HEROISM AND ESTROGEN
Well worth seeing, this stylized 100-minute tour de theatre nonetheless requires—and rewards—an informed audience: It needs eager theatergoers already aware of the story it tells so well. Despite depicting the same tragic tale, Pink Milk is not to be confused with Breaking the Code, Hugh Whitemore’s superb 1986 drama 
and acclaimed 1996 film in which Derek Jacobi’s performance fully matched the fervor he brought to I, Claudius. That burning indictment detailed the terrible fate of British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing (1912-1954), a brilliant Cambridge and Princeton scholar—and, not incidentally, homosexual—who invented the “Turing machine,” an essential prototype for our digital computers. More crucially, working with nerdy fellow-patriots at Bletchley Park during World War II, Turing was able to break Hitler’s “Enigma” code and shorten the war by exposing the Nazis’ secret transmissions. But this unsung hero soon became an unsought martyr.
Turing had his own secret code: His undoing uncannily recalls the fall of Oscar Wilde, succumbing like Turing to the same odious law against “gross indecency.” Sadly, he did so from a similar want of wariness. Like Wilde, who brought a very imprudent libel suit against his lover’s father, Turing played a part in his own doom: He complained to the constabulary about a burglary (of fishing knives, among other 
trifles) which he believed was perpetrated by Arnold, a male whore who supposedly slept with 300 or so men–including Turing.
Turing’s desire for justice backfires badly: The unconscionable authorities, far from prosecuting petty larceny, enforce the worst of the Victorian “blue laws.” They make Turing choose between jail and chemical castration: For two unspeakable years, Turing had to inject estrogen into his grotesquely altered body (supposedly so that he could become a woman who thus had the right to love a man). The torture was too much: Like a similarly persecuted Tyler Clementi at Rutgers University, Turing committed suicide, a lonely death much too similar to Oscar’s solitary demise in a dreary French hotel in 1900. (Some destinies only change their details.)
All this is worth knowing before seeing Alex Paul Young’s 100-minute free-flowing fantasia on the rise and fall of a dedicated dreamer. Perfectly disciplined by choreographer/director Brandon Powers, seven young and attractive performers inexhaustibly dance and enact Turing’s tale, anchored by Aaron Stephenson’s 
anguished depiction of a man brilliant with abstractions and clueless to the risks he ran as an open gay lover only a half century after Wilde’s humiliation.
Abstract in its own way, this co-production by Oracle B*Sides and White Elephant features frenetic break-out dances depicting Alan’s galloping imagination and libidinous adventures. It all but gambols through Turing’s tell-tale childhood: Where most boys have imaginary friends, Turing creates an imaginary robot named Otto (Darren Barrere) who symbolically changes identities as Turing’s life twists and turns. Turing has a seminally unsuccessful fling with a girl named Joan (Carrie Drapac) but basks in the transient adoration of the equally doomed Christopher Morcom (Cole Doman), who will die of a debilitating infection contained in the pink milk he consumed. In a series of lovely couplings, Morcom literally plays on Turing as he does the piano: Their shared delight—a truly innocent ardor—is as happy as life lets them love.
Regrettably, Turing’s work at deciphering the Enigma Code is desultorily treated here. (It’s never clear how decisive it was in shortening the war and saving so many straight soldiers.) More realistically presented, Turing’s postwar dalliance with the predatory rent boy Anthony (played by Charlie Kolarich who—no accident—also portrays Alan’s disapproving dad) leads to a fairy tale’s worst nightmare, epitomized by Jessica Dean Turner’s assorted authority figures. (Turing, who supposedly watched Disney’s 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs over 100 times, 
would die of his own poisoned apple—which he injected with cyanide to end his “sex change” from hell.)
Swift as a prophecy and swirling with seven driven performances, Pink Milk is a fanciful, often enthralling, exercise in eloquent energy. Sometimes it dreams out loud when you’d prefer it to be precise and prosaic (all the more reason to bone up on Turing beforehand). In its strange way it’s probably closer to how Turing saw his life, unspooling faster than he could control the consequences, a delirium that only death could straighten out, so to speak. Think of him every time your laptop lets you reach the world.
Admission is free but reservations are required.
photos courtesy of Oracle Productions
Pink Milk
Oracle Productions in association with White Elephant
Oracle’s Public Access Theatre, 3809 Broadway
scheduled to end on September 7, 2013
for tickets, visit http://www.publicaccesstheatre.org
for info on this and other Chicago Theater, visit http://www.TheatreinChicago.com
