‘This Much I Know:’ InterAct’s latest production is an intricate puzzle, crammed with ideas and standout performances

With the lights still up, a bearded, South Asian man with a British accent implores us to turn off our cellphones, not merely silence them. As he challenges the audience, we start to wonder: Is this prologue or play? What sort of reality are we in?

Within moments, we realize we have become students in a lecture hall, and our interlocutor is a psychology professor, Lukesh (Sorab Wadia). Using illustrative projections, he articulates the dicta that will frame the action and set the thematic stakes of Jonathan Spector’s 2022 drama, This Much I Know.

“We can’t really reconstruct past beliefs or thought processes,” Lukesh declares.

“We make sense of things, even things there’s no sense to be made of.” And this: “False ideas can be dangerous” because “they’re sticky” and “we are so desperate to make things connect.”

The playwright’s initial sleight of hand is so compelling that, during Thursday’s opening night performance, some audience members believed a fire alarm that emptied the Proscenium Theatre at the Drake was scripted. (It was not, and the normally two-hour, 15-minute performance resumed after a short delay.)

Under producing artistic director Seth Rozin, InterAct Theatre Company has always been drawn to plays of ideas. This Philadelphia premiere, directed by Rozin, is among the densest of such dramas.

Its themes include the tension between reality and illusion, and Spector, who loves to literalize his metaphors, injects a few magic tricks into the show. But he doesn’t stop there.

Because the plot is an intricate set of puzzle pieces, one character, an aging, alcoholic Russian, must be an aficionado of jigsaw puzzles. Another, an angst-ridden white nationalist, wrestles with a college thesis on H.G. Wells and his dystopian 1895 science fiction novel, The Time Machine, as the play itself shifts back and forth in time.

Both these figures are played, with complete physical commitment and impeccable accents, by the same actor, Mark Worth. Worth’s metamorphosis into multiple characters, including Russians of diverse ages and inclinations, is this production’s indisputable highlight.

There is considerable (self-conscious) cleverness and craft in the script. And Rozin’s fluid direction is aided by Nick Embree’s minimalist set, Michael Long’s projections, Lindsay Alayne Stevens’ lighting, and Alison Roberts’ quick-change costuming. But all this is in service to arguments, influenced by the behavioral economist Daniel Kahnemann, that aren’t always lucid and a narrative that isn’t fully convincing.

InterAct’s This Much I Know nevertheless offers substantial pleasures. The play’s shape-shifting, with all three actors (Worth, Wadia and Jessica DalCanton) skillfully taking on numerous roles, is fun to watch. And its ruminations on both the persistence and transitoriness of belief systems, as well as the seductions of storytelling, make for meaty post-theater debate.

Spector is a graduate of New College of Florida, a public honors college and progressive bastion that was the object of a recent conservative takeover by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Patrick Brosnan’s 2026 documentary, First They Came for My College, shown at the Philadelphia Film Festival, offered a tendentious, grass-roots view of the conflict.)

Eureka Day (2018), Spector’s best known play, is a prescient, comic take on “woke” culture and vaccine denialism that lampoons the rigidity of both sides. InterAct mounted a production in 2019, and a Broadway revival won a 2025 Tony Award. Spector’s Birthright (2025), dramatizing the fierce debates of six Jewish friends who once took a “birthright” trip to Israel together, had a successful off-Broadway run earlier this year.

This Much I Know focuses on Lukesh’s problematic relationships with his writer wife, Natalya, and his white nationalist student, Harold. Natalya is working on what she calls “an imagined family history,” neither novel nor memoir, “a hundred percent factual but totally made-up.”

A tragedy in her own life propels her back to Russia to learn more about her family’s Soviet-era relationship with Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, a tragic figure in her own right. DalCanton plays both (traumatized) women, who blur, perhaps intentionally, in the course of the drama. Wadia doubles as the gentle Indian man, Brajesh Singh, whom Svetlana describes as her greatest love.

Harold is the scion of a prominent white nationalist, and from the beginning he insists that he agrees only in part with his father’s extremist views – a story with parallels to Svetlana’s. As Harold tracks the evolution in Wells’s ideology for his thesis, he experiences a profound transformation of his own.

One key narrative question is whether Svetlana used her influence with her tyrannical father to plead for the lives of Natalya’s unjustly targeted great-grandparents. Her actions matter intensely to Natalya, but less so to us.

Svetlana, a defector to the United States who abandoned her children in the process, represents the unsatisfactory murkiness and moral ambiguity of the stories we tell ourselves. “Once you have gained sight, it is impossible to feign blindness,” the character asserts. But that vision, she adds, was just “the first piece of a puzzle I did not know I was assembling.”

InterAct Theatre Company’s “This Much I Know” runs through Nov. 22 at the Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St. 215-568-8079 or boxoffice@interacttheatre.org