"Dave DaVinci Saves The Universe" Redux

Imagine having a machine that allows you to travel back in time and gives you the ability to correct the mistakes you have made, and affords you the chance to live a life more extraordinary than how you lived it before. Would you use it? This is a question that The House Theatre of Chicago asks again, years after it originally posed it in its 2005 hit, “Dave DaVinci Saves the Universe.”

While they don’t have an actual time machine (that we know of), the three playwrights, Chris Mathews, Jake Minton (the two writers of the original “Dave”) and Nathan Allen (also the director of both versions) “re-imagined” the original story into a new show that will run September 21-November 8, 2008 in The House’s new home in the Chopin Theatre (1543 W. Division Street). Armed with the critical success of last year’s “The Sparrow”, the writers replaced characters and revised the dialogue to freshen up the previous version and provide it with a new point of view. The result, whether or not you’ve seen the original production, is a mesmerizing telling of a scientific fantasy love story.

“Dave” is about a genius scientist’s (Dennis Watkins and Stephen Taylor alternately play the future and present Dave) desperate quest to invent a time machine that would allow him to go back and prevent the suicide of his teenage daughter (Perdi, played by Paige Hoffman) a popular science fiction protégé. His obsession to undo the heartbreak caused by the past is creating intolerable pain for his wife (Nora played by Stacy Stoltz) and is destroying his marriage. His desperation causes him to see and talk to the characters from his daughter’s novels—a stereotypical android (T.H. Thoth, played by Joshua Holden), space crusader (Paige Hoffman as
Cass Meridian) and a giant red, furry, ram-like creature (Arcturus, magnificently played by Carolyn Defrin who does double duty as Nora’s younger self)—who guide him on his journey while they play out theirs. Dave does manage to invent the time machine but learns from his future self that the mission cannot be easily accomplished without significant repercussions, if it can be done at all. He and Nora must then make some difficult choices.

Time travel and science fiction aren’t easy to translate on stage. Even with scenic designer Collette Pollard’s set that easily turns a cozy living room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to a stark spaceship ready to enter a black hole (if you’ve ever wanted to see an Eames La Chaise up close, now’s your chance), and Debbie Baer’s color-coded costumes that help the audience distinguish between the past and future versions of Dave and Nora, and between Perdi and Cass Meridian—not to mention the remarkable piece of art that forms Arcturus—the time machine transitions are too quick and complicated to comprehend.

If there is anything to comprehend about Dave’s time-bending schemes, it may be that they are too scientifically intricate for us to follow. Or it may just be that they don’t really matter all that much. Although it poses many theories and questions about time travel the core of the story, after all, is the relationship that Dave and Nora has to salvage and the healing that they must attempt to survive from their daughter’s dark death. And Watkins, Defrin, Stoltz and Taylor tell this part of the story with simple but powerful emotion that leaves nothing to puzzle over.

Only those who saw the show in its first go-round can tell whether this year’s “Dave DaVinci Saves The Universe” was re-imagined for the better. Those who will see the show with virgin eyes, however, should appreciate “Dave” for what it presently is –a uniquely inventive show that weaves fantasy into the mundane.