The physics of the stage, for much of the Cold War , was the physics of warfare and massive destruction; these anxieties gave rise to a substantial body of dramatic work dwelling on the destructive possibility of atomic weapons .1 In such plays scientist-characters wrestle with the implications of dangerous discoveries, or ordinary citizens huddle in terror, dissolving the social contract within the confines of fallout shelters . The horror of nuclear weapons grew from the Soviet Unionâs August 1949 atomic bomb test to a peak in 1962 with the Cuban missile crisis and was revitalized in the 1980s but then subsided as the forces leading to the falls of the Berlin Wall and of the Soviet Union brought the Cold War to a close (Kuznick and Gilbert 2). In its wake, a new post-Cold War genre of science play has emerged, in which science remains a major theme without the plays being dominated by or even concerned with the possibility of another nuclear war.
Also fading, or at least changing substantially, is the interest the Cold Warâs drama had taken in casting blame on the scientists who developed the bomb and on the politicians and military personnel who had put it to use. In mid-twentieth century plays such as The Burning Glass (Charles Morgan ), The Traitor (Hermann Wouk ), The Tragedy of King Real (Adrian Mitchell ), and âPilot Lights of the Apocalypse â (Louis Ridenour ), the dramatic action often moved inexorably to condemnations, as if the discovery that a weapon could be used were concomitant with making catastrophic use of it. The nuclear arsenal became Chekhovâs gun on the worldâs mantel, necessarily to be fired before the resolution of the plot; the imagined inevitability of nuclear destruction called out for blame to be cast before the shot even went off. With the ending of the Cold War and the resetting of the Doomsday clock, nuclear physics becomes more than a weapon , and dramatistsâ treatments of it often reframe questions about blame and responsibility in terms that no longer immediately indict scientists for inventing the bomb . The nuclear imaginary ceases to be quite so terrifying, but it is a domain rich with possibilities that had been virtually ignored in drama for most of a century.
As a general category, âscience playâ has been under some dispute. How much science, of what kind, in what way, and to what effect must there be in a play for it to count as a âscience playâ? The answers are varied and vehemently argued. Acknowledging that there are at times very good reasons to focus more narrowly, I follow Kirsten Shepherd-Barrâs deliberately broad definition offered in her inaugural book on the subject, Science on Stage: any play in which scientists or scientific concepts appear as such. Shepherd-Barrâs chief focus, however, is the playsâ âintegration of form and contentâ (5). As she emphasizes, âthe best [of the science plays] successfully employ a particular scientific idea or concept as an extended theatrical metaphor. They literally enact the idea that they engageâ (6). My own argument develops in relation to a narrow class of science plays, those that âenactâ theoretical physics. These plays differ from their Cold War precursors, including those Charles A. Carpenter addresses in his bibliography of âNuclear Ageâ plays, not only through their more philosophical engagement with the science but also by their greater tendency toward enacting the physics in their forms rather than simply engaging with the bomb in their themes. While Cold War -era plays engaging with physics typically treat the discipline primarily as the source of nuclear weapons, after the Cold War a wider array of the pursuits and considerations of physics are allowed to enter the theater. Significant among these are concerns about time and causality.
The new physics of the twentieth centuryâquantum physics and relativity âfundamentally changes the relationship of space and time. When Albert Einstein âs âOn the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies â was published in 1905, our ability to measure time, and even what it means to measure time, fell under new questions. As the mathematician Hermann Minkowski said of the changes introduced by relativity theory, âspace by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent realityâ (75). Minkowski here underscores the striking shift in our understanding of what time is: it is no longer an independent dimension; instead it is formed by and formative of a network of space-and-time. âWhenâ ceases to be meaningful absent a knowledge of âwhere.â On stage, many plays enter into these alternative networks of space-and-time by enacting temporalities other than the familiar one-directional, steady movement from past through present toward future. This book is an analysis of the troubling of temporality arising in post-Cold War drama using concepts from physics to inform or even dictate the dramatic flow of time.
Moreover, Minkowski âs formulation underscores another commonality between twentieth-century physics and dramatic enactions thereof: how we look at them matters. He suggests that space and time had been previously distinguishable from one another and that Einstein âs observations (codified as the theory of relativity ) are what produce this âfading away.â Such an implication (not at all intended in Minkowskiâs analysis) bears analogy to the effect of observation in quantum physics. Erwin Schrödingerâs famous thought experiment âhis catâmay provide a helpful illustration. Schrödinger envisioned a closed box into which one could not see. Into this box are placed a living cat and a device that will kill the cat if a single radioactive atom decays (an event engineered to be exactly as likely as not to happen within an hour); at the end of the hour, before the box is opened and the cat observed, is the cat alive or dead?2 The upshot of the experiment is that in the moment before the box is opened, the cat exists not as a living cat or as a dead cat but as a cat both alive and dead and neither alive nor dead. It has no particular state of being. Both the cat and the radioactive particle for which it is an analogy are spread across all of the more-and-less probable ways they could be.
By contrast, consider a tossed coin that has been covered before its result can be seen. This coin (much larger than the quantum scale) really has either heads or tails upmost. Although we have not yet looked, we know that it is one or the other, and, before we look, it already is whichever one it is. At the quantum level, things are very different. Looking to see how Schrödingerâs quantum cat is doing does not simply show the observer what has been establishedâon the contrary, the cat becomes alive or dead and ceases to be a probabilistic blur of 50â50 living-dead-ness in the act of becoming observed: an ontological shift and not a straightforwardly epistemological one occurs.
Delving into subatomic physics made metaphysicians of many physicists as they attempted to explain the weird reality they were encountering, giving quantum theory many philosophical interpretations of quantum physics. In the early and ongoing discussions among physicists about how things work at the quantum level, âWhat does it mean?â is a frequent concern. Among the answers, the Copenhagen Interpretation holds the widest sway (although its precise features, and the degree to which its inventors Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg themselves would agree with its current iteration, are a matter of debate). The Copenhagen Interpretation holds that the probabilistic events at the quantum level are ontologically unknowable. Our lack of certainty is not a failure on our part or on the part of the equipment; it is, as Schrödinger put it, âa distinction between a spoiled or badly focused photograph and a snapshot of clouds and damp fogsâ (812, my translation). The former is blurry because we do a poor job of photography while the latter is blurry because clouds of fog are blurry. The uncertainty about fog is inherent to reality; quantum uncertainty is a real blur, not a failure of our apparatus. But observation makes things take on observable features. The quantum world appears to be âmadeâ by being seen.3
Similar to an observerâs bringing of a quantum element into a determinate state of being, the plays I consider enforce spatio-temporal states on their characters. The conditions of possibility within which their characters act are created by the playsâ obedience, in their very structures, to scientific theories and practices. By enacting principles of theoretical physics, the plays reorganize the shape of time, moving away from the metronomic forward march we commonly consider time to follow; characters moving through these unusual temporalities experience changes not only in what they are capable of effecting but also in what they can know about both the contexts in which they act and the possible outcomes of those actions. These changes in the charactersâ knowledge and power, traceable to the alterations in the temporality at work in these plays, are legible as alterations in the ethical conditions of the charactersâ decision -making processes.
Arkady Plotnitsky and others have seen in the metaphysical considerations of quantum physics a connection to...