Review: SNOWGLOBE
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Imagine the universe as a snowglobe—you know, one of those round glass paperweights you turn upside down and it snows. Inside this snowglobe is a little house and a little tree and two women who are stuck inside trying to figure out what they're doing there. This is the premise of Snowglobe, a new play by Nicholas Wardigo at the Shubin Theatre.
If you're going to premiere a whimsical one-act meditation on whether it is possible to prove the existence of God, you can't do better than to have Charlotte Northeast and Amanda Schoonover play Ingrid and Sonja, the two women. Under Willliam McKinlay's direction, Northeast and Schoonover deliver some big ideas with ease and charm.
Ingrid is a scientist, a mathematician, with a mind that works by logic and wants proof that ends in QED. Sonja wants to interpret the facts, to create a creation narrative, a gospel that ends in Amen. They divide the labor, as human beings tend to: the people who discover the facts and the people who interpret them. Physics vs. theology.
This is Darwin meets William Paley, where Samuel Beckett turns out to be Godot. Guess who doesn't show up. There's a great Yiddish joke one of Beckett's characters tells about a tailor who takes too long to make a man a pair of pants. The man, outraged, points out that God made the world in six days. The tailor replies, "Look at his work, and look at mine." As Sonja tells Ingrid, "Look at the world—nothing this awful could happen by chance."
Because the ideas are huge and Wardigo wants to make sure we understand, he spends most of his 75 minutes rephrasing the same problem, with small variations, proceeding only by tiny increments in his argument. Now and then it looks as though some drama might emerge, but the characters are never really developed except as position papers, talking heads.
The set on the tiny Shubin stage was obviously built on a shoestring (or shoelace, as it turns out here), which is too bad since the illusion of the miniature enclosed world, a circumscribed universe full of fake snow needs a bit more sparkle and magic—somebody needs to shake it and make it snow.
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MacKnight Foundation, Shubin Theatre, 407 Bainbridge St. Through Feb.9. Tickets $17-25. Information: https://macknight.yapsody.com or (347) 644-7577.
