Ben
Brantley

June 3, 2015

For a woman of mystery, Georgie Burns sure seems like an out-in-the-open kind of gal. Make that way out. As embodied to explosive perfection by Mary-Louise Parker in Simon Stephens’s “Heisenberg,” Georgie keeps coming at — and after — Alex Priest (Denis Arndt), the sole other character in the play. He doesn’t stand a chance in hell of fending off this full frontal assault on his attention. Neither does anyone in the audience. Like Alex, we may first be inclined to resist Georgie, as well as the play in which she appears. “Heisenberg,” which opened on Wednesday night in a Manhattan Theater Club production at New York City Center, initially appears to be little more than a reworking of a romantic screwball formula we know too well: wacky heroine meets inhibited hero and sends his well-ordered life into chaos. Movies haven’t abandoned this scenario since a madcap Katharine Hepburn besieged a prim Cary Grant in the 1930s. And Georgie, a loud American in her 40s, in London, would seem to be telling us that we’re following just such a plotline when she assesses her effect on Alex, a quiet Irish-born butcher in his mid-70s: “You’re not so much a creature of routine as a psychopathic raging monster of it. And then I come along.” But theatergoers have learned that it’s a mistake to underestimate Mr. Stephens, who has a way of making us feel anew the hidden, authentic pulse that keeps clichés alive. The author of the current Tony-nominated adaptation of Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Mr. Stephens has written an adventurous assortment of dramas (“Harper Regan,” “Punk Rock,” “Port”) that locate the exotic in the familiar.