I Saw It On Television - A Review of 'The Farnsworth Invention'

Aaron Sorkin’s writing style isn’t for everyone. Television had a hard enough time with his fast-paced and information-crammed dialogue. Transitioning the style to theater, where actors speak slower and audiences listen accordingly, isn’t easy; and the first ten minutes of Sorkin’s new two-hour play ‘The Farnsworth Invention,’ now at The Music Box, are spent getting used to the dialogue and exchange between the characters, for both the audience and the actors.

Once that hurdle is passed, the audience is in for some remarkable performances, coupled with lessons in history, science, and if you’re paying attention, morality.

The play follows David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America and founder of NBC (Hank Azaria,) and Philo Farnsworth, a genius farm boy from Idaho (Jimmi Simpson) as they race to create the world’s first television and, when that battle is lost, to get the patent to it. Snippets are shown of boys’ youths, in which they display similar courage and dispositions, before growing up into men with dissimilar fortunes and power. At the end, Sarnoff manages to keep his fortune, while Farnsworth gets to keep only his integrity and shattered idealism. In the scene where the two face off, it’s hard to tell which of them envies the other more.

Other cast members play multiple roles, usually with a passable amount of grace and fluidity (though Nadia Bowers’ accent as Sarnoff’s French wife sounds more like Russian,) and all of the cast double as stage hands. The set, staging and costumes all work well, but Sorkin’s script remains central in any theater-goer’s mind. When the lives of Sarnoff and Farnsworth are branded by emotional strife or tragedy, Sorkin doesn’t cheapen them by lingering too long. The play lives by the theme eternalized in the very first (and last) episode of Sorkin’s ‘The West Wing’ and stated by Azaria in his closing monologue of the play: “It’s what’s next.”