God Particle

By John Farrell, Contributing Writer

There can be half a dozen shows on a Saturday night on Theater Row, when the theater scene is booming on Santa Monica Boulevard.

It is a little seamy when there is little going on, with Abraham Lincoln being  the only sign of theater. He is seen leaving a theater where he was performing, taking off his stovepipe and climbing into his car to go home.  No, it wasn’t a Lincoln, but a Toyota.

Down the street, at The Complex, a very hip crowd made almost the only action — except for the stray prostitutes. The God Particle Complex was given a brief and very funny performance.

It is a farce of sorts, a delicious one-joke play that lasts less than 50 minutes and involves eight actors in a show that is, frankly, a little lonely. Don’t drive up to Santa Monica Boulevard just to see it. If you are there anyway, it is worth a visit but it is a long way for a short, if amusing performance.

The play is set in the subterranean CERN complex, the huge billion dollar circular accelerator in which hundreds of scientists have been trying (and recently almost succeeded) in finding the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle,” whose existence completes the family of sub-atomic particles.

Sven (Brian Allman) explains a bit of this. Then, we are left in the capable — sort of — hands of Dr. Feldman (Scott Harris) and Dr. Fleurmon (Andrew Erskine Wheeler) who have a great deal invested in finding the Higgs Boson.

Appearing out of nowhere is The Visitor (JR Reed) in a silver stretch-latex suit. He gives them a helping of powder and tells them they have created a black holes (one of the very unlikely results of the CERN collider’s high speed physics experiment) and tells them that they have to change the experiment for the sake of the future. From there things get progressively worse as the end of the universe in enacted before our eyes.

It’s funny, bright and short, and if you are in the neighborhood for another play, it’s worth seeing.

Tickets are $15. Performances are at 10 p.m. Jan. 19  through Feb. 8, at The Annex at Artworks in Los Angeles.
Details: www.madcapsofscience.com
Venue: The Annex at Artworks
Location: 6581 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood