Theatre in Review: Heisenberg (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)

	Denis Arndt, Mary-Louise Parker. Caption: Joan Marcus

Heisenberg begins on a meet-cute note when Georgie Burns, a woman in her early 40s, approaches Alex Priest, a man in his 70s, and kisses him on the back of his neck. They are total strangers, in London's St. Pancras Station. Surprisingly, he doesn't flee into the night, although by the end of Simon Stephens' play, you might find yourself wishing he did. Here, Stephens -- an often-fine playwright -- has fallen back on the old sex-comedy trope of a stuffed-shirt male versus a wacky, messy life-force female. It's a setup that goes back at least to the 1951 blockbuster The Moon is Blue, the text of modern romantic comedies, and it has sometimes been put to more poignant use by playwrights like William Gibson (Two for the Seesaw) and novelists like Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist). The trick lies in making the woman equally lovable and bizarre, and also creating some kind of quirky chemistry between her and the man. On these grounds, Heisenberg constitutes a thoroughly fizzled science experiment.

A loose collection of electric wires, flopping around and sending sparks in every direction, Georgie is everyone's nightmare of an American abroad, barging in where she hasn't been invited, talking too loud (and managing to work the word "fuck" into nearly every sentence), and generally not making too much sense. She announces that she is a widow, adding that the kiss was triggered by the fact that the back of Alex's neck reminded her of her late husband. She also overshares about her honeymoon in Thailand, her spouse's tragic death, and her career as a waitress, which, she adds, gives her an unparalleled ability to read others' personalities with a single glance. To show off those skills, she says, "I've seen your type before. The shy, brooding, intellectual type. You come in. You sit down. You order a croissant. You read a fucking poem. Or something. You're too shy to smile. You're too shy to tip. You leave. I'm right, aren't I? I've got you down to a T. Don't you try and think you've got the measure of me, mister man. 'Cause on the contrary, I've got the measure of you."

Never mind that Alex is actually a butcher and not cripplingly shy; never mind that everything Georgie has said about herself is a lie; and never mind that her increasingly noisy banter has a fairly consistent undertone of veiled menace. Five days later, she bursts into Alex's shop, having discovered the address via Google; she owns up to her untruths and says she wants to get to know him better. Then again, their conversation goes like this:

Alex: My privacy has been violated.

Georgie: "Violated" is a bit strong. "Violated" is a bit hyperbolic.

Alex: Nice word.

Georgie: Thank you. Ha. "Nice word." Patronizing fucker.

If you were Alex, would you (a) call the cops, (b) barricade yourself in the shop's back room, or (c) whip out a can of mace and start spraying the room indiscriminately? All three are reasonable options. Instead, Alex starts sleeping with Georgie, which guarantees sexual satisfaction for him -- as he admits, it has been a long, long time between girlfriends -- while subjecting us to further reams of arch dialogue.

To enjoy Heisenberg, one must fall in love with Georgie, or at least be able to tolerate her. But, too often, her manner, supposedly defined by a disarming eccentricity and blunt, clarifying honesty, is merely grating and infantile. When Alex reveals his true age to her in a restaurant, she all but shouts, "Oh my God, you're unbelievably old!" Later, she adds, "Seventy-five. Never been married. It's just a little fucking drab, what?" She quickly adds, "Sorry. That was another example of my inability to keep my stupid fucking mouth shut even at the best of times, wasn't it?" Later, taking note of Alex's daily habits, she observes, "You're not so much a creature of routine as a psychopathic raging monster of it." Fishing for compliments, she asks Alex, "Do you find me exhausting but captivating?" Well, yes and no.

Then, apropos of nothing, Georgie asks Alex for fifteen thousand pounds, to finance a search for Jason, her estranged son, who ran off to America rather than spend another minute with his mother. ("He found me mortifying," she says -- a judgment that's pretty hard to argue with.) She then talks Alex into joining her in New Jersey -- "You could be my Sherpa" -- while she seeks out Jason. It's never clear why so much money is needed for a quick transatlantic trip, unless Georgie insists on flying first class and staying at the Waldorf Astoria. In any case, the trip is a dramatic nonstarter, seemingly existing to give Alex and Georgie another location in which to hash out their relationship issues.

Apparently with the full cooperation of the director, Mark Brokaw, Mary Louise Parker doubles down on all of Georgie's most irritating qualities, delivering her lines in a flat, braying manner that, for a few moments, had me wondering if Georgie wasn't supposed to be mentally impaired; as the evening wore on, she increasingly sounded like Gilda Radner playing the nerdy Lisa Loopner. Too often, she's unpleasantly aggressive, not a lovable kook. In contrast, Denis Arndt cocks his head back, smiles enigmatically, and throws away his lines with such élan that one dearly wishes his costar would get the message. Arndt's character often doesn't make sense: We're repeatedly told that he is a profoundly solitary person, but then we learn that he's a master of the tango, a dance for which one famously needs a partner. Arndt also can't make a convincing case that Alex is truly smitten with Georgie. Still, he's a pleasure to have around.

The probably fatal choice made by Brokaw involves trying to replicate last season's intimate Off Broadway staging of Heisenberg, which played for several weeks at Manhattan Theatre Club's tiny City Center Stage II. Therefore, in addition to the normal seating at the Friedman, most of the stage is filled with audience bleachers. The actors are left with a thin strip of stage with a couple of tables and chairs, which, as designed by Mark Wendland, is drab and confining; the play appears to be unfolding, for no good reason, in a rehearsal room. The absence of scenery, which would normally act as an acoustic reflector, makes the dialogue often difficult to hear; it doesn't help that Parker has taken to swallowing her lines, reducing many of them to a mush of vowel sounds. In contrast, Arndt speaks with crystalline diction, even in his quietest moments. The rest of the production -- Michael Krass' casual wear, Austin R. Smith's white-light washes, and David van Tieghem's occasional sound cues -- is perfectly solid, if not especially memorable.

This is the first romantic comedy in recent memory that leaves one actively rooting for the couple not to get together. Then again, Heisenberg is neither romantic nor especially funny. The title alludes to the famous uncertainty principle, which Georgie mangles thusly: "If you watch something closely enough, you realize you have no possible way of telling where it's going and how fast it's getting there....If you pay attention to where it's going or how fast it's moving, you stop watching it properly." As objects go, Georgie is one I'd just as soon not be observing at all. -- David Barbour