MIND OVER MATTER: IDEAS TAKE CENTER STAGE IN JOHNATHAN
SPECTOR’S INTELLECTUALLY COMPELLING THIS MUCH I KNOW

When was the last time you made a choice? What went through your mind? Did you know what you were going to choose before you did it?

The psychology professor (Firdous Bamji) who steps onstage at 59E59 Theaters at the start of This Much I Know from Jonathan Spector (whose Eureka Day won a Tony for Best revival last year)—is preoccupied with those very questions. After delivering the obligatory “turn off your cell phone†announcement, he even muses that someone in the house, inevitably, will actively choose not to comply.

Firdous Bamji

With a few slides projected onto the blackboards behind him, our lecturer quickly reveals he’s grappling with a personal crisis: his wife, a writer, has fled the country following an unimaginable accident. She’s in Russia, seeking distant relatives as she tries to process her grief, and to confirm her family’s unfortunate ties to the late Russian dictator Joseph Stalin.But we’re not here merely to witness a psychology lecture or a breakdown. This Much I Know interlaces three intertwining narratives: the professor and his runaway wife; the son of a white supremacist wrestling free from his father’s Christian nationalist ideology; and the story of Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, Stalin’s only daughter, who defected to the United States in 1967.

Ethan J. Miller with Dani Stoller

Bookended by the professor’s lecture, the play unfolds with Mr. Bamji and his two castmates working splendidly in sync. Ethan J. Miller flexes his multi-character muscles most impressively, inhabiting reporters, emergency workers, and Russian relatives. Dani Stoller brings warmth and intelligence to the professor’s wife and beguiles as Svetlana. With seeming effortlessness, Bamji balances direct address with emotional depth, both as the confident professor and as Lukesh, a shy gentleman who catches Svetlana’s eye in a playful romance. His lighter moments of flirtation and fun with Stoller make his darker turns of discourse and destitution hit harder—such a layered and wonderful performance. Even a mid-show cell phone interruption becomes an opportunity for a deft, graceful in-character quip.

Firdous Bamji, Ethan J. Miller, and Dani Stoller

Director Hayley Finn leans into the production’s overlapping themes—and even the storytellers’ words. Through fluid transitions, characters exit and enter, sometimes with the same actors on shared words or phrases like Olympic relay runners passing a baton.

Firdous Bamji and Ethan J. Miller

Misha Kachman’s tesseract-like set of sliding, scrim-wrapped walls begins as the professor’s blackboards, then becomes a projection surface for Mona Kasra’s haunting images of Stalin and other Russian historical figures (voiced by an enshadowed Bamji on a desk mic). The walls’ motion—revealing and concealing scenes in turn—energizes the storytelling and keeps the two-hour-and-thirty-minute runtime brisk as we move from one storyline to the other.

Dani Stoller and Ethan J. Miller

Inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s psychology book Thinking, Fast and Slow, This Much I Know, a revival which came to NYC from from Theater J in Washington, fuses its three stories, themes, and even shared language into a meditation on choice, responsibility, and the evolution of belief. Guided by Finn’s smart staging and an outstanding trio of performers, the result is a thoughtful, intricately woven work. Just go see it—and maybe, somewhere along the way, you’ll decide why you chose to do so.

photos by Carol Rosegg