The Science of Disconnection

The evidence is clear. The proof is certain. The math is sound.

There were three words in particular that intrigued me about The Science of Disconnection months before I had the chance to see it: "very limited seating". What could be the reason for such a thing? What was happening to the Refinery's performing space that would restrict the audience size so much? I have to admit I was hoping to walk in there and find a working physics laboratory set up in the theatre (complete with Jacob's Ladder and Tesla Coil). But no, instead I was greeted by a quaint little tea room, blocked off by paper screens, and the intimate audience of 32 filed in and formed a circle around the edge. Almost like a story circle.

The play, penned by Canadian playwright David Belke, recounts the story of Austrian-born Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, celebrated as the "German Marie Curie" (according to Albert Einstein) and whose work was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission. We see her early days in Berlin, struggling for acceptance among the exclusively male intelligencia, her long-standing partnership with chemist Otto Hahn, her exodus from Germany in the shadow of the impending Holocaust, her secret labour to discover one of the most significant scientific advances in human history, and the succeeding lack of acknowledgement for it. The photograph of Meitner on the playbill shows her in the laboratory, stern, humourless, and darkly beautiful. Her eyes are heavy, loaded with a spinning cosm of knowledge, and their gaze pierces out through the picture, as if a challenge to anyone who looks at it, to tell them that her place is there and she will not be moved.

Taking on the role of Meitner is the charming, talented, starred-in-Velocity-and-is-therefore-better-than-other-people Jamie Lee Shebelski. She marches timidly out on stage (if one can indeed march timidly) armed with a small leather suitcase and a memory of old Berlin. She carries the one-woman show with grace and reserve. Other solo shows might require the actor to act out with utmost passion, bouncing to and fro around the stage, but this one required a lot of quiet ponderance and subtle anguish, which I think is more difficult to convey. She holds the audience's attention through gesture and stillness, enthusiasm and despair. The only slight waver was that some of her crosses to signify time transitions could have used more fluidity. Her performance is brave in both its intimacy and its sense of defiance. She is alone on the stage, just as Lise Meitner was in life, so closely surrounded by peers but not really among them.

The evidence is clear. The proof is certain. The math is sound.

This is a memory play. Meitner does not simply give an account of her life, straightforward from one end to the other, but she rather flits around, unstuck in time and space, following the ebb and flow of a receding memory. In amongst the regular linear story, we return frequently to two focal points. The first is a café in Berlin, 1907, where her partnership with Otto Hahn began, although she has trouble capturing the exact details of the nebulous memory. The second is on a train fleeing Germany in 1938, where the stark details are all too clear and every time she revisits it she risks being trapped there, that time will rewrite itself and she will not escape. These two focal points capture both her romantic side and the grim nature of her reality.

The director's helm was manned by Will Brooks. I feel a bit of sympathy toward directors of solo shows, since their work is inevitably more invisible than with most other plays. I can't really speculate where his direction begins and ends with regards to Jamie Lee's performance, but from the blog I know that he pulled multiple duty as producer, publicist, and lighting and set designer. The stage aesthetic served the play very well with its unique sense of confinement making the audience part of Meitner's inner circle. A model of an atom sketched on the stage floor in what looks like charcoal stretches out to embrace the audience, while leaving Shebelski, for most of her stage time, fixed at the nucleus; the subtle trick reinforced Meitner's centrality, both to her own story and science in general, as well as makes a point the art of solo theatre, where one singular performer must have the gravitas to keep the audience from flitting away. The paper screens were used, with the help of some simple lighting effects, to display images throughout the play; they were basic and symbolic, like what you might find drawn on a blackboard. The audience plays three roles: Meitner's confidants, her students, and complicit with her judgemental peers. Establishing this balance requires the careful harmonisation of a lot of simple elements, and Brooks pulls it off.

Meitner was a strong woman who committed herself body and soul to her craft. Despite the great divide between the fine arts and nuclear physics, this is an actor's play in that it involves someone who struggled long and hard to do great work even among minimal recognition. At one point she remarks on her struggle, saying, "First it was [being a woman], then it was the ancestry of my grandparents: there will always be a reason to exclude me." While this may show a detachment from the realities of the Holocaust, it also develops a narrative of exclusion and mistreatment. Meitner had everything stacked against but somehow succeeded (she was the first woman ever admitted to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for science). Therefore, The Science of Disconnection is both a harsh examination of her marginalisation and a triumphant celebration of the fact that her story is being told. Shebelski captures this duality nowhere better than when she says, "The truth wants to be discovered." Shebelski grapples with Meitner's troubled mind, someone who can't help but see human interaction in atomic terms, as a series of connections and disconnections. Just as Meitner examined the interactions of the universe's smallest particles to unlock its largest secrets, Shebelski takes those small interactions and creates a profound image (and, thankfully, she does not end the play by staring dramatically at the audience and saying, "This is the science of disconnection.")

I mentioned a blog earlier. You can look back over the production of this play by visiting this blog at http://www.thescienceofdisconnection.com . The blog's content and existence are indicative of a greater trend with this play, that being that it's larger than itself. Putting on this production was an act of bravery by the RiverCity Ensemble Cooperative, and I say that mainly because the limited seating means a tremendous cut to potential revenues. So this was purely put on "for love of the game" as it were. Knowing all this I would hate to say anything bad about the play, so it's a good thing I don't have to. The Science of Disconnection is a remarkable piece of theatre showcasing human interaction's capacity for great creation and destruction, as well as the interplay between a single human narrative and the mysteries of the universe. I could go on for a lot longer, but I think I'll just trail off with Meitner's own words:

The evidence is clear. The proof is certain. The math is sound.