A 71-year-old man is relaxing on a bench in front of a London railway station. Without warning a 42-year-old American woman walks up and kisses him on the neck. He is at once shocked and fascinated.
And they begin to talk …
So begins “Heisenberg,” an intimate romantic comedy by Simon Stephens, which will be presented by Northern Stage, the Upper Valley’s regional professional theater, Feb. 16-March 6 at the Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction.
What follows is an impossible and impossibly charming odyssey. Alex Priest is an Irish-born London butcher, pretty much locked in his way of many years, perhaps shut down. Georgie Burns is a free spirit Alex thinks might possibly be out of her mind. And she may well be, but she too is shut down. Perhaps that is the mutual fascination?
“The play asks the question, according to Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, who is directing, “What if we acknowledge that the world is unpredictable, but instead of looking at that instability with fear, we see possibility?”
Northern Stage’s BOLD associate artistic director, Wansley heard Stephens speak about his play.
“He talked about it being the story about the instability of the universe, and how that can actually be a positive force of change,” she said recently by phone. “I think of how we are living through so much instability and how much anxiety we’re experiencing right now about that instability.
“I think it’s a beautiful play in the moment to just say, ‘Yes, everything could change tomorrow.’ And maybe that will be a change for the better,” she said. “Maybe you’ll meet somebody tomorrow who will completely change your life.”
These characters in this dramatic pas de deux are fascinating and surprisingly convincing. Alex, played by Jamie Horton (title role in Northern Stage’s “King Lear”), is strictly a creature of habit.
“Actually the other character calls him a ‘psychopathic raging monster of habit.’ He’s lived a very routine life for quite a long time and is not anticipating any great change,” Wansley said.
Georgie, Monica Orozco (“Camino Real” at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre), is pure chaos.
“She is someone who wears her heart on her sleeve. Someone who is always playing games, she loves to make things up,” Wansley said. “They are both people who have experienced great loss — and dealt with it in unhealthy ways. And that is what the play reveals as we peel back the layers of the onion.
“I love that it’s a story about two people who change each other,” Wansley said. “And I think (Northern Stage Producing Artistic Director Carol Dunne) specifically programmed this piece for this moment in the pandemic. So many people in our community have experienced loss.”
Alex says at one point, “It’s an unexpected boon at this time of life.”
“I love thinking about that — that we’re doing this piece in some ways for those community members who have experienced loss to say, perhaps you’ll meet someone tomorrow who will change your life.
“That being said, the play is also funny,” Wansley said. “It certainly has moments of real emotional vulnerability, but with our actors who are phenomenal, the play is quite funny.”
While the playwright calls for virtually no staging at all, Northern Stage’s production is taking some freedom with that.
“We’re approaching the production with what I would call ‘poetic realism,’” Wansley said.
The Broadway production actually followed instructions.
“We felt that version has been done before and we wanted to see, instead, if we keep the playwright’s intention of minimalism, and also of only using what we need to tell the story but we also allow ourselves a little more of a sense of place.
There are six scenes in six locations, which are very specific. It is the forecourt of St. Pancras railway station in London — not any train station but a specific train station in London — and the play ends in Lincoln Park in New Jersey overlooking the Hackensack River and the Pulaski Skyway.
“There is a very specific metaphor the playwright is giving us for the way you can find beauty and renewal in unlikely places,” Wansley said. “We’ve really taken that as inspiration for the production. The design team has agreed upon just a couple of specific details for each scene to evoke the memory that Alex or Georgie has of this moment.”
The production also boasts original music. Thomas Crawford, a composer new to the area, has written an original score for piano and cello, that he and cellist Eric Love, Northern Stage’s education director, have recorded.
“It’s quite astonishing,” Wansley said. “Even though the play is in fragments, with the music I think we’re taking the audience on an emotional arc.”
“Heisenberg” was written before the pandemic, but it could have been created for today.
“We’re in a moment that we can’t have right now, an unexpected physical encounter between two strangers,” Wansley said, “That just doesn’t happen in this moment, so there’s something delicious about seeing that moment on stage and remembering what it was like.”
