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| Volume 50, Number 1, Winter 2000-2001 |
NUMBER THEORY WINS RAVES FROM BROADWAY CRITICS AND PRODUCERSby Lisa Gubernick Nuclear fission. Number theory. Greek mythology. Not exactly the makings of a light evening out on the town. But in recent months on stages across America, theater audiences have been paying to immerse themselves in subjects they haven't touched since they were in college, if then. "I couldn't follow the science-which is what they were talking about most of the time," says Marianne Johnson, a New York business consultant who saw "Copenhagen," the hit Broadway show about atomic scientists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and the making of the first atomic bomb. "It's hard to keep track of who all the characters are," Martin Lewis, a Denver laboratory designer, said when he was four hours into the 10-hour "Tantalus" in Denver. Most of the 27 actors in the play based on Greek mythology wore feature-obscuring polymer masks. Call it the theater of the truly obscure-or at least the considerably confusing. These days, some of the hottest shows across America are the hardest ones to understand. "Traditionally, there has always been one snob hit. It's always been English and slightly hard to understand. The audience felt rewarded because they sat through it," says Jack Viertel, creative director of Jujamcyn Theaters, one of the producers of "Proof," whose dialogues about number theory are currently playing to packed houses on Broadway. "But this year, the audience seems to be especially hungry for this." All told, there will be about a half-dozen highbrow shows playing on and off Broadway this season. In regional theaters, the growth is even more dramatic. Ben Cameron, executive director of Theatre Communications Group, which represents regional theaters, estimates that the number of straight dramas has increased more than 25 percent from 1,500 to 1,900 in the past five years. This year's most popular productions included local versions of "Wit," which features an English professor who specializes in the 17th century poet John Donne, and "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," about a (fictional) meeting between Albert Einstein and the cubist artist. The trend is, in part, a backlash against all the big-budget megamusicals that have dominated Broadway for the past decade. "Shows there are entertaining-you can just as well see one as another," says Barry Herman, a Denver retailer of women's wear. "I like things that make you think." To some extent, the heavy dramas may also be less economically risky. In the wake of diminishing corporate support for Broadway musical extravaganzas-SFX Theatrical Group, a big corporate producer, is no longer backing big-budget musicals on its own, and Walt Disney Company hasn't officially announced any new Broadway shows since "Aida" opened last season-straight shows may be more appealing. Their investment costs are rarely much over $1 million, while big-budget musicals can cost $8 million or more. Outside New York, too, one can see drama succeeding in the wake of the decline of the big-budget musical. A shortage of new musicals going out on the road has left stages available for riskier, less expensive shows. So instead of the helicopter landing on "Miss Saigon," which will be shuttered in January, and dancing "Cats," which closed in September, audiences can expect to be treated to a work based on the life of physicist Richard Feynman, which will open at the Mark Taper Forum, in Los Angeles, this spring. New York's Lincoln Center Theater will present a production based on the afterlife of British poet and scholar A.E. Housman by Tom Stoppard, one of Britain's more esoteric playwrights. How thick is this stuff? "Copenhagen" is sufficiently dense with atomic theory that Playbill actually includes a four-page gatefold walking playgoers through atomic history from 1895 to 1945 (Sample item: "The Critical Mass: Frisch and Peierls . . . calculate, wrongly, but encouragingly, the minimum amount of U-235 needed to sustain an effective chain reaction.") Even one of the producers of "Copenhagen," Roger Berlind, says he understand the facts of nuclear science buttressing the play only "in a certain way. I was terrible at physics." "Proof" saves its hardest stuff for the last speech: "I've got Eberhart's Conjecture setting up this section," says the play's protagonist. "qn as the nth prime, all that stuff, b's positive not divisible by p . . . Pretty basic number theory . . ." Then the stage goes dark.
How do you sell shows that go over the audience's head? Marketers play it both ways. On one hand, they count on snob appeal. They have courted the academic press, pushing to get their shows off the entertainment pages and into academic media to give the shows more scholarly heft. Last fall, the producers of "Proof" hosted a day-long seminar at New York University with a panel of mathematicians discussing whether or not "proofs yield objective knowledge of the real world." "Creating Copenhagen," at the City University of New York, included discussion of "how the wave function yields definite states." (An article on the show ended up in Physics Today, published by the American Institute of Physics.) In Denver, the Center for the Performing Arts, where "Tantalus" was produced, collaborated with the University of Colorado to present a symposium on adaptations of ancient drama. At the same time, marketers are trying to emphasize that while this may be serious drama, it shouldn't be that hard to sit through. Two highbrow hits, Yasmina Reza's "The Unexpected Man," which features two characters exchanging their interior monologues as though they are conducting a conversation, and "Betrayal," a Harold Pinter play that includes discourses on novelist Ford Maddox Ford and poet William Butler Yeats, are under 90 minutes long. "Tantalus," which has closed in Denver and will begin a tour of Britain this winter, tried to lighten its dramatic load by giving patrons a 15-minute break between each of the nine episodes. "It's like series TV," said the show's press agent, Adrian Bryan-Brown. "Think of it like 'Dynasty.'" A pretty face doesn't hurt either: Ads for "Proof" feature the show's fetching star, Mary-Louise Parker, with a numerical equation superimposed across her forehead. Though less expensive than musicals, serious drama can still have daunting economics. Some shows are doing limited runs, which have cachet and limit the costs of using brand-name stars. (The Feynman show in Los Angeles is scheduled to star Alan Alda.). Other productions are mounted as not-for-profit ventures. "Tantalus" was budgeted at $8 million by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and received rave reviews, but it didn't break even. "Proof" started in the not-for-profit Manhattan Theatre Club before investors spent $1.3 million to move it to Broadway. Since "Proof" opened on Broadway in October, the show has been playing at more than 90 percent capacity, and producer Daryl Roth says she hopes to recoup her investment by early [this] year. Now producers say they hope to mount a road show-almost unheard of for serious dramas in recent years. But despite savvy packaging and great reviews, some theatergoers revolt. Greg and Leigh Anne Brodsky saw "Copenhagen" at the suggestion of Mr. Brodsky's mother. "It was a big yawn," says Ms. Brodsky. As they walked out during intermission, they noticed comedian Jackie Mason was playing next door and snuck in to watch his show instead. "We howled," she says. "It was a great second act."
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