My overall impression
RICHARD ADAMS, The World Socialist Website (to be posted soon)
Labeled “a tragic one-act science farce” by its creators, Chris Bell and Joshua Zeller, The God Particle Complex is a cheeky romp through the realm of high energy particle physics. The action is set in the bowels of CERN (Consell Européen pour la Researche Nucléaire) and alongside the seventeen mile tube that constitutes the Large Hadron Collider, The actors, many of them veterans of the highly-acclaimed Actors Gang, bring their commedia dell’arte style to a send-up of vacuous press conferences, the collision of sub-atomic particles (mimed by rival particle physicists with competing theories about the Higgs Boson), scientific competition, the possibilities of wormhole time travel, and the potentially apocalyptic threat of colliding particles in the LHC that might create micro-blackholes that could, theoretically, eventually swallow up Planet Earth.
The play takes place on the day when the results of a massive experiment intended to demonstrate that the Higgs Boson – the so-called “God Particle” – actually exists outside the theoretical models of physicists. This is a play that asks what happens when the stretchy rubber of high theory hits the hard road of empirical data. Indirectly this is also a play about the hubris of those who seek the grand theory to everything and, in their quest to prove their theories, have created the largest scientific apparatus ever built in order to find the smallest thing that refuses to be found. Lest you be intimidated by such subjects, let me assure you that this is a play that children could love and that will entertain even the most scientifically illiterate among us.
Last year, I spent a week studying String Theory for Dummies and for about an hour or so, I felt that I had a grasp of the key concepts. I’d embarked on this little adventure in self-education because, as someone with an undergrad degree in physical chemistry, I’d followed the advancements in particle physics and cosmology – until I couldn’t. There came a point, sometime between the discovery of the strange quark and the explosion of string theories that it struck me that without a working knowledge of advanced mathematics, a grasp of exotic geometries, and a facility with complex statistics, I would never “get it.” While the CAL Tech kids in the audience – where this project originated – no doubt got more of the jokes and could sneer with delight at the folly of their misguided colleagues, the rest of us “civilians” got a rollicking introduction to one of our species’ grandest projects, thanks mainly to Sven (Roy Starr) who, with the aplomb of a carnival barker-slash-standup comedian, served as our narrative guide.
The entire cast sparkles. Kate Grabau whose unflappable beam of a smile as CERN’s PR frontperson delivering the news that the experiment has failed, captures the grand guignol charade of all high-profile press conferences. Special kudos to the bickering pair of theoretical physicists Doctors Feldman and Fleurman (Scott Harris and Andrew Wheeler), and especially to Elsye Ashton and Kevin Dulude who manage to bring a dead-pan joy to a two-headed character known as The Cosmic String. The script by the playwright team of Chris Bell and Joshua Zeller strikes a perfect balance between irreverence and awe, shtick and theory, keeping it simple but never dumbed-down. Without hammering the point, they ask whether it’s really worth the price to invest so much public money in such an extravagant quest for knowledge. Yet they also address the question of what happens if and when such experimental enterprises fail to achieve their most-hyped goals. Director Debbie McMahon’s staging is inventive and wonderfully choreographed. This show is the Fringe at its best.
