"This Much I Know" at Aurora Theatre Company

 

Aurora Theatre Company photo, uncredited

Oh, my. Now that I've broken the ice and written a posting, it seems like time to revisit posting about plays.

This world premiere of a play by the creative team that brought us the acclaimed Eureka Day (playwright Jonathan Spector and director Josh Costello) is really terrific, so I felt like I needed to use the vast reach of this blog (yes, that was sarcasm) to try to entice a few more people to see it.

The Play

First off, this is a well-crafted piece of writing. It's clever without being full of itself, and thoughtful but without straining the brain. Inspired in part by the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman (notably Thinking, Fast and Slow), the play explores how (or whether) people make decisions and choices and how they react to events outside their control. So we have three characters: a professor, his wife, and a student, but all of the actors portray a variety of characters as the narrative slips in and out of time.

Ultimately only the professor's character really gets fleshed out--we have many questions left about the wife and student. But that's a detail, really; the overall effect is still quite satisfying.

The Production

The staging is nice and simple, though there is a fairly busy wall that gets projections, talking portraits, and a number of flags popping out of it. The rest is mostly space for the actors, with a few simple items: blocks that serve as chairs, a desk, etc. And we mostly get to focus on the three actors. Lukesh (Rajesh Bose) is a self-assured professor of psychology who analyzes everything. His wife, Natalya (Anna Ishida), has her life upended by an accident. And the student, Harold (Kenny Toll), arrives in Lukesh's office having been ostracized from the English department for his white-nationalist views. As Lukesh struggles to hold together his relationship with Natalya and Harold comes to grips with his relationship with the rest of the world, we're drawn into background stories that take us to Stalinist USSR and modern Russia, the world of online racism, and a number of Lukesh's lectures that increasingly intersect with his personal life.

Through all of this, the players are shifting in and out of their roles. It's quite a deft choreography, and mostly keeps the play pretty seamless. There are two intermissions in the just-over-two-hour play, which seems a bit much, but they are the two logical breaks in the story, and I suspect the actors need a breather.

Bottom Line

It's really refreshing to see solid, new work like this. The script is really interesting without being over the top, and the acting and direction are quite wonderful. The show is probably a little bit longer than it needs to be, but it's well worth it, and never drags. I quite enjoyed it!

The show runs at Aurora through October 2nd. I definitely recommend seeing it.