Wrestling with the Head Trips of "And Then We Were No More" and "This Much I Know"

Every once in a while I see a show that is filled with smart ideas, and that is interestingly directed and well-performed and yet still leaves me cold. Over the past week or so I saw two shows like that: the new play And Then We Were No More, which is scheduled to run at La MaMa through Nov. 2; and a remounted production of the 2023 drama This Much I Know, which opened this week at 59E59 Theaters. I suppose they were so disappointing to me because I had so been looking forward to seeing both of them. 

And Then We Were No More is a cautionary tale about a future in which everyone seems to have given up all their rights in exchange for being kept safe, which in this case means that people who commit crimes can be tortured and then executed by a pneumatic device that, after its victims are dressed in weird outfits, vaporizes them out of existence. 

This dystopian view of where we might be headed comes with an impressive pedigree: it’s written by the actor Tim Blake Nelson who so loves exploring ethical and philosophical issues that he actually wrote a whole play about Socrates and it’s directed by Mark Wing-Davey who has frequently collaborated with the always thought-proving playwright Caryl Churchill. But I wanted to see this show because it stars Elizabeth Marvel, an actor whose performances consistently live up to her surname.

And once again Marvel delivers, this time as a lawyer assigned to represent a young woman who has committed a heinous crime. The lawyer knows that verdicts are pre-determined but she is so moved by her client (portrayed with aching vulnerability by recent NYU grad Elizabeth Yeoman) that she attempts to make the case for a more just judicial system. Meanwhile, Scott Shepherd’s government official argues that the needs of the greater society should outweigh those of the individual.  

It's important stuff.  But here it’s never really turned into dramatic stuff. And over the course of the two plus hours of back and forth debate I found my mind wandering to where my theatergoing buddy Bill and I might eat after the show and whether it might be warm enough for us to eat outside. None of which is what I think a play with such heady prentions intended me to be thinking about. 

I didn’t fare much better with This Much I Know either. I’d want to see this one because it’s written by Jonathan Spector whose Tony-winning play Eureka Day not only found a way to look at both sides of the intense debate over vaccination requirements for school kids but also managed to do that in an engaging—and sometimes even amusing—way. 

But This Much I Know is way more ambitious and far less accessible. Inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” it’s a heady—and very talky—meditation on why people make the decisions they do and the moral implications that can accompany those choices. 

And Spector amps ups the complexities even more by exploring his theme through three storylines centered on different protagonists and set in different time periods: a present-day psychology professor who is trying to figure out why his wife recently left him, the college-aged son of a leading white supremacist who is trying to separate himself from his father’s beliefs and the young Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin who in 1967 would defect to the west.  

The three actors who play these roles—Firdous Bamji, Ethan J. Miller and Dani Stoller—also portray all the other people who interact with the main characters and under the nimble direction of Hayley Finn, they’re terrific as they switch from one to another simply by changing accents, gestures and maybe a hat or two. But I found it hard to care about any of them as the narrative hopped around from one storyline to the next and I grew tired of trying to figure out how each of those narratives connected to the other two.

And yet, I’m glad I saw both plays because they made me think really seriously about why I go to theater and what I’m looking for when the lights go down. It turns out that the priority for me is a visceral experience rather than a purely intellectual one. 

Now, I still like Big Idea shows. But watching these two made me realize that a show also needs to make me feel something. In other words to work for me, it needs to appeal to my heart as well as my head. And alas, neither of these did that.