Though she begins her 75-minute show in the Central Square Theater with an angry blast at former Harvard president Larry Summers, who infamously suggested that there might be innate differences between men and women when it comes to math and science, De Cari does not sustain that tone.
Instead, she gives a guided tour through the quirky precincts of MIT, and of her own mind, with a satirical tone that darkens into pathos when she recounts her desperate desire to please her father, and the impact on her of his suicide while she was at MIT. Only after numerous false starts would she eventually discover that she wanted to be an actress rather than a mathematician. When Di Cari incarnates her younger self (one of 30 characters she impersonates in the show), it is with the quavery voice of a young woman uncertain of her place in the world.
Which is not to say that Di Cari misses the chance to reenact her encounters two decades ago with some of MIT’s male chauvinist oinkers, affirming the truth of that old adage about revenge being a dish best served cold.
We get a glimpse of the professor who, upon learning she was married, asked: “Wouldn’t you rather be home, raising children?’’ And the one who blithely asserted: “You won’t have much time for your studies, will you? You’ll want to be home, starting a family.’’ And especially the one who put De Cari in charge of delivering cookies to a weekly seminar (another female student had earlier been put in charge of delivering coffee).
For the most part, though, she depicts the men of MIT as clueless rather than sinister, as nerdy technocrats who are baffled by the women at MIT rather than openly hostile to them (in contrast to, say, the seething misogyny of the male characters in “Mad Men,’’ which is set in the early 1960s). De Cari, in turn, was baffled by MIT. As a graduate of the freewheeling University of California at Berkeley, she was startled by MIT’s obsessively competitive culture and its bloodless detachment from the common ruck of humanity.
