Gravity by Arzhang Luke Pezhman is Disappointingly Light

 Who wants to see everything fall apart?

I do, for one, and so do lots of other people. That’s why people read thrillers, watch horror movies and attend tragedies. The appeal of these darker stories is a mixture of schadenfreude and catharsis, and the latter is especially potent in stories with relatable premises like Arzhang Luke Pezhman’s play Gravity. Set in a British classroom during the ignition of the Large Hadron Collider, Gravity uses the bonds and explosive separations between its characters to illustrate chemical reactions—or is it the other way around?

But despite its scientific premise, Gravity is no Elective Affinities. Its tense, thoughtful plot revolves around the worst human nature has to offer: schoolchildren. The saving grace of aging instructor David Milford’s Year 10 science class is Kyle, a vulnerable “late developer” who takes an interest in physics. But to David’s dismay, Kyle is also the favorite target of Chantay, a duplicitous girl whose brother is serving in Iraq, and Reese, a loudmouth with a dangerous sense of fun. All of the characters are troubled, and despite the best efforts of David and a no-nonsense counselor, it becomes increasingly clear that he cannot preserve both Kyle’s sanity and his own.

David is the best part of the play because he is its most tragic figure. Anyone who has sat in the back of the classroom and witnessed their favorite teacher struggle to keep a rowdy class together can sympathize with his situation, and the mysterious, disturbing opening scene makes that plight all the more compelling. Half of his lines are explanations of physics terminology or reprimands directed at his mostly-unseen class, but the struggle between disciplining and inspiring his students is potent and nuanced enough to make the play meaningful. From a narrative perspective, David is not the problem.

His students are.

Kyle and his classmates Reese and Chantay are a lot less compelling than they ought to be. The former is an enigma for most of the play, suffering the jibes of his adolescent peers in sinister silence and drifting slowly away from the guiding hand of his imperfect mentor. The closest he comes to opening up is alluding to the death of his father, but this is not fully explored. He never twists the narrative and never proves a worthy foil to his teacher. In a better play, Kyle would be an agent in his own story instead of bouncing between competing influences like a deflated football. Reese and Chantay, not quite antagonists, can be summed up in the following exchange, which occurs on page 62:

 

REECE: I shoved a rocket up my next door neighbors’ cat’s arse. Stick’n’all. Now when that went off in a confined space, it must ‘ave made a right mess of its insides. Took a while for it t’die though, could ‘ear it cryin’ in pain all night.

CHANTAY: (Hits him.) You’re a bastard.

It’s not like talented actors couldn’t bring more life to these roles—it’s almost guaranteed that they will. But if the battle for Kyle’s soul is the center of Gravity, that soul ought to have a little more weight, and characters like David prove that not everyone in the script is flat.

For people who remember their teachers with love, hatred or regret, Arzhang Luke Pezhman’s play might convey an appropriate sense of pathos. But for me, the tragedy of Gravity is not that everything falls apart. It’s that it doesn’t quite come together.

By the way: Kyle, Reese and Chantay speak with transcribed h-dropping (my father suggests Cockney?) British accents. I’m not an expert and I wasn’t a teenager in 2008 so I don’t know if their accents and slang are era-appropriate or not. But for theater companies looking to stage Gravity, this is an important detail to keep in mind.