‘Incognito’ Review: Muddled Mystery

metroweekly.com:

Incognito (★★★☆☆) enter dancing — or, rather, they enter arranging themselves into dancerly poses around an elegantly minimal set.

The effect definitely is mystifying, if awkward-looking, whatever impact is intended by director Allison Arkell Stockman and movement director Emma Jaster.The brief movement prelude to this intricate puzzle of interconnecting stories, written by Nick Payne, makes for a shaky start in a production that, at times, seems taxed by the effort to tie together the play’s disparate threads and timelines.The four-person ensemble, playing 20 characters total, perform admirably in distinguishing the main figures featured, including Dr.

Harvey (Marcus Kyd), a New Jersey pathologist who shocks his wife Eloise (Kari Ginsburg) by bringing home the brain of his latest autopsy subject, recently deceased Princeton professor Albert Einstein, in the trunk of his car.Based on the actual pathologist who performed Einstein’s autopsy then secreted the brain away in order to study it for physiological signs of genius, Harvey risks his career for science, on the chance he won’t be sued or arrested.

His and Eloise’s story winds through not only that intrigue, but a touching domestic drama that elicits an affecting portrayal from Ginsburg and Kyd.Throughout, Ginsburg excels at adding light comic touches, particularly opposite Gerrad Alex Taylor playing Einstein’s son Hans Albert, whom Harvey and Eloise host for dinner in the hopes he’ll grant Harvey permission to hold onto the brain.