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Press Resources for REQUIEM FOR TESLA

The Austin American-Statesman
February 21, 2001

Rude Mechanicals’ ‘Tesla’ flashes with inspiration

By Jamie Smith Cantara
Special to the American-Statesman

What makes a genius? Where does that flash of light, that brilliant idea, originate? Does it come from trauma, from one’s parents or from Mars? Even the great inventor Nikola Tesla didn’t know for sure.

“Requiem for Tesla,” a sharp new play by Kirk Lynn for the Rude Mechanicals theater company, follows the life of the little-known Tesla (1856-1943), a Serbian born in Croatia whom we can thank for invaluable experiments with alternating current, wireless communication, remote control and a host of other known and indecipherable inventions. Lynn successfully mixes biography and prevarication using historical material, 1930’s Frankenstein and science-fiction depictions, a little Faust and a little more Freud. It is an appealing and strange world, on that testified to the weird connections in life’s degrees of separation.

Director Shawn Sides, who also conceived the piece, proves again that she is one of the city’s most intriguing directors. She fabricates striking vignettes and brings all the elements together with signature movements.

Michael Miller plays Tesla as a two-dimensional eccentric. “I am smaaaart,” he proclaims. Then he tells of leaving family behind to work with Thomas Edison in American. Tesla was quirky and Miller enacts the man’s penchant for the number three and love for pigeons as well as his phobias of germs and spherical objects. His only weakness in the portrayal, and this is also a script problem, is toward the end of the show when the character has a psychological breakdown that begs too much for audience empathy.

Lana Lesley as Tesla’s deliberate and small-voiced friend Katherine Johnson perches on her upstage swing, singing “the moon belongs to everyone, the best things in life are free,” a nice touch since Tesla wanted to give the world wireless electricity at no charge. As lab assistant and cousin Czito, Michael Kranes assumes an Igor mantle and explains many of the inventions using amusing hand gestures that recall flight attendants pointing out emergency exits. Perching his own head above the shirt collar of a barrel-chested cut-out representing John Pierpont Morgan, Barry Miller give larger-than-life embodiment to the notorious financier..

Robert S. Fisher plays both the coffee-guzzling Edison and the folksy Mark Twain. Dressed in a dark suit and sporting slicked-down hair on the Edison side and a white suit to match the wild white hair on the Twain side, Fisher stands in right or left profile depending on which character he represents at the moment.

Stephen Pruitt’s scenic design and Zach Murphy’s lighing design come together in a marvelous crosshatch of wires, tubes and lightbulbs. Buzz Moran’s quintessential eerie laboratory sounds and the gentle clicking of old film reels hinted at the music by the Golden Art Trio add aural texture.

“Requiem for Tesla” brings the accomplishments and eccentricities of the nearly forgotten visionary to light.