“Love Song” humbles audiences

by Lydia Howell

Frank Theatre and playwright Carson Kreitzer always embrace provocative themes with a bold ambiguity and complex character development, leaving audiences with more questions than answers. “The Lovesong of J. Robert Oppenheimer” is a searing kaleidoscope of history, myth and philosophical / psychological contradictions, swirling around the “father of the atomic bomb.” With poetic realism and gripping drama, Kreitzer relates the WWII Manhattan Project and its ramifications through 1950s communist witch-hunts and the nuclear arms race.

Phil Kilbourne plays Oppenheimer with disarming nuance, patiently peeling away scientific calm, exposing a complicated core of raw, unhealed wounds. It’s a tour de force performance that haunts. Jewish identity and assimilation’s cost; emotion versus intellect; ethics pitted against ambition; awe battling with arrogance are spun by Kilbourne’s embodiment, like slow-motion exploding atoms. Sidestepping easy conclusions of “men’s technology gone mad,” Kreitzer creates an angry anima for Oppenheimer through Lilith, the first woman God created in Hebrew myth, rejected by Adam for her lack of submissiveness. Giving a primal performance, Maria Asp vaporizes any assumptions of women’s “peaceful nature.” A Cassandra conscience, seething over betrayal, with barely-contained rage, Asp verges on a Kali rampage. She and Kilbourne are beveled mirrors to one another in a dance of terrifying fascination. Do we dare to look into their fractured glass and see our own contradicted selves?

The play brims with a dizzying array of historical figures (with acrobatic multiple-roles played by most of the cast): Oppenheimer’s competitor/colleague Edward Teller (inventor of the hydrogen bomb), is played with manic zeal by John Reidlinger. Tom Sherohman has amazing acting agility, portraying refugee scientist Isador Rabi, General Groves and J. Edgar Hoover. Annie Enneking plays Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, with a wise-cracking worldliness worthy of Dorothy Parker, that makes you covet her invitation to afternoon cocktails. Gwendolyn Schwinke isn’t given enough to do, glimpsed in dual roles as Oppenheimers “Red mistress” and his mother. Her characters’ sketchiness is Kreitzer’s only off-key note.

Director Wendy Knox stages the play like a nuclear meltdown in progress. She choreographs visceral physicality into a play of ideas, carried by propulsive emotions. Reid Rejsa’s sound design is ingenious. President Truman on radio, big band music and sound effects are in kinetic harmony with Michael Kittel’s lighting magic. John Francis Bueche’s stark set evokes the Army base Los Alamos lab and a guard tower at Auschwitz. These three technical magicians make a frame resonant of Greek myth that’s perfect for this story of tragic triumph.

Act One focuses on the race to make the ultimate weapon to stop Hitler, setting you on seat’s edge, even though you know the outcome. Act Two explores Oppenheimer’s fall from governmental grace, in the spy scares permeating the emerging Atomic Age. (There’s an eerie parallel to the current search for “sleeper” terrorists, a powerful reminder that we need historical memory.) Carson Kreitzer and the Frank Theatre ensemble hypnotize us with the modern Prometheus of science and the ancient longings of religion out of which it was born, both forces within a timeless scar of the hated outcast. Phil Kilbourne achieves a magnificent tortured meditation at the end of Oppenheimer’s life that could move even the most cynical. Maria Asp’s Lilith lingers to taunt even the most complacent with profound questions the daily news demands we ask.

“The Lovesong Of J. Robert Oppenheimer” is an unforgettable theater experience, that leaves one humbled and disturbed, awed by the human capacity to create and destroy from our broken hearts and, ultimately, mysterious Spirit.

$18 through March 2, Thurs-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. Playwright’s Center, 2301 East Franklin, Mpls. 612-724-3760 or www.franktheatre.com.