Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✩✩
by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Ross Manson
• Tarragon Theatre and Volcano, Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto
April 1-May 3, 2015;
January 4-29, 2017;
• National Arts Centre, Ottawa
February 28-March 11, 2017;
• Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto
March 22-April 2, 2017
“Proving the Commonplace”
Hannah Moscovitch’s play Infinity, now having a remount after its world premiere run at the Tarragon Theatre in 2015, is a play about the nature of time that seems to do nothing but fritter it away. Initially, the idea behind the play, a coproduction between the Tarragon and Volcano, seems like a good one. Ross Manson, Volcano’s Artistic Director, asked Moscovitch to write a play about time from the points of view of theoretical physics and music. One assumes the intent was to look at time from both an intellectual and an emotional perspective.
This may sound like a promising idea, but the play Moscovitch has produced is unsatisfying. It has only three characters – Elliot (Paul Braunstein), Carmen (Amy Rutherford) and Sarah Jean (Haley McGee*) – but Moscovitch is unable to make us care about any of them. Partially, this is because the play’s concept forces the characters to have a semi-allegorical function – Elliot as physics, Carmen as music and Sarah Jean as mathematics. Partially, this is because the conflicts of Moscovitch’s characters seem more manufactured than immanent. And partially, this is because Moscovitch’s dialogue is so banal especially when contrasted with the beautiful music Njo Kong Kie has written for Andréa Tyniec to play on the violin between scenes.
The play follows what seem to be two separate story lines in alternation – one involving Carmen and Elliot and one involving Sarah Jean – until about halfway through, Moscovitch reveals how the story lines are related. In the Carmen/Elliot story, we see how the two meet when they are both graduate students and follow them through their struggles living together, having a baby and Elliot’s success. In the Sarah Jean story, Sarah Jean, unlike Carmen and Elliot, addresses the audience directly to explain to us why she is so angry. A former roommate told Sarah Jean that her greatest problem was not understanding love. To examine whether this is true, Sarah Jean gives us a chronological survey of her fairly sordid sex life from youth to the present to see what part of love she doesn’t understand.
Not only are the Carmen/Elliot and Sarah Jean stories presented in different styles, they contrast in mood. The couples’ story is primarily serious; Sarah Jean’s is primarily comic. The two narratives connect when Moscovitch reveals that Sarah Jean is the daughter of Carmen and Elliot. From that point on the stories move forward, with McGee sometimes playing their 8-year-old girl in the past and sometimes her grown-up self in the present.
One of the plays many flaws is that Moscovitch lets us know a great deal about Elliot and Sarah Jean and virtually nothing about Carmen. Elliot talks about what he is trying to do in his doctoral thesis on time. We know more than we want to about Sarah Jean’s sex life. But we never see Carmen composing or even talking about what, how or why she composes or what goals she has in music that might parallel Elliot’s goals in physics. It may be that Tyniec’s playing Njo Kong Kie’s compositions is supposed to represent this aspect of Carmen. Yet, in performance that is not the effect. It seems mostly like music where the tension of a scene coalesces before one scene changes to the next.
A second flaw goes back to the play’s very conception. Theoretical physics does not present a unified view of the subject of time. Manson was able to get famed theoretical physicist Lee Smolin on board as an advisor, but Smolin’s view of time, as expressed in his book Time Reborn (2013), happens to be the opposite of the most current view of time of such thinkers as Stephen Hawking. (For a play in line with the Hawking school of thought, look at Constellations from 2012 by Nick Payne.) The result is that the play represents Lee Smolin’s view of time rather than that of theoretical physics in general.
The current view of time, one espoused by Elliot at the beginning of the play, follows Einstein in saying, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent”. The view Elliot announces near the end of the play is Smolin’s “revolutionary” view that time is real. To the layman the idea that time is real is merely common sense. It is only a “new” breakthrough if the leaders in your subject of expertise have been claiming the opposite for 100 years. Thus, Elliot’s big breakthrough at the end is no eye-opener for the audience.
Sarah Jean arrives at a similar breakthrough that is similarly commonplace, i.e. “love is real”. Moscovitch, succumbing to the tendency to overexplain, all too common in Canadian drama, has Sarah Jean explicitly link her discovery to her father’s. Her struggle to discover “love is real” is just like her father’s to find “time is real”. Rather than being impressed, all we can think is how easily intellectuals can delude themselves about things others take as givens.
Strangely enough, although Moscovitch’s main character espouses Smolin’s view of time, the structure of her play contradicts it. By alternating scenes taking place in Sarah Jane’s present with those between her parents occurring before she was born, Moscovitch shows us a place where past, present and future do all exist at the same time. Does Moscovitch thus disagree with Smolin’s view or does she think that art can represent what does not exist in reality?
In spite of these conceptual and dramaturgical issues, the cast give excellent performances. Braunstein’s character is the richest. As a man working on a theoretical questions, he shows us how Elliot in only ever partially present in the everyday world since his work that consists of thinking never stops. When he finally does make his Smolin-influenced breakthrough he presents it with a mixture of humbleness and wonder,
Rutherford has the thankless, underwritten role of Carmen, who seems either to be complaining or crying or both. Since Moscovitch shows us that Carmen knows what Elliot is like when she first meets him, when they live together and when they have a child, it seems improbable that she continues to complain about what Elliot is like. She knows already. The question is why she can’t accept it. Besides, if Carmen really is a composer, she would, in fact, be in the same mental position as Elliot – always solving compositional problems or having musical insights in the background, thus both in and not in the everyday world all the time. She thus should understand what Elliot is like rather than act as if he is mentally abandoning her. Rutherford plays the manufactured arguments Moscovitch write with all the conviction she can, but they still ring false.
Haley McGee delivers her lines as Sarah Jean with a dry, self-critical humour that is quite amusing. She is also effective as her younger emotionally labile self, but the tantrums that Moscovitch gives her to enact belong more to children who are less than four rather than to eight-year-olds.
Teresa Przybylski’s striated, curving abstract set creates the impression of something, let’s say time, permanently streaking past the character’s. Given the banality of Moscovitch’s dialogue, it’s not surprising that the most effective scenes are those nonverbal scenes choreographed by Kate Alton that both accord more fully with Njo Kong Kie’s music and give an aura of greater mystery to the action that the spoken scenes ever do.
It may have seemed like a good idea to try to unify theoretical physics, music and mathematics all in the same play, but since theoretical physics is still struggles to come up with single unified theory or “theory of everything” and since music and mathematics themselves are hardly static entities, it really is too much to ask a playwright to unite all three when all are currently disunited in themselves. Moscovitch has done what she can, but it’s possible that something beyond an uninteresting family drama is needed convey such complex ideas.
*In the 2017 revival and tour the role is played by Vivien Endicott-Douglas.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is an edited version of the review of the play’s world premiere in 2015. The creative team and cast except for Haley McGee are the same.
Photos: (from top) Paul Braunstein, Andréa Tyniec (behind scrim), Amy Rutherford and Haley McGee; Haley McGee; Amy Rutherford and Paul Braunstein. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2015-04-02
Infinity