Reviewed by Tracey Paleo, Gia On The Move

“The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.”

Einstein!  (Celebrating 100 Years of Relativity) makes a return to the 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival via the McCadden Theatre with no more insight into the science of the icon than we already know.

Instead, what playwright/actor Jack Fry gives us is a singularly intimate view of a man as complicated as the theory of relativity itself.

Einstein has arisen from his rest to cure some of the more mysterious facts surrounding his life’s work and set the record straight about how it all happened. Because it wasn’t easy.  Set smack in the middle of WWI Berlin, Germany, Einstein is a Jewish scientist, married with two boys and a wife he doesn’t actually live with, a teaching job that doesn’t ever make ends meet at the end of the month and frustrated by his need for independence in order to prove his ideas on general relativity, a theory of gravitation which threaten to depose Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation, and change the world forever.  In the meantime, he must deal with years of doubt, failed experiments due to weather, peers who attempt to claim his theory as his own, and pernicious press.  It’s a race to the finish and nothing is certain.

Einstein! Has just been named a 2016 ‘Pick of the Fringe’ and deservedly. Jack Fry puts in an especially moving and nuanced performance that is so inescapably real, it’s almost as if he, Einstein, is.

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