Play puts physics on stage
By Rebecca Kiriakopoulos
Infinity is the compelling story of love, sex… and math?
The original play by indie sensation and Ottawa-born playwright Hannah Moscovitch will make its National Arts Centre debut Feb. 28 on stage at the NAC’s English Theatre.
The play is a production by Toronto-based theatre company Volcano and is directed by Ross Manson, the company’s founder.
The production also includes choreography by Kate Alton and original music by Njo Kong Kie.
The worlds of science, music and mathematics collide as Infinity tells the story of a theoretical physicist, his wife, a violinist, and their daughter, a mathematician.
As the plot unfolds, the three brilliant minds explore topics of family, love and time in an attempt to answer the question: “How does a person fit inside their own life given all the uncertainty the world throws at us?”
“Hannah situates these questions in a play that vibrates with theoretical physics and music, two very different languages that humans have developed to deal with the mysteries of the universe,” said Manson.
“It’s a wonderful way to connect human mysteries with universal mysteries.”
Infinity infuses sexuality, music and science into a show that is both evocative, intellectual and humorous, according to critics.
Moscovitch has revealed that the inspiration to write a play on the contemplation of time came from the book Time Reborn by Lee Smolin, world-renowned American theoretical physicist.
Moscovitch and Manson reached out to Smolin and consulted him on the project, and his physics and theories inspired the actual physics in the play.
The show premiered in 2015 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, winning the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play in 2015.
Infinity returned to Toronto in January before making its way across southern Ontario as part of the Ontario Presents tour.
The tour included short stops in five cities. Manson says travelling with a theatre production is difficult to pull off.
“The biggest challenge of this particular tour is the vastly varying sizes of stage that we are visiting,” said Manson.
“We’ve had to build a couple of different sets, and each has expandable components to allow us to grow or shrink as need be. There was a lot of math in the tour design, as well, handled by our production manager, Peter Eaton, who might as well have been a theoretical physicist!”
One of the stops on the tour is Ottawa, where Moscovitch was raised before moving to Toronto to pursue her career as a playwright. Her other works have been performed in the capital, but this will be the first time that her work has reached the national stage at the NAC.
“It’s inevitable that talented artists will gravitate toward the larger theatre markets outside of Ottawa as they develop their skills, and it often surprises us to learn that an exciting artist we are looking to book already has a place to sleep here in town,” said Nate Medd, managing director of NAC’s English Theatre. “It’s awesome to play a role in a homecoming like this.”
Moscovitch’s NAC debut is highly anticipated, not only by those in Ottawa but by the rest of the production company as well. Mason says he’s excited for a number of reasons.
“Infinity is a play that deserves a national platform,” he said. “The collaborative team is thrilling and an unusual confluence, one of the world’s great theoretical physicists, Lee Smolin, the former composer-in-residence for La La La in Montreal, Njo Kong Kie, and Hannah herself, so it’s significant for me that the NAC is essentially supporting a kind of play-making that is breaking boundaries, and doing so in a thrilling way. That’s a good thing.”
The play is scheduled to run from Feb. 28 to March 11 at the NAC’s English Theatre before making to other Ontario venues later this year.