Theater Review: "A Disappearing Number" Mostly Adds Up

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 17 July 2010 22:49

Written by Laura Blum

Most moviegoers today believe life takes place in 3-D. Suspecting they may have a point, I took a momentary break from the cinema to catch the flesh-and-blood performance of A Disappearing Number, at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts' David H. Koch Theater in New York City.

Presented as part of the Lincoln Center Festival (July 7 to 25, 2010), it's one of 45 works by artists and ensembles from 12 countries.

The play, it turns out, makes liberal use of 2-D screens, as is the wont of English playwright and director Simon McBurney and his theater] company Complicite, with whom he shares writing and creative-juice credits for this mind-tickling piece.

McBurney had me applauding from the production notes. "Time for school, where I would understand nothing about math except that I got the wrong answer," he recalls his boyhood trauma. This was the assurance I needed to brave 110 minutes of musings about mathematics and the World War I-era collaboration between Cambridge University math
professor G. H. Hardy (David Annen) and young Indian clerk Srinivasa Ramanujan (Shane Shambhu), a raving mathematical genius.

Fortunately for numbers-challenged viewers like me, the play also ponders beauty, imagination and love, not to mention the nature of infinity and the past's link with the future.

A Disappearing Number takes its opening spark from Ramanujan's first overture to Hardy, as described in Hardy's book, A Mathematician's Apology. The then unknown quantity scrawled a letter to the tweedy don proving that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ... equals -1/12. At first glance Hardy figured it was the rantings of a crank, but soon recognized amid the scratchings the Riemann zeta function with s = - 1. Apparently we have all this to thank for today's cell phones and computers.

But rather than concentrate on the relationship between the plumped Brit and the pinched Brahmin, Complicite folds a present-day love
story into the mix. Contemporary audiences can relate to the gadget-wielding Indian-American businessman, Al (Firdous Bamji) and his math lecturer partner, Ruth (Saskia Reeves) without having to digest a period piece on top of demanding curriculum. And their
figure-fueled philosophical – and even geographical -- quests
certainly draw resonances with the historic pair's.

Yet the Julie and Julia device gets a bit choppy, and leaves something of an artificial aftertaste. Foretaste as well: we first encounter Ramanujan's mathematical ideas when Ruth first encounters Al, in the opening scene. Through the course of the play we will join them in fathoming the mysteries of the universe, in celebrating connectedness and in mourning the loss of a baby, a marriage and a spouse.

Too bad such character development eludes the heroic duo of Ramanujan and Hardy. Competing for our emotional allegiance, they don't stand a chance.

Fortunately, there's more than enough passion and intrigue to go around in the use of math concepts as a prism into human nature. For example, death is compared to infinity; partitions of numbers stand as a metaphor for the partition of individuals as well as of India and Pakistan; and the entropy of cadavers is matched with the decomposition of numbers into prime factors.

If math's essence is complexity at its simplest expression, Complicite can slap gold stars on their foreheads for the stark elegance of its thematic inquiry.

The narrative structure also offers a riff on math. Hopping back and forth in Al and Ruth's relationship – and across the century – teases out mathematical patterns, as do our protagonists.

Michael Levine's production design and Paul Anderson's lighting take the logic of patterns to its poetic and pulsing edge. Though at times
almost too much of a good thing, the projected infinities of calculations filled the stage with chaos' beauty and mystique.

Taken together with Nitin Sawhney's music of live tabla rhythms (played by Hiren Chate) and hypnotic chants of mathematical sequences, the play gives a sound and light show of sufficient dimensions to put any 3-D movie out there to shame.

Additional details about A Disappearing Number and the Lincoln Center Festival are posted at: www.lincolncenter.org.

A Disappearing Number
Lincoln Center Festival
July 7 to 25, 2010
David H. Koch Theater
20 Lincoln Center Plaza
(Columbus Avenue at 63rd Street)
New York, NY 10023

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