The tiniest things

Jon Spooner was on holiday in the French Alps, chatting on his cellphone about the L.A. presentation of “Neutrino,” the play he directs and in which he is also now appearing at the Skirball Cultural Center.

“We’re interested in how we store, receive and send information to each other,” Spooner said. “Each member of the audience receives information in a different way. We also look at how the information you receive can be infected, or polluted.”

Or at least that’s what Spooner seemed to be saying. He was speaking from a busy restaurant, where the background noises of dishes and other diners often obscured his words -- an apt if inadvertently ironic illustration of his point.

In fact, the interview itself could almost have been incorporated into “Neutrino,” a quirky comedy that is certainly one of the few plays named after a subatomic particle. Cellphones figure even more prominently in the play than do neutrinos.

A neutrino, for those who haven’t followed recent hot topics in science, is “the smallest amount of reality ever imagined,” Spooner said. Vast numbers of neutrinos pass through our bodies in any given moment, he added. “Neutrino,” the play, explores “the importance of those small moments and how they become universal.”

It’s not as abstract as it might sound, for “Neutrino” has a dose of realism. In scenes written by Chris Goode, the play examines several young people aboard a train.

In one part of the train, an attraction grows between a male stand-up comic, who’s philosophically drawn to chaos, and a female librarian, who’s oriented to the ‘70s group the Carpenters and the Dewey Decimal System.

In another part of the train, the comic’s former girlfriend is traveling with her new girlfriend to meet her parents -- who aren’t aware their daughter now has a lesbian partner. The comic at first is annoyed by his ex’s cellphone chatter but then needs to use her phone.

Meanwhile, a lecturer (Spooner) who’s not on the train begins speaking about neutrinos in reasoned, plausible language. But soon he starts spinning increasingly wild theories. His topics include the nature of coincidence, the role of rail travel in dispersing anger, Richard Carpenter’s participation in government attempts to reach extraterrestrials, developments in spider surgery, the function of airplane crashes, the interaction of the soul and the body in suicide, and what he sees as the opposite of the big bang -- the big crunch, which will be the universe’s ultimately happy ending.

The train passengers and the lecturer unite for choreographed movement at the beginning and end of “Neutrino.”

The play is the creation of the British troupe Unlimited Theatre, which made its U.S. debut at the Skirball Center on Wednesday. The company’s members met at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds in the ‘90s -- though they weren’t studying science there. Spooner’s degree is in English literature.

But artists and scientists think similarly, Spooner said. “They are open to possibilities, they make hypotheses, and the results aren’t absolutely provable.”

“Neutrino” is part of the Skirball’s “Einstein” exhibition, which Spooner finds flattering, because Einstein “changed the way we think about the world.”

Skirball program director Jordan Peimer said that “Neutrino,” which he first saw at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2001, “seemed the perfect foil to the rationality of Einstein, a reminder that all the science in the world can’t explain the attraction between two people.”

Einstein “had a deep sense of spirituality,” Peimer added. The scientist’s sometimes rocky love life showed that he was aware of the “inexplicable moments” in human relationships.

As for “Neutrino’s” farfetched theories, written by Unlimited member Chris Thorpe, Spooner said, “the possibilities of being in a world where they could be true are amazing.”

“For an hour, there’s enough of the real world for the audience to recognize itself, but enough of these other worlds for the audience to dream.”

And, speaking of the intersection between reality and fiction, Spooner has his own story to tell. The 31-year-old has been in L.A. only once before, when he was 19 and “flat broke.”

But “I feel I know my way around L.A. in a computer-generated way,” he said.

“I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto.”

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‘Neutrino’

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. today and Friday

Price: $20

Contact: (310) 440-4500, Ext. 3; www.skirball.org

Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes