My Lord, What a Night

The exclamatory title is what all the characters experience in Deborah Brevoort’s play detailing a 1937 link forged between Albert Einstein and Marian Anderson.  She’d just ended an appreciated concert at Princeton but been denied a room at all-white Nassau Inn. Her admirer Albert Einstein, who’d experienced anti-Semitic danger in Germany, then invited the diva to stay in his campus home.  Their friendship, affected by visits from a Jewish academic administrator and a black woman civil rights activist, must end in important decisions for all four.

Director Kate Alexander has not only auspiciously paced the drama. She’s perfectly chosen and inspired the cast too. Thursday Farrar both looks like and has the demeanor of Marian Anderson. She also makes her singing of a Negro spiritual a real treat. The important transition in her thinking doesn’t seem scripted but natural. It’s much abetted by the urgings and arguments of Mary Church Terrell, strongly presented by personable Nehassaiu deGannes. She appears to be what was at the time called “lady-like,” yet we find her a fearless black proponent of civil rights and social equality.

David Edwards is endearing as somewhat rumpled genius Albert Einstein. It’s heartening to see him as much humanistic as scientific, especially since the plot reveals he must be both.  No ivory tower academic, he concerns himself with important threats to the human race.  Small wonder, then, that he sees the significance of Marian Anderson’s dilemma and Terrell’s concerns. His own dilemma: what he must do about the equations that he just learned not only he has been working on.

Rod Brogan clearly shows Abraham Flexner as the academic fearful of Einstein and Anderson upsetting all his efforts to make himself and other Jews more acceptable at Princeton.  He doesn’t want to be accused of approving Terrell’s types of action.  Will Rexner ever stop regarding as too aggressive Einstein’s invitation to Anderson and her insistence on accepting it, refusing to go to a segregated “Y”?  Or will we see some changes made on everyone’s part after “the night”?

Appropriate scenery (by Isabel & Moriah Curley-Clay) consists of Einstein’s living room-with-study surrounded by metaphoric columns. In between the columns are an entrance, shelves chock-full of papers and books (including a spot for tea-making equipment and cups), a huge blackboard with Einstein’s equations, a window to a tree-leaf-filled exterior. (Neat changes in the shelves in Act II make plot changes evident.) A central desk, full of papers, is flanked by an easy chair with small table on one side of the room and a two-seater with little table on the other.  Einstein’s violin sits over a book  on the floor under a lamp. Oriental rugs carpet the room.  There’s not a useless element in or on the set.

Costumes by Lea Umberger define the characters.  Einstein’s brown trousers and tops as well as his simple brown shoes without socks seem chosen basically for his comfort. The others dress to tell others something about the kind of people they are—from Anderson’s formal scarlet and black dresses with mink coat to Terrell’s tailored outfits in muted colors to Rexner’s navy blue business wear.  Period hair styles differ in the same way for each character, with Einstein’s mostly tousled and the women’s carefully sculpted.

Michael Pasquini’s lighting shifts nicely with times of action and the outside weather seen through the office window. Thom Korp provides good sound, making Anderson’s singing come through as if we were in the room with her.

Both play and production offer us an involving experience of important happenings that led to important decisions and actions at its time…and even ours.