Nina Metz

With the world premiere of "Hannah and Martin," TimeLine Theatre once again proves you don't need an enormous budget or vast performance space to produce compelling theater. First-time New York-based playwright Kate Fodor crafts a transfixing account of the complex, questionable love affair between the two twentieth-century philosophers of the play's title. At the center of it all is Hannah Arendt, played by Elizabeth Rich, an actor with an appealing, tomboyish quality, who packs a wallop as the Jewish political theorist who escaped from Germany during World War II. Years before Hitler rose to power, while she was a student at Marburg University, Arendt began a love affair with her professor, a man seventeen years her senior, the German intellectual Martin Heidegger, whose landmark work, "Being and Time" is now a staple of philosophy curriculums. It was a relationship complicated by several factors: Heidegger was an elusive sort of lover (he was married) and perhaps most significantly, he later became a supporter of the Nazi party. It is a thick, knotty role that's played with considerable detail and oblique charm by David Parkes. In fact, the entire six-member cast is quite good, under the direction of Jeremy B. Cohen. Brian Sidney Bembridge's set design, alternating floorboards of wood and blackboard (upon which lines from the play are scribbled in chalk), suggests a boxed trap encasing these characters.

Hannah and Martin plays at the TimeLine Theatre, 615 West Wellington, (312)409-8463, through June 8.

(2003-05-14)

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