Bradley Cooper Transforms Into “The Elephant Man”

Two-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper transforms so methodically into the disfigured Joseph Merrick at the start of The Elephant Man, now in the midst of a limited engagement at the Booth Theatre, that you barely realize it’s happening. When you finally do, it kind of knocks the wind out of you. Early in this cold and spartan revival, directed by Scott Ellis (You Can’t Take It With You), we see movie star Cooper staring ahead, shirtless, on a bare and sloping stage. To his left stands Alessandro Nivola, as Dr. Frederick Treves, the London physician who would become Merrick’s confidante and caretaker. Between them hangs a projected image of the titular 19th-century Englishman, whose agonizingly human story has been chronicled in books, an Oscar-nominated film, and this, the often-revisited version by playwright Bernard Pomerance first staged in 1979. In a clinical, if sobering monologue, Nivola will describe Merrick’s appearance—“The thumb was like a radish, the fingers like thick tuberous roots”—to be met in turn by a reaction from Cooper, who, for this example, twists one hand into an angry ball.