Theatre in Review: Completeness (Playwrights Horizons)

	Aubrey Dollar and Karl Miller. Photo: Joan Marcus

Here's how boy meets girl in Completeness: Molly, a budding microbiologist, is running an experiment involving yeast cultures, genetics, and ailing lab rats. (Please don't ask me more; my science grades were only marginally higher than Rick Perry's.) The process yields an enormous, unwieldy amount of data; however, Elliot, a computer scientist who catches her eye, offers to create an algorithm that will screen out the useless information, allowing her to make meaningful conclusions. Positively blushing, Molly says, "You would do that for me?" He would and he does, and it's only natural that he invites her over to his place to watch the algorithm do its stuff.

It's love at first sight. Or something like that.

In Completeness, Itamar Moses traces the romance of these two brainiacs, as they talk their way into bed, then almost talk themselves out of happiness. A comedy about knowledge and carnal knowledge -- which, in the playwright's view, may be the same thing -- it presents us with a pair of highly developed, thoroughly articulate young scientists who become suddenly tongue-tied when the experiment involves intimacy. Or, as Molly puts it, "It'll be a long, long time from now, if ever, before we can know with our brains all the things our bodies already know."

As anyone who has seen earlier works by Moses knows, he is something of a scientist himself, putting his characters under a microscope and mining plenty of meaningful data from the tiniest exchanges between them. Here he uses his laser eye to describe how two very singular people find themselves orbiting each other, trying, against their better judgment, to make a real commitment. The first time they get under the covers, Elliot is startled to find Molly examining him at close quarters -- but, good scientist that she is, she explains that having sex without examining a new partner's genitals is like biting into an unexamined piece of fruit. The pair's post-coital conversation involves Elliot's explication of something called the Traveling Salesman Problem, an unsolved mathematical-geographical tangle that he lays out with remarkable lucidity. "You say this to all the girls," says Molly, made skeptical by the smoothness of his presentation.

In truth, neither Elliott nor Molly is ideally set up for long-term love, and each of them soon experiences qualms that, by all rights, should permanently drive them apart. (The ruthlessness with which they each abandon their exes is enough to set off alarm bells about any future relationships.) Elliot, for one, is supremely devoted to his work. "We recognize that life exists," he says. "Otherwise, who would run the computers?" Molly is haunted by an unexplained sadness that drives her every so often to pull up stakes and leave any loved ones behind. Things get really sticky when Molly's ex, who is also her advisor, puts the kibosh on her experiment and she turns to a sympathetic colleague. (She needs his lab rats.) Meanwhile, Elliott is testing a new theory with an awfully cooperative young female undergraduate. Suddenly, their made-for-each-other status seems awfully brittle.

If all this sounds too clinical for words, in Moses' hands it becomes a funny and often touching study in 21st-century manners, both intellectual and romantic; the play's structure, especially the way in which Elliott's and Molly's dilemmas often mirror each other, has the elegance of one of Elliott's theorems. And, about halfway through Act II, when our interest starts to wane -- when both young lovers, so insistent about their inability to commit, threaten to become a little whiny - the day is saved by the sheer charm of the cast assembled by the director, Pam McKinnon.

Karl Miller's Elliott knows just how well he can capture a lady's heart with his slick, scientific talk, but you're always aware of the real need underneath his sales pitch; he's also adept at using halting gestures and half-spoken lines to convey his sheer bafflement at the ways of women, especially during a breakup scene with the skillful Meredith Forlenza, as Lauren, another computer whiz. Most winning are the sideways looks he keeps giving Molly as he carefully, quietly raises the possibility that someday they might have children together -- or not. Aubrey Dollar, who resembles a young Blair Brown, is loaded with a winsome, wide-eyed appeal that belies the steel-trap mind inside. She's also capable of remarkably subtle effects; a short, slight pause is all she needs to change the mood on stage from frisky and funny to deeply melancholy, as she begins to focus on the end of the affair. Rounding out the quartet is Brian Avers, equally convincing both as Molly's furious ex-boyfriend/mentor and as another grad student, who wouldn't mind running a few experiments with her himself.

It all unfolds on David Zinn's clever set, depicting a university common room, which keeps opening up to reveal various other locations, including a pair of accurately seedy grad-student apartments. Zinn's costumes are accurate enough to suggest he's been spending time on campus lately. Russell H. Champa's lighting works a number of mood changes using mostly white light, with blue and green accents for a welcome touch of variety. Bray Poor's sound design captures the technological sounds of modern life - ringtones, the Windows musical logo, and that little chime that informs you that you've got mail.

Based on the results at Playwrights Horizons, we must conclude that Completeness isn't as strong as other plays by Moses, such as The Four of Us and Back Back Back; it has a tendency to go slack at times, coasting a little too confidently on the appeal of its cast. The action also features one of those little coups de théâtre that Moses is so fond of; amusingly staged by McKinnon, it nevertheless doesn't seem particularly germane to the action. But, for most of its running time, you're likely to be awfully glad to be spending time with Molly and Elliott, even if they are too smart for their own good, and you'll be rooting for them , hoping that, in matters of the heart, they don't outsmart themselves.--David Barbour