By Lucas Hnath
a staged reading from our SCIENCE & THEATRE series
Young Isaac Newton desperately wants to become a member of the club of clubs for scientists, the Royal Society. In order to convince Robert Hooke, the institution’s curator of experiments, he sticks a needle into his tear duct to prove that light is made of particles. Ouch!!! And if science won’t do it there is another way: Hooke keeps a detailed diary of his sex life …
Isaac’s Eye playfully blends the facts of Newton’s life with an equal dose of fiction to explore what great people are willing to sacrifice to become great people.
“Isaac’s Eye wins a whole mess of points for its originality. This odd little jeu d’esprit about the history of science considers immortal matters like male rivalry and overweening ambition from a willfully skewed perspective.” — The New York Times
Lucas Hnath’s other plays include Death Tax (Humana Fest/Steinberg Award), NightNight (short play for Humana Fest), A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney (Soho Rep) and Red Speedo (coming up at the Studio Theatre, Washington DC). A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011, Lucas Hnath has enjoyed playwriting residencies with The Royal Court Theatre, London and 24Seven Lab, New York. He is a two-time winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant for his feature-length screenplays, The Painting, the Machine and the Apple and Still Life. He received both his BFA and MFA from NYU’s Department of Dramatic Writing and is a lecturer in NYU’s Expository Writing Program.
- Sat, August 17, 2013 | 8pmMain Stage
With Mary Kelly, Ben Maddox, Jeffrey Mittleman and Tomas Spencer
Directed by Günther Grosser
Presented with special permission from ICM Partners
Links
szenische Lesung von Isaac’s Eye
Isaac Newton, der große Isaac Newton: als junger Spund von Ehrgeiz zerfressen, wünscht er sich nichts sehnlicher als in die Royal Society – die Champions-League, das Oberhaus, das Theatertreffen der Wissenschaft – aufgenommen zu werden. Robert Hooke ist einer der führenden Köpfe dort, Kurator für Experimente, und Newton möchte ihn von seiner Befähigung überzeugen, indem er sich eine Nadel in den Tränenkanal steckt, um zu beweisen, dass es sich bei Licht nicht um Strahlen sondern um Partikel handelt. Er hat jedoch noch einen zweiten Pfeil im Köcher: Hooke führt ein detailliertes Tagebuch über sein Sexleben, und Newtons Freundin Catherine könnte es ihm abnehmen…
Eine Farce über Ambitionen: geschickt verbindet Lucas Hnath, einer der vielversprechendsten jungen Autoren der us-amerikanischen Szene historische Fakten und Fiktion zu einer bösen Groteske darüber, was die Großen manchmal bereit sind zu riskieren, um Große zu werden.
eine szenische Lesung im Rahmen unseres Science & Theatre–Projektes