Courtesy of Sean Elliot
Set on the imaginary cold, northern sea isle of Oldfoundland, the Theater Department’s fall play “Set Zero” opened with Farin—portrayed by Ave Mary Aloia ‘26—singing an original song written by the playwright, Mashup Mushtaq Deen. Soon after, the rest of the cast appeared onstage.
Ishamael, played by Ryan Brearley ‘28, appeared as the brilliant mathematician and aging patriarch of the family. Mia Rubino ‘25 played Miriam, the prodigious mathematician, daughter of Ishamael and mother of the family. Lucas Vasquez ‘25 played Noah, the husband of Miriam, handyman, and stay at home dad of the family. Shiloh and Shilo, played by Nadia Hopkins ‘25 and Amanda Brady ‘25, appeared as the family’s curious children forced to study mathematics. Giuseppe Piccirilli ‘25 was Bernard, a shepherd, the voice of reason and father of Noah.
“Something pretty unique to the play is that everyone is almost always on stage,” said Nadia Hopkins ‘25, “so figuring out what everyone was doing at different parts of the play even if they weren’t in the central scene was very important.” The small cast combined this consistent lens into their actions, creating a feeling of intimacy in the audience beyond a typical single-narrative production.
The play was performed during Fall Weekend in Tansill Theater, a dimly-lit black box venue. Despite the heat inside, the play’s minimalist set design and clever use of space built an atmosphere of cold isolation for the 90-minute long production. Projections of crashing waves, scene titles, and family photos were cast behind the simple, wooden set to increase immersion for audience members. “We had audience on three sides,” explained Hopkins. “Ken Prestininzi [the director] wanted the experience of watching this play to be a little bit like walking through an art gallery.”
In addition to the projector, the set design consisted of a chalkboard, a table converted into a dinner table and boat, a desk for Ishamael, a ladder leading to a telescope, and the floor, which doubled as a space for chalk writings and mathematical proofs.
Brearley was brilliant as Ishamael, successfully portraying the spirit of aloofness and struggles of a famous but aging mathematician grappling with his impending death by casting empty bottles filled with letters to no into the ocean. Rubino as Miriam was equally outstanding as the daughter seeking approval from her father both as a mathematician and a person. Central to the plot was Miriam’s relentless drive to finish her mathematical proof.
“I was interested in math as an explanation and metaphor for what the world is— to understand it through the rhythm and magic of the equation that Miriam is trying to solve,” Hopkins explained when asked about her initial interest in the play. Miriam’s struggles with the proof (and through it, her family) led her to contemplate jumping off the high cliffs of Oldfoundland at many points during the play. In contrast, Vazquez, who played Noah, portrayed a sense of calm and stability as the son of a shepherd, and the only non-mathematician in the family.
Like Miriam, Noah was equally driven to solve his problem, a broken telescope in the family house. While all other family members wrote off this telescope as a toy or a relic of the past, Noah saw the telescope both as a window to the outside world, and as a project for him as the handyman to fix.
Bernard serves as a peacemaker throughout the play, trying on separate occasions to convince Ishamael to be less hard on Miriam and Miriam to be less hard on herself. Through the game of chess, Bernard unsuccessfully tries to convince Miriam to be easier on the kids. Instead of playing with her usual mathematical precision, Bernard implores Miriam to enjoy herself and play more freely, guided by feelings. This scene shows why Bernard is respected by Ishamael for his creative, outside-the-box thinking.
Toward the end of the play, Miriam catches Ishamael—who has previously dismissed the telescope—peering into it instead of examining the mathematical proof she had asked him to read. When questioned, Ishamael claims that he sees himself when he looks through the telescope, showcasing a change in his perspective.
Beauty is a central theme of the play. While teaching Shiloh and Shilo, Miriam states that there is beauty in math unlike anything else. This is because the beauty of math is definitive in that one plus one will always equal two. Hopkins explained that whilst preparing for the play, each member of the cast was tasked with bringing a mathematical problem to rehearsal that they found beautiful.
Although no one on the cast specifically studied math, “There was one assistant stage manager who was a math major [Jay Sexton ’27], and [they were] very helpful,” Hopkins shared. “The actor’s process though was more about what the math signified for our characters than the nitty gritty of how the math actually worked. The equation itself might not have stayed the same every night, but what it meant to Miriam did.”
Not all the characters appreciated math in the same way. The youngest child, Shilo, does not find math as enthralling as the rest of the family, and finds the abacus lessons taught by Miriam uninteresting. As a result of her rebellious spirit, Shilo is slapped by Miriam for disrespecting her and asking too many questions instead of doing the math.
Her rebellious spirit eventually leads her to meeting Farin, played by Aloia, a bottle collector who has been collecting Ishamael’s bottles from the ocean. Farin has been seeking Ishamael since the beginning of the play and at times, they make direct eye contact with Ishamael through the lenses of their binoculars. Farin senses Shilo’s disdain for math, lack of respect for her father Noah who she sees as an unsophisticated boatman/handyman, and even gets her to admit her disinterest in math.
Eventually, Shilo leads Farin to the family’s isolated house. This marks a turning point in the play, as Ishamael senses death coming closer. After much contention and debate amongst family members, Ishamael agrees to speak to Farin and gives them all of his bottles.
Shortly after, Ishamael’s condition worsens and without any bottles to put his written letters in, he eats the letter he writes. This is also the last letter he writes, because soon after he has Noah row him out into the middle of the ocean, where he proceeds to jump out to sea.
The play concludes with a flashback to how Noah and Miriam met, with Noah saving Miriam from jumping off the cliffs and spreading her arms out giving her the feeling of flying through the windy coast.
In the Director’s Note, Director Ken Prestininzi claims that “like the family in Set Zero, we want to do the math to discover some truth in humanity.” However, the “pursuit of beauty, love, and truth is full of obstacles and problems.” In particular, Prestininzi was inspired to put on the play due to pi, the infinite irrational constant representing the ratio between the circumference and diameter of the circle.
For Prestinzi, “every play is in pursuit of its own math…its own beauty”: the more one knows, the more they realize that there is no knowing everything. Though the pursuit of understanding everything may be eternally unreachable, Prestininzi believes that we can “stay near and dear to each along along the way,” finding ultimate beauty in the bonds formed with people and the world around us.
