język polskijęzyk angielski

The practice of relativity

Genre
Drama
Original language of the play
Cast details
a woman (20-40) and a man (20-40)
Are we able to travel in time and space without vehicles? Are there several parallel worlds? Do we exist in many realities at the same time? Or are we limited to one and one only? Can our souls travel to another century, which is just another parallel reality and then can we penetrate into a person from the other reality? Can we become somebody else for a moment or even for longer than this? Caroline experiences something unbelievably surprising: for about a year she travels again and again back in time and lives there as a different person. Every time she is there she cannot remember the 21st century, but when she returns to the present, she remembers almost everything she has experienced during her time of travel. The one thing she does not recall is the names. Her husband doesn't believe she actually switches between centuries; to him these are just dreams. After about a year he is forced to change his attitude. Caroline returns from a journey into the past, but this time she knows her husband's name in the past. It was Curie.

The Name is the turning point of the play: Caroline and her husband find out, after going through encyclopaedias and biographies, that most of the events Caroline has experienced during her journeys had really taken place in history. During the most recent adventure Caroline was either Maria Skłodowska Curie or Irene Curie (similar to the movie "Being John Malkovich.") We have two time layers in this play: the present – here the young people live and experience travelling in time, which makes them think of the beginning of the Universe, about relativity, etc. - and the past, with some emotional moments from the life of the Curie family.

„The Practice of Relativity" is like a detective story in which at the beginning many details seem not to be connected, but at the end we find out they are all parts of one large, clear picture. The play has been written for two actors, but it is easily transferable into a drama including all the dreamed characters. The stories told by the protagonists have to be transformed into dialogs. The dialogs are very lively; the author has a pleasant sense of humour and in an unpretentious way shows us the possibility of existence in many parallel realities, or simply the unusual dream patterns and how they may penetrate our life.