Photograph 51 Press

 Program for Photograph 51

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WASHINGTON POST 

Theater review: ‘Photograph 51’ at Theater J

By Nelson Pressley, Monday, April 4, 7:57 PM

In the early 1950s, Rosalind Franklin was in the thick of a race for a Nobel Prize, but in “Photograph 51,” Anna Ziegler’s zippy history play at Theater J, Franklin didn’t much know or care. The frosty Franklin keeps her face to her microscope and does much of the key work uncovering the structure of DNA, while cannier men grab the glory.

Melodrama? You bet, and a good one. Franklin, deliciously snippy in Elizabeth Rich’s clipped, focused performance, is the clear intellectual hero: She is the purest, most genuinely curious scientist. The men, a casual bunch next to the burning, all-business Franklin, tend to be various strains of pig — ambitious, sexist, anti-Semitic, etc.

Yet Ziegler smartly roughs up this outline, blurring the edges enough to keep these historical personalities interesting. Franklin’s no saint: She’s hell in the hyper-competitive British academic workplace, intimidating and defensive about every semantic and substantive slight. Her superior, Maurice Wilkins, is smug and entitled, but he’s practically knocked woozy by Franklin’s constant lashings. The reflections that gradually color the play deal with the eternal human mystery of why people act as they do — the very stuff of drama, of course, and a far less solvable riddle than that of the DNA structure these characters stalk. CONTINUE READING

JEWISH DAILY FORWARD 

'Photograph 51' Puts Science Onstage

By Menachem Wecker

Elizabeth Rich as Rosalind Franklin in ‘Photograph 51.’ Photo by Stan Barouh.

Watching the current production at Washington D.C.’s Theater J of Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51,” which tells the tragic tale of Jewish scientist and almost Nobel laureate Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1900).

Whitman’s narrator, who finds himself “tired” and “sick” of all the proofs and figures in the academic astronomy lecture he is attending, decides to glide out of the room and look up in rapture at the “perfect silence of the stars.”

Just as Whitman’s narrator chooses life over science (as if it is the case that never the twain shall meet), “Photograph 51’s” distinguished cast, directed by Daniella Topol, are forced into a Nietzschean choice between the Dionysian and the Apollonian — between fun and math.

The play tells the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. While scientists James Watson (James Flanagan), Francis Crick (Michael Glenn) and Maurice Wilkins (Clinton Brandhagen) are after hours drinking buddies and friends, Franklin (Elizabeth Rich) neglects office politics and socializing and devotes herself to her work.  CONTINUE READING

Trey Graham

Photograph 51 By Anna Ziegler Directed by Daniella Topol; At Theater J to April 24

Perhaps the one topic more beloved to playmakersthan playmakers themselves is the tragic tale of a solitary unsung hero, and few heroes would seem to have been more unsung and more inclined toward the solitary than Rosalind Franklin. A prickly researcher who toiled in the labs of King’s College in the wake of World War II, she obsessively pursued hard data on the structure of DNA. She found it, too—and the tale of how the names Watson and Crick would come to be more associated than hers with that discovery is central to Photograph 51; the production takes its title from a breakthrough image Franklin captured with the X-ray camera that was both her greatest tool and her probable executioner. (She died of ovarian cancer at 37.)  CONTINUE READING

TWO HOURS TRAFFIC 

Friday, April 1, 2011
Theater J's Photograph 51

Artistic Director Ari Roth preceded opening night of Theatre J’s latest production, Photograph 51, with his usual welcoming curtain speech. In it, he quoted The Chosen, saying that both these and these were the work of DC’s Theatre J. Both plays rely heavily on narration, but I found the way narrative elements functioned in the script of Photograph 51 to be much more dramatically successful.

Photograph 51 is a fictionalized account of the race amongst scientists to discover the double helix structure of DNA in the 1950s. In 1962 Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. Rosalind Franklin was not credited at the time, despite her important role using X-rays to take photographs on a molecular scale. The title refers to the fact that the structure of DNA was clearly revealed in Franklin’s fifty-first photograph. (Don’t worry; you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy the play).

The story of Franklin’s contribution, and of her personality, is not cut-and-dry, and the narration reflects this. The characters interrupt each other, protest, and contradict. This quality brings the narration to life – it doesn’t stop the story, it is a continuation of it. The narration, from the very beginning, sets up and reveals character relationships. CONTINUE READING

WASHINGTON JEWISH WEEK

The race to map DNA, the road to gender equality

by Lisa Traiger Arts Correspondent


In Photograph 51, former Washingtonian Anna Ziegler tracks the race to map the structure of DNA, following two competing teams of scientists in post-World War II England. Based on historic accounts -- Brenda Maddox's The Dark Lady of DNA, James Watson's The Double Helix and Maurice Wilkins' The Third Man of the Double Helix -- the tale in playwright Ziegler's hands is one of intrigue and missed opportunities, unapologetic intellect and dogged perseverance, soaring triumphs and dashed hopes.

At the nucleus of this event, but oft-forgotten or overlooked in history and biology texts, is London-born Rosalind Franklin, the lone woman and one of the few Jews who worked on the project.

The production, on stage at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's Theater J through April 24, is, thankfully, less concerned with the science than with the relational orbits of the characters.

In director Daniella Topol's hands, the work becomes part memory play, part testimony told in flashbacks, as the prominent personalities unravel on Giorgos Tsappas' sleek platforms and lab tables that could easily take a page from an Ikea catalogue. Franklin's story is both compelling and poignant. She broke through barriers at a time when women weren't permitted in most research labs to become the top in their field of crystallography. But along the way, her single-minded pursuit of scientific perfection -- focused, methodical, detail-driven -- isolated her, especially from her male colleagues. CONTINUE READING

WE LOVE DC 

We Love Arts: Photograph 51
By Jenn Larsen, 3:00 pm April 4th, 2011

Biographical plays can be tricky. The best – works like Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus or Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code – have come to brilliantly define the genre but also created conventions that theater audiences now take for granted. There are the poetic monologues illustrating the main character’s motivations, the chorus or narrator trying to shape the life for you (either trustworthily or not), crazy jumps in time, and an overall attempt to make some philosophical sense out of a life. The pitfall is, a life may not necessarily have a theme other than the playwright’s desire for one.

Playwright Anna Ziegler teases some sadly beautiful metaphors out of the life of scientist Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51, now playing at Theater J. It’s a swift ninety minute production with no intermission, befitting the race it depicts but perhaps also the difficulty in breathing theatrical life into what was an intellectual and lonely pursuit. If you have a young niece or daughter whose interest in science you want to encourage, this may be the play to take her to – or not, considering it’s a deeply discouraging look at the boys’ club Dr. Franklin struggled against in her quest to map the contours of the DNA molecule.

It’s this struggle that Ziegler focuses on, and she makes us feel it keenly. We cringe every time the mature and learned Dr. Franklin is addressed by her backbiting colleagues as “Miss Franklin.” But there’s something else going on here as well, the suggestion that it was this prejudice alone that resulted in her not being the first to win the DNA mapping race. Does Ziegler want us to be convinced of that at the play’s end, or is it simply that Franklin’s pride was the block to success? CONTINUE READING

DC THEATRE SCENE 

Photograph 51
March 31, 2011 By Steven McKnight Leave a Comment

The theme for Theater J’s recently announced 2011-2012 season,“Brilliant Fictions/Shattering Facts”, could also apply to its current production of Photograph 51, Anna Ziegler’s fascinating drama of scientist Rosalind Franklin’s role in the race to decipher the DNA molecule, an accomlishment that made James Watson & Francis Crick household names.

Franklin is now famous as a feminist martyr for her role in DNA research, not for her more accomplished work in other fields.  According to the ideological version of her story, she was mistreated by other scientists because of her gender and her lack of romantic interest in her credit-stealing colleague, Maurice Wilkins.  As a result of that fact and her death from cancer at the age of 37 in 1958, Franklin was denied adequate credit for her work, which was the essential foundation for the fame and 1962 Nobel Prizes awarded to Watson & Crick and Wilkins.

Fortunately, playwright Anna Ziegler treads a mostly sure-footed middle ground between the ideological version of the story and the more prosaic historical one.

Photograph 51 is set during Franklin’s tenure at Kings College in London from 1951-53 when she used her expertise in x-ray diffraction to take pictures of genetic structures.

Franklin (Elizabeth Rich) gets off to a rocky start when she arrives in London to begin a research fellowship.  Not only is she denied the independent authority promised her, but she is instructed by Maurice Wilkins (Clinton Brandhagen) to change her research focus to the structure of DNA. CONTINUE READING

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