Magic between a tricky spot and The Other Place

There's a slippery quality to Sharr White's The Other Place, the drama opening the Magic Theatre season. The first half of this 80-minute one-act is especially slick as we try to gain our bearings, but White and director Loretta Greco keep tilting the playing field. Just when we think we know what's really going on in the story of a brilliant scientist's life, along comes new information or a trip to the past that reconfigures what we thought we knew.

Memory is a tricky, tricky thing. How accurate or trustworthy are our memories? That's a question that Juliana Smithton should be asking herself, but she's not, because she doesn't know anything's wrong.