Two people are in a train station. You’d think they’d be waiting for a train, but it turns out they’re not. It’s unclear what they’re waiting for. Moreover, something has happened before the play starts. The situation is already awkward. “It’s fine,” he says. “It’s not,” she says. “It’s just weird. I feel awful.” We don’t know what they’re talking about.
“Were you supposed to be meeting him here?” he asks. “No. What gives you that impression?” she responds. “Nothing. Just,” he begins. “You’re just joining the dots,” she interjects. “Woman walks up to man. He’s sitting down minding his own business.”
“You kissed the back of my neck,” he says. We still don’t know who they are. But we know something is drawing them together.
Heisenberg, by Simon Stephens — running now at New Haven Theatre Company for the next two weekends, through May 9 — tells the story of the relationship between Alex and Georgie, who meet abruptly in a train station.
They have the kind of jerking, somewhat off-putting interaction that suggests that perhaps they won’t and shouldn’t meet again. But instead, in the second scene, Georgie arrives unannounced at the butcher shop where Alex works. She tells him that she isn’t stalking him, or maybe she is. He was easy enough to Google, having told her his name and occupation. She tells him everything she told him before was a lie, that she’s really a different kind of person. They begin to talk more, and it’s so awkward it isn’t; so off-kilter that it’s disarming.
By the third scene, it’s a date.
Neither Georgie nor Alex ever mention it explicitly, but the title of the play — which in an earlier version had the subtitle The Uncertainty Principle — refers to, as Wikipedia handily defines it, “a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics. It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.”
In applying this mathematical concept of elusiveness more poetically, and to human relationships, Stephens lands in less precise territory than the principle dictates. But it’s not as overwrought as it might sound. The play earns its title by looking, in quite granular detail, at the ways that what Georgie and Alex say and do not say to each other continually shape and reshape their relationship to one another — and the ways that a series of almost imperceptible shifts can suddenly add up to a big change.
The audience can appreciate these subtleties thanks to NHTC’s own finely tuned production, directed nimbly by Steve Scarpa. The action takes place on an unfussy stage, in which the props are disassembled and rebuilt from scene to scene. Wardrobe changes are slight. This means that all attention is on the actors, who are almost in close enough proximity to one another that the viewer can take in both actors — the speaker and the listener — in one go. Melissa Andersen as Georgie and George Kulp as Alex ably swerve through the subtleties the play lays out for them, letting us feel the sense of instability that both characters often feel, whether it’s their shakiness about themselves and their motivations or their occasional moments in which the sheer weight of the improbability of their relationship crashes around them.
On its surface, Heisenberg plays almost like a romantic comedy — in other words, line for line, it’s often quite funny — with Georgie as the eccentric, energetic younger woman and Alex as the gruff, taciturn, older man. But the play has more to say than that. It gives both characters complexity and depth with each passing scene, and as we experience revelation after revelation — some larger and louder than others — it adds up to a sharp take on the way perhaps all relationships are constructed.
Who among us doesn’t, when first meeting others, present a certain version of ourselves, bringing out some aspects of our personalities and hiding or omitting others? The contradictions we have, especially the ones we’re not terribly proud of, tend to come out later.
Heisenberg succeeds as a quietly original piece of theatre in its intense attention to the way that cat-and-mouse game affects the relationship itself. By the time the play’s finished, it has made a strong case for the improbability of most human relationships. They came to be because certain conversations played out exactly as they did, and no other way; had the details been rearranged, certain things said earlier or left unsaid altogether, it might not have worked out at all.
So many plays make tragedy out of the dissolution of a romance. Heisenberg looks at it the other way: that any of them happen at all, perhaps, is defying the odds, and their persistence is a small miracle to be cherished.
Heisenberg runs at New Haven Theatre Company, 839 Chapel St., for this weekend and next through May 9. It was announced at this first show that the run is almost sold out; visit NHTC’s website to grab the last couple tickets, or to get on a waitlist.
