Infinity is the perfect amount of time
Playwright Hannah Moscovitch doesn’t dodge the big issues. Moscovitch has written with distinction and considerable heart about the Holocaust, Nazi war criminals and gender politics in modern academia. Her plays (The Russian Play/East of Berlin – and others) have been produced all over the country (including Edmonton) and she has been dubbed “the hottest young playwright in Canada” by the media mavens of the East.
In her new(ish) play, Infinity, she goes beyond earthly borders to engage, as the dictionary defines the word, “the assumed limits that increase without bounds.” The play began as a commission to write about “time,” a concept today so fluid (thank you, Einstein) and so intangible that turning it into a drama seems absurd. Any attempt is in danger of foundering on the rocky shores of grandiose technical concepts that do not easily translate into the stuff of drama – conflict, emotion, heart, action, dialogue and intimacy. But, as we’ve seen here on Edmonton stages in such terrific productions as Constellations and Arcadia, arcane scientific principals can make for solid theatre.
Moscovitch wisely addresses the infinite by concentrating on a single family unit and exploring the nature of time through a simple love story.
So, in Infinity, a mathematician, a musician, and a theoretical physicist combine to probe the outer limits and inner passions of love and science.
Sarah Jean (Cayley Thomas) is dumped off from a cab and into the side door of the theatre. In a blistering monologue, she insists she is “very normal” but her words betray a very messed up young lady who is searching for emotional intimacy in a series of sexual encounters (described in some detail – “I’m fucked up by love,” she admits). She is set on this course by the increasing dysfunction of her family. Mathematics, safe reliable and predictable, becomes the only permanent thing in her unmoored life.
We are then thrown back in time to discover Carmen (Larissa Pohoreski) and Elliot (Ryan Parker) who meet awkwardly at a university party. He’s a science nerd with desultory social skills and a tendency to nervously speed talk. “You’re the prettiest girl in the room,” he burbles. She’s just broken up with her boyfriend and is susceptible to the honeyed words of this tentative but determined young scientist. Soon they begin a torrid relationship that ends up in a positive pregnancy test.
The inevitable happens. She abandons her promising career in music to becomes a frustrated housewife while he disappears into the esoteric world of theoretical physics.
The offspring of the increasingly complex relationship is Sarah Jean, a combination of her unhappy emotional mom and driven dad and possessing a good deal of the negative aspects of both.
Thomas is terrific in the role of Sarah Jean. She skillfully navigates a wide range of emotions and ages. As a young child, she throws a most impressive tantrum kicking and screaming and pounding the floor and then ages on stage without makeup or change of costume. The actress invites us into her character’s needy and churning inner life.
As much as Moscovitch must have enjoyed writing the whirlwind that is Sarah Jean, the playwright flirts dangerously close to stereotype with the unhappy wife and obsessive husband. However, she gives the expressive Parker (perhaps best known locally as a light comic actor) the space to take his closed-off academic persona and run with it. He impressively spouts science but the actor shines when he probes behind all those equations to uncover some surprisingly tender emotions. The playwright is less kind to Pohoreski who struggles to find a little dramatic territory to call her own as the unsupported home-bound wife. As her husband disappears into his work, she becomes less sure of his love – and of herself.
Pohoreski is also a fine musician and the play is made up of vignettes. In between the scenes, Pohoreski plays a series of cryptic and strident (what sound like) solo violin exercises that certainly break up (but also add to) the action.
There is no real set – just a couple of props but media designer Ian Jackson (lighting – Scott Peters), has devised projections of mathematical equations, musical notations (“Musicians understand time,” observes the play) and heavenly bodies floating through a black and white cosmos. They are excellent representations of the basic concepts of the play.
Infinity is about far more than science and mathematics. Moscovitch juxtaposes two stories here, – one of the lifelong search of the physicist to place bounds on time and, with a bit of help from Eisenstein and quantum mechanics, thinks he has it. But, as he lies dying, surrounded by his family, it turns out that in all that impressive scientific jargon, Parker’s physicist is not as untouched as he seems. He is emotionally attached to his family in idiosyncratic and oblique ways. There is one particular moment when he lies on his bed, deep (we think) into a new approach to time and all that it means. But his heart is somewhere else – somewhere where he is close to those he loves most.
Director Bradly Moss smartly propels his three players through the intricate maneuvers of their relationship with his usual skill with actors. He also keeps his eye on the cosmic concepts that inspired the work in the first place. In Moscovitch’s world, time is not a construct. It is real. It is fluid and ever-changing. With telling performances and the director’s ability to pull real feelings from Moscovitch’s words – academic concepts and real-life, time and love come satisfyingly together.
Infinity, a production of Theatre Network, plays in the Roxy on Gateway through May 6. Purchase tickets HERE.
