We are all the suns of our own universes, yet I’m not sure I would have had the audacity, or maybe the wisdom, to extend the metaphor to a personal theory of wave particle duality or to a life-sized paradigm shift. Emily Levine dares to see the biggest picture out there and then shrinks it down to the size of her own life in her one-woman show, Emily at the Edge of Chaos, at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Directed by Marcia Jean Kurtz, Levine takes us through a personal phase transition during her experience contracting the rare disease with her candid ability to be funny and tragic in the same breath.

Levine acquires acromegaly, a syndrome resulting from excess growth hormone or in this case a tumor on the pituitary gland. The delayed diagnosis, life changes and corrective surgery result in an upgrade from Emily 2.0 to Emily 3.0. She experiences her own personal paradigm shift- a physics term denoting phase transitions that Levine adopts. From a life of levity, Levine’s acromegaly is a harsh gravitational pull downward as she experiences fatigue, loss of memory and wit, and extreme tissue swelling in her hands, feet and head. Her extremities literally weigh her down until she no longer resembled the person she once was.

Whether it was the reminder that no matter what the human mind has accomplished, it is still subject to what happens to our bodies, or maybe it was the cosmology and physics books she read while bedridden- Levine has come up with some big ideas about the interconnectivity of our lives, society and the laws that govern our physical planet. Our education system tends to separate psychology and chemistry and physics and sociology, so it’s a rather complicated challenge to try to draw connections between them. Levine takes on that challenge with enthusiasm and humor, whether it’s relating the Bush era to the Law of Contradiction- you are either with us or against us- to describing her own health problems with the first theory of quantum physics, know as the butterfly effect and the notion of disorder giving rise to order. She relates her body’s overgrowth to our nation’s cycle of consuming and growing in the context of the closed loop in physics- a closed system impermeable to new matter.

It’s clear Levine’s experience with acromegaly led her to the edge of chaos, a place where she is able to intimately connect with her audience, seamlessly mixing scientific jargon and personal disclosure. Her unique perspective and clever use of science delivers some very human experiences in a fresh and approachable way.

Emily on the Edge of Chaos will be running through April 11th at the Ensemble Studio Theater.