In 'Einstein's Dreams,' relativity over easy

CAMBRIDGE -- As a casualty of college Physics 101, I approached "Einstein's Dreams," presented by Catalyst Collaborative at MIT (a partnership between the university and Underground Railway Theater ), with some trepidation. Would my eyes glaze over? Would I emerge -- as I invariably did from class -- feeling hopelessly, irremediably dense?

Not to worry. Wesley Savick's lively adaptation of MIT humanities professor Alan Lightman's best-selling novel (less fiction than a set of philosophical musings) focuses on the genius's thought processes, not the ground breaking theories they engendered. A series of playful vignettes examines some tantalizing "what ifs," such as: What if time ran in fits and starts, or backward , or in concentric circles?

The premise still sounds dauntingly abstract, but it's not at all in Savick's inventive staging. The set is bare but for three chairs and three movable screens, which will fill in as whiteboards and blackboards, windows and doors. It's 1905, and 26-year-old Einstein (Robert Najarian) may be on the verge of a breakthrough, but right now he's a rag doll, nodding off at his patent-office desk. Co-workers -- longtime friend and colleague Michele Besso (Steven Barkhimer) and a typist (Debra Wise) -- gently twit him for his occasional fugue states. "Hey, Einstein!" chides Besso at one point -- our first hint, among many to come, that it's permissible to laugh.

A childlike delight infuses this exploration of weighty ideas. To laypeople, for example, time might seem a simple matter of measurements; Einstein perceived vagaries that struck him as a scientific problem to be solved.

To demonstrate his postulate (or working theory), one scene suggests that time really only started getting tricky with the invention of the mechanical clock, an intriguing if maddening device at odds with the natural rhythms that had hitherto ruled. Wise and Barkhimer, as "dreamtellers," embody the factions at war to this day: those on "body time" ("We know that the body is a thing of wild magic," enthuses Wise with a suggestive wiggle) and those on mechanical time (the body is "a thing to be ordered, not obeyed," counters Barkhimer, assuming a posture of Prussian rectitude).

Other enactments examine the notion of multiple realities and the prospect of eternal life, which definitely has its hidden drawbacks. For one flight of fancy, an oddly upbeat vision of the end of the world, the actors fan out among the audience, ascribing secret desires to unsuspecting onlookers and ultimately establishing a real communion.

Wise and Barkhimer, along with Najarian as the dreamer, imbue the highly physicalized theoretical antics with such good humor and grace, such humanity, that the science-averse can't help being drawn in.

There's no final exam, just a series of optional post-performance discussions, mostly conducted by MIT physics professors and fanned by hand-raisers hoping to impress. For that, you might want to brush up on your Heidegger.