The protagonists of the two most successful dramas this season on Broadway, Whose Life Is It Anyway? and The Elephant Man, are a paralytic and a physical monster. To those who follow trends in American entertainment, this should be no surprise. Already many perplexed and agitated articles have been written about the tendency over the past few years of television and the theater to celebrate the problems of mental and physical affliction, and a variety of dark conclusions, social and psychological, have been drawn as to why the crippled, the retarded, the blind, the cancerous, and the freakish have suddenly come to possess an urgent cogency for such a large audience.

Now if a similar taste for the diseased and mutilated were found in the drama of an earlier age, it would simply be dismissed as betraying no more than a straightforward penchant for the grotesque, a callous sense of curiosity, or a superstitious reverence for the aberrant. One can well imagine the manner in which, say, Barbara Tuchman would have treated such a phenomenon had it been part of her benighted 14th century, how her sentences would have shuddered with horror and bafflement as she tried to discover a common humanity between herself and those who foregathered to watch the staged tribulations of the maimed and to enjoy the bitter jokes and homilies of the moribund.

But since we are dealing with a contemporary fashion, most commentators have found more complex and gentler reasons for its success than a widespread and unabashed delight in the macabre. Some perceive these dramas as wholesome earmarks of an age in which all the aspects of life, pleasant and unpleasant, are being resolutely and humanely faced. Others sniff at these works as being no more than the latest thing in radical sentimentality, the last refuge for a civil-rights theater that must find ever more extreme examples of the social outcast in order to keep audiences titillated with guilt and rooting mindlessly for the underdog.

Whatever may be the general cultural reasons for the popularity of these two plays, it must be said that they present situations of anguish and horror far beyond the ken and imagination of the average theater audience. For example, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, written by Brian Clark, a British television writer, is a quite traditional and unsurprising play. Indeed, were it not for the singular condition of its hero, it would seem little more than a drowsy courtroom melodrama with bad character actors and unlikely moral dilemmas. However, in Whose Life Is It Anyway?, the courtroom is set around a hospital bed, in which lies a young man named Ken Harrison, the victim of an automobile accident that has left him, from the neck down, paralyzed; and the moral dilemmas revolve around the very purpose of life itself. For Harrison, an extremely intelligent man in his early thirties, a former sculptor and unaffected sensualist, wants to be allowed to die—something that must be granted him by the authorities since his injuries have left him incapable of performing even those few movements necessary to take his own life. The prosecutor in the trial, the hospital’s head surgeon, wants to prove Harrison guilty of a premature and irresponsible decision brought on by that depression natural to one whose body has suffered such a severe trauma, and he argues in favor of the general preservation of life and for the ultimate authority of medical experience in delicate, borderline cases. A judge is brought in to decide whether Harrison’s petition should be allowed, psychiatrists are called to deliver their opinions of the patient’s mental condition, and lawyers are summoned to defend the institutional and individual point of view. In the end, the judge decides, after a brief moment of painful, solitary, downstage thought, that Harrison’s request should be granted, that he, after all, is the final authority on whether or not the conditions of his existence are bearable.

There are many reasons why the audience enthusiastically approves this decision. First of all, it is what the hero of the play wants, and Ken Harrison, especially as played by the fine young English actor Tom Conti, is a winsome, entertaining fellow. Indeed Conti, allowed by the script to move little except his eyes and lips, manages to give such a sense of physical life to his character that he turns the simple condition of consciousness into an argument for a worthwhile existence. But since Harrison says he wants to die, and argues for his obliteration with contrived bursts of logic and black humor, the audience see no contradiction between enjoying his argument and endorsing it.

Then there is the strained and tendentious way the playwright presents the opposing point of view. The doctor who wishes to perpetuate Harrison’s existence has little but fatuous arguments to offer, and he seems to be as much concerned with preserving his surgical handiwork as he is his patient’s life. Moreover, in a scene in which, against Harrison’s will, he injects him with valium and thereby robs him even of the right to think lucidly about himself, our doctor becomes no more than a self-righteous bully, a symbol of the smug medical authority which everyone who has ever been in a hospital delights to see confounded.

Yet it seems to me that the main reason behind the general approval of the play’s resolution is that death is never considered to be anything more than an abstract end to consciousness. It has no Hamlet-like imagination to body it forth, to give it spiritual or religious consequence, to make it a palpable and terrifying presence. Indeed, one never knows just what Harrison believes he is embracing in his choice, whether he thinks of death in terms of heaven and hell, le Grand Peut-être, or as absolute nullity. The audience is thus allowed to think of death as little more than a happy ending for its hero, a vague something that allows him to outwit the plans of authority and the constrictions of fate.

Still, the real objection to this sort of drama lies not in its point of view but in the singular nature of the situation it is based on. Like the overwhelming majority of those who see Whose Life Is It Anyway?, I have no vital idea of what it would be like to be faced with the choice Harrison has to make. His is too rare a case to acquire the self-evident, persuasive force of art. One leaves the theater willing to debate the play’s conclusion but unwilling to take it seriously to heart.

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If Whose Life Is It Anyway? presents us with a rare situation, Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man is about an individual who is without question unique. The play is based on the life of John Merrick, a man so hideously deformed that he became, in the 1880’s in England, quite famous. An object of revulsion and awe to the popular mind, he was also a celebrity’s celebrity, a curio both of science and of fashionable society. Merrick’s early years had been spent on the edges of squalid carnivals and tent shows where he took his place among the more usual run of exploited freaks. Then he came to the attention of Frederick Treves, a surgeon at London Hospital, who rescued him from the horrors of the side show and gave him the shelter and safety of a hospital room, in which he lived for six years until his death.

During this time, a public subscription was raised for his maintenance, and he was studied by science and visited by a variety of eminent Victorians. All who met him were impressed by his intelligence and sensitivity, and it was generally held to be a high mark for humanity that such a sensibility could dwell in a form so monstrous and survive a past so brutal.

What exactly did Merrick look like? I have seen drawings of him, but the configuration of flesh and bone are so grotesque that they would seem beyond the powers of language. However, in his memoirs, Dr. Treves has left us a description of Merrick which is used in part in The Elephant Man and which gives a strong idea of his appearance:

The most striking feature about him was his enormous and misshapen head. From the brow there projected a huge bony mass like a loaf, while from the back of the head hung a bog of spongy, fungus-looking skin, the surface of which was comparable to a brown cauliflower. . . . The circumference of the head was no less than that of the man’s waist. From the upper jaw, there projected another mass of bone. It protruded from the mouth like a pink stump, turning the upper lip inside out and making the mouth a mere slobbering aperture. . . . The face was no more capable of expression than a block of gnarled wood.

If one adds to the above the fact that the papillomatous growths which covered and hung from the body gave off a hideous stench, one may understand a little the degree of physical loathsomeness which The Elephant Man asks its audience to imagine.

I say imagine because, except for some briefly presented and slightly out-of-focus slides, the audience is not asked to endure for the course of the play a real-life image of Merrick. Instead, while the above description is spoken and the slides are shown, an exceptionally comely young actor named Philip Anglim, naked except for a loose loin cloth, slowly assumes the distorted outline of Merrick’s body—he also suffered a twisted posture due to the effects of a broken hip—but does nothing else to depict visually the wild explosions of tumors that made his features more feral than human. When he speaks, it is with a high, pinched, monotonous voice that, while separating inflection from meaning, nevertheless manages to color the utterances of his character with a poignant intelligence. In short, except for an odd tilt of his hips and a hobbled gait, it is safe to say that Anglim presents a portrayal of his character’s soul rather than his body.

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Reducing the anomalies of the Elephant Man to little more than a limp and a slight speech impediment results in making an aesthetic virtue out of a practical necessity. I have no idea how the person of Merrick could be presented in a way that would permit the actor to perform his role and the audience to endure his presence, and I have nothing against the use of theatrical suggestion. Still, in this case, where the character’s physical being is so important, indeed is the very focus of the play’s action, one feels that this compromise, while clever enough, lets everyone off a little too easily.

However, this omission of physical detail does not keep one from apprehending the terrible isolation of the play’s hero; and, indeed, by presenting us with a sort of in vacuo horror, Pomerance in a way reinforces the rather simple theme of his play; namely, that those who knew the Elephant Man saw in him only what they desired or could stand to see, using him as a symbol for their consciences, their philosophies, and their fears.

Treves, for example, wishes to obtain for Merrick as normal a life as possible, but this is done as much from his scientist’s desire to demythify the mistakes of nature as it is from the recognition of his teratoid patient as a human being. A churchman who tutors Merrick in the dogmas of Christianity finds in his unaffected and direct grasp of religion a faith that he would wish for himself. And an actress, a kind, worldly woman, who comes closest to true friendship with Merrick, nevertheless treats his affliction as if it were a sign of artistic alienation, an accident of the spirit rather than of the flesh. Only when he insists on the needs of that flesh and tells her of his wonder about the female body, does she face the fact that her friend is more than a set of original and sensitive opinions on art and literature.

In the end, no one can understand who and what Merrick really is. He himself can explain his appearance only by an old wives’ tale that his mother was knocked down by an elephant shortly before his birth. When he dies, his deathbed scene is aptly horrible and touching. Because of the weight of his head, he had to sleep in a position that kept it upright, usually resting it on his knees which he would draw up close to his chest. In his last scene, he allows his head to ease back tentatively until it drops upon the bed; the pillows are too soft to sustain its bulk and heaviness, and Merrick dies, presumably of a dislocated neck. Was this an accident, the final sad result of his desire to be and do as other people? Or was it a way of letting the strangeness of his body take him out of the world forever? Both history and The Elephant Man leave the question unanswered.

The fact that this play holds one’s attention has much more to do with the facts of Merrick’s life than with their theatrical embellishments. The writing achieves no more than a blurry grandiloquence which comes heavy to the tongue of most of the cast. And of that cast, only Carole Shelley, who plays the actress, seems to belong to the world she is in. As the Elephant Man, Philip Anglim belongs of course not to a world but to his character, and like that character, his performance is open to many interpretations. Some, I’m sure, will find it a masterly piece of work, a triumph of method over means. Others will feel that it’s the viewer’s imagination that supplies the real details of the depiction of Merrick, and that any actor who could stand in an awkward position for the length of two acts could have, in this role, achieved the same sympathetic response.

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The Elephant Man, like Whose Life Is It Anyway?, offers one not really the stimulation of art but rather the excitement of an extreme situation. In Merrick and Harrison we have two characters on the outer edges of being, but they have got there not through the imaginative action of the plays they are in, but because they are the random victim of a traffic accident and the butt of a lusus naturae. In life these events may well be called tragic; in art, however, they are trivial. They can, of course, give the appearance of specialness to the characters who suffer them, and in the theater appearance can go a long way and should not be belittled. But by themselves they do not earn the right to our highest attention. An Elephant Man and a paralytic seeking death need, just as much as kings or housewives, to be infused with significant life by a dramatic intelligence. In these two plays, that intelligence is rarely present, so that one is left with the feeling that true human horror has been reduced to little more than clever theatrical conceits. Playwrights Clark and Pomerance have depended on awing the audience with these conceits, and they have in general been proven right. The bizarre is always compelling to those who bring bored minds to the theater and who therefore identify the eccentric with the profound. However, there will always be some of us who demand subtler shocks to our system, and who will find in plays like The Elephant Man and Whose Life Is It Anyway? only a sad sideshow appeal.