Review: Simon Stephens' HEISENBERG Flirts With Romantic Uncertainty

If you've ever sat down with a potential lover to have a serious talk about where your relationship is and how fast it's developing, you may be pursuing a lost cause, according to German physicist Werner Heisenberg's 1927 Uncertainty Principle.

Of course, the soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner was referring to physical objects and the impossibility to determine their location and momentum simultaneously, but undoubtedly playwright Simon Stephens had uncertainty in mind when he christened his somewhat oddball, two-character romance as Heisenberg.

As one character puts it, "If you watch something closely enough you realize you have no possible way of telling where it's going or how fast it's getting there."

Manhattan Theatre Club's new Broadway entry is a transfer of director Mark Brokaw's Off-Broadway production from last season, once again starring Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt, a terrifically match pair of actors playing a questionably matched pair of lovers.

As designed by Mark Wendland, their playing area is a rectangle at the downstage lip of the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Ten rows of upstage arena seating have been added so that audience members observe from two sides. With two tables and two chairs as the only set pieces, there's more focus on the physicality of the characters, as if the contact between then was being noted as part of a physics experiment.

The first contact, which occurs just before the play begins, is a kiss that 42-year-old New Jerseyan Georgie applies to the back of the neck of 75-year-old Irishman Alex in a London railway station.

Alex is willing to accept the kiss as an innocent mistake, assuming Georgie mistook him for her husband, who it appears she just mentioned. But the numerous details she reveals about her marriage at their first meeting are then retracted by Georgie when she figures out a way to manufacture a second encounter.

In a sense, Heisenberg plays off the standard romantic comedy pairing of an off-beat, eccentRic Young woman who fascinates a straight-laced, conservative older man, though Stephens injects it with more honesty and heart than punch lines.

Both Georgie and Alex are emotionally damaged, with the quiet gentleman, a butcher, tending to bottle up his feelings and be satisfied with living out the rest of his days alone. The colorfully expressive Georgie craves attention, and while Alex is eventually handed a good reason to suspect she has an ulterior motive for getting involved with him, he has to admit, she helped him find his smile.

And it's indeed a quite charming smile Arndt displays in a gracefully strong performance, mixing good-natured, gentle humor with a fear of the hurt that may result from opening up his heart once more.

Georgie is the kind of role Parker regularly excels at, utilizing unpredictable vocal tones and cadences that continually intrigue as she rapidly bounces between subjects and emotions. The chemistry between the two evolves nicely from guarded to mutually supportive.

HEISENBERG may seem somewhat thin and whimsical on the surface, but in the hands of two fine actors it's a touching and satisfying venture.