E-Mail This Article to a Friend Shiny Ruby Rinne Groff maps the dawn of TV BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Ruby Sunrise By Rinne Groff. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Set by Eugene Lee. Costumes by Deborah Newhall. Lighting by Deb Sullivan. Sound by Bray Poor. With Julie Jesneck, Stephen Thorne, Anne Scurria, Jessica Wortham, Mauro Hantman, Fred Sullivan Jr., and Russell Arden Koplin. At Trinity Repertory Company through June 20.

It seems fitting that The Ruby Sunrise should be a play about invention, because it’s as inventive as anything you’ll see this side of Alan Ayckbourn or Tom Stoppard. Not that it’s as calibrated as the former or as intellectually heady as the latter. In the end, this new play by Rinne Groff — a production of Trinity Repertory Company and Actors Theatre of Louisville in the second half of a doubleheader world premiere — seems more ingenious than substantive. It is, however, clever and full of heart — as is Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis’s high-spirited production, which unfolds on a set by Eugene Lee in which Americana meets origami.

A meditation on all-American ingenuity that begins in 1927 in an Indiana barn where a fanatical young farm girl sets out to invent television, Groff’s play hops to a live-television studio of the 1950s, the medium’s so-called Golden Age, to focus on the creative and romantic collaboration of a beleaguered writer and a "script girl" determined to get her unsung mother’s story told. Of course, the young woman’s mother is the thwarted inventor of the earlier drama, whose tale is eventually recorded live in black-and-white by old-time TV cameras, in a version watered down by commercialism, censorship, timidity, cliché, and the McCarthy blacklist. The play’s dovetailing is deft and, as it moves from weatherbeaten heartland to Philco Television Playhouse, its conveyance of period atmosphere expert. But it’s not entirely clear what Groff is saying. As near as I can figure, it’s that compromise is, if not ideal, inevitable. But is it really better to have one’s dream distorted than to have it blow up in one’s face?

Whatever Groff’s overarching intent, she has put together a fascinating story, the seed of which is that of little-known inventor Philo Farnsworth, who had a "Eureka" moment regarding television electronics while mowing a farm field. Groff turns Farnsworth into a scientifically and mechanically handy teenage girl named Ruby, who is positively on fire to invent TV. Having escaped an abusive home in Kentucky, she turns up on a distrustful, alcoholic aunt’s Indiana doorstep with a scheme fostered by Popular Mechanics and the notion that TV might change the world. Among her insights: the boob tube will put an end to armed conflict because "who could bear to see war right in your own living room?"

After you mop up the irony of that, you can return to the high-energy spectacle of driven, overall-clad Ruby — who in Julie Jesneck’s rendering has more energy than Reddi Kilowatt — trying to build a cathode tube out of radio parts and pilfered lab equipment as Henry, Aunt Lois’s agriculture-student boarder, falls for the evangelical tinkerer. Henry, a polite, not-overly-ambitious 20-year-old who sees "fairies" rather than bioluminescence in fireflies, just wants Ruby to slow down long enough for romance.

Evidently he succeeds, at least in the short run, or we would not have the second part of The Ruby Sunrise, in which the focus shifts to television production assistant Lulu, who has a natural instinct for the nascent medium, and writer Tad Rose, whom she seduces into co-opting her mother’s story (which did not end happily), with an eye toward its persistence rather than its despair. In the process, Lulu has to stare down both while attempting to protect her monument to mom from the thousand callow exigencies that conspire to take the sheen off television’s Golden Age. At the climax, Groff’s two tales are fused, as we watch Ruby’s story filmed on the studio stage, defanged and with a bimbo heroine, dripping formulaic hope and looking a lot like Lassie.

That’s a lot to get your arms around, but the Trinity/ATL production has long arms. Eustis stages both the naturalistic and the TV-studio sections of the play with a nod toward the latter, with stagehands bustling in and out to fold and rotate Lee’s complicated set and help the actors with Deborah Newhall’s apt farmland and ’50s-chic costumes. And the actors do a fine job of juggling flesh-and-blood character with period archetype.

Jesneck is a bit maudlin as a promising young actress brought low by the blacklist, but her Ruby is a vulnerable, twitching whirlwind for whom such routine acts as sitting down and smacking open the barn doors are small explosions. As Lulu, Jessica Wortham manages to incorporate both Rosalind Russell cool and the impetuous shadow of her mother. Stephen Thorne is touchingly square as Henry and subtly superficial as the ’50s actor who plays him. And 25-year Trinity vet Anne Scurria dines out on the double casting, morphing from cynical, broken-hearted Aunt Lois to imperious faded-star-reduced-to-television Ethel Reed, clad in tight leopard and holding her cigarette as if it were a scepter. In these capable hands, Groff’s play is never less than entertaining. But like Ruby’s fever dream of television, it aspires to be more.