Theater Review: Beneath the “Ether Dome”

Ether Dome is nothing if not ironic: a dire need for relief generates a mess of pain.

Ether Dome, by Elizabeth Egloff. Directed by Michael Wilson. Staged by the Huntington Theatre Company, a co-production with Alley Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, and Hartford Stage, at the Boston Center for the Arts, Calderwood Pavilion, Boston, MA, through November 23.

Greg Balla, Lee Sellars (seated), Tom Patterson, and Richmond Hoxie in Elizabeth Egloff's provocative medical thriller Ether Dome directed by Michael Wilson, playing Oct. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014 at the South End / Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Greg Balla, Lee Sellars (seated), Tom Patterson, and Richmond Hoxie in the Huntington Theatre Company production of Elizabeth Egloff’s “Ether Dome.” Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

By Bill Marx

In her program notes for the dexterous Huntington Theatre Company production, playwright Elizabeth Egloff asserts that Ether Dome “is not just a story of about the discovery who discovered ether. It’s about the values of American society in the 1840s, and their attitudes toward medicine, science, religion, and human suffering.” She should have made that clear to the HTC, which calls the play a “medical thriller” on its website. The problem is that the script is neither an olde culture critique or a suspense yarn: most of the three-act evening boils down to a not particularly mysterious narrative about the trials and tribulations of those who came up with the first anesthetic (at Massachusetts General Hospital), with the last act finally generating some  dramatic conflict. Far too much of this historical drama feels like it is trying to back off from grappling with the essential question the script raises in its first and last scenes – why are we so indifferent to the pain of others? That was not just a hot potato for medicine in the 19th century — it remains so in 2014.

Ether Dome has a fascinating story to tell, but the evening’s emphasis is on what happens to its trio of bedeviled protagonists, not on what their clash of values means. The conflicting doings of the idealistic Hartford, Connecticut dentist Horace Wells, his opportunistic assistant W.T.G. Morton, and the brilliant Mass General Hospital surgeon Charles Jackson are treated with the melodramatic pizazz of a ’30s Warner Brothers bio-pic: fast-moving exposition, (overly)calculated bits of humor, flickers of class tension and personal confrontation, women set up as appendages to ‘great’ men, compulsory scenes of public disgrace, defeat, and triumph. As in the movies, obvious visual symbols are erected: one of them here is a masterdon that the head of Mass General Hospital, John Collins Warren, is slowly piecing together — we get it, the pre-ether doctors are dinosaurs (Not since George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemna have so many physicians looked so expendable on stage.)

Wells is the impractical visionary (he wants his discovery to be free to all), fumbling his big chance in 1845 to prove at Mass General that laughing gas is the answer, Morton is the calculating scallywag (it was an age of hoaxers) who, with the unknowing help of Jackson, comes up with a resolution that he thinks will make him a fortune. Jackson is the detached genius, a wiz at birthing ideas who is unable to handle the blood and guts of primitive surgery. By the end all three proud men (antagonistic collaborators, in a way) must deal with tragic fates that they don’t deserve, given the enormous gift they have given to mankind. Without anesthesia, surgery was torture. George Orwell talks about this in his classic essay “How the Poor Die”: “Surgery, in particular, was believed to be a particularly gruesome form of sadism …From the nineteenth century you could collect a large horror-literature connected with doctors and hospitals.”

So Ether Dome is nothing if not ironic: a dire need for  relief generates a mess of pain. All the jockeying for scientific credit as well as  acts of betrayal (conscious and unconscious) are painlessly conveyed in Wilson’s agile production, which makes adept use of projections to move us from Hartford to Boston, from New York to Europe. The performances are generally strong: Michael Bakkensen’s dreamer-to-a-fault Wells gives way to what looks like madness, while Tom Patterson blissfully stays away from the furtive idiom of the con man — his Morton earnestly means to do good while he cashes in, which is very much the American way. Among the high class doctors, Richmond Hoxie tinctures his avuncular air with the right amount of acidic calculation, while William Youmans provides a solid portrait of an eccentric thinker barely tethered to the real world. The female roles are of the thankless, stand-by-your-man-until-you-faint variety. Amelia Pedlow (Elizabeth Wells) and Liba Vaynberg (“Lizzie” Morton) do what they can.

Ken Cheeseman, Richmond Hoxie, Tom Patterson, Bill Kux, and Greg Balla in Elizabeth Egloff's provocative medical thriller Ether Dome directed by Michael Wilson, playing Oct. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014 at the South End / Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Ken Cheeseman, Richmond Hoxie, Tom Patterson, Bill Kux, and Greg Balla in the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of Elizabeth Egloff’s “Ether Dome.” Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

All of the maneuvering (including the less than admirable behavior of Warren) is tied up neatly in a bittersweet finale that underlines what most of us knew at the start of the play – under the eye of eternity it doesn’t really matter all that much who gets the credit for creating a substance that revolutionized surgery. I disagree with Egloff, who argues in the program notes that her historical drama about medicine and hubris is particularly relevant: “the issue of doctors, drug medicine, and the treatment of patients continues to be controversial.” Well yes, but this pre-Civil War tussle among individuals (who are depicted as anachronisms) doesn’t have all that much to say about what is going on in today’s gargantuan global battle among mega-corporations, governments, lobbyists, pharmaceutical companies, and the health care industry. Lawyers would chew up modern versions of Wells, Jackson, and Morton lickety-split.

Ether Dome does make one contemporary connection it could have explored more fully. In the final scene, Warren visits an ill Jackson at McLean Hospital, at one point asking why, when Wells first came to Mass General, they wouldn’t accept his discovery. Jackson silently sits at his telescope looking at the stars — cue astral projections. For me, the image isn’t inspiring (the unending search for knowledge) but subtly chilling. In part, the doctors were blind to alleviating suffering because of their indifference to the human beings they treated: they are more concerned with gathering ancient bones and scanning the heavens. (One wishes the play’s cut-and-slashed patients were portrayed as individuals rather than as types). Here Egloff is onto something: today that indifference has been baked into our broken system, an essential part of the high stakes economics (and politics) of health care. But the 1840s isn’t going to tell us all that much about that. For some reason, aside from your perennial hospital deathbed epics, plays about the American health care morass are rare. Surely a dramatist has written an accomplished script that gets us closer to the challenges we face now, rather than then?


Bill Marx is the Editor-in-Chief of The Arts Fuse. For over three decades he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.

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