Tag: Louis Slotin
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Louis Slotin Electronic
Did you know that the only way you can get my play Louis Slotin Sonata is to order it as an e-book available here? That’s an offer so exclusive I can’t even take advantage of it. (I don’t have a Kindle or any other kind of e-reading device.) So until Houghton Mifflin decides to publish the deluxe coffee table edition of the script, this is the only way of owning it.
If you don’t know the play, here’s a synopsis:
At 3:20 PM on Tuesday, May 21, 1946 Louis Slotin‘s hand slipped– a small, practically insignificant blunder, except that Slotin was the chief -bomb builder at Los Alamos, and at that fateful moment he held in his hands a plutonium bomb core named “Rufus”. The slip caused a chain reaction that in turn released a deadly “prompt burst” of radiation. Slotin and others saw a blue glow and felt a momentary flux of heat on their faces. Slotin flung the shell to the floor but it was too late. The damage was done. In the milliseconds it took for the plutonium to spit its deadly neutrons, Louis Slotin became a walking dead man.
With a structure inspired by classical music’s sonata allegro form, LOUIS SLOTIN SONATA traces a brilliant scientist’s last nine days, as his body and mind gradually succumb to the chaos wrecked by radiation. Reliving the moment of his accident again and again, Slotin slowly makes his own unique way to redemption.
If you do know the play, please consider adding your review to the Amazon page. It would help me out a lot.
* WINNER of the LA Weekly Award for Best New Play
* WINNER of the Backstage West Garland Award for Playwriting
* Nominated for Theatre LA’s Ovation Award for Best Writing – World Premiere Play
* Pick-of-the-Week, The New York Times
* Excerpted in The Best Men’s Stage Monologues of 1999, Smith & Kraus.
* WINNER of The Seattle Times Footlight Award for Best New PlayThe New York Times “…a crafty narrative… irresistibly gripping…. as a historical episode suitable for dramatizing, you can’t do much better.”
The Los Angeles Times “…a rare bird– a new play that wraps intellectual complexity, emotional depth and theatrical derring-do in one tight and memorable package. It’s bleak, it’s cheeky– it’s dazzling…. Be there!”
WBEZ Chicago Public Radio “… Intellectually thrilling and rigorous. It really is a must see.”
Backstage West “…a powerful play, full of ideas, extremely verbal, creatively written and extraordinarily presented… imaginative, gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, and unexpectedly, highly amusing.”
The LA Weekly “… drama and symbol couldn’t be more delicately interwoven.”
The Seattle P-I “…Like the crazed geniuses in science fiction, Mullin mixes gobs of this and gobs of that and then — Good heavens! It’s alive! It’s powerful!”
The Seattle Times “…a tumultuous, tour-de-force staging that spreads plenty of intellectual and emotional fallout.”
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Louis Slotin Sonata is #1!
Funny story: I mentioned on Google+ this morning that sales of the Kindle version of my play Louis Slotin Sonata seemed to have gone through the roof (though in the interest of perfect honestly, I must now instruct you to picture a roof approximately six inches off the ground.) Shortly thereafter, my friend and colleague Wes Andrews chimed in to point out that the play is the bestselling e-book in the playwriting category. (See the rankings here. )
Shocking!
At this point I began mentally listing reasons this might be so:
- In November, Louis Slotin Sonata will be receiving a production on the retired ocean liner, The Queen Mary, produced by California Repertory Company, or Cal Rep for short, the resident theatre company at California State University – Long Beach. Now, a staging of the play does not necessarily translate into a significant boost in Kindle sales. I only saw a small uptick when A Red Orchid produced Slotin in Chicago last year; but I wonder if, since the play is being done under the auspices of a university, perhaps certain professors are assigning the text as course reading. If so, that would be sweet. I’d like nothing better than to start feeding at the trough of mandatory academic assignment, especially in light of how often and eagerly I rail against the dangers of academia infecting American Theatre with the debilitating disease of elitist inaccessibility.
- It ain’t exactly hard to top a list of books about playwriting. It’s a bit like being the best ice-hockey player in Chad: an achievement, undeniably, but one that needs to be placed in context. Adding to the irony is the fact that that Louis Slotin Sonata isn’t about playwriting, it is playwriting. When I first published the script “playwriting” was the closest category Kindle offered. (A further irony is implied here: Amazon recognized that books about playwriting were more likely to sell than plays themselves.) All that said, I flatter myself to think that reading Louis Slotin Sonata might teach you things that you won’t learn from Playwriting for Dummies (number two on the list).
- You can only get Louis Slotin Sonata on Amazon. While Slotin is probably my best known play, it is not necessarily the most successful by all standards. Tuesday has had more productions and The Sequence has netted me more money. A while ago I decided that I would hold Slotin back from hard-copy publication, if only to see how well it might do if solely offered electronically. It was an experiment. I like to think Louie would approve.
Regardless of how I might try to explain it, the situation remains absurd. And thus, it is my sworn duty as a theatre artist to do everything possible to perpetuate it. You can help. You can order the play for your Kindle of course, but if that does not work for you either because…
- you do not have a Kindle (I sure don’t)
- or you already have a copy of the play
- or don’t have the $7.99 to spend
… you can still help by going to Amazon and supplying a review of the play. Reviews and good ratings help raise the profile of an electronic title.
So think back. Did you see Slotin in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle or Chicago? What did you think? Type those thoughts out and post them to Amazon. Maybe give the play some stars. Then sit back with me and see how long we can keep this absurdity going.
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Chicago Posts: Dead and Alive
Three nights ago my old friend Louis Slotin and I each got one of those chances that only theatre can offer. He got to be alive while I got to be dead.
Everybody loves a dead playwright. The deader the better. Living ones are prickly and unpredictable. Actors and directors assume, sometimes rightly, that living playwrights have special insight into their plays because, well, they wrote them. Such insight can be resented as often as welcomed. Rehearsing a play is a process of discovery. No one wants to do an Easter egg hunt with someone they suspect knows where all the eggs are hidden. Smart playwrights understand when it’s time to walk out of the rehearsal hall so everyone else can breathe a little. They do this even though they know that they do not in fact have all the answers and really might like to stay and hunt for a little treasure too. In other words, a smart playwright knows when to roll over and play dead.
As I confessed in an earlier essay installment of these Chicago Posts, I have seen every full production of every play I have ever written. Often I have been part of the development process, even if the play has already had its world premiere. For Louis Slotin Sonata’s second production which was staged off–Broadway at Ensemble Studio Theatre I rewrote substantially, adding at least one scene, which I would later cut. I was living in New York at the time, so I could attend as many rehearsals as I wanted (and thought wise.) The same was true for the third production at the now dead Empty Space Theatre. By then I had moved to Seattle with my wife and kids and was able to work with the director, John Langs, to touch up the script, and most importantly, completely swap out the second act song, replacing it with the utterly original “Sodom Saki Shuffle” for which I wrote all new lyrics which the incomparable Mark Nichols then brilliantly scored. (Click this to hear the Seattle version of the Sodom Saki Shuffle.)
For this fourth production of the play at A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago , I had nearly zero input. I answered a few small script questions via email from the director Karen Kessler, but otherwise I really might as well have been blissfully departed. So I had no idea what I was in for when showed up at the storefront theatre in Old Town two nights ago. I have sat through productions I had nothing to do with that blew me away with their unforeseen brilliant interpretation of my script, and I have sat through shows so awful, so utterly antithetical to the play I imagined that I was struck quite literally catatonic with horror, rage and shame.
Louis Slotin was just about to leave Los Alamos when he had his accident. His bags were packed. He was showing the “crit test” to Alvin Graves, his replacement at Pajarito Canyon labs. The next day he planned to fly out to the South Pacific to see the Navy explode the very plutonium core he held in his hands. From there he would head to the University of Chicago to continue his studies in his original field of biology. Of course, Slotin never made it to Chicago. He never made it out of Los Alamos alive. They put his radiation-ravaged body in a lead-lined casket and shipped it to Winnipeg, Manitoba, his hometown.
Two nights ago I saw Louis Slotin alive in Chicago. He was occupying the body of an actor named Steven Schine, who through happy happenstance looks a hell of a lot like him. I watched as that long-ago dead man was forced to, via long distance phone call, break the news in Yiddish to his father Israel Slotin that he was dying. Israel was inhabiting the body of an eminently accomplished veteran Chicago actor named William J. Norris.
I watched those men relive a pain that no one should even have to live through once. I watched and I wept. But I also felt a great strange satisfaction. After 64 years Louie had arrived where he was going.
Maybe I should play dead more often.
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How can I talk about The Borrowers?
One of the rules of this blog, which I have mentioned before but not adequately explained, is that I do not do stage reviews. I see no value in my pumping or panning a particular production. Whether recent stagings of Hamlet or The Adding Machine or Glengarry Glen Ross or other chestnuts from the canon are, or are not, up to the professional standards of excellence that Seattle theatre talent is clearly capable of achieving, I honestly do not care. Nor, frankly, do I think anyone else does outside of this quasi-incestuous community of Seattle theatre professionals. The discussion I want to have takes place at the next level up. It has to do with how we can make theatre that matters to the widest possible population of human beings. I have maintained here and elsewhere that there is something tantamount to fiddling while Rome burns about offering a production of Glengarry Glen Ross and calling it a cogent theatrical response to the recent mortgage meltdown when the play is no such thing and the mortgage meltdown had its epicenter little more than a mile due south of the Seattle Rep at the former Washington Mutual Tower at 3rd and University. The Seattle theatre administrative elite may believe that nothing actual happens in this city, but history will certainly prove otherwise.
So I will not offer a review of The Borrowers, which I saw this Friday, Opening Night, at Seattle Children’s Theatre. What I can do is talk about how the play reopened my eyes to something essential about our art form.
For those of you, like me, who did not know the story, The Borrowers is about a family of very small folk who live under the floorboards of an English house. In the second act, after being forced from their comfortable home, the Clock family emigrates into the great out-of-doors. At one point as they are wandering the countryside a giant crow comes on stage and threatens to eat them. As soon as the perfectly wrought puppet bird came on stage I did what every playwright does, I turned to the audience to gauge their response–the key member in this instance being my five-year old son. His reaction was odd. He was staring right at the huge bird but did not seem to be seeing it. It was as if the spectacle was so huge and strange and unlooked-for that his brain just could not process it. And then suddenly he stiffened. He saw the bird. The giant bird. I stiffened too, because if there was going to be a moment when my little boy would start bawling in fear, this was surely it. And then something amazing happened. His eyes widened. And then a huge wonder-filled grin spread across his face. He looked over at me and said, “I know there’s a person inside that bird. I can see his feet.” This knowledge did not ruin his experience of the moment: exactly the contrary. His knowing there was a person in that bird allowed my son to fully enjoy the wonder of the story.
This is important. This is something essential about theatre. Our challenge is not to fool people, but to charm them. The audience neither needs nor wants us to convince them we are, say, Hamlet or Louis Slotin. They need us to convince them that being these beings matters as part of the human experience.
Let me track the essential trajectory again: something giant happens on stage the likes of which our audience member has never seen before. Said audience member cannot at first even process the experience. Then comes a shock of recognition of a huge, potentially horrifying truth. Finally, audience member realizes that this truth is only human after all.
Everything that happens on stage is human. Everything.
As Pod Clock, the Borrower family father who fights off the giant crow Ian Bell was superb as usual, but remember, I am not reviewing this show and therefore am not officially recommending you go see his delightful performance. Nor am I suggesting that you share, along with your family the awe that Emily Chisholm, as his daughter Arrietty, channels upon seeing an open field for the first time: “It is a sea! It is a sea!” Surely I would never tell you go see Marianne Owen, who so effortlessly balances the flustered chatty charm of Mrs. Clock with a steely core of loyalty for her family. Nor will I recommend Chris Ensweiler’s tour de force romp through four characters each so distinctly drawn– but more importantly, distinctly fun!– that you had trouble keeping in mind that it was the same person playing them.
I cannot recommend any of them. That is not what I do here. Remember?
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Steve Schine Joins a Very Exclusive Club
Gotta say, my Chicago home boy, Steve Schine, is practically a dead ringer. Don’t ya think?
Compare with . . .
No dis, mind you, on my former Slotin homeboys, the inestimable Paul Morgan Stetler (The Empty Space Theatre, Seattle) and the seminal William Salyers (Circle X Theatre, Los Angeles and Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York).
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Louis Slotin will Finally Reach Chicago
While I have kept this news close to my vest for a while, it is now official, folks! My play Louis Slotin Sonata will be produced in Chicago this Fall at A Red Orchid Theatre.
The Chicago Sun-Times covers the announcement here.
BroadwayWorld.com – Chicago’s story is here.
What makes this upcoming production particularly gratifying for me is that Slotin had immediate plans for his life beyond Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. He intended to switch gears from physics and engineering to pursue his original area of study, life sciences, at the University of Chicago. His bags were already packed when the accident happened. After all these decades, if only in my admittedly strange and somewhat sentimental imagination, Louie will finally arrive where he was heading.
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The Best Compliment Any Actor Could Receive
I suppose you could say William Salyers is my Burbage. Just as Shakespeare wrote the roles of Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and Lear for the actor Richard Burbage to premiere, I too have been, over the last 15 years wrighting roles with Bill as my
primary actor in mind. Now, I should be clear: Bill is not the only actor I’ve written roles for. There have been others. Kellie Waymire leaps to mind, and then my heart breaks again thinking of her untimely passing.But let me focus on Salyers for this essay. Simply put: knowing Bill Salyers exists has helped me have the temerity to pull parts into the world that I might otherwise have despaired could be properly performed, at least by anyone I knew personally. Bill would argue that this is nonsense; that I would have written roles like Audie McCall, and my versions of Louis Slotin, Stonewall Jackson and Francis Collins even if I didn’t have the hope that he would one day play them.This is just one way that Bill, like so many actors, misunderstands the crucial function played by great performers in the process of making plays.
Bill spent many years doing strong work in Seattle theatre before moving to Los Angeles to make his grab at a slice of the Hollywood pie. (The fact that Equity limited the kind of stage work he could do up here in ways it did not in the Southland was also a factor, but more on that in my yet-to-be written essay “Sacrificing Art on a Dubious Union’s Altar”.) Salyers has been especially invaluable to the development of new plays, originating such roles as Mr. Wickett and Truett in Louis Broome‘s Texarkana Waltz, Hampstead Hamilton in Jillian Armenante‘s In Flagrante Gothicto, Audie McCall in my own Tuesday and of course the title role Louis Slotin Sonata, for which Salyers received a Backstage West Garland Award for Best Actor.
Bill happens to be that old school sort who arrives at the theatre before anyone else and leaves after all the other cast members have already thrown back their first shot. It was well after final blackout one night during the L. A. run of the Sonata when the house manager came backstage and told Bill someone was waiting in the lobby to talk to him. This was odd, since Bill didn’t remember having any acquaintances in the audience that night, but the play was pretty controversial, so he figured it might just be someone who wanted to hash out one of the play’s divisive points with him in lieu of the playwright.
Waiting for him in the lobby was a slight elderly woman. Bill politely introduced himself, but the lady, in a heavy Eastern European accent, skipped past formalities. “Are you Jewish?” she asked. Louis Slotin had been Jewish, and his struggle with his faith was a principal thematic thrust of the play. Bill, however, was not Jewish, and told the lady so.
“But you are European, no?” she persisted.
“No, ma’am.” Bill smiled. “I’m just a country boy from Oklahoma.”
“Oh.” She seemed puzzled. “Well, then where did Mengele come from?”
During the play Louis Slotin has a nightmare in which he imagines himself as Josef Mengele, escaped from Auschwitz and fleeing East across the Eurasian continent. At this point Bill guessed where the old lady was going. Many Jewish audience members, and scientists, objected to Mengele’s inclusion, believing hotly that no self-respecting Jew, or scientist, would ever envision himself as one of the most heinous pseudoscientific torturers of all time. Bill began dutifully defending the playwright: “Well, I think what the author meant by Mengele is that often during our deepest feelings of grief and shame we cast ourselves as the most evil character we can imagine.”
“No, no,” said the lady. “Where did Mengele come from… in you? How did you know what he was like?”
Bill admitted, “I didn’t. I have no idea what Mengele was like. I can only imagine.”
“That’s strange,” said the lady.
Bill began to feel uneasy. “Why strange?” he asked.
“I knew Mengele,” she said.
The very air between them seemed to tighten. “You… knew Mengele?”
“Yes.”
Bill had to ask. “You were at Auschwitz?”
“Yes.”
“You actually saw him face to face?”
“Many times.”
“I—I don’t know what… to say.”
“Your performance was very convincing.”
Bill made a motion to touch the lady, on the arm perhaps, some gesture of common humanity; but the woman stiffened, instinctively pulling back. She politely bid him good night and left the theatre, leaving Bill to ponder, less with pride than baffled awe, how it could be possible to blindly reach across the chasm of half a century to summon up the monster that still haunted this woman’s memory.
Some times such is the power of theatre, such as it is.
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I think anyone who has actually witnessed Salyers’ transformation from Slotin into Mengele can vouch for how disturbingly uncanny it was. An off-hand Teutonic arrogance entered his voice and something very palpable died behind his eyes, as he began to speak these words:“My name is Doktor Joseph Mengele. I am physician and a scientist. I am wearing the skin of a foolish Canadian Jew who tried to kill me…”
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(I wrote an earlier version of this essay in 2003. I have revised and posted it here in anticipation of using it to support my essay “Why Locally Grown Plays Matter”, which I hope to have published by January 15, 2010.)
