Aptly enough, “Einstein” — the inept new drama about the father of the relativity theory — makes time slow to a crawl. When it finally ends, you’re not sure if you’ve been at the theater for three hours or three days.
Playwright Jay Prasad guides us through five decades of Albert Einstein’s life, from his fumblings as a budding scientist in Switzerland to his death in Princeton, NJ.
So sure, lots happens, yet “Einstein” lacks drama. It lacks everything that makes for a good show, really.
Trouble starts from the very first scene, when we meet Einstein (Richard Kent Green) as a young man in Bern. His stilted conversations with his friend Basso (Grant Kretchik, mugging wildly) are embarrassing to watch: They don’t talk like people, but like actors imitating people.
Here and there are glimpses of Einstein, the womanizer. He’s a total jerk to his baby mama, Mileva (Jill Catherine Durso), before marrying his drab cousin Elsa (Sheilagh Weymouth), though not without flirting with her young daughter, Ilse (Durso again).
We move through the years at a snail’s pace as Einstein spends time in Germany, flees the rising Third Reich and ends up in America. Looking more like rocker David Crosby than the woolly-haired genius, Green dutifully delivers reams of wooden dialogue about physics. Eyes glaze over, the way they do when the doctors on “Grey’s Anatomy” spout medical gobbledygook.
We hit rock bottom with the laughable “did they really go there?” scene in which Einstein, then living in Berlin, puts on a wig and dark glasses to sneak into an interview with Hitler in 1932.
Never mind the idiotic setup — Hitler was then 43 and a mere year away from power, but boyish actor Jay William Thomas mugs as coyly as if he were being interviewed by TMZ. If this was meant to be funny, mission not accomplished.
Just then, you idly wonder what Prasad and director Randolph Curtis Rand could possibly have been thinking. It’s a fleeting moment, and then it’s back to snoozing.