With four actors, 21 characters, and three interwoven stories in multiple timeframes and numerous accents, Incognito at Sarasota's Urbanite Theatre is an intriguing exploration of the human brain at work.
As the play unfolds over a quick 90 minutes without intermission, filled with twists and turns and unexpected connections, the drama’s rushing stream-of-consciousness perhaps parallels the way the human brain’s neural pathways create links and store memories.
Sounds heavy, cerebral if you will, but the audience is in for a rollicking ride as characters emerge and stories merge. Though sometimes the leaps and free associations are not immediately obvious — and you cannot let your mind wander for a moment — you’ll marvel again and again at the playwright’s words, the director’s dexterity, and the actors’ dazzling delivery.
It all begins with a true-life incident so bizarre as to be unbelievable if it were merely written into a play. When Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey, Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on call, performed the autopsy… then stole Einstein’s brain. Harvey lost that job, took the brain to Philadelphia, preserved it in formaldehyde and stored it in his basement. Only later did he receive Einstein's family's permission to study the brain.
After [Harvey’s] wife threatened to dispose of the brain, he returned to retrieve it and took it with him to the Midwest. For a time he worked as a medical supervisor in a biological testing lab in Wichita, Kansas, keeping the brain in a cider box stashed under a beer cooler. He moved again, to Weston, Missouri, and practiced medicine while trying to study the brain in his spare time, only to lose his medical license in 1988 after failing a three-day competency exam. He then relocated to Lawrence, Kansas, took an assembly-line job in a plastic-extrusion factory, moved into a second-floor apartment next to a gas station, and befriended a neighbor, the beat poet William Burroughs. The two men routinely met for drinks on Burroughs’s front porch. Harvey would tell stories about the brain, about cutting off chunks to send to researchers around the world. Burroughs, in turn, would boast to visitors that he could have a piece of Einstein any time he wanted.
This background is dispensed with pretty quickly, setting up the play’s true intent: the consideration of just what Harvey hoped to learn by studying Einstein’s brain. What could dyed tissue on glass slides possibly tell us about how genius is formed? To Harvey’s chagrin and everlasting regret, nothing.
There are three primary narrative threads to keep track off in this tumult of a play about mind and memory. One, the true story of Einstein’s brain and Harvey, its thief; two, the fictionalized story of a neuropsychologist who fumbles in her first romance with another woman; and three, also based on actual events, the story of Henry Molaison, a young man in the late 1950s, who suffers from epileptic seizures and has a partial lobotomy that controls his seizures, but has the unfortunate side effect of leaving him unable to form new memories.
This last tale, of a man repetitively searching for his lost memory, where everything is always new, really is the heart and soul of Incognito. And that heart is broken.
(A recent 2016 book, Patient HM: A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets, by Luke Dittrich, lets us know that Henry’s brain was also kept after his death, and sliced and diced for clues about memory and identity.)
And when the synapses no longer snap, who is it we have become? That, essentially, is the core of the play.
British playwright Nick Payne’s drama is a witty, albeit demanding and unrelenting, exploration of what makes our mental life tick. Just what does happen when things go awry? Are the brain and the mind the same? What in the brain makes us human? If we no longer remember, are we free to recreate identity? Where is the self in all this tissue and nerves? Is there even a self?
This is a lot to handle in under two hours. Not all the posed questions are answered, and some of the neural pathways seem dead ends. But this powerful ensemble cast of two men and two women tackles it all with aplomb, good humor, and genuine insight into the faltering mind.
In today’s world filled with news of mental illness, memory loss, dementia, and suicide, Urbanite Theater offers us a timely and relevant exploration of how our human consciousness and its discontents are but a product of that cauliflower brain of ours.
The minimalist set in this intimate black-box theater consists of just four stools and a disemboweled piano. Here, the focus of this production is not on theatrical trickery and tomfoolery, but on the human voice and the human condition. A lone key played on the piano has never seemed so poignant, so desperate, and so hopeful, all at the same time. The final scene — with its masterful blend of sound, silence, stillness, lighting — stuns in its simplicity.
The very word incognito means concealed identity. This stirring drama, evocatively staged and brilliantly delivered, attempts to peel back the concealed layers of our human consciousness and show what’s lurking underneath.
With Incognito, Urbanite Theatre has given us a compelling, spirited, and droll affirmation that, indeed, Descartes got it right: our thinking is our identity.
Ben Wiley taught literature and film at St. Petersburg College. At USF/Tampa, he was statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are film, theatre, books, and kayaking Florida rivers. He also reviews films and writes the BookStories feature in Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact him here.
This article appears in Jun 7-14, 2018.