Published in AMERICAN THEATRE, Vol. 24 (January 2007), pp. 96-103

When Is ‘Science on Stage’ Really Science?

Not very often, despite the claims of a lively new book

By Carl Djerassi

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr’s Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen is a good read—it’s well-written and sophisticated but utterly biased. Bias is often interesting but always irritating. Webster’s defines it as “systematic error introduced into sampling…by selecting or encouraging one outcome or answer over others.” In the very first paragraph of her book, Shepherd-Barr proclaims that “for centuries, science and theatre have enjoyed a fruitful intersection in the form of dramas that utilize scientific ideas or feature scientists at their center.” The full evidence for the first three centuries encompassed by this bullish statement are a total of seven plays by Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Shadwell, Goethe and Ibsen, plus the sole 18th-century contestant, the hapless farce Three Hours after Marriage (ascribed to John Gay, but in fact written in collaboration with John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope), which has nothing to do with science and was staged only once during the succeeding 280 years.

But the dictionary definition of bias really raises its ugly head later on the same page, where it is claimed that the unprecedented success of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen has created a new phenomenon over the past decade through “a surge of new plays about science.” The supposed evidence is presented in the book’s appendix, which lists 62 plays and musicals that have appeared since the Copenhagen premiere in 1998. This seems impressive until the skeptical reader discovers that nearly half of these have neither been performed nor published, and that the majority of the rest were workshop readings or single minor-venue stagings. And even among the smash hits in the appendix, alongside the legitimate science play Breaking the Code (misattributed to Stephen Poliakoff rather than Hugh Whitemore), one discovers Angels in America: Tony Kushner, a “science playwright”? And the play a “science play,” because of AIDS?

I attribute the problem partly to the author’s peculiar definition of “science” and partly to her tendency to place this supposed science-on-stage explosion into the “half-full-and-rapidly-filling-glass” category. As an academic theoretician, unconcerned with the practicalities of bringing a play text to a theatre-going public Shepherd-Barr is raising a question (What can science do for the stage?) that is wholly different from that offered by a scientist-turned-playwright who continually confronts the problem of bringing a work to the stage (What can the stage do for science?). .My rebuttal will focus on a more realistic “half-empty” scenario. For me, as a playwright and scientist, the word “explosion” carries a rather different meaning. Is it just a momentary puff or an event with lasting consequences? And while my presentation will be both personal and partly revisionist, I nevertheless share one objective with Shepherd-Barr, namely a desire to make the scientific content of the modern theatre grow and thrive.

The root of the contrast in our respective views is that from my perspective, the appearance of names such as Darwin, Einstein, Schrödinger, Tesla, Feynman or other scientific luminaries in the titles, or allusions to chaos theory or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in a play, do not automatically define such works—whatever their intrinsic dramatic value—as “science-in-theatre” plays. There are canonical plays—admittedly few, but important ones, and written by famous playwrights—that have some scientific themes, yet I would not categorize them as “science-in-theatre” but rather as plays with some scientific content. Four examples should suffice: Brecht’s Life of Galileo, Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists and Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood and Arcadia, all of which are covered in some detail by Shepherd-Barr.

Brecht’s and Dürrenmatt’s motivation was primarily to express their skepticism about science, the actual science playing a minimal role. Brecht’s politics made him question any science that was not devoted to the service of the people, while Dürrenmatt, in expressing his fear of atomic and nuclear annihilation at the height of the Cold War, put his Newton, Einstein and Möbius characters into an insane asylum, which became his metaphor for the physicist’s world (rather different from Heinar Kipphardt’s docudrama In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which addressed similar concerns about the atomic and nuclear bomb but did so in “science-in-theatre” terms). Galileo, of course, illuminates also the conflict between religion and science and the ultimately flawed natures of scientists and of men of the cloth.

Skepticism toward contemporary science is not Stoppard’s motivation for introducing scientific concepts into some of his plays. He has always shown a healthy curiosity for the intellectual qualities of science, and like other non-scientist playwrights has used science for metaphorical purposes. Yet I rather doubt that Stoppard’s motivation in writing Hapgood was to illustrate Einstein’s photoelectric effect or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, both of which are described at length by a physicist-turned spy named Kerner. Rather Stoppard was writing a fiendishly clever whodunit—not an explication of 20th-century physics—and he was neither the first nor the last to use Heisenberg’s physics as metaphor.

That leaves Arcadia, a superb play and an interesting transition between “science-in-theatre” and a play simply containing some science. Arcadia has didactic sequences dealing with science, some of them rather long. I suspect that Stoppard’s motivation in these forays (discreetly criticized in Shepherd-Barr’s book) was not to teach his theatre audience about, say, iterated algorithms; in fact, Arcadia has to do with nature and how we humans handle and mishandle it, understand and misunderstand it. The science is there because Stoppard decided to write a play for which scientific concepts are useful and intellectually attractive metaphors. Attempt the experiment of removing the “pure” science in Arcadia without changing the overall play structure and plot—you’re left with a clever play about Byron, in which only very sophisticated viewers or readers would recognize the remaining underlying scientific metaphors.

There are pure “science-in-theatre” plays where the play could not exist without the science. The quintessential one is Frayn’s Copenhagen, which calls upon quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle for much of the scintillating interplay between Heisenberg and Bohr, under the skeptical eye of Bohr’s wife. It is so well known and so thoroughly covered in Science on Stage that no further comment on my part is necessary. Another important science-in-theatre play by another prominent British playwright is Poliakoff’s Blinded by the Sun, which attempts to illuminate through a theatrical version of the chemical “cold fusion” debacle of the early 1990s some of the idiosyncratic aspects of a scientist’s drive for name recognition, as well as the competitive aspects of a collegial enterprise. In France, Jean-Noël Fenwick’s play Les Palmes de M. Schutz, dealing with Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium and played in its entirety in a realistic stage replica of a laboratory, went far beyond a succès d’estime to be turned into a film. Neither of these two plays nor their authors are even listed in the index of Science on Stage!

Crossing the Atlantic: Two Canadian plays, Maureen Hunter’s Transit of Venus and Vern Thiessen’s Einstein’s Gift, are first-class examples of recent successful “science-in-theatre” plays dealing, respectively, with historical astronomy and the German chemist and Nobel laureate Fritz Haber. Considering that Shepherd-Barr dedicates six pages to Hallie Flanagan-Davis’s E =mc² (not performed for the past 40 years and unplayable because of the required 75 actors), why devote only one sentence each and no index entry for these two extraordinarily performable Canadian science plays?

And consider the depiction of another Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, in American Peter Parnell’s play QED. Many critics might see QED as “science-in-theatre,” but to me this virtual one-man play was mostly an entertaining farce—an example par excellence of a non-scientist author parodying for a dumbed-down audience his view of the speech and behavior of scientists. While in real life Feynman did play bongo drums and pursue women, his enduring fame as an inspired teacher and Nobel-winning physicist rested on other qualities. A review of QED in the scientific journal Nature put it succinctly: “We get 40 seconds of a Feynman diagram scrawled on that blackboard as a gee-whiz illustration…Instead of Feynman’s speed of comprehension we get frenetic, fussy movement.”

That brings me to a first-class American play, Proof, which won the Pulitzer and is cited by Shepherd-Barr, along with Copenhagen, as evidence for her “explosion.” But Proof’s main concern is the interaction of a daughter with her deceased father, a mathematician. Is Proof “science-in-theatre”? I shall let the author, David Auburn, answer in his own words: “I don’t have any objection to how it’s been labeled. There’s almost no math in the play, so I’m pleased, in a way, that I’ve fooled people” (from an interview in Dramatist magazine).

Indeed, Shepherd-Barr concedes that Proof is not a science play, but she nevertheless continues to flog it as such because of its deserved commercial success. The same is true of the marvelous Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones, which Shepherd-Barr lists as a major science play, then retreats with the remark that “there are just a few passages of scientific explanation scattered throughout the play, with little attempt to integrate the ideas formally.”

Getting back to Shepherd-Barr’s “half-full-and-rapidly-filling glass” prognosis for plays with scientific content, one must note that focusing simply on the number of plays with some science in the title or text written during the past 10 years without considering their performance history is equivalent to counting the number of unpublished science book manuscripts that may have been written during the same period but never read by anyone but the author’s pals. In the final analysis, a book is only a book after it has been published, and a play only a play after it has been staged or otherwise made available to the public. And real success in the theatre generally refers to extensive runs on numerous stages, as was the case with Copenhagen and Proof. The fact is that the number of such commercially produced plays is small, and there is no evidence that it is growing. If the experiment were feasible, I would offer substantial odds that if Copenhagen had been submitted to the Royal National Theatre (where it was first staged) or any other major theatre under an unknown playwright’s name, it would probably not even have been read—it would certainly not have been produced. Even as deservedly famous a playwright as Frayn had this to say in an interview about his own play:

I lost all faith that the play would ever be produced. It seemed to me that I was writing it for my own benefit, that no one ever would put on this incredibly abstract, remote piece. Even if anyone did, the idea that anyone would come to see it never occurred to me… The way I came to this play was not first through science. I have no background in science at all. My background is in philosophy.

Since serious plays with a science content—and especially “science-in-theatre” plays—also carry with them a pedagogic component (however carefully hidden) and since they represent such a minute component of the dramatic literature, it seems appropriate to consider other means of dissemination. One would be the availability of DVDs or videocassettes of such plays, but unfortunately, in contrast to movies, there is no meaningful public access for renting or buying such audiovisuals. This leaves the reading public, and I would like to make a case that efforts to increase the public’s interest in reading science plays may pay some dividends. Published plays are usually cheap and short—two major commercial advantages—but most are published by theatre publishers with limited distribution, minimal marketing and with no coverage by book reviewers. Only theatrical smash hits (e.g., Arcadia, Copenhagen) with real intellectual and literary content reach sales levels that are of interest to standard book publishers. So let me present a personal example to show that this need not always be the rule.

Oxygen, a play I wrote with the distinguished chemist and Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann, is without question a “science-in-theatre” play, dealing at it does with the discovery of oxygen and the centenary of the Nobel Prize in 2001. While well known in scientific circles, our names meant nothing in the theatre world when we finished the first draft of Oxygen in late 1999. After half a dozen staged readings in 2000, the play opened in 2001 at the San Diego Repertory Theatre in California, the Mainfranken Theater in Würzburg, Germany, and the Riverside Studio Theatre in London. Since 2001, the play has been translated into nine other languages and has had 33 independent productions as well as numerous staged readings or excerpted performances—the majority in university theatres.

So theatrically speaking, the “science-in-theatre” play Oxygen did better than the great majority of science plays written during the past 20 years, though it clearly did not reach the commercial success of some of the major plays described earlier. Yet in terms of distribution, our play has fared far better than the vast majority of recent science plays. We convinced Wiley—an important science publisher (rather than a conventional theatre publisher)—that Oxygen could be considered a valuable book in the field of science history that just happened to be written in all-dialogic form. That being true, why wait for theatrical premieres to determine whether Oxygen was also a theatrical success before printing the play text in book form—usually a sine qua non of theatre publishers? The English and German versions of Oxygen were released in print prior to its world premiere and reached a sales level of about 8,000 copies by the end of that first year. While such a figure might seem piddling if judged by Stephen King or Danielle Steele standards, it is more than respectable if compared with the annual sales of most plays. In the subsequent two years, Oxygen also appeared in book form in seven other languages, with a commercial DVD being distributed by Educational Innovations, Inc. In addition, the BBC World Service and the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) broadcast radio versions of the play around the centenary of the Nobel Prize in December 2001.

A similar experience with the book publication of An Immaculate Misconception and Calculus, the other two plays in my “science-in-theatre” trilogy, has convinced me that such a strategy is workable and of substantial scope. I would urge committed authors of serious science plays not to limit themselves solely to exposure in traditional and often not-all-too-welcoming theatrical venues, but to examine other literary paths whereby their play texts may reach a wider public.

Why should such efforts for wider distribution be more appropriate for science plays than most others? If science in a play serves only the function of a metaphoric role—however elegant that metaphor may be—then the science per se is mostly tangential (as is the case in the majority of the 122 plays anointed by Shepherd-Barr as science plays). But many science plays—and all “science-in-theatre” plays—also contain a substantial dose of informational content that in this day and age of scientific illiteracy ought not be ignored.

Science is inherently dramatic—at least in the opinion of most scientists—because it deals with the new and unexpected. But does it follow that scientists are dramatic personae, or that science automatically becomes the stuff of drama?

To use the play format solely as a novel way to transmit information is not just dangerous, it borders on theatrical infanticide, since it raises immediately the warning flag associated with the charged term “didactic”—the sharpest stiletto in any dismissive review of a work of fiction or drama. People do not pick up a novel or go to the theatre to be educated, the professionals tell us—they go to be entertained. But what Quintus Horatius Flaccus said some 2000 years ago in his Ars Poetica (“Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo,” which translates as “delighting the reader at the same time as instructing him”) is also true today. What is wrong with learning something while being entertained? In other words, why not use drama to smuggle (with a substantial does of theatricality) important information generally not available on the stage into the minds of a general public?

New York Times critic Bruce Weber once wrote that “not all theatre audiences are so conditioned by low-brow entertainment that they are prepared only to have their senses tickled, but not their brains massaged.” In my two most recent plays written for the commercial theatre, Phallacy and Taboos, I have started to compromise by greatly reducing the scientific content, something that according to Shepherd-Barr even Stoppard found necessary to do with his Hapgood after its initial appearance.

Phallacy, which deals with a historically accurate reattribution of a putative Roman bronze in a major European museum, ran for 10 weeks in two London theatres, and a Manhattan premiere ) is scheduled at Cherry Lane Theatre for May 2007. Its focus is on the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the scientist (represented by the character Rex) versus the art historian (Regina) as they examine the age of an art object from widely different perspectives: aesthetic and art historical connoisseurship opposed to cold material analysis. A brief excerpt from the beginning of the play illustrates the tenor and nature of the conflict:

REGINA: You’re saying that our sculpture could not be of Roman origin? That all Roman bronzes, without exception, had low nickel content?

REX: I’m saying it’s extremely unlikely. And that’s why I’m here. To tell you…before informing anyone else…what additional chemical tests we carried out to prove our assumption—

REGINA: So, you’re just making an assumption?

REX: Well, no, because we carried out further tests—

REGINA: Nonetheless, these tests were all based on your assumption. You assumed that the sculpture is a Renaissance work. That all the evidence in my book…all 345 pages…is hogwash.

REX: Well…hogwash, no…I wouldn’t say that, not exactly hogwash—

REGINA: (Infuriated) You see, this is what I find so I infuriating. You slavishly follow the rules of chemistry you learned as a student…lessons you now teach to your students…who will then teach it to their students… rules promoted by art-hating boors, shielded from any sense of beauty by a dense fog spread from ear to ear. You disembowel every vestige of aesthetics…you ignore style, form, patina…in fact all connotative accompaniments. Someone really ought to prick that balloon of self-righteous…pompous…simplistic arrogance of yours.

REX: You may live to regret those words.

REGINA: (Still steaming) Transforming the wine of aesthetics into vinegar! How typical of you chemists. When chemists dabble with art, the best that can be said is the results are unpredictable.

REX: Unpredictability is what science is all about…

REGINA: Is it really? And even if it is, then why doesn’t that teach you humility…rather than arrogance? And why not recognize the importance of visual beauty…a concept that barely exists in your chemical world.

I present this example as an illustration of how the realities of the current commercial theatre—with its phobia towards any didactic tendencies inherent in “science-in-theatre” and the inverse relationship between a play’s scientific content and the likeliness of it being produced—have caused me to tone down the scientific load of the plays I continue to write. Yet having demonstrated—at least to my personal satisfaction—that doses of pedagogy in “science-in-theatre” are not necessarily the kiss of death in terms of engaging an audience, I have now undergone mitosis by shifting some of my “science-in-theatre” from the stage to the place where new pedagogy is best suited: the school classroom—a topic that is barely discussed in Science on Stage. But that is another story for another venue.

So let me conclude by saying why I feel that Shepherd-Barr’s book has deserved this partial rebuttal rather than a conventional book review. According to Shepherd-Barr, her book should “help teachers design and implement courses on science plays.” One idiosyncratic view, focusing, as she does, largely on theatricality rather than content, is simply too limited for the intended readers of her book. They deserve to know more.

Carl Djerassi, professor of chemistry emeritus at Stanford University, is one of the few American scientists to have been awarded both the National Medal of Science (for the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive) as well as the National Medal of Technology. He is the author short stories, poetry and two autobiographies as well as of five novels and eight plays.