STRANGE PATTERNS
Professor Nakamoto's Nexus of Numbers
When Gregg Tobo takes the stage as the enthusiastic Professor Nakamoto, he looks like an unassuming college professor. But don’t let your guard down, because soon you’ll be wondering what’s real and what’s fantastical.
It’s all part of Tobo’s one-person show, “Professor Nakamoto’s Nexus of Numbers,” an unbelievable combination of mind tricks and mathematics that plays at Theatre Asylum’s Elephant Space, June 21 – 29, 2014. The 55-minute play tells of Professor Nakamoto’s obsessive mathematical inquiries and his search for patterns, all of which builds to an impossible and inexplicable climax. Afterwards, one must conclude that Tobo (the show’s author and performer) is either a mathematical genius or a skilled and subtle magician.
Or perhaps he’s both.
Tobo doesn’t deny that he’s a magician, and yes he knows how to perform mathematical memory stunts like memorizing 500 digits of pi, but if this is a magic show — well, it doesn’t look or feel like a magic show. All the usual trappings of a magic show have been stripped away so that everything appears guileless and above-board. But if there’s no artifice, how can you explain the increasingly improbable patterns and seeming coincidences that emerge throughout the show?
To create his play, Tobo has drawn inspiration from a variety of sources, including Sylvia Nassar (“A Beautiful Mind”), Darren Aronofsky (“Pi”) and David Auburn (“Proof”), as well as A. R. Luria, (“The Mind of a Mnemonist”), Dante Alighieri (“The Divine Comedy”), and “I Ching” translator Richard Wilhelm.
He debuted “Professor Nakamoto” in Washington, D.C. in 2013 where it won a “Best of the Fringe” award playing at the Goethe Institute. That was followed by a run at the 250-seat Dairy Performance Space in his hometown of Boulder, Colorado. The show was so well received that this year Tobo is taking the show on the road with performances in Hollywood, California; Indianapolis, Indiana; and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Every performance ends with the audience filing out trying to make sense of what they’ve seen and asking themselves if what they saw was “real.” I’ve seen the show, and I can tell you, the smarter you are, the more you’ll be amazed and astonished.
I tried to get Tobo to give me a hint about which parts of the show are “real” and which are “tricks”, but he only smiled and said: “Ah, that’s the mystery, isn’t it?”
IF YOU GO
What: Professor Nakamoto’s Nexus of Numbers (part of the 2014 Hollywood Fringe Festival)
Where: Theatre Asylum Elephant Space 6320 Santa Monica Blvd. Hollywood, CA. 90038
When:
Saturday June 21 2014, 5:30 PM
Sunday June 22 2014, 8:30 PM
Wednesday June 25 2014, 8:30 PM
Friday June 27 2014, 11:30 PM
Sunday June 29 2014, 5:00 PM
Who: Ages 12 and up
Running time: 55 minutes
