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.
“Nackt besser aussehen.” — Jiminy McFIT
The winners were:
The American Dream – according to Neil LaBute
NEIL LaBUTE is one of America´s most controversial playwrights; born in Detroit in 1963, he has written twenty plays (like BASH, The Shape of Things, Fat Pigs or reasons to be pretty) and directed nine movies (like In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty or Lakeview Terrace).
Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust as a one-woman-show featuring hand puppets and pop music. With an intense physicality, Bridge Markland performs high speed changes between Mephisto, Faust and Margarete/Gretchen using the puppets as her opponents. She acts to a sound collage made up of the text of the play and popular music from different generations.
In a nutshell, Anna Ziegler‘s play shows the making of an outstanding scientific discovery in a bone-dry, ritualized and women-excluding male establishment, in which an emotional minefield, social coldness and hierarchies, antisemitism and ferocious fighting for recognition and scientific priority went hand-in-hand with scientific curiosity, meticulousness and juvenile enthusiasm. (in 1952, James Watson was just 24 years old, Rosalind Franklin was 32 !).
Marianne has worked at the Berliner Arbeitsamt all her life and then she hears Bob Dylan on the radio and the Wall falls down.
Lydia Stryk was born in DeKalb, Illinois, birthplace of barbed wire and is now based in Berlin. She is the author of over a dozen full-length plays including Monte Carlo, The House of Lily, The Glamour House, American Tet and An Accident, which have been part of festivals around the United States and produced at, among others, Denver Center Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Victory Gardens, HB Studios, The Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Magic Theatre, and in Germany at Schauspiel Essen, Theaterhaus Stuttgart and Forum Theater with Schauspiel Independent and featured at Biennale Bonn. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing and Per Lauke Verlag, and excerpts appear in numerous anthologies including Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays from Northwestern University Press. 
