Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen , Kirsten Shepherd-Barr , Princeton U. Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006. $29.95 (271 pp.). ISBN 0-691-12150-8
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr’s Science on Stage: From “Doctor Faustus” to “Copenhagen” misses a few hundred quotation marks—specifically each time the word science is used. The author’s concept of science is, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic. For instance, Tony Kushner’s deservedly famous Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which debuted in 1991, is considered a “science play” because one of the characters suffers from AIDS. Shepherd-Barr focuses on what science can do for the theater and totally ignores the opposite proposition, which deserves equal attention: what the stage can do for science.
Shepherd-Barr not only uses the term “science on stage” to apply to any play that somehow features such names as Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Nikola Tesla, Richard Feynman, or Erwin Schrödinger but also goes so far as to state that “even the way in which theater scholars are trained to research and publish their work derives from and emulates the scientific model” (page 38). Her main argument, on page 4, is that science plays cannot be categorized according to content “because they fail to take theatricality into account.”
But what is theatrical for some is kitsch or worse for others. The theatricality of any play is greatly affected by how the director and actors approach it, and Shepherd-Barr clearly has seen very few different productions of the same play. In fact, she probably has seen only a small percentage of the 122-odd plays listed in the appendix, “Four Centuries of Science Plays: An Annotated List.” So many plays on that list had only a single run or, even more frequently, a single reading or workshop presentation. Clearly, her judgment could at best be based on textual scrutiny.
Yet let me take just one play as an example: Michael Frayn’s 1998 Copenhagen, to which the author gives more attention than any other. According to Shepherd-Barr’s genuinely thorough and sophisticated analysis, Frayn’s is a science play par excellence, an opinion I share, and, according to her, superb in its theatricality. But her analysis is clearly based on a viewing of Michael Blakemore’s brilliant original staging. What about the German production, with its typical example of Regietheater in which any modification of the playwright’s text and directorial instructions is considered fair game and in which Werner Heisenberg is made to do somersaults? Some would call that “theatrical”; Frayn, on the other hand, used very different and rather pejorative terms.
Shepherd-Barr is so enamored by “theatricality” that she dedicates the entire last chapter, “Alternative Currents: New Trends in Science and Theater,” to the concept. Actually, her wide-ranging generalities are based only on three theater directors: Luca Ronconi, who is Italian; Jean-François Peyret, who is French; and British director Simon McBurney. She ascribes to Anglo–Saxon backwardness the fact that neither Ronconi nor Peyret has ever been presented on the Anglo–American stage, but disregards that Ronconi’s requirement for a five-story building set on stage or the need for a large repertoire-style theater group in staging Peyret’s plays can hardly be accommodated by the commercial Anglo–American theater. Her ignoring practical considerations is typical of academic theater scholars unconcerned with the fact that, in the end, a play is only a play if it is performed on the stage on more than a single occasion or is at least widely disseminated in a book.
Such unconcern over the facts of theatrical life is illustrated by the author’s dedicating six pages to the old 1948 play by Hallie Flanagan Davis, E = mc2 , which requires 75 actors and has not been staged for the past 40 years. But she provides only one sentence and no index entry for a modern and highly successful play like Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code, which is about the life of Alan Turing; moreover, she misat-tributes the work to the playwright Stephen Poliakoff. Yet she does not hesitate to emphasize approvingly on page 200 that the apparent wave of new theatricality about to engulf “traditional” theater is being “devised by contemporary theater practitioners … who present alternative approaches that try more directly to engage the audience with the ideas themselves.”
Shepherd-Barr considers Copenhagen “conceptually quite traditional,” and “heavily textural,” using “science, biography, and history to frame its main concerns” (page 201). Direct citations of Ronconi and Peyret illustrate what these new “science theater directors” are after. The author writes on page 202 that Peyret calls Copenhagen “fake theater” that is “for the museum.” She further adds that Ronconi, too, feels similarly about Copenhagen, “there being no question that the text drives these productions.” (I can see Shakespeare rising from his grave!) According to Peyret (page 202), if audience members “want to know whether Heisenberg was good or bad, they have access to the scientific debates … they don’t have to see a play.” And, he adds (page 207), “We don’t have to do night school. … We do not do scientific theater, we in fact do not even know what that means.”
The final chapter is replete with such preposterously one-sided, black-and-white wisecracks. The theatrical science theater by the new directors is undoubtedly novel and on occasion very interesting. But whether that style, with its deliberate elimination of the scientist from the scientific discovery, represents a wave or a passing fad remains to be seen. In any event, it does little for science.
So, what is good about Science on Stage? It represents a well-written and super-detailed account of a handful of “science” plays from Doctor Faustus and The Alchemist, written centuries ago, to Galileo, The Physicists , and other plays of the first half of the 20th century. The book also contains excellent analyses of some contemporary science plays such as Copenhagen and Arcadia to provide, as the author writes, “a sense, through specific examples, of what I judge to be core science plays.” Her comment is fair enough, provided that her subjectivity and bias are recognized. But I worry when Shepherd-Barr concludes that her book should “help teachers design and implement courses on science plays.” Her definition of science plays is idiosyncratic, and teachers ought to cover all views of how science on stage can be presented, not just Shepherd-Barr’s.
Carl Djerassi is a professor emeritus of chemistry at Stanford University in California. He has written five novels and eight plays, including Calculus and Phallacy, which is scheduled to debut in May 2007 at New York City’s Cherry Lane Theatre.
