Now Then Again

by Penny Penniston

Description

A time-bending love story between two physicists. Described by The Chicago Sun-Times as "a deft little romantic screwball comedy with a very brainy twist. It brings to mind some of Tom Stoppard's more intellectual theatrical hijinks. But it's also the kind of work that might have beguiled such 1930s and '40s era film directors as Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, who probably would have hired Albert Einstein as a script consultant." "Few new plays require a basic understanding of quantum show more mechanics - the physics theories of matter and energy - for full appreciation. And when young playwrights are thinking of settings for their plays, they don't normally alight on such less-than-sexy locations as the Fermilab National Particle Accelerator Laboratory in west suburban Batavia. But if originality and intelligence are the most important qualities in attracting audiences to hear new work, Chicago scribe Penny Penniston deserves enormous success with her smart, funny and thoroughly captivating NOW THEN AGAIN ... Penniston has tried to use some of the issues found in and around quantum mechanics (which involves great complexities of chronology and relativity) and apply them to a triangular love relationship ... To describe how all this plays out would ruin the considerable pleasures of the show. Suffice to note that present and past prove to be relative concepts. Penniston's ideas are emotionally warm and intellectually stimulating." -Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune "One thing I particularly like is the spate of unusual new characters that science brings to the stage ... In PROOF and NOW THEN AGAIN, the main characters, all in their twenties, find the pursuit of difficult knowledge no less enlivening and nervous-making than things like their careers, their families, their social graces, their hormones and their heartaches. I can't recall seeing similar types on the stage before ... illuminating an obviously extant kind of life experience I'd never before considered but was delighted to discover." -Bruce Weber, The New York Times "The great thing about all this is that Penniston makes the physics so utterly transparent that you can ride on the love story and even feel like a minor genius, too. She makes physics fun ..." -Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times show less

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Devil_llama 1,923 reviews

A play that explores quantum theory backwards and forwards - literally. The first act plays forward, as a man and a woman meet too late to find romance, but do manage to write an important physics paper together. The second act plays backward, to demonstrate the uncertain nature of time, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle. The play moves backward through time, to the first meeting of the couple, with the effect of giving the story a different ending. One of the rare physics plays that doesn't seem to care about nuclear bombs. This play is a celebration of science, not a denigration, which makes it a refreshing change in the genre of science plays.

Nov 25, 2013

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