Playwrights have been writing about science for four hundred years, and we’re wondering if the proliferation of easily accessible information in the 21st century has made it more difficult. Anyone who has ever tried to incorporate the seminal double-slit experiment of physics into a work knows just how tricky writing about science can be. 2010 PTC Associate Jordan Hall set her play Travelling Light among quantum physicists in a research facility. We asked our former Membership Coordinator researcher/theatre-maker Janice Valdez to pursue her interest in science on stage in an interview with Jordan.
About the Play:
In Travelling Light, David, a renowned physicist, vanishes in an accident that cripples his particle accelerator. With rumours of fraud swirling, Cameron, his research partner, struggles to carry on their work – but reaching toward David’s transcendent dream, she finds herself drowning in the morass of corruption, wasted potential, and broken hearts that may have been his undoing.
Janice Valdez: What of your own experience informed your choice to write a play involving particle physics?
Jordan Hall: Foolish exuberance?
I’m not sure if I ever “choose” to start a play. What typically happens is this: Dozens of events and ideas that I’m fascinated or terrified or confused by are percolating around in my back brain until some subconscious catalyst causes the germ of a play to bubble up. In the case of Travelling Light, that brew included the excitement over the activation of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), as well as some of the wilder theories springing up in pop-culture about the consequences of turning it on; TED Talks; Ray Kurzweil’s concept of technological singularity; books like Chris Mooney’s Unscientific America that unpack the disconnect between scientists and the general population in North America; the aesthetics of modern noir; a fascination with the philosophical implications of particle & quantum theory. The materials for an interesting play should generate challenging questions for the writer.
The part of the process where I do make a choice– the part where I keep writing and rewriting long after the initial excitement has worn off and I’m starting to understand just how immense the project might be– depends a great deal on two things: One) a strong sense of the understanding that I want to communicate to the audience, and Two) whether or not distinct character voices and conflicts are emerging from the material. When I began work on Travelling Light, I knew that a man had vanished, and I knew that much of Cameron’s (my protagonist’s) worldview depended on what had ultimately happened to him. I also knew I wanted to try to impart the deep sense of wonder I feel when I consider the ways the sciences, and particle physics in particular, allow us to see the world: The impossible elegance of a handful of particles and basic interactions generating the infinite complexity of existence. It’s beautiful and arbitrary and humbling in the best possible way.
JV: Can you comment on any unexpected results or experiences from your process of writing Travelling Light, so far?
JH: One of my goals with Travelling Light was to stay as close to the actual science as possible. I dislike it when fiction presents science inaccurately for no reason. Which is to say, where accuracy will do no harm to the project, I’d prefer that writers strive to represent scientific concepts as realistically as is possible. (Within our own abilities, that is. I don’t want to pretend that I have any expertise in particle physics, or claim that the physics depicted in this play are a perfect representation.) The process of writing a play where the needs of genre, plot, and scientific accuracy don’t always perfectly align has been a complicated one, but also a fascinating artistic challenge. The play is still developing, but in the current draft there are moments where the placement of revelations has been adjusted to realistically reflect the ways in which results would be delivered, and plot developments changed to speak more accurately to the implications of evidence or lack thereof. You can’t just fire up a particle accelerator and say “Eureka!” There are years spent theorizing and designing devices like the LHC, and even once the experiments are running, it takes months of analyzing data to produce results. The scale of that endeavour is part of the drama of particle physics– but how do you dramatize “big data” analysis? How do you make these complicated processes accessible? How do you relate the findings that result to psychological worlds of your characters? I’m still grappling with these questions.
JV: What, if any, parallels did you see between the science you wrote about and the creative process of playwrighting?
JH: At the heart of both processes is the idea of the experiment, I think. You put forth a theory that describes how you think the world works, and then you design something in an attempt to provide evidence for that theory. You test it out for yourself in your own little laboratory or workshop or brain, and when you think it says what you want it to say, you turn it over to your peers to see if it they get the same results when they try it . A play is a playwright’s hypothesis about the world, that’s all.
(I really wanted to make a joke about playwrights and particle physicists often having to deal with their experiments generating intangible results, but it just didn’t seem fair to either party.)
JV: Plays like Seeds (by Annabel Soutar) and The Laramie Project (by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project) are considered forms of performed research. Would you consider your play a form of performed research?
JH: As much as I think that any play which gives the audience the benefit of a playwright’s distilled understanding could be termed “performed research”, ultimately, I’m going to say no. I’m not even sure I’m comfortable thinking of documentary and/or verbatim plays like Seeds or Extraction (created by Tim Carlson) in that way.
“Documentary”, “verbatim”, and “performed research” are all terms that make claims about the art they describe. “Documentary” claims that what you’re watching is true, in some way. “Verbatim” claims that the words you’re hearing are the words someone spoke. What does “performed research” claim? That my play is somehow objective? That it would hold up to some type of methodological scrutiny? Can any of these claims be true when there’s an artist collecting and distilling and editing the raw materials to suit a project?
The moment you make a claim like “performed research” your responsibilities as an artist become very different from those of someone working in fiction. You have to figure out how you’re going to live up to that claim as best you can– and to manage that while simultaneously creating a compelling piece of art? It’s mind-boggling. I have nothing but admiration for the person who assembles a good documentary or verbatim play.
But to the point: Even though I’ve made a commitment to keep the physics in Travelling Light as close to the actual as my limited understanding allows me to, that was part of the project of writing a fictional play. I wanted to speak about genius, and the push/pull between inspiration and evidence, and the sense of wonder at the world that this branch of scientific thought opens up for me. Fiction gives me the freedom to fine-tune character relationships to underscore those resonances without having to worry about my fidelity to the actual.
(There is, by the way, a terrific documentary about the LHC and the search for the Higgs called Particle Fever, which I’d recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in particle physics. It’s a unique window into the LHC, and the real significance of the Higgs.)
JV: How did you research for your characters who are experts in particle physics? One might think you are a scientist yourself with the way the characters talk.
JH: When you’re researching particle physics, you actually end up reading about a great many physicists as well, and the history of physics is filled with fascinating characters: Lise Meitner, who refused to help develop the atom bomb; Richard Feynman, whose first wife divorced him because he would work on calculus problems while driving the car; Robert Wilson, who discovered the top-quark, and actually became a licensed welder so he could create sculptures for Fermilab– the list goes on and on. Beyond just reading histories and memoirs about these scientists, we also have access to recorded lectures, documentaries, podcasts, and online videos of physicists. Frequently I’d be learning scientific concepts and developing character vocabulary at the same time.
Finally, it is worth noting that dialogue in Travelling Light isn’t really how physicists speak. It’s a particular mélange of scientific vocabulary, elevated diction from philosophical treatises, and banter from screwball comedies. It’s about as close to the speech of real physicists as the dialogue in His Girl Friday is to the day-to-day conversations of journalists.
JV: How do you get into the vocabulary of science for a play in a way that is accessible but still true to the complexity of the science?
JH: You develop the best understanding you can of the concepts in question. You whittle away at metaphors until you think they work effectively. You look for the moments when scientific realities and plot mechanics overlap, and try to figure out which concepts and details it is necessary for the audience to understand, and which they don’t need. You experiment with how much context can carry information. Then you try the play out on readers and audiences and try to identify where they get lost, where they ask the wrong questions, where they’re confused– and you adjust the work to compensate.
Also, you have faith that your audience probably understands more than you think. Collectively, they’re a hell of a lot smarter than you are. Give them a place to start, and they’ll keep up.
About the Playwright:
Jordan Hall is an emerging artist whose work has been dubbed “stellar, insightful” by Plank Magazine, “thoughtful” by CBC Radio, and “vivid, memorable” by NOW. Her first full-length play, Kayak, won Samuel French’s 2010 Canadian Playwrights Competition, and has been produced to critical acclaim across Canada. An Associate at Playwrights Theatre Centre from 2010-2013, she is currently Playwright-in-Residence at Pi Theatre, with support from the BCAC to develop her upcoming play, How to Survive an Apocalypse. As a screenwriter, Jordan recently co-created Carmilla: The Series for SmokeBomb Entertainment. She has also been a finalist in both the LA Comedy Fest and Beverly Hills Short Screenplay Competitions, as well as a winner of the Crazy8s Short Film Production Competition. As a dramaturg, Jordan worked on The Hearing of Jeremy Hinzman at the 2012 Summerworks Festival, and spent five years as a mentor for UBC’s Booming Ground program.
Jordan has written both speculative fiction (Kayak, Run Dry) and science fiction (The Second Last Man on Earth, Do Over). Travelling Light is her first piece of hard science fiction.
If you want to know more about Jordan Hall, go to http://www.jordanhall.ca/
About the Interviewer:
Janice Valdez is a researcher, theatre maker, actor, singer and alumni of PTC’s Block A playwriting group of 2012. Janice is doing her PhD studies in research-based theatre at the University of British Columbia as part of the Language and Literacy in Education Department under the supervision of Dr. George Belliveau. Janice volunteered to interview Jordan Hall for this Science on Stage blog stemming from her own curiosity about the similarities of creative process and concepts of experimentation among artists and scientists.
