Entangled: 12 Scenes in a Circle K Off the I-40 in New Mexico

In Emily Zemba and Mona Mansour’s "Entangled," a clerk runs a Circle K gas station and convenience store in the New Mexico desert. It’s about thirty miles from any other civilization, but not far from an atomic bomb testing site and a nuclear lab.

The play opens with a several days’ worth of customers compressed in time into a herd of simultaneous walking and talking. The clerk is convinced that time acts differently here, and that there must be a portal in the bathroom - sometimes people go in but they don’t come out. The road trippers descending upon the store make up the clerk’s whole day, whereas to them, he is just a blip in their journeys. Families, couples, thruples - the only person he shares some time with is a man from Vegas who sells…well, time shares, and who wants to build a property near the Circle K. At one point, we hear a recording of Carl Sagan tracing the discovery that our planet and our sun were not in fact the center of the universe.

(For full disclosure, I am a friend and colleague of Emily Zemba’s from drama school and I find her work really delightful and especially skilled at using whimsy and abstraction. The Laugh-In moment definitely said Zemba to me. This is my first encounter with the co-author Mona Mansour.)

With each scene, the customers' conversations pervert science for their own benefit. A marriage proposal misunderstands the odds of two compatible people meeting each other. A group headed to a dinner party discovers all the men are named John and decide it must mean something, it can’t be just coincidence, though of course John is among the most common men’s names in the country. The Laugh-In sequence reduces science to jargon and a series of two-line jokes. The time share guy even effectively wants to bend time and space to let his owners move in year-round: literally share time. We laypeople turn science and math into BS to sell junk. Scientists sometimes turn it into nuclear bombs.

The tone is one of a knowing comedy. I do think I need a little more darkness to help me get the importance of the people who disappear. Does it matter that people never return from the bathroom? No one in the store does anything about it, and this is a point the play is making. But where are the people who miss the disappeared?

I zoomed in on the pseudoscience theme, but again I need a little more help seeing what the play wants to say about cyclical time and the significance of our connections to one another. Maybe it’s simply that we fail to see these connections. It’s a sad message. But I’m still thinking about it. It's more than just a blip in my day.

CONTEMPLATIVE HAPPY FACE MINUS