By David Rooney

Bradley Cooper, by his own account, traces his earliest desire to be an actor to seeing the David Lynch film, The Elephant Man, at age 12. His investment in the tragic real-life character of Joseph Merrick, known as John, intensified when he performed the physically demanding role in Bernard Pomerance’s play for his Actors Studio master’s thesis, and again further when he appeared in a full production at the 2012 Williamstown Theatre Festival. That staging now comes to Broadway, bearing ample evidence of Cooper’s personal connection to the material, which goes far beyond technical craft to a place of wrenching empathy.

Pomerance’s 1977 bio-drama calls for the central role to be performed without special makeup or prosthetics. It seems almost absurd witnessing hunky Cooper so subsumed by a character renowned for his grotesque deformities that we forget whom we’re watching. But in Scott Ellis’ production, directed with as much compassion as precision, the illusion becomes complete. In fact, Cooper’s tremendously moving performance, along with the sensitive work of co-stars Patricia Clarkson and Alessandro Nivola, transforms this rather starchy play from patronizing edification into a haunting emotional experience.

While Lynch’s 1980 film starring Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt was adapted from other source material, the play covers more or less the same period. It concentrates on the few years leading to Merrick’s death in 1890 at age 27, when he lived at London Hospital under the care of Dr. Frederick Treves (Nivola). Merrick’s hellish early life is sketched with economy via quick scenes with Ross (Anthony Heald), the sideshow barker who acquired him from the Leicester workhouse where his mother had placed him as a child.

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"His physical agony is exceeded only by his mental anguish, a despised creature without consolation," announces Ross, luring spectators to gape."See Mother Nature uncorseted and in malignant rage! Tuppence." The florid sales pitch tells us more than we see initially, and while the glimpses of inhumane exploitation are harrowing, it’s the theatrical transformation of Cooper into Merrick that rivets the attention and tugs at the heart.

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Cooper, with costars Patricia Clarkson and Alessandro Nivola

As Treves talks medical students through Merrick’s bone disorder and resulting skin growths, life-size photographs of the real subject are projected onto a central screen. Cooper stands alongside, clad only in period undershorts, his shape and posture altering as each malformation is described. His mouth crumbles into a lopsided version of Munch’s “Scream”; his shoulder droops, leaving one arm abnormally extended; his hand twists into a gnarled stump; his hip collapses, forcing him to use a cane.

That distressing depiction of physical torment — which Cooper sustains throughout the play — is matched by Merrick’s determination to speak with painstaking correctness, despite an obstructed windpipe that makes even breathing difficult.

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When attention to a newspaper editorial by the hospital administrator (Henry Stram) draws sufficient donations to make Merrick a permanent resident, Treves endeavors to give him a normal life. As John’s questioning mind, his graciousness and his subtle wit come to light, he receives a stream of visitors bearing gifts, from clergy to royalty, all of them recognizing something of themselves in the gentle monster. His most profound friendship is with Mrs. Kendal (Clarkson), an actress well versed in the uses of artifice who responds to John with an absolute genuineness that seems to take even her by surprise.