by Lucas Hnath
Sex, drugs & science in the 17th century
Watch the video trailer HERE !!
Isaac Newton wants to become a member of the Royal Society. Catherine wants to start a family.
Robert Hooke wants to know what Newton knows. 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.
And by the way – it’s the best science comedy out there!
“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 (Humana Fest/Steinberg Award), NightNight, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney (Soho Rep) and Red Speedo (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.
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: Magnus Hengge/adhoc
Supported by the Andrea von Braun Stiftung
No rehearsals. No director. No set. A different performer reads the script cold for the first time at each performance. Will you participate? Will you be manipulated? Will you listen? Will you really listen?
“Nackt besser aussehen.” — Jiminy McFIT
The winners were:
“In the real world,
if there is no justice
there can be no love
.”
Two fucked up individuals are washed up in a run down bar in the Bronx: Truck-driving, short-tempered Danny, whom they call “the beast” encounters Roberta – mother of a moronic son, fearless and constantly seeking for punishment. A perilous cocktail of dangerous closeness, violence, emotion and audacity clashes in John Patrick Shanley’s fierce and heartbreakingly funny comedy – with an outcome you’d never guess in your wildest dreams.
John Patrick Shanley – American playwright, screenwright and director, won the Academy Award for his screenplay Moonstruck (1987). 2004 he was eternalized on the Bronx Walk of Fame. His play Doubt: A Parable won the Pulitzer Prize for Theatre in 2005, the Drama Desk Award as well as the Tony Award for Best Play. In 2008 the play was made into a feature film, starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hofmann and Amy Adams; Shanley directed it himself. He directs his plays himself as well whenever he can.
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).