George (Paul Schoeffler, right) is visited by the ghost of Sir Isaac Newton (Jonathan Hadley) in Carole Buggé’s Strings Attached.
Early in Carole Buggé’s new comedy-drama, Strings Attached, one of the author’s characters name-checks British writer Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen, about an actual 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the Danish capital. Buggé’s reference is a two-edged sword: her own work doesn’t come close to Frayn’s, but it does indicate that she has a passion and knowledge of physics that she wants to share with audiences. Frayn’s treatment is a rare instance of making science dramatically interesting, but Buggé’s overstuffed play is less viable.
It’s not that she doesn’t make a wholehearted stab at it. Act I opens with a married couple on a train platform: June (Robyne Parrish) and George (Paul Schoeffler) are awaiting a colleague, Rory (Brian Richardson), who is running late. All three have given papers at a physics conference in Cambridge, England.
Robyne Parrish is June, and Brian Richardson plays Rory, both physicists with competing theories.
Once the three enter a train compartment (cannily broken apart by set designer Jessica Parks into a horizontal collection of seats, with glimpses of the British Rail logo at both ends), their conversation turns to electrons and wavelengths, of course. And from then on Buggé seems intent on explaining every physics theory from Newton to the present day.
In fact, Sir Isaac Newton himself (Jonathan Hadley, dressed by Elena Vannoni in a green frock coat, lace cuffs and jabot, and white wig) appears to George to discuss his views and theories.
Newton: I invented the world, dear boy! My three laws of motion, along with my discovery of gravity, explained the movement of the cosmos! What is it you have now at the center of creation?
George: The Big Bang.
Newton: How vulgar.
Newton’s prudery matches George’s character, too, because George is landed gentry and a stuffed shirt, caustic and condescending. Also making appearances as iconic ghosts are Marie Curie (Bonnie Black), June’s idol, and Max Planck (Russell Saylor), the dapper German who inspires Rory and shares a love of music: he and Einstein relaxed by playing together. “Music is based on physics,” Planck helpfully says, although Rory would have known that.
Much of the dialogue is intent on explaining what the scientists would have known without elaboration, and smacks of an introductory college course:
Rory: I read your latest paper, June—I thought it was brilliant, the idea of gravity leaking into our universe from a parallel one. It dovetails so well with M theory.
George: [to Rory] You really think there are parallel universes tucked away in between ours—
Rory: The idea is at least as old as Emmanuel Kant.
June: His theory of parallel planes, or “separate worlds.”
Or, in a dialogue between June and Curie, June points out that her theory of special relativity has been overtaken by Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.” Although the phrase “spooky action” provides a frisson of enjoyment, the general discussion is head-spinning.
“Buggé seems intent on immersing the audience in every physics theory from Newton to the present day. ”
To counterbalance the physics—the punning title refers to string theory, while conversations cover wavelengths and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and inevitably Schrödinger’s cat is dragged in—Buggé has the good sense to make her characters well-rounded: June is a rock-climbing enthusiast, and George is in thrall to his Catholicism, which naturally causes tension with scientific theory. But the wit that Frayn and Tom Stoppard use for weighty subjects, for example, is transmuted here into two sets of broadly caricatured foreign couples (Black and Saylor) who stumble into the compartment for comic relief.
In Act II, the characters again meet on a train platform, only now June and Rory are married. (Parallel universes?) The conversations about electrons and such still make for heavy weather, though.
Schoeffler with an intrusive Ukrainian passenger (Russell Saylor) in Strings Attached. Photographs by John Quilty.
There are also brief time-outs for the actors, under the direction of Alexa Kelly, to deliver some well-known lines of poetry expertly, presumably to show that scientists are not a collection of dry bones. Newton recites William Blake’s The Tyger (“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright”), George recites lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and June throws in lines from May Oliver. They are a welcome respite from the talk of super-symmetry and M theory, and interestingly point toward those artists’ grappling with the mysteries of the universe in their own ways.
All the actors are good, but near the end everything falters. It feels as if Buggé has more that she wants the audience to understand, although it’s already more than a layman can comprehend. She would have been well-advised to heed Rory’s comment on Frayn’s Copenhagen: “A bit dodgy, writing about a real event. Seems you’re setting yourself up for failure.” Although the events in Strings Attached are fictional, the principle still applies.
The Pulse Ensemble Theatre production of Strings Attached plays through Oct. 1 at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; matinees are at 3 p.m. Wednesday and Sunday. For tickets and information, call the box office at (212) 714-2442, ext. 45, or visit bfany.org/theatre-row.
