A Disappearing Number
Opening Night: July 15, 2010
Closing: July 18, 2010
Theater: Lincoln Center Theater
Inspired by the true story of the unusual friendship between two of the 20th century’s most remarkable pure mathematicians–Cambridge University don G.H. (Godfrey Harold) Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, a young Brahmin genius–A Disappearing Number interweaves their tale with a fictional contemporary love story between a present-day university lecturer and her American-Asian partner. Past, present, and future occur simultaneously onstage as A Disappearing Number explores such themes as the beauty of science, our quest for meaning and knowledge, who we are and how we connect to one another–and ultimately, what is permanent and what disappears forever.
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July 19, 2010
Math was my worst subject in school, so my heart sank a bit when "A Disappearing Number" began with an earnest lecturer striding onto the stage of the David H. Koch Theatre and explaining numerical sequences. But when another actor entered and said, "I’ll bet you thought the whole show would be like this," the audience laughed, and we knew we were in safe hands. This complex, bizarre, theatrical meditation on how numbers influence our lives flows like a combination sci-fi thriller and scholarly treatise. Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney and devised with members of his company, Complicite, it’s presented here for an appallingly short run as part of the Lincoln Center Festival after winning the Evening Standard and Olivier awards for best play in London.
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August 10, 2010
Life is rough: In Jonathan Tolins’ "Secrets of the Trade," closeted New York teenager Andy Lipman has only a celebrity mentor, a pair of wonderfully supportive parents, and an Ivy League education to see him through his coming-out experience. How will Andy survive? Pretty easily, it turns out, although it’s a little harder to understand how this production survives its extraordinarily low stakes and thematic shallowness. Somehow, though, between uniformly excellent perfs and just enough charm to squeak by, survive it does.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 14, 2010
In the theatre, darkness is frequently more illuminating than light. When you have to work to drag even the tiniest bit of hope or faith from characters, how can you not feel you’ve accomplished more than if their happier sides are on display from minute one onstage? That Lucy Thurber’s play Bottom of the World, which the Atlantic Theater Company just opened at its Stage 2 space, succeeds at all given how hard you don’t have to work is a happy circumstance, if one that won’t inspire much satisfied celebration.
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July 17, 2010
Zeroes, ones, twos and threes glide and slide, shimmy and leap before your eyes in the quietly mesmerizing play “A Disappearing Number,” a production from the British company Complicite that plays through Sunday as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. The familiar little digits we use for all sorts of mundane purposes, like marking time and counting money, slowly begin to acquire talismanic power as they swim across the video screens onstage or blink from a clock in the corner.
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July 16, 2010
To make a longish story short, A Disappearing Number, which is being presented for a short run by the Lincoln Center Festival 2010 and the David H. Koch Theater, is a thrilling, thrilling, thrilling play — perhaps a surprising statement for a work about mathematics, a subject that can instantly make eyes around the globe glaze over.
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July 19, 2010
Shortly into the Complicite theater company’s "A Disappearing Number," a professor (Saskia Reeves) delivers a lecture on mathematics. As she scribbles ever more complicated equations, you can practically feel the audience tense.
READ THE REVIEWJuly 19, 2010
Math was my worst subject in school, so my heart sank a bit when "A Disappearing Number" began with an earnest lecturer striding onto the stage of the David H. Koch Theatre and explaining numerical sequences. But when another actor entered and said, "I’ll bet you thought the whole show would be like this," the audience laughed, and we knew we were in safe hands. This complex, bizarre, theatrical meditation on how numbers influence our lives flows like a combination sci-fi thriller and scholarly treatise. Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney and devised with members of his company, Complicite, it’s presented here for an appallingly short run as part of the Lincoln Center Festival after winning the Evening Standard and Olivier awards for best play in London.
READ THE REVIEW