Albert Einstein's theories might
not seem the best choice for popular entertainment. But Alan Lightman's 1993
novella "Einstein's Dreams" was a best-seller and Burning Coal Theatre Company's
1998 stage adaptation was an early hit for the fledgling company. Now, for its
10th anniversary season, Burning Coal brings the piece back for another look.
Lightman's charming book centers on 1905, when Einstein was a patent office
clerk in Berne, Switzerland. It catalogs his dreams about how time might be
interpreted. Could there be moments when time stands still? Does time repeat
itself so that all actions return again and again?
What if time goes backward so that we remember the future? Lightman suggests
that these whimsical imaginings spurred Einstein on to his famous E=MC2 theory.
The author's literate vignettes turn stodgy physics into easily understood
concepts. The book's vivid language and beautiful imagery have obvious
theatrical appeal, already spawning more than 20 adaptations.
Burning Coal's version by playwright Kipp Cheng turns the book's orderly
progression of dreams into a fantasia of overlapping elements, adding
biographical references beyond what the book contains. Rebecca Holderness stages
the hour one-act as one long dream filled with sudden, bright images appearing
from murky shadows. She arranges the cast of 14 in various groupings, sometimes
in tableaux, sometimes as choreographed ensemble, sometimes as individual
personalities. Various characters emerge as necessary to become Einstein's
friends and family.
Clifford Campbell makes a wonderfully distracted, bumbling Einstein, his mind
always on theories even while dining with friends or working in the office. He
gives Einstein great humor without losing the dignity of his genius. Rosa
Wallace garners sympathy as Einstein's wife Mileva, her devotion constantly
tested by his focus on science rather than love life.
David Coulter gives Einstein's office mate Besso a jolly practicality, the
domestic arguments with his strong-willed artistic wife Ana (Gabrieal Griego)
adding familiar reality to the heady swirl.
The production employs an intriguing device in which Einstein's grown-up sons
and abandoned daughter speak to and for him, another bending of time. Stephen
LeTrent's quietly sober Hans and John Moletress' mentally unstable Eduard add
poignancy to their father's neglect, while Quinn Hawkesworth easily blends
daughter Liserl into Einstein's present office typist, another time twist.
The physical production is brilliantly executed, from Matthew Adelson's
constantly shifting lighting, to Vicki R. Davis' mostly white period costumes
and Chris Guse's otherworldly sound design.
The script and staging are exhilarating, although both obscure some of the
clarity of Lightman's visions, as well as throwing out tantalizing bits that beg
for a little more follow-up. And although in dreams anything is possible, some
of Holderness' images seem too much at odds with the accompanying text.
But it's justification enough if the production induces audiences to read
Lightman's book and to pursue more on Einstein's life and theories. A theater of
provocation trumps a theater of complacency.
Some people keep dream diaries. Myself, I keep theater and dance reviews.
They have more in common than you might at first think.
Each attempts to record and interpret evanescence—decidedly short-lived,
never-to-be-exactly-repeated phenomena. Each carefully analyzes
improbable (and, more than occasionally, bewildering) signals for the presence
of meaning. And despite—or, perhaps, because of—their best efforts, each takes
on that faint tinge of the surreal sometimes associated with foreign
correspondence.
I have before me the notes I took and the News & Observer review I
wrote for Burning Coal Theatre's first production of Einstein's Dreams in
November 1998. Celebrating the company's 10th season, Burning Coal has revived
the show, in Leggett Theater at Peace College, through Dec. 17. The words on the
page tell but a part of the story—a point that, as it happens, another show from
last week, Ride Again Productions' The Christmas Letters, has at its
heart.
The review doesn't disclose the certain stillness, that edge-of-the-chair
feeling we had at its opening—the uncanny sense, which we've had on more
than one occasion with Burning Coal, that we were witnessing a step into the
future of regional performance, and therefore a step into the totally
unknown.
The words can't entirely relate Morag Charlton's elegant set design of
suspended and earthbound objects, a shadow box whose elements constituted a
rebus taken directly from the subconscious, or the gravitas of Thomas
Limbert's original sound score, which echoed Philip Glass and Gustav Mahler at
key points. They don't completely impart the singular risk—or the success—of
Rebecca Holderness' fusing of direction, unconventional stage movement and
choreography, on an exceptional cast whose number included Ana Sferruzza,
Michele Vazquez, Bob Barr, Emily Ranii and a haunted Mark Filiaci. They don't
tell the degree to which we were all pulled into a waking dream—and an
impassioned enquiry into the properties of human bodies as they fall in and out
of time, space and relationships.
In particular, the words on that distant page don't indicate the hope that
Einstein's Dreams gave us for the future of new, strikingly original
theater in this region.
I must remember all of these qualities for a particular reason. For the most,
they are either absent or greatly attenuated in the current restaging of
Einstein's Dreams. Before we go any further, though, this caveat: We're
told that relativity challenges the perspective of those traveling near the
speed of light. Ironically enough, this show's relativity, so to speak, to the
1998 world premiere challenges mine.
In all likelihood, the less you know about the first show, the better this
one is going to look. After all, under Holderness' direction, Cliff Campbell
makes his eminently distracted Einstein a man all but under siege by the
sleeping and waking notions that chase him. And no harm can surely come when
masterful actor Quinn Hawkesworth ushers us into the speculative worlds of the
opening sequences—worlds where time is circular, or folds upon itself like
origami. David Coulter acquits himself well as Besso, Einstein's less than
brilliant friend, while Jim Sullivan almost seems to channel Tom Wolfe and
Gabrieal Griego gives painter Ana what she can in their abbreviated moments on
stage.
But. The original venue—the space known now as Kennedy Theater, before its
windows were closed, its walls were painted black and its acoustics dampened by
black draping—was large enough to let Holderness and visual artist Morag
Charlton both stretch out and explore unconventional, multi-story set design and
theatrical choreography, in a room as bright and airy as Alan Lightman's
text.
With all due respect, Leggett Theater is a shoebox by comparison. Early on,
this cast of 14 seems crammed on stage, particularly when they have to carefully
step across a maze of 12 stools and chairs that have been scattered across it.
So much for Holderness' original choreography.
The mysteries expand. Why—particularly when Charlton's name is still featured
on the company roster—was Matthew Adelson's workmanlike set design substituted
for her clearly superior original visions? Chris Guse's subtle, ambient pre-show
sound score of voices echoing down the halls of time fully earned the audience's
applause before the first line—but the comparatively low-grade electronic score
that followed (and a tasteless dance music curtain call) left us wondering why
Limbert's original score had been jettisoned. It would be a tall order for any
actor to follow Bob Barr's initial invocation for the end of time. But John
Moletress, who elsewhere has been allowed to tinge yet another
character—Einstein's son, Eduard—with sexual melodrama, isn't up to it.
For all its strengths, Kip Erante Chang's original adaptation still seemed
the first act of a larger work. With much less magic now onstage, the script's
seams show in a way they didn't once; it doesn't seem as much finished as
abandoned in mid-thought—like the half-built bridge Lightman evokes at one point
in the text.
That is tragic. Once, Einstein's Dreams pointed toward the future of
performance, our future. Now, the work points mainly to a glory unfortunately in
its past.
REVIEW Number 3
