Theatre
Invisible Atom
BY Steve English March 24, 2008 13:03
Featuring Anthony Black. Directed by Ann-Marie Kerr. Written by Anthony Black. Presented by Necessary Angel Theatre Company and 2b Theatre Company. To Mar 30. $20; Sun PWYC/$15 adv. Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson. 416-504-7529.
From the outside, Invisible Atom — Anthony Black’s one-man show about free-market economics, particle physics and socio-evolutionary progress — sounds just slightly more fun than John Maynard Keynes Presents the General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money: The Musical! But once inside, the brainy theoretical stuff pulls back, revealing a personal tragedy that’s smart, witty and surprisingly poignant.
Emerging from the inky blackness onto a stage bare save for a four-foot riser, Black launches into an extended monologue as Atom, an orphaned stockbroker at the apex of an existential crisis; we literally meet him mid-leap. A former Wall Street shark with a million-dollar home, a new baby and all the self-satisfaction money can buy, Atom’s world has recently been blown to shreds by a terrorist attack that wiped out his colleagues, his livelihood and his sense of purpose in one fell swoop. Shattered, he embarks on a quest in search of his birth parents, discovering in the process that he is descended from “a long line of bastards” that includes both Sir Isaac Newton and infamous predatory capitalist Adam Smith, the founding fathers of our present-day scientific/economic industrial complex.
The economic and atomic theory bits serve as interesting allegories for Atom’s personal crisis; science’s need to divide the indivisible into forever smaller fragments and macroeconomics’ ravenous march towards “progress” amplifying his sense of psychic disintegration. The personal drama comes off a tad gooey and maudlin by comparison, but the overly sentimental hand helps humanize the heady, abstract themes. If you’re looking for an excuse to put off your tax return for one more night, here it is.
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1
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