Twenty-eight-year-old grad student Rachel Hardeman tiptoes into Professor Zelda Kahn’s Cambridge office (Harvard? MIT?) with such diffidence that you half expect her to change her mind and tiptoe back out, no one the wiser. She doesn’t do that. And yet she doesn’t go so far as to make her presence known, either. She simply stands there—timidly, it seems—waiting for the professor to look up from her papers and register her presence.
She greets Rachel cordially, once she notices her. They clearly have an appointment, but just as clearly know very little about each other. Rachel isn’t Zelda’s student; the professor doesn’t know at first that they work in the same branch of science, much less that Rachel applied to present a paper at the conference but was rejected.
Nevertheless, Treem makes the most and more of her familiar tropes, delivering a smart, vital piece of work that accesses the thrill you get listening to the banter of terribly erudite people in plays like Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, while also—again, a la Bennett—warming your heart. Not least of all, it provides a canny portrait of second- and third-wave feminism confronting each other across the chasm of a generation and the width of a mahogany desk.
Through 4/6: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM Timeline Theatre 615 W. Wellington 773-281-8463timelinetheatre.com $35-$48
