I’ve never quite had a Broadway experience like Aaron Sorkin’s tedious, exposition-laden film-script-on-stage The Farnsworth Invention. It is a play, in that it’s being performed in a playhouse by a staggering nineteen actors. But it is no more a work of drama than any of the various one-hour long History Channel documentaries currently filling my TiVo like unread books on a shelf, there simply to impress people. “That’s right, baby, I recorded a special on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.”
Instead this is the story of the creation of television told to you, told to you, TOLD TO YOU relentless by its two leading figures: media mogul David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria) and misunderstood inventor Philo Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson). It is a play-by-play of the process, so much so that I started to wonder why it wasn’t narrated by Al Michaels and John Madden. If you’re going to the theatre hoping to see characters - in scenes - engaged in conflict than I recommend you go nowhere near The Music Box. Characters in this play are rarely allowed to breathe under Des McAnuff’s frenetic, warp-speed direction nevermind stop for a few minutes and actually speak to one another.
And what an odd complaint for a Sorkin piece, perhaps, the best dialogue writer living today. Sorkin is the man who wrote passionate anti-drug messages from the desk of Sports Night, allowed a religious president to put a cigarette out on his God’s altar on The West Wing and whose Christmas Episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is a poignant elegy to the spirit of New Orleans musicians and one of the greatest pieces of television writing you’ll ever see. So the question: why is a man so gifted at the art of dialogue so afraid to let his characters speak to each other in this play? The answer may just be that it’s not a play at all.
The Farnsworth Invention commits more than the mere mortal sin of being exposition heavy. It is almost emotionally fraudulent. When Sorkin wants you to feel a little something for one of the people in the piece, he throws in Cossack soldiers and dying children like he’s tossing Snickers bars into a little kids pillow cast on Halloween. “Here you go, son, no big deal.” We’re told about things like alcoholism and depression and shown none of it, with the painful exception of two drastically unintelligible bar scenes where all kinds of espionage is taking place.
We’re told everything. And when we’re finally shown something, we’re told that something never happened. I think that’ll pretty much sum of the fate of The Farnsworth Invention. Outside movie theaters all across the country, he’ll turn to her and say, “You know this was a play.” She’ll look at him puzzled, “How?” The answer: not very good.
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