Staff Photos by Mel Nathanson: Director
Rebecca Holderness
Reviewed by Scott Ross
of CitySearch11
11/10/98
In the hands of its playwright Kipp Erante Cheng and director Rebecca Holderness, Einstein's Dreams is an often exhilarating meditation on time, an experience in which word and movement form a peculiarly beautiful form of audiovisual poetry. This adaptation of Alan Lightman's popular novella does not simply represent the search by Albert Einstein for a correct theory of time but boldly examines our own perceptions of it. Bracingly theatrical in conception and execution, it engages you on the very highest levels: mind, heart, ears and eyes. Holderness has not so much directed as choreographed the large cast of this moving picture show. She establishes her stage as a place where images collect and disperse, masses coalesce and mutate and the very word itself is born up, passed around and redeposited in kaleidoscopic fashion. How much of this is her direction and how much the dramaturgy of Kipp Cheng is unknown to me, which is probably as it should be; between themselves they have crafted a work of serious yet playful art that blurs the line between these distinctions. We part company, however, on the conception of Einstein himself. As played (dreamt?) by Eric Dean Scott he appears nearly buffoonish: wheeling around like a whirling dervish, staring in wide-eyed idiocy, rolling about on his lectern, getting himself trapped inside a chair with no seat--a pantomime here, a contortion there. In the blazingly theatrical context of Einstein's Dreams no one should look for absolute imitation or correct representation; still, the meaning of this alternately catatonic and hyperactive activity eludes my grasp. More satisfying are the Elizabeth London's Liserl, who narrates much of the proceedings with sympathy and grace; Tony Lea's sweetly melancholic Eduard Einstein; David Henderson's robust yet pitiable Besso; and Michele Vazquez's resigned and under appreciated Ana. Morag Charlton has contributed charming minimalist scenery, and the lighting by Matthew Adelson is beautifully conceived, particularly in its imaginative use of light bulbs suspended above the actors, turned on and off by hand at strategic moments. More than simply an arresting image, they are both ironic and iconic, subtly drawing on the old cartoon notion of a light bulb going off as ideas strike. Strongly recommended.
By BYRON WOODS
Correspondent - The News and Observer
11/12/98
RALEIGH -- There is an all too temporal world where time never stops and nothing ultimately lasts. But in that world, a group of artists work and play with temporality and deliberately use it in their works. Some even refer to them as "time arts." They band together for weeks or months to craft an environment and a series of moments in which certain events occur. None of these will last. The artists know it. Regardless of the quality of the work, it will perish at the moment it is finished. They continue anyway. Toward the end of their labors, they let other people see the sequence of events they have assembled. The art -- the product of so many hands, so much effort, so much time -- is visible for an hour, after which it vanishes. Time's up. That world, of course, is this one. The work described is better known as theater. And if you'd care to see a pensive, moving meditation on the temporality of life, you'd best make reservations now for "Einstein's Dreams." Since this Burning Coal Theatre Company's world premiere lasts just over 60 minutes, I'm not certain I should regard Kip Erante Cheng's adaptation of the Alan Lightman best seller as a finished work. It's an exquisite hour in large part. Sections of the novel are omitted, but what's here is deftly written -- an always tasteful, always tentative balancing act between the cosmic and the realm of the human. Cheng should be encouraged to edit and extend his manuscript.
Both novel and stage production center on a series of hypothetical dreams a 26-year-old Albert Einstein has in Berne, Switzerland, in the spring and early summer of 1905. Young Einstein is still trying to figure out the riddle of relativity -- the relationship between time, light and gravitation. He works on his equations during his hours as a patent clerk, and when he goes to sleep, his dreams continue the work.
Eric Dean Scott makes an ethereal and perpetually distracted Einstein. At times he's amusingly overcome by the chaos of conflicting notions having it out in his subconscious. At other points, the sober implications of his theories overwhelm him and us. If time is reversible, big mistakes can be unmade; if it can be slowed sufficiently, situations, relationships - lives - can be thought through, salvaged, saved. If time is less than constant, the work suggests, we dare dream what may be the cruelest dreams -- the ones in which ruined hope remains intact. We may be unable to do otherwise.
The sharp moments in which these dreams are entertained add savor to this imaginative production. Director Rebecca Holderness incorporates the visual language and the choreography of dreams in this large ensemble work, seamlessly abetted by Morag Charlton's shadowbox set of platforms, chairs, and mechanical and mundane objects. At times, Thomas Limbert's music distracts; still, it provides exquisite counterpoint to sequences in which time runs backward, and where gravity and time are directly related.
The ensemble boasts some of this region's strongest actors in a work that really has but one leading role. Credit Holderness for assembling a corps as strong as it is even. As Einstein's first wife, Ana Sferruzza makes Mileva a companion almost as distracted as Einstein, but one we sense is more preoccupied by the permanence of human, not quantum relationships. To some degree the script shortchanges the role of Einstein's friend Besso, played well by David Henderson. Michele Vazquez makes the most of a similarly underdeveloped Ana, Besso's wife. Mark Filiaci is impressive as Hans, Einstein's son -- and interrogator in a number of dream sequences. Tony Lea is equally strong as Eduard, Einstein's second son.
Among the notable inhabitants of Einstein's dreams are Emily Ranii, Carolyn Rashti, Ellie Ruttenberg, Benjamin Smith, Elizabeth London, Nan Stephenson and Vanessa Davis. In a particularly moving sequence, while this community stands in a circle on stage, veteran actor Bob Barr invokes the end of time with singular, terrible dignity, to a Limbert musical accompaniment reminiscent of Mahler.
We're all in there, somewhere, in a world where time - or life - concludes before we would.
While there's still time, I recommend that you see "Einstein's Dreams."
By Bill Morrison
Staff Writer - The News and Observer
10/30/98
nbsp; In this age of political correctness, one hesitates to call any woman a "dream girl" (unless one is referring to the Elmer Rice play or the Betty Hutton screen adaptation that was something of a nightmare). But how else to describe director Rebecca Holderness, a woman so talented and witty that she suggests the New York of a more sophisticated age, when anything was possible and the avant-garde really did deliver on its promise.
Staff Photos by Mel Nathanson: Director
Rebecca Holderness
Last season in Raleigh, she staged a "Love's Labours Lost" for Burning Coal
Theatre Company that was as fresh as paint. It had the energy of a Marx Brothers comedy
and the shimmering beauty of a Shakespeare sonnet. Seeing this great dream of a show was
like sitting around in Shakespeare's brain and being privy to his thoughts -- and what a
heady experience that would be.
Now Holderness is back in Raleigh to stage the world premiere of
"Einstein's Dreams," a piece she commissioned. The work is based on Alan
Lightman's best-selling novella, in which the author imagines a series of dreams Einstein
might have had while he was chasing after his Theory of Relativity. Holderness discovered
the novella, found an adapter (Kipp Erante Cheng, who, like many theater people, would
crawl across the Sahara for this woman), and then a producer, the same Burning Coal
Theatre Company that so charmed her last season.
Each of the dreams is a little gem, very theatrical, very
stage-worthy. They're all about time and space and relative actions and movements. The
writing sometimes suggests Christopher Isherwood, the man who was a camera, recording the
sights and sounds of Berlin before the deluge. One can see this piece as cinema (with
touches perhaps of the German expressionist films and the surreal films of Cocteau).
Consider this excerpt from the book:
"Sunday afternoon. People stroll down Aarstgasse ... full of
Sunday dinner, speaking softly beside the murmur of the river. The shows are closed. Three
women walk down Marktgasse ... stop to peer in windows, walk on quietly. An innkeeper
scrubs his steps ... reads a paper, leans against the sandstone wall and shuts his eyes.
... The streets are sleeping, and through the air there floats music from a violin."
As he plays, the young musician looks out the window of his
upstairs room, his eye recording the action in the street, a couple close together. He
thinks of his wife and infant son in the room below. As he plays, another man, identical,
stands in the middle of another room and plays another violin. The image is repeated an
infinite number of times: "It is a world of countless copies."
Eric Dean Scott rehearses a scene from 'Einstein's
Dreams.'
The first man senses the others, "he feels himself repeated a thousand times,
feels this room repeated a thousand times ... His music floats and fills the room, and
when the hour passes ... [an hour that was countless hours] he remembers only the
music."
Einstein loved the violin, as pianist Rudolph Serkin recalled
many years ago, but the young genius was a terrible violinist: "He always played
without any vibrato, so it always went skreek-skreek-skreek."
"Einstein's Dreams," on the other hand, promises
beautiful music, lovely images and words that sing. The 18-member company is headed by New
York actor/dancer Eric Dean Scott, who plays the young Einstein. Elizabeth London plays
his illegitimate daughter, who appears as a sometimes narrator putting the story in
context while recalling the events and dreams that defined her famous father's life.
Holderness has assembled a dream cast; everyone wants to work for
this company. The large ensemble includes Tony Lea, Mark Filiaci, Spencer Stephens, Nan.
L. Stephenson, Sean Rivenbark, Ana Sferruza and David Henderson. Even this company is a
dream, shared by Jerome Davis, the artistic director, and his wife, Simmie Kastner.
Some day, a permanent theater. Some day, a permanent company. But
for now this band of strolling players moves from space to space (in this case, Thompson
Theatre), staging shows as boldly imagined as they are brilliantly acted and produced
(last spring a school gymnasium was transformed into a great, ruined church, the setting
for "Pentecost," a drama about war and remembrance and language). This second
season -- a season of premieres -- opened with the American premiere of Alex Finlayson's
"Winding the Ball," which opened to mixed reviews. Burning Coal has no
university support, no trust funds, no sugar daddy fueling the flames, but it's evidently
here to stay.
Alan R. Hall
CHN Columnist
November 18, 1998
How much of an individual's life is affected by dreams? How important are his
daydreams. How deep are his sleeping dreams? And is it possible to act upon the data we
receive from these dreams, to truly interpret and act upon what our dreams tell us?
Psychologists affirm that there is a certain amount of stored data in that vast brain, and often you might catch a glimpse of that information by learning to interpret your dreams.
Albert Einstein, we are told, was obsessed by his dreams, which enlightened him on several aspects of time - what is it, how does it work, how does it travel, and what is its effect on mankind in general.
All these questions were asked in "Einstein's Dreams," which had its world premiere last weekend at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium. This play is the latest in a growing line of hits by the second-year company, Burning Coal Theatre. This staging is breathtaking, engrossing, inspiring and, mostly, kinetic. The play was filled with motion; people marching in, people marching out, sitting in chairs, standing on chairs, running through crowds. All these actions were taking place in Einstein's dreams.
And it is this analysis of time taking place in his dreams that finally, after years of research, allows him to deliver to the world that oh-so-deceptively simple equation E=m(c) squared: Energy equals mass times rate of speed squared.
At least, that's how it happens in "Einstein's Dreams." This world premiere show, written by Kipp Erante Cheng, adapted from the book of the same title by Alan Lightman, is an ensemble account of what was happening inside (and outside) Einstein's (Eric Dean Scott's) brain while his mental energies were spent upon this question: How do we quantify time, define it, understand it.
This examination of the struggle to achieve an answer to Einstein's questions continues to haunt him as he tries living with his wife and children and working in a small patent office in Bern, Germany.
One character to note is one of the first to speak. She is a young woman, apparently informed of what is happening, and a sort of narrator/defender of Einstein, even though he does not even acknowledge her presence. This woman is Lieserl, a child born of Einstein and Mileva before their marriage, and offered up for adoption. History does not note her whereabouts after that point. Yet here she is, now a grown woman (Elizabeth London) as her siblings are grown men, one a successful engineer (Mark Filiaci), the other a victim of schizophrenia (Tony Lea).
But it is Lieserl who moves the play along, as scene after scene of home life play themselves out on several squares, over each of which is a light bulb. Action on that square takes place only when that bulb is lit.
In the meantime, Einstein's friend at the patent office, Eduard Besso (David Henderson), tries to draw Einstein out on what it is he is so avidly pursuing. But Einstein could not even begin to tell him.
This cast is made up of 17 players, two of which - Einstein and Lieserl - were brought down from the Big Apple with the director of this production, Rebecca Holderness, who among many other accomplishments directed Burning Coal's "Love's Labors Lost" last summer.
The viewer of "Einstein's Dreams" will feel as if he had entered a dreamlike landscape, full of nameless people, strange objects (mostly chairs), and an absolute dissolution of time as we know it. Significant events do not follow chronologically, and a character at one age may appear at an entirely different age in another scene.
Each member of this drill-team-like ensemble does an incredible job of keeping the pace at breakneck speed while shooting themselves across the stage at a dangerous rate. These people are his neighbors, his associates, the people in his life. They are also the nay-sayers, rivals and deriders of Einstein's theories. They provide a backdrop, interact in scenes as needed, but generally keep the pace going, going until Einstein finally wakes, the last piece has fallen, and in a Eureka-like shout, sends his multiple pages of notes flying high above his head.
The reason I can tell you all this is, first, everybody knows a little about Einstein; everybody has heard of E=m(c) squared. It is the journey that you take at this show that is important; the familiar signposts are merely pointers on the way. Like Einstein, dream a little. Find out what question that you want answered. And pursue it with alacrity. In short, follow your bliss. Let your dreams be your guides.