Einstein, Kafka and Planck vs. Time, Space and Conventions

World Premiere of a new play by Robert Marc Friedman

The foundations of European society were being shaken and World War I was about to deal them a final blow when Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity in Berlin on November 25, 1915 – now even space, time, gravity and the cosmos were no longer what they used to be. Everything seemed to be relative, all conventions were crumbling and God had left the building.

Within a few years, Einstein emerged as an internationally-acclaimed scientist comparable to Copernicus or Newton. In Stockholm, however, the Nobel Committee for Physics resisted the massive support for his theories of relativity. What was at stake was whether or not a prize should go to Einstein and his “corrupt Jewish science,” as it was called by those who would soon instigate the next European catastrophe.

At the same time in Prague, Franz Kafka whittled away at the conventions of literature – transforming sons into beetles, examining the fate of people lost in indecipherable bureaucratized societies and making the strange look normal.

Einstein and Kafka met in Prague. They had things in common.

Einstein had been recruited to Berlin by the highly-revered leader of German physics, Max Planck. Beyond their devotion to theoretical physics and classical music, however, they had few things in common.

Robert Marc Friedman’s new play tells a tale of strained friendships, the search for new perspectives and scientific integrity against a backdrop of a fierce battle between uncompromising opponents in a decaying society.

ROBERT MARC FRIEDMAN is a scholar and playwright born in 1949 in Brooklyn, New York, and now living in Norway. After studying physical sciences and theatre at New York University, he earned a doctorate in history of science at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently professor at University of Oslo and professional member of the Dramatists Guild of America. Friedman researches the history of modern physical and environmental sciences in their social and cultural contexts. Among his numerous publications are Nobel Physics Prize in Perspective in Nature (1981), Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (1989), and The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prizes in Science (2001). Friedman’s dramatizations of his research include a television film, Vitenskap i motvind (1982), for Norwegian State Broadcasting [NRK] and stageplays performed in several countries: Remembering Miss Meitner (2002), Becoming Albert Einstein (2005), and Amundsen vs Nansen (2011). Friedman’s numerous honors for both scholarly and artistic contributions, include Tetelman Fellow at Yale University (2009) for public understanding of science and the University of Oslo’s Public Outreach [Formidling] Prize (2015). He will be an artist-in-residence at the Djerassi Artist Residency (California) in 2016.

       
Pics: Gerald Wesolowski

by Lucas Hnath

Sex, drugs & science in the 17th century

Three additional performances of the best science comedy out there!

Watch the video trailer HERE

Isaac Newton wants to become a member of the Royal Society. Robert Hooke wants to know what Newton knows. Catherine wants to have a family. The guy with the plague wants to stay alive. They conduct a risky experiment.

Afterwards, Newton doesn’t know any more than before but Hooke gets his sex diary back, Catherine’s skepticism is stronger than ever and the guy with the plague is dead.

Science moves in mysterious ways.

Isaac’s Eye mixes the facts of Isaac Newton’s life with an equal dose of fiction to explore what great people are willing to sacrifice to become great people.

It puts the history of science onstage, juxtaposing historical characters and facts with our 21st century based projection of them.

“I tend to write plays about people who are trying to do something that is impossible or nearly impossible. I’m interested in people who are trying to accomplish things that very few people will ever accomplish. … Huge ambition brings with it aspects of wonder, high stakes, and danger. But even more interesting than that, when you combine enormous ambitions with the small conflicts we experience everyday, the ordinary becomes illuminated. There’s a Virginia Woolf quote that I like very much: The paraphernalia of reality have at certain moments to become the veil through which we see infinity. We are neither roused nor puzzled; we do not have to ask ourselves, What does this mean? We feel simply that the thing we are looking at is lit up, and its depths revealed. Conflating the mythic with the miniscule has become my strategy for piercing Woolf’s veil.”    Lucas Hnath

Lucas Hnath is one of the most promising voices in contemporary US theater. His other plays include Death Tax, NightNight, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney , Red Speedo and The Christians. 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.

Isaac’s Eye is part five of Science&Theatre, a collaboration of English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center with Prof. Dr. Regine Hengge (Institute for Biology/Microbiology at the Humboldt University Berlin) and her team of young scientists.

Photo Lucas Hnath: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times  | Production photo: Casey Tower