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When a Photograph Is Worth More than 1,000 Words: Photograph 51
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Aria Alpert and Graham Norris (background). Photo by Ed Krieger.
Most people will not know about Rosalind Franklin and her photograph #51. If you say the names James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, 1962 Nobel Prize winners, you'll equally draw a blank. Yet in the science community, these names have weight and they were involved in a monumental discovery although only three of the four were in the money. Photograph #51 was worth a Nobel prize and scientific immortality.
By 1962, Franklin was dead. Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously, but some feel that Watson, Crick and Wilkins did not give Franklin credit where credit was due. And Franklin was dead, but not forgotten. There is after all, a college in Chicago that bears her name. Buildings were named after her.
Crick died in 2004 as did Wilkins. Watson is still alive as is Raymond Gosling. Donald L. Caspar is still alive. A letter he sent to Franklin is available to read online.
The image drawn of Rosalind Franklin in Brenda Maddox's 2003 book "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA" is one of grace and vibrancy and also one of sadness. Learning about her illness, she put out of her mind the possibility of romance, even though she had met someone she felt she might have loved.
The play, "Photograph 51," opens with five people, all men, standing under an unflattering overhead light. A woman enters. She has her long hair tucked back. She is neatly dressed in a sensible black and grey dress; she is slender and wears black pumps and pearls. She is a proper lady.
"When I was a child, I used to draw shapes," Franklin (Aria Alpert) tells us. Playwright Anna Ziegler establishes quickly that Franklin was a woman who had grown up isolated, excited by something and yet no one listened to her. As a child, her parents didn't encourage her, but her single-mindedness got her through college and graduate school. She believes she's coming to a laboratory at King's College in London from Paris in 1951 to do her own research and yet begins to work under biophysicist Maurice Wilkins (Daniel Billet). Gosling (Graham Norris) attached to her as her assistant. Wilkins attempts to use her first name, shortening it even to an uncomfortably affectionate "Rosie," but settles on calling her Miss Franklin although she calls him Dr. Wilkins. Gosling follows suit. We learn that women are not allowed to eat in the senior dining room where open discussions between fellow scientists occur. Wilkins makes no attempt to mitigate this slight.
There is also a bit of scientific espionage. When researchers, Watson (Ian Gould) and Crick (Kerby Joe Grubb), from another university chat with Wilkins, it's more for information than just spreading goodwill. And somehow, they do get unpublished information on Franklin's work and a peak at photograph #51 and that leads them to making a correct model of the double helix of DNA before Franklin herself.
Director Simon Levy gives us questions and questionable characters. No one here is evil. Even Wilkins in his attempts to find a good working relationship with Franklin is more socially inept than male chauvinist pig. They are not only men of their times (1951-1958), they are science geeks. Girl trouble plagues more than one of them. Yet not all the men portrayed here are nerdish clods. Ross Hellwig as Casper, represents a true meeting of the minds, someone who Franklin could not only work well with, but also someone she could have a romantic relationship with. We hear their correspondence throughout and know that Franklin could sparkle, she could be charming and warm. Hellwig is properly intelligent and respectfully inquisitive--the man many intelligent women are looking for.
Alpert as Franklin easily warms to the glowing gush of a woman who recaptures her childhood excitement for patterns, for nature and for intellectual stimulation. And yet, she easily frost over to Franklin, the lady with the withering stare, the kind of feminist that could be polite and yet had learned how to distance men, particularly married men who sent out romantic tentacles.
Ziegler's Franklin isn't a blameless woman, victimized by the old boys' club. She was a complex person, self-protective--perhaps justifiably so, perhaps too much so for her own good. She was brilliant, but ultimately tragic. Had she lived longer (she died at 37 from ovarian cancer), who knows what she would have achieved?
This play which is making its West Coast premiere, moves swiftly, concentrating on a great race and the failure of collaboration for an intermissionless 90 minutes. Intensely exciting and provocative, the themes transcend gender and science and surely will fuel many probing conversations.
"Photograph 51," Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave. (at Normandie), Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. $18-$25. Ends May 3.
For more articles by Jana J. Monji:
Anna Ziegler Awarded Prize Money
Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews DVD
Spider-man the Musical: Big Splash or Big Splat?
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