With Photograph 51 (running through March 10; tickets), Seattle Repertory Theatre has done an excellent job staging Anna Ziegler’s script, which too often leaves too little to the imagination. Director Braden Abraham leads a talented cast and design team in this story of the race to uncover the structure of DNA.
A tale of competing teams of scientists with challenging personalities, facing changing social norms, the action centers on Rosalind Franklin (Kirsten Potter), who takes a research position to take photos of molecular structures through X-ray crystallography. She works alongside Maurice Wilkins (Bradford Farwell) and in competition with James Watson (Benjamin Harris) and Francis Crick (MJ Sieber), the latter two now best-known for their discovery of DNA’s double helix. In 1962 Wilkins, Watson, and Crick jointly won the Nobel Prize for their work, four years after Franklin’s death, which had made her ineligible for such recognition.
The most striking feature of the script is Ziegler’s use of the cast as a chorus of narrators to set, drive, and comment on the action in hindsight. Much of their commentary touches on the idea that Photograph 51 is one of many versions of the tale. While core elements of the plot do offer a welcome revision to the commonly understood story, the comments come to feel disingenuous as we get caught up in this particular narrative.
In keeping with the style of the script Scott Bradley’s set flirts with cleverness and embraces a high degree of self-awareness. Just as the chorus breaks down theatrical illusion the set keeps actors visible on the open wings when not playing in a scene. There they observe the action from gorgeous mid-century furniture. Sconces and hanging lamps are fitted with a tangle of spindly dowels suggesting a matted mess of nucleic acids. Lab tables are wheeled about a central platform into a variety of arrangements to suggest different locations. A vast screen over this playing space is underused but unobtrusive.
You don’t need to bone up on your biology in order to understand Photograph 51. The jargon is minimal and the objectives are clear. We know Watson and Crick win the race, what matters is how they do it and what happens to those around them. While Ziegler’s straightforward handling of the scientific language and ideas is laudable, she is similarly explicit with the characters and plot. The neatness of it all gives the play a whiff of the mawkish with coincidences that feel excessively manipulated. In one key instance Franklin allows a degree of emotional life into her world, and immediately collapses in pain. Moments later, the audience hears the bad news.
Not only does this play ask too little of its audience, it doesn’t allow us the chance to take an active part in understanding the plot or its implications. In the most egregious instance, a narrator informs us that we are witnessing the moment when everything in the story is possible. Franklin then has a line and the narrator concludes that the preceding line made the denouement inevitable. Had Ziegler trusted her audience to draw these conclusions on its own, Photograph 51 would be far more satisfying.
The bald-faced statements that drag the script down do give the play an aesthetic integrity, as the characters are mostly drawn in broad strokes as well. Thankfully the cast fleshes out their characters sufficiently to keep them sympathetic and interesting. Wilkins is written as a well-meaning misogynist, a product of his times, whose humanism is a foil to Franklin’s puritan intellectual rigor. Farwell is all stumbling awkwardness in the role. Harris plays the insistently obnoxious Watson in Moritz-Stiefel hair with an enthusiasm that is almost charming. Crick comes off as relatively sympathetic in Sieber’s performance despite the character’s weak moral compass.
Brian Earp and Aaron Blakely are the standouts of the cast as the research assistants, Don Caspar and Ray Gosling. Ziegler writes them as minor characters in the pursuit of DNA but Gosling was a significant presence in the research. Earp keeps Gosling both appealing and very human as he referees the personal battles between his colleagues. The historical Caspar wasn’t involved in any of the events of the plot but the script gives him a key, if vague position in Franklin’s personal story. Blakely brings life to the stage in this most emotionally present character in the show.
Potter’s performance is perhaps even more notable as she finds humanity in the stultifying confines of a character who, as Ziegler spells out in no uncertain terms, gives precedence to her head over her heart. Potter plays Franklin’s passion for ideas with a fervor that engages the audience till the very end. By that time you may be wondering at the obstacles that kept Franklin from her recognition — along with those that kept this play from being better than the pretty good show it is.
