STAGE REVIEWS : A Waterfall of Words but Little Magic

The program notes for “Boundary Waters,” at South Coast Repertory, give theatergoers the impression that it’s a magical mystery tour to the boundaries of physics, a land of “imaginary time” and “cosmic strings” and subatomic “strangeness.”

We read the names bestowed on quarks by Caltech Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann: “up, down, charmed, strange, top and bottom.” It’s as if we’re about to see a contemporary “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a mix of physics and mysticism and high comedy.

Apparently, that is what playwright Barbara Field had in mind. But her play is more accessible, more earthbound, and not nearly as funny as all that.

Like Shakespeare, Field turns loose a band of men and women, some at sexual cross-purposes, in the woods at night. Five of her sextet are physicists, and they’re in the Boundary Waters, near the Minnesota-Ontario border, on a camping trip and bird-watching expedition.

The season is not midsummer, however. It’s October. Four of the six are at least middle-aged, and their concerns are more autumnal than those of the young lovers in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Likewise, this play is no dream. One of the characters awakens from a dream as the play begins, and two others later share a peyote-induced hallucination. But we don’t see their visions except through their words, which are inadequate for the purpose.

“Boundary Waters” remains close to its realistic surface. Field creates a few ripples, but she doesn’t plunge into the depths. Her realism is not of the well-known “magical” variety.

This sense of skimming over the play’s deeper concerns is felt most acutely when she treats physics itself. Her play is an opportunity to give us lay people an idea of what the physicists are talking about, in theatrical terms. Field provides plenty of verbiage about the ties that bind creative physicists and creative artists, about the explorations of physicists that put more conventional uses of the imagination to shame.

Yet just as we begin to glimpse into those worlds, she stops short. The play’s youngest, snottiest physicist (Brian Drillinger) is wrestling with a problem about cosmic strings. His girlfriend (Kristina Lankford) is drawn to him, despite wildly contrasting personalities, because she gets a thrill out of his quest, akin to her own search for “ecstasy” among the Huichol Indians (she’s an anthropologist, the play’s one non-physicist).

But we are not invited into his quest on any level. The other physicists have ruled “no shop talk,” and his mentor, Nobel laureate Declan McIntyre (Ken Ruta) tries to avoid him for his own psychological reasons. When the young hotshot finally breaks through to a solution, it happens offstage. When he relates the details to Declan, it’s on a piece of paper that we, of course, don’t see.

While the play fails to evoke the wonderment of modern physics, it’s more successful at demonstrating the human frailties of modern physicists. But even here there are problems.

Although Drillinger does create a memorable portrait of a desperately unkempt young Turk, generally the play’s laughs are derived more from the lines (including a joke I had heard before, in a Borscht Belt routine) than from the characters.

Field has a good grip on the troubled marriage of the brilliant Natalie (Barbara Tarbuck) and the too-doting but secretly conflicted David (Pierre Epstein). Yet Natalie’s dalliance with her younger colleague Spindlequick (Nicholas Hormann), who specializes in the study of solitary waves called solitons (symbolism here) but takes greater pride in his role as the sybaritic camp chef, isn’t a very credible response.

The script’s devotion to realism creates an unnecessary credibility problem on a more basic level: It must be cold in these Northern woods at night, but no one notices it until the morning. If the play were set in a more fantastic mode, if we were asked to suspend our disbelief on a grander scale, we wouldn’t notice their not noticing. But it isn’t, we’re not, and we do.

Lighting designer Tom Ruzika could have had a field day in a more expansive play. As it is, his lights seem awfully unvarying, considering the dusk, the Northern Lights, the stars, the campfire. They constrict rather than expand the vision.

There is no problem with director Martin Benson’s cast. The actors understand their characters on a psychological level, and convey that understanding well. But there are boundaries to these characters that can’t be transcended by acting.

‘Boundary Waters’

Pierre Epstein: David

Barbara Tarbuck: Natalie

Nicholas Hormann: Spindlequick

Brian Drillinger: Cometti

Kristina Lankford: Sylvia

Ken Ruta: Declan

Playwright Barbara Field. Director Martin Benson. Sets Michael Devine. Lights Tom Ruzika. Costumes Walker Hicklin. Music and sound Michael Roth. Stage manager Julie Haber. Dramaturg John Glore.