SYNOPSIS

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Prime Numbers is a suspenseful, character-driven mystery related to a killer’s contract gone bad, that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, revenge and recovered humanity, transcending tragedy and evoking redemptive triumph. The play premiered off-Broadway in New York City (GCC, February 2009).
 
Set in the United States-Mexico border, Tijuana—the main thoroughfare for sex and drug trafficking, but also the border of the Promise Land for thousands of people—the story follows the interweaving paths of six characters trapped together in a remote motel during a rainstorm.
 
JULIETTA is a young local pharmacist. She and her partner, Eddie, inseparable and madly in love, are involved in amphetamine smuggling through the border. Their life spins out of control when a contract killer, LEFTY, is hired to kill Eddie.

 

Eddie is comatose. Lefty knows that Julieta is hiding in a motel and decides to find her. He has a car accident and when he wakes up, he cannot remember a thing.
 
Over a few emotional days, the killer’s gap of memory becomes an illusion that engulfs his real identity. The past collides with the present, secrets are revealed, as Julietta drags him into an elaborate and breath-taking game of deception. She convinces him that he is a writer and that the only thing they found in his car was a military dog-tag. Julietta calls him EDDIE and pretends to help him remember. She also writes his “novel”: a story about the secrets of the people living in the motel.
 
Only Julietta and the motel owner, CAIN, know the truth about “Eddie”. The audience follows Lefty’s point of view and illusion. He is a novelist from Los Angeles and his last book was about a writer ensnared in his own fiction. As the hypnotic and serpentine search of the missing parts of his life unfurls, we gradually discover that his five neighbours in the motel seem eerily similar to the cast of his novel.

Lefty’s “characters” all add their voices to the chorus that makes up this symphony of his delusional creation: Cain, the landlord, a devoutly religious man; Professor OEDIPUS, a math genius, obsessed with prime numbers and gambling; MARGUERITE GAUTIER, a former singer and show woman; MEDEA, a transplant from Iraq trying to escape from her husband.

In mathematics, a prime number is a natural number that has exactly two distinct natural number divisors: 1 and itself. In the story, prime numbers describe the terrain of human suffering, reminding us that all our lives are fragile and connected. They become a symbol of what comes to us unbidden and what we choose, portraying people who fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. It is a story about the borders we carry inside, the truths from which we distract ourselves and the dreams we hold dear even in the most desperate of circumstances.