Playwright: Kenneth Lin
At: Broadway Armory, 5917 N. Broadway, Chicago. Tickets: www.jackalopetheatre.org . Runs through: June 30
How much is a human life worth? For Mitch ( Joel Ewing ), one of the key figures in Kenneth Lin's new play Life on Paper, the question is at the core of his career. A mathematics genius whose years-long effort to prove a complex equation blew up in his face, Mitch is now working with insurance companies, using his skill with numbers to help justify lower payouts in wrongful death claims. Investigating a Wisconsin plane crash, his job is complicated because one of the passengers was a local billionaire who had been planning to gift his home town with $50 million, enough to change the town's future...unless Mitch succeeds in reducing the payout.
Opposing him is a local bank actuary named Ida ( Mary Williamson ) who knew the dead man and knows and loves the town and its people. She is also quite good with numbers, though not at Mitch's level, but she believes that she needs to get him to see past them into the heart of the town in order to persuade him to get his client to pay out a larger sum.
It is a fairly stereotypical conflict—head vs. heart—in unusual trappings, but both Ewing and Williamson strive to give their characters more depth than that stereotype suggests. The key to Mitch's character—and the underlying symbolic structure of the whole story—lies in a scene in which he explains his mathematical proof to a captivated Ida. To Lin's credit, the writing here, as elsewhere, is crisp and clear. He manages to boil the complexities of this proof ( which has to do with the distribution of prime numbers ) into an easily-digestible shorthand that makes it clear not only to Ida but to the audience as well: no easy feat. As Mitch explains that he was trying to prove that the equation works out to infinity, it may be geeky stuff but his passion is plain, and Ewing works overtime to allow us into this numbers guy's soul. It works on Ida; they end up in bed together. ( Who knew math could be foreplay? )
Williamson's performance is also outstanding. We meet Ida in the middle of a divorce ( from artist/nice guy Michael, played by Josh Odor ). With her personal life out of joint, she has thrown herself into her job, and her defense of her town seems to give her something to focus on. It's as if she can resuscitate something in herself if she can get Mitch ( and the courts ) to see the importance of considering what is intangible as well as the raw numbers from an algorithm.
However, as good as the performances are ( including Guy Wicke as Mitch's cousin and Satya Jnani Chavez as a waitress ), it is difficult to get past the script's inherent staging issues. Lin has done director Gus Menary and scenic designer Ryan Emens no favors with an episodic structure that features scenes in a hotel breakfast room, an office, a bench high on a hilltop, a hotel room, a Winnebago( ! ), a courtroom, and an art gallery. As clever as Emens' set is with its hidden rollouts, etc. it might have been better to go with something less complicated. Changing from one scene to another—though Menary's crew has it down to a science here—is clunky and awkward and time-consuming. The long set changes risk pulling the audience out of the play, especially dangerous with such heady material. I found myself sitting there wondering if this play might have been stronger as a two-hander, concentrating solely on the interesting relationship between Mitch and Ida on a far simpler set. But that's me; your mileage may vary.
