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| One of the freer actresses of our time, Mary-Louise Parker |
We're still talking about a fresh, new, two-character play we came to too late to
review in 2016, Heisenberg, by British playwright Simon Stephens. We hope Heisenberg does well at the Tonys.
Mary-Louise Parker played to raves on Broadway in 1990 with
Alec Baldwin in Prelude to a Kiss, more recently starred in the cable TV Weeds,
for which she won a 2006 Golden Globe, and she received a Tony in 2001 for her
role in Proof. Parker doesn’t play victims or losers. She is bold and one of
the freer actresses of our time.
In Heisenberg, which seems to be written for her, Mary-Louise Parker plays an American living in
London, a hippie grifter who meets a well-preserved older man in a train station
(Denis Arndt). Their unlikely friendship leads them to spend a night together.
In the morning, he realizes her intentions were not as he thought. Given
time to reconsider, he chooses to go along with her anyway. She boldly takes them
where they’ve never been before.
It’s a mature perspective that what initially seems very
good can turn out to be very bad—and revert back to good in the end. The uplift
you get from Heisenberg is philosophic and romantic. The
title is from physics’ Heisenberg uncertainty principle that explains the
more clearly you see one thing, the less clearly you see another.
