Fans of stage theater probably already know about The 222, the large art gallery with the small theater at 222 Healdsburg Ave. While the Raven hosts several community theater productions all year round—including staging school holiday productions from The Healdsburg School and St. John’s Catholic School this month—The 222 is home base for the quieter, more professional one-act plays that explore the subtleties and surprises of personal relationships.
Case in point: Heisenberg, the 80-minute, two-person play being staged again this weekend. If the name is familiar, it could be because of the Breaking Bad protagonist. But just like the high school chemistry teacher, the play takes its reference from the theoretical physicist who postulated that a thing cannot ever truly be measured—the so-called uncertainty principle.
That meta-text, if you will, is put to the test in the first scene of Heisenberg, as staged at The 222. Melissa Alce (as Georgie Burns) bursts onto the stage in bipolar, if not magnetic, opposition to Paul Vincent O’Connor (Alex Priest). It is the unlikeliest of circumstances that has brought them together, so unlikely as to be random (another principle of quantum mechanics). In her early 40s, she is imaginative, loud, perhaps delusional, of unfiltered speech and manner, a-flurry with extravagant gestures and proclamations. She may, or may not, have a son who is lost to her.
He’s a butcher, 75, who’s thinking of retiring.
The improbability of their coming together becomes, over the course of the play, an inevitability. The transitions between the five scenes are each simply played out in silence with the cool jazz track that defines the venue. Between the transitions, when the stage lights are up, the actors demonstrate the difference that experienced, career-stage actors can bring to a play.
On opening night the delivery may have been a bit rushed; the reaction to a line may have taken a moment longer to sink in. But there are an awful lot of words in Simon Stephens’ 2015 play (and a shout-out to Alce’s efforts to learn them all), and even given the observational simplicity of a two-actor, one-act play, subtleties need room to breathe. Sometimes director Rondell McCormick allows that, but it takes the actors’ relationship with the audience, even over a relatively brief run, to establish it.
As Paul Mahder said before the play began: “This is real theater. There is no rewind.” That’s true of any stage play, of course, and in a way it’s true of the characters in Heisenberg, too. They are—by their own admission—stumbling their way through this stage of life, trying to find out what the next scene brings, and if that lost child can ever be found.
Tickets to ‘Heisenberg’ are now on sale at the222.org; performances this weekend at 222 Healdsburg Ave.
