Einstein’s Dreams

Play

With Steven Barkhimer (Michele Besso, Dreamteller), Robert Najarian (Albert Einstein), Debra Wise (Typist, Dreamteller)

Three figures populate the stage: Einstein (Robert Najarian), Michele Besso (Steve Barkhimer) and The Typist (Debra Wise). They romp, they dance, they grin, they gesticulate, all in the service of creating an impressionistic collage of Einstein’s discoveries in 1905 about special relativity.

Michele Besso was Einstein’s friend and co-worker at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern before Einstein was able to secure a university posting; they remained lifelong friends. A play based on that relationship would itself be quite interesting, but this is not it.

This play is more of a scientifically-inspired cabaret that utilizes brief takes on Einstein’s early inquiries and utilizes the personalities of Einstein, Besso and the typist (and various characters portrayed by Wise) to convey the sense of Einstein’s insight.

It all works, up to a point.

One couldn’t ask for three better actors to take on the job. Wise, Barkhimer and Najarian are all accomplished thespians and do their very best to pull a successful entertainment out of this pastiche that focuses minimally on the characters themselves. The actors are funny, charming and graceful, but the characters are not well-enough drawn to give any real sense of who they are. If one accepts the simplicity of this motif, the fast-paced series of brief dramatic episodes works just fine – it’s light, it’s quick and it tickles the intellect.

The texture of the play derives from that of the novel on which it is based. By using the construct of thirty dream sequences to convey something about Einstein’s imaaginative process, it is clearly more directed to fanciful and scientific reflections than to something more focused on characters and destinies.

A novelistic format, however, provides something that a play doesn’t – the time itself to digest it. When one reads such an impressionistic amalgamation, one has the capacity to put the book down, reflect, situate oneself amidst the flurry of images and ideas and compensate, with one’s own organizational capacities, for the episodic structure of the book.

In play format, the challenge, especially for those who may not be intimately familiar with the particular chronicles of the book, is to put everything together in real time. In this case, it’s something of a challenge to do so, and though the lightness of cabaret prevails – there certainly are many entertainments along the way – it is somewhat challenging to put together a sense of the whole. The show is very short – 70 minutes without intermission – and feels a bit like a race through ideas about time, with delightful moments along the way, but not always a clear sense of where one has been or where one is going.

Robert Najarian, among other things, is a talented dancer (he teaches and consults in fight choreography), and his gestures, throughout the performance, give a delightful and entertaining embellishment to his animated portrayal of the great physicist.

Roberto Cassan provides wonderful and inventive musical accompaniment throughout, corroborating the vibe of offbeat intellectual cabaret.

Indeed, as with all of its efforts to produce a series of plays that have scientific import, the Central Square Theater has continued a noble mission.

Running in repertory at Central Square Theater with Einstein’s Dreams is Michael Frayn’s dramatic hit Copenhagen, about a meeting between the nuclear physicists Niels Bohr (Steven Barkhimer), from Denmark, and Werner Heisenberg (Robert Najarian), from Germany, near the end of World War II.

– BADMan