"Of all the characters and all the actions to try to transform into drama, why would anyone deliberately choose scientists doing science?"

New York Times, Sept. 29, 2002

From London to New York to Paris, the world’s greatest actors are playing not kings or tyrants but ... scientists? Oscars, Tonys and Pulitzers have all gone to sci-scripts as the entertainment industry has rewarded the recent boom in science-related plays and movies. As Copenhagen, a play with a small cast, a specific set, and a huge vocabulary, took the world-stage by storm in 1998, and as far back as Brecht’s Galileo premiere in 1940, the theatre world has tried on science for size and found a perfect fit. But how could such seemingly disparate sects compliment each other so well? Science has a reputation for being stuffy, esoteric and impenetrable. Theatre has a reputation for melodrama, shock-value and “make-believe.” How could the two worlds of hard fact and sensational fiction unite?

Like this, playwright Tom Stoppard might answer: take a brilliant girl and her tutor and set them in 19th century England; then take a strikingly similar group of people and set them in modern day; add some sex, some mystery, and some literary allusions; overlay the whole thing with chaos theory, and you’ve got an acclaimed play, a scientific playground and a love story. Perfect.

Of course, there is no such recipe for the types of plays categorized by the recent “science play” swell. Science plays seem to be divided into categories: plays with known scientists as characters, plays with general scientists as characters, and plays with science as a metaphor. All three categories offer intriguing plays that may help us understand why science has become an asset to the stage.

The first category, plays about famous scientists, is an obvious starting place because of the inherent draw of fame. Audiences immediately respond to famliar characters and ideas because they already have opinions about the subject. Inside this category there are further internal categories including plays about famous scientists before they were famous as well as plays about famous scientists during formative experiences.

Steve Martin’s comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile is an example of the first sub-category. The play revolves around one afternoon in 1904 on which Albert Einstein waits at a café currently inhabited by the likes of Pablo Picasso. As noted by the playwright, one year later Einstein will publish his first theory of relativity. Not only do we get to enter the world of this hyper-famous mind, but we also see Einstein before his fame, and in the case of the play, during the formulation of his theory. We know everything the character will become and we get to see him as he is becoming it. This gives the audience extra knowledge and invests them more in the story. Much of Martin’s humor draws from allusions to the future of his two main characters. After a duel in which Einstein and Picasso both scribble on napkins (Einstein producing a formula, Picasso a sketch) the two debate the outcome:

Picasso: My lines mean something.
Einstein: So do mine.
Picasso: Mine is beautiful.
Einstein: Men have swooned at seeing that.
Picasso: Mine touches the heart.
Einstein: Mine touches the head.
Picasso: Mine will change the future.
Einstein: Oh, and mine won’t?

Martin alludes that scientists and artists share a sense of beauty and an impact on cultural progress. Science and the stage share this duality as well.

Plays like Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, which incorporates science-titans Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, focusing on Galileo Galilee during his famous trial by the Italian Inquisition, fall into the second sub-category. Both plays entice their audiences by allowing entrance into the fascinating world of genius at its peak. This voyeurism is enhanced because, like the case of Martin’s Lapin Agile, we know what happens in the end; their work, their lives, and their deaths. There is a power in foreshadowing becasue we know something the characters do not; and we, as audience members, inherently apply the future to the present. We know that Galileo recants his beliefs to save his life, and this foreknowledge adds a foreboding sense of demise to the play. This sense of oppression--not the theoretical science--is what Brecht was trying to convey. Just as science can be a metaphor for the human journey, so too can it provide allegories for political and social distress. Eric Bently writes in his introduction to Galileo, “In the 1930s, the subject of Galileo to Brecht was an analogy between the seventeenth-century scientist’s activities and those of twentieth-century left-wingers in Hitler’s Germany.” This analogy solidifies in Brecht’s script as the audience realizes that “more than certain notions about astronomy were at stake--at stake was the liberty to advance these notions.” It wasn’t the science that made the metaphor, but the freedom to choose science. As Andrea says in the play, “Many of us believed that you stood for the liberty of teaching […] Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all.”

The combination of science and history offers compelling uses of theatre’s most effective tools--foreshadowing and risk-taking. Foreshadowing drives the play on much like it would in a detective novel: by dropping hints and information along the way instead of in one package. Risk-taking strengthens the plot by making every decision or action more important than the last. A character is inherently more interesting the more he has to lose. But how does science compliment these theatrical devices?

Science gets to claim the most fundamental principles gracing the human imagination: the beginning and end of the universe, the fundamental building blocks of life, the evolution of being. By foreshadowing the discoveries of such principal theories, whether in terms of the theory itself (like Arcadia’s Thomasina alluding to chaos theory) or of the mind of the scientists (like Lapin Agile and Proof), the playwright harnesses science’s cultural significance and applies it to fiction. Foreshadowing lends an air of universal importance to the story being told on stage. Thus, any preeminent science sparks the audience’s appreciation of the play.

Science also adds risk. We wouldn’t care about Romeo if we didn’t know that he has a possibility of losing everything (including his life) if he doesn’t find Juliet in time. Because proof is the golden prize of science, anything less is irrelevant and worthless. There is no runner-up theory. There is no theory that “kinda works.” It is all-or-nothing and thus the weight of a scientist's work is tremendous; they have a lot to lose if they don’t get it right. The obvious synchronicity between science and theatre is not only functional but provocative.

Both plays about famous scientists and general scientists allow the audience access to science as a metaphor for the play itself. Heisenberg’s theory of atomic uncertainty pervades every moment in Copenhagen, resulting in a play that teaches as it entertains. In the final line of the play, Heisenberg summarizes the scientific metaphor: “But meanwhile there it is. […] Preserved by one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things." Even the set and blocking of the play, as interpreted by the Royal National Theatre, exudes an atomic feel: the three characters confined to a circular space onstage, moving around each other as though in orbit during their conversations. In this case science became a blueprint for the interpretation of the script. However, as in the cases of Galileo and A Beautiful Mind, theatre itself is the interpreter of science. Both plays incorporate descriptions, exhibitions and theoretical discussion about their respective scientific subjects (celestial mechanics in Galileo, game theory for A Beautiful Mind) but do not use the science as metaphor. This allows for more explicit focus on the circumstances and emotions of the scientists and less on the theory. Either way, as the New York Times articulates, “Stories about scientist doing science offer the chance to understand the seemingly impossible-to-understand, if only vicariously."

The second category ofscience plays, those about fictional scientists, is bestexemplified by the 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, David Auburn’s Proof. The play centers on the life and circumstance of Catherine, the daughter of an ingenious and insane mathematician. As Catherine struggles with the possibility of inheriting both her father’s madness and genius, a young math student discovers her father’s notebooks containing what might be the proof to one of the most coveted math problems in history. Based on fictional characters, plays like Proof tend to revolve less around science as they do around the humanity of a scientist. Auburn actually removed the math from Proof during its workshop to focus more on the emotional world of the characters. Science becomes less an element in the play and more a metaphor for its characters. In the case of Auburn’s play, the scientific metaphors explore the nature of proving science, the youth assumed to inspire the best science, and the mental illnesses common among the greatest scientific minds. None of these is theoretical or empirical; instead they are habitual human side-effects of being a scientist. In the final script there is no math, but the weight of the mathematical metaphors and allusions have allowed Proof to be commonly regarded as a “math play”.

Although science as a metaphor for the scientist is a common theatrical device, in Arcadia, the much-lauded play by Tom Stoppard, science plays without a scientist. The play follows the lives of two sets of people: one in 1809 and the other in the present. Instead of being scientists themselves, they are students of science (Newtonian science specifically), desperate to understand the world and perhaps add something to the cannon of thought. The young Thomasina constantly questions the Newtonian precepts of her tutor Septimus by asking why she can’t unstir the jam in her rice pudding, and why most of the shapes in the world are irregular instead of geometric. Thomasina alludes to modern chaos theory, a theory one of the modern characters frequently expounds on. This theory becomes a metaphor for the disorder and order in the play, while no chaos theorist appears.

What makes the theatre amore profound experience than a novel or poemis the actual presence of actors. The sensory aspect, the virtual human interaction, provides a sense of reality to an obviously fictional world. The story literally “comes alive” on stage. Essentially theatre is based on immediate observation, focused experience. This is an equally fitting description of science. Theatre is a human creation attempting to explain or relate common human experience. Science is a human creation attempting to explain and relate common natural experiences. Theatre requires human participation; so does science. Theatre is built on conflict. Science creates it.

Science and theater converge because both reward commitment, revel in extremes, question reality, and, most importantly, search for truth. In the union, science is made accessible to the masses by the intimacy of theatre, and the fiction of theatre is made all the more real by the actuality of science. Science becomes tangible, scientists become human, and the natural drama of the imagination--whether scientific or artistic--comes alive.

 

References

1. Auburn, David. Proof. London: Faber and Faber, 2001.

2. Auburn, David, and Christian Parker. “A Conversation with David Auburn.” Dramatists Magazine. Volume 3, Number 5, May/June 2001.

3. Brecht, Bertolt, with intro. by Eric Bently. Galileo. New York: Grove Press, 1940.

4. Frayn, Michael. Copenhagen. London: Methuen Drama, 1998.

5. Martin, Steve. Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays. New York: Grove Press, 1996.

6. Panek, Richard. “Discovering Drama, Even Song, in Dry Old Science,” New York Times: September 29, 2002.

7. Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: 1992.