Arts & Events

In the late 1930s, Lise Meitner, an emigre German Jewish physicist in Sweden received a letter from her longtime collaborator, chemist Otto Hahn in Berlin, detaailing a problem: an experiment involving unranuim the two had been pursuing with their collaborators before Meitner's escape from Nazi Germany, was not, as expected, given the knowledge and theorizing of the cutting edge of then-contemporary physics, producing heavier elements ... on a walk with her nephew, Robert Frisch, a scientist living in Copenhagen, Meitner hit on the answer: without knowing it, they had split the atom. Hahn would receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery. Meitner was mentioned, but did not share the prize. 

Jennifer Blackmur's new play, premiered by Indra's Net with its founder Bruce Coughran's direction, approaches this discovery (maybe the key scene in the play), its prehistory and all that took place around and after in the lives of the principals, with an unusual device, making it a dialogue between Meitner--or an apparition of Meitner, an appearance--and Hahn's painter wife, Edith, who's an inmate in an asylum. Is it all in Edith's head? The two give a great deal of exposition of this fascinating story over flashbacks, tableaux from their lives, which also contain much in the way of exposition ...  

(Some similar situations in late 30s Germany were staged brilliantly by Bertolt Brecht in his one act, 'The Jewish Wife.) 

The ensemble is very good, clearly committed to its task of illumination: Janet Keller as Edith, Teressa Byrne (a nice choice for playing Meitner; better-known as an operatic actor-singer), Michael Kern Cassidy as Hahn--and playing various roles, two actors bringing a lot of juice to the production: Darek Burkowski and well-known Jeff Garrett. Several have collaborated before with Indra's Net in its program of staging plays about modern science. ScottAlexander supplies the original muic during the action.  

The story's fascinating; Blackmur's play is ambitious, but doesn't develop a consistent stylization; its back-and-forth (and deliberately "random") repetition of tableaux-to-dialogue slip back into what it seems to try to avoid: melodrama. But Meitner's tory is so rich--and seemingly fraught with ambiguities, of its personalities, of the times--it could fuel any number of plays, like the release of great forces of energy from a small, if volatile, mass--the nucleus of the Bomb which Meitner refused to get involved with in development ... 

Thursdays-Saturdays at 8, Sundays at 5 through November 23, Osher Studio, 2055 Center Street, near Shattuck. $20-$28. (415) 613-9210; www.indrasnettheater.com