Women abound in plays about science. How else would writers simplify lofty concepts for the audience without some wife, sister or comely student fetchingly furrowing her brow at the brilliant fellows and saying something along the lines of, “Wait, let me get this straight ...”?  :Photograph 51â: Kristen Bush, flanked by Jeremy Webb and Haskell King, at Ensemble Studio Theater.  Among the many virtues of Anna Ziegler’s intermittently pedantic but largely satisfying “Photograph 51” is a refusal to soften the woman at its center, the British scientist Rosalind Franklin (Kristen Bush), by making her anything other than formidably, even self-sabotagingly, intelligent. As Ms. Ziegler tells it, Franklin — who got further faster than anyone else in the 1950s race to grasp the double-helical structure of DNA, only to falter because of her own rigorous standards — is possibly the smartest and definitely the most persistent person in the room.  It falls to an all-male cohort of fellow scientists to play catch-up as the men tag-team the narration, contradicting one another and hovering ominously around Nick Francone’s Bunsen-burner-heavy set whenever a major plot point emerges. These clusters, accompanied by portentous mood music, mark a rare misstep on the part of Ms. Ziegler and the director, Linsay Firman, in this production, the latest from the Ensemble Studio Theater/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project.  Three of these men — the Nobel Prize-winning James Watson (a fidgety Haskell King), Francis Crick (a droll Jeremy Webb) and Maurice Wilkins (an officious Kevin Collins) — would go down in history as the discoverers of what is repeatedly referred to in “Photograph 51” as “the secret of life.” And Ms. Ziegler doesn’t claim that Franklin made the final deductive leaps, only that the men’s breakthrough owed a large (and, for 15 years, unacknowledged) debt to her painstaking efforts, particularly the illuminating photo that gives the play its title.  The ensemble work can be spotty, but Ms. Bush more than makes up for this, allowing only the briefest glimpses of the vulnerability and ambition beneath Franklin’s poised surface. Her unsentimental, beautifully calibrated performance may not provide the secret of life, but it offers multiple insights into the sad and honorable secrets of one particular life.
Anna Zieglerâs âPhotograph 51,â at Ensemble Studio Theater, examines the contributions by Rosalind Franklin to the race to discover DNA.