INSIGNIFICANCE
British playwright Terry Johnson’s richly wrought Insignificance, a cultural collage that both invigorates and entertains, plays brilliant variations on its own scheme of relativity. Johnson uses highly unlikely but far from random encounters to throw together four very different characters in a New York hotel room in 1954.
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The play’s first–and last–image prevails: the Professor staring, as if peering past the end of the universe, at a blackboard covered with equations. In New York to attend a conference on world peace, he’s been subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Senator barges into the room, pours himself a stiff drink, and tries to browbeat the Professor into squealing on his “Commie” colleagues at tomorrow’s inquisition. The Senator has reason to be desperate: the hearings themselves are under attack, and to justify the witch-hunt he needs to land a big fish like the Professor.
After the Senator slinks off, the Actress bangs on the Professor’s door. Looking like the giant billboard that’s said to be outside the hotel window, she wears a full-length fur and what looks like Monroe’s famous white dress, the one blown up by the breeze from a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. She’s come to impress the Professor with how well she grasps the specific theory of relativity–and by doing so, kill off for at least this one night her dumb blond/sex goddess image, what Hollywood considers her “reality.” And she’ll turn some tables: if she can explain it to him accurately, he has to show her his legs.
And the 70-year-old Professor who’s facing death wrestles with what he sees as his own lack of a moral center. The Professor believes that most Americans are chronically unable to take responsibility because they measure themselves by shallow reckonings. But the Professor forgives himself nothing, You sense that if he could take the atom bomb with him, he’d kill himself. But the curse is immortal.
Robert Maffia brings a gritty realism to his jealous jock. He’s especially adept at conveying the bonehead cruelty of a man who means well but thinks little. A simple lout who calls Freud “Floyd” and pops his gum annoyingly during sex, this thickheaded Ballplayer expects that living with a tormented movie star will be no different from the generic bliss he sees on Ozzie and Harriet.
