POMERANCE, Bernard 1940-

PERSONAL: Born 1940, in Brooklyn, NY. Education: Attended University of Chicago.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Alan Brodie Representation Ltd., 211 Piccadilly, London W1J 9HF, England.

CAREER: Playwright. Cofounder of Foco Novo Theatre Group, London, England.

AWARDS, HONORS: Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award for best play and best director, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Drama Desk Award, and Obie Award, all 1979, all for The Elephant Man.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

High in Vietnam Hot Damn (first produced by Foco Novo Theatre Group, London, England, 1971), published in Gambit 6, 1972.

Hospital (first produced by Foco Novo Theatre Group, London, England, 1971), published in Gambit 6, 1972.

Thanksgiving before Detroit (first produced by Foco Novo Theatre Group, London, England, 1971), published in Gambit 6, 1972.

Foco Novo, produced by Foco Novo Theatre Group, London, England, 1972.

Someone Else Is Still Someone, produced by Foco Novo Theatre Group, London, England, 1974.

A Man's a Man (adaptation of a play by Bertolt Brecht), produced in London, England, 1975.

The Elephant Man (first produced at Hampstead Theatre, London, England; produced Off-Broadway at Theater of St. Peter's Church, January 14, 1979; produced on Broadway at Booth Theater, April 19, 1979; produced on Broadway at Royale Theatre, 2002), Grove (New York, NY), 1979.

Quantrill in Lawrence (also see below; first produced in London, England, 1980), Faber (London, England), 1981.

Melons (also see below), first produced at Pit Theatre, London, England, 1985, produced in New Haven, CT, 1987.

The Collected Plays of Bernard Pomerance (includes Superhighway, Quantrill in Lawrence, Melons, and Hands of Light), Grove Press (New York, NY), 2001.

POETRY

We Need to Dream All This Again: An Account of Crazy Horse, Custer, and the Battle for the Black Hills, Penguin (New York, NY), 1987.

SIDELIGHTS: When Bernard Pomerance left his native New York City to settle in London in the early 1970s, his ambition was to be a novelist. Before long, however, he realized that drama was his strength. Pomerance became involved with the left-wing fringe theatre groups that were flourishing in London at the time. Teaming up with director Roland Rees, he founded the Foco Novo Theatre Group, which has subsequently produced many of his plays, including High in Vietnam Hot Damn and Someone Else Is Still Someone. The play that first brought Pomerance to the attention of the general public was The Elephant Man, which had a long and successful run at the Hampstead Theatre before being brought to New York City in January of 1979, where it met with widespread critical acclaim.

Pomerance's award-winning play is based on the true story of Englishman John Merrick (1836-1890). Merrick was afflicted with a disease (scientists now believe it was neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder) that grotesquely deformed him. His head was thirty-six inches in circumference, large growths covered his body, and his hips were so deformed that he could barely walk. He earned a living as a sideshow freak before he was befriended by Frederick Treves, a prominent surgeon. In addition to providing Merrick with a home at London Hospital, Treves sought to introduce the young man to Victorian society. Under Treves' guidance, Merrick became a figure in London society, visited by members of the Royal Family and aristocrats. Pomerance first learned of Merrick from his brother. A book written by Treves, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, and a study of Merrick by Ashley Montagu, which included Treves' memoirs, was also useful.

One of the problems in staging The Elephant Man is how to convey the sense of Merrick's hideously misshapen body. In a prefatory note to The Elephant Man, Pomerance wrote, "Any attempt to reproduce his [Merrick's] appearance and his voice naturalistically—if it were possible—would seem to me not only counterproductive, but the more remarkably successful it was, the more distracting it would be." Instead of relying on make-up and padding to suggest Merrick's deformity, Pomerance uses a clever theatrical device. Early in the play, Treves brings Merrick to London Hospital to lecture about him. In the course of the lecture the audience views enlarged photographs of the real Merrick. "The pictures are so horrifying, so explicit in their detail, that we transfer the image to the actor beside the screen, even though he is simply contorting his body," Martin Gottfried observed in the Saturday Review. Other critics also found that they had no difficulty in believing that the actor on the stage was horribly deformed. Many paid tribute to the talent of Philip Anglim, who played the part of Merrick in the New York production. Through his twisted motions and muffled speech, Anglim convinced the audience that the man he was playing was so repulsive that people would shriek and run away from him in terror.

However deformed his body, Merrick is portrayed in the play as an intelligent and sensitive man. His innocence often causes him to challenge the ideas and assumptions presented to him by his more worldly benefactors. According to Richard Eder in the New York Times, Pomerance "has made Merrick not an abstraction, but a most individual exemplar of Natural Man. His deformities are external; they stand for the deformities, social and moral, that twist the lives of those who crowd about him; but his spirit is clear, vulnerable and acute." As the play progresses, Merrick's pure and questioning spirit is subdued. The drama, Eder explained, is a "haunting parable about natural man trading his frail beauty and innocence for the protection and prison of society."

The two other principal characters in the play are Treves and Madge Kendal. Treves, New Yorker contributor Edith Oliver pointed out, is portrayed as "a complex man, responsible, encouraging, and sympathetic, but a Victorian whose spontaneous kindness seems to conflict with his squeamishness about sex and his utter trust in rules and standards." The kindly physician teaches Merrick how to conform to society, but he tragically comes to realize that this educational process has had many detrimental effects on both the physical and mental health of his patient.

Initially, Treves has difficulty finding anyone who would care for the horribly deformed Merrick. He resorts to hiring an actress, Madge Kendal, to visit Merrick in the hopes that she can use her acting skills to hide her repulsion. Merrick and Kendal become close friends. He is able to express his deepest feelings to her, and in a moving scene she reaches out to this sexually repressed man by undressing to the waist for him. Both characters benefit from their relationship.

Several critics observed that the driving tension of The Elephant Man fell off in the second act. John Simon, writing in New York magazine, described the first act as "terse, thoughtful, theatrical in the best sense, and devoid of spurious rhetoric—a lesson from Brecht well learned, with an added touch of humanity often lacking in the master." However, he felt that the second act suffers from "some insufficiently developed marginalia . . . , some less than revelatory speechifying . . . , some top-heavy irony with a few minor characters reduced to over-convenient contrivances. Above all, too many, and conflicting, layers of symbolism." Eder offered an explanation as to why the second act is the weaker half of the play: "In part it is inevitable: the opening up of the Elephant Man is more exciting than his decline. And furthermore many of the themes that are dramatized at the beginning remain to be expounded at the end. They are expounded very well indeed, but some of the play's immediacy flags a bit."

In viewing The Elephant Man as a whole, however, reviewers were generous with their praise. Gottfried commented that its flaws "do not fatally mar the play, for what counts most is its overwhelming humanity; its tragedy and compassion; its soaring poetry; the theatrical beauty it makes of the contrast between innocence, deformity, and the stark Victorian staging." "The Elephant Man," Stanley Kauffmann maintained in the New Republic, "is the best new American play since 1972," while T. E. Kalem, writing in Time, felt that the drama is "lofted on poetic wings and nests in the human heart."

A 2002 Broadway revival of The Elephant Man received mixed reviews. Lasting only one-hundred minutes, the revival is a condensed version of the original, casting Billy Crudup as Merrick. Like his predecessor, Crudup portrays Merrick without makeup or padding. Noted Roy Sorrels in a review of the play published on the Culture Vulture Web site, "Without mask or padding, the actor's face, body, and voice are left unimpeded to reveal the character. The absence of mask allows Merrick to be a mirror for each of the main characters of the play, each of whom sees some feature of his or her own personality reflected." On Talkin' Broadway's Broadway Reviews Web site, Matthew Murray observed, "When Crudup walks, it's with an anguished shoulder roll and stiff legs, the effect being one of clockwork precision, as effortless to him, apparently, as anyone not possessing such an affliction may walk."

The revival features Kate Burton as Mrs. Kendal, the actress asked to befriend Merrick. Sorrels felt that Burton "gives the character a fascinating sense of depth." He went on to explain, "First seen as a strutting, overdressed, self-consciously witty but apparently shallow woman, she slowly morphs, through her growing relationship with Merrick, into a fully dimensional, flawed, yet beautiful woman."

Despite the stunning success of The Elephant Man, Pomerance remains a mysterious figure. He fled back to England shortly after The Elephant Man opened in New York City in the 1970s. In a rare interview, he talked with Michael Owen of the New York Times about his conception of drama. "The most important element in theater is the audience's imagination," he remarked. "What is in them, is in me. It goes back to the function of memory. My function is—I don't know the proper word—is to remind them that this too is true, though our consciousness may deny it. I don't mean to tell them something they do not already know. I'm not bringing hot news. My interest in the audience is to remind them of a common thing and, if only temporarily, they do then become a unity, a community."

Pomerance's play Melons was produced in London, England, in the 1985-1986 season. Writing a report on the London theater scene for the New York Times, Benedict Nightingale said that this play was "recognizably the fruit of the same moral imagination, it too is about a noble savage oppressed and exploited by a civilization with less claim to true virtue than himself." Melons is set on a New Mexico Pueblo Indian reservation in 1906, where an old Apache warrior leader named Caracol (called John Lame Eagle by the white men) is living in seclusion. Caracol is confronted by a former enemy, ex-cavalry officer Stolsky, who is now working for an oil company that wishes to survey the Indian's land, an assignment that needs Caracol's cooperation.

Irving Wardle, reviewing Melons for the London Times, felt that the play's confusing structure diminished its appeal. "Instead of proceeding in a straight line toward an inescapable tragic outcome," he wrote, "the action undergoes labyrinthian contortions, as Caracol embarks on prolonged speeches evoking the massacre of his family and his reunion with them, events loop into flashbacks and double-flashbacks." Nightingale suggested that the play might have worked better as a "ruminative monologue" for the central character alone. Both reviewers, however, had high praise for actor Ben Kingsley in the role of Caracol/John Lame Eagle. In 1987, Melons was given its American premiere by the Yale Repertory Theater. Despite strong performances in all the major roles, New York Times reviewer Mel Gussow reported that the play was "thoughtful drama, but its portent has to be mined from beneath the verbiage." As had reviewers of the London performance, Gussow was jarred by the bloody conclusion of the play, in which Caracol ritualistically beheads two geologists.

In 1987, Pomerance also published We Need to Dream All This Again: An Account of Crazy Horse, Custer, and the Battle for the Black Hills. This book-length narrative poem recreates the events surrounding the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn. Martin Kirby in the New York Times Book Review called Pomerance's verse "prosy" and described the narrative as "mixing pathos and satire." Kirby felt that Pomerance was unsuccessful in the devices he used in an attempt to revitalize what has become a cliche Indian/white confrontation. He objected particularly to the use of "arch, smirking metaphors derived from current popular culture—'Crazy Horse goes not left or right, but—imagine Dr. J. driving on Bill Russell—takes it straight to Red Cloud.'"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 13, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.

Graham, Peter W., and Fritz H. Oehlschlaeger, Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1992.

Pomerance, Bernard, The Elephant Man, Grove (New York, NY), 1979.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1979.

Drama, winter, 1972; autumn, 1974; winter, 1977-1978.

Harper's, April, 1987, p. 31.

Library Journal, May 15, 1987, p. 98.

New Republic, February 17, 1979; May 12, 1979.

Newsweek, February 5, 1979, p. 67.

New York, May 7, 1979.

New Yorker, January 29, 1979; April 30, 1979, pp. 45-46.

New York Times, January 15, 1979; February 4, 1979; April 15, 1979; April 20, 1979, p. 7; April 21, 1979; May 1, 1979; June 3, 1979; August 14, 1979; January 26, 1986; November 14, 1987.

New York Times Book Review, August 23, 1987, Martin Kirby, review of We Need to Dream All This Again: An Account of Crazy Horse, Custer, and the Battle for the Black Hills, p. 17.

Publishers Weekly, April 3, 1987, p. 66.

Saturday Review, March 17, 1979, Martin Gottfried, review of The Elephant Man, p. 60.

Time, January 29, 1979, p. 64.

Times (London, England), December 20, 1985.

Variety, November 11, 1987, p. 97.

Washington Post, May 20, 1979.

Western American Literature, winter, 1988, p. 358.

ONLINE

Talkin' Broadway's Broadway Reviews Web site,http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/ElephantMan.html/ (April 14, 2002), Matthew Murray, review of The Elephant Man.

Culture Vulture Web site,http://www.culturevulture.net/Theater3/ElephantMan.htm/ (April 18, 2002), Roy Sorrels, review of The Elephant Man.