Incognito, by the British playwright Nick Payne, now being given a stellar interpretation at Shaker Bridge Theater in Enfield, was first produced in 2016, four years before the onset of the COVID pandemic. Yet, the play, which considers memory and time and how our brains understand them, is an eerie echo of life lived during a calamity.
How do we filter a daily barrage of information? How do we recall the people we love, and the people we lost? What does the brain remember, and what does it forget, both under duress and under “normal” circumstances?
During COVID, our sense of time has blurred — what year is it, again? — and our expectations that we can reliably predict what will happen today, tomorrow or the next day, have been completely upended. That feeling of familiar ground constantly shifting underneath us is what animates Incognito’s mysteries.
Payne, who is almost 40, has constructed an inventive, intellectual puzzle that draws on two famous 20th century medical cases involving profound amnesia, and the infamous theft of the 20th century’s most celebrated brain — Albert Einstein’s. Four actors play, in all, 20 characters who rapidly enter and exit, and change roles in the blink of an eye.
One of Incognito’s lead characters is Henry Maison, who, as the result of a botched surgery on his brain to relieve persistent seizures, now can no longer form new or lasting memories. He has a wife, Margaret, whom he is always happy to see and embrace. But a minute later, when reintroduced, he asks her if they’ve met before.
Henry is not unhappy, but neither does he seem entirely content. Since he can’t remember what he can’t remember, he lives in a perpetual twilight zone. It’s the people around him who are sometimes driven nearly mad by his inability to recall, even as they study him, and perhaps exploit his guilelessness in the name of science. The line isn’t always clear.
Payne also borrows the case of Tom Harvey, the pathologist on duty the night Albert Einstein died in Princeton, N.J. in April 1955. Einstein had been on the faculty of Princeton University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and died suddenly of an abdominal aortic aneurysm.
In the process of the autopsy, Harvey decided, on crazed impulse, to remove and keep Einstein’s brain, with the intention of studying it to understand what made Einstein a genius. He stored the brain in a glass jar filled with formaldehyde. Once the theft was discovered, he was fired and his marriage to his long-suffering wife, Elouise, eventually collapsed. Yet Harvey persisted in holding on to Einstein’s brain, in the delusion that only he could interpret for the world the intellect that produced e=mc2.
A parade of characters fill out the dramatic frame: a lawyer, a waitress and a journalist, stoned hippies, scientists and neuropsychologists. At the root of all their inquiries, fictions, lies and selective memories is the assertion by one of the characters that “the brain is a story-telling machine.”
We tell stories to exist. But, what happens if we don’t have the story, or can’t remember it? We may exist bodily but there’s a question of whether we still exist as thinking beings. Are the memories still in the brain, waiting for some trigger to be released, or do they disappear over time?
Payne maps out the different circuitous routes the brain travels, from thoughts to speech. But, as he dramatizes, there are also deep, non-verbal neural pathways — namely, playing and listening to music, as Henry Maison does — which summon memory and feeling in a way that spoken language isn’t always capable of.
Incognito could be shorter by perhaps 10 minutes. Sometimes the writing is convoluted. But this production boasts an exceptionally well-matched cast. They evoke, with great intensity, not only Payne’s quicksilver shifts in ideas and language.
Leeanne Hutchison and Grant Neale, who have acted in a number of Shaker Bridge productions over the years, are very affecting as Elouise and Tom Harvey, bewildered by their turn in the public eye. Neale turns on a dime, from a Welsh patient with amnesia to a doctor working with Maison to the bumbling Harvey. He resists the temptation to caricature Harvey, and instead gives him a kind of counterintuitive nobility as a frustrated seeker of knowledge.
Hutchison is spot-on as Harvey’s exasperated, more worldly wife. She also plays Martha Murphy, a neuropsychologist studying amnesiacs, who is embarking awkwardly on a new lesbian relationship after years of marriage to a man.
And Hutchison makes a great impression as Evelyn, who says she is Einstein’s daughter as the result of a liaison. Einstein’s brain was no larger than anyone else’s, she scornfully tells Tom Harvey when he visits her. He was often a cruel husband and parent. He had an enormous intellect but, more to the point, he had the capacity to work without stopping.
As Murphy’s potential lover Patricia, and as a flirty Midwestern waitress, among other parts, Anna O’Donoghue brings a terrific range and humor to the stage. She’s poignant, amusing, and surprising, and has a way of saying the lines as if they are newly minted.
The emotional heart of the play is in Henry Maison, who has both the aspect and transparent emotions of a child. Travis Clark Morris plays him with a wistful, understated quality that serves the character beautifully. He also excels as one of Einstein’s sons, a noxious, misogynist human resources drone, and a duplicitous journalist who ropes in Harvey.
This was the first play I’d been to since the pandemic started. To be in a theater with actors giving life to such a smart play was a reminder of theater’s immediacy and potency, the way it can catch lightning in a bottle. Under Bill Coons’s searching, fluid direction, Incognito shows us how art can burrow beneath the surface of what seems incomprehensible.
Shaker Bridge Theatre’s production of