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
