THEATER - "Bone Portraits"

“You’ll notice I’ve compressed time a bit here,” says a very jocular Thomas Edison (the excellent Gian-Murray Gianino), the inventor cum sideshow narrator cum ringleader of Bone Portraits, a fantastically theatric new play. Edison pauses for a moment, adjusting a minute wrinkle on his bright red jacket. “Or maybe you won’t.” Another beat. “Kids these days,” he says, dismissively, walking behind a homemade proscenium (of ghost-white curtains), as he reveals more about the x-ray’s accidental birth and consequences.

It’s a lovely bit of meta-narrative, filled with knowing asides to the audience. Fitting, too, since there are moments where Deborah Stein’s carnival of a script is more confusing than a hall of mirrors, and you won’t know what’s going on. No matter: the incredibly talented director, Lear deBessonet, throws so many visual bones your way that you won’t care. “I’m a scientist and a showman,” Edison says (which explains why the show’s antics are so digestible). “Back then, there wasn’t that much of a difference between the two.”

[Read on] at New Theater Corps