BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE | The new theater season is only a few weeks old, but it’s safe to say Nick Payne’s “Incognito” will be one of the most exciting plays you’ll see this year. That may be even more surprising when one realizes that the play is ostensibly about brain function. Or, more accurately, about how much we cannot know about how our brains work but how much we want to.
The play is loosely based on several true stories, including that of Thomas Harvey who removed Einstein’s brain during the great man’s autopsy and kept it to study for nearly 40 years. It’s also the story of Henry Mason, a man whose brain seems to have no capacity for short-term information retention, and of Evelyn Einstein who believes she is the adopted daughter of Einstein’s son but might actually be his much younger half sister. In all, over the course of 90 minutes, we meet some 20 people whose lives intersect and overlap. It is not so much a plot-driven piece as a human collage, and the cumulative power of it by the end is profoundly moving.
Far more poetic and abstract than Payne’s previous work, “Constellations,” its underlying questions are how do we know what we know and what defines who we are? Payne doesn’t attempt any answers, but rather marvels at the incomprehensible complexity of it all, just as do we in watching.
Directed with absolute precision by Doug Hughes with movement by Peter Pucci on Scott Pask’s magnificently minimal set with Ben Stanton’s gorgeous and understated lighting, the play recalls Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” in which he writes, “A poem should not mean/ But be.” The power of this piece is in the total experience of it as it unfolds, as we’re drawn into disparate lives and marvel at the power of the couple of pounds of meat we all have in our heads.
The four-member cast is stunning. Geneva Carr, Charlie Cox, Heather Lind, and Morgan Spector playing multiple characters bring each one levels of originality and specificity that make them distinct and moving.
Neuroscience may not necessarily be an obvious topic for popular theater, but in Payne’s hands it becomes fascinating and deeply human. But then after all, it is the stuff we are made of.
INCOGNITO | MTC at New York City Center, 131 W. 55th St. | Through Jul. 10: Tue.-Wed. at 7 p.m.; Thu.-Sat. at 8 p.m.; Wed., Sat.-Sun. at 2 p.m. | $90 at nycitycenter.org or 212-581-1212 | Ninety mins., no intermission
