It begins with someone onstage asking those in the audience who haven’t silenced their phones to consider why they’ve ignored his request. The man isn’t trying to shame anyone, he says, just curious. Behavior, and how our decisions might reflect nature or nurture, are the questions at the heart of “This Much I Know,” the playwright Jonathan Spector’s return to New York after his comedy “Eureka Day” won last season’s Tony Award for best play revival.
That play was a one-act petri dish, a satirical study of ultraprogressive parents reacting to a mumps outbreak at their kids’ school. “This Much I Know” shares some scientific impulses with “Eureka Day,” which Spector developed around the same time but premiered first. Both plays question truth (how we experience it and how it can define ideology) and use chat-room projections to great comic effect.
“This Much I Know” is a more ambitious experiment: cerebral and rangier and, almost by design, impossible to pull off. This superbly acted production, transferred to 59E59 Theaters from Theater J in Washington, makes a fascinating case for trying anyway.
The inquisitive man at the top is Lukesh (Firdous Bamji), a psychology professor at an American university who is likable but prone to TED Talk self-importance, as we see throughout his lectures. Having lost her taste for his mansplaining, Natalya (Dani Stoller), his wife, flees to Russia. She’s writing a book about her family history, and wants to investigate the role that Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, might’ve played in it.
This is where Spector’s study mutates and expands, now also following the real-life Svetlana (Stoller again) as she defects to the United States in 1967. Reporters ask: Is she formally disavowing her father? Was this a tough decision? And what about her children she left back home? Instinct is what drove Svetlana to change her life; inheritance is what might stall her.
Back on campus, Harold (Ethan J. Miller) faces a similar challenge. He’s become a pariah now that a magazine article has outed him as the son of a prominent white nationalist. It’s a “more cosmopolitan” branch of the community, he argues (Spector is great at dark comedy), and he doesn’t totally agree with his father, but the damage is done. No one in his department will sponsor his thesis, so he appeals to Lukesh, who sees an opportunity to test out theories on confirmation bias.
The time-and-space hopping are deftly rendered in Hayley Finn’s direction, with the three performers swapping through a number of roles, often midsentence. (Miller, playing by far the most, is a chameleonic wonder.) Misha Kachman’s set is a deceptively intricate puzzle box, taking on the look of a standard college classroom but revealing a number of hidden panels and platforms.
Character transformations are aided by gentle costume changes (designed by Danielle Preston), or through projected portraits of Stalin and Harold’s father (by Mona Kasra), both of whom Bamji voices under cover of Colin K. Bills’s lighting.
The peril of parallel storytelling is that the least interesting or developed thread — the Stalin one is both — threatens to dominate the rest. And at almost two and a half hours, each starts to fray a bit; their human arcs becoming less interesting than their mind-expanding concepts.
Spector was inspired by the 2011 psychology book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which distinguishes emotional and logical modes of thought. In combining the two, emotional impact is underserved, but philosophizing comes through miraculously intact. It’s in their pairing, and the skill with which Spector has conceived it, that the play shines. As far as drama on which to hang ideas (and showcase such stage virtuosity), “This Much I Know” is a eureka moment.
This Much I Know
Through Oct. 19 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
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