Playwright: Jeffrey Stanley . At: TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington. Phone: 773-281-8463; $30, $25
Runs through: Dec. 23
If you're reading this by electric light you should thank not Thomas Edison but Nikola Tesla. Who? Exactly. Edison's smear campaign against the man who developed alternating currents makes those swiftboaters who sank Kerry look like Boy Scouts. But while Edison was electrocuting dogs and cats to 'prove' how dangerous Tesla's system was, AC power became the light of the future. Even so, Edison won where it mattered: AC powers the world, but Tesla died broke and alone.
With Tesla's Letters, TimeLine Theatre offers a brainy feast that uses the Tesla as a switch to illuminate a rich, multi-faceted examination of matters historical, philosophical and political. Through Tesla, playwright Jeffrey Stanley broaches atrocities of both war and capitalism, the uneasy legacy of a mythical killing machine and the endless ability of people to turn a blind eye toward barbarities that don't have an immediate and detrimental impact to their own bottom line. Director Nick Bowling has an encyclopedic amount of material to work with in this intelligent, talky drama, and he manages it nimbly. Even when the dialogue veers toward expository clunkfest, Tesla's Letters crackles with smarts and heart.
Tesla was genius, that much is inarguable. Born in 1856 he came up with his first invention at 4—a wheel powered by June bugs. But his seemingly boundless creativity was matched by an equally boundless darkness: Tesla was afflicted by hallucinations and night terrors throughout his life and displayed a host of classic obsessive/compulsive disorder symptoms from constant hand-washing to a horror of touching round objects. Whispers continue today about Tesla's rumored 'death ray,' a small, lethal weapon capable of annihilating thousands with a single, deadly beam.
Yet as vivid as Tesla is within Tesla's Letters, the man is not a character in the drama, not in the corporeal sense. Set in 1995 ( 52 years after Tesla's death ) , the story moves from Belgrade's Tesla Museum to Croatia and back, as American graduate student Daisy ( Tien Doman, a penetrating mix of idealism and wariness ) learns far more than she anticipated while researching her thesis. Daisy intends to study Tesla's correspondence, but museum caretakers Dragon ( Joel Stanley Huff ) and Biljana ( Janet Ulrich Brooks, deftly concealing and revealing the layers of Biljana's own history ) have their own agenda for her. Telsa's personal tragedies become entwined within the tragedy playing out in the Serbo-Croatian war as Daisy finds herself entangled in both her thesis subject's past and his country's future.
Tesla's Letters skirts the edge of didactic too closely to be a great drama, and by ending the first act literally with a bang, Stanley pens a manipulative cliff hanger that isn't necessary. But TimeLine's production has depth, insight and intrigue, welcome additions all in this season of singing Santas and dancing reindeer.
