AISLE SAY Boston

THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS ONE

by Peter Morris
Directed by Steven Cosson
The Market Theatre
Winthrop Park, Harvard Square/(617)576-0808

Reviewed by Will Stackman

In higher mathematics, the square root of minus one, an imaginary number, is symbolized as lowercase   i. In Peter Morris's prize-winning undergraduate play, The Square Root of Minus One, this numerical shorthand -- never directly referenced in the text -- is one of the many bits of adolescent cleverness embedded in this rather shallow excellently crafted script. Morris's characters are essentially cyphers. We see what they do; we get only stereotypical information about why they do it. While this opagueness echoes the intellectual and emotional state of the main character, the device is not enough on which to build a full-length play, even a 90 minute thriller with no intermission.

However, the current production, the first actual play of the Market Theatre's first full season is tightly directed by Steven Cosson, effectively mounted by Robert Pyzocha, and uniformly well acted. Thomas Shaw brings an intensity to the main character, Dewis, that should earn him a solo bow, even in such a tight ensemble show. In the hands of an actor without the ability to unfold a character, the role could degenerate into nothing but a whining loser, taking the show with it. The other three students, Andy Powers as Colfett, the amoral ring-leader, Matthew Greene as Stull, a closet-Nazi Episcopalian, and Jack Ferver as Wiggins, their almost willing victim, do yeoman work carrying the play along, but make much less of their characters, remaining masks rather than real people. Only Ferver -- who may have a career as Rowan Atkinson's youthful clone -- has moments of humanity, which pass almost unnoticed due to his nudity. Incidently, a sign in the miniature lobby warns that there will be smoking onstage, but there is nothing to warn front-row patrons about explicit torture, full-frontal nudity , masturbation , and simulated fellatio.

Director Cosson, designer Pyzocha, and lighting designer Gina Gjertson have used with the ambience of the former Harvard eating club where the Market Theatre is housed, create an believable setting for the play. There are enough details to place the action, though the scene changes, done in dimness by a female crew disguised as first-formers, would seem less amateur were there more built-ins and fold-outs and less fiddly furniture. Morris specifies the period as the ’50s in a school serving Philadelphia's upper crust, but as the company's dramaturg Kathy White suggests, there's been little change in some quarters. Certainly some New England schools haven't made it into this millenium. and barely into the last quarter-century.

Only headmaster Cuttymeat's platitudes about Alma Mater which open the show, performed with comic intensity by Thomas Reiff, sporting a Phi Beta Kappa key on his lapel, truly limit the show's time frame. Unfortunately, this role is written with no further depth and Reiff becomes no more than the fat man students deride. So too with William Church's character, Mr. Landis Boning, the barely closeted English maths professor with an equally ridiculous name. This role, which might have been used to create some sort of plot complication , merely provides a touch of comic venality. Indeed costumer Harriet Voyt carefully costuming tends to heighten the stereotypes, including Sara Newhouse's slatternly waitress in pink with lace showing. The play becomes a melodramatic schoolboy vision, rather than effective drama. One almost expects one of the characters -- and it could be any one of the students -- to step forward as in some of the films Morris claims to have been inspired by and announce that this has all been a flashback. Now it's time for the consequences and the real drama.

No doubt The Market Theatre, impressed by Morris's Yale and Oxford credentials -- and literary pretensions -- thought that a world-premiere, in the professional sense, of this student prize-winner about a situation which might resonate with their neighbors in the colleges down the street could be a hit. Even if the world hadn't suffered psychic upheaval earlier in the month, the gratuitous unpleasantness in this script, thinly disguised as adolescent angst, would probably not be any more tolerable or significant. Old news told in retro style, even if superbly acted, is still old news. It doesn't become absurd unless it actually is. What works for the Oxford Dramatic Union on their yearly pilgrimage to the Fringe doesn't necessarily translate into professional theatre. And confusion over imaginary numbers is a weak metaphor for the perceived inability of the children of privilege to get a life.

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