PAST WIVES

"This World of Tomorrow" and "Oedipus" look back.

- BY HELEN SHAW

In "This World of Tomorrow," a nostalgic time-travel romance by Tom Hanks and James Glossman, now at the Shed, the Oscar-winning actor (and novice playwright) plays Bert Allenberry, a tech titan dissatisfied with life in 2089. You can't blame him: even though his existence looks glossy and smooth, every scene set in the future takes place in an office of some kind—“working remotely” must not have survived the sixth extinction.

We actually meet Bert and his girlfriend, Cyndee (Kerry Bishé), in the past, as they amble around the 1939 World's Fair, in Queens, which is represented by gliding L.E.D. columns showing pixelated images of, for example, the Lagoon of Nations. (Derek McLane designed both the set and the projections.) Bert’s a boss with vague crises on his hands—he’s worried about “Newtonian sequencing” and the “roadblock on our Vox-PAC.” To help him unwind, thoughtful Cyndee has bought them a quarter-billion-dollar getaway from a boutique firm that can send super-wealthy tourists to a narrow slice of the past: a few hours in New York on June 8, 1939.

On Bert’s first trip, he is transfixed by a gee-whiz sentence he hears on a ride: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.” When Bert and Cyndee return to work in 2089—Cyndee is also Bert's top executive—he repeats the line to his business partner, M-Dash (Ruben Santiago-Hudson). A hurrying future. Bert loves that idea. Enchanted by the technologist optimism of the World’s Fair, Bert returns, several times, alone. On each visit, he meets a local, the beautiful, quietly melancholy Carmen (Kelli O’Hara), and Cyndee is soon forgotten.