Meshing fable, science works at Annex - for a while
Theater review
"Einstein's Dreams." Directed by Mark Gallagher. Thursday-Sunday through March 11 at Annex Theatre, 1916 Fourth Ave., Seattle. $7-12. 206-728-0933.
There must be something in the air. First the Flying Karamazov Brothers juggle the theories of Albert Einstein in a new show, "L'Universe." Now Annex Theatre is raiding the physicist's dreams.
The Annex ensemble (under Mark Gallagher's direction) is using music, dance and choral dialogue to convey some Zenlike fables about time from the popular book, "Einstein's Dreams."
The project is a theatrical challenge, to say the least. Alan Lightman's experimental novel depicts Einstein as a patent clerk living in Switzerland in 1905 - the year the young scientist published several important papers on the elasticity and relativity of time.
As Einstein sleeps, Lightman imagines the dreams that led him to his theories. More than two dozen are conveyed, like extended haikus, in lyrical, meditative segments of a few pages each.
Lightman's meshing of science and fable, psychology and treatise has won praise from such admirers as novelist Salman Rushdie, who called it "intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written."
That there is no sustained narrative thread through Lightman's slender tome, just a theme and variations, has not deterred the Annex folks one bit. In fact, in their stage piece they even dispense with the character of Einstein.
Instead, with precise choreography (by Amii LeGendre), beautiful lighting (by AJ Epstein), multiscreen video imagery (by Sandy Cioffi), wrap-around music (by Eugene Lemcio and Jill Wainsguard) and 13 intensely focused actor-dancers, the company plunges through about a dozen Einsteinian dreams, inviting us to imagine an "infinity of worlds" within time.
But as well-composed and earnestly performed as those worlds are, they merge and blur before the clock runs out on the 90-minute piece. And, relatively speaking, the show's brief encounters and mind-tickling suppositions are more and less engaging.
It's tough to dramatize such ruminations as "All things happening have happened a million times before," or "Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life . . . without time, there is no life."
The Annex ensemble embodies these thoughts in fleeting relations between mothers and children, lovers, strangers. The longer episodes are the more dramatically suggestive: In one, a man's fate depends on whether he visits a certain woman. In another, someone's life is shaped by a humiliating childhood incident.
There's also an ecstatic fantasy of people reacting to news that the world will soon end. Instead of mass panic and chaos, there's new zest for life, spontaneous love affairs and blissful swimming.
But a resonant, even profound nugget of prose can seem simplistic, even mawkish when recited - which is the sporadic effect of Annex's "Einstein's Dreams."
While ardent fans of the book may embrace it fully, the show can easily feel like a precious, repetitive exercise at times.
But it does demonstrate that Gallagher and the energized young cast (Sara Balcaitis, Gavin Cummins, Melissa Munson, Shannon Kipp, et al.) are capable of originating polished, thoughtful and well-integrated multimedia works.
May they continue on that track, but with material that makes time fly - not just circle back on itself.