A couple of weeks back, I stopped in on Mickle Maher’s “Working With the Playwright” class, where Maher is working with students to write an adaptation of Constantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares for a spring production at the New Logan Center for the Arts. I’m a 2010 UT alum, and I’m writing an article on the process for the University arts website.
The stage is set for the class, with Danzig leading.
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Watch THE HOMECOMING‘s director Will Bishop and Andrew Cutler, playing Lenny, discuss working together, working on Pinter’s text, and more.
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To help us prepare for The Physicists, dramaturg Peter Borah runs us quickly through the history of science.
“The Physicists was written in 1961, which was a pretty unique time in the history of science. The weird thing is that people really cared about science, in a way they never had before. In the middle ages, science was something afew pointy-headed academics did. After the scientific revolution, science was seen as something more useful, but not especially more so than anything else. As late as the turn of the century, science was still a small-potatoes enterprise done in back rooms of universities. However, by the sixties, science had been launched into a position of unprecedented prestige and importance by WWII, the Bomb, and the Space Race. In the late fifties we get huge pushes for science education in the US, and scientific progress is seen as a major political issue.
The Bomb
One of the biggest reasons for this is the atomic bomb. There are few single events that changed the world as thoroughly as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. WWII was an incredibly destructive and deadly war, but at least people mostly died the old-fashioned way. But, with the invention of The Bomb, suddenly entire cities can vaporized by anyone with a plane and enough science.
The State of Physics
This new focus on science (especially physics) led to a level of prestige that has rarely been matched before or since. There was a huge influx of new young physicists, and established physicists were given a great deal of funding for a variety of research projects. The universities were still major centers of physics research, but government projects and even private laboratories started to fund a great deal of research as well.
Intellectually, physics was in a period of great change. Around 1930 the discoveries of general relativity and quantum mechanics overturned pretty much everything we thought we knew about science. Newton’s mechanics had long been the standard example of rock-solid scientific truth, and suddenly they no longer applied. By 1961 physicists had absorbed the implications of this, and were starting to make major strides in understanding these theories. There was hope that a “unified field theory” might soon be found, which could describe all the fundamental physical forces under one theory. (Einstein worked on this for many years, up to his death.) There was a great deal of optimism that physics would continue to progress at a tremendous speed, and that breakthroughs even more fundamental than relativity or quantum might be just around the corner.”
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