'Disappearing' act is pure magic
It is a telling sign of the unequivocal magic of director Simon McBurney that within the first few minutes of "A Disappearing Number" even a mathematically challenged member of the audience (that would be me, sweaty palms and all) began thinking about numbers in the most complex and all-consuming ways.
Sadly, "A Disappearing Number" -- the mind-altering production McBurney created in collaboration with Complicite, his remarkable London-based, globally admired theater company -- will not be seen in Chicago, though it might have been an ideal match for the programming of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's World Stages or the Museum of Contemporary Art's performance series. But last week, with memories of several astonishing Complicite productions of the past 25 years still dancing in my head, I hopped on a Megabus for the nearly five-hour ride to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Complicite was making its sole U.S. stop under the auspices of the University Music Society. And I was grandly rewarded.
terms.
"A DISAPPEARING NUMBER" by the Complicite theater of Great Britain (presented by the University Music Society of Ann Arbor, Mich.)
It is not just the enormous scope of the story that McBurney and his actors spin so beautifully, so inventively and so powerfully in this production. Though granted, this 110-minute piece does deal with an unusually vast number of "big issues": the mathematical and spiritual nature of infinity; the sometimes unbridgeable differences between Eastern and Western thought; the destructive nature of colonialism; the quest for eternity (whether through reproduction or the introduction of a new way of thinking); the disconnects in our contemporary global culture that often far outreach the "connections" made possible by computers and cell phones. But the real wonder of it all is that McBurney finds a way to deeply humanize all these ideas -- seamlessly linking an actual historical story with a fictional contemporary tale and echoing E.M Forster's classic novel A Passage to India along the way.
The "true" story concerns the relationship between two groundbreaking mathematicians: the Cambridge-based G.H. Hardy (played by an aptly restrained but passionate David Annen) and the young Indian brahmin Srinivasa Ramanujan (Shane Shambhu, who brings a beautifully understated awkwardness to his role), essentially a self-taught genius. From 1913 until Ramanujan's untimely death in 1920 (when he was just 32), these two men engaged in a complex intellectual partnership that focused on number theory, infinite series and various other abstract musings that have ramifications for today's high-flying proponents of string theory and other "keys to the universe" notions.
The contemporary story concerns the pairing of a brilliant mathematics professor, Ruth (the wholly remarkable Saskia Reeves), who is obsessed by the work of Hardy and Ramanujan, who is caught off-guard by the attentions of Al Cooper (an appealingly high-energy Firdous Bamji), a globetrotting, fortysomething Indian-American investment banker who has never set foot in India.
Using a chalkboard that flips into a projection screen as the backdrop for some remarkable high-tech footage (credited as "by Sven Ortel for mesmer") and sound design (by Christopher Shutt), "A Disappearing Number" carries us along on handwritten formulas, speed-of-light scenes of Indian streetlife and the cacaphony of modern airports. Throughout, the music of Nitin Sawhney (enhanced by a tabla player onstage who beats out mathematically demonic rhythms) drives thought in a different way. And when snowflakes fall in the guise of projected numbers, the mathematics of crystallization become visible.
As I said, magic.
One final note: McBurney is embarked on a radically different project at the moment -- directing the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," with a celebrity cast that includes Katie Holmes, John Lithgow, Patrick Wilson and Dianne Wiest. It begins previews Thursday and opens Oct. 16 at the Schoenfeld Theatre on West 45th Street.