‘A Disappearing Number’ dazzles

Latest Complicite show does the math in endlessly fascinating ways

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

OFF BROADWAY REVIEW

Like previous works by the dazzling Complicite company from London, "A Disappearing Number" begins very small and rapidly expands into mind-blowing dimensions.

This latest piece starts simply in a classroom with a mathematician scrawling numbers across a board.

Before director Simon McBurney's engrossing production concludes nearly two hours later, a fictional romance and a real-life story have intertwined in a ceaseless shifting of time and space amid a constant stream of theory about the beautiful possibilities of infinity.

Sure, some of this abstract talk sails way over my head — and possibly yours as well — but the dreamlike multimedia environment of Complicite's production is stunning theater. The Lincoln Center Festival presentation is said to be a sell-out at the David H. Koch Theater, where its brief concludes on Sunday, but anybody who owns a ticket is in for a quite a remarkable ride.

The central story relates the remarkable 1910s friendship that grew between a Cambridge mathematics don (David Annen) and a lowly clerk from India (Shane Shambhu) who proves to be a theoretical genius and bravely voyages to England only to suffer the fatal effects of nasty food and weather in an alien culture. This real-life saga is interspersed with modern-day scenes from a sweet but tragic romance between a British math professor (Saskia Reeves) and an Indian-American businessman (Firdous Bamji).

A company-developed work conceived by McBurney, this brainy melding of parallel stories is nonlinear in structure but easily unfolds in Complicite's typically vivid, fluent world of visuals, music, drama and movement. The designers contribute greatly to the complex charm of the production as do the actors, whose warmth cuts through the coldest of mathematical abstractions.

An echoing quality to the sound reinforcement — intentional or accidental — makes hearing a bit of a strain at times in the vast Koch Theater and a couple of loose ends in the text remain puzzling, but "A Disappearing Number" provides an inventive and evocative exploration of the mysterious connections that string together our universe.

"A Disappearing Number" continues through Sunday at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, New York. Call (212) 721-6500 or visit www.lincolncenterfestival.org.