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A New View Of Newton In 'Isaac's Eye' : NPR
Oct 05, · Written by Lucas Hnath. Directed by Adam Belanger. But Toronto’s theatre Unit Actors Company got to Hnath first with Isaac’s Eye, the official Toronto debut of a Hnath play. An interesting, if highly fictionalized view into Isaac Newton, focusing on an experiment he really did do, in which he put a needle into his tear duct to see what would happen to light and colors the staging of which I would think would be extremely problematic, even with a special effects wizard/5. Isaac’s Eye by Lucas Hnath Theatre Pro Rata February , Performing at Gremlin Theatre. The play Isaac Newton is one of the towering geniuses of western science: apples falling from trees, the laws of motion, the calculus. He was also a bit on the eccentric side: he stuck a needle into his.
Isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf
What would Isaac Newton be like if he had been born a few centuries later? I'm Ira Flatow. Anyone who's taken a high school science class knows the name Isaac Newton.
You remember this tale: He's sitting under a tree, an apple falls on his head, he figures out gravity, or so the story goes. Not really true. Like that story, much of what we know of Newton seems to be a sort of two-dimensional, simplified version, probably because he lived so long ago.
But what if we could pull Newton into the 21st century, modernize the language, spiff up the settings, make it contemporary? How might his personal and scientific struggles be seen today? It's called "Isaac's Eye," it's a part-fact, part-fiction, part-modern look at Newton's life. Joining me now to talk more about it are Lucas Hnath; he is the playwright and screenwriter.
The play is presented in partnership with the Alfred P. Our number is if you'd like to join in the conversation. Let me begin with you, Lucas. Why choose this? I'm sure you've been asked this a thousand times. And during the conversation, Johnson mentioned, just in passing, this story about Isaac Newton putting a needle behind his eye and using it to squish the eyeball. And that got my imagination started. And as I walked home, I imagined that happening onstage, and I imagined all the things that could happen while Newton is incapacitated.
And I thought, well, isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf, that's got to be a play. And Haskell, you're the one who did it onstage. KING: I had no idea what else went on in the play, but unintelligible and Lucas came to me and said we have a play where you stick a needle in your eye, and I said I'm in. KING: Yeah, I can see them out of my peripheral vision, and then I hear about it afterwards, and it's a pastime of ours afterward.
The show, people tell me how certain isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf members squirmed, putting their hands over their faces and such. FLATOW: Lucas, one of the interesting parts of the play starts right at the beginning, where a narrator comes out and says: Not everything you see here is real. I mean, I've never seen very many plays - and I think a play of, you know, Richard Feynman or something, he doesn't come out and say hey, this is real, this is not real.
Why did you think you needed to do that? It's theater, after all. I had written one about Anna Nicole Smith, I wrote one about the Clintons, and I would basically take a couple of details from these people's lives and use them to tell really stories about myself.
And I started wondering if that was right and if there's something wrong in doing that, whether or not there is just something egregiously narcissistic about imposing my own story onto these other people. And so when I came to write this play, I had that debate raging in my mind and thought, well, I'll just come clean, and I'm going to say exactly what's true so I feel a little less guilty about making so much up.
Did you know who he was before you got into this play? I didn't want to read a huge amount, I didn't want to do a huge amount of research about Hooke because I wanted to be true to the play itself and Lucas's world of it.
But there's a really, really interesting part of Boris Johnson, the London mayor, isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf, has written a book about famous Londoners, and he described Hooke as the greater inventor you never heard of. And a lot of that stuff is in the play. I mentioned what is real, what is not real. And you say: This is the stuff that's real, and this is the stuff that's not real. If it's not on the blackboard, it really did not happen.
And that isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf Linsay Isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf, directed that play, as well, by Anna Zeigler. And yeah, they just - I don't think they wanted to use me, but I worked really hard on the audition material.
And then after that, Linsay and I isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf a relationship. And I just - you know, James Watson, and doing James Watson and Isaac Newton were - the process was radically different, and that difference was really interesting in that James Watson is still alive, and there's plenty of archival footage to look at him and be very specific.
We've interviewed him many times here. It was terrific. Of course there's no way of knowing what Newton really was like, is there? He - you know, toward the end of his life became one of the people who ran the mint and prided himself on how many counterfeiters he was able to have executed. So you sort of work backwards from information like that, and you sort of think, OK, what type of person is this? Probably somebody who enjoys vengeance a little bit.
I didn't think about that when I was writing the play. Actually weirdly enough, I based a lot of his language and demeanor on myself. One of the things that Newton says again and again in the play, his little catchphrase, he goes yay. And I do that all that time. I've stopped doing it now that the play has opened, but I was just - I was really in my head just writing myself onto the stage, and it turns out that that reads as having a little bit of Asperger's, which KING: Well, you know, yeah, there's that information floating around, but, you know, that's controversial, I mean because we don't really know.
You know, some people like to say Einstein was as well. I think Baron-Cohen says that as well, but it's really hard to say. FLATOW: What's very interesting about the arc of the play, in the arc of the play you really, you're really into the Newton character, but the Hooke character slowly becomes more evident and takes over a large part.
And it's a surprise, it's welcome, but it's surprising, Michael, you don't really think of the reach that he has towards the end. I think that's what we want. It's interesting too, isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf. I mean he does, you know, come out and speak to the audience. And yeah, and he has quite a - Lucas has really created quite a trajectory for this character. I think - I'm glad that that reads - yeah. HNATH: Catherine is real, and by some accounts Newton was close with her father, and her father actually gave Newton a number of books that he used to study in his young age.
And yeah, some people propose that the two were close, but the love triangle is a total invention. KING: You know, Newton wrote very little about himself personally, but he - there's this thing called the Fitzwilliam Papers, and it's a very strange diary, which is basically a list of confessions, things like ate an apple on my day, things isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf that sort.
And one of them was beating Arthur Storer. You're all out there like you're dressed, like we're all dressed today: sneakers, jeans, things like that. Was that strange that you're not, you know, dressed I think the costumers are fantastic, and that's Suzanne Chesney phthe great costume designer, and just the idea to try to, even if it's just subliminally, you look at these people, and you have a feeling of who they are in our world.
And, you know, then - and the way Lucas has written the dialogue, it's very contemporary, I mean although it's using all of these ideas of the time. I think that's really - that's one of the most interesting things about the play to me, isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf.
KING: Yeah. No, and I think also it serves to separate that era, giving us in a strange way more access to their relationships as people, and it kind of divorces them from those archetypes, those, you know, titans of science. I've never seen it absolutely bare to the brick. What's the point? What was the point, for our listeners? HNATH: You know, I have found over the past couple of years that my plays all tend to be staged on stages that are almost completely empty, and I think there's a really practical reason why it's got to be that way, is because the language is really dense.
And I need the audience to rely as much as possible on the language for information. And when you have a lot of set dressing, a lot of clutter, that's also giving you information, and that's - it's easier to rely on the set and the dressing of the set for information than the language. The audience wants to rely on those visuals, and so by depriving them of the more easily identifiable objects onstage, I'm forcing them to really listen to the isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf. We'll be back talking more about "Isaac's Eye.
Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break, isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf. We're talking this hour about the play "Isaac's Eye," running at the Ensemble Studio Theater, and we're here with Haskell King, who plays Newton; Lucas Hnath, who is the playwright of the play, he's also a screenwriter; and Michael Louis Serafin-Wells is an actor, and he plays Robert Hooke.
Our number, Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Ogden, Utah. Don ph in Ogden, hi Don. DON: And one of the people that Isaac Newton really took after was Leibniz because he came up with calculus at the same time as Newton, sort of like Hooke coming up with his theory of - starting to come up with his theory of universal gravitation. But Leibniz published at the same time as Newton, and Newton never forgave him for it.
He kept him out of a lot of the most important work in that time. I don't want to necessarily give away how it comes out. I mean, as Don said, you know, he mentioned the calculus, but - I mean, isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf, that is - it's - there's a lot of debate about that anyway, right. And I know Newton received his, the problem, at like 4 p. And Leibniz came out and said, well, no one could solve that without using my calculus.
And yeah, that started FLATOW: Lucas, as a playwright, do you view these plays as teaching moments at all, to teach people about the characters or about calculus or any of that? HNATH: I actually kind of in a way go out of my way not to view it that way because then you run the risk of the play turning into a kind of lecture, and for me the thing that's primarily on the top of isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf head is I have to figure out what each character needs at any given moment and what's standing in their way and what they're going to do that's going to be a really interesting to watch on stage in order to get what they want.
And I isaacs eye lucas hnath download pdf we can learn a lot by watching that.
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Review: Isaac’s Eye by Lucas Hnath, at Custom Made Theatre. Listen Download. KPFA theater critic Richard Wolinsky reviews “Isaac’s Eye” by Lucas Hnath, at Custom Made Theatre in San Francisco through March 11, Custom Made website. Oct 05, · Written by Lucas Hnath. Directed by Adam Belanger. But Toronto’s theatre Unit Actors Company got to Hnath first with Isaac’s Eye, the official Toronto debut of a Hnath play. An interesting, if highly fictionalized view into Isaac Newton, focusing on an experiment he really did do, in which he put a needle into his tear duct to see what would happen to light and colors the staging of which I would think would be extremely problematic, even with a special effects wizard/5.
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