Playwright: Alex Paul Young. At: White Elephant Project at Oracle Theatre, 3809 N. Broadway. Tickets: 252-220-0269; www.publicaccesstheatre.org; free. Runs through: Sept. 7
If you can buy into the notion of an opera about a real-life U.S. president's excursion into the realm of a Cold War enemy (John Adams' Nixon In China), it's not a stretch to imagine a ballet constructed on the life of Alan Turing, the breaker of the so-called "Enigma Code" and the inventor of the computer. What makes the cognitive leap even easier is that Alex Paul Young dispenses with satin-toe-shoe classicism in his depiction of a homophile martyr whoexcept for a home-built robot substituting for a childhood teddycould be any of a number of brilliant gay men brought to his knees by a repressive society.
Our playwright, you see, is not concerned with the biographical facts as much as with Turing's boyhood attachment to Christopher Morcom, who may have been his first loveror notand whose untimely death as a result of drinking unpasteurized milk infected with tuberculosis bacillus introduces an element of romantic tragedy to Young's portrait of Turing as an appropriately sensitive genius. Bullied by representatives of unfeeling authority, our hero's only solace is found in the flowers of the fields and the seminal animated feature film, Snow White And The Seven Dwarvesa fantasy leading him to commit suicide with, literally, a poisoned apple.
Playgoers needn't bring their CliffsNotes to the theater, however, since the White Elephant Project presents its material in a kaleidoscopic swirl of sensory images incorporating synchronized movement, abstract mime, spoken-word orchestrations and a soundscape of electronic music provided by Visager (né Josh Brechner), directed and choreographed by Brandon Powers. Surrounded by Emma Pardini's stark gloss-white floor and chalkboard-gray wallsthe latter shadow-boxed in the manner of a flow-chart picked out with vividly colored applesan athletic ensemble led by Aaron Stephenson as the conflict-racked Turing and Cole Doman as the sorely-lamented Morcom hold us entranced for the show's 100-minute duration with a continuous stream of physical and aural spectacle.
The play's title, by the way, does not refer to the tainted bovine by-product ingested by the unfortunate Morcom, but to nursing injuries suffered by the infant Turing's mothermaybe. When we recall that the universe occupied by scientists is boundless, and its possibilities limitless, why should that of Young's play not also permit each audience member to draw their own interpretation from the dazzling cavalcade of kinetic activity they have witnessed?