For those of us unschooled in quantum mechanics (I sigh and raise my hand), Heisenberg was the physics professor who created the uncertainty principle, which says that you can’t exactly measure both the speed and position of a particle, because to measure one would affect the other. He also discovered why some metals become magnetized.
The physicist is never mentioned by name in the play named for him that’s opened at the Rep’s Studio Theatre. But both his benchmark concepts are at work in Simon Stephens’ fascinating drama. Alex Priest meets Georgie Burns in St. Pancras Station in London. Joneal Joplin plays Alex, a butcher who rather personifies the phrase “an old bachelor”, much, one suspects, in the mode of Garrison Keillor’s Norwegian-Minnesotan farmers. Georgie is Susan Louise O’Connor, a middle-aged American woman now living in London. She seems to be, at the very least, impulsive. The contrast between the two is vividly apparent by the time they part.
A week later, Georgie shows up at Alex’ butcher shop, and things really begin to take – or lose – shape. She did give Alex her real name, she says, but pretty much everything else was fiction, just an impulse. There are no customers in the shop, so the conversation – mostly hers, as frequently is the case – continues. Joplin’s Alex is not truly a curmudgeon, as the role could have been played. He’s very reserved, polite, but blunt when pushed, so controlled that his puzzlement at this very different woman is scarcely visible except in transient facial expressions and the occasional fleeting small gesture.
As Georgie, O’Connor seems very much a random particle, bouncing around physically and intellectually. Her dress and her hair are at odds with her age, she throws herself about with her enthusiasm, not always at the most opportune point, and she admits her son, from an affair with a man from Amsterdam, whom she raised in London, has gone to the United states “to find his North American roots”. He’s told her he never wants to be in contact with her again. We’re not quite sure if this is true or not – and we’re really not sure just how off-key she is mentally. Or maybe she’s conning Alex. Careful, exquisite work from both actors.
The story, with adult language flying right and left, is mesmerizing, and both actors carry it with aplomb and style, dazzling to watch. On one level, this is a sort of standard tale, couple meets cute, what happens next? But it’s way more complex and engaging to watch, both painful and funny. That’s a hard combination to carry off, but Stephens manages it perfectly.
Steve Woolf directs this careful 80-minute show, excellent pacing, and making full use of Peter and Margery Spack’s scenic design that bisects the theater. Despite the actors facing away from half the audience from time to time, everything is nicely audible, thanks in part to Rusty Wandall’s sound. Nathan W. Scheuer did the lighting and Marci Franklin put together the costumes.
The word “bijou” brings to mind, for some of us, the name often given to a movie theater back in the middle of the last century. It’s French, meaning something small and elegant. Heisenberg is a bijou.
Heisenberg
through November 12
Repertory Theatre St. Louis Studio Theatre
Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts
130 Edgar Rd., Webster Groves
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