MAD SCIENCE,
SANELY STAGED

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Cold War
satire still packs a comic sting

Kate Mulligan and JR Reed

The Actors’ Gang has been a pillar of L.A. theater since 1988, when they burst onto the scene with their staging of Freaks at the old Tiffany Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, a production heralded by a poster sketch of Shannon Holt greedily devouring a rat that appeared prior to opening on virtually every telephone pole, streetlight, utility pole, street box, and construction wall throughout the city.

Some forty years later, with actor and founding member Tim Robbins serving as artistic director and the company housed in Culver City’s historic Ivy Substation, The Actors’ Gang remains not merely one of the jewels in the crown of the Los Angeles theater community, but one of its preeminent gems. Therefore, one can expect that even its lesser successes will not be utterly devoid of a hefty helping of excellence.

Pierre Adeli

This is the case with The Physicists (Die Physiker) by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990), directed by Gang stalwart Brent Hinkley. Having lived in the shadow of Nazism only to emerge into the blinding dawn of the Atomic Age, the sensibilities of Dürrenmatt’s 1961 play are understandable.

The setting is the asylum Les Cerisiers (“The Cherry Trees” in a nod to The Cherry Orchard), where a nurse has been murdered and the hunchbacked head administrator Dr. Mathilde von Zahnd (Kate Mulligan) has called in Police Inspector Voss (JR Reed) to investigate. Suspicion immediately falls on Albert Einstein (Pierre Adeli)—or rather, the delusional patient who believes himself to be the great German-born theoretical physicist.

Kate Mulligan

What follows is a comic concoction that ricochets between slam-door farce, humorous whodunit, Spy vs. Spy, and an indictment of humanity’s plunge into the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War, which Dürrenmatt maintains qualifies us all as lunatics. As Einstein moans, “Do you want to arrest me because I strangled a nurse or because I invented the atomic bomb?”

Dürrenmatt’s thin premise runs with the precision of a Swiss watch, which is possibly the play’s major flaw. A dab more chaos is called for, but chaos is not a conspicuous trait of the citizenry of Confoederatio Helvetica.

Kate Mulligan and Pierre Adeli

Hinkley dexterously directs the production with a sharp eye for the absurd, keeping the action moving at a rapid pace even when there’s not much absurdity—or action—in the script to rush along.

The cast brings more to their performances than there is on the page, especially Mulligan and Jolene Hjerleid as Monika, one of the assorted doomed nurses. The “mad” physicists—Einstein (Adeli), Möbius (Vincent Foster), and Sir Isaac Newton (Brian T. Finney, as reliably excellent as ever)—function like The Three Stooges for a postgraduate crowd.

JR Reed

All in all, whatever the shortcomings of the material, the crew at The Actors’ Gang gives The Physicists its best—and their best is always impeccably entertaining.

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photos by Bob Turton Photography

The Physicists
The Actors’ Gang Theater
The Ivy Substation in Culver City
Thurs & Sat at 8; Sun at 2 (June 7)
ends on June 20, 2026
for tickets, visit Actors’ Gang

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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Vincent Foster