Second stage

I am still waiting, still hoping, still trying for a second staging of my Copernicus play, “And the Sun Stood Still,” to follow its successful production in Boulder last spring. Finding another venue is proving even more difficult than I had imagined, but meanwhile the play continues to be heard. L. A. Theatre Works, a non-profit media arts organization with a forty-year history, will soon produce an audio recording of “And the Sun Stood Still” in its West Hollywood studio, under the direction of Rosalind Ayres of BBC Radio. When completed, the recording will become part of  the L. A. Theatre Works repertoire, from which plays are regularly downloaded on iTunes, streamed on-line, checked out of 11,000 libraries, broadcast on various radio networks in the U.S. and abroad, and used by teachers in 3,000 American high schools.

On occasion, I have taken the part of Rheticus (Copernicus’s provocative young visitor) in informal enactments of two scenes from the play’s first act, with my friend and mentor Owen Gingerich of Harvard as Copernicus. Gingerich is an acknowledged world authority on Copernicus, which makes his rendition of the role an oversized in-joke for our audiences.

We performed first on a whim at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where we were both attending an astronomy meeting in September 2012.  It went well enough to be reprised at a Harvard Observatory “Open Night” last March. Gingerich promised to wear the blue velvet scholar’s robes that had been custom-made for him in connection with a ceremony in his honor held at a university in Poland. In Cambridge, after word got out about the “actor” and the costume, we filled the auditorium and the overflow space and still had to turn away a large number of folks.

We put on our act again this past November as part of an interdisciplinary weekend conference at Smith College on the theme of space. And we’re about to take the stage again this coming weekend – a command performance at the home of a rare book collector in Virginia.

All this fun is so much more than I envisioned when the idea for the play first occurred to me, forty-plus years ago. But I'd still like to see the play unfold on stage again, from a seat in a playhouse somewhere.

On stage

"And the Sun Stood Still," the Copernicus play that I conceived 41 years ago but couldn't find the courage to start writing until 2006 -- the play I've rewritten and revised more times than I can count since then -- opened last weekend in Boulder, Colorado. I was sleepless with excitement for several nights beforehand. And perfectly delighted with the preview and premiere performances. The first review has just appeared.

So much of what I like best now in the script is the result of workshop and rehearsal collaboration with director Stephen Weitz of BETC, the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company. He helped me discover the weaknesses in the version that was published in 2011 as the heart of A More Perfect Heaven. For example, he eliminated one of my six characters. This was Franz, the sole fictional identity in a cast of otherwise real people. I had invented him for a reason, but Stephen deemed him a disturbing distraction. Absent Franz, the religious conflict and scientific content stood out more clearly. The interactions of the remaining characters became more dramatic. It was the sort of radical change I doubt I ever could have come to on my own. 

Several of the BETC actors, most notably Jim Hunt as Copernicus, had participated in various staged readings of the play. Last year they read it twice at conventions in Denver -- once for the American Physical Society in April, and again in October for the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. But the difference between a staged reading and a fully staged performance is a leap of multiple imaginations that envelop the dialogue in costumes, scenery, lights, and music. I never thought I'd see the day.