Uncertainty drives rom-com
Two strangers meet in a London train station in ACT’s ‘Heisenberg’
With a title like “Heisenberg,” you’d be forgiven for thinking Simon Stephens’ play at American Conservatory Theater was about the titular theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics. Instead, this “Heisenberg” is a romantic comedy of sorts about an English butcher in his mid-70s and an American woman in her 40s who meets him by chance at a London train station and starts more or less stalking him, but in a nice, if disconcerting, way.
Directed by Hal Brooks (Marin Theatre Company’s “My Name Is Asher Lev,” Berkeley Rep’s “No Child …”), the ACT production stars veteran Bay Area actor James Carpenter and New York-based Sarah Grace Wilson, seen here in California Shakespeare Theater’s 2005 “Othello” and 2008 “Uncle Vanya.”
The title is by no means incidental to Stephens, the prolific English author of plays such as “Harper Regan” (which San Francisco Playhouse did in 2011) and the Tony and Olivier Awardwinning “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” which visited SHN’s Golden Gate Theatre last year.
“I think coming across Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle for the first time, even my kind of layperson’s reading of it, was the thing that crystallized the idea of the play,” Stephens says on the phone from the United Kingdom. “This notion that
when an atom is watched and perceived, it can’t be predicted, and when that atom’s behavior is predicted, it suggests it’s not properly seen, struck me in some sense as a metaphor for how humans interact with one another. If we watch one another closely enough, our behavior becomes completely surprising. And if we base our relationships on prediction, then it means we’re perhaps not looking at each other properly.”
The uncertainty principle comes up in conversation in the play, but not in a particularly prominent way.
“I don’t think people need to know the idea,” Stephens says. “I don’t think people need to be versed in atomic physics. I’m certainly not versed in atomic physics. But I was really drawn to
the idea that unpredictability comes out of watching somebody too much.”
That was only one of several inspirations for the play, which premiered in 2015 in a New York production that went on to Broadway.
“I wanted to write a play for American theater,” Stephens says. “I love American plays. And there were a couple of things that I’d never done formally that I was drawn to, which I think are familiar in American plays. I’d never written a play for two actors before. I’d never written a play that was effectively a story of redemption and hope to quite the same degree. And then I was drawn to the idea of writing something that crystallized the relationship between New York and London. I was excited by the youth of the USA and the kind of withered age of Europe.”
More than anything, the play depicts the volatile uncertainty and almost limitless possibility of encounters between strangers.
“I came across a news story in my hometown of
a man whom I remember from my childhood, who’s an old man now, who had been befriended and then finally robbed by a younger woman,” Stephens recalls. “I was fascinated in the emotional impact of a crime like that, for both the criminal and the victim.”
There’s no lack of dodgy behavior and warning signs popping up between Stephens’ characters, and at times it seems about to take a very dark turn, but what’s surprising is how easily they move past that.
“It’s unusually optimistic for me,” Stephens says. “Normally, my plays are bleak and dark and depressing. I think in a time of political difficulty and tension, at a time when the political register of conversation seems to be based on mistrust, I think there’s a level of hope in this play and a level of kindness that is somehow politically radical.”