| Artistically produced off-Broadway play about the famous female
mathematician who was tortured to death by Christian monks in the 5th
Century. In Wellman's unusual telling, however, Hypatia ends up in 20th Century Alexandria, Virginia where she trades her prized possession (the number zero) for a bicycle!
Thanks to Vijay Fafat for sending me a copy (which reads more like an avant-garde poem than a script) and pointing out the preface (which explains how it started as a libretto before getting turned into a play by the A.R.T.'s Bob McGrath).
According to a Curtain Up Review by Les Gutman:
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McGrath and his designers have indeed provided plenty to see and hear as Hypatia goes on her seventy minute time-tripping magic carpet ride. Performed almost entirely behind a scrim onto which a large array of Laurie Olinder's very fine projections are unleashed, McGrath has positioned his cast of fourteen on a spartan, multi-level set around Hypatia, who rests in a raised circle at center. It's a striking image, its focus shifting under Jane Cox's lights. Every once in a while, "someone sings a little song." (The songs were created by the cast, and a few of them are actually quite good.)
...
For Hypatia, people beget numbers and numbers beget machines; we are all machines and there are machines within machines. McGrath's staging is itself a well-oiled machine, and the disciplined cast functions beautifully and frequently machine-like as its many parts.
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