A reprint from American Scientist the magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

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From physics to biology, science is offering playwrights innovative ways of exploring the intersections of science, history, art and modern life

Harry Lustig and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Two thousand million people in the world, hope for a “third culture” of art that would “be and the one who has to decide their fate is the on speaking terms with the scientific one.” A only one who’s always hidden from me….. number of recent science plays show how ef- fective this conversation can be, and suggest n a bare stage, actor Hank Stratton, playing that the “third culture” that Snow envisioned Othe role of Werner Heisenberg in Michael may actually be arriving in the intersection be- Frayn’s acclaimed play Copenhagen, muses on tween science and the theater. the impossibility of self-knowledge. The fiction- al Heisenberg is agonizing over his role in the Anxiety and Distrust Nazi effort to build an atomic bomb and finds “Science plays” have a long history and a dis- himself unsure of his own motivations. tinguished provenance, starting with Christo- For four years on the London stage, two pher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, published in 1604. years on Broadway, and in cities across Europe Although it does not deal with specific scien- and America, Copenhagen has defied the con- tific concepts, the play features a scientist who Harry Lustig is an emeritus pro- ventional wisdom that science and art cannot strikes a bargain with the Devil and meets a fessor of physics and Provost co-exist. Despite or perhaps because of its heady horrible demise as a result of his lust for Emeritus at City College of the mix of quantum physics and moral dilemmas, it knowledge. City University of New York. His has been popular with critics and audiences Marlowe’s distrust of the motives of scien- Ph.D. is in theoretical nuclear alike; it won the Tony Award for Best New Play tists set the tone for many future plays in the physics, and his research ranges in 2000 and was filmed for presentation this fall genre. Other playwrights expressed this dis- from the theory of nuclear reac- to U.S. public-television audiences. As New York trust in more comedic form. Ben Jonson’s The tions to the history of physics. Be- Times critic Ben Brantley put it, “Who would Alchemist (1610) lampooned both the practi- tween 2000 and 2002, with Brian B. Schwartz, he organized and have ever thought that three dead, long-winded tioners of this ancient pseudo-science, un- produced three symposia on the people talking about atomic physics would be masked by Jonson as jargon-babbling rogues, play Copenhagen in New York such electrifying companions?” and their willing dupes. When Jonson’s sly al- City, Washington and Albu- Yet the success of Copenhagen has not been chemist, Subtle, quizzes his accomplice, Face, querque, New Mexico. This arti- an isolated phenomenon. In recent years, sci- Jonson has great fun with the terminology of cle is based in part on a talk he ence has become a surprisingly popular subject Renaissance science: gave at the 2002 Annual Meet- for playwrights. According to our best count, Subtle. Name the vexations, and the ing of the American Physical So- more than 20 plays on a scientific theme have martyrisations ciety. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr is opened in a professional production over the Of metals, in the work. an associate professor of English last five years, although none has yet matched at North Carolina State Univer- sity in Raleigh, specializing in Copenhagen’s popular success. At the very least, Face. Sir, putrefaction, modern drama and theater histo- science is in vogue on stage as it has never been Solution, ablution, sublimation, ry. She co-organized a Raleigh before. The best of these plays go far beyond Cohobation, calcinations, symposium on Copenhagen in using science as an ornament or a plot device. ceration and March, organized a “Science on They seriously embrace scientific ideas and Fixation. Stage” panel at the 2001 Sigma grapple with their implications. In an era when Subtle. This is heathen Greek, Xi Forum and is currently on traditional dramatic subjects such as dysfunc- to you, now? leave in England writing a book tional families have become tired, playwrights And when comes vivification? about science and theater. Ad- have found the lives and discoveries of real sci- dress for Lustig: 304 Chula Vista entists to be full of dramatic possibilities and Face. After mortification. Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501. In- ternet: [email protected]. For Shep- thought-provoking metaphors. herd-Barr: Department of Eng- In his famous 1959 essay on “the two cul- Later, George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s lish, Box 8105, NCSU, Raleigh, tures,” C. P. Snow lamented the widening gulf Dilemma (1906) made fun of a passel of medical NC 27695-8105. Internet: between science on one side and the arts and charlatans with such famous lines as “Stimu- [email protected] humanities on the other, and expressed his late the phagocytes!” But the play also shows

© 2002 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 550 American Scientist, Volume 90 with permission only. Contact [email protected]. Figure 1. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen has been the bellwether of a flock of new science plays in recent years. In this publicity photograph from the touring production, Hank Stratton (center) as Werner Heisenberg addresses Len Cariou (right) as Niels Bohr, while Mariette Hartley (left) as Margrethe Bohr listens. In actual performances, spectators have occupied the stalls behind the actors, creating the impression of a tribunal. (Pho- tograph by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Broadway in Boston/Clear Channel Entertainment.) that Shaw has genuinely investigated the bio- hearings of the Atomic Energy Commission chemistry that the doctors discuss. and contemporary news sources. Davis leaves Science on Stage Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, with its portrayal of the fate of the Earth in the audience’s hands, actual scientists in historical situations, marked a pleading with us to choose the right path in Contemporary Plays turning point in the history of scientific plays. In our use of atomic energy. a version of the play published in 1939 (but not After Darwin (1998) translated, and therefore not widely known), Memory and Duality Timberlake Wertenbaker Brecht took a very positive view of his protago- Even as they retain some elements of skepticism nist; but in later revisions, which were strongly toward science, contemporary science plays ex- Arcadia (1993), Galileo influenced by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he por- plore a broader range of attitudes and, as in (1970, unpublished), 2 Hapgood (1988) trayed Galileo as an antihero. The revised play, E = mc , have frequently drawn their themes Tom Stoppard published in 1947, is the Brecht Galileo most from science itself. No play illustrates this better widely used and read around the world. than the masterpiece of the genre, Copenhagen. Blinded by the Sun Several other playwrights also saw the Michael Frayn’s play, familiar by now to (1996) bomb in Faustian terms. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, many American Scientist readers, re-enacts the Stephen Poliakoff in The Physicists (1962), warned of the apoca- 1941 visit of Werner Heisenberg to his mentor lyptic results of modern physics put into the and friend Niels Bohr, in Nazi-occupied Den- Calabi Yau (2002) wrong hands. The play uses the Möbius strip mark. The third “long-winded” character is Susanna Speier as a central image and is one of the first mod- Bohr’s wife Margrethe, who in this play (al- ern plays to integrate science formally as well though probably not in reality) was present for Copenhagen (1998; 2000) (Also a PBS Hollywood as thematically. Another remarkable science the first part of the conversation. The action Presents film.) play that warns of the dangerous potential of takes place outside chronological time, as the Michael Frayn physics, while actually discussing scientific three deceased characters struggle, with the ideas, is Hallie Flanagan Davis’s E = mc 2 (1948). hindsight of 60 years of history, to make sense The Division of Memory This play is part allegory and part documen- of what happened that afternoon. (2001) tary, as it features a character called Atom and From 1939 until Germany’s defeat in 1945, Clarinda Mac Low, a Professor who explains the physics that the Heisenberg was in charge of the most impor- James Hannaham and audience needs to know. Much of the play’s tant part of the country’s uranium project. As a Tanya Barfield dialogue is taken directly from transcripts of result of the visit to Copenhagen, the friendship

© 2002 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 2002 November–December 551 with permission only. Contact [email protected]. to make the chain long enough for a large explosion… Heisenberg. Eighty generations, let’s say… Bohr. … you would need many tons of it. And it’s extremely difficult to separate. Heisenberg. Tantalisingly difficult. Bohr. Mercifully difficult. The best esti- mates, when I was in America in 1939, were that to produce even one gram of U- 235 would take 26,000 years. By which time, surely, this war will be over.

Later we find out what they had missed: Heisenberg. Because you’d always been confident that weapons would need 235 and that we could never separate enough of it. […] Figure 2. Heisenberg (left) and Bohr chat at a conference in Copenhagen in 1936. The fa- ther-son relationship between Bohr and Heisenberg is a central theme of the play Heisenberg. What we’d realised, though, Copenhagen. In 1941 Heisenberg, by then the leading scientist in Germany’s nuclear was that if we could once get the reactor program, paid a mysterious visit to Bohr in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. The friendship going… between the two men cooled as a result of this visit. The rift was never fully healed, and in later years the two men could not even agree on what had provoked it. (Photo- Bohr. The 238 in the natural uranium graph courtesy of the Emilio Segré Visual Archive, American Institute of Physics.) would absorb the fast neutrons… Heisenberg. […] And would be trans- between the two men cooled abruptly. Some- formed by them into a new element alto- thing had happened, but neither ever explained gether. An Experiment with an definitively what it was. Frayn explores the Air Pump (1999) Bohr. Neptunium. Which would decay in mystery with three alternative scenarios, or Shelagh Stevenson its turn into another new element… “drafts” as the characters call them, each with Great Men of Science, different outcomes. No concrete answers are Heisenberg. At least as fissile as the 235 nos. 21 and 22 (1998) provided in the text. Even the characters’ own that we couldn’t separate… Glen Berger memories of the events prove unreliable. Margrethe. Plutonium. The questions begin with the very opening Humble Boy (2002) lines from Margrethe to her husband: “Why Heisenberg. Plutonium. Charlotte Jones did he [Heisenberg] come to Copenhagen? … Heisenberg. […] If we could build a reactor What was he trying to tell you?” They contin- An Immaculate we could build bombs. That’s what had ue: Did Heisenberg say to Bohr what he had Misconception (2001) brought me to Copenhagen. Carl Djerassi intended? If not, why not? What was Bohr’s reaction? What was Heisenberg’s? And in- Scientifically, the first passage is not com- Louis Slotin Sonata evitably, why did the Germans not achieve an pletely accurate, but it is basically correct about (2001)* atomic bomb, and why, under Heisenberg, did what Bohr and Heisenberg had thought at one Paul Mullin they not even try—or did they? Did Heisen- time. The second passage is scientifically cor- berg deliberately slow down the bomb effort rect, and moreover it is thematically crucial. Mnemonic (2000) for moral reasons? Was it Heisenberg’s or his Heisenberg says he wanted to ask if it was Théâtre de Complicité fellow German scientists’ incompetence? Had morally right to go on working on the reactor he made an incorrect calculation, or no calcula- project in light of this apocalyptic discovery; Molly Sweeney (1994) Brian Friel tion at all, of the critical mass required for an Bohr thinks Heisenberg came to ask for his explosive chain reaction? blessing—or, even worse, for his help. Moving Bodies In the script, Frayn dives right into the Copenhagen is built out of such dual, and duel- (1999Ð2000)* physics, going far beyond what most theatergo- ing, interpretations. The title itself does double Arthur Giron ers can be expected to know. The level of sophis- duty, as the location of the action but also as the tication makes the characters believable, and it name of the famous “Copenhagen interpreta- Oxygen (2000) also conveys crucial plot points. First, the char- tion” of quantum mechanics developed by Bohr Carl Djerassi and Roald acters explain why they both thought, in 1939, and Heisenberg in the mid-1920s. In this inter- Hoffmann that an atomic bomb could never be produced: pretation, the state of a quantum particle is not determined until the act of observation puts it Picasso at the Lapin Agile (1996) Bohr. What all this means is that an explo- into a definite state. Even then, complementary Steve Martin sive reaction will never occur in natural attributes such as a particle’s position and mo- uranium. To make an explosion you will mentum obey an uncertainty relation: The more have to separate pure [uranium-]235. And precisely the observer (who may be a machine)

© 2002 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 552 American Scientist, Volume 90 with permission only. Contact [email protected]. measures one, the less precisely can the other be “with the moment when the assembly would Proof (2000) measured. Quantum-mechanical objects and be tight enough to achieve critical mass.” He David Auburn light behave, to use classical language, some- had chosen an extraordinarily dangerous part- times as waves and sometimes as particles. The ner to flirt with. Richard Feynman once called Q.E.D. (2001) principle of complementarity states that these such experiments “tickling the dragon’s tail.” Peter Parnell two attributes can never be demonstrated in the Ordinarily, wooden spacers separated the same experiment or observation. two halves of the bomb and prevented a chain Safe Delivery (1999) The uncertainty principle and complemen- reaction from getting started. But for the test, Tom McGrath tarity are grist for the playwright’s mill. The Slotin had removed the spacers and was using Schrödinger’s Girlfriend characters cannot agree on anything that hap- the blade of a screwdriver to keep the shells (2002) pened—not even when and where the conver- apart. The screwdriver slipped, and the assem- Matthew Wells sation took place. The staging of the play rein- bly clicked together. A blue glow enveloped forces the scientific ideas. In the Broadway and the room. Slotin pulled the bomb apart instant- The Secret Order London productions, the stage was round and ly, but there was no way to undo the lethal (1999Ð2000)* bare, and the actors’ motions around it called dose of radiation he had received. Seven other Bob Clyman to mind the electrons, protons and neutrons men who were in the chamber with him re- moving in an atom. Some of the audience sat ceived smaller doses and survived, because Space (2001) in a tribunal at the back of the stage, watching they had been shielded by Slotin’s body, but Tina Landau and “judging” the action in stark marble stalls. he died after nine days of increasing agony at Three Tales (2002) They were in turn watched by the rest of the the Los Alamos hospital. Steve Reich and Beryl audience—the observers observed. Playwright Paul Mullin has turned this ter- Korot Many philosophers of science have ques- rible accident into what could be one of the tioned the application of the Copenhagen inter- most provocative science plays since Copen- Untitled one-woman show pretation to the macroscopic world of human hagen, called Louis Slotin Sonata. (Like several (2000) beings, finding it impermissibly reductive. In other recent science-based dramas, this play re- Anna Deavere Smith spite of the fact that this extrapolation is the ceived funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foun- very premise of the play, in one of his two copi- dation through a program that encourages Wit (1999) ous “postscripts” Frayn has said he doesn’t take playwrights and artists to take on scientific and (Also an HBO film.) it literally. “The concept of uncertainty is one of technological themes.) Where Copenhagen is Margaret Edson those scientific notions that has become com- spare and cerebral, Louis Slotin Sonata is flam- Y2K (1999) mon coinage, and generalized to the point of boyant and emotional. In the play, Slotin suf- Arthur Kopit losing much of its original meaning,” he writes. fers hallucinations during his final days, giving Clearly his intent is not to debase the coinage Mullin a chance to bring on some unlikely any more. Instead, he uses uncertainty as a characters. J. Robert Oppenheimer is there, re- Late-19th- to mid- metaphor (always part of the artist’s license) for peating his line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am 20th-century plays the inherent unfathomability of memory, “a sys- become death, shatterer of worlds.” Einstein tematic limitation which cannot even in theory shows up—you guessed it—playing dice, and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) be circumvented.” God himself puts in an appearance, dressed in George Bernard Shaw Copenhagen has, in its own way, created an a pinstripe suit and fedora and bearing an un- observer effect, leading to a reexamination of canny resemblance, as Overbye points out, to E=mc2 (1948) the historical record that it scrutinizes. In Feb- Harry S. Truman. Obviously the playwright is Hallie Flanagan Davis ruary, a decade ahead of their stated schedule, giving the audience some strong hints about hu- the Bohr family unsealed, for publication, man beings playing God. An Enemy of the People some letters to Heisenberg that Bohr drafted In one of the hallucinations, Josef Mengele, (1882) in the 1950s but never sent. They cast serious the sadistic Nazi death camp doctor, arrives in Henrik Ibsen doubt on one of the suggestions in the play: Hiroshima to watch the scientists achieve in mil- that Heisenberg might have been reluctant to liseconds “what took us years to do in stinking, Galileo (1939; 1947) Bertolt Brecht work on the bomb for moral reasons. But the filth-filled camps.” To critic Bruce Weber, writing new revelations do little to settle the uncertain- in The New York Times, the scene seemed too con- The Genius (1983) ties in the play and nothing to alter Frayn’s es- trived: “It feels motivated by theatricality rather Howard Brenton sential points about uncertainty. In fact, some than drama, especially when Mengele leads the lines of Bohr’s letters, such as his repeated show’s weirdest sequence, a parody of a vaude- In the Matter of J. Robert statement “I am greatly amazed to see how ville chorus line, with scientists singing doggerel Oppenheimer (1964; much your memory has deceived you,” read about thermodynamics. Like a lot of elements in trans. Ruth Speirs and per- as if they could have been written by Frayn. the play, the scene is ornamental and distract- formed 1967Ð68) ing, presented by the playwright not because he Heinar Kipphardt The Slip of the Screwdriver should but because he can.” Inherit the Wind (1955) On May 21, 1946, Louis Slotin, a Canadian Louis Slotin Sonata succeeded in provoking a Jerome Lawrence and physicist at Los Alamos, repeated a “criticality symposium at Los Alamos after a special read- Robert E. Lee test” that he had done many times before. He ing of the play. (The postperformance sympo- slipped the pieces of a plutonium bomb closer sium seems to be turning into a new science/art Men in White (1933) together and farther apart, “flirting” (as Den- form; Copenhagen has also given rise to several of Sidney Kingsley nis Overbye has written in the New York Times) them.) Many of the Manhattan Project veterans

© 2002 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 2002 November–December 553 with permission only. Contact [email protected]. The Physicists (1962) complained bitterly about the antiscientific bias so forcefully to the public’s attention, raising Friedrich Dürrenmatt of the play. But the play’s excesses do not hide powerful ethical and historical issues that sci- the fact that Mullin has done his homework; as ence itself could not solve. But biology has tak- R.U.R. (1921) he told Overbye, he plowed through a three- en its own turn on the stage. One example is Karel Capek inch-thick file at Los Alamos on the Slotin case. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play After Darwin, “I vowed to tell it like it was,” he said. “Any- dramatizing another explosive scientific topic: Pre-19th-century thing less would be grave digging.” It seems to the theory of natural selection. plays us that the playwright has every right to ques- After Darwin borrows a metatheatrical tech- tion whether the atomic scientists were heroes nique from Tom Stoppard’s mathematics play The Alchemist (1610) or irresponsible “cowboys,” playing around Arcadia, with scenes alternating between two Ben Jonson with the dragon when there were safer ways to historical periods. The present-day characters test the bomb assembly. He is also entitled to the are actors, Tom and Ian, putting on a play about Dr. Faustus (1604 and conclusion that the bomb should not have been Charles Darwin (played by Tom) and Robert 1616 versions) dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although FitzRoy (Ian), the captain of the Beagle. The Christopher Marlowe one might have wished for a more balanced pre- scenes alternate between this historical costume sentation of the argument. drama and the present, in which Tom and Ian Musicals Still, the “two cultures dichotomy dies hard. talk with the Bulgarian director, Millie, and the Curt Dempster, the artistic director of the En- African-American playwright, Lawrence. Einstein’s Dreams semble Studio Theatre, told Overbye after the As the play progresses, the tension builds in (2002), Fermat’s Last symposium: “They were running into us, the il- each time frame. Darwin and FitzRoy become Tango (2000) lusionists. We were running into the reality.” estranged, as the very religious captain feels Joanne Sydney Lessner Copenhagen has decisively undermined the old increasingly threatened by the implications of and Joshua Rosenblum argument. Illusion and reality do not have to run Darwin’s discoveries. FitzRoy even threatens The Electric Sunshine into each other, if both are treated with respect. his former friend with a pistol. Ian feels threat- Man (1978) ened, too, when Tom confides to him that he John F. Wilson and Grace Evolution and Betrayal has been hired to appear in a movie and will Hawthorne In recent years most “science plays” have been have to quit the play in order to do so. That physics plays, perhaps because the bomb would close down the production. In order to brought the consequences of modern physics save his job, Ian betrays Tom by secretly e-

Figure 3. In the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s production of Louis Slotin Sonata, Bill Salyers (center) in the role of Slotin clutches the instrument of his demise. The play dramatizes an incident from 1946, when a Canadian physicist working at Los Alamos exposed himself to a lethal dose of radiation while testing the components of a plutonium bomb. (Photograph by Richard Termine for The New York Times.)

© 2002 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 554 American Scientist, Volume 90 with permission only. Contact [email protected]. mailing the film director and telling him (false- family squabbles.” Clearly, science works as Imperfect Chemistry ly) that Tom is HIV-positive. theater. And theater can work at conveying the (2000) Where does evolution by natural selection ideas of science. In an article he prepared for Albert M. Tapper and come in? Wertenbaker relies on the somewhat the symposium “The Copenhagen Interpreta- James Racheff shopworn parallel between biological Darwin- tion: Science and History on Stage,” physicist ism and social Darwinism, which seems to be John Marburger wrote, “Many stories can be Quark Victory (2000) defined here as people being incredibly selfish told of [science’s] struggles and their conse- Robert and Willie Reale in order to survive. Tom defends his defection quences, but I doubt that many will rise to the to the film project by citing adaptation and sur- standard set by Frayn’s Copenhagen. I will end Star Messengers (2001) Paul Zimet and Ellen vival, and Ian justifies his betrayal in the same by thanking Michael Frayn for bringing the Meadow terms: “I don’t want another two years without core issues of this beautiful aspect of science to work. I want to survive, I want Millie to sur- such a large audience.” We hope that other (*indicates sponsorship by vive, I want this to survive.” Just as FitzRoy playwrights will take up the challenge. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation) wants his faith to remain intact, Ian wants the Bibliography play to go on; but both of them know in their Bernstein, J. 2001. Hitler’s Uranium Club, the Secret Record- An augmented and annotated hearts that Darwin/Tom’s decisions are irrevo- ings of Farm Hall. New York: Copernicus Books. list of science plays, with cable. They object to the way that Darwin and Bethe, H. A. 2000. The German uranium project. Physics capsule summaries and Tom “play God,” but they fail to see their own Today 53:34–36. bibliographic information, is interventions in the same hubristic light. Bohr, N. 1957–1962. Unsent drafts of letters to Heisenberg available along with links to The play’s subplots strengthen the scientific and memoranda about the 1941 meeting. Released by Internet resources for further the Niels Bohr Archive, February 6, 2002. Naturens Ver- exploration of “Science as metaphors. The stories of Millie and Lawrence, den 84(8–9); http://www.nbi.dk/NBA/papers/ Theater” on the American who are both transplants of a sort, provide dif- docs/cover.html Scientist Web site: ferent “takes” on adaptation and the losses and Brantley, B. 2000. “Copenhagen”: A fiery power in the be- compromises it entails. A second subplot in- havior of particles and humans. The New York Times, http://www.americanscientist.org/ volves Ian’s “babysitting” a Tamagotchi toy for April 12:E-1. articles/02articles/lustig.html his niece. The toy is constantly beeping and in- Carpenter, C. A. 1999. Dramatists and the Bomb: American terrupting him to demand virtual nourishment, and British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, 1945–1964. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. which he must provide speedily lest the crea- Cassidy, D. In press. New light on Copenhagen and the ture die. The attention he gives to the virtual pet German nuclear project. Physics in Perspective. while betraying his flesh-and-blood colleague Frayn, M. 2000. Copenhagen. New York: Anchor Books. sends a bleak message about technology as a Frayn, M. 2002. Post-postscript. http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ dehumanizing force. ashp/nml/artsci/frayn.htm After Darwin, which was produced at the Haynes, R. D. 1994. From Faust to Strangelove: Representa- Hampstead Theater in London, received mixed tions of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore: reviews. On the one hand, the London-based Johns Hopkins University Press. critic Benedict Nightingale noted that Werten- Jonson, B. 1987. The Alchemist (ed. Peter Bement). Lon- don, New York: Methuen. baker “bangs away at her theme a bit relentless- Logan, J. 2000. “A strange new quantum ethics.” American ly.” But on the other hand, Nightingale wrote, Scientist 88:356–359. “the dramatic brew is rich and mentally nour- Marburger, J. H., III. 2002. On the Copenhagen interpreta- ishing, embracing as it does questions of God tion of quantum mechanics. http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ and godlessness, determinism and free will, bi- ashp/nml/artsci/marburger.htm ology and ethics.” It remains to be seen whether Overbye, D. 2001. Theatrical elegy recalls a victim of nu- After Darwin presages a lasting subgenre of “bi- clear age. The New York Times (April 3):F-4. ology plays,” but it is the first serious attempt to Pais, A., and M. Frayn. 2000. What happened in Copen- hagen? A physicist’s view and the playwright’s re- integrate evolutionary theory with the theater sponse. Hudson Review 53:2. both thematically and formally. (As an aside, we Powers, T. 2000. The unanswered question. New York Re- would like to note one very worthy successor, view of Books, May 25. Tom McGrath’s Safe Delivery, a play about gene Rhodes, R. 1995. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New therapy inspired by the research of the writer’s York: Touchstone Books. daughter. This play was sponsored by the Well- Rose, P. L. 2000. Frayn’s “Copenhagen” plays well at his- come Trust, which has mounted in England a tory’s expense. The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 5):B4–6. program comparable to the Sloan Foundation’s Ruddick, N. 2001. The search for a quantum ethics: support of U.S. plays about science.) Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” and other recent We hope that the three plays we have cho- British science plays. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts sen to discuss—out of the many that we could 11:415-29. have chosen—give some flavor of the variety Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. In press. “Copenhagen“ and be- of treatments of scientific themes in contempo- yond: The “rich and mentally nourishing” interplay rary plays. The infusion of scientific ideas has between science and theatre. Gramma. Snow, C. P. 1993. The Two Cultures. Cambridge, U.K.: invigorated a theatrical scene that, as recently Cambridge University Press. as 15 years ago, was criticized by the promi- Weber, B. 2001. “Louis Slotin Sonata”: A scientist’s tragic nent theater critic and scholar Martin Esslin for hubris attains critical mass onstage. The New York Times the banality of its subject matter and its refusal (April 10):E-1. to treat topics “outside the narrow range of Wertenbaker, T. 1998. After Darwin. London: Faber.

© 2002 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction 2002 November–December 555 with permission only. Contact [email protected].