WHAT DO QUANTUM PHYSICS, ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSES, AND A TALKING CAT have in common?
If you’re playwright Victoria Stewart, the answer is Philip K. Dick. Stewart’s newest work, 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick, opens this Thursday at the Playwrights’ Center. It’s a delightfully elliptical, darkly funny piece about the famed science fiction author and presumed crackpot. 800 Words begins in 1982, shortly before Dick’s death, at a time when he began having religious visions that dramatically affected his work. Characters like his dead sister, his fifth wife, and Eastern European spies filter in and out of his consciousness. Sasha, the loquacious cat, is played by a puppet (manipulated by Kimberly Richardson), and serves as a symbol for “the metaphysical heavy lifting,” explains Stewart, who recently received a McKnight grant. “Philip was very into animals (he felt that cats were more empathetic than humans); and he did, in fact, have a cat named Sasha right before he died. I felt like a cat needed to be there to witness everything, the way cats do: at the e
