The Farnsworth Invention

TimeLine Theatre

Chicago

(773) 281-8463

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Aaron Sorkin’s “pseudo-documentary yarn” about the invention of television unfolds like “a spectacularly uneven prizefight,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. In one corner is Philo T. Farnsworth, a scrappy inventor somewhere out in remotest Idaho, imagining the mechanics of what would become the quintessential American medium. In the opposite corner is Farnsworth’s far more powerful opponent, David Sarnoff, chairman of the behemoth Radio Corporation of America, who sees the potential of this burgeoning technology and schemes to control it. West Wing creator Sorkin is often criticized for writing “smug and artificial” dialogue, but here his “impossibly articulate” characters couldn’t seem more natural.

Credit director Nick Bowling for that, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. Bowling sharpens the contrast between Sarnoff’s “hail-fellow-well-met manipulativeness” and Farnsworth’s innocent earnestness. He also smartly “scrapes off the slickness” from Sorkin’s script—a slickness that was, infuriatingly, emphasized in the original, 2007 Broadway production—and adds a “surging physical vitality” that the original staging lacked. Indeed, if The Farnsworth Invention is any indication, in the competition to be America’s pre-eminent theater city, “the Windy City appears to be blowing the Big Apple out of its once-secure spot at the top.”

The Chicago production owes its success to two very fine local actors, said John Beer in Time Out Chicago. P.J. Powers “dominates as the gruff Sarnoff,” precisely capturing that character’s “mix of steely authority and insecurity.” As the David to Powers’ Goliath, Rob Fagin “captures Farnsworth’s dreamy brilliance and fatal naïveté, his family and the larger world no match for the fascination of his lab.” Bowling, meanwhile, handily orchestrates the play’s enormous cast of supporting characters, shuffling them in and out of laboratories and boardrooms to effectively convey the bustling spirit of the ’30s. Sorkin’s script still has its problems, but TimeLine’s take on The Farnsworth Invention proves “bracing throughout.”