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While most often associated with Shakespeare (which is the “S” in its official full name), SPARC Theater continues to embrace another “s” word that is closely linked to its hometown of Livermore … science.
The nonprofit performing arts company is presenting its fourth annual Science@Play series next month, script-in-hand performances of two works that are apt selections for a community known for being home to two national laboratories and the namesake of an atomic element.
The theatrical reading of Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” comes first, from March 14-16 in the quaint SPARC Studio in downtown Livermore. A similar production style with the newly commissioned play “PM10” by Mildred Inez Lewis follows March 28-30.
“Readings like this are fun because you can focus directly on the language and storytelling. Since we are not spending time on physical movement and external production values, we can draw the playwright’s story out,” Emilie Talbot, who is directing the “Copenhagen” shows, told me this week.
“This play is particularly suited to a reading like this as it does not depend on a large or detailed setting, and the action is ultimately in the dialogue,” Talbot said. “It also requires nimbleness and flexibility, but that is also what is so much fun, for it means that the discoveries are coming fast and furiously, and the audience experiences something fresh and lively.”
“Copenhagen”, which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2000, follows the real-life stories of physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margrethe at a critical moment in scientific history.
“It is a play about ideas told very directly through relationship. The characters … are actively searching for an answer to a question that haunts them, and they dive into questions of memory and intent in much the same way they tried to understand the working of the atom,” the director said.
“Frayn subtly draws parallels between quantum physics and our own actions,” Talbot added. “However, it is not a static discussion, but an active, lively debate between three people that pulls all three of them, and the audience, to unexpected places. Questions about why we do what we do, if we can ever know why and what that knowing might entail are all picked apart, hashed out, argued over — and that debate is a story in itself.”
It’s an evocative piece appropriate to tell at this time, in the eyes of Lisa Tromovitch, executive and artistic director for SPARC.
“We, today, are of the nuclear age. It’s fascinating to examine the human-side of the race to harness nuclear power that is now past-history for us,” Tromovitch told me.
“It’s also fascinating to me to see scientific principles such as the uncertainty principle manifest in our daily lives, reflecting our personal ways of thinking and remembering,” she said. “We often think of ourselves, humans, as somehow apart from the rest of nature, but we are as integral a part of it, and as subject to its laws, as any individual atom is.”
Two weeks later, Science@Play will examine the modern environmental quandary of the Owens Lake Restoration Project with “PM10”, a dramatization of an unlikely love story amid the very real questions on remediation of the dried lakebed.
“‘PM10’ will be such an important play,” Tromovitch said. “Though it is set in a very specific place, Owens Lake, California, the interplay of community, history and science applies to all places that are dealing with acute issues around water, climate change, air quality. The changes we’ve made to our environments are affecting our health, our welfare, and our sense of community.”
“Berkeley Rep is doing ‘Uncle Vanya’ right now. Chekhov foresaw the same issues in 1897!” Tromovitch added. “Yet we still need contemporary writers like Mildred Lewis to write for us again, to call our attention to the intricacies of the issues we face today, and that future generations will face if we don’t act. Of course it’s also a love story, and so is ‘Uncle Vanya’.”
Directed by Dawn Monique Williams, three performances of “PM10” will be at the SPARC Studio in Livermore that holds an audience of 50 while a fourth show will be added – a Saturday matinee on March 29 – in San Ramon’s Front Row Theater, nearly twice the size at 90 seats.
“Our SPARC Studio space is more casual, and the post-show discussions tend to be more lively, perhaps because we’re all seated on the same level,” Tromovitch said. “We will have post-show discussions for all the readings. That’s half the fun, really! I always learn something new with all the lab scientists and engineers in our audience.”
Science@Play arrives amid a busy and important time for the theater company.
SPARC Trivia Night fundraiser this Friday (Feb. 28) at 3 Steves Winery in Livermore — the game hosted by our Streetwise columnists Nancy and Jeff Lewis’ Home Brew Trivia starts at 6:30 p.m. The nonprofit also has its Shakespeare’s Birthday Party/Fundraiser with Wolf Hamlin and the Front Porch Drifters at 3 Steves Winery in Livermore on the evening of April 23.
Then attention turns to SPARC Theater’s trademark Shakespeare in the Vineyard production, “Sir John Falstaff & The Merry Wives of Windsor”. Tromovitch’s adaptation of the Bard’s classic tale runs in July outdoors at Darcie Kent Vineyards in Livermore before moving indoors to the historic Village Theatre in downtown Danville in August.
The Shakespeare in the Vineyard shows are something to behold.
My wife and I have had the pleasure of seeing two of SPARC’s past full plays — “Twelfth Night” last year and “Othello” in the round in 2019 (which included a high school classmate of ours as Desdemona) — but we’ve never been to the studio in Livermore. Perhaps this intriguing Science@Play slate is the time; I’ll have to see how our March schedule shakes out.
Editor’s note: Jeremy Walsh is the editorial director for the Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division. His “What a Week” column is a recurring feature in the Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine and DanvilleSanRamon.com.
