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12/16/2015Theater: 'Heisenberg' -- Be Certain It's Worth Seeing | Evernote Web
https://www.evernote.com/Home.action#n=0da662d3-51b0-46d3-9f5a-8c733e0c5a70&ses=4&sh=2&sds=5&1/3Theater: 'Heisenberg' -- Be Certain It's WorthSeeingTheater: 'Heisenberg' -- Be Certain It's Worth SeeingHEISENBERG *** 1/2 out of **** MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUBTwo people. Two tables. Two chairs. What more do you need for very satisfying theater? Nothing. Heisenberg isa world premiere play at Manhattan Theatre Club and it surely marks a very good week for author SimonStephens. On Sunday, he'll be celebrated for The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, whichStephens adapted from the novel by Mark Haddon. An unlikely project, it's likely to win multiple Tonys andprobably the Best Play Tony for Stephens himself. That show had every bell and whistle imaginable for bringingto life the interior mind of a young man somewhere on the spectrum of autism.With Heisenberg, Stephens has pared it down. The staging is as simple as possible, featuring two actors, twotables, two chairs and nothing else. It's the perfect counterpart to Curious Incident. While it's not as ambitious asthat work, it's a very good play given a very good production with two very good actors.Mary-Louise Parker plays Georgie Burns, a flake of a woman. The play begins just after she's apparently walkedup to a much older man on a train platform in London and kissed him on the neck. She doesn't know him, hedoesn't know her, she can't really explain herself but there it is. From this nutty moment spills out a story offriendship and romance.The man she's nibbled is Alex Priest, a butcher who lives alone and never married; clearly, he hasn't beenkissed on the neck or anywhere else for a very long time. Denis Arndt is wonderfully good capturing the quiethumor, integrity and wary warmth of this man. He's no easy mark but a mark he is, perhaps.Georgie apologizes and flirts and rambles on; it's the sort of nutty character that can grow tiresome very quicklyand one I've a knee-jerk aversion to in stories. But Parker is too good for that -- she keeps Georgie too real to bedismissed as some wacky "character." Georgie tracks Alex down (there aren't many butchers in that area ofLondon with his name, after all). Once she's explained "googling" to him and admitting she lied about this andthat when they met and suggests he ask her out -- even though Alex is old enough to be her grandfather (nevermind her father) -- we're off to the races.Director Mark Brokaw provides a steady, sure hand to these proceedings. I'd call them modest proceedings butit's too rich a tale and too well-performed for that. Frankly, it's a pleasure as always to see the merest propsbecome a bench at a train station, a butcher's shop, a bedroom, New Jersey (yes, New Jersey) and so on usingjust our imagination. Georgie is a lonely soul who has let her son drift out of her life. Alex is a man whosebusiness is slowly fading; no one needs a butcher much anymore and he's left alone to ponder the one long-gone love of his youth. It takes little imagination to see how they could be drawn to each other.Tony and Emmy winner Parker is marvelous of course and it's a pleasure to see her in such intimatesurroundings as The Studio at Stage II of New York City Center. The audience is seated on two sides of a smallrectangular play area, with the two actors between us. When the work is good (as it is here), when the actorsgood and the director in control, you never feel in these sort of stagings that an actor has their back to you orthey're playing to the other side of the room; it just feels natural and believable. Parker is matched very well by
12/16/2015Theater: 'Heisenberg' -- Be Certain It's Worth Seeing | Evernote Web
https://www.evernote.com/Home.action#n=0da662d3-51b0-46d3-9f5a-8c733e0c5a70&ses=4&sh=2&sds=5&2/3Arndt, a veteran and accomplished actor I don't believe I've seen before. It's a battle of wits and while Parker isgiven fancy moves and a torrent of words, Arndt parries easily with a raised eyebrow, a choice phrase or juststoic silence.Stephens makes one crucial choice about halfway through the play that was a little too conventional, a choicethat explained things too neatly for my taste. Happily, it wasn't a fatal error and the story recovered once it gotback to the relationship of these two equally needy and interesting people. Some ideas are left dangling. Alexannounces that he has a habit of bursting into tears every once in a while for no apparent reason. But thisspontaneous act never really happens. (Oh, he cries once but it's clearly motivated and doesn't startle you in theleast.) And I must have missed any particular allusion to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or some otherreason the play is called Heisenberg. Nonetheless, I'm certain this is a production worth seeing.THEATER OF 2015Honeymoon In Vegas ** The Woodsman *** Constellations ** 1/2 Taylor Mac's A 24 Decade History Of Popular Music 1930s-1950s ** 1/2 Let The Right One In ** Da no rating A Month In The Country ** 1/2 Parade in Concert at Lincoln Center ** 1/2 Hamilton at the Public *** The World Of Extreme Happiness ** 1/2 Broadway By The Year 1915-1940 ** Verite * 1/2 Fabulous! * The Mystery Of Love & Sex ** An Octoroon at Polonsky Shakespeare Center *** 1/2 Fish In The Dark * The Audience *** Josephine And I *** Posterity * 1/2 The Hunchback Of Notre Dame ** Lonesome Traveler ** On The Twentieth Century *** Radio City Music Hall's New York Spring Spectacular ** 1/2 The Heidi Chronicles * The Tallest Tree In The Forest * 1/2 Broadway By The Year: 1941-1965 *** Twelfth Night by Bedlam *** What You Will by Bedlam *** 1/2 Wolf Hall Parts I and II ** 1/2 Skylight *** Nellie McKay at 54 Below *** Ludic Proxy ** 1/2 It Shoulda Been You ** Finding Neverland ** 1/2 Hamlet w Peter Sarsgaard at CSC no stars
https://www.evernote.com/Home.action#n=0da662d3-51b0-46d3-9f5a-8c733e0c5a70&ses=4&sh=2&sds=5&1/3Theater: 'Heisenberg' -- Be Certain It's WorthSeeingTheater: 'Heisenberg' -- Be Certain It's Worth SeeingHEISENBERG *** 1/2 out of **** MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUBTwo people. Two tables. Two chairs. What more do you need for very satisfying theater? Nothing. Heisenberg isa world premiere play at Manhattan Theatre Club and it surely marks a very good week for author SimonStephens. On Sunday, he'll be celebrated for The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, whichStephens adapted from the novel by Mark Haddon. An unlikely project, it's likely to win multiple Tonys andprobably the Best Play Tony for Stephens himself. That show had every bell and whistle imaginable for bringingto life the interior mind of a young man somewhere on the spectrum of autism.With Heisenberg, Stephens has pared it down. The staging is as simple as possible, featuring two actors, twotables, two chairs and nothing else. It's the perfect counterpart to Curious Incident. While it's not as ambitious asthat work, it's a very good play given a very good production with two very good actors.Mary-Louise Parker plays Georgie Burns, a flake of a woman. The play begins just after she's apparently walkedup to a much older man on a train platform in London and kissed him on the neck. She doesn't know him, hedoesn't know her, she can't really explain herself but there it is. From this nutty moment spills out a story offriendship and romance.The man she's nibbled is Alex Priest, a butcher who lives alone and never married; clearly, he hasn't beenkissed on the neck or anywhere else for a very long time. Denis Arndt is wonderfully good capturing the quiethumor, integrity and wary warmth of this man. He's no easy mark but a mark he is, perhaps.Georgie apologizes and flirts and rambles on; it's the sort of nutty character that can grow tiresome very quicklyand one I've a knee-jerk aversion to in stories. But Parker is too good for that -- she keeps Georgie too real to bedismissed as some wacky "character." Georgie tracks Alex down (there aren't many butchers in that area ofLondon with his name, after all). Once she's explained "googling" to him and admitting she lied about this andthat when they met and suggests he ask her out -- even though Alex is old enough to be her grandfather (nevermind her father) -- we're off to the races.Director Mark Brokaw provides a steady, sure hand to these proceedings. I'd call them modest proceedings butit's too rich a tale and too well-performed for that. Frankly, it's a pleasure as always to see the merest propsbecome a bench at a train station, a butcher's shop, a bedroom, New Jersey (yes, New Jersey) and so on usingjust our imagination. Georgie is a lonely soul who has let her son drift out of her life. Alex is a man whosebusiness is slowly fading; no one needs a butcher much anymore and he's left alone to ponder the one long-gone love of his youth. It takes little imagination to see how they could be drawn to each other.Tony and Emmy winner Parker is marvelous of course and it's a pleasure to see her in such intimatesurroundings as The Studio at Stage II of New York City Center. The audience is seated on two sides of a smallrectangular play area, with the two actors between us. When the work is good (as it is here), when the actorsgood and the director in control, you never feel in these sort of stagings that an actor has their back to you orthey're playing to the other side of the room; it just feels natural and believable. Parker is matched very well by
12/16/2015Theater: 'Heisenberg' -- Be Certain It's Worth Seeing | Evernote Web
https://www.evernote.com/Home.action#n=0da662d3-51b0-46d3-9f5a-8c733e0c5a70&ses=4&sh=2&sds=5&2/3Arndt, a veteran and accomplished actor I don't believe I've seen before. It's a battle of wits and while Parker isgiven fancy moves and a torrent of words, Arndt parries easily with a raised eyebrow, a choice phrase or juststoic silence.Stephens makes one crucial choice about halfway through the play that was a little too conventional, a choicethat explained things too neatly for my taste. Happily, it wasn't a fatal error and the story recovered once it gotback to the relationship of these two equally needy and interesting people. Some ideas are left dangling. Alexannounces that he has a habit of bursting into tears every once in a while for no apparent reason. But thisspontaneous act never really happens. (Oh, he cries once but it's clearly motivated and doesn't startle you in theleast.) And I must have missed any particular allusion to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or some otherreason the play is called Heisenberg. Nonetheless, I'm certain this is a production worth seeing.THEATER OF 2015Honeymoon In Vegas ** The Woodsman *** Constellations ** 1/2 Taylor Mac's A 24 Decade History Of Popular Music 1930s-1950s ** 1/2 Let The Right One In ** Da no rating A Month In The Country ** 1/2 Parade in Concert at Lincoln Center ** 1/2 Hamilton at the Public *** The World Of Extreme Happiness ** 1/2 Broadway By The Year 1915-1940 ** Verite * 1/2 Fabulous! * The Mystery Of Love & Sex ** An Octoroon at Polonsky Shakespeare Center *** 1/2 Fish In The Dark * The Audience *** Josephine And I *** Posterity * 1/2 The Hunchback Of Notre Dame ** Lonesome Traveler ** On The Twentieth Century *** Radio City Music Hall's New York Spring Spectacular ** 1/2 The Heidi Chronicles * The Tallest Tree In The Forest * 1/2 Broadway By The Year: 1941-1965 *** Twelfth Night by Bedlam *** What You Will by Bedlam *** 1/2 Wolf Hall Parts I and II ** 1/2 Skylight *** Nellie McKay at 54 Below *** Ludic Proxy ** 1/2 It Shoulda Been You ** Finding Neverland ** 1/2 Hamlet w Peter Sarsgaard at CSC no stars