Just Wrought

Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.

Category: American History

  • A Red Orchid’s Poster for Louis Slotin Sonata

    A Red Orchid’s Poster for Louis Slotin Sonata

    The poster for the new production of Louis Slotin Sonata in Chicago. . .

    I have to say…

    I like it.

    I like it very much. 

    Eye-witness accounts of atomic blasts invariably share some sentiment to the effect that the explosion’s aftermath easily rates as the most beautiful and simultaneously horrible sight the witness has ever seen.  Richard Rhodes collects page after amazing page of first-hand reports from the test shot at Trinity in his seminal history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.  Here’s just one from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother Frank: 

    And so there was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us.  It was so brilliant purple with all the radioactive glowing.  And it just seemed to hang there forever.  Of course it didn’t.  It must have been  just a very short time until it went up.  It was very terrifying.

    And the thunder from the blast.  It bounced on the rocks, and then it went—I don’t know where else it bounced.  But it never seemed to stop.  Not like an ordinary echo with thunder.  It just kept echoing back and forth in that Jornada del Meurto.

    By cropping the mushroom cloud neatly by half, the designer has de-iconized the image, forcing us to look again more closely at the amazing, disturbing forms and colors, not to mention the cloud’s sheer enormity.

    Posters are for putting butts in seats.  I have no idea if this will do that.  But I could stare at it all day.

    May human eyes never witness such beauty again.

    Posted at 10:21 AM in American History, Louis Slotin Sonata, Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: A Red Orchid Theatre Company, Atomic bomb, Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, Frank Oppenheimer, Louis Slotin Sonata, Louis Slotin Sonata Poster, Mid-West Premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, mushroom cloud, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Trinity Test Shot

  • Science in Plays on NPR from 2004

    Forgot about this one. Blessings on NPR for perpetually archiving these stories and making them so easy to access so long after the fact.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4122442

    Posted at 10:21 AM in American History, Louis Slotin Sonata, Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: A Red Orchid Theatre Company, Atomic bomb, Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, Frank Oppenheimer, Louis Slotin Sonata, Louis Slotin Sonata Poster, Mid-West Premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, mushroom cloud, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Trinity Test Shot

  • To Kill Yourself with a Cannonball

    To Kill Yourself with a Cannonball

    To kill yourself with a cannonball
    Requires a grim determination;
    A devotion quite beyond the norms
    Of self-extermination.

    Contrary to more mundane means,
    It’s important that you show
    A knack for holding on to things,
    As opposed to letting go.

    To drown oneself with a twelve-pound shot
    Takes physical precision.
    It’s not the sort of thing one tries
    If prone to indecision.

    To grasp the sphere with both hands firm
    Is an easy proposition,
    But to lift it clear and cross the deck
    With a hangman’s erudition,

    Then scale the rail’s see-sawing height
    With both hands occupied,
    And take your leap into the swell
    Before your mates have spied,

    Well, it’s really quite a trick to pull.
    I can’t blithely recommend it.
    Though truth be told, there’s poetry
    In such a strange, stark way to end it.

    So hold on tight for as long you’re able
    While you watch the heavens recoil.
    Only drop your weight when it’s too late
    To hope your plan might spoil.

    Posted at 10:21 AM in American History, Louis Slotin Sonata, Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: A Red Orchid Theatre Company, Atomic bomb, Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, Frank Oppenheimer, Louis Slotin Sonata, Louis Slotin Sonata Poster, Mid-West Premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, mushroom cloud, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Trinity Test Shot

  • He said He was Going to Do It, and Apparently He Did

    He said He was Going to Do It, and Apparently He Did


    CRAIG:  The human sequence is only the beginning.  Next we gotta do the chimp. it’ll be easy since it’s 90% the same as the human anyhow. 
          Then I want to shotgun everything in the human digestive tract; a cubic meter of Sargasso sea water, the Amazon rainforest, the entire globe.  I’ll take Sorcerer II and circumnavigate, shotgunning samples as I go.  There’s an infinity of questions to be asked, but we don’t even know the basics, like what friggin’ lives out there.
        I want to build an artificial genome from parts.  A whole new life form and see if we can make it work.  Doctor Frankenstein eat your heart out.

    KELLIE:  Sounds like you might get that invite to Stockholm after all.

    CRAIG:  Screw it.  They only give you a million dollars anyway.

    KELLIE:  What would make you happy then?

    CRAIG:  Happy?  If I could be the first to synthesize life, I’d be happy. . . for a while.

    When I wrote those words five years ago,  I never doubted even then that Venter would accomplish his seemingly impossible goals.

    J. Craig Venter is a playwright’s dream.  A real-life Faust, a gigantic brain attached to an even bigger mouth, a brilliant bio-tech Muhammad Ali.  It was a pleasure to build The Sequence around his race with Francis Collins to decode the human genome.  Now he’s apparently booted up a whole new life form from parts, just like he said he would, both in my play and in real life.

    New York Times: “Researchers Say They Created a ‘Synthetic Cell’

    Paper Bits

    Posted at 10:21 AM in American History, Louis Slotin Sonata, Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: A Red Orchid Theatre Company, Atomic bomb, Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, Frank Oppenheimer, Louis Slotin Sonata, Louis Slotin Sonata Poster, Mid-West Premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, mushroom cloud, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Trinity Test Shot

  • The Sequence in Print

    The Sequence in Print

    I am delighted to announce that my play The Sequence, which dramatizes the real-life race to decode the human genome, is now available in print from Original Works Publishing.

    It has been a long road since that phone call eight years ago when Curt Dempster, then artistic director of Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, offered me a commission to write something about the genome race.  He had seen Craig Venter on The Charlie Rose Show and I imagine he recognized a kindred spirit: an arrogant, monomaniacal genius who had the raw guts to want to change the world.  I knew nothing about the story.  I wanted instead to write a play about scientific investigations into human consciousness (still do, for that matter), but after doing some initial research I was quickly convinced that there really was a play here.  The detail that sold me for good was learning that Venter had secretly used his own “genetic material” as Celera’s sample for sequencing.  The lofty fog of scientific endeavor suddenly cleared as this act of sheer human outrageousness snapped everything into crisp dramatic focus.  There was a story here.  Boy oh boy, was there a story!

    Curt has since passed on, by his own hand, determined as ever to navigate this life on his own terms or none at all.  He never got to see the world premiere of The Sequence at The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena.  He never got to see this final script, which he conceived by commission nearly a decade ago.  But in my overwrought imagination, I see him thumbing through it, slouched in his hovel of an office at the corner of 52nd Street and New Jersey, dog curled beneath his chair, surrounded as he always was with stacks and stacks of new play manuscripts, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, some of which he had asked for, most which he hadn’t, nearly all of which he would never read (he preferred to watch readings), but every single one of which he believed in; because for Curt, theatre was about making plays, not merely staging those already made.

    You can pre-order the script by clicking here.

    I hope you like it.  I also hope that when you read it, you remember that The Sequence, like all plays, was wrought more than written, and ultimately meant to be watched more than read.

    The cover for the Original Works publication of The Sequence, by Paul Mullin

    Posted at 10:21 AM in American History, Louis Slotin Sonata, Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: A Red Orchid Theatre Company, Atomic bomb, Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, Frank Oppenheimer, Louis Slotin Sonata, Louis Slotin Sonata Poster, Mid-West Premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, mushroom cloud, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Trinity Test Shot

  • So long Howard Zinn!

    Thanks for telling the stories that were better, fiercer, truer and
    ultimately nobler than the ones we were otherwise being told about this
    country

    I owe An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show to you.  I had heard rumors of the Salted Wife, but your A People’s History of the United States gave me the historical resources that proved it wasn’t just a ghost story.  It’s just one of the tales I lifted.

    Here’s that section for you, Howard!  You did well.  May we live up to your example.

    The Bardo of the Salted Wife


    BARDO VOICE:  Oh free and bravely born, having died and failed to grasp the clear light of reality, which is nothing but thine own nature most true, thou art entering now into the Bardo of the Salted wife. 
        Be not distracted.  Be not afraid or attracted.  Whatever strange terror might become thee here, repeat these words:

          (As the Bardo Voice speaks the following, the words flash on a screen.)

    BARDO VOICE & AUDIENCE:  “Although the clear light of reality dawned upon me I was unable to grasp it, and so I must wander here.  Whatever visions appear now, I must accept them as the reflections of mine own nature most true.”

    BARDO VOICE:  Behold, she stands before thee.  Born in Bristol and bred there, she sails for the New World in Sixteen Hundred Ought Nine.

    SALTED WIFE:  All I ever wanted was to sail the Ocean Sea.

    BARDO VOICE:  Pitching and plunging over an angry Atlantic.

    SALTED WIFE:  All my brothers are sailors.  All my girl’s life, to ride the waves is my only wish, my only hope.  I make no bones about this to the man who takes me as wife and takes me across.  ‘Tis an even exchange.  My body and the brood it will bear him buys this journey, not my soul.  The English, so says he, can only claim this land with womanhood.  New subjects to the crown do not flower from the mere mud.  The female sex itself is the soil of this New World.

    BARDO VOICE:  Jamestown.

    SALTED WIFE:  The moment we land my only hope is for us to fail and sail away.  Seems likely enough: squalid huts crouched inside ramshackle fort, savages culling us one by one when we stray too close to the forest which holds us forever in its suffocating shadow.
        Oh, perhaps tomorrow we’ll ship for some place else.  Or better still perhaps we’ll just keep sailing round and round and round this wonderful globe Columbus found.

    BARDO VOICE:  It was a hard winter, 1609.

    SALTED WIFE:  Hard.

    BARDO VOICE:  Bitter.

    SALTED WIFE:  Dark.

    BARDO VOICE:  Contagion.

    SALTED WIFE:  Starvation.
          Who’d’ve thought that in such a terrible time I’d find my love for my husband.

    BARDO VOICE:  The livestock went quickly.

    SALTED WIFE:  Too quickly.

    BARDO VOICE:  So the pets became livestock.

    SALTED WIFE:  But they only lasted a day or two.

    BARDO VOICE:  Then it was the rats and mice and worms.

    SALTED WIFE:  But they weren’t enough.

    BARDO VOICE:  Leather, bark, grass, feces.

    SALTED WIFE:  Become hungry enough, and suddenly the world surrounds you with food.

          (A man appears out of the shadows and moves toward the Salted Wife.)

    BARDO VOICE:  A few settlers prayed perhaps God would forgive them if they secretly dug into a few of the fresh shallow graves.
        And another… well another had yet a fresher meat in mind.

    SALTED WIFE:  Isn’t that strange.  I never loved him, not a jot, until one night it all changed, the moment he kissed me on the neck with his razor.

          (The man reaches up and slits the woman’s throat.  The front of her dress runs dark with color.)

    BARDO VOICE:  Be not afraid.  Be not attracted.  Beings in the bardo often do not realize– as thou dost, as thou must– that they are dead.

    SALTED WIFE:  Now my love flows from me with such force that I doubt that I could staunch it if I tried.

    BARDO VOICE:  He took the rump first, the most obvious meat.

          (The man starts to carve the woman into shadows.)

    SALTED WIFE:  He pays me so much more attention now.

    BARDO VOICE:  Then he worked his way down the legs: first the thighs, then the calves, then boiled the feet for a bouillon.

    SALTED WIFE:  He caresses me so tenderly.

    BARDO VOICE:  He made bacon of her back; rubbed her ribs with salt.

    SALTED WIFE:  And looks after me so carefully.

    BARDO VOICE:  Packing what was left of her in a hogshead cask.

    SALTED WIFE:  It’s strange.  Something has certainly changed.  But I can’t put my finger on it.

    BARDO VOICE:  Because she has no fingers.  He’s gnawed them to the quick and crunched the bone open to suck the marrow.
        By the time his fellow survivors grew suspicious of his queer vigor, all they found of the Salted Wife was her head.

          (Tight pin spot on the woman’s head.)

        They killed him of course.  And thou canst hardly doubt they let him go to waste.

    SALTED WIFE:  With my husband’s love, I dream anything is possible.  Now I am sure I could become the mother of a nation.

          (The Salted Wife disappears.)

    BARDO VOICE:  Thou hast journeyed past the Salted wife.  Go now.  Leave this Bardo quickly.  But know thou never canst forget her, for she is nothing but thee.

          (Lights fade to black . . .

    Posted at 10:21 AM in American History, Louis Slotin Sonata, Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: A Red Orchid Theatre Company, Atomic bomb, Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, Frank Oppenheimer, Louis Slotin Sonata, Louis Slotin Sonata Poster, Mid-West Premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, mushroom cloud, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Trinity Test Shot

  • THE SEQUENCE now Half-Price

    THE SEQUENCE now Half-Price

    Just slashed the price of the Kindle version of my play The Sequence. To order the digi-script, hit my page for the play here and then click through the Amazon badge pictured just to the right of the synopsis.

    The Sequence dramatizes the real-life race to decode the genetic instructions for building a human being.  The play world-premiered in 2008 produced by The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena, California. 

    Here’s a little teaser:

    Renegade researcher Craig Venter develops a controversial “shotgun” technique for sequencing DNA, then quits the NIH over an institutional lack of imagination. He quickly makes a fortune in the private sector, and becomes simultaneously the most loved and hated scientist in the world.

    A folksy doctor named Francis Collins inherits the U.S. government’s Human Genome Project. When his victory in the sequencing race is threatened by Venter, he quickly makes the transition from apparent bumpkin to fierce competitor.

    Journalist Kellie Silverstein cuts her teeth on the biggest science story of all time, while simultaneously running a race with her own mortality.

    In the competition to sequence the human genome, will the grand prize be the public good or private profit? And how will three people, amid the frenzied race to determine what makes a human being, discover their humanity?

     Kerri Krause, Hugo Armstrong and William Salyers as Kellie, Venter and Collins

    So if you dig electronic versions of play scripts (and really, who doesn’t?) then order a copy of The Sequence now, because supplies of these electron configurations are going fast!  (186,000 miles per second, to be exact.)

    ****

    Note: other scripts of mine currently available on Kindle include:  Louis Slotin Sonata, Tuesday, The Ten Thousand Things and The Don Juan Cult Concerto.

    Posted at 10:21 AM in American History, Louis Slotin Sonata, Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: A Red Orchid Theatre Company, Atomic bomb, Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, Frank Oppenheimer, Louis Slotin Sonata, Louis Slotin Sonata Poster, Mid-West Premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, mushroom cloud, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Trinity Test Shot

  • Jonas Spongeman Crossing

    A quick, dirty antidote to any overdose of holiday cheer.

    It’s Christmas Night, 1776.  A boat carrying a cannon across the Delaware River during George Washington’s famous crossing also carries snatches of conversation among the two Marblehead boatmen poling the craft and an Irish gunner attached to the cannon.  The bitter rain has turned to driving snow.  The river is choked with ice cakes the size of livestock.  And on the other side are four hundred Hessian mercenaries to be fought come the dawn.  Will they be asleep, drunk from their Yuletide revels, like the Virginian General hopes?  Or will they be waiting for the rag-tag rebel army with their own Christmas surprise?

    William Salyers directs a cast of veteran voice talent in this ten minute audio drama. {Adult language}

    Jonas Spongeman Crossing by Paul Mullin

    For a full script, click here.

    Posted at 10:21 AM in American History, Louis Slotin Sonata, Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: A Red Orchid Theatre Company, Atomic bomb, Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, Frank Oppenheimer, Louis Slotin Sonata, Louis Slotin Sonata Poster, Mid-West Premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, mushroom cloud, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Trinity Test Shot