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WASHINGTON POST

Theater review: ‘Photograph 51’ at Theater J

By Nelson Pressley, Monday, April 4, 7:57 PM

In the early 1950s, Rosalind Franklin was in the thick of a race for a Nobel Prize, but in “Photograph 51,” Anna Ziegler’s zippy history play at Theater J, Franklin didn’t much know or care. The frosty Franklin keeps her face to her microscope and does much of the key work uncovering the structure of DNA, while cannier men grab the glory.

Melodrama? You bet, and a good one. Franklin, deliciously snippy in Elizabeth Rich’s clipped, focused performance, is the clear intellectual hero: She is the purest, most genuinely curious scientist. The men, a casual bunch next to the burning, all-business Franklin, tend to be various strains of pig — ambitious, sexist, anti-Semitic, etc.

Yet Ziegler smartly roughs up this outline, blurring the edges enough to keep these historical personalities interesting. Franklin’s no saint: She’s hell in the hyper-competitive British academic workplace, intimidating and defensive about every semantic and substantive slight. Her superior, Maurice Wilkins, is smug and entitled, but he’s practically knocked woozy by Franklin’s constant lashings. The reflections that gradually color the play deal with the eternal human mystery of why people act as they do — the very stuff of drama, of course, and a far less solvable riddle than that of the DNA structure these characters stalk.

Ziegler has a good deal of fun with her scenario, ladling plenty of punch lines into laboratory broth. Alexander Strain, as a graduate assistant caught in a lot of crossfire, shows excellent timing with the hapless glances and deadpan lines Ziegler provides. And Ziegler practically makes a comic duo of James Watson and Francis Crick, the hotshot Yank and twee Brit who sniff out secrets from the Wilkins-Franklin camp as they tiptoe toward the limelight.

Daniella Topol’s staging is as brisk and knowing as the 90-minute (no intermission) script. Giorgos Tsappas’s austere set has an antiseptic look, with a narrowing focus that cleverly puts the characters under a metaphorical microscope. This design also dramatically frames the famous photograph of the title, the one Franklin made confirming the DNA double helix.

Franklin did not get her name on the Nobel that Wilkins, Watson and Crick shared four years after she died in 1958, which is reason enough for Ziegler to get the men squabbling over her history. Should they feel guilty, or was the outcome inevitable? The frictions are steadily entertaining, in part because Topol has cast the play extremely well: The acting is intelligent and light, and the play feels like it’s constantly on the move.

Clinton Brandhagen is particularly deft as Wilkins, finding an appealingly soft center in a role that might have come off as hopelessly priggish. Tim Getman, as an American scientist in thrall to Franklin, brings a thread of poetic longing into the mix, and with his mustache, big glasses and sweater, he looks especially of the 1950s (the costumes are by Ivania Stack).

James Flanagan relishes the unflappable obnoxiousness of Watson, Michael Glenn has a quiet bumbling quality as Crick, and Rich is near-heroic as the monastic Franklin. The show is probably too much fun to be strictly accurate history, but while Ziegler clearly did plenty of homework, she frankly declares that “Photograph 51” is a work of fiction. That is very much how it plays — not that you don’t believe what Ziegler is showing you, but that you do.

JEWISH DAILY FORWARD

'Photograph 51' Puts Science Onstage

By Menachem Wecker

Elizabeth Rich as Rosalind Franklin in ‘Photograph 51.’ Photo by Stan Barouh.

Watching the current production at Washington D.C.’s Theater J of Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51,” which tells the tragic tale of Jewish scientist and almost Nobel laureate Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1900).

Whitman’s narrator, who finds himself “tired” and “sick” of all the proofs and figures in the academic astronomy lecture he is attending, decides to glide out of the room and look up in rapture at the “perfect silence of the stars.”

Just as Whitman’s narrator chooses life over science (as if it is the case that never the twain shall meet), “Photograph 51’s” distinguished cast, directed by Daniella Topol, are forced into a Nietzschean choice between the Dionysian and the Apollonian — between fun and math.

The play tells the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. While scientists James Watson (James Flanagan), Francis Crick (Michael Glenn) and Maurice Wilkins (Clinton Brandhagen) are after hours drinking buddies and friends, Franklin (Elizabeth Rich) neglects office politics and socializing and devotes herself to her work.

The truth is, however, that Franklin is barred from the senior common room because she is a woman. She tells her doctoral student Raymond Gosling (Alexander Strain), who tries to comfort her with the argument that biophysicists aren’t great conversationalists anyway, that “scientists make discoveries over lunch.”

She’s right. Not only does Wilkins end up sharing one of her photographs (Photograph 51, to be exact) with Watson and Crick without her permission over drinks, but the group often attacks Franklin for being a stiff. Both Watson and Crick are portrayed more as frat boys than as scholars, with Watson noting at one point, “The Jews really can be very ornery,” and Crick suggesting that Franklin may have been more successful had she been more friendly.

Tragically, despite Franklin’s devotion to her work, she does not share the Nobel Prize with Watson, Crick and Wilkins, though she discovered the bulk of the contours of the double helix. In a haunting scene in the play, Watson and Crick build their double helical model in slow motion as Franklin takes a rare break from her research.
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Franklin eventually gets wind of how her research and her life are passing through her hands, and as the plagiarists complete their model, she falls to the floor in pain from a croquet ball-sized pair of tumors in her ovaries.

“For a moment I think of naming one Watson and the other Crick,” she says, “but no, I tell myself. Rosalind, dispel the thought.”

In his introductory note in the playbill, Theater J artistic director Ari Roth suggests that scientists’ discoveries and actors theatrical breakthroughs aren’t all that different. “Both come only after endless research and development involving countless hours behind an instrument, devising outlines and calculations while laboring to intuit a functional structure; an architecture capable of holding an undulating, living thing within its confines,” he writes.

Of course the yield is very different. While Watson and Crick — scaling their mountain on Franklin’s shoulders — map the contours of genetic structure, theater doesn’t usually offer anything quite so monumental. But just as “Photograph 51” argues for a reevaluation of Franklin’s place in history, it also questions whether science and theater are not more similar than they seem.

Trey Graham

Photograph 51 By Anna Ziegler Directed by Daniella Topol; At Theater J to April 24

Perhaps the one topic more beloved to playmakersthan playmakers themselves is the tragic tale of a solitary unsung hero, and few heroes would seem to have been more unsung and more inclined toward the solitary than Rosalind Franklin. A prickly researcher who toiled in the labs of King’s College in the wake of World War II, she obsessively pursued hard data on the structure of DNA. She found it, too—and the tale of how the names Watson and Crick would come to be more associated than hers with that discovery is central to Photograph 51; the production takes its title from a breakthrough image Franklin captured with the X-ray camera that was both her greatest tool and her probable executioner. (She died of ovarian cancer at 37.)

If Anna Ziegler’s efficient 95-minute biodrama feels a little let’s-tell-a-story in its dramaturgy, and if its conversations get once or twice a little fact-and-figure-ish, the playwright still puts plenty of flesh on her tale’s bones. Better, Daniella Topol’s warm and personable cast brings the supporting characters—an intensely disagreeable Watson, a bluff, worldly Crick, and Franklin’s emotionally constipated, professionally unsupportive colleague Maurice Wilkins among them—admirably to life.

Best of all is the wonderfully convincing Elizabeth Rich, whose passion and intensity provide the story with a solid, satisfying emotional center. Her Franklin comes across as blisteringly intelligent, understandably aggrieved, frustratingly unaware of how alienating she is in her unbending seriousness, and painfully conscious of her own limits.

Did institutional sexism limit Franklin’s accomplishments? Did her own combativeness derail collaborations that might have taken her across the goal line first? Did Watson and Crick cross a line when they looked at that photo without her permission—or when a Cambridge colleague slipped them a copy of a report she’d written about its implications? Slippery questions, some still unresolved in the real world—and to its credit, Photograph 51 puts them in play but never quite insists on the answers. Like the diligent, dogged Franklin, it insists on precision and declines to draw more conclusions than the data supports—and like her, it’s worth an admiring tip of the hat.

TWO HOURS TRAFFIC

Friday, April 1, 2011
Theater J's Photograph 51

Artistic Director Ari Roth preceded opening night of Theatre J’s latest production, Photograph 51, with his usual welcoming curtain speech. In it, he quoted The Chosen, saying that both these and these were the work of DC’s Theatre J. Both plays rely heavily on narration, but I found the way narrative elements functioned in the script of Photograph 51 to be much more dramatically successful.

Photograph 51 is a fictionalized account of the race amongst scientists to discover the double helix structure of DNA in the 1950s. In 1962 Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. Rosalind Franklin was not credited at the time, despite her important role using X-rays to take photographs on a molecular scale. The title refers to the fact that the structure of DNA was clearly revealed in Franklin’s fifty-first photograph. (Don’t worry; you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy the play).

The story of Franklin’s contribution, and of her personality, is not cut-and-dry, and the narration reflects this. The characters interrupt each other, protest, and contradict. This quality brings the narration to life – it doesn’t stop the story, it is a continuation of it. The narration, from the very beginning, sets up and reveals character relationships.

Michael Glenn, Elizabeth Rich, Clinton Brandhagen, Alexander Strain, James Flanagan. Photo by Stan Barough.
Director Daniella Topol has assembled a tight ensemble that includes James Flanagan, who plays James Watson with a bouncing arrogance; Alexander Strain as the young and eager graduate assistance Ray Gosling; and Clinton Brandhagen, portraying the mousy Maurice Wilkins with sensitivity. Elizabeth Rich is spot on as Rosalind Franklin, intellectually intense, strong, but still very, very human.

In ways Anna Ziegler's script reminds you of Stoppard. It had intensely intellectual discussions that remain engaging because you can see the human yearning beneath. The script is about possibilities – the possibilities of science, and the possibilities of human relationships. What happened? What could have happened? The question of “if only?;” the regret that we all, scientist or not, struggle with in our daily lives.

Franklin died in 1958 from ovarian cancer, possibly caused from her exposure to X-ray radiation. Her methodical and precise nature kept her from jumping ahead, of making claims before she was absolutely sure. And perhaps because of this it is not her name that history marks as the discoverer of the double helix.

Near the very end the characters come together to muse about what could have prevented Franklin, and what could have caused her to succeed. “If only you had been less careful, less wary.” “If only you had been more wary.” “If only you had been friendlier.” “If only you had been born at another time.”

Near the beginning of the play Franklin talks about seeing a production of The Winter’s Tale with Sir John Gielgud. This production is returned to at the end as a fantasy of what might have happened had Wilkins seen the play with her. They talk about what they like about the show. It’s about hope, Franklin maintains, Hermione doesn’t come back to life, but life is projected onto her by Leontes and those present, because it is the only way he can be forgiven. Leontes must deal with his guilt, Wilkins with his. Wilkins and Franklin recall the line of Antigonus: “I have heard but not believed the spirits of the dead may walk again.” The spirits of those scientists inhabit the stage at Theater J through April 24.

WASHINGTON JEWISH WEEK

The race to map DNA, the road to gender equality

by Lisa Traiger Arts Correspondent


In Photograph 51, former Washingtonian Anna Ziegler tracks the race to map the structure of DNA, following two competing teams of scientists in post-World War II England. Based on historic accounts -- Brenda Maddox's The Dark Lady of DNA, James Watson's The Double Helix and Maurice Wilkins' The Third Man of the Double Helix -- the tale in playwright Ziegler's hands is one of intrigue and missed opportunities, unapologetic intellect and dogged perseverance, soaring triumphs and dashed hopes.

At the nucleus of this event, but oft-forgotten or overlooked in history and biology texts, is London-born Rosalind Franklin, the lone woman and one of the few Jews who worked on the project.

The production, on stage at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's Theater J through April 24, is, thankfully, less concerned with the science than with the relational orbits of the characters.

In director Daniella Topol's hands, the work becomes part memory play, part testimony told in flashbacks, as the prominent personalities unravel on Giorgos Tsappas' sleek platforms and lab tables that could easily take a page from an Ikea catalogue. Franklin's story is both compelling and poignant. She broke through barriers at a time when women weren't permitted in most research labs to become the top in their field of crystallography. But along the way, her single-minded pursuit of scientific perfection -- focused, methodical, detail-driven -- isolated her, especially from her male colleagues.

As Franklin, Elizabeth Rich has the unenviable task of playing an unlikeable woman. She's brusque, demanding, impatient, a perfectionist. She's also an anomaly and a loner. Surrounded by a boys' club of colleagues made up of researchers in her own lab at King's College in London, and at a competing lab in Cambridge, she remains staunch in her single-minded pursuit: photographing DNA to discover the double helix, the two undulating strands that map life.

It is only through correspondence and later a collegial in-person relationship with an open-minded American researcher, Don Caspar (Tim Getman), that Ziegler allows viewers to truly understand the obstacles women faced in the scientific fields of previous generations. Franklin is a double outsider: a woman and a Jew. And for her, while her Jewishness is nearly beside the point, her male, non-Jewish colleagues' opinions differ: One remarks on her questionable loyalty to her home country of England and another on her downright orneriness, both results of her Jewish heritage.

Photograph 51's outcome is tragic, for Franklin -- with all her dedication and commitment to her scientific project -- never learned or allowed herself one of modern science's most fundamental principles: to collaborate and share her research. Ultimately, she lost a personal battle against ovarian cancer, which prevented her from completing her work.

And, in the end, Ziegler makes Franklin more than a singled-minded lab rat in search of credit and accolades; the woman scientist was after esteem and respect from her male colleagues, most of whom couldn't even bring themselves to use the honorific "doctor" when addressing her. Ziegler posits in the voices of the scientist's male colleagues the what-ifs: what if Franklin collaborated, what if she were open to sharing, and, ultimately, what if Franklin had been a man.

In our post-feminist era, it's easy to judge her harshly for her single-mindedness, dedication and unstinting work ethic, but the truth is, as a man, she would not have been rejected. Rosalind Franklin was a woman trapped in her time, and as many doors as she pushed open, others remained forever locked for her.

Subtly, Ziegler reveals another hidden side of Franklin that bears noting: The dogged scientist also saw beauty in the deep immersion in science -- of "making the invisible visible," of unlocking the secret of life.

Theater J's production ably binds together the fragments that are known of Franklin's brief life. That she never modeled the double helix or received recognition for her work left her with regrets, but Photograph 51 is ultimately as much a journey of self-discovery as one of scientific accomplishment, and as a theatrical experience, it's not just for science lovers. The portrait Ziegler paints, shaded with regret, is one colored by the humanity of a lonely soul.

WE LOVE DC

We Love Arts: Photograph 51
By Jenn Larsen, 3:00 pm April 4th, 2011

Biographical plays can be tricky. The best – works like Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus or Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code – have come to brilliantly define the genre but also created conventions that theater audiences now take for granted. There are the poetic monologues illustrating the main character’s motivations, the chorus or narrator trying to shape the life for you (either trustworthily or not), crazy jumps in time, and an overall attempt to make some philosophical sense out of a life. The pitfall is, a life may not necessarily have a theme other than the playwright’s desire for one.

Playwright Anna Ziegler teases some sadly beautiful metaphors out of the life of scientist Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51, now playing at Theater J. It’s a swift ninety minute production with no intermission, befitting the race it depicts but perhaps also the difficulty in breathing theatrical life into what was an intellectual and lonely pursuit. If you have a young niece or daughter whose interest in science you want to encourage, this may be the play to take her to – or not, considering it’s a deeply discouraging look at the boys’ club Dr. Franklin struggled against in her quest to map the contours of the DNA molecule.

It’s this struggle that Ziegler focuses on, and she makes us feel it keenly. We cringe every time the mature and learned Dr. Franklin is addressed by her backbiting colleagues as “Miss Franklin.” But there’s something else going on here as well, the suggestion that it was this prejudice alone that resulted in her not being the first to win the DNA mapping race. Does Ziegler want us to be convinced of that at the play’s end, or is it simply that Franklin’s pride was the block to success?

The play follows the work of two English laboratories on the hunt for the map of the DNA molecule’s structure – sometimes competing, sometimes working together. Franklin endures the stiff-upper-lip machismo of her scientific partner Maurice Wilkins at the Cavendish Lab, while at Kings College Francis Crick and James Watson are able to work more closely together despite different backgrounds and temperaments. They also may just be more cut-throat.

Director Daniella Topol guides a fine cast through the action, keeping the jumps through the time vortex and shifting voices of the scientific chorus cleanly delineated. They’re led by Elizabeth Rich as Dr. Franklin, whose strength is either a blessing or a curse. Rich keeps the enigma of Franklin’s persona intact, so that her inner life is just out of reach to us, glimpsed but never known. It’s an intelligent, thoughtful performance that’s the touchstone of the production. As her research partner (or adversary, depending on how you look at it) Dr. Wilkins, Clinton Brandhagen is so rigid in his inability to see past her femininity you want to punch him. James Flanagan and Michael Glenn, as Watson and Crick, have a lot of fun playing off each other and at times this manic energy threatens to push things a bit off-kilter. Were the Kings College duo really so Machiavellian in their pursuit of the prize? I’m not sure, but Ziegler’s chooses to give us that version.

As the conscience of the play, Tim Getman’s bright-eyed Don Kaspar really makes us feel the slights Franklin suffers, in just one heartfelt scene where the long-time admirer from graduate student to fellow scientist reacts to his idol being condescended to as “Miss.” That one wordless moment says it all. Ziegler starts to explore a romantic relationship between the two, only to have it cut off mid-hand-holding by the first pangs of Franklin’s ovarian cancer. It’s an awkward transition that felt too forced. It seems an unnecessary plot device, an attempt to warm Franklin up, and I preferred the scenes where the two communicate their intellectual admiration through reading their correspondence.

There are some truthful moments that the production does its best to mine, such as the loneliness and grueling toil of scientific research, and also its danger ,as Franklin’s cancer seems linked to her x-ray work. There are also a lot of unanswered questions – was the misogyny of the 20th century scientific community the reason Franklin didn’t win the race? Was it her own pride and inability to find a way to compromise with Wilkins that was the cause? Both? Neither? The play does a serviceable job trying to tease out these themes, but it’s not imbued with the same enigmatic depths as its subject.

DC THEATRE SCENE

Photograph 51
March 31, 2011 By Steven McKnight Leave a Comment

The theme for Theater J’s recently announced 2011-2012 season,“Brilliant Fictions/Shattering Facts”, could also apply to its current production of Photograph 51, Anna Ziegler’s fascinating drama of scientist Rosalind Franklin’s role in the race to decipher the DNA molecule, an accomlishment that made James Watson & Francis Crick household names.

Franklin is now famous as a feminist martyr for her role in DNA research, not for her more accomplished work in other fields.  According to the ideological version of her story, she was mistreated by other scientists because of her gender and her lack of romantic interest in her credit-stealing colleague, Maurice Wilkins.  As a result of that fact and her death from cancer at the age of 37 in 1958, Franklin was denied adequate credit for her work, which was the essential foundation for the fame and 1962 Nobel Prizes awarded to Watson & Crick and Wilkins.

Fortunately, playwright Anna Ziegler treads a mostly sure-footed middle ground between the ideological version of the story and the more prosaic historical one.

Photograph 51 is set during Franklin’s tenure at Kings College in London from 1951-53 when she used her expertise in x-ray diffraction to take pictures of genetic structures.

Franklin (Elizabeth Rich) gets off to a rocky start when she arrives in London to begin a research fellowship.  Not only is she denied the independent authority promised her, but she is instructed by Maurice Wilkins (Clinton Brandhagen) to change her research focus to the structure of DNA.

Franklin’s unwillingness to cooperate with her colleagues in the male-dominated lab eventually leads Wilkins to share Franklin’s work (including one particularly famous and beautiful photograph) with his professional friends, Cambridge scientists Francis Crick (Michael Glenn) and his young fellow researcher James Watson (James Flanagan).  Aided by the eponymous “Photograph 51,” these two win the race to describe the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, which the characters refer to as “the secret of life.”

Ziegler reveals Franklin as an intelligent and complicated woman who was far better at scientific research than human relationships.  The playwright is aided by Elizabeth Rich’s finely nuanced portrayal of a mostly unsentimental scientist who never understood the importance of getting along to get ahead.

Rich’s wonderful central performance is supported by a fine ensemble cast.  Clinton Brandhagen capably handles a difficult job role as the officious and conflicted Wilkins. The remainder of the cast, including Alexander Strain as lab assistant Ray Gosling and Tim Getman as a poetic younger scientist whose admiration of Franklin begins with correspondence, do a fine job handling the wry and witty humor that infuses the work.  James Flanagan in particular gives an effective comedic portrayal of the energetic and awkward young Watson, who was only 24 at the time of the discovery.

Director Daniella Topol adeptly controls the pace of the piece, giving it an air of suspense while nicely balancing the character interplays.  She handles the ending scenes with great sensitivity, when the playwright makes a late nod to the emotional costs of the intense scientific focus.  She also does a fine job handling the interwoven narration from the characters who occasionally speak directly to the audience.  It is a mostly useful device that keeps the play moving while explaining the science to the audience, only occasionally feeling awkward or didactic.

The production also benefits from a nicely understated set from Giorgos Tsappas.  It is spare and angular, focusing on the competing scientific worlds.

Turning from the drama to the history, the playwright freely admits that Photograph 51 is a work of fiction and that she has “altered timelines, fact and events, and recreated characters for dramatic purposes.”  Based upon my research, some of the more interesting facts that might have diminished the dramatic impact of the work include:

    * While Franklin photographed DNA (using a sample provided to her by Wilkins), she had already left both King’s College and DNA research behind to study viruses prior to Watson & Crick’s creation of their double helix DNA model.
    * Watson’s account of seeing Franklin’s photograph in his gossipy 1968 memoir “The Double Helix” (whose general accuracy was challenged by Crick, Wilkins, and others) is considered by some to reflect more delight in his strategem than the actual importance of the photograph.
    * Even if Watson & Crick had never seen Franklin’s photograph, the team headed by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling was only weeks behind in their research and Franklin herself was a couple of major steps from a DNA model.
    * While the play implies that Franklin was wrongfully denied adequate credit for her work, she never felt that way during her lifetime and she actually stayed for some weeks at Crick’s home in 1957 during a medical convalescence.
    * Both Wilkins and Franklin were credited in a footnote to Watson & Crick’s famous paper, but even if Franklin’s contributions to DNA research were thought worthy of Nobel consideration, she was ineligible because the Nobel committee does not give posthumous awards.

Yet the omission or downplaying of these considerations can be excused given the playwright’s disclaimer, the intelligence and skillfulness of her writing, the general balance of the story, and the very fact that the work is interesting enough to inspire additional research.  The production’s program not only provides fuller background about Rosalind Franklin, but also cites additional resources for those who are intrigued by the story.

In Photograph 51, Watson & Crick speculate about how a future Nobel Prize might change their lives and advance their careers.  Let’s hope that this prize-winning play  (it won the 2008 STAGE International Script Competition for plays that deal with science) helps advance the career of its promising playwright Anna Ziegler.