Why do couples stay together? Mutual comfort? Desire? Self-destructive neurotic drives? Is it because nobody else knows how to make that Cajun chicken alfredo just the way you like it? Or is it, as a character in ENTANGLED: 12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 says, because the two halves of a couple are “two particles that resonate with a vibrational frequency?” Babe, I know I messed up, but you’re my particle! 

ENTANGLED, a very funny new play from the Society Theater Company, is interested in the link between science and love. Can we use science to understand why couples come together, how they stay together, and what pulls them apart? The play affectionately satirizes a type of dialogue I call “science-bro poetry-speak:” where people use expansive metaphors about atoms, galaxies, and the vastness of the universe to say something about earnest about their feelings. (“Remember we talked about, like, oh, it's a miracle that our molecules could connect?” says one character, desperately trying to get his girlfriend back.) But Entangled also has an undercurrent of appreciation for the kind of poetry of physics popularized by Carl Sagan, who told us that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The play’s goofy characters may not really understand science, but there’s something poignant in the way they use it to try to understand each other.

The show is set in a Circle K gas station somewhere in New Mexico. The play’s 11 cast members bounce off each other in little vignettes where they play boyfriends and girlfriends, coworkers and families, all passing through the Circle K to take a break from the open road and eat some empty calories. The show’s setting - it was directed by Scott Illingworth, with associate direction by Stephanie Jean Lee - works well as a petri dish for bickering. The empty, fluorescent-lit gas station, with its walls that are not any color and its unappetizing assortment of Funyuns, lighters and condoms, is the perfect setting for folks to just let loose and tear their loved ones to shreds for no reason.

The land the station was built on, it turns out, is near Los Alamos, the site of the Manhattan Project, where Robert Oppenheimer and his fraternity of scientists worked on the atom bomb. As a result, buildings in the area are infected with - to use a technical term - weird time particles. “The energy of those discoveries those scientists made - at the quantum level - It shifted things. It messed with the natural order of this place,” explains the station’s cashier & owner (a subtle & and skilled Joshua David Robinson). The energy, dude! That may be why the characters in Entangled all like to talk in the poeticized tone of a Carl Sagan voice-over.  Like the burger joint in Stephen King’s time-traveling novel 11/22/63, the gas station is built over a rift in the space-time continuum. (They presumably used the same contractor.) The show’s conceit is that the wackadoo space-time stuff starts affecting the people coming through the gas station who weirdly repeat conversations they’ve already had, burst into hilarious fits of tightly choreographed Latin dance, or create elaborate costumes made out of Funyuns wrappers.

The cosmic rays of ENTANGLED don’t start zapping its denizens until its second half, though: for most of its runtime, the play is a bunch of very funny, sparkling character showcases about people in relationships who come in and out of the gas station. These scenes are sharply observed mini-dramas of fighting with your partner in a public space. (Personally, I recommend IKEA. You will fight, but when you run out of energy, you can go to bed.) Caroline Grogan, Shpend Xani and Christy Escobar are a great, punchy trio as two techies and one hippie entangled in a stressed-out throuple. Escobar in particular has a fantastic delivery, and made me laugh when describing how she meditates: “Okay, here I am, I am here, here’s where I am right now, and I can go; you wait here for when I get back, I’ll be back, but you can wait.”  Rosa Gilmore and Leslie Fray stand out as a cranky couple, Petra and Nadia, who have stopped at the Circle K so Nadia can use its bathroom, which is occupied. They clearly love each other, but every interaction threatens to turn into a fight about their entire relationship. An impatient Petra: “Are you in pain, or just like, hey, I’d love to pee?” Nadia: “Why do you shame me???” All of the couples’ dialogue (the play was written by Mona Mansour and Emily Zemba and further developed through improvisation) is a funny, truthful examination of all the attacks, counterattacks and defense mechanisms we employ against the people we love. 

The show's main narrative is developed through a series of long conversations between the cashier/owner, Joshua David Robinson, and a real estate developer Alexandra Templer, who plays it for laughs as a pothead skater bro in a backwards baseball cap. As the cashier, Robinson is a man  resigned to life in the middle of nowhere: he moves with the languid pace of someone who knows nothing will ever happen to him. He’s not really interested in the bickering couples who come through the store, or even in his own business. He’s on a quest to understand his strange gas station. He forms an odd couple with the real estate developer, who thinks that the station’s space-time qualities could be a way to market the surrounding land: “I see possibility. I see thousands of galaxies. And, each galaxy has one and a half baths, an eat-in kitchen, a pull out couch, and a small deck, luxurious enough for a two-family vacation.” 

Their scenes are funny, too, and well-acted, but they may not be as compelling as the more sparkling character studies dotted throughout. ENTANGLED’s conceit of a rift in the space-time continuum works well as an excuse for some hilariously odd setpieces.  But the play’s sharp, poignant insights about relationships may be more satisfying for an audience than its mythopoetic musings about science. Two people giving each other a hard time about whether one of them really has to use the bathroom says more about human nature than Carl Sagan ever could.