Yesterday after returning home from Dublin, I dumped off my luggage, freshened up and went out to the first public reading of the play I told you about in an earlier post (link here). The one I wrote with playwright Oliver Mayer, from the USC School of Theatre.
You’ll recall that it has scientists as characters, and aspects of scientist’s lives are on display. There’s particle physics and cosmology (the areas within which the scientists work)….. the non-scientist is in the music industry, and there are lots of intermeshings of the approaches to life to be found in those career choices. There’s laughter, jealousy, love, hatred, suspicion, all that good stuff…. Oh, and there’s Disco…which probably has something to do with an earlier party I told you about.
The reading was at the Senior Common Room at Parkside International Residential College, one of the splendid halls of residence on the USC campus, and so we had a very interesting audience of students and faculty (including Michael Waterman, one of the heroes of modern Computational Biology, who (I think) invited us to do the reading at Parkside), from various disciplines in the Arts, Humanities and Sciences. In addition we had some theatre people, including some local theatre directors, writers and actors from around Los Angeles…. Here’s a quick shot of the audience:
And a reminder of the cast of players (see that earlier post for more on them): Gary Perez, Geraint Wyn Davies, and Marlene Forte:
It was good to see that Ger was ok, since the last time I saw him, two weeks ago, he was shot to death on a rooftop in downtown LA, too late to be saved by Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. (Ok, just kidding…..that was in the current season of the TV series “24″ – for more, see the last couple of paragraphs of my earlier post.)
Here are some more shots of them in various scenes:
This time, we had a director for the play’s reading, Andrew J. Robinson, actor/director and director of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Acting at the USC School of Theatre (bottom left – he’s done a ton of stuff, but you’ll all remember him as the Scorpio killer in the iconic film Dirty Harry…..he’s the guy who is opposite Clint Eastwood in the “Do you feel lucky?” scene…..[Update: Perhaps many of you will know his excellent character "Garak", the tailor on Deep Space Nine]), and School of Theatre MFA senior, Andrea Szlagowski (spelling?) reading the stage directions (bottom centre). Oliver’s former mentor from Columbia University, celebrated educator and playwright Howard Stein, came along as well (bottom right), and made several very generous comments and observations afterwards.
Oliver and I gave a quick introduction to how we came to work together, what our motivations were/are, etc. We also had a question and answer session afterwards. I’ve no idea what I said in detail (I was in the middle of jetlag haze) but I certainly took the opportunity to explain my motivations in general terms (science education, breaking down the public’s fear of science and scientists, etc…..see the earlier posts (links e.g., here, here and here.) Speaking to a number of actors, and writers afterwards also gave me the chance to appeal to them to seek out opportunities to write and perform works where science and scientists are just as much a part of the tapestry of society as doctors, lawyers, sportspeople, politicians, etc.
The good news was that it was well-received by the audience, on both “sides”: The people from the arts liked it and found much familiar, and so did the scientists….and I think they learned a little bit about each other…..which is the point. It’s certainly going to be really valuable and exciting to develop this further, and initiate more projects and collaborations of this sort.
-cvj
March 9th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
This is all very tantalizing. Do you have a working title for the play? Just nosy….
March 9th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Dark Matters.
-cvj
March 9th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Cool project, Clifford — I love seeing scientists involved in interdisciplinary projects like this.
Hey, your director played Garak on Deep Space Nine! I always thought he was one of the best things about that show (which had many good things about it).
March 9th, 2006 at 8:02 pm
I find it interesting that you mixed science and music.
March 9th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
Supernova: – Wow! Maybe *that’s* why he seems so familiar to me….. That’s funny. You’re right…. that show did have some surprisingly good aspects (despite being a Star Trek show)…. and that character was indeed one of them. He was a favourite of mine….
I’ll update the post…
Elliot:- How so? I find it very natural to do so….. do you?
-cvj
March 9th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
I find it extremely natural to do so. I just think it is interesting that you came to the same conclusion. I think there are many similarities not only in the professional approaches that musicians/scientists take but in the aesthetics around what is good or not good science/music. A topic with many potential tangents.
Elliot
March 9th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
Richard Powers has blended music and science in a couple of his novels, The Gold Bug Variations and The Time of Our Singing. Of course, he’s scarcely explored every angle of the relationship…there’s plenty of room for more stories.
March 10th, 2006 at 4:01 am
Wow. Just wow.
–Q.
March 10th, 2006 at 10:39 am
Maybe you could inlcude the discovery of a “new energy producing machine” in your play that has a “new mathematics” attached to it.
I mean it’s fictional, in that our expectation of the future, might we have discovered a cyclical process that we had tapped into? Another story maybe?
Just a thought.
March 27th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
[...] I like the idea of this. Recall my oft-repeated-on-this-blog quest for better public understanding of science, and more familiarity with scientists and science on the part of the “person on the street” (as a means to the former) (see e.g., here and here). Well, the idea that there’s a secret underground of scientists infiltrating various jobs that we’re not expected to occupy is an excellent one! (Will work it into that novel/screenplay/whatever that I’ll try to get around to writing one day.) [...]
March 31st, 2006 at 11:31 pm
[...] So for the first time ever, I stepped into our fancy new Molecular Biology building. I was expecting to be accosted by security the moment I walked in, because, I don’t really expect that they’d let us poor theoretical physicists walk around in such splendid surroundings! Luckily, the first person I saw as I walked in was Mike Waterman (he who helped host the reading of our play last month), whose Computational Biology group is now also in this building. So all was ok. [...]
April 21st, 2006 at 12:14 pm
[...] Anyway, some students took on the challenge. They are required to seek out a real scientist, and get them to read the work and comment. Well, they found me. (I guess there were no real scientists willing to do this, so a string theorist will have to do. LOL!) Well, I did this with one student last year, and it turned into a really fun and informative series of conversations where we both learned a lot. Me about the process and contraints involved in writing for the entertainment industry, and the student about what science and scientists are like. I’ve also spoken about this sort of thing in the context of the (later) playwriting project I got involved in later last last year, about which I’ve blogged here and here, and will tell you more later. [...]
May 3rd, 2006 at 1:28 am
[...] I had a great time talking to Aimee afterwards, and we were both intrigued by the possibility of maybe collaborating on something in the future, as we are both at USC with interests in crossing the borders between disciplines. I have no idea what we might create, but I can sense the possibility of promising ideas taking shape just because we are on the same wavelength on a number of things. Like happened when I started chatting with my colleague the playwright Oliver Mayer – ideas sparked there too, just because we got on the same page. And we wrote a play. So we shall see. [...]
May 18th, 2006 at 2:38 am
[...] Recall also that I’ve been working with a playwright, Oliver Mayer, for all those reasons I keep blogging about concerning science and the public, science outreach, science education, science and the media, etc, etc. I’ve been telling you, for example, about the wonderful process of having real actors read your words, and how interesting and instructive the whole experience is. See posts here, and here. [...]
July 24th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
[...] P.S. There’ll be two more public readings of that play (in progress) I’m writing with Oliver Mayer on Tuesday and Wednesday, in the greater Los Angeles area. If interested in going, please email me for more details. See here and here for earlier reading descriptions. We’ve got two new actors for two of the parts….. and yes -I can’t believe it either- once again, you’ll know them as having played shadowy evil characters from the show 24! I’m sure this is all a coincidence that it keeps happening. [...]
January 2nd, 2007 at 11:19 pm
[...] Yes, today is work-on-the-play day and it will be very interesting, since you’ve not looked at the thing for a long time due to other commitments. Certainly not since it was read by real actors with real people in the audience at the Pasadena Playhouse during the Summer, although you could not attend, due to being out of town. You wonder if it was as fun as the other public reading, and whether readings will ever be as magical to you as that first private one. [...]
October 30th, 2007 at 11:30 am
[...] the playwright Oliver Mayer – ideas sparked there too, just because we got on the same page. And we wrote a play. So we shall [...]