Big Bang Playground

A new play by Dana Smith

Or: Brilliant Absence

Curving like a double helix, Dana Smith’s Big Bang Playground brings together two separate stories of love (two co-workers of Indie-Greeting Card Store falling for each other and the strange tale of an astrophysicist, a glowing space crystal, and his mother) to create a solid, elegant structure of astrophysics and grief, outer and inner vastness and the things that matter in a world that could shatter in a moment.

The relationship that grows between Blue (Veronica Von Tobel) and Quinn (Caitlin Susen) (under the hardly-unbiased eyes of their manager Aaron (Chad Shohet), is a wondrous, simply poetic love story, that both thrives in the simple (surviving their absurd retail experience where” Sentimentality is Our Speciality” a deliciously painful slogan) and amid the hostile. Smith possesses a wonderful sense of dialog that sparks like poetry but flows so naturally. Von Tobel and Susen reflect light off each other, the former cracking open Blue’s spiky vulnerability and the latter, slowly revealing a mortal hollowness inside her (And leading to a diamond point soliloquy of shining devastation, a coup for both actor and author), while Shochet grows Aaron beyond his comedic beanpole to something lush and vibrant.

Meanwhile, Dr. Oberhaus (Dwayne Blackaller) working on a mysterious space crystal (a little Lovecraft-lite, a little Heavy Ruhl) toys to balance his muted emotions and consummate professionalism with his adoring Mother (Jenny Sternling). Suffering a sudden loss, and as the crystal, perhaps, begins to effect his perceptions, the astrophysicist begins to flake apart, his carefully controlled orbit wobbling. Sternling, in her embodiment of unconditional regard, gives us a warm counterpoint to Blackaller’s beautifully rendered emotional fractures and explosions of emotion (a mother son impromptu perofmrnakce of Queen is a highlight).

The play spreads itself wide, with choral speech, embodied metaphors, impossible stage directions and other scrumptious pieces that are brought to the fore in a staged reading. A play like this, with so much metaphor and magic conjured on stage would be “impossible to produce” as Blackaller put it in the talkback, following it with “And that’s a good sign that it ought to be.”

There is so much compressed into its ninety minutes, but the core of it: the supernova of love and the black hole of grief, both remain beautifully defined, their impossible geometry sketched by Smith’s exactitude and illuminated by the actors art.