Melissa Andersen as Georgie and George Kulp as Alex in New Haven Theater Company's production of Simon Stephens' Heisenberg. Performances run Thursdays through Saturdays, May 1-10, at EBM Vintage in downtown New Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Alex and Georgie are face to face, trying to figure each other out. Alex, brow furrowed, studies Georgie’s face. Georgie, speaking a mile a minute, scrunches her mouth and begins to tell a story about her late husband. Around them, St. Pancras Station is vibrantly alive, buzzing with passengers. But for a moment, they might as well be the only two people there.
“What?” Alex asks, and the question dangles in the air. “Your smile,” Georgie answers emphatically. It’s the beginning of a conversation that will stretch across six weeks, several neighborhoods, bedrooms and butcher shops, and at least two countries. They just don’t know it yet.
So unfolds Simon Stephens’ Heisenberg, which seals New Haven Theater Company’s (NHTC) 2024-25 season with a kiss—literally—starting this week at EBM Vintage. Directed by Steve Scarpa with an intimate cast of just two people (George Kulp as Alex and Melissa Andersen as Georgie), the play explores what can happen in the aftermath of a chance encounter, from unlikely romance to discussions so delicate they feel combustible.
Performances run Thursdays through Saturdays, May 1 through 10, at 839 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven. Tickets and more information are available here.
“The play feels a little bit like eavesdropping on a real conversation,” said Scarpa, who is returning to the director’s chair for the first time in several years. “And there was something about that that was appealing to me—watching these two people, who are earnest, decent people, who are trying to make their way in the world who are learning what they want in their lives and how they go about achieving those things.”
“We tell intimate stories that our audiences really like,” added NHTC President J. Kevin Smith, who acted just weeks ago in the company’s production of Lucas Hnath’s The Christians. “This is a rounding out of the stories we’ve been telling this season about how difficult sometimes it is to really know people based on where you’re looking at them from.”
Director Steve Scarpa at a recent tech rehearsal: "The play feels a little bit like eavesdropping on a real conversation," he said.
Set in London in the present day, Heisenberg follows 75-year-old Alex Priest (Kulp) and 42-year-old Georgie Burns (Andersen), an Irish-born butcher and American expat who remain hesitantly—then not so hesitantly—in each other’s orbits after a surprise meeting at St. Pancras Railway Station. Amidst the hustle and bustle of the evening rush, Georgie has kissed Alex on the back of the neck, a quirky and audacious and boundary-flouting move that sparks a conversation between the two of them.
“It’s fine,” Alex says gently, so unfazed that his reaction is more surprising than the kiss itself. A wire snakes from his orange, padded headphones to an old-school walkman that rests comfortably in his hands. But Georgie pushes back, aware of the physical boundary she has crossed. “It’s not,” she says, chagrined, and we in the audience want to know what’s coming next.
The longer one watches, the harder it is to stop watching. Not because it’s particularly endearing (this is not a rom-com, and Stephens bucks most of the conventions of a meet-cute) but because Georgie is a train wreck. Across from Alex, she can’t stop talking: about her job as a waitress at Yotam Ottolenghi’s posh Islington restaurant; about her late husband; about their luxe honeymoon in Thailand and her interest in impromptu street photography. She is at once insufferable and in shambles, that friend you worry about because they are making words, but they really don’t seem okay.
As her mouth flaps open and closed, a listener may wonder how many times they’ve heard something like this before—and whether they’ve listened at all, or just tuned it out on instinct.
Often (and a credit to Andersen, whose commitment to the role is fierce and consistent), she is speaking so fast that the audience can barely keep up, doing mental gymnastics as she flies from subject to subject. There’s a moxie and an impulsiveness there, yes, but something else too. Maybe it’s just that bracing, clunky honesty we all keep beneath the surface. Or maybe it’s something deeper, that is eating away at the very core of who she is.
Before the two part, she asks Alex to linger, simply so she can be in his presence. Even in the strangeness of the moment, there’s an intimacy there, a reminder of how thin and delicate the line can be between being quirky and being mentally unwell, being unwell and just being lonely. When the two do leave the station—she an animated, live wire, he mellow and unbothered—there’s a nagging sense that they will see each other again, and it’s not a surprise when they do.
What is a revelation—and at times a delight, particularly as this duo mines the script for affect, rhythm, and humor—is exactly how those encounters go. From that first brush in the station, there is a strange meeting at Alex’s butcher shop, a tentative, at times tender first date, a night together that walks the tightrope between a cute date in and a low-stakes heist. Onstage, Kulp and Andersen have a snappy, sharp chemistry that fits the script, particularly its quick narrative volleys and unexpected, sometimes hairpin turns.
Kulp, in this sense, is masterful: he has a sense of timing that is well suited to Stephens’ script, and its slow unraveling of two characters. In his expressions and gentle Irish brogue, he can and does convey entire worlds—of shock and discovery, of painful lived experience and hurt, and perhaps most endearingly, of bemusement. Where Georgie is a motor mouth, he is slow and hesitant to emerge from his shell, demanding that the audience wait for it. When his defenses fall, revealing a soft, deep interior, it’s well worth the wait.
In the company’s backroom-turned-black box, the set is fairly minimal, leaning on Kulp and Andersen to do the heavy narrative lifting. There is a cafe table with two glasses, a half-filled bottle of wine and cheery tablecloth; a bright white duvet cover; painted and overturned crates that become station seating, a butcher counter, and Alex’s bed. But the rest is up to these actors, and they rise to the challenge several times over.
In so doing, they keep the audience—and each other—guessing until the end. Alex and Georgie may not be real people, but there are plenty of Alexes and Georgies in the universe, from New Haven to London to Enniscorthy, whence Alex’s character hails, to Georgie's native New Jersey. There are, between them, real-life stories of love and estrangement and unspeakable loss; of children who grow up and run away; of questions that come on too strong and questions that are fully out of left field.
There are people who wonder, every day, if falling in love is the greatest and most unadvisable con of them all.
In physics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle posits that the more a person knows about the location of a particle—or in this case, a person—the less they know about how quickly or slowly it is traveling. In the play, the more Alex and Georgie can pinpoint each other in physical time and space, the less it seems they can predict what the other will do next. That's hard, of course, because these characters also happen to live with Newton's Third Law of Motion: they are inextricably bound up in each other's lives, and what each does changes the other's outcome.
The idea—that to know one thing is to give up knowing another—works for the show. While the principle is never mentioned by name beyond the title (Stephens generously doesn’t hit a viewer over the head with a heavy-handed scientific metaphor), it’s always there, lingering somewhere among the lo-fi sound cues and moody lighting in the background.
What is mentioned outright, and may be more apt for two people in something like love, is a piece of music—specifically Bach’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in B minor. As Alex flips on a record player, the sound fills his home, violin weaving in great, bright strokes around the piano. In the audience, listeners know that there will be a rise, a climax and a denouement: this is Bach, and that’s just what he does. But back in the bedroom, the narrative doesn’t seem as straightforward at all.
“It’s very plinky-plonky,” Georgie says. This time, Alex is the one to push back, to let her know that she’s got it all wrong. “You’re not listening to it,” he says. “You can hear it. That’s different from listening.” Tracing the sound with a finger, he flips the idea on his head, pushing her to identify and listen to the silences as well as the sounds. It pushes the audience to rethink everything they’ve seen and heard since walking into the show.
Before a tech rehearsal last Thursday, both Kulp and Andersen said they’ve been grateful for the chance to act in the play, and to collaborate with Scarpa as he returns to directing. Kulp, who has performed with the company for years, recalled reading the play and instantly seeing Andersen in the role of Georgie. Now, he’s glad to be bringing Alex to life alongside her.
“It moved me,” he said. “Both of these people are, I think, completely opposite, but somehow they find each other. I’ve just had a blast exploring what I can do with this guy.”
“What I loved was the writing,” Andersen added. “The way he [Stephens] writes, like the characters are so clear based on the way they speak. I don’t think that Georgie is very similar to me, but I love playing her. I think she’s a wonderful human. The intimacy, getting to work with Steve [Scarpa] and George [Kulp] and figure these characters out, it’s just been really awesome.”