Actors Chris Hecke and Irene Polk exude a tangible interpersonal chemistry in “Completeness,” an inordinately wordy love story by Itamar Moses. What’s most impressive about their work in director Joey Davila’s modestly budgeted Stage Door Theatre production, though, is their skillful articulation of all the analytical verbiage in the play about computer programs and biological theories, which essentially passes for the sort of lovey-dovey sweet nothings that abound in typical rom-coms.
Laypersons in the audience are likely to be blinded by so much scientific talk, to paraphrase a popular Thomas Dolby song. These two co-stars seem to thrive on it instead, rattling on at substantial length about mathematical abstractions and metaphysical variables with a perfectly uncomplicated ease, as if they had actual firsthand knowledge of what they’re saying, or like it was almost second nature for them. The convoluted technicality of the dialogue surely must have been a chore to memorize, but you’d never suspect that to listen as Hecke and Polk discuss it so nonchalantly and matter-of-factly.
Credit: Matthew Bish
Credit: Matthew Bish
Hecke’s Elliott and Polk’s Molly are both graduate students at an unnamed university. He’s studying computer science, she molecular biology, and they first meet-smart at adjoining computer stations in the campus library. Tom Cruise may have had Renee Zellweger at a simple “hello,” but Elliott essentially attracts Molly with an offer to design a “data mining algorithm” to assist her in proving (or disproving) an experiment she’s conducting on the binding and interactive principles of yeast proteins.
How romantic. Can love be far behind?
No sooner have they started meeting at Elliott’s place to further pontificate about the minutia of their collaborative research project than things soon advance to another, more human level in his bedroom. Even there, he and Molly reveal the details of their past relationships and sexual histories, their attitudes about compatibility and commitment, and their distinctions between physical and emotional intimacy, with the same deductive reasoning they’d use in a classroom.
Meanwhile, back in Elliott’s living room, as the couple’s courtship continues, so do the cerebral conversations. They exchange notions of polynomial time and exponential time, or the “factorial curves” of life, or the “confrontational intractability” of love. From a white board affixed to the wall, they scribble equations or graphs to illustrate their respective academic hypotheses to each other.
Whether or not you know what any of it is supposed to mean, or if it might as well all be Greek to you, playwright Moses goes too far out of his way — rather blatantly and clumsily — to suggest certain metaphors or correlations between the science and the romance that’s consuming his characters. In the believable performances of Hecke and Polk, everything appears to make sense to them, but it’s a moot concept when the audience can’t fully grasp a lot of what they’re talking about to begin with.
“Completeness” is a bold but curious choice of material for Dunwoody’s traditionally mainstream Stage Door, which is still in the process of regrouping, post-pandemic. Longtime artistic director Robert Egizio was unceremoniously furloughed during the 2020 shutdown, and his original replacement (Willie E. Jones III) barely made it through half of his first season before resigning in late 2021.
Now under the leadership of another new artistic director, Justin Ball, let’s wish the company well — and just hope that its future shows strike a better balance among those that are more entertaining or accessible, and less ostentatious or inscrutable than this one.
THEATER REVIEW
“Completeness”
Through Feb. 12. 7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays. $35 ($20 for students). Dunwoody Cultural Arts Center, 5339 Chamblee-Dunwoody Road, Dunwoody. 770-396-1726, stagedoortheatrega.org.
Bottom line: At least the two co-stars manage to avoid being blinded by all of the play’s science.
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