Entangled: 12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 in New Mexico
145 6th Ave, Manhattan, NYC
March 11-29, 2026
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| Entangled, featuring Joshua David Robinson, Shpend Xani, Hiram Delgado, Caroline Grogan, Meredith Garretson, Christy Escobar. Photo by Ashley Garrett. |
If everything in the universe (or multiverse) is predetermined, an incalculably immense and complex cascade of cause and effect down to the subatomic level, does that mean not only that there is no free will but also that there is no such thing as true randomness? If humans typically experience being as unidirectional temporal movement, what would it mean to accept the concept that all points in time exist simultaneously? What might prompt someone to make (or "make") an important life decision in the aisles of an interstate-adjacent chain convenience store? These are the sort of questions you might find yourself contemplating after
Entangled: 12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 in New Mexico, currently in its world-premiere run at HERE Arts Center. Entangled, from collaborative, research-driven theater company SOCIETY, seamlessly conjoins big ideas from quantum physics with big laughs and the small details of human lives and relationships. Having experienced this inspired production, one might never again consider buying a travel-size bag of Funyuns without also considering one's place in the space-time continuum.
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| Entangled, featuring Joshua David Robinson and Alexandra Templer. Photo by Ashley Garrett. |
The Circle K of the title is operated by an unnamed attendant (Joshua David Robinson, understatedly fantastic in the role), who inherited the store from his parents, who themselves built it on land purchased by his grandparents in the 1950s. In the show's second scene, each of which is numbered and titled via projection, we meet the first set of Circle K customers, a couple (Brian Bock and Rosa Gilmore) whose snack-food decision-making veers unexpectedly into an epiphanic disagreement connected to the question of making plans for future or not–a relationship issue but also a pointer to questions of free will and temporality. In fact, the Circle K seems to witness a fair amount of customer conflict, maybe because long periods stuck in a car make people irritable, or maybe because of the crack in space-time that the attendant believes to be present on the site of his store (specifically, in the restroom, and conjured in part by
Lauren Nychelle's vibrant lighting design). The store is located near Los Alamos, best known for its role in the Manhattan Project in the 1940s (when we first see the attendant, he is reading Richard Rhodes's 1986 book
The Making of the Atom Bomb). The attendant's theory is that energy sticks around–and that those scientists' work was "to
break things." One repeat customer (Alexandra Templer, making up a delightful duo with Robinson), currently working in timeshares, envisions constructing a resort trading on the "meaning" and "mystery" of the area and working with the attendant as a team. But then and again, as another coupled customer (Brian Bock) notes after another unexpected quarrel, life can change dramatically in "2 seconds," and, as his and other examples here show, for seemingly insignificant reasons.
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| Entangled, featuring Joshua David Robinson, Shpend Xani, Hiram Delgado, Caroline Grogan, Keren Lugo, Rosa Gilmore, Annie Fox, Meredith Garretson, and Christy Escobar. Photo by Ashley Garrett. |
The attendant's would-be resort partner correctly observes that humans are "desperate" for meaning, leading a group of customers in once scene, for example, to refuse to accept that an extremely unlikely coincidence is in fact only a coincidence. (And even if they were correct, non-randomness does not equate to meaningfulness, or even necessarily purposefulness.) As the play's stranger occurrences are anchored in the impressive realism of
Jacob Bers's Circle K set, its cosmic meditations are grounded in the mundanities of buying gas and cigarettes and needing to use the bathroom and being annoyed with a significant other; it's a lot of fun just to watch the attendant watch the customers and their eruptions of drama, quietly entering items they've opened before paying for into the register. The play often comes back to how much we don't know, not just that we don't know the future or what our partners may be thinking or feeling but also that we don't know, as one character points out, what dark matter, which is theorized to make up most of the universe, is; as the attendant says, a description of something is not the same as the thing itself. To take his example, we can call light, "energy," we can define it as "both a particle and a wave," we can measure it, but none of that means that we understand what it IS (a lot, in fact, like thought and consciousness). One member of yet another couple (
Hiram Delgado and Annie Fox) who passes through the Circle K argues that quantum entanglement–the interconnection of particles such that one influences the other regardless of the distance between them–is actually a very poor, misapplied metaphor for human (romantic) relationships. A few characters can't handle the possibility that existence is meaningless and/or they are powerless to affect its trajectory, lashing out (Leslie Fray's traumatized small farmer Karina) or having a public existential breakdown (memorably acted by Keren Lugo). Others, like the professor (Meredith Garretson) whose class traumatized Karina as a college student, align with the view that answers about questions such as whether free will exists or how time actually works don't affect how we
experience space-time (not unlike Thomas Ligotti's argument that most humans actively, intentionally or otherwise, repress their consciousness of the "malignant" uselessness of life and of consciousness); but
Entangled, well stocked with entertaining surprises, eye-opening moments, and excellent performances, makes it really fun to think about those answers anyway.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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