REVIEWS ...
Monday, June 21, 2004
Kwiat shines in a quirky gem
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Versatile, gifted actors make you believe they are who they're playing when they step onto a stage. Yet sometimes an actor and his role are so exquisitely in synch that performer and character seem to merge.
See Peter Parnell's QED at GableStage and you'll be treated to a wondrous example of an actor inhabiting his role: Carbonell Award-winner David Kwiat really is that good as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.
Parnell's play (the title signifies quantum electrodynamic theory) uses all the classic devices of the one-person show, though a second character, a student of Feynman's (played by an alluring Autumn Horne), adds two-character interaction, albeit fleeting, to the formula. Neither as gripping as David Auburn's Proof nor as brain-busting as Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, QED is the most purely entertaining work in the small surge of plays and movies about scientists and mathematicians.
It's 1986, two years before his death, and on an especially fraught Saturday in his office at the California Institute of Technology, Feynman reflects on the dizzying highs and devastating lows of his life.
He delivers energized, exultantly curious lecture-soliloquies as though he is in the classroom and we are the students he's duty-bound to engage and enlighten. He hammers away on colorful drums, readying himself for a scene-stealing performance in an amateur production of South Pacific. He takes calls from colleagues, his wife and the doctors who have devastating news about the cancer that has claimed one of his kidneys.
This quirky, quark-defining theoretical physicist has plenty to talk about: the lingering death of his beloved first wife, Arlene, when he was a young scientist helping to develop the atomic bomb; his pragmatic visits to strip clubs when he was of a mind to sketch nude models; his fury at the politics clouding the scientific truth of his work on the commission investigating the Challenger disaster.
Director Joseph Adler and his clever design team create a world that matches Feynman's whimsy: drawings known as Feynman diagrams decorate the walls of Tim Connelly's set, along with a sizable photo of Albert Einstein with his tongue extended; Michael J. Hoffman's music/sound design begins with the juxtaposed sounds of a nuclear detonation and the strains of Bali Ha'i from South Pacific.
But the glory of GableStage's QED flows mostly from Kwiat's embraceably eccentric performance. His energy, offbeat charisma, scientific curiosity and touching vulnerability reincarnate an extraordinary man.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Making physics funny and fascinating
By Bill Hirschman, Staff Writer
If you stayed awake in high school physics, you may remember Brownian motion -- the hypnotic ricocheting of molecules as they carom around under the microscope.
But no frenetic molecule careens about like David Kwiat in a superb performance as physicist Richard Feynman in the GableStage production of Peter Parnell's nearly one-man show QED.
Parnell's adequate, if plotless, script depicts a pivotal day for the Nobel Prize winner in 1986. But it's really a platform for Feynman's passionate evangelism for his view that existence is worthwhile only in the search for knowledge. That quest, Feynman warns, is an almost quixotic project that starts in doubt and likely will end there.
Following the strong hand of director Joe Adler, Kwiat's performance affirms his status as one of South Florida's finest character actors.
Under an untamed mop of salt and pepper hair, Kwiat joyously stalks Feynman's office lecturing the audience, his rubbery face contorting around eyes bulging with excitement and a mouth agape in wonder. Kwiat's enthusiasm and craft inexorably draw in the audience's allegiance and affection.
Kwiat, Adler and Parnell posit no cliched ascetic absent-minded professor living inside a disconnected world of his own. This is a scientific Falstaff exulting in the world we know, drinking life like a flagon of hearty mead.
Feynman brainstorms for a lecture on What We Know, prepares to portray a bongo-banging chief for an amateur acting troupe's South Pacific, rails against the dilution of a report he helped write about the cause of the Challenger disaster, helps a grad student (Autumn Horne) in his CalTech office, plans a trip to the wilds of the Asian steppes, reminisces about the horror of helping invent the atomic bomb, and tries to decide whether to have life-threatening surgery to deal with his fourth recurrence of cancer.
He faces his illness, its treatment and even the prospect of death less with fear than fascination. They are all scientific problems to be analyzed and solved.
"Will we ever understand it?" he asks about science, nature and life. "I don't know. But not knowing is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong?".
QED stands for Feynman's Nobel Prize-winning theory of quantum electrodynamics. You do not have to know a scintilla of physics to enjoy yourself --although it does provide another layer of resonance if you do.
Feynman and Kwiat are just wonderful company: funny, fascinating and illuminating far more than the nature of light's dual nature as a particle and a wave. If he had been our physics professor, we might have learned something.
Bill Hirschman can be reached at 954-356-4513 or bhirschman@sun-sentinel.com.
Friday, July 2, 2004
Brain Man
By Tony Guzman, Critic at Large
"QED" stands for quantum electro-dynamics, the underlying principle of which was one of the mysteries of physics until it was worked out by the brilliant Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman. Luckily for QED, the play about him written by Peter Parnell and currently running at GableStage, Feynman was also a colorful eccentric who, besides having helped create the atomic bomb and heading the presidential commission on the Challenger space shuttle disaster, also loved to sketch nudes, frequent topless bars and steal the show by hamming it up in walk-on roles in amateur theatricals.
With the economy of an elegant scientific formula, Parnell manages to weave in all the multifarious threads and themes of Feynman's life by having everything come up in the context of one afternoon and evening in 1986 in the physicist's Cal Tech office. Feynman takes calls, talks to the audience about his life and insights - and rehearses his part as the chief of Bali Hai in South Pacific. Parnell ups the stakes by having Feynman face a time-pressured decision regarding whether or not to undergo a life-threatening operation for his most recent recurrence of cancer. There's even Miss Field, a fun-loving female physics student flitting in and out of the action to spice things thing up.
Apart from the intrinsic interest of QED's themes and the window it opens on one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of recent times, the real kick this GableStage production offers - the theatrical equivalent of the Big Bang - is the chance to see one of South Florida's most consummate actors, David Kwiat, in what is surely the role of a lifetime for him. Kwiat's an actor of the Old School: on opening night he had all his many lines down pat and rendered them trippingly on the tongue - no first night flubs - and every moment and effect of his performance was rendered with the aptness of a Vermeer - no blank looks while still trying to "find" his way early in the run. What's special about this QED, performance-wise, is that it allows a first-rate actor of the British, "external" type to run the table from loony comedy to heart-wrenching sorrow, while affording Kwiat with a chance to go beyond the cleverly entertaining facility of his somewhat abstracted stage persona. As Feynman, Kwiat cracks us up and charms us, as always, but he flashes anger as well (over the Challenger disaster) and conveys genuine, aching pain (over the death of Feynman's first wife who succumbed to tuberculosis while he worked on the A-bomb). A master of surfaces, in QED Kwiat also plumbs the depths.
As a quasi-one-man show, QED obviously requires a tour-de-force performance, and David Kwiat delivers big time. Autumn Horne, one of our most likeable and talented young actresses, gives us a plausible and stage-brightening Miss Field who's darn cute dancing to jungle drums (although we're not entirely convinced that she really understands what quarks are). Bottom line: QED is a fascinating play and David Kwiat is great in it. You'll laugh, you'll think about "the nature of things," you'll be happy for and proud of David.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
One-Man Wonder
In 'QED', both actor and subject are highly charged
By Dan Hudak
Richard Feynman was a physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1965, helped develop the atomic bomb, and was a key member of a panel that investigated the Challenger explosion in 1986. He was also a loon. Oozing eccentricity as often as possible, Feynman -- aside from being considered the greatest mind since Einstein -- was also an avid bongo player, an artist (with a fetish for nude models), and an actor in local theater.
As brilliantly portrayed by Carbonell Award-winning David Kwiat in QED, Feynman's life and work is given a renaissance performance that would surely have made him proud (he died in 1988). In what is essentially a one-man play, Kwiat exudes a spirit and poignancy that demonstrates complete control of the ever-shifting dialogue and mood, captivating us to the point where he can make us laugh or mourn seemingly at will.
Although Autumn Horne makes a brief appearance as his student, most of the time Kwiat is alone on the intimate set at the GableStage. The events of the play, which take place at Feynman's office at Cal Tech on a Saturday afternoon in June 1986, include a number of phone calls from doctors (he has cancer), his wife, the Challenger committee, and visiting Russian friends. Kwiat also speaks directly to the audience on a number of occasions, recounting Feynman's rich and storied life of accolades, questions, and loss.
There are few scholarly topics that elicit more blank stares than physics, let alone quantum electrodynamics, a field-within-a-field that describes how atoms produce radiation and that gives the play its name. But with Kwiat embodying Feynman's zest for life, it's not hard to stare in amusement and appreciation.
