- QED Home
- Diagrams and Equations
- Singing and Drumming
- What We Know
- The Chief of Bali Hai
- Physics X Class
- The Nobel Prize
- Tuva or Bust!
- The Challenger
- The Connection Machine
- Feynman's Cancer
- Hot Springs at Esalen
- Los Alamos from Below
- Safecracking
- Feynman and family
- Feynman and Art
- Topless bars
- CalTech
- Feynman Lectures
- Hans Bethe
- Production History
LA Times Review, March 2001, Mark Taper Forum
|MICHAEL PHILLIPS | TIMES THEATER CRITIC"Physics is like sex," Richard Feynman once said, honing both his philosophic worldview and his pickup lines. "Sure, it has some practical results, but that's not why we do it."
You don't hear that one in "QED," Peter Parnell's 1 1/2-person play now in its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. You hear many others, though. The bongo-slapping, California Institute of Technology-affiliated, Nobel Prize-winning physicist--for much of the 20th century, the world's ideal of a really fun science guy--died in 1988. Now he has returned for one more office-hours chat, with Alan Alda having a ball as Feynman. Allison Smith takes the 1/2-role, that of Feynman's wide-eyed, bushy-tailed student, eager for knowledge.In addition to quod erat demonstrandum (that proves it), QED stands for quantum electrodynamics, a theory (in the words of John and Mary Gribbin, writing in "Richard Feynman: A Life in Science") describing "all interactions involving light (photons) and charged particles . . . as far as the everyday world is concerned, QED explains everything that isn't explained by gravity."
For those who feel they may need a little lie-down after reading that, let alone anything more detailed on the subject, don't worry. Parnell, a co-producer on TV's "The West Wing," last represented at the Taper by his two-part adaptation of "The Cider House Rules," throws a fair amount of physics at the audience, but in a don't-worry-be-happy way. It's not crucial to catch it all. It's the man behind the theories, and the bongos, that got Alda, Parnell and director Gordon Davidson thinking about Feynman's stage possibilities.
Those possibilities have emerged only partly realized. After an engaging first act, "QED" loses its way in the second, uncertain in terms of form and focus. Alda's an enthusiastic presence throughout, and his audience rapport is formidable--as was Feynman's. But the actor, who initiated this project, can do only so much to suggest what the text avoids--namely, anything messy or controversial, any of Feynman's true, rich contradictions. Feynman's many fans will find nothing to offend them here. That's not necessarily a sign of dramaturgical success.
The play is set in June 1986, in Feynman's Caltech office. He enters pounding away on his beloved drum, to the tune of "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame." Tonight Feynman will portray the chief of Bali Ha'i in the Caltech production of "South Pacific." Meantime, he has a lecture to write, on the topic of "What We Know."
He listens to his phone messages, then turns to the audience and tells story after story, many of them funny, some moving. The most affecting material relates to his involvement in the Manhattan Project, coinciding with the death of his first wife, Arline.
Early on, "QED" settles comfortably into the shoes of solo shows like "Tru" (Capote, that is) or "Full Gallop," the Diana Vreeland tribute. But then we hear the voice of That Second Character, student Miriam Field (Smith) outside Feynman's door. He agrees to see her in a half-hour. Feynman talks to us some more, before heading off to do his show, and to greet some well-lubricated Russian friends whom Feyman's pal Ralph Leighton is hosting.
Act 2 makes an attempt at actual two-character-playdom, for the worse. After the post-performance party, the student follows Feynman back to his office, to talk about her future in physics and to let him sketch her portrait. He undergoes a bout of the late-night fantods; she helps him through it.
Alas, this is Parnell's least convincing material. Though director Davidson guides "QED" with a steady hand, he and choreographer Donald McKayle err in trying to turn the drum-crazy dance into an audience-pleasing climax.
There's so much raw material here, so many choice anecdotes. Feynman was the one who, with one plop of an O-ring into a glass of ice water, explained NASA's space shuttle Challenger disaster. The kid from Far Rockaway in Queens, N.Y., the enfant terrible of the Manhattan Project, made physics hot, both as high science and pop art. All that, and Feynman liked to hang out in Gionanni's, a strip joint not far from his home, the one where he spent his years with his third wife. (His second marriage has been airbrushed out of the play and, oddly, even out of the Taper program's Feynman timeline.)
Parnell crams in as much as he can. What's missing from "QED" is the stuff that makes academia such an innately theatrical wellspring--the rivalries, the charges of theory-swiping, the back-stabbing. Parnell (like Alda, to some extent) is eager to make us like his subject, though he has ignored a lot of what makes him provocative. It's an entertaining introductory course for an act--Alda is very easy company--but I didn't buy a photon of Act 2.
You don't hear that one in "QED," Peter Parnell's 1 1/2-person play now in its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. You hear many others, though. The bongo-slapping, California Institute of Technology-affiliated, Nobel Prize-winning physicist--for much of the 20th century, the world's ideal of a really fun science guy--died in 1988. Now he has returned for one more office-hours chat, with Alan Alda having a ball as Feynman. Allison Smith takes the 1/2-role, that of Feynman's wide-eyed, bushy-tailed student, eager for knowledge.In addition to quod erat demonstrandum (that proves it), QED stands for quantum electrodynamics, a theory (in the words of John and Mary Gribbin, writing in "Richard Feynman: A Life in Science") describing "all interactions involving light (photons) and charged particles . . . as far as the everyday world is concerned, QED explains everything that isn't explained by gravity."
For those who feel they may need a little lie-down after reading that, let alone anything more detailed on the subject, don't worry. Parnell, a co-producer on TV's "The West Wing," last represented at the Taper by his two-part adaptation of "The Cider House Rules," throws a fair amount of physics at the audience, but in a don't-worry-be-happy way. It's not crucial to catch it all. It's the man behind the theories, and the bongos, that got Alda, Parnell and director Gordon Davidson thinking about Feynman's stage possibilities.
Those possibilities have emerged only partly realized. After an engaging first act, "QED" loses its way in the second, uncertain in terms of form and focus. Alda's an enthusiastic presence throughout, and his audience rapport is formidable--as was Feynman's. But the actor, who initiated this project, can do only so much to suggest what the text avoids--namely, anything messy or controversial, any of Feynman's true, rich contradictions. Feynman's many fans will find nothing to offend them here. That's not necessarily a sign of dramaturgical success.
The play is set in June 1986, in Feynman's Caltech office. He enters pounding away on his beloved drum, to the tune of "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame." Tonight Feynman will portray the chief of Bali Ha'i in the Caltech production of "South Pacific." Meantime, he has a lecture to write, on the topic of "What We Know."
He listens to his phone messages, then turns to the audience and tells story after story, many of them funny, some moving. The most affecting material relates to his involvement in the Manhattan Project, coinciding with the death of his first wife, Arline.
Early on, "QED" settles comfortably into the shoes of solo shows like "Tru" (Capote, that is) or "Full Gallop," the Diana Vreeland tribute. But then we hear the voice of That Second Character, student Miriam Field (Smith) outside Feynman's door. He agrees to see her in a half-hour. Feynman talks to us some more, before heading off to do his show, and to greet some well-lubricated Russian friends whom Feyman's pal Ralph Leighton is hosting.
Act 2 makes an attempt at actual two-character-playdom, for the worse. After the post-performance party, the student follows Feynman back to his office, to talk about her future in physics and to let him sketch her portrait. He undergoes a bout of the late-night fantods; she helps him through it.
Alas, this is Parnell's least convincing material. Though director Davidson guides "QED" with a steady hand, he and choreographer Donald McKayle err in trying to turn the drum-crazy dance into an audience-pleasing climax.
There's so much raw material here, so many choice anecdotes. Feynman was the one who, with one plop of an O-ring into a glass of ice water, explained NASA's space shuttle Challenger disaster. The kid from Far Rockaway in Queens, N.Y., the enfant terrible of the Manhattan Project, made physics hot, both as high science and pop art. All that, and Feynman liked to hang out in Gionanni's, a strip joint not far from his home, the one where he spent his years with his third wife. (His second marriage has been airbrushed out of the play and, oddly, even out of the Taper program's Feynman timeline.)
Parnell crams in as much as he can. What's missing from "QED" is the stuff that makes academia such an innately theatrical wellspring--the rivalries, the charges of theory-swiping, the back-stabbing. Parnell (like Alda, to some extent) is eager to make us like his subject, though he has ignored a lot of what makes him provocative. It's an entertaining introductory course for an act--Alda is very easy company--but I didn't buy a photon of Act 2.
Variety Review, March 2001, Mark Taper Forum
By STEVEN OXMAN Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman apparently pronounced the word "in-ter-est-ing" making sure all the syllables were distinct. And, as depicted by Alan Alda in Peter Parnell's play, "QED," Feynman found lots of things highly "in-ter-est-ing." This is the genius, after all, who contributed some essential understanding to our knowledge of the universe, and who also loved playing hand drums, performing bit roles in theatrical productions at his home base of Cal Tech and learning lots about a tiny, distant country because he found the odd spelling of its capital city "in-ter-est-ing." A well-cast Alda captures this blend of eclectic curiosity and irrepressible enthusiasm, qualities that make the first act of this work an entertaining and informative portrait. But as a play, Parnell's "QED," receiving its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, never engages with its subject in any imaginative way, and ultimately reduces big ideas to transparent sentimentality. There's poetic injustice in portraying in the most conventional way possible a man who questioned the traditional approach to everything.The play is inspired by the writings of Feynman and his long-time friend Ralph Leighton, particularly on their work "Tuva or Bust!" Tuva, or actually Tannu Tuva, is the name of the land Feynman impulsively began investigating when he discovered its bizarrely named capital. His offbeat interest in visiting the place and the zeal with which he pursued it (learning the language, studying its folk tales) demonstrated his remarkable capacity for letting his mind go wherever it took him -- which is exactly what made him such an important scientist.
With this characteristic at its core, Parnell has fashioned what is in essence a one-man show, although another character, a physics student of Feynman's played by Allison Smith, does make a couple of appearances. Alda addresses the audience in Feynman's voice as he prepares a lecture with the overarching theme "What We Know," which this gives him an opportunity to reflect on his extraordinary life.
He talks of his time at Los Alamos, where he contributed to the development of the atom bomb. He goes into various tangents about his most important work, trying in bits and pieces to explain his still-governing theory of quantum electrodynamics (thus the title, which also refers to the Latin acronym often seen at the end of complex mathematical solutions). A force of nature himself, he thinks out loud about the nature of nature, which "doesn't give up its secrets easily," and how it's necessary for people to come to terms with essential doubt.
His ponderings get interrupted by a series of phone calls. Some of these deal with his involvement in investigating, and solving, the mystery of the space shuttle Challenger's disastrous fate. But more often on the other line are doctors who discuss with him the newly found cancerous tumor dangerously close to his only remaining kidney.
"QED" touches on so many different themes that talking about it at length would make it sound deep indeed, since, as Feynman says toward the end, "Everything is in-ter-est-ing if you look at it deeply enough." Parnell, however, looks at everything very superficially, particularly the dramatic choice he places at the center of the piece -- whether Feynman will decide to have a risky operation to remove the tumor. Whatever possibilities exist for contemplating a great scientist forced to confront his own mortality get reduced to pure saccharine. This is where the second character comes in, as Parnell creates a cliched scene in which Feynman's good-looking female student reminds him of life's pleasures. Smith is fine in the role, but it's not much of a role.
Plays about scientists form a dramatic genre of their own. Many of them deal with how politics can collide with science, like Brecht's "Galileo" and Howard Brenton's "The Genius." There's Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt's fanciful "The Physicists," and Hugh Whitemore's more traditional bio-play "Breaking the Code," about mathematician Alan Turing. Michael Frayn, in his Tony Award-winning "Copenhagen," depicting a meeting between nuclear physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, found a way to infuse the structure of the scientific subject itself into the dramaturgy. In his plays "Hapgood" and "Arcadia," Tom Stoppard played artistically with scientific principles even though the works were not about science directly.
"QED" pales in comparison to all of these plays, primarily because it talks about ideas without developing them or finding a way to reflect them theatrically. When taking on a subject like Feynman, one is really taking on the structure of the world itself, because that's what he cared about. Here, all we get are cute quips, albeit nicely delivered by Alda, a seasoned and likable pro.
Director Gordon Davidson stages it all as well as possible, keeping Alda moving around but not letting it get jittery. D. Martyn Bookwalter's lighting and Ralph Funicello's realistic set, depicting Feynman's office at Cal Tech with equations cluttering the blackboard, are also perfectly fine.
In the end, we're left knowing a few more facts about a very in-ter-est-ing man, but the piece lacks both insight and creativity.
With this characteristic at its core, Parnell has fashioned what is in essence a one-man show, although another character, a physics student of Feynman's played by Allison Smith, does make a couple of appearances. Alda addresses the audience in Feynman's voice as he prepares a lecture with the overarching theme "What We Know," which this gives him an opportunity to reflect on his extraordinary life.
He talks of his time at Los Alamos, where he contributed to the development of the atom bomb. He goes into various tangents about his most important work, trying in bits and pieces to explain his still-governing theory of quantum electrodynamics (thus the title, which also refers to the Latin acronym often seen at the end of complex mathematical solutions). A force of nature himself, he thinks out loud about the nature of nature, which "doesn't give up its secrets easily," and how it's necessary for people to come to terms with essential doubt.
His ponderings get interrupted by a series of phone calls. Some of these deal with his involvement in investigating, and solving, the mystery of the space shuttle Challenger's disastrous fate. But more often on the other line are doctors who discuss with him the newly found cancerous tumor dangerously close to his only remaining kidney.
"QED" touches on so many different themes that talking about it at length would make it sound deep indeed, since, as Feynman says toward the end, "Everything is in-ter-est-ing if you look at it deeply enough." Parnell, however, looks at everything very superficially, particularly the dramatic choice he places at the center of the piece -- whether Feynman will decide to have a risky operation to remove the tumor. Whatever possibilities exist for contemplating a great scientist forced to confront his own mortality get reduced to pure saccharine. This is where the second character comes in, as Parnell creates a cliched scene in which Feynman's good-looking female student reminds him of life's pleasures. Smith is fine in the role, but it's not much of a role.
Plays about scientists form a dramatic genre of their own. Many of them deal with how politics can collide with science, like Brecht's "Galileo" and Howard Brenton's "The Genius." There's Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt's fanciful "The Physicists," and Hugh Whitemore's more traditional bio-play "Breaking the Code," about mathematician Alan Turing. Michael Frayn, in his Tony Award-winning "Copenhagen," depicting a meeting between nuclear physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, found a way to infuse the structure of the scientific subject itself into the dramaturgy. In his plays "Hapgood" and "Arcadia," Tom Stoppard played artistically with scientific principles even though the works were not about science directly.
"QED" pales in comparison to all of these plays, primarily because it talks about ideas without developing them or finding a way to reflect them theatrically. When taking on a subject like Feynman, one is really taking on the structure of the world itself, because that's what he cared about. Here, all we get are cute quips, albeit nicely delivered by Alda, a seasoned and likable pro.
Director Gordon Davidson stages it all as well as possible, keeping Alda moving around but not letting it get jittery. D. Martyn Bookwalter's lighting and Ralph Funicello's realistic set, depicting Feynman's office at Cal Tech with equations cluttering the blackboard, are also perfectly fine.
In the end, we're left knowing a few more facts about a very in-ter-est-ing man, but the piece lacks both insight and creativity.
New York Times Review, Lincoln Center NY, November, 2001
Click here for a photo of the full stage from this performance
BEN BRANTLEY: The lecturer, as lecturers are wont to do, poses a rhetorical question. Is it possible, he asks, indicating himself, that ''this thing walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you,'' is in fact simply ''a great glob'' of atoms?
That is certainly one possibility, sir. But wouldn't it be equally accurate to say that this thing -- if one may so call the personable and popular actor Alan Alda -- is a great glob of other, more readily identifiable elements? In fact, can't this thing be broken down into the particles that traditionally make up evenings of theater in which well-known performers impersonate dead celebrities?
''QED,'' a new work by Peter Parnell in which Mr. Alda portrays the physicist Richard Feynman, is such a textbook example of biographical theater that it's hard to watch it without seeing the diagram beneath. Bring a checklist of the traits you associate with the genre, and you'll find them all accounted for even before intermission.
A sustained monologue inspired by professional problems that reveal a larger personal crisis? Check. Outlandish eccentricities, manifested in amusing use of unexpected props and/or costumes, as well as peppery anecdotes? Check and double check.
Careful dropping of names and/or awards to establish subject as person of consequence? Check. Scenes in which subject sinks into self-doubts followed by scenes that affirm joy of living? Check, check, check.
Yes, that seems to sum up the principal ingredients found in standards of the biographical play like ''Mark Twain Tonight!'' (with Hal Holbrook), ''Tru'' (Robert Morse as Truman Capote), ''Full Gallop'' (Mary Louise Wilson as Diana Vreeland) and ''Master Class'' (Zoe Caldwell as Maria Callas).
None of the above, however, wore their outlines as visibly as does ''QED,'' which officially opened last night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center and can be seen on Sundays and Mondays through Dec. 17. For a play about a man who said he wasn't frightened ''by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose,'' it remains disappointingly earthbound.
It's easy to understand why Feynman's life would have attracted Mr. Alda, who initiated the project with the show's director, Gordon Davidson, who is the artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum. Theoretical physicists and mathematicians have become hot properties in theater with the unlikely success of Michael Frayn's ''Copenhagen'' and David Auburn's ''Proof.''
And Feynman, who died in 1988 at 69, was more than just a physicist of indisputable brilliance and creativity who helped redefine his discipline. (Feynman's work on quantum electrodynamics, or QED, won him the Nobel Prize.)
He was also a flaming iconoclast whose hobbies included bongo playing, nude life drawing and amateur acting in musical comedies; a thrice-married, self-defined womanizer; a famously charismatic teacher and the co-author of the best seller ''Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character'' (1985).
In other words, if you want sexy science, Feynman would seem to be your man. What's more, the role of a maverick eccentric physicist would appear to be custom made for Mr. Alda, best known as the maverick eccentric surgeon in the television sitcom ''M*A*S*H.''
Yet most of ''QED'' feels firmly rooted at the lectern. You're always conscious of the effort and research behind the play, which Mr. Parnell revised repeatedly for Mr. Alda, and it never acquires the surprising spontaneity of Feynman's beloved quarks.
The setting is Feynman's office at the California Institute of Technology in 1986. (Ralph Funicello designed the photographically detailed set.) Feynman is thinking out loud -- which means talking to the audience in chummy professorial style -- about a speech he is supposed to deliver called ''What We Know.''
Yet more somber elements, linked by those literal segues that might as well begin with ''Speaking of . . . ,'' keep intruding. They include shadowy memories (of himself as a young scientist on the fabled Los Alamos team, of the illness and death of his much-loved first wife) as well as phone calls from his oncologist and surgeon, reporting on the progress of the cancer that would eventually kill him.
There are also the more immediate realities of Miriam Field (Kellie Overbey), the enthusiastic student who keeps showing up with questions, and Feynman's performance that very night in a production of ''South Pacific.'' This allows Mr. Alda to make the requisite wild and crazy entrance beating a large drum and singing ''There Is Nothing Like a Dame.''
In a high-pitched, ear-taxing New Yawk accent, which brings to mind Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker, Mr. Alda's Feynman discourses breezily on photons, his childhood in Far Rockaway, the folklore of a land called Tannu Tuva (then part of the Soviet Union) and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, to which Feynman famously applied his debunking intelligence as a member of the presidential investigating commission.
That's just the first act. In the second, which takes place after a drunken cast party, Feynman sobers up to dig into his inner self, becomes melancholy and defeatist and does a celebratory dance with that pesky student, which reminds him that life must go on.
The scope of these musings may reflect Feynman's mercurial interests and intelligence. But the play and Mr. Alda's performance groan with the strain of dutifully covering all bases, as if cramming for a course on ''Feynman: Man and Myth.'' In popularizing a popularizer ''QED'' somehow loses the original heat and intensity of its subject, leaving only bright chalky outlines of character.
Mr. Alda works hard at keeping things lively. But it's telling that his most affecting moments are silent, when the animation drains from his face as Feynman contemplates the cosmic hangover of nuclear experimentation or the imponderable fact of mortality. Only then do you feel that Feynman is truly following his own dictum: ''Remember that everything is interesting if you look deeply enough.''
BEN BRANTLEY: The lecturer, as lecturers are wont to do, poses a rhetorical question. Is it possible, he asks, indicating himself, that ''this thing walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you,'' is in fact simply ''a great glob'' of atoms?
That is certainly one possibility, sir. But wouldn't it be equally accurate to say that this thing -- if one may so call the personable and popular actor Alan Alda -- is a great glob of other, more readily identifiable elements? In fact, can't this thing be broken down into the particles that traditionally make up evenings of theater in which well-known performers impersonate dead celebrities?
''QED,'' a new work by Peter Parnell in which Mr. Alda portrays the physicist Richard Feynman, is such a textbook example of biographical theater that it's hard to watch it without seeing the diagram beneath. Bring a checklist of the traits you associate with the genre, and you'll find them all accounted for even before intermission.
A sustained monologue inspired by professional problems that reveal a larger personal crisis? Check. Outlandish eccentricities, manifested in amusing use of unexpected props and/or costumes, as well as peppery anecdotes? Check and double check.
Careful dropping of names and/or awards to establish subject as person of consequence? Check. Scenes in which subject sinks into self-doubts followed by scenes that affirm joy of living? Check, check, check.
Yes, that seems to sum up the principal ingredients found in standards of the biographical play like ''Mark Twain Tonight!'' (with Hal Holbrook), ''Tru'' (Robert Morse as Truman Capote), ''Full Gallop'' (Mary Louise Wilson as Diana Vreeland) and ''Master Class'' (Zoe Caldwell as Maria Callas).
None of the above, however, wore their outlines as visibly as does ''QED,'' which officially opened last night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center and can be seen on Sundays and Mondays through Dec. 17. For a play about a man who said he wasn't frightened ''by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose,'' it remains disappointingly earthbound.
It's easy to understand why Feynman's life would have attracted Mr. Alda, who initiated the project with the show's director, Gordon Davidson, who is the artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum. Theoretical physicists and mathematicians have become hot properties in theater with the unlikely success of Michael Frayn's ''Copenhagen'' and David Auburn's ''Proof.''
And Feynman, who died in 1988 at 69, was more than just a physicist of indisputable brilliance and creativity who helped redefine his discipline. (Feynman's work on quantum electrodynamics, or QED, won him the Nobel Prize.)
He was also a flaming iconoclast whose hobbies included bongo playing, nude life drawing and amateur acting in musical comedies; a thrice-married, self-defined womanizer; a famously charismatic teacher and the co-author of the best seller ''Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character'' (1985).
In other words, if you want sexy science, Feynman would seem to be your man. What's more, the role of a maverick eccentric physicist would appear to be custom made for Mr. Alda, best known as the maverick eccentric surgeon in the television sitcom ''M*A*S*H.''
Yet most of ''QED'' feels firmly rooted at the lectern. You're always conscious of the effort and research behind the play, which Mr. Parnell revised repeatedly for Mr. Alda, and it never acquires the surprising spontaneity of Feynman's beloved quarks.
The setting is Feynman's office at the California Institute of Technology in 1986. (Ralph Funicello designed the photographically detailed set.) Feynman is thinking out loud -- which means talking to the audience in chummy professorial style -- about a speech he is supposed to deliver called ''What We Know.''
Yet more somber elements, linked by those literal segues that might as well begin with ''Speaking of . . . ,'' keep intruding. They include shadowy memories (of himself as a young scientist on the fabled Los Alamos team, of the illness and death of his much-loved first wife) as well as phone calls from his oncologist and surgeon, reporting on the progress of the cancer that would eventually kill him.
There are also the more immediate realities of Miriam Field (Kellie Overbey), the enthusiastic student who keeps showing up with questions, and Feynman's performance that very night in a production of ''South Pacific.'' This allows Mr. Alda to make the requisite wild and crazy entrance beating a large drum and singing ''There Is Nothing Like a Dame.''
In a high-pitched, ear-taxing New Yawk accent, which brings to mind Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker, Mr. Alda's Feynman discourses breezily on photons, his childhood in Far Rockaway, the folklore of a land called Tannu Tuva (then part of the Soviet Union) and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, to which Feynman famously applied his debunking intelligence as a member of the presidential investigating commission.
That's just the first act. In the second, which takes place after a drunken cast party, Feynman sobers up to dig into his inner self, becomes melancholy and defeatist and does a celebratory dance with that pesky student, which reminds him that life must go on.
The scope of these musings may reflect Feynman's mercurial interests and intelligence. But the play and Mr. Alda's performance groan with the strain of dutifully covering all bases, as if cramming for a course on ''Feynman: Man and Myth.'' In popularizing a popularizer ''QED'' somehow loses the original heat and intensity of its subject, leaving only bright chalky outlines of character.
Mr. Alda works hard at keeping things lively. But it's telling that his most affecting moments are silent, when the animation drains from his face as Feynman contemplates the cosmic hangover of nuclear experimentation or the imponderable fact of mortality. Only then do you feel that Feynman is truly following his own dictum: ''Remember that everything is interesting if you look deeply enough.''
Catalyst Collaborative@MIT, Cambridge, MA July, 2008
REVIEW FROM BOSTON GLOBE: The new Central Square Theater certainly knows its neighborhood. The handsome black-box theater, a joint project of the Nora Theatre Company and Underground Railway Theater, opened its doors this weekend with a lively blend of music and math, drama and science, art and life. You can't get much more Cambridge than that.
In repertory with a reprise of jazzman Stan Strickland's luminous "Coming Up for Air" - an unforgettable autobiographical show, written and directed by Jon Lipsky, that debuted in Boston in 2006 - the theater is presenting "QED," Peter Parnell's play about the eccentric, brilliant physicist Richard Feynman (also directed, beautifully, by Lipsky). It's an apt pairing, and not just because Feynman had his musical side as well as his mathematical one.Both shows weave personal anecdotes and musings into something larger and more universal. Both touch on fear, loss, and death, and both leave us with a richer, more expansive sense of what it means to be alive. And "QED," like "Coming Up for Air," paints a vivid portrait of a fascinating person - it's just that, in this case, the person is not a beloved local musician but an award-winning California Institute of Technology professor and Nobel laureate (the play's title comes from the work that brought him that honor, on quantum electrodynamics) who died in 1988.
"QED" also fits neatly into the mission of the Catalyst Collaborative @ MIT, which Underground Railway and MIT founded as a way of building links between theater and science. Sunday afternoon's audience seemed more scientific than your typical theater crowd - there were knowing chuckles at a few references that went right over this liberal-arts major's head - but the play is truly a play, not a physics lecture. Like Feynman does, it humanizes scientific questions, and it makes them seem accessible without ever talking down to its audience.
Parnell originally wrote the play for Alan Alda, who performed it in 2001. Keith Jochim, who plays Feynman here, is less angular, more solidly built, than Alda, but he has a similar buoyant energy and unforced charm. "QED" is billed as "an evening with Richard Feynman," and that's just what it feels like with Jochim effortlessly holding our attention onstage: two hours in the company of a great raconteur with a sharp mind, an endless curiosity, and an infectious enthusiasm for life.
The play is almost a one-man show, but Danielle Kellerman shows up periodically as an inquisitive student. Kellerman fills that part nicely, both in her first, slightly dowdy incarnation and in a later visit (after the cast party for a student production of "South Pacific," in which Feynman has just played the chief of Bali Hai) that finds her in considerably looser spirits. But the role itself feels dramatically unnecessary; it allows the playwright to weave in a bit more exposition, but it doesn't really add to our understanding of the only character we're really interested in here, Feynman himself.
Even so, the play's structure is generally deft, with few of the awkward contrivances that can make the mechanics of telling a life story onstage feel too obvious. Parnell simply gives us Feynman, in his office on a Saturday, working on a lecture he'd forgotten to prepare, taking phone calls, playing his drum, and looking back at his life.
The title of the lecture he's been asked to give is "What We Know." Feynman scoffs at the ridiculousness of that ambitious aim - then proceeds, over the course of this marvelously humane show, to give us a pretty good tour of exactly that.
In repertory with a reprise of jazzman Stan Strickland's luminous "Coming Up for Air" - an unforgettable autobiographical show, written and directed by Jon Lipsky, that debuted in Boston in 2006 - the theater is presenting "QED," Peter Parnell's play about the eccentric, brilliant physicist Richard Feynman (also directed, beautifully, by Lipsky). It's an apt pairing, and not just because Feynman had his musical side as well as his mathematical one.Both shows weave personal anecdotes and musings into something larger and more universal. Both touch on fear, loss, and death, and both leave us with a richer, more expansive sense of what it means to be alive. And "QED," like "Coming Up for Air," paints a vivid portrait of a fascinating person - it's just that, in this case, the person is not a beloved local musician but an award-winning California Institute of Technology professor and Nobel laureate (the play's title comes from the work that brought him that honor, on quantum electrodynamics) who died in 1988.
"QED" also fits neatly into the mission of the Catalyst Collaborative @ MIT, which Underground Railway and MIT founded as a way of building links between theater and science. Sunday afternoon's audience seemed more scientific than your typical theater crowd - there were knowing chuckles at a few references that went right over this liberal-arts major's head - but the play is truly a play, not a physics lecture. Like Feynman does, it humanizes scientific questions, and it makes them seem accessible without ever talking down to its audience.
Parnell originally wrote the play for Alan Alda, who performed it in 2001. Keith Jochim, who plays Feynman here, is less angular, more solidly built, than Alda, but he has a similar buoyant energy and unforced charm. "QED" is billed as "an evening with Richard Feynman," and that's just what it feels like with Jochim effortlessly holding our attention onstage: two hours in the company of a great raconteur with a sharp mind, an endless curiosity, and an infectious enthusiasm for life.
The play is almost a one-man show, but Danielle Kellerman shows up periodically as an inquisitive student. Kellerman fills that part nicely, both in her first, slightly dowdy incarnation and in a later visit (after the cast party for a student production of "South Pacific," in which Feynman has just played the chief of Bali Hai) that finds her in considerably looser spirits. But the role itself feels dramatically unnecessary; it allows the playwright to weave in a bit more exposition, but it doesn't really add to our understanding of the only character we're really interested in here, Feynman himself.
Even so, the play's structure is generally deft, with few of the awkward contrivances that can make the mechanics of telling a life story onstage feel too obvious. Parnell simply gives us Feynman, in his office on a Saturday, working on a lecture he'd forgotten to prepare, taking phone calls, playing his drum, and looking back at his life.
The title of the lecture he's been asked to give is "What We Know." Feynman scoffs at the ridiculousness of that ambitious aim - then proceeds, over the course of this marvelously humane show, to give us a pretty good tour of exactly that.
Theater Project, Brunswick, ME, Feb, 2009
REVIEW from BOSTON PHOENIX: One of the formative puzzles for young Richard Feynman came from his father, a uniform manufacturer in Queens: How would you explain sleep to a Martian? From an early age, the great physicist Feynman's approach to rationality had an eccentric tilt, with a curiosity for the world that went well beyond science: Yes, Feynman helped build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, and later won the Nobel Prize for the theory of quantum electrodynamics, but he also played the bongos devotedly, cracked safes for fun (not profit), and was determined to visit the forgotten land of Tuva (of throat-singing fame). Christopher Price portrays this charming renaissance maverick in the dramatic portrait QED, by Peter Parnell. The nearly one-man show, culled from the words of the scientist himself (as well as from the book Tuva or Bust!, by Feynman's buddy Ralph Leighton), is on stage now at the Theater Project, in Brunswick, under the direction of Al Miller.
Our time with Feynman is an extended chat in his office at Cal-Tech (a comfy balance of academic bric-a-brac, institutional furnishings, and anthropological oddities, designed by Price), where he talks right to us about everything on his plate: among other things, his upcoming cameo as the Chief of Bali Hai in the school's student production of South Pacific; his contribution to a report on the recent Challenger disaster; the Tuvans whom he and Ralph have just flown into Pasadena; and his options for dealing with the alarmingly large tumor in his kidney. These threads interweave in relaxed fashion and real time, trailing off and picking up again as Feynman reminisces, philosophizes, draws scientific diagrams on the chalkboard, and fields a series of phones calls from his wife, his doctors, a fed from the Challenger commission, and fellow Tuva-phile Ralph.
Feynman is the ultimate professor to drink beers with and revere: He's affable, unorthodox, and utterly un-ensconced in academia. Price gets his conversational tone just right; nails the working-class, outer-borough New York accent; and laces his easy patter with comfortable beats, stutters, and ums. He does an excellent job conveying a sense of the man's quick mental gears turning as he veers from subject to subject, and downplays the emotional, life-and-death freight of his cancer decisions. Instead, what registers is the enthusiasm of his curiosity for all problems in need of solving, and indeed toward most everything.
One result of his understatement, however, is that the show often seems to glide by in a single mood, of casual, good-humored ramblings. A couple exceptions do change the tenor compellingly: Price has some fine moments of subtly played disquiet (on the legacy of Los Alamos), grief (for his dead first wife), and fear (when the pain in his gut reminds him of his stakes); and a visit from a student, Miriam (the lively Abbie Killeen), also stirs him. But generally, the emotional breaks are few. To be sure, Feynman's puzzle-master equanimity is part of one of the play's main themes: The curious puzzle-solver can get so caught up in the beauty of solving the puzzle — whether nuclear fission or his own cancer treatment — that he forgets its larger emotional or moral implications; that, as the self-aware Feynman puts it, "he loses touch with the world outside of the puzzle." That remove can be troublesome, or it can be salvation, and Price gives us a great sense of Feynman's blithe fascinations.
Still, the two-hour-plus show could stand to shift down or up from cruising speed a little more often. While the problem is largely that the script is set to keep the pace as true to a real-time encounter, Price could still rev up some of the shifts between reveries and phone conversations, and streamline the pauses when Feynman tells us or someone on the phone to "hang on" while he roots around for something on his desk.
But overall, QED is a gratifying gift of time listening in on the thoughts of a man who's full not just of figures, but of love for the world in all its minute complexities. In his warm and irresistible Feynman, Price movingly illustrates how that love, that boundless curiosity for the world — throat-singing and nude models as well as photons and gluons — is the source of his brilliance.
Our time with Feynman is an extended chat in his office at Cal-Tech (a comfy balance of academic bric-a-brac, institutional furnishings, and anthropological oddities, designed by Price), where he talks right to us about everything on his plate: among other things, his upcoming cameo as the Chief of Bali Hai in the school's student production of South Pacific; his contribution to a report on the recent Challenger disaster; the Tuvans whom he and Ralph have just flown into Pasadena; and his options for dealing with the alarmingly large tumor in his kidney. These threads interweave in relaxed fashion and real time, trailing off and picking up again as Feynman reminisces, philosophizes, draws scientific diagrams on the chalkboard, and fields a series of phones calls from his wife, his doctors, a fed from the Challenger commission, and fellow Tuva-phile Ralph.
Feynman is the ultimate professor to drink beers with and revere: He's affable, unorthodox, and utterly un-ensconced in academia. Price gets his conversational tone just right; nails the working-class, outer-borough New York accent; and laces his easy patter with comfortable beats, stutters, and ums. He does an excellent job conveying a sense of the man's quick mental gears turning as he veers from subject to subject, and downplays the emotional, life-and-death freight of his cancer decisions. Instead, what registers is the enthusiasm of his curiosity for all problems in need of solving, and indeed toward most everything.
One result of his understatement, however, is that the show often seems to glide by in a single mood, of casual, good-humored ramblings. A couple exceptions do change the tenor compellingly: Price has some fine moments of subtly played disquiet (on the legacy of Los Alamos), grief (for his dead first wife), and fear (when the pain in his gut reminds him of his stakes); and a visit from a student, Miriam (the lively Abbie Killeen), also stirs him. But generally, the emotional breaks are few. To be sure, Feynman's puzzle-master equanimity is part of one of the play's main themes: The curious puzzle-solver can get so caught up in the beauty of solving the puzzle — whether nuclear fission or his own cancer treatment — that he forgets its larger emotional or moral implications; that, as the self-aware Feynman puts it, "he loses touch with the world outside of the puzzle." That remove can be troublesome, or it can be salvation, and Price gives us a great sense of Feynman's blithe fascinations.
Still, the two-hour-plus show could stand to shift down or up from cruising speed a little more often. While the problem is largely that the script is set to keep the pace as true to a real-time encounter, Price could still rev up some of the shifts between reveries and phone conversations, and streamline the pauses when Feynman tells us or someone on the phone to "hang on" while he roots around for something on his desk.
But overall, QED is a gratifying gift of time listening in on the thoughts of a man who's full not just of figures, but of love for the world in all its minute complexities. In his warm and irresistible Feynman, Price movingly illustrates how that love, that boundless curiosity for the world — throat-singing and nude models as well as photons and gluons — is the source of his brilliance.