Both shows weave personal anecdotes and musings into something larger and more universal. Both touch on fear, loss, and death, and both leave us with a richer, more expansive sense of what it means to be alive. And "QED," like "Coming Up for Air," paints a vivid portrait of a fascinating person - it's just that, in this case, the person is not a beloved local musician but an award-winning California Institute of Technology professor and Nobel laureate (the play's title comes from the work that brought him that honor, on quantum electrodynamics) who died in 1988.
"QED" also fits neatly into the mission of the Catalyst Collaborative @ MIT, which Underground Railway and MIT founded as a way of building links between theater and science. Sunday afternoon's audience seemed more scientific than your typical theater crowd - there were knowing chuckles at a few references that went right over this liberal-arts major's head - but the play is truly a play, not a physics lecture. Like Feynman does, it humanizes scientific questions, and it makes them seem accessible without ever talking down to its audience.
Parnell originally wrote the play for Alan Alda, who performed it in 2001. Keith Jochim, who plays Feynman here, is less angular, more solidly built, than Alda, but he has a similar buoyant energy and unforced charm. "QED" is billed as "an evening with Richard Feynman," and that's just what it feels like with Jochim effortlessly holding our attention onstage: two hours in the company of a great raconteur with a sharp mind, an endless curiosity, and an infectious enthusiasm for life.
