Washington Post Staff Writer
May 3, 2000; Page C1
In "The Mathematics of Change," playing at Theater J through Sunday, Josh Kornbluth "hits the wall" as a freshman math student at Princeton. He makes a hilarious splat. This second of Kornbluth's trilogy of autobiographical one-man evenings (the first was "Red Diaper Baby," which will repeat this Saturday in a late-night performance) takes him from proud math nerd to victim of a nervous breakdown as he scales the perilous heights of higher mathematics.
Kornbluth paces in front of a blackboard as he recounts his college trials. Even in retrospect, it's an emotional experience. Much chalk is flung about.
Josh has breezed through the lower mathematics. Even triangle-based trigonometry, which felled his fellow students--"Kids were impaling themselves on triangles. Other kids were going inside triangles, never to emerge!"--failed to slow him down.
Having been told by his eccentric, math-loving father that he will be "the greatest mathematician who has ever lived," young Josh is full of confidence, even though his high school math teacher sneers at him that someday he will "hit the wall." The wall turns out to be calculus.
There are lower walls on the way that, although Kornbluth doesn't smash into them like Wile E. Coyote, do trip him up. There's the little matter of his student employment, for example. First he works assisting a biology professor. His job: "Giving very bad diseases to mice."
After a misadventure involving a syringe, Kornbluth seeks another line of work. He ends up in the physics department adjusting screws inside the cyclotron while it's still turned on and spewing radiation.
You may think it isn't possible to laugh yourself silly at jokes about math. But you would be wrong. True, the show sags in places.
We revisit some of Josh's eccentric fellow Princetonians a bit too often. And things don't so much segue into more serious territory as suddenly fall into it. But Kornbluth is an endearingly funny performer--rumpled, earnest and ironic in equal measure--and this is a laugh-out-loud evening.
His first day at Princeton, the eager Josh learns about math majors who have cracked under "the strain."
What, he wonders in his innocence and arrogance, could that strain possibly be?
"The Mathematics of Change" is about his finding out. What cracks the audience up probably did come very near to cracking poor Josh up when he went through it 24 years ago. But that's comedy for you: One man's agony is another's guffaw.
The Mathematics of Change, by Josh Kornbluth in collaboration with John Bellucci. Directed by John Bellucci. Lights, Mike Daniels. At Theater J through Sunday.