The Elephant Man is a touching true story based on an 1800’s man with a severe physical disorder called “elephantitis”. An acclaimed doctor, Frederick Treves finds grossly disfigured John Merrick in a freak show. At first only concerned with examining him from a scientific standpoint, Teves later takes Merrick to live in the hospital where he works after Merrick was mistreated and beaten by his boss and the police. As the hospital becomes Merrick’s home, he slowly becomes a figure of public importance, a charity cause, and influences the perspective of the doctors who tend to him and the wealthy who visit after learning of his condition.

The Elephant Man gives a deeply sentimental message of the true importance of appearance. As we watch Merrick suffering needlessly, mocked and feared due to his grotesque appearance, he continues to have a pure and noble heart, seeking out religion and being concerned with the welfare of those around him. Though people treat him as though retarded, he is actually very intelligent and an avid reader, at one point sharing abstract thoughts on the true meaning of love based on the tragic love story Romeo and Juliet. We see that Merrick’s disability causes him to be severely misunderstood by the public around him but he continues to break every stereotype that they conjure about him. The message is given even more meaning with Patrick “Pat” O’Brien’s performance. Though this is his first time acting in a show, he stepped up to the challenge and added whole other level of depth and emotion to his character.

Overall, the show was very well done. The lighting and music were haunting and the acting on point. The only weak point of the show for me was being able to understand what was going on. Sometime’s the character’s dialogue was hard to hear or understand, and so subsequent scenes sometimes tended to be a little confusing. This flaw subtracted minimally from the story as a whole, however, and the show definitely lived up to Viper standards.