The play has been called a docudrama and criticized for being more of a classroom exercise than a workable drama. Not at the TimeLine, where “The Farnsworth Invention” moves with the speed of an engrossing suspense story, a fascinating study of two outsized characters on a collision course.

          The play is also about storytelling in the theater. Sarnoff and Farnsworth take turns as narrators, like the Stage Manager in “Our Town.” The narrative shifts back and forth between the two principals, always driving forward toward the moment when the scientific breakthrough arrives that turns television from an impractical laboratory exercise into an invention with enormous potential to impact society.

In the play, Sarnoff and his RCA mega corporation are the winners while Farnsworth disappeared into alcoholic obscurity. Both men are allowed to present their case but the play ultimately tips toward the more articulate and complex Sarnoff. He may not be more right than Farnsworth, but he’s more persuasive.

Sarnoff’s side possibly won because of scientific spying, though Sarnoff insists he never strayed beyond the letter of the law. Sarnoff may have sailed close to the wind morally, but the man was also an idealist, and a naïve idealistic in hindsight. He started his executive career in radio and was incensed when an early radio station dared to sell commercial advertising. Sarnoff insisted that radio, and later television, should be pure mediums that would benefit all humanity by transmitting entertainment and information without the taint of paid advertising.

Sarnoff was the first in his circle to recognize the immense potential of television once the technical bugs were worked out. One of his colleagues claimed ”The thing’s a monstrosity, David. It’s huge and unsightly. Think of a person’s home, where the hell are they going to put it?” To which Sarnoff responds prophetically, “Where they used to put their radio.”

As a production, ‘The Farnsworth Invention” is not for a faint-hearted theater. The 2007 Broadway production employed 19 actors. The TimeLine staging uses 16--the performers playing Farnsworth and Sarnoff and 14 others who impersonate dozens of named and unnamed characters. That’s a lot of people to accommodate on the compact TimeLine stage. Plus, the play consists of numerous short scenes that require scenery changes on the fly. The TimeLine solves the logistical problem by having characters rapidly roll sets and props on and off stage, even the complex apparatus of Farnsworth’s laboratory. A balcony at one end of the playing area provides the action with vertical as well as horizontal space.

By the end of the evening, the audience doesn’t know who or what to believe. Farnsworth and Sarnoff both come across as flawed but brilliant, Farnsworth as a scientist and Sarnoff as a marketer. There is enough credit to around for both of them, not that the true creator of TV is such a burning question these days. But Sorkin has endowed the story with some witty lines, crackling confrontations, and a stage full of absorbing characters (though occasionally played for easy laughs). This is a literate, sometimes tense, often humorous show that deserved better than its brief run in New York City.

Director Nick Bowling has done a masterful job of orchestrating the complex physical production. With all those scenes and all those characters, the narrative thread could have been lost in confusion, but Bowling keeps the storyline clear and vibrant throughout. John Culbert designed the set, Lindsey Pate the period costumes, Keith Parham the lighting, Kevin O’Donnell the sound, and Mike Tutaj the projections. Special praise goes to Emily Guthrie for designing a mass of properties that are huge aids in telling the scientific side of the birth of TV.

          “The Farnsworth Invention” runs through June 13 at the TimeLine Theatre, 615 West Wellington Avenue. Most performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 and $35. Call 773 281 8463 or visit www.timelinetheatre.com.

                 The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars.

        Sherman’s play creates a day in Isadora’s life, a tempestuous day even for a woman who lived a life of endless turmoil. The year is 1923 and the place is Duncan’s house in Paris. Duncan is at the end of her tether, without money and trying to manage her young Russian poet husband, a high-strung alcoholic.

        Sherman doesn’t provide much plot. The skimpy storyline deals with Duncan’s yearning to start a dance school for children. To finance the project she invites an Italian consulate official to a private dinner in the hope that he will bankroll the school. The highlight of the play comes when Duncan discovers the official is a lowly file clerk and the dinner turns into a food fight out of a Marx Brothers movie.

        Sherman does write a convincing portrait of Duncan in all her maddening complexity, a portrait brought to vivid life by Jennifer Engstrom’s bravura performance. In one scene, we watch Isadora as she reacts to a Chopin piece played in her drawing room by a young Greek musician named Eliopolos. We see how Duncan internalizes the music, transfixed into ecstasy by Chopin’s genius. This is our only window into Duncan’s artistic soul, but we still never see her dance.

        The closest the audience comes to a glimpse of Duncan’s art comes in a cameo performance by a Swedish girl brought to the dinner by Duncan’s American friend Mary Desti to demonstrate modern dance for the Italian consulate official. But the girl’s earnest performance is a caricature of Duncan’s work and Isadora angrily stops her, to everyone’s embarrassment.

        The audience hears about Duncan’s performances through monologues by other characters who testify to the life- transforming power of her movement on stage, but we have to take their word for Isadora’s brilliance. There is a short film clip of Duncan dancing in the excellent exhibition on her life and the staging of the play in the TimeLine theater lobby. It’s well worth checking out before the show and during the intermission.

        The production plays in several languages. Sergei Esenin, Duncan’s volatile husband, speaks only Russian. Her exasperated maid speaks only French. The girl dancer speaks Swedish and the Italian consulate official speaks Italian. But it’s the manner rather than the substance of the speaking that counts and the spectator has no problem following the Babel of tongues, a tribute to Eva Breneman, the language and dialect coach.

        Engstrom gets outstanding support from the TimeLine ensemble. Patrick Mulvey captures the Russian poet in all his wild-eyed volatility. The real Esinen did hang himself in 1925. Janet Ulrich Brooks delivers a wonderfully shaded performance as Miss Belzer, Duncan’s newly hired translator, a meek and diffident woman who blends quiet comedy with sadness and pathos.

        Mark Richard gets maximum comic mileage from the consulate official. Richard has always been one of the local theater’s drollest, and most underused, performers and here he gives a lesson in how to be funny with a wry change of expression and an arch of the eyebrow.

        Alejandro Cordoba is Eliopolos, the young concert pianist who admits he is a pederast, no big deal in his native Greece. Cordoba’s performance adds a superb mix of charm and humor to the production. Jeannie Alfelder is first rate as the French maid and Mary Williamson is fine as Mary Desti, the friend trying to hold Duncan’s life together before the dancer self destructs. And there is a delightful brief appearance by Jessica Steans-Gail as the young dancer. The actress has only a few unintelligible lines but her facial expressions and body language were spot-on.

        Nick Bowling directs with a sureness of touch that can’t entirely energize the slow first act, but his production does accelerate in the more animated second act. Bowling’s deft handling of the assembled eccentrics at the dinner party suggests he should be an ideal director for a revival of “You Can’t Take It With You.”

        The physical production is a big help to the success of the staging in the set by Keith Pitts, Seth Reinick’s lighting, Bill Morey’s 1920’s costumes, and Josh Horvath’s sound.

        “When She Danced” runs through December 20 at the TimeLine Theatre, 615 West Wellington Avenue. Most performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m., with added Wednesday performances on November 9 and 16. Tickets are $25 and $35. Call 773 281 8463 or visit www.timelinetheatre.com

        The show gets a rating of three stars.          November 2009

        “All My Sons” opened on Broadway in 1947, two years before Miller gained international stature as a dramatist with “Death of a Salesman.” The earlier drama premiered while memories of World War II were fresh in the minds of audiences, not only the flush of victory but also the somber recognition that some American businesses knowingly manufactured defective war material that cost American lives in the war.

        That’s the theme of “All My Sons,” at least on the surface. Joe Keller is a successful manufacturer in a midwestern city. During the war, his company produced faulty airplane cylinders that led to the deaths of 21 American pilots. Both Joe and his partner went on trial for selling substandard parts but only the partner was convicted, mostly because of Joe’s false testimony.

        The play feeds the audience essential narrative information at a leisurely pace. The first act mostly is a portrait of midwestern family contentment as Joe and his family and neighbors gather in the Keller backyard for casual chitchat. But tensions gradually emerge. Joe’s wife Kate is obsessed with her certainty that her son Larry is alive and will return, though he is listed as killed in action during the war. Larry’s girlfriend Ann appears in town and Larry’s surviving brother Chris wants to marry her, against Kate’s fierce opposition. For Kate, Ann marrying Chris would concede that Larry is really dead.

        But the heart of the narrative is Joe’s guilt in the manufacture and distribution of the defective airplane parts and allowing let his partner to take the fall. After the revelation of his complicity, Joe fires off volleys of self justification. Lots of businesses were guilty of shoddy practices during the war. He hoped the bad cylinders would never be used. Admitting his factory produced defective work would have destroyed Joe’s business and everything he worked for over 40 years. He was putting family security above the abstractions of right and wrong.

        The moral issue comes down to the conflict between commitment to family and the greater good of the community. For Joe, “Nothin ‘s clean. It’s dollars and cents.” For his idealistic son Chris, “There’s a universe outside and you’re responsible to it.”

        The moral debate is one-sided. Nothing can justify Joe’s sending 21 pilots to their death and then railroading his partner to prison. It’s not the social issues that elevate “All My Sons” to a major work, it’s the human drama, at least in the TimeLine production. The disintegration of Joe Keller before our eyes has the quality of Greek tragedy, a basically decent man destroyed by his own flaws.

        The TimeLine revival soars on the wings of a superlative ensemble, directed with perfect pitch by Kimberly Senior. The director allows the play to breathe with unforced humor, the casual comedy setting the table for the intensity of the final third of the play, with its revelations and final resolution.

        Roger Mueller is the first among equals in the cast as Joe Keller, an uncomplicated blue collar man who really believes he did what was best for his family, and himself, in betraying those pilots and his partner. In some ways, the superstitious Kate Keller is the heart of the story. Her implacable belief in her son’s survival has infected the lives of the key characters around her for years. Janet Ulrich Brooks renders Kate’s obsession with almost terrifying ferocity.

        TimeLine artistic director P. J. Powers delivers a stunning cameo as George, the son of Joe’s disgraced partner, come to the Keller home as an avenging angel. Powers makes his entrance in a state of full-blown fury with no on stage warm-up, and sustains the character’s antagonism and bitterness with searing credibility to his final exit.

        Erik Hellman is an almost saint-like Chris, a stark contrast to the burly and plain speaking Joe Keller. Cora Vander Broek is Ann, conflicted between her love for Chris and the final recognition that the Keller family prospered on the disgrace of her father. Mark Richard is a neighbor doctor and friend of the family, disillusioned by the American lust for money, money, money. Juliet Hart plays the doctor’s wife and John Byrnes and Rebecca Buller are next door neighbors. Well done, all of them.

        The action is located in Jack Magaw’s realistic backyard set. Lindsey Pate designed the 1940’s clothing, Charles Cooper the atmospheric lighting, and Christopher Kriz the sound.

        “All My Sons” has some flaws, notably the melodramatic ending and the occasional lapse into preachy discussion.  But as a family drama it’s riveting whether or not the spectator buys into the morality debates. The production cements TimeLine’s standing as the hottest theater in town.

        “All My Sons” runs through October 4 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 and $35. Call 773 404 7336 or visit http://www.timelinetheatre,com/all-my-sons.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.         Sept. 2009

        “The History Boys” does seem an improbable hit, at least in America. It’s a very English play by a very English playwright named Alan Bennett. It deals with a group of eight teen-age boys in northern England studying for exams that will admit them to one of England’s two most prestigious universities, Oxford or Cambridge.

        The eight boys are a precocious lot and often obnoxious in the way of teen-agers full of themselves. Their main instructor is Hector, a middle-aged man with an unconventional attitude toward education that can be summarized in his remark to Mrs. Lintott, a fellow teacher. “You give them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it.”

        Hector rejects education as a commodity. Learning should be its own reward. Throughout the play he conducts a game with his students in which they try to stump him with scenes from old movies. If he correctly identifies the movie, which he always does, the students must contribute a small sum into the class kitty.

        The headmaster is impatient with Hector’s style of thumbing his nose at conventional curriculum teaching. So the headmaster brings in a young instructor named Irwin to tutor the students in a style that will gain them entry into Oxford or Cambridge, for the greater glory of the school.

        “The History Boys” pits Hector’s free form methods against Irwin’s insistence that the boys find an unorthodox angle to a topic to separate themselves from competing students taught to regurgitate the traditional academic line on history and literature.

        The play dissects contrasting philosophies of education and the meaning of history and how they impact on life and society. Bennett also adds stimulating verbal cadenzas, like a discussion of the Holocaust that takes an unconventional and uncomfortable turn, or Mrs. Lintott suddenly going off on a rant about how history short-changes women.

        The nearly three-hour evening is fleshed out with individual portraits of the boys. Dakin is the class stud. Posner is a gay Jewish lad with a crush on Dakin. (A thread of homosexuality is a recurrent element in the play.) Rudge is the amiable class slow learner. Scripps is a young man with an unfashionable love of religion.

        Irwin is perhaps the most stimulating and challenging figure in the play. He displays a dry wit and a disturbing way of turning a subject upside down. He expresses his credo as “History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It’s a performance. It’s entertainment. And if it isn’t, make it so.”

        The headmaster sides with Irwin against Hector. And when Hector is spotted fondling one of his boys while the teacher gives the boy a ride on his motorbike, the headmaster seizes on the incident to force the man’s early retirement.

        “The History Boys” is loaded with in jokes and name dropping, largely from English pop and high culture. It’s not essential for an audience to identify George Formby and Gracie Fields or Stevie Smith and Philip Larkin, but it helps.

        Bennett has not written a conventional linear play. The action shifts back and forth in time. Characters speak directly to the audience. The production includes film clips and sudden bursts of song. But it all comes across as natural and inevitable.

        “The History Boys” makes enormous demands on a production. The show must cast eight actors who look and sound like bumptious teen-age boys. The TimeLine culled eight enormously talented young men out of 200 actors who auditioned for the roles. The choices couldn’t have been better.  The young men fit their roles perfectly, down to their various English accents.

        The staging gets a tremendous performance from Alex Weisman, himself only a college junior, as the conflicted Posner. But he is only the first among equals. The other students are played with great ensemble bonding and individual relish by Will Allen (Scripps), Brad Bukauskas, Behzad Dabu, Rob Fenton, Joel Gross (Dakin), Govind Kumar, and Michael Peters (Rudge).

        Donald Brearley is first rate as Hector, the teacher who loves education as long as it isn’t packaged as education. Andrew Carter delivers an exceptional performance as Irwin the skeptic who sees education as a means and not an end, and has his own demons beneath that unflappable exterior. Ann Wakefield is properly acerbic as Mrs. Lintott until she goes off on her tirade about women and history. Terry Hamilton, as always, is spot on, this time as the headmaster who equates good education with success in the academic marketplace.

        Presiding over the complex staging with unobtrusive but unerring insight is director Nick Bowling. He is handsomely assisted by Lindsey Pate’s costumes, Keith Parham’s lighting, Andrew Hansen’s sound and original music, and Mike Tutaj’s projection design. Special mention goes to Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set, which uses every inch of the TimeLine playing area and then some to create a multi-level school environment.

        “The History Boys” runs through June 21 at the TimeLine Theatre, 615 West Wellington Avenue. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m., with three Wednesday performances at 7:30 p.m. in June. Tickets are $25 to $35. Call 773 281 8463 or visit www.timelinetheatre.com.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.    April 2009