Generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, bridging science and the arts in the modern world.
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An Enemy of the People
By: Henrik Ibsen
When a small town relies on tourists flocking to its baths, will a report of dangerously polluted waters be enough to shut them down? Henrik Ibsen weighs the cost of public health versus a town’s livelihood in An Enemy of the People.
And The Sun Stood Still
By: Dava Sobel
Dava Sobel’s thoughtful play brings to life the story of Nicolaus Copernicus, the Renaissance astronomer and mathematician who proposed the heliocentric model of the universe in which the Sun stands at the center. Plagued by self-doubt and threatened by religious censure, Copernicus resisted the publication of his work until just before his death in 1543. The play follows Copernicus in those final years as he works to complete his research with the help of Georg Rheticus, a young disciple from Wittenberg, Germany.
Arcadia
By: Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard's Arcadia merges science with human concerns and ideals, examining the universe's influence in our everyday lives and ultimate fates through relationship between past and present, order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. Set in an English country house in the years 1809-1812 and 1989, the play examines the lives of two modern scholars and the house's current residents with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier. Music composed and arranged by John Rubinstein.
Behind the Sheet
An important medical breakthrough has a shameful history. In 1840’s Alabama, a slave-owning doctor performs medical experiments on involuntary subjects – enslaved women – in an effort to solve the problem of fistulas, a post-childbirth anomaly. As the experiments proceed, and he gets close to a solution, the women try to survive and even find dignity in the face of inhuman treatment.
Boy
By: Anna Ziegler
Anna Ziegler’s Boy is a powerful statement about sexual identity and the mystery of what makes us who we are. After a baby boy is seriously injured in an accident, a doctor persuades his parents to raise the child as a girl. As the child grows up, the child—known as Samantha and Adam at different times—faces an extraordinary challenge to carve out a place in the world.
Breaking the Code
By: Hugh Whitemore
Brilliant mathematician Alan Turing cracked the German Enigma code and enabled the Allies to win World War II. But Turing was to find that the country he saved cared less about his genius and more about his sexual orientation.
Bump
By: Chiara Atik
What not to expect when you're expecting! Based on the true story of Jorge Odón and the birthing device he invented in his garage, playwright Chiara Atik's comedy spans time and space in an effort to grapple with the mystery and the miracle of maternity.
Completeness
By: Itamar Moses
A play about love between gun-shy young scientists. Just how does a computer scientist romance a molecular biologist? Elliot offers to build a computer program to help Molly with her latest research project, but they discover that love just might be the winning formula—if they can only move beyond their fear and past heartbreak.
Continuity
By: Bess Wohl
A sheet of ice sits in the desert of New Mexico. A mad eco-terrorist plants a bomb in order to save humankind. A beleaguered film crew tries to get in one last shot before losing the light. Storytelling and science collide with hilarious and devastating consequences.
Copenhagen
By: Michael Frayn
How different would the world have looked had the Nazis been the first to build an atomic bomb? Werner Heisenberg, one of Hitler's lead nuclear scientists, famously and mysteriously met in Copenhagen with his colleague and mentor, Niels Bohr, one of the founders of the Manhattan Project. Michael Frayn's Tony Award®-winning drama imagines their reunion. Joined by Niels' wife, Margrethe, these three brilliant minds converge for an encounter of atomic proportions.
Doctor Cerberus
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s coming-of-age, coming-out cocktail with a twist of terror. Thirteen-year-old Franklin Robertson is trying to survive adolescence. His parents don’t understand him, his brother torments him, he has no friends, and he’s more interested in the high school quarterback than any girl. The one bright spot in his life is the glow of the black-and-white TV in his parents’ basement. Here, he worships at the altar of the Saturday Night Horror Movie, hosted by the eerie Dr. Cerberus. Before long, Franklin is convinced that only by going on the show will his life be redeemed—by Dr. Cerberus himself!
The Doctor's Dilemma
The blowhards, the know-it-alls, the scrupulous and the impecunious are all targets for Shaw’s incisive wit in his classic satire of the medical profession. A well-respected physician is forced to choose whom he shall save: a bumbling friend or the ne’er-do-well husband of the woman he loves.
Donny's Brain
By: Rona Munro
The acclaimed Scottish playwright Rona Munro has created a remarkable story about a man who wakes up from a car crash with brain damage. Now, he sees the world as the person he was three years ago, when his life and loves were in a very different place.
End Days
In Deborah Zoe Laufer’s End Days, a suburban family is undergoing a spiritual crisis following the September 11th attacks. Sylvia Stein has turned to Christianity to save her disaffected husband Arthur and her rebellious teenage daughter Rachel. But as Sylvia races around preparing for the Rapture, Rachel is learning that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in her philosophy.
The Explorers Club
By: Nell Benjamin
It’s London, 1879, and the hapless members of the Explorers Club must confront their most lethal threat yet: the admission of a woman into their hermetically-sealed ranks. But the intrepid Phyllida Spotte-Hume turns out to be the least of their troubles, in this hilarious farce starring members of the original Broadway cast.
Extinction
By: Hannie Rayson
A zoologist in Australia gets funding to save an endangered species from the very company that threatens its existence. Will this deal with the devil allow her to save the species, or will it destroy her entire life's work? Playwright and newspaper columnist Hannie Rayson's play about the urgent need to combat man-made climate change to protect biodiversity.
Fake
By: Eric Simonson
Oscar-winning and Tony-nominated writer and director Eric Simonson explores the most famous archeological hoax in history. Alternating between 1914 and 1953, journalists and scientists set out to uncover who planted the Piltdown Man skull. Everyone’s a suspect, including legendary Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Franklinland
By: Lloyd Suh
This comic romp through the American Revolution puts the spotlight on the relationship between William Franklin and his brilliant, domineering and wildly egomaniacal father Ben. As Ben Franklin plants the seeds of a new republic, King George III appoints William Royal Governor of New Jersey – a change in affairs that creates a family rift of revolutionary proportions.
The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial
By: Peter Goodchild
The Scopes Trial, over the right to teach evolution in public schools, reaffirmed the importance of intellectual freedom as codified in the Bill of Rights. The trial, in a small-town Tennessee courtroom in 1925, set the stage for ongoing debates over the separation of Church and State in a democratic society—debates that continue to this day. Peter Goodchild used transcripts from the trial to create this intense docudrama.
Headstrong
By: Patrick Link
In the wake of increasing concern over brain trauma in professional athletes, Patrick Link has crafted a story about a retired NFL linebacker who must deal with a family tragedy and his own suffering because of the violence of his chosen sport.
An Immaculate Misconception
By: Carl Djerassi
Dr. Melanie Laidlaw is a scientist developing the first use of ICSI, short for intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Her collaborator, Dr. Felix Frankenthaler, turns out to have his own ideas about how to implement their new procedure. The wild card is Melanie’s new lover, Menachem Dvir, a fellow scientist. Carl Djerassi’s darkly comic ménage-à-trois plays out not only in bedrooms and labs, but also in test tubes and under the microscope.
Intelligence-Slave
By: Kenneth Lin
The story of Curt Herzstark, an Austrian industrialist and concentration camp prisoner who was sent by the Nazis to an underground salt mine during the war. While in captivity, he continued his experiments with a device that would eventually become the hand-held calculator.
Lenin's Embalmers
By: Vern Thiessen
After Vladimir Lenin’s death, Stalin orders two Jewish scientists to preserve Lenin’s body for all time. If they succeed, the rewards will be considerable. If not, it’s the gulag – or worse. Based on real events, Vern Theissen’s nimble dark comedy exposes the absurdities of Soviet life under Stalin.
Life on Paper
By: Kenneth Lin
One of the world’s wealthiest men has died in a plane crash. The insurance company representing the airline assigns math genius Mitch Bloom to the case to minimize their payout – but Mitch finds himself facing a formidable opponent in Ida Watkins, a small town actuary who challenges his ideas about the value of a human life. Includes an interview with playwright Kenneth Lin.
The Lost World
By: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Adapted by: John de Lancie, Nat Segaloff
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s rollicking adventure tale follows a scientific expedition deep into the Amazon jungle—right back into the time of dinosaurs and cavemen. Before Jurassic Park, before Indiana Jones—there was The Lost World! Adapted by John de Lancie and Nat Segaloff. Original music composed and performed by Peter Erskine.
Lucy
By: Damien Atkins
In a thought-provoking play by Damien Atkins, thirteen-year-old Lucy, who suffers from autism, moves in with her estranged and misanthropic mother. Having lived her entire life with her father, Lucy, as well as her mom, struggle with all the difficulties of such an arrangement.
Moving Bodies
By: Arthur Giron
A chronicle of the brilliant life of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman. From his role in the development of the atomic bomb to his controversial testimony at the investigation of the Challenger disaster, Feynman casts a long shadow across the worlds of physics and mathematics. Through playwright Arthur Giron’s eyes, we see how Feynman became one of the most important scientists of our time.
Nan and the Lower Body
By: Jessica Dickey
Nan takes a prestigious research position working for Dr. George Papanicolaou, the inventor of the Pap smear. The doctor worries Nan's new husband might distract from their important work, but Nan has a secret that could upend everyone's plans for her.
The Other Place
By: Sharr White
Nan takes a prestigious research position working for Dr. George Papanicolaou, the inventor of the Pap smear. The doctor worries Nan's new husband might distract from their important work, but Nan has a secret that could upend everyone's plans for her
Paradise
Yasmeen is a Yemeni-American high school senior with big dreams. Dr. Guy Royston is her science teacher with a mysterious past. When Yasmeen asks Dr. Royston for an important favor, it sets off a series of events that challenges their core beliefs about science, faith and the nature of love. Includes a conversation with playwright Laura Maria Censabella.
Photograph 51
By: Anna Ziegler
Rosalind Franklin was a gifted research scientist who was part of the race to uncover the secrets of DNA in the 1950’s. Her more famous contemporaries Watson and Krick took all the kudos for the discovery of the molecule’s double helix structure—yet it was Franklin’s skill with X-ray diffraction that first uncovered what’s called “the secret of life.”
The Physicists
In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, Johann Mobius, the world’s greatest physicist, is locked away in a madhouse along with two other scientists. Why? Because he is haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon, and the other two are convinced they are Einstein and Newton. But are these three actually mad? Or are they playing a murderous game with the world at stake? This darkly comic satire probes the cost of sanity among men of science and whether it is the mad who are the truly sane.
Please Continue
By: Frank Basloe
Based on the true story of renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram, Please Continue recounts the infamous obedience experiments at Yale in the 1960s. In that study, participants were asked to administer strong electric shocks to a subject who gave the wrong answer to a question, not knowing that the shocks were fake, and they were the real subject of the study. The play examines how the experiments gave insight into the nature of authoritarianism and individual morality.
Proof
By: David Auburn
An enigmatic young woman. A manipulative sister. Their brilliant father. An unexpected suitor. One life-altering question. The search for the truth behind a mysterious mathematical proof is the perplexing problem in David Auburn’s dynamic play. Proof won both a Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The Real Doctor Strangelove
By: Peter Goodchild
The birth of Armageddon. The first H-Bomb detonates and the proud father is Edward Teller. But he’s on a collision course with Robert Oppenheimer, head of the team that created the Atomic bomb. Now Oppenheimer has turned pacifist and the government will stop at nothing to neutralize him. And Teller is their star witness. Peter Goodchild based the play on his book.
Relativity
By: Cassandra Medley
At the center of Cassandra Medley’s play is the controversial idea that higher concentrations of melanin in the genetic makeup of people of color make them mentally, physically, and spiritually superior. Based on the scientific studies of her now-deceased father, Kalima, a fledgling molecular scientist looking to come into her own, has a difficult time owning his flawed research. Her mother Claire, who carries her deceased husband’s scientific torch, has a hard time reckoning with her daughter’s enlightenment.
The Ruby Sunrise
By: Rinne Groff
Hailed by The Boston Globe as “a gem,” The Ruby Sunrise begins when a 1920s tomboy feverishly works to develop her latest invention—a little something called “television.” Twenty-five years later, her daughter will stop at nothing to bring her mother’s incredible story to life during TV’s Golden Age. But will it get the truth it deserves?
Secret Order
By: Bob Clyman
In the high-stakes world of cancer research, Dr. William Shumway has just made a stunning breakthrough. But is it really the long-sought cure for cancer? Despite the young scientist’s reservations, a senior mentor pressures him to trumpet his findings to the world. Part medical drama, part suspense-filled thriller, Bob Clyman’s Secret Order turns its microscope on bioethics, money and power.
Spill
In April of 2010, British Petroleum gave orders to speed up production on its colossal drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon. Despite the objections of many on the rig, safety measures were ignored or overlooked. On April 20th, the Deepwater Horizon exploded. Eleven men paid the ultimate price and countless thousands who call the Gulf Coast home found their lives irrevocably altered.
Tooth and Claw
In an emotional ecosystem as complex as that of our planet, is life nothing more than survival of the fittest? Michael Hollinger based his probing work on the real-life giant tortoise named ‘Lonesome George’, and the efforts to preserve his species that threatened the livelihood of the native fishermen on the Galàpagos Islands.
War of the Worlds
By: H.G. Wells
Join actors from Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation as they recreate this classic radio thriller. The breathless pace and convincing details make it clear why the 1938 broadcast of an “eyewitness report” of an invasion from Mars caused a nationwide panic. Originally directed by Orson Welles and performed by his Mercury Theatre of the Air, War of the Worlds is an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel of the same name.
What You Are Now
By: Sam Chanse
Are we stuck with our memories – or can we fix them? Pia is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on changing the way we process traumatic experiences. Will Pia’s emotionally distant mother - who survived the Khmer Rouge in 1970’s Cambodia – benefit from her daughter’s work? Or are some things just too terrible to remember?
