equal grace and accomplishment. While she's not the one responsible for making the play's intellectual or emotional points, she deserves a lot of credit for the show's success by keeping the audience's eyes on her and off her somewhat less accomplished cast-mates on a number of occasions.
LaChrista Borgers, who plays Dally's wife Josephine, is an up-and-coming Seattle actress. She was notable in Annex's surprisingly good sci-fi epic interlace: falling star last year, and in Bone Portraits she shows she's capable of more emotionally focused performance. Jason Franklin, like Shawnmarie Stanton, plays the rest of the supporting roles. It's an athletic performance that keeps him running, and although he does a good job with most of his characters, he pales in comparison to her. Finally, Adam Davis's performance as Dally is strangely passive. He's got his earnestness down, and has a certain charm, but sparks don't exactly fly in a number of scenes.
Still, Bone Portraits is yet another example of a small theatre doing ambitious and meaningful work. It's not an intellectual heavy-hitter (E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime is a deeper exploration of the era and its tensions, and Brecht's Galileo remains the benchmark standard for the themes), but it gets the job done with a healthy dose of engaging humor and emotional punch, in an all-too-reasonable 75 minutes, while showcasing some great performers. It's well worth the drive to Ballard.
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