From BroadwayWorld: Rehearsals Begin for Lucas Hnath's ISAAC'S EYE

BroadwayWorld has all the details on EST/Sloan Project's World Premiere presentation of Lucas Hnath's ISAAC'S EYE, directed by our own Linsay Firman!

Rehearsals begin this week for the world premiere of Isaac's Eye by Lucas Hnath, directed by Linsay Firman. Isaac's Eye, an Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Project for New Plays on Science and Technology presentation, is the tale of an emotionally immature, 25-year-old Isaac Newton, his drive to become a fellow of The Royal Society and the great scientist Robert Hooke who, in Mr. Hnath's play, is the nemesis standing in his way. Iaaac's Eye begins previews Wednesday, January 30, at 7:00pm for an opening on Saturday, February 9, at 7:00p.m at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, 549 West 52nd Street. Isaac's Eye is brash, irreverent, often comical, and ultimately scrupulous in dissecting fact from fiction in search of what history may have been hiding all these years.

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David Auburn, Lisa Randall, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jonathan Weiner on “what makes a great play about science”

Every fall the EST/Sloan Project brings together playwrights, scientists, and science writers to brainstorm ideas about “what makes a great play about science.” This year’s participants included Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn, author of Proof; Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall; astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of Hayden Planetarium; and Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner. Doron Weber, vice-president of Programs at the Sloan Foundation, moderated the far-ranging ninety-minute discussion. A selection of excerpts follow (you can also watch video excerpts):

Weber: Since most of the audience is playwrights, I’d like to say that, in addition to EST, which is our flagship partner, we have a relationship with Manhattan Theatre Club and Playwrights Horizon. We have commissioned over 250 plays in the last decade plus. There’s a play now on Broadway we are supporting [An Enemy of the People]. And there are many ways we try to support the work in addition to the initial productions. We have a relationship with L A Theatre Works where we have done a series of audio recordings with A-list actors of some 20 plays about science, including Proof. We just did Copenhagen with Alfred Molina reading the part of Bohr. These recordings go to libraries and to 3,000 schools and are now incredibly popular on Chinese radio. Millions of people in China are listening to plays that were written for these commissions. A play we did two years ago, Photograph 51, is now being developed into a film. So I am encouraging you to devote yourself to this program.

Lisa, tell us one play that deals with science that you like, an example of something that you think did a good job.

Randall: There are probably many good plays about science but I have to say, and I’m not just saying this because he’s sitting next to me, but I really, really did love Proof. I actually thought it was one of the best plays I’ve seen for many reasons. I also saw Breaking the Code last year in Cambridge. That was about Alan Turing and breaking the Enigma process. It was historical, about what was happening during World War II and the development of computers and also about his personal life. I thought it was woven in a very interesting way. And Copenhagen did a very nice job of using physics as metaphor and again dealt with a historical event but also communicated what was going on at the time in physics.

But with Proof – this is embarrassing because you’re sitting here.

Auburn: I’m not embarrassed at all (laughter)

Randall: There were a couple of things I liked. Sometimes when you see things you don’t get a sense of what it’s really like to be doing the thing itself. You see a play or a movie about a writer and you hear a typewriter busily typing but you don’t actually know what they’re thinking or how they’re getting into it. And I think there was a way you got into the people’s heads. And I have to say that I really like the idea of just thinking about what proof means, just in life, you know, when you have people who aren’t listening to you – how do you prove anything to them? And I don’t usually focus on this but I actually think that for the woman mathematician character, it really got at a lot of the issues that women really face. You had people who just weren’t listening and how do you say something to people who aren’t listening?

Weber: Neil, tell us something about your work that would be of interest to us from a storytelling perspective.

Tyson: It’s not so much a matter of my work. There’s a broader story to be told. In the context of playwriting, it doesn’t matter to me if your play is science-themed. I think it’s great if it is. Here’s what’s been missing: it’s probing the mind and the decision-making tree that goes on inside the mind of a scientifically literate person. That’s what’s missing in all the great literature. I know how a cop thinks, a doctor thinks, a lawyer thinks. I know how the wronged lover thinks. But how does a chemist think? How does a physicist think? A biologist? A mathematician? You probe emotions that are folded in with whole other kinds of brain training and you have a different story to tell. I’m so disappointed when I see characters rehashed and I think of all the story telling that could happen that isn’t.

Dare I suggest that that’s why the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory has been so successful? It shows a bunch of nerdy, nerdy people -- living. That’s all it is. There are things they do. You know? Oh, I want to make my soda colder. OK, let me drop it for a second into some liquid nitrogen. It’s things they have in their house. . . . So, why hasn’t anyone written a story about the entomologist, you know, an expert on bugs, falling in love with an exterminator. Where’s that story? I want that story.

Weiner: There really is a huge opportunity in storytelling with scientists because they’re as obsessed as we are as writers. They’re obsessive in similar sorts of ways. They’re thinking about their work all the time just as we are when we’re engaged in storytelling. They love it and they love the genealogies. I was hanging around with these young scientists today who were doing an experiment. In the throes of the experiment, they were also kind of competing about their family trees in their field: who descends from the great neuroscientists of the 1920s and who, sadly, does not. You can actually go online and find these genealogies. They’re called neurotrees and they’re kept up as religiously as Wikipedia entries, back through a hundred years.

There’s also something very special in storytelling terms about scientists when you can find a scientist who has something in their personal stories or in their character that speaks to the research. That’s not always the case. It’s hard to find. Since I write nonfiction I actually do have to find them. I think it’s wonderful when you can find some interesting way of marrying the two. The character and the subject. When you do, it’s extraordinary. There’s a great deal of interest and drama. There’s almost a renaissance emotion for the writer and then for the audience in seeing that humanity in the search of the science. . . In both Proof and Copenhagen you see that. You see the obsessions, the passions, and in interesting ways, the connection of the characters’ inner mechanism with the work. And you need to get to know the scientists well in order to do that.

Weber: David, you are not a mathematician. What led you to write about mathematicians?

Auburn: I didn’t set out to write a play about science or math. I started with what I thought were interesting enough dramatic ideas that I could get going on a play. As I recall it, one was an idea about two sisters who found something left behind after a parent’s death and then began arguing about who it belonged to and who should control it. And the other idea was about someone who was approaching the age when many people experience the onset of mental illness -- in their early twenties – and, knowing that it had happened to their father, fearing it would happen to them. I came to the math in an effort to combine those two ideas somehow.

One of the triggers was I was reading a book about the mathematician Paul Erdös. It was called The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. I don’t know if he was crazy exactly but he was certainly a borderline character. And the book introduced me to this world of mathematicians that I knew a little bit about because I had known some in college. These people, many of whom have that kind of obsessive relationship to creativity, and also who have a pleasurable relationship to it, which I found very appealing. A delight in the powers of their own creativity. An excitement in uncovering new worlds, making connections that weren’t there before. And I thought if I could get some of that going in a character who was also very fearful about what the implications of that would be for them. If the thing that they both hoped they would become, a profoundly creative mathematician, was also the thing that signaled that they were in real trouble mentally, I thought that would be very interesting. So that kind of came about in a backhanded way.

It turned out to be this wonderful experience, both because the play worked well and because I got to meet all these wonderful people. I probably spent two years both before and afterwards talking with mathematicians, spending time with them, and hanging out with them. In terms of the mental illness component which became somewhat controversial because a number of mathematicians got annoyed, not just because of this play but other things implied this connection and they were getting tagged as loonies in popular culture. I did a panel with this one mathematician who became a friend after the play and he had brought to the panel some kind of statistical breakdown he had found of the incidence of mental illness by profession and it had mathematicians more in the twenties and writers at #1. (laughter) I try to repeat that on his behalf whenever I do one of these panels.

Watch video excerpts of this discussion.

Read more about The EST/Sloan Project

Don’t miss this year’s EST/Sloan Mainstage Production, Isaac’s Eye

EST/Sloan Project presents Isaac's Eye, January 30 - February 24

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Isaac's Eye by Lucas Hanth

Directed by EST/Sloan Project Associate Director Linsay Firman

January 30 – February 24, 2013

(opens February 9)

“The last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.”

– John Maynard Keynes on Isaac Newton

One experiment young Isaac Newton tried boggles the mind. To understand  light and optics better, Newton inserted a long needle “between my eye and the bone, as near to the backside of my eye as I could.” Why take such a risk? Lucas Hnath’s brilliant new play, Isaac’s Eye, reimagines the contentious, plague-ravaged world Newton inhabited as it explores the dreams and longings that drove the rural farm boy to become one of the greatest thinkers in modern science. Newton’s Salieri was the hot-headed, randy polymath Robert Hooke—and how the two combative scientists differed in style and thinking prefigures much of the science that would follow. Far from a costume drama, Isaac’s Eye is brash, irreverent, often comical, and ultimately scrupulous in dissecting fact from fiction in search of what history may have been hiding all these years.

January 30 – February 24 (opens February 9).

Pick Your Price Previews: Wedneday, January 30 - Saturday, February 2

Runs: Wednesday - Sunday @ 7pm

Pick Your Price Matinees: Saturdays & Sundays @ 2pm

General Admission: $30 Student/Senior:$20

Isaac's Eye won the 2012 Whitfield Cook Prize, an annual award given by New Dramatists for an unproduced, unpublished play deemed worthiest by an outside panel of judges.

Lucas Hnath on Isaac Newton:

I write so frequently about science and technology because I'm interested in characters who take themselves to the very edge of human experience. Newton takes himself to the edge of what can be seen by our eyes — much as astronauts go to the edge of our world, or a swimmer who uses performance enhancing drugs takes himself to the edge of what the body can experience.

I perceived Newton as a kind of risk taker. But as I studied him more, I actually enjoyed what a difficult, argumentative person he was. He's probably not someone you would have wanted to hang around.

Robert Hooke is an especially exciting character because almost no one knows who he was. But he did so much that you've heard about but never knew came from him: the artificial respirator, the earliest telescopes, the plan-form map, the theory of elasticity. At the time he was called “London’s Leonardo.”  

I think with Newton and Hooke you have a man and his shadow. Hooke is this wretched figure: sinful, hedonistic, grotesque. Newton, by contrast, is deeply moral. And yet, these distinctions become a bit more complicated before the play reaches its end. You come to realize how vicious and brutal a person Newton could be.

Isaac’s Eye and The EST/Sloan Project process

Four years ago, Isaac’s Eye was but a few paragraphs Hnath submitted for funding to The EST/Sloan Project. He describes how the play developed:

When I submitted the idea to Sloan, I had no play. I had a one-page proposal. The proposal outlined much of the story, but still, it was highly tentative. The folks from Sloan gave some feedback, and I actually rewrote the proposal based on their comments. They had some concerns about the factual accuracy of the play. As a result, I added what has now become the play's primary theatrical metaphor: the writing of “what’s true” on the wall. Sloan's concerns about accuracy actually opened the door for me to explore the relationship between truth andfiction in our attempts to understand the world and one another.

After I was given the commission, EST allowed me to use their space during the off-season to workshop the play. I'd bring in rough pages and notes, and I'd have actors read the text. I'd listen. I'd make changes on the fly. These little workshops allow me to quickly write a first draft. Beyond the first, EST held a couple more workshops to give Linsay Firman and me a chance to try out the play on its feet.

After I had written a second draft, I had a conversation with Daniel Todes, a science historian and professor at Johns Hopkins. At the time I was using Newton's work with alchemy to create some dramatic stakes. Todes told me that Newton's work with theology was far more controversial, which led me to change his secret work from alchemy to theology. This enabled me to explore Newton's relationship with God.

Many drafts later, I met with Gabriel Cwilich who expanded my understanding of how Newton and Hooke represented two opposing ways of looking at the world, two fundamentally different scientific approaches. Newton focused on a limited number of topics and obsessively studied and tried to relate those few things. Hook, on the other hand, was all over the place. He studied voraciously anything and everything. The next draft sharpened the differences in how they practiced their disciplines intothe conflict.

In the spring of 2012, another play by Lucas Hnath, Death Tax, was produced at the 36^th Annual Actors Theatre Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville to rave reviews. “This play is pure joy for thinkers,” exulted the reviewer for Louisville.com. “Hnath expertly inserts enough ambiguities and layers to his characters to keep play analysis junkies occupied for months.”

Hnath’s other plays include Red Speedo, Hillary and Clinton, Sake Tasting with a Séance to Follow, The Courtship of Anna Nicole Smith, Odile’s Ordeal, Tonguetied, and Three Attempts at Corrective Eye Surgery. A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011, Hnath’s work has also been produced at the University of Miami, The Culture Project, Target Margin and Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Besides EST, his plays have been developed at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and Cleveland Public Theatre. He has also enjoyed playwriting residencies with The Royal Court Theatre and 24Seven Lab and is currently working on two commissions for Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Linsay Firman, Associate Director of The EST/Sloan Project and Literary Manager at EST, directed the NY premiere of Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, reprised at the 2011 World Science Festival. Other NYC productions include Rachel Bond’s Anniversary, Garrett M. Brown’s Americana and Jose Rivera’s Flowers, all in the EST Marathon; Perdita by Pierre Diennet (Lion Theater), Joy Tomasko’s Unfold Me, Catherine Trieschmann’s Crooked, Heather Lynn MacDonald’s Pink (all at Ariel Tepper’s Summer Play Festival); Anne Washburn’s Apparition (chashama) named one of Time Out New York’s ten best plays of 2003, Howard Barker’s The Power of the Dog and The Possibilities, Joe Orton’s Loot, and Peter Rose’s Snatch (Soho Rep). She began working in new play development as the Associate Director of Soho Rep, where she worked from 1998 – 2004.

The EST/Sloan Project: Fifteen years of acclaimed productions

The upcoming Mainstage Production of Isaac’s Eye continues a tradition that began in 1998 and continued last season with Patrick Link’s acclaimed play, Headstrong, a gripping family drama about concussions and sports which Stone Phillips found “funny, frightening, relevant, and enlightening.” Its 2011 predecessor, Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler, about the life and work of British scientist Rosalind Franklin and her role in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, was reprised for the 2011 World Science Festival and was a sold-out hit.

In previous years EST/Sloan has dramatized the travails of two Russian scientists charged with embalming Lenin’s corpse (Lenin’s Embalmers, 2010), the conflict of two generations of black scientists (Relativity, 2006), a solipsistic anthropologist coping with mothering an autistic child (Lucy, 2008), the last days of a tragically irradiated nuclear physicist (Louis Slotin Sonata. 2001), and the romantic resonance discoverable in string theory (String Fever, 2003), among other subjects. In the spring of 2009, Deb Laufer’s End Days brought together the Rapture and Stephen Hawking for what Backstage called “A serious comedy, and the best new play I’ve seen in a long time. Ferociously good.” In 2007 David Zellnik’s Serendib investigated how the dynamics of a group of primate field researchers mirrored the behavior of a troop of Sri Lankan temple monkeys. (“A great play” – NPR) The complete roster of mainstage productions below shows how impressive the range of scientific topics has been:

Season      Featured Play

1997-98    Flight by Arthur Giron (Wright Brothers)

1998–99   Tesla’s Letters by Jeffrey Stanley (physics and engineering)

1999-00   Moving Bodies by Arthur Giron (Richard Feynman – physics)

2000-01    Louis Slotin Sonata by Paul Mullin (Los Alamos Atom Project)

2001-02    Secret Order by Bob Clyman (cancer research)

2002-03    String Fever by Jacqueline Reingold (physics)

2003-04    Tooth and Claw by Michael Hollinger (Galapagos/evolution/biology)

2004-05    Luminescence Dating by Carey Perloff (archaeology)

2005-06    Relativity by Cassandra Medley (melanin research)

2006-07    Serendib by David Zellnik (evolution/genetics/field research)

2007-08    Lucy by Damien Atkins (autism/anthropology)

2008-09    End Days by Deborah Zoe Laufer (cosmology & religion)

2009-10    Lenin’s Embalmers by Vern Thiessen (science of embalming)

2010-11     Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler (women in science/discovery of double helix)

2011-12     Headstrong by Patrick Link (concussions and sports)

The people behind The EST/Sloan Project

Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs, The Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the Sloan Foundation;

William Carden, Artistic Director at EST;

Graeme Gillis, Program Director for EST/Sloan

Linsay Firman, Associate Director for EST/Sloan

EST/Sloan Science Advisors

Darcy Kelley, professor of biological sciences and co-director of the Doctoral Subcommittee in Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University; editor of Journal of Neurobiology.

Stuart Firestein, professor of biological sciences, Columbia University and director of the Firestein Neurobiology lab.

Gabriel Cwilich, associate professor of physics, Yeshiva University

Hall of Fame Linebacker & NY Giants great, Harry Carson calls Headstrong "Outstanding" - WATCH

Hall of Fame Linebacker and all-time NY Giants great, Harry Carson calls Headstrong "Outstanding" and "Very informational" in this footage from Saturday night's post show discussion.

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More videos coming soon.

We are thrilled to announce Headstrong will be extending through May 27!

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Tim Cain in Headstrong

Based on all the enthusiastic response from critics, audiences members and our esteemed panelists, we are extending the run of Headstrong through May 27th!

“Headstrong is a riveting, character-driven work of art. The piece is a must-see..." Aurin Squire reviews Headstrong for TheaterOnline.com!

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Alexander Gemignani & Tim Cain in Headstrong

Aurin Squire reviews Headstrong for TheaterOnline.com!

“Headstrong is a riveting, character-driven work of art. The piece is a must-see for anyone who has an interest in any form of competition. The writer manages to make the world of football players both unnecessarily tragic and universally heroic. In the last year, many media outlets are beginning to turn their attention to the dangers of competitive sports. All of them would be wise to go watch Headstrong and see how a brilliant writer, director, and cast show the complexities of this issue.” – theateronline.com

Click here to read more

“Well-acted and incisively directed by William Carden..." Headstrong gets 3/4 stars from NY Post!

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“Well-acted and incisively directed by William Carden, Headstrong boasts strong characters and pungently funny dialogue. A chilling final twist suggests that the problems facing this tragedy-plagued household are far from over.” – NY Post

Click here to read more!

Headstrong Post-show discussion with Concussion experts Irvin Muchnick & Dr. Annegret Dettwiler-Danspeckgruber: Monday 4/23

Join us for a post-show discussion on Monday 4/23 with Irvin Muchnick, a leading reporter and writer on the concussion crisis in sports.

UPDATE: Just added to the panel is Dr. Annegret Dettwiler-Danspeckgruber, Associate Research Scholar at The Princeton Neuroscience Institute!

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who attended the discussion! Video of the event is below.

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Previews run 4/18 - 4/29!

Click here for tickets.

Click here for more information.

Headstrong Post-show discussion with Neuropsychologist Dr. Jill Brooks & Reuters Health Editor Ivan Oransky: Wednesday 5/2

We are excited to announce another post-show discussion after the Wednesday, May 2nd performance of Headstrong.   The discussion will be moderated by Ivan Oransky, executive editor of Reuters Health, and will include clinical neuropsychologist Dr. Jill Brooks and others.

UPDATE: Just added to our 5/2 panel is Peter Keating, senior writer for ESPN The Magazine!

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Check back soon for more details!

Video from our 5/2 Headstrong post-show discussion with Dr. Jill Brooks, Peter Keating & Ivan Oransky

Just in case you missed it, below is the video from our post-show discussion with clinical neuropsychologist Dr. Jill Brooks, Peter Keating senior writer for ESPN The Magazine &  Ivan Oransky executive editor of Reuters Health.
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Part 2 coming soon!