Alter Ego Blog

Exciting news ahead! Alter Ego Productions has decided to shake off the cobwebs and emerge with renewed vigour (Old English), to present Off-Off Broadway with their production of David Freeman's A First Class Man, this fall beginning, the 5th of October to the 21st of October, 2006 at the 45th Street theater. Keep tuned!

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)

A First Class Man is the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a shipping clerk living in India in the early 20th century, possessing an innate genius and a full time passion for producing complex mathematical theorems and equations, without any formal training in mathematics. Quixotic fraud?? Not according to the eminent British mathematician and Cambridge don, GH Hardy, who recognizes Ramanujan's talent and wants him to come over to Cambridge. One problem: Ramanujan's religious beliefs forbids him to travel overseas.

A First Class Man explores the complex and dysfunctional relationship between a Cambridge educated don steeped in the precise world of mathematics, whose scientific orthodoxy clashes with Ramanujam's more intuitive and spiritual relationship with numbers. In the end, eventually, we discover that even the stripped down and sequestered world of mathematics and academia, cannot keep apart human frailties and cultural differences.