by Richard Lord
Uhh … quixotic primes?
Unless you’re a post-doctoral student conducting research in the more arcane depths of mathematical theory or at least a grad student in Mathematics just slogging into that area, chances are you’ve never heard of quixotic primes until just now.
Quixotic primes are sort of … uhh, mostly prime numbers or numbers with a few prime divisors whose values can be …uhh, factored into a product of two prime numbers so that the … uhh, prime factorization of P(nk) has no less than k factors. Or something like that. (Sorry, that’s the best I can do; I was lucky to pull a B in Algebra II class.) Let’s keep on the safe side and say they are a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Now if someone told you that there could be a very engaging play with quixotic primes at the center of the drama, you’d probably think they were fooling you. But let me be the one to inform you that there is indeed a very engaging show running on South Hicks Street that is just that: Quixotic Professor Qiu.
Playwright Damon Chua, a Singapore native who now lives and pursues a successful career as a theatre professional in New York, wrote this play now enjoying its world premiere courtesy of Philly’s Inter Act Theatre Company. It’s not only a strong piece of theatre, it’s quite up to date on some of the consequences of the officially sanctioned Sinophobia now infecting the country. The title character at the center of the action is a Mathematics professor at what seems to be a mid-level university. This Professor Qiu is cruising along nicely on the publish-or-perish tenure track, and the work that he’s been doing in the realm of those quixotic primes gets him published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. That would all be so obviously innocuous – except that there are a few complications.
The first complication is Qiu’s own background. Born in China, he spent the early part of his life there, coming to the US with his parents when he was an adolescent. He’s now a proud American, but he does have that background in the PRC.
This complication would not be so complicated except that a good chunk of his research into quixotic primes was partially financed through a generous grant of roughly US$30,000 by a Chinese institute. That grant was helped along by Anna Zeng, a close childhood/early adolescent friend of Qiu’s. We eventually learn that during the process of arranging the grant, Anna encouraged Qiu to share some of his research with the institute, supposedly in order to … well, sort of prime the pump on the flow of that grant money.
It’s not too long before the Chinese institute’s interest in Qiu’s research arouses the interest of another organization: the FBI. The Bureau has launched an investigation into why his work is being funded by a Chinese institute and why Qiu, himself a former Chinese citizen, has maintained contacts with China. The plot then takes a slippery Kafkaesque turn as Qiu discovers that some government officials think that his work with quixotic primes might just involve some quixotic crimes. All too abruptly, Qiu finds himself spinning in a vortex of presumptions, conjectures and the dark edge of nuances. Early in the play, Professor Qiu asks his teaching assistant Varleria Diaz a question that is echoed throughout Cervantes’ classic, Don Quixote: “What is truth?.” Qiu all too soon learns that if truth is malleable, the consequences can be rather frightful.
Feeling the squeeze of being under investigation, Qiu first seeks some level of support from Dr. Krishnan, head of the Mathematics Department at his university, but quickly discovers Krishnan is more concerned about protecting his own position than he is to lending any meaningful aid to Qiu.
Qiu decides that the only way for him to clear his name is to get his old friend Anna to verify that the research he’s been funded to conduct was undertaken in all innocence of any possible misuse. However, Anna is an employee of an institute in present-day China, where the government keeps both a close eye and a short leash on its citizens (especially those in privileged positions) and is ready to punish any who step out of line. As the Kafkaesque element adds layers of perceived menace, Qiu discovers that the current edition of American justice can seem to be not all that different from the authoritarian Chinese variety.
Playwright Damon Chua has written a play which very much speaks to the moment. (In fact, a Physics professor at Temple University recently underwent an experience similar to Qiu’s.) More, where it works well, Quixotic Professor Qiu works very well. The play gets us deeply interested in the dilemmas faced by both Qiu and Anna Zeng, and how the knots of their respective dilemmas serve to tighten each other – almost to the choking point. The play is packed with many strong scenes and powerful writing. However, there are also some weak spots, mainly involving the hounding of Qui by the FBI.
In those scenes, the writing slips into satire of the too facile variety. This is particularly evident in a scene where Special Agent Simpkiss is conducting an interview with Valeria, Qiu’s teaching assistant (TA), who has turned against Qiu for personal rather than patriotic reasons. In this scene, both of the characters slip into hackneyed dialogue, and their interaction is more a pas de deux of clichéd characters than a compelling scene. It’s of a much different tone than the rest of the play and just doesn’t fit or function that well. In fact, the joke at the end of the scene isn’t that effective because the whole scene hovers on the edge of the barely credible.
Though more successful than the Simpkiss-Valeria interview, the interrogation of Professor Qiu by the two FBI agents is also less effective than most of the other scenes of the play as the agents are slightly overdrawn. (One of the better elements in this scene is how Agent Simpkiss tries to seduce Qiu with an offer straight out of the House Un-American Activities Committee playbook – Qiu wil be off the hook if he just names names. Qiu’s reaction to this offer is all too real.)
In the title role, Justin Jain comes off as the consummate academic suddenly tripping over the rules of a game he doesn’t understand. Jain’s delicately nuanced performance shows us Professor Qiu at his academic apex and how he slides down from there into the ring of persecution. At every turn, Jain is assured in the way he lets us meet this character who informs us at the beginning that he can also slip into “inscrutable”. It’s a solid performance all the way through.
Tamil Perlasamy is commendable as Dr. Krishnan, head of the Math Department and, hence, Qui’s boss. Perlasamy proves adept as revealing the superficiality of the man as well as his resolution to stay uninvolved in order to protect himself. Perlasamy is most convincing as he shifts between friend and foil of Qiu. When Krishnan betrays Qiu, we realize that betrayal was always going to be too easy for him.
Perlasamy also plays the second FBI agent involved in the interrogation of Professor Qiu, where his performance is efficient but not noteworthy. This has nothing to do with Perlasamy’s acting talent; the role as written calls for the character to be functional rather than in any way remarkable.
David Pica also takes on more than one role, the main one being FBI Special Agent Simpkiss. Simpkiss is written in a way that eludes any attempt to make the character truly menacing or in any way sympathetic – he’s a fed just doing his assigned nasty job. Pica himself does a decent job making Simpkiss as credible as he can, but he’s best in his role as Jake the bartender, where he plays it straight. This actually allows his moments of humor to come through nicely and allows Pice to display his skills as an actor.
For much of the performance, Madeleine Garcia is quite good as Valeria Diaz. In the very early going, Garcia’s Valeria is the dedicated teaching assistant to Professor Qui, and there, she hits every note just right. Her best scene is the quasi-dinner date with Qiu, where we see that she has a crush on the professor. Her nervousness in this scene suggests a flustered schoolgirl, but she has enough aplomb to handle her misunderstanding of this dinner together well.
Garcia’s weakest moments come in that meeting with FBI Agent Simpkiss. It’s not that Valeria has now turned on Qiu and is more than willing to twist events such as the dinner and his casual statements, but it’s how that betrayal is portrayed. Again, much of the fault here lies with the script and not Garcia’s acting ability.
But the strongest, most compelling performance in this praiseworthy production belongs to Bi Jean Ngo. Anna Zeng is actually the most challenging character in the play, and Bi Jena handles the challenges of that role masterfully. We see Anna in very different stages of her life, as a young girl with a crush on her childhood friend Qui, as a young civil servant sailing along in in academia, and as the obsequious Party functionary, still supposedly in an academic position but all too aware of the perils any deviation from the Party line and the rigid rules of her institute can occasion. When Anna refuses to lend Qiu the support he desperately, you can almost feel the invisible straps pulling at her and making her a traitor to herself as well as to the professor.
Bi Jean Ngo is able to show the insidious growth of fear that ultimately defines the character of Anna. But she’s also able to show us the romantic feelings she has for Qui even as she does a good job of hiding those feelings from Qiu himself. (There’s a moment where Anna delivers a short monologue talking about her relationship with Qiu. As the monologue winds up, she mentions the possibility of those romantic feelings, and Bi Jean delivers the last line — “Isn’t that ridiculous?” — with a wonderfully placed, stifled sob which lets us know it was anything but ridiculous.) Bi Jean’s performance is full of small but very effective grace notes such as that stifled sob. Accordingly, the most impactful scenes in the show are those with Anna and Qiu where the charged emotions are most intense. It’s there that Justin Jain and Bi Jean Ngo show their power as actors.
Director Chongren Fan and his offstage team do a good job at showcasing Damon Chua’s script at its finest. In addition to guiding the actors to their fine performances, director Fan oversees effective staging. You-Shen Chen’s minimalist set suggests hidden spaces and corridors lined with surprises; director Fan makes the most of this to create a visual subtext that underscores Qiu’s work and the dilemma resulting from that work.
Lindsay Alayne Stevens’ lighting design also enhances many of the scenes, as in that dinner scene with Qiu and Valeria, where red dominates the setting. Red is a propitious color in Chinese culture, but here it also suggests something ominous beginning to take shape.
Fan also makes good use of audio engineer John Kolbinski’s expertise, brining a nice directorial touch during an imagined confrontation between Qiu and Anna Zeng, when their voices are given a slight echo.
Costume designer Ariel Wang also deserves an appreciative nod, especially for the contemporary Chinese “couture” Anna Zeng dons in the later scenes. This is the unofficial uniform that civil servants in Xi Jinping’s China expected to appear in, and it also helps define the characters, as in this production.
As the play comes to end, author Chua turns to a Brechtian device: a character steps forward and asserts the message the audience should take with them as they leave the theatre. This device fails more often than it succeeds, but with this play, it is fitting and effective.
Also quite fitting is this quote from Don Quixote (a work cited by one of the characters in Chua’s play): “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” As Quixotic Professor Qiu warns us, to see life as it is today might just be enough to drive us all mad.
Quixotic Professor Qiu runs Wednesday – Sunday at the Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks Street, Philadelphia until February 23. Performances are Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at 7:00 p.m.; Saturdays at 2:00 and 7:00; Sundays at 2:00.
The Trivia Trail
Pierre de Fermat was a 17th century French mathematician who came up with the theorem mentioned in the play that touches on Professor Qiu’s research. He’s most famous in popular discourse for “Fermat’s last theorem”, also known as Fermat’s conjecture. This theorem asserts that no three positive integers a, b, and c can suit the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. He scribbled this in the margins of an ancient Greek mathematics text that he was doing some work on. After making this baffling claim, Fermat then wrote that he had found an incontrovertible proof for the claim, but he did not have enough room in the margin to include it.
This teaser set off three and a half centuries of attempts by mathematicians to either prove the theory or prove that Fermat was wrong and his claim of lack of space was just a trick to bamboozle people. The theorem was finally proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician. However, an enduring mystery is why, if Fermat himself did have that proof, he never found the time in the remaining 28 years of his life to share it//write it down in some other space.
Well, Monsieur Fermat was also a practicing lawyer. It figures.
Although literary historians dispute this point, it’s possible that Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, found himself in a situation similar to Professor Qiu’s. There’s some evidence that one of both of Cervantes’ parents were conversos, Sephardic Jews who had converted to Catholicism when the Spanish Inquisition was raging. Although conversos were accepted as legitimate and allowed to remain in Spain while those who kept to the Jewish faith were expelled, the conversos were always suspect. They were often questioned as to where their true loyalties lay. Tomás de Torquemada, the most notorious of the Inquisition’s inquisitors, allegedly took special pride in being able to get Jews whose conversion was not fully genuine to confess to their ruse.