Juls Hoover and Paul Eiding (Photo by Jeff Lorch)
Reviewed by G. Bruce Smith
Brave Space Productions at The Skylight Theatre
Through Dec. 22
RECOMMENDED
It seems unlikely that a delicately rendered play should be inspired by German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his “Uncertainty Principle.” Yet, Simon Stephens’ Heisenberg, currently at The Skylight Theatre, was the result of a request from the Sloan Foundation, an organization that encourages leading playwrights to explore scientific or technological themes in their works. Where science is “hard,” Stephens’ play is gentle. Where science is supposed to make sense of the world mostly through facts, Heisenberg takes two very different characters and somehow creates a believable relationship that should not make sense at all.
Georgie Burns (Juls Hoover) and Alex Priest (Paul Eiding) meet at a train station in London, where they both live. Or rather, Georgie imposes herself on Alex, who is quietly content to sit by himself.
She is American, he is British. She is 42, he is 75. She works as a receptionist at a primary school. He is a butcher who has owned his shop for decades. She has been abandoned by her partner and son. He has lived a solitary life as a single man with no children. She is brash, talkative, annoying. He is quiet, introspective, thoughtful (though he loves all kinds of music – including rap – and is apparently a killer tango dancer).
Georgie pursues Alex, though it’s not quite clear what her intent is. After their chance meeting at the train station, she googles him and locates him at his shop. Alex’s initial reluctance to engage with her slowly fades away and an unlikely romance begins – or does it? After their first – and mutually very satisfying sexual encounter – Georgie reveals something that comes as a punch in the stomach to a man who has just made himself vulnerable for the first time in decades. But it’s not the end of their story.
Georgie’s revelation is a dramatic moment in a play that otherwise has none and yet is so completely absorbing. That’s not only because the dialogue is so gracefully compelling, but also because of the actors’ stellar performances. Both Hoover and Eiding, under the direction of Cameron Watson, so fully inhabit their characters that you can actually see Georgie’s hidden terror of what people may think of her and Alex’s long solo walks throughout London as part of a routine that never changes.
The action takes place on a cleverly designed set (Tesshi Nakagawa) made up of simple platforms, benches, tables and chairs, arranged in a circular pattern, that make scene changes seamless. A lovely but subtle lighting design (Ken Booth), also circular, enhances the elegance of the narrative.
While it might be difficult to understand how Stephens was inspired by a German physicist (who was a principal scientist in the Nazi nuclear program in World War II) to create such a tender piece, director Watson has a theory. In his program note, Watson says he believes that the playwright “is simply saying that we can’t and don’t know the ‘position and velocity’ of others. Until they smash into each other. And that is what happens to these two people. The universe, somehow, born out of randomness and chaos, aligns them.”
Brave Space Productions at The Skylight Theatre, 1816 ½ N. Vermont Ave., Hollywood. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm; thru Dec. 22. bravespaceproductions.com. Running time: One houand, 30 minutes, with no intermission.
