"Heisenberg" at ACT

ACT rehearsal photo by Beryl Baker

As longtime readers will recall, I'm a sucker for a play about science. So when I saw the ACT was doing a show called Heisenberg, that got me going. Werner Heisenberg is, of course, an important character in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, of course, and his role in the development of nuclear physics is well known.

Simon Stephens' play, however, has nothing at all to do with the scientist or science. The popular perception of Heisenberg's work boils down to a single concept, known as the uncertainty principle, which is loosely understood to mean that an outside observer cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a quantum particle with any precision. This is (as with most of quantum physics) both extremely counterintuitive and wholly inapplicable to life on the human scale. This has to do with the way an observer affects objects being observed, but again, this applies only to observations of quantum effects, not humans or human-scale objects.

That doesn't mean it can't serve as something of a metaphor, which is roughly what Stephens attempts here. More or less, this play says if you know where you are, you can't know where you're going, and vice versa.

The Play

But enough of theory, let's talk about the play. Alex is a 75-year-old butcher who likes to sit in train stations, even though he doesn't like to go places. He loves being in London, though. One day as he sits on a bench in the station, the loud, flighty American Georgie approaches him and immediately starts telling rather bizarre, incoherent, and untruthful stories. Although bemused and somewhat annoyed, Alex finds himself somewhat engaged by the whole encounter.

Next we find Alex working in his butcher shop, when who should walk in but Georgie? She has tracked him down using her super Google powers, so now we think she's a psychotic stalker. But it turns out she only wants to con him out of enough money to go find her son in New Jersey. Maybe. Meanwhile, Alex is rather stoic and lonely, seems to know he's getting toward the end of his life (which appears to have no other people in it, at all, except one girlfriend of his youth), so what has he got to lose by talking with his stalker?

So they date. Alex gives a really exceptional speech about listening to all kinds of music, though it ends with a facile appropriation of the notion that the music isn't in the notes, but the spaces between them. They go to bed. Because, you know, why not?

For reasons good or ill, they end up going to New Jersey together, despite his stated aversion to travel and her inability to keep a story straight. It seems to be a fairly quirky but workable relationship. End of play.

So it's a character study, which is not generally my cup of tea, and it rates as fairly implausible, even if you try to apply some pop-culture version of the Heisenberg principle to human interactions. We never know where the relationship is going, or why. Just deal with it.

The Production

The acting carries the day here. Bay area stalwart James Carpenter is outstanding in his portrayal of Alex. The staid, soft-spoken butcher has an incredibly expressive face and subtle body language. Sarah Grace Wilson can't possibly be as annoying as her portrayal of Georgie, so I give her credit as an actor. Together they manage to have a degree of chemistry (or physics--see? I can make facile science jokes, too!) that seems unwarranted by anything in the script, but manages to make the bizarre relationship tenable.

The first couple of scenes are truly irritating, with Georgie creating a situation that any but the ever-patient Alex would have extricated themselves from. But once we pass peak irritation, it just becomes a strange and quirky (if still somewhat predatory and exploitative) relationship, fitting the tropes of many a romantic comedy. It really is only because the acting is so exceptional that one can really stand to see it through.

The set design is clever, with an octagonal wooden platform that can raise sections to serve as a bench, a butcher's counter, a bed, a restaurant table, etc. But on the big Geary Theater stage, the two people feel truly isolated (which is apt, because there are no other characters in this story except mentions of Alex's long-ago fiance and Georgie's gone-to-Jersey son). Maybe that isolation is meant to mean more than the characters' lack of social connections, and somehow ties into the faux-physics notions, but mostly it just seems like an awful lot of stage space for what is essentially a very small play.

Bottom Line

As is often the case with the genre of modern romantic comedies, one has to completely suspend disbelief and just go with the fact that for some reason these characters find some attraction in one another, despite the efforts of one or both to demonstrate that any such attraction is at best masked behind cynical attempts to defraud or at least mislead. At least the quality actors in this production make at least a plausible attempt at showing some changes in the characters that can justify why they eventually pair up.

As a character study, I guess it's OK. As a vehicle for two really good actors, it's excellent, and worth seeing just for that. But I wish they had a more plausible vehicle that actually justifies the time and effort of the artists. because of them it's pretty good, but feels like it really ought to be better.

The show runs for another week, through April 8, at ACT's Geary Theater.