Making sense of math’s role
Lecture-style performance reveals connections between life and numbers
After premiering in Vancouver last fall, Long Division is being remounted in a refreshed version.
Directed by Richard Wolfe, the Pi Theatre production features choreography by Lesley Telford and musical score by Owen Belton. The multimedia piece explores the mathematical underpinnings and patterns of human connection via seven characters in a bar. We talked to Peter Dickinson, the play’s writer and a Simon Fraser University professor, about Long Division.
Q: You’re in New York, seeing some plays. Is Hamilton still playing?
A: Yes, but try to score a ticket for less than $1,000!
How do you decide on what to see when you have a limited time?
It’s a combination of things. Paula Vogel’s play Indecent is her first on Broadway, I’m a big fan of her work, I’ve taught her work many times. And then we’re seeing the revival of Sunday in the Park with George. I’m a (Stephen) Sondheim fan, so that made it an easy choice.
And we follow what’s getting buzz. I will admit to being a bit of a star-watcher to a certain extent. Laura Linney (Nocturnal Animals, The Squid and the Whale) and Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City) are alternating in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (193). It’s the kind of play that I don’t know if it will stand up. But they’re two accomplished actresses I’d pay good money to see any time.
Had you been working on Long Division for a long time?
I’d been working on it for about five years. I wrote a previous play called The Objecthood of Chairs, which has a similar style in that I combine lecture performance with physical and dance theatre. There are movement scores in both pieces.
In that first play, I told the story of two men and their relationship through the history of chair design. It was a combination of mining my research about that and trying to craft a story that was human and where the audience could find a way in. When I was thinking about a subject for a new play, I took the profession of one of the characters in that first play, who was a math teacher, and said, “Let’s see what happens to his character, let’s see where he goes after the breakup of his relationship.”
At first, I wrote it (Long Division) in an attempt at completely real, kitchen-sink naturalism, and it was a complete disaster. So I went back into this lecture-style performance.
Long Division is set in a bar. Is the setting left over from that attempt at realism?
I guess so. It’s kind of a meta-theatrical play in the sense that the characters address the audience, and they’re aware they’re in a theatrical setting. One of the characters is an actress, and she comments on the connection between mathematics and theatre.
But yes, there’s a bar setting, and there’s the event that brings everybody together. There’s a story that is grounded in the world. At the same time, they’re drawing our attention to that as a construction by pointing out the mathematical patterns that underpin everything.
This is being called a “refreshed” remount. What’s changed since its first run
It’s mostly been cuts, and some massaging of certain sections. And I think it’s a play that actually needs a little distance.
Like mathematics, the patterns only reveal themselves at a remove. I think I needed that distance to see where things were working and where they could be better. So it’s a gift for me to be given this opportunity, to make things pop a little more and to make the math, which isn’t meant to be difficult, more understandable and relatable.