Theater Review - Get Back

In the Fantastic Four comic books, cosmic radiation transformed Susan Storm Richards into the Invisible Woman. In real life, cosmic radiation turned physicist Ralph Alpher into a kind of invisible man.

Alpher’s name never became a byword for scientific genius like Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, and that’s the whole point of Lauren Gunderson’s play Background. Winner of the 2004 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award, Background offers a mind-blowing metaphor for the physicist’s life, yet only gets superficially inside his head.

Essential Theatre’s production begins when Alpher (Darren Marshall) suffers a heart attack the night that other scientists receive the Nobel Prize for discovering cosmic background radiation. Decades earlier, Alpher’s own research mathematically proved the radiation’s existence — providing crucial support for the big-bang theory — but Alpher languished in obscurity. After his heart attack, the little-known scientist sees his life pass before his eyes, in reverse order.

Background tries to fit the highlights of an entire life into about an hour, so not surprisingly, individual scenes tend to be short and sketchy. Worse, the cast performs the roles in largely one-dimensional ways, with Marshall playing Alpher as a stuffy professor, Amy Holt his concerned housewife, etc. In the play’s most intriguing touch, Katy Carkuff, as Alpher’s loving daughter, witnesses the entire action, including events that occurred before she was born.

Dramatic works about scientists, including A Beautiful Mind, invariably focus on the personal problems of famous thinkers while downplaying their work. Gunderson turns tradition upside down by choosing a little-known scientist and exploring his research with genuine curiosity. Background’s counterclockwise structure neatly fits with cosmology: Science reconstructs the big bang by starting at the present and working backward to the first nanosecond of creation.

But Background’s narrative hook becomes increasingly thin as the play skips back to Alpher’s childhood, and then literally to the dawn of the universe. Background starts with a provocative premise, but draws few insightful conclusions about Alpher’s character or the human condition. The play ends with a cosmological big bang, but not an emotional one.

Essential Theatre presents Background in repertory through March 5 at Dad’s Garage Top Shelf, 280 Elizabeth St. Wed.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. $15. 404-523-3141. www.essentialtheatre.com.