Glass half empty — or is it half full? — in ‘Two Minds’
One theater company’s everyday can be another’s momentous occasion. Case in point: With “Two Minds,” the Marsh, which specializes in solo performance, is mounting a play with not one but two actors. “Next thing you know, there’ll be 30,” joked Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman in her curtain speech at the show’s Sunday, May 6, opening night.
But Lynne Kaufman’s play, about the Nobel-winning Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman (Jackson Davis) and Amos Tversky (Brian Herndon), feels slight rather than expansive, rote and one-note rather than rich.
The richest part is the pair’s findings themselves. Tversky and Kahneman debunked the long-held belief that human beings make decisions rationally. Give us hot or cold coffee right before we make a choice, they posited, and we tend to choose differently than we might otherwise. Ask us to guess the answer to a multiplication problem, but present the multipliers in different sequences, and our estimates vary enormously (but in predictable ways). Tell us a medical procedure has a 90 percent chance of success, and we evaluate it very dif-
ferently than if you had said it has a 10 percent chance of failure.
Kaufman grounds this breezy survey of the pair’s fascinating discoveries in a portrait of collaboration by opposites. Tversky is all swagger and flamboyance; Kahneman is like Woody Allen but “without the jokes.” When each served in the Israeli army, Kahneman worked in intelligence, while Tversky “loved jumping out of airplanes.” When another academic lambastes their work, Tversky either writes him off as a “sleazebag” or insists on an immediate, hardcharging rebuttal, while Kahneman lets the criticism genuinely unsettle him and the foundation of their work.
Directed by TheatreWorks Artistic Director Robert Kelley, Davis and Herndon ably emphasize the pair’s contrasts. Davis finds both a quiet dignity and a ready comic straight man in Kahneman’s prevailing gloom. Eternally besotted with worry, he’s almost relieved and delighted when something goes wrong, vindicating his congenital pessimism. He gives Herndon’s sweeping gestures, stadium-ready volume and full-bodied sighs of exasperation something to puncture.
Still, even these sharply defined performances can’t overcome exposition so baldly declared it might as well announce itself with blinking lights: “I shall now talk about my childhood during the Nazi occupation.” Kaufman makes being an academic seem as simple as coming up with a title for a paper. When the two first alight on their careerdefining idea, the moment has all the subtlety of a campy horror movie, each line delivered in italics and triple-underline: “You’re saying — we’re irrational?”
Scene upon scene makes cheesy parallels between the pair’s professional and private lives. If they’re trying to measure happiness, it must be because one of them is brooding on unhappiness in his own marriage. If they’re trying to study grief — the way we try to rationalize and make sense of tragedy, and the limits of our imagination in doing so — it must be because one of them just lost someone (someone whom the script gets around to mentioning and trying to make us care about only in the moment it’s convenient). Kaufman more often tells us, rather than shows us, that the pair are like a bickering married couple, and even a rivalry plot — one gets more acclaim and attention than the other — feels by the numbers.
Still, 70 minutes is a fine amount of time to spend immersing oneself in Tversky and Kahneman’s illuminating ideas. It’s about the length of time of a college lecture — which might have been a more insightful format for this story.
Amos Tversky is all swagger and flamboyance; Daniel Kahneman is like Woody Allen but “without the jokes.”