THE GUM PLAY by Lucas Kavner launches The 2013-2014 EST/Sloan First Light Festival on December 2

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On Monday, December 2 a reading of THE GUM PLAY by Lucas Kavner kicks off The 2013-2014 EST/Sloan First Light Festival, a two-month program of readings and workshop productions of new plays in progress that have been funded by The EST/Sloan Project.

THE GUM PLAY finds the elderly and disgraced former President of Mexico Antonio López de Santa Anna exiled on Staten Island in the 1870s but scheming a triumphant return to power with the money he will realize from his new invention.

The EST/Sloan blog recently had a chance to chat with Lucas Kavner about his new play.

THE GUM PLAY features a different General Santa Anna than most of us know. Not the young “Victor of Tampico” who repelled the Spanish in 1829, or the general who slaughtered the defenders of the Alamo in 1836 (and was defeated and captured a month later by Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto). Here we have a humiliated ex-president/general in his seventies living as an exile on Staten Island. How did you become interested in this aspect of Santa Anna’s life? 

One of my first day jobs in New York was writing flash cards for a tutoring company, basically putting together easy-to-understand blurbs about random facts for kids. And one of the assignments was "American Inventions," so chewing gum was on the list. I was just writing the initial paragraph, learning about Santa Anna being exiled and bringing the initial shipments of chicle to Staten Island, and then hanging out as an old man with an American in this very bizarre situation, and it all just seemed completely hilarious to me. 

I held onto the story for a long time, always having it in the back of my mind. 

How did he come to live on Staten Island?

He ended up on Staten Island during a long period of exile from Mexico. It was just one of the places that was willing to take him in, when many others weren't. 

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 It’s hard to believe that Santa Anna is responsible for the origin of the product we know today as Chiclets.  What kind of research did you do to write your play?

There are very few concrete, agreed-upon accounts of Santa Anna's Staten Island years, it seems. The only facts everyone agrees on is that he brought chicle to Staten Island, tried to turn a profit with it, and subsequently lived there for a time. But I tried to suss out everything I could about that period in Santa Anna's life and various accounts of chewing gum history in America. I spoke to a few "gum experts" and scientists currently employed by gum companies to learn about the properties of chicle, and their information definitely informed a few of the scenes pretty concretely.

I also spent a day in Staten Island — wandering around the museums and talking to historians — and all I found as evidence of Santa Anna's presence there were his signature in a church guest book and an ad he had published in the New York Times where he basically announced his intent to form a ragtag army to take back to Mexico. This second discovery ended up being a major part of the play.

Much of the action in the play is driven by Santa Anna’s combative and entrepreneurial character. How closely do you think this matches the historical Santa Anna? 

The historical Santa Anna was incredibly crafty and absurdly egotistical, by all accounts, so I tried to imagine what that character would be like towards the end of his life, when he's obviously been knocked down a few pegs and is scrambling to remain marginally relevant. 

All the plays in the First Light Festival somehow engage science. Do you have any background in science? Taken any science courses? 

I worked as a reporter at the Huffington Post for a few years and while I was there one of my beats, ironically, was covering the intersection of science and culture. So I ended up becoming pretty obsessed with that intersection. I wrote a big piece for Huffington Magazine about humanoid robots and the Singularity theories and I've been writing and reading a lot about that on my own time recently. 

I was never great at science in school (I remember a physics professor in college telling me I'd be great in the class "if I didn't have to do any math.") But I remember loving most of my science classes, despite my lack of mathematical talent.

What other plays have you written? 

My first play, FISH EYE, was given a great production at HERE Arts Center by the Colt Coeur company in 2011. My next play, CARNIVAL KIDS, will likely have a production here in the spring but I'm not 100% sure so I'll just go ahead and say “likely.” I'm also an actor and comedy person, most recently performing in the last few incarnations of Stephen King and John Mellencamp's GHOST BROTHERS OF DARKLAND COUNTY, and I've been performing weekly improv at the Peoples Improv Theater for the last four years.

What would you like the audience to take away from your play?

I'm just excited to be introducing this crazy situation to an audience, in general. I think it's so ridiculous and amazing that it actually happened the way it did, and even though I can't possibly know if I'm close to getting certain details right, I hope they learn something and laugh a good amount. It's a comedy, so laughter would be a great thing.

Heather Berlin, Deb Laufer, Ivan Oransky, and Jonathan Weiner to discuss “what makes a great play about science” at EST/Sloan’s Fall Artist Cultivation event on Monday, October 21

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Over the past 15 years The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Project has awarded playwrights grants totaling more than one million dollars. The EST/Sloan Project mission: “to stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.” 

Every year EST/Sloan kicks off its new season with the Fall Artist Cultivation Event. This lively event brings together a panel of scientists, science writers and playwrights for a far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion with prospective playwrights about “what could make a great play about science.” The 2013 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will take place at EST on Monday, October 21 at 7 PM.   

This year's panelists include:

• Neuroscientist Heather Berlin, currently an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a Visiting Scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Berlin is also a presenter on the international Discovery Channel Series "Superhuman Showdown, a frequent commentator on the History Channel, and has appeared on StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson. 
• Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer, author of End Days (EST/Sloan 2009 Mainstage production and awarded The ATCA Steinberg citation) , Sirens, Leveling Up, Out of Sterno, and many other plays. Laufer is also the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award and the Lilly Award.
• Dr. Ivan Oransky, vice president and global editorial director of MedPage Today, co-founder of Retraction Watch, and founder of Embargo Watch. Oransky also teaches medical journalism at New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. 
• Journalist and author Jonathan Weiner, winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Beak of the Finch, and also author of Long for This World, His Brother’s Keeper: A Story from the Edge of Medicine, and Time, Love, Memory.

The discussion will be moderated by William Carden, Artistic Director of The Ensemble Studio Theatre.

Click here to RSVP

Click here to read a blog post with excerpted quotes from last year's event. You can also watch some entertaining video clips of the event here.

Headstrong panelists Bennet Omalu and Harry Carson featured on Frontline documentary, League of Denial

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Tonight PBS is devoting two-hours of primetime programming and the season premiere of Frontline to the  documentary, League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis. The show is based on the research of two award-winning ESPN investigative journalists, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru. Their related book, League of Inquiry: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth was just published today.  The documentary and the book investigate how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage.

In April 2012 EST/Sloan mounted the world premiere of Headstrong by Patrick Link, a play that dramatizes the tremendous impact years of NFL collisions has on one extended family. Veteran newsman Stone Phillips found the play "funny, frightening, relevant and enlightening, Headstrong folds the scientific, medical, social and cultural aspects of the sports/CTE story into a dramatic family narrative beautifully with wonderful, engaging characters."

Two of the key figures in the PBS documentary – forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu and New York Giants great Harry Carson – participated in a post-performance discussion about Headstrong and about the controversial subject of concussions and sports in 2012. You can watch video excerpts of that discussion, moderated by Phillips, here.  

You can download an audio recording of a full cast performance of Headstrong now from LA Theatreworks. 

LA Theatre Works recording of Patrick Link's HEADSTRONG on SiriusXM Book Radio Wed @ 9pm

Tonight at 9pm the L.A. Theatre Works recording of Patrick Link's Headstrong will air on SiriusXM Book Radio 80!  It will also air on Thursday night (4/4) at 7 PM on LA's KPFK, 90.7 FM, along with twenty or so other local NPR affiliates, including one in Beijing! For a full station list, visit the LA Theatre Works website.

The cast includes Deidrie Henry, Ernie Hudson, Ntare Guma, Mbaho Mwine & Scott Wolf!

It will also be available on latw.org starting Friday.

Thomas Shadwell satirizes Robert Hooke in The Virtuoso, 1676, and the image sticks

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The diversity of Hooke’s accomplishments was impressive even in his own time, and would be unthinkable today. As well as making an important contribution in almost every scientific field, Hooke was a notable scientific artist; a pugnacious controversialist; a brilliant designer of watches, telescopes, quadrants, and scientific instruments of all sorts; a surveyor and urban developer of the first rank; and one of the most important designers and builders of country mansions, town houses, churches, hospitals and monuments of his time.

In The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine laments that one of the most memorable images of Hooke is the buffoonish character created by Thomas Shadwell in The Virtuoso, the hit comedy of London’s summer season in 1676. The title refers to the character Sir Nicholas Gimcrack whom we first meet onstage lying on his stomach on a table, a piece of string in his teeth, the other end tied around the belly of a frog in a bowl of water. Attended by a “Swimming Master,” Sir Nicholas is learning how to swim by imitating the movements of the frog.   Encountering him for the first time, two young admirers inquire about his method:

Longvil: Have you ever tried in the water, sir?

Sir Nicholas: No, sir, but I swim most exquisitely on land.

Bruce: Do you intend to practice in the water, sir?

Sir Nicholas: Never, sir. I hate the water. I never come upon the water, sir.

Longvil: Then there will be no use of swimming.

Sir Nicholas: I content myself with the speculative part of swimming; I care not for the practice. I seldom bring anything to use; ‘tis not my way. Knowledge is my ultimate end.

Shadwell aimed his satire at the Royal Society, the learned body founded in 1660 to discuss science and run experiments. Some of the entries in its early proceedings bear a close and comical resemblance to what we find Sir Nicholas exploring. As Matthew L. Jones and Matthew Stanley explained in a recent talkback after a performance of Isaac’s Eye:

Jones: If you want to amuse yourself for an hour, look at the first few issues of their journal, the Philosophical Transactions, filled with deadly serious experiments and a whole lot of reports from various flaky gentlemanly figures who sent in all kinds of observations . . . Leibniz, the great mathematician, publishes an article about a sheep whose head looked like a wig.

Stanley: One of the things I love about the early Royal Society: There are these experiments that now we look back on as the first glimmerings of atomic truth right next to an entry about snakes with feet. The Royal Society did not particularly distinguish between these things in terms of their philosophic value. These were all things in which gentlemen should be interested.  

Much of the comedy in the play comes from Sir Nicholas’s detailed description of his experiments. One involves transfusing blood between a sheep and a man--and the result:

he bleated perpetually and chew’d the cud; he had wool growing on him in great quantities; and a Northamptonshire sheep’s tail did soon emerge or arise from his anus or human fundament. . . I shall shortly have a flock of ‘em. I’ll make all my own clothes of ‘em.

Shadwell takes pains in his prologue to claim that no one scientist served as his source:

Yet no one coxcomb in this play is shown;
No one man’s humour makes a  part alone;
But scatter’d follies gather’d into one.

That’s not, however, how Londoners or Hooke himself reacted. Many might have recognized direct quotes from Hooke’s Micrographia. Over the course of a month Hooke chronicled in his diary hearing about the play after its first performance – it was the talk of the town -- his response to seeing it, and then actually buying a copy of the script:

Thursday, May 25 [The date on which King Charles II reportedly saw the play]: At coffe house. Mr. Hill gave Sir J. Hoskins, Aubery and I an account of Virtuoso play.

Thursday, June 1: I was not at the Society. Morgan told me of play.

Friday, June 2: With Godfrey and Tompion at Play. Met Oliver there. Damned Doggs. Vindica me Deus [God grant me revenge]. People almost pointed.

Saturday, June 3: At Garaways, Sir J. More, Flamstead, Hill from Play Floutingly smiled.

Sunday, June 25: Walked to Sir J. Cutler. Whistler served me a dog trick. Lady Cutler askd about Virtuoso. Disturbd with drinking wine and walking.

Saturday, July 1: In Mr. Montacues coach to Sir Chr. Wrens. Noe company. Virtuoso play. Sick with drinking whey.

Monday, July 3: At Mr. Martins tooke virtuoso 1sh

Jardine closes her biography of Hooke by recounting the story of Margaret Godolphin, royal lady in waiting, who worried, after seeing The Virtuoso, whether she should retain Hooke as the architect to remodel her first married home. She expressed her concern to fellow Society member John Evelyn, who sent her a scorching reply, “I was amaz’d to see one of your Sex pleas’d with what the wretches said.” He hoped she would “rise above shallow and fatuous mockery of a great man like Hooke.” But Jardine’s final paragraph testifies to Shadwell’s lasting impact:

In spite of Evelyn’s rebuke, it is Shadwell’s unkind satirizing of Hooke which has continued to inform historians’ versions of his character and life. If we are to accord Hooke the respect and admiration he deserves we would do well to remember Evelyn’s indignation at the idea that Shadwell’s caricature had anything whatsoever to do with the brilliant man himself.  

You can read excerpts from Matthew L. Jones and Matthew Stanley’s discussion of Isaac’s Eye with playwright Lucas Hnath and physicist Gabriel Cwilich here and listen to a podcast of the entire discussion at Science Talk.

Learn more about Isaac’s Eye.

Part two our of Insider Interview with ISAAC'S EYE playwright Lucas Hnath & director Linsay Firman

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Check out part two of our Insider Interview with Isaac's Eye playwright Lucas Hnath & director Linsay Firman, where they talk about the genesis of the play and the process behind it.

Q&A with the Cast - Kristen Bush from ISAAC'S EYE

Our Q&A with Kristen Bush is part two of our four part series with the cast of Isaac's Eye. Kristen plays Catherine Hooke, a pharmacist and love interest to both Isaac Newton & Robert Hooke. 

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Q. What about the character of Catherine Hooke surprised you, as you started to explore playing a female pharmacist in 1655?

A. There is very little known about my character, Catherine Storer. I wanted to find more factual evidence of her existence, but beyond what the play covered, there wasn't much more. I suppose the most interesting surprise of all was how relatable her relationship to Isaac was: the ambiguous 'did-they-love-each-other-or-didn't-they' is something nearly everyone has gone through. The notion that she shared some of his scientific curiosity becasue of her profession makes sense & is shown by the way she structures an argument.

Q. Does the period factor at all in to your characterization of Catherine, or does it feel like a fully modern role to you?

A. This play has felt timeless to me. It feels like the present at times but there is a scarcity in the language that suggests a rural, straightforward setting that could exist in many times.

Q. Catherine says that she and Hooke have been dating. Imagine a date with Robert Hooke, what is that experience like?

A. I think it would involve lots of raunchy sex.

Q. You previously played scientist Rosalind Franklin, in the EST/Sloan Production of Anna Ziegler's PHOTOGRAPH 51. In many ways, Rosalind was more like Isaac. Has that influenced how your Catherine relates to Isaac in this production?

A. One of the contradictions in the way that Catherine wants a relationship with  Isaac is how she both loves his genius and wishes he could alter it to fit her needs. It has been eye-opening to play a part where the character has existed in the spaces around another character for years...only to realize that it's not 'good enough.' The fact that Catherine doesn't blame Isaac for his emotional shortcomings suggests a real openness. I suppose it could be seen as a mirror of Rosalind & her various interactions. I can empathize with both sides.

Q. Did historical research about the real Catherine Storer affect your creation of the character at all? Do you think Isaac Newton really loved her?

A. Certainly, any kind of research affects one's work in the space. however, at a certain point, the actor needs to let it go. With this play in particular I have found that so much of what happens...happens in the moment on stage. That combined with the sheer fact that there is so little known about her has left much to our imaginations, which I've found liberating. And I think he loved her...because why not? That's more compelling than if he didn't.

Click here for more information on  Isaac's Eye

Q&A with the Cast - Michael Louis Serafin-Wells from ISAAC'S EYE

Just in case the front row wasn't close enough for you, we're giving you a new opportunity to better get to know the cast of Isaac's Eye! First up in this four part series is the "deliciously sly" Michael Louis Serafin-Wells who plays Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton's contemporary and rival.

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Q: What is your favorite detail about Robert Hooke that is not in the play?

A: Because Hooke is already, arguably, the most famous scientist in the world when the play begins, he might be seen as privileged. He is, of course, not. His father, like Newton's step-father, was a rural clergyman. Dutiful son, he remained at home until his father died. And after the funeral, with his entire inheritance (£20) in his pocket, he fucking WALKED to London. Knowing no one. No prospects and made his own way. That is a fucking Working Class Hero. It's the goddamn 1600's. Even 20 years later when he's worked his way up from nothing, maybe some vestige of this shows up in the play when ON FOOT he travels to meet Newton for the first time...

Q: While Newton and Hooke are rivals, Isaac regards Hooke as a mentor? How do you see this from Hooke's perspective?

A: Well, this - aside from the very controversial Catherine scene, is my favourite element of the play - those moments when Hooke is Newton's teacher, working with, challenging, goading his brilliant but sloppy pupil to do the work, find the truth. You might remember this, at the Opening Night fucking Neil deGrasse Tyson was there with his entire family taking up the front row. At the reception, he grabbed me around the shoulders from behind and first said "that was pretty crazy - you're right in our face! (talking about that front row in full light steps away from us)". "Well", I said you're right in OUR face, so the feeling is mutual!" He laughed and then told me how much he liked us bringing Hooke and Newton to fleshy, flawed, real life and then said, "but when they get down it - beyond the ambition and the jealousy and everything - above everything - they both want to know the truth. That was... it's well done".

Q: Hooke does some fucked up shit. Do you think he was really fucked up, or just a product of his time?

A: I reject the premise. What exactly did he do that was so "fucked up"? Anything called out in the play is, I think, brilliantly, counter-balanced later in the play by Lucas. Beyond that, did he murder anyone? Did he cheat anyone? I think not. I think the fucked-up thing is that he was so thoroughly erased from history by his rivals. What's that line about history? That it is written by the victors? From our own brief American history, why is  the late-George McGovern cited so poorly? Because he lost? To fucking Nixon?! Calling someone a "McGovernite" is meant to be a political slur. That's bullshit. Is anyone prouder to be a "Nixonite"? (beat) Yeah, I guess they are. God help them...

Q: What do you think Robert Hooke would be doing, were he alive today?

A: I think he'd be living in a rent-stabilzed apartment in Brooklyn, writing his 40th book (self-published), doing readings at The Strand, a recurrent guest on New York Public Radio, hanging out with punkrock science nerds like Fugazi's Guy Picciotto and Ian McKaye and inventing a lot of cool shit that some other asshole gets all the credit for.

Click here for more information on Isaac's Eye

An eye-opening chat: Lucas Hnath, Matthew L. Jones, Matthew Stanley, and Gabriel Cwilich discuss the characters, science, and times behind ISAAC’S EYE

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2019","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"465","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"700"}}]]Following the February 20 performance of Isaac’s Eye, the playwright Lucas Hnath joined two professors of the history of science, Matthew Stanley from New York University and Matthew L. Jones from Columbia University, to discuss the historical background of the play: the scientists Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke, the experiments they did, and the times they lived in. EST/Sloan science advisor Gabriel Cwilich of Yeshiva University moderated the discussion. The excerpts below give a flavor of the far-ranging fifty-minute discussion. You can listen to the entire proceedings on “Inside Isaac,” the February 24 and 25 episodes of the Science Talk podcast from Scientific American.

Cwilich: Lucas, I’m going to start by asking a question I’ve been asking you for the last couple of years. Why Newton? Why, Lucas, why?

Hnath: I first got the idea to write the play when I was listening to a podcast of the Leonard Lopate show on my walk home. He was interviewing George Johnson who wrote a book called The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. In passing Johnson mentioned this experiment where Newton placed a needle in his eye. On my walk home I just started imagining what that would look like on stage. I thought that would make for an interesting stage action.  To put a needle in your eye. And you’re incapacitated while you’ve got a needle in your eye. That seems to be a bad position to be in. But that doesn’t really make a play. What would compel this person to put a needle in his eye? So I started looking for potent conflicts in Newton’s career. And one that stood out to me was the one with Robert Hooke. The two had several points of contention in their beliefs. But they also seemed like very disparate personalities. Hooke is sleeping around a lot and studying a lot of different subjects. Newton is more monastic in his approach to science and to the outside world. That’s a rough version of the origin story.

Cwilich: Matthew, tell us something about the real Newton and how much of the real Newton do we see in the play?

Jones: Well, you get a definite flavor of the real Newton. When he was battling, he was battling indeed. The dispute over who invented the calculus was a big and nasty dispute in part because Newton organized the papers such that we could follow his victory and he organized a publishing campaign against his bitter enemy Leibniz, who had no power actually at the time. But one thing we really get a sense of is the extent to which he was deeply concerned with the problems of the human being and coming to know them. And that was very much a problem of our bodies as well as our minds. And I think Lucas was right to focus on this moment in which the evidence suggests he really did constantly stick what he called a bodkin in his eye. Because he wanted to know not just something about theories of light but also something fundamentally about how fragile we are as sensing and thinking beings. It’s just a fundamental thing for him but it’s a fundamental thing indeed for the entire period in which he’s operating. And his answers are at once quite askew to those of his contemporaries and also transformative in the development of science. So we capture a lot of that. And one of the things I like a lot about the play is the way in which the emotional content of his character is also captured in the rather innovative approach that he takes to what they called natural philosophy.

Stanley: One of the things I’ve always liked about the needle experiment is that it’s not an experiment all by itself but sort of demonstrates an important part of Newton’s character. That he sort of sat down one day and said to himself, “Now I’m going to figure out colors.” And he said, “Where are all the different places where you might study color?  Well, we see it in glass and we see it in water. And we need to look at how we can mix different chemicals together. And you know sometimes when you stare at the sun you see some colors. So I’ll stare at the sun for a while.” And he does this long enough that he incapacitates himself and he has to lay out for a few days. And then he discovers at some point – and everyone can do this experiment without hurting themselves – that if you press on your eye a little bit you do see these funny little rings. And he says, “I should check that out, too.” This is one little part of this entire project to learn everything about colors. And then once he’s experienced them all, then he can figure out what it really means and the truth behind it.

Cwilich: This play is all about seeing. What role did optics play in Newton’s life?

Jones: Given Newton’s theological orientation, to understand the laws of optics was to very fundamentally understand something about the divine making. Light had long been associated with divine agency and was something other than this world. That is unquestionably one of the reasons he was so deeply interested in it and it reflects a lot of the work that he does.  And it’s in the Opticks that he’s the most speculative. Late in his life he publishes many editions of Opticks (available in a reprint by Dover with a foreword by Albert Einstein). And at the end of the book he has a long series of queries where the true beliefs of Newton are allowed to say their name, bizarre things about fermentation and other sorts of stuff. These set an entire research program for generations of English scientists in the eighteenth century. So it’s utterly central to what he does on all sorts of levels.

Stanley: Yes, one of the interesting things I find about Newton and optics, that’s reflected nicely in the structure of the play, is that it brackets his whole life. It’s one of the first things that Newton can get serious traction on as a young man. He can show that he can do it better than the Cartesians, so that’s appealing.  It’s a time when glass technology is advancing rapidly, so he has new sorts of tools. It’s amenable to mathematical investigation and it’s connected to transcendent issues. So it’s a perfect storm for the young Newton to tackle the particular issues he’s interested in. And then when he’s older it’s also his victory lap. He writes the Opticks once he’s President of the Royal Society and he can finally say what he really thinks about light and God and matter and gravity and living inside God’s brain and fermentation and all these things that he can only say at the end. In that sense I like that you get the full arc of the experience of Newton.

Cwilich: Let’s not leave out the other big character in this play, the incredibly interesting Robert Hooke . . .

Jones: I was very pleased to see Hooke here. He functions very effectively, if anachronistically, as you indicate at the end of the play. Hooke, like Newton, came from very modest social circumstances. And that modesty of his social circumstances, despite his having gone to Oxford, is what enabled him to do what he did. Without him the Royal Society would have been a talking club and of very little significance. He had a knowledge of the topography of London – if you wanted to get anything from drugs to any kind of chemical thing or any mechanical contrivance – he could call in favors and have it done almost overnight. So Leibniz demonstrates a calculating machine and Hooke says – and this is classic for Hooke – “Oh, I already have one of those.” Which was complete crap. But a month later he demonstrates one that probably worked better – it’s one of the missing items alluded to in the play. But he could do that. Now that meant that the Royal Society could be more than words about intervening in nature. Because Hooke is the one who could get air pumps working because he knew where to get cement. Remember this is an age when nothing is standardized. No chemicals. You can’t depend on anything. Which is why Huygens and Newton blow their own glass and make their own lenses, because you couldn’t trust anyone. Hooke was a master of this. His character – he’s a wheeler dealer with knowledge of the street – is integral to the kind of science and technology he does. It couldn’t happen if he weren’t this kind of character.

One thing I very much liked in the play: The diary, like the needle in the eye – those are tools of investigating the perversities of the self. There’s this deep and profound sense that these scientists don’t know how to trust themselves as individuals. The answers that philosophy has given don’t count. Diaries, as well as sticking needles in your eyes, are investigating yourself so that you may be able to have any sense of what you might be able to say about their nature. They’re integrative practices.  And it’s not accidental that Hooke is writing this diary around the same time as Samuel Pepys. We don’t have diaries of this kind if you go fifty years earlier. They’re just not there. Whereas for the next century and a half we’re going to have too many. And they’re not nearly as interesting as Hooke’s.

Stanley: In terms of legacy one of the things I find interesting about Hooke is that he sort of gets written out of history in a very important way. Partly that’s because Newton wants to crush all the records of his rival. But partly it’s because the gifts that Hooke brought to the investigation of experimental philosophy were mechanical and messy and dirty and relied on your hands and knowing how to make cement and smoking enough opium before you worked on the air pump. And those were the sort of characteristics that men of science did not necessarily want to associate themselves with. Hooke was so closely associated with the messy effectiveness of experimentation, that people were happy to not talk about him, because they didn’t want science to look messy. So, in that sense, Hooke is great insofar as people didn’t talk about him.

Jones: One thing I should say about Hooke is despite the nature of their rivalry, Hooke knew his lack of the kind of mathematical gifts that Newton had and it was really under Hooke’s prodding and indeed almost by creating the rivalry that he enabled Newton to come out of his shell. Newton had produced this unbelievable new mathematics and this unbelievable new account of motion but he hadn’t done anything. He just sat on this stuff and was totally ambivalent about publication and especially after the disaster that had happened when his optical paper was published. Hooke for all of his faults had a sense that Newton could solve these problems and indeed out of that almost forced Newton’s hand into producing the Principia, which truly is a turning point in .the way one thinks about the relationship between mathematics and physics.

The current production of Isaac's Eye runs through March 10. More details here. 

ISAAC NEWTON STUCK A NEEDLE INTO HIS TEAR DUCT (& no one knows why)

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But we can give you a few possible reasons! Lucas Hnath's "Brilliant New Play" ISAAC'S EYE has been EXTENDED through March 10th! 

Don't miss what The Scientst called: "Thoroughly engaging, thought-provoking, and very funny."

And Charles Isherwood from the The New York Times describes it as: "A  quirky sendup of fusty historical dramas... funky, stylized, but distinctly contemporary. Isaac's Eye wins a whole mess of points for originality."

Act now, ISAAC'S EYE ends its limited engagment on March 10th!

Click here for more information on Isaac's Eye