RNA and Juliet: Science students try hand at playwriting

Students and community members gathered in Taplin Auditorium in Fine Hall on Monday evening for the staged readings of four winning plays from this year’s Science Playwriting Contest. The plays were directed by Jeff Kuperman ’12 and performed by student actors.

Physics professor Christopher Herzog GS ’02, who produced the event, welcomed the several dozen audience with a description of the event and said that his motivation for the competition was to “get more people interested and excited about science.”

The competition was designed for “authors who might never have thought to write a play about physics and math, actors who do not ordinarily get a chance to perform in plays on science,” he said, while also opening new venues to present crucial if often inaccessible scientific ideas to wider audiences.

“I feel each of the plays you will hear tonight goes some way toward realizing this goal,” Herzog said.

The evening of performances began with the two plays that had tied for third place in the competition: “The Language of Love,” by Dave Holtz ’10, and “Transplant,” by Minqi Sebastian Jiang ’12.

“For me, as a playwright, it was an extremely rewarding experience,” Holtz said of the evening. “I’ve always found that with work that I’ve written you don’t realize that something is funny or interesting or how well it works until it’s in front of an audience.”

The two third-place plays were followed by the second-place winner “A Quantum Comedy,” written by Erisa Apantaku ’14.

“I wrote a screwball comedy about quantum,” Apantaku said in an email. “I tried to put as many puns in there as possible. In the end, I think it turned out pretty punny.”

Apantaku said that she hoped the event would become “an annual thing, because at Princeton there are so many of students who want to pursue both scientific research and creative writing.”

The evening concluded with a reading of the winning play, “Glass, Darkly,” by Lily Yu ’12.

Both playwrights and organizers said that the event had been successful and that they enjoyed the enthusiasm of the audience.

“The audience seemed to enjoy the plays, chuckling at the two comic pieces and intently involved in the two serious plays,” theater professor Robert Sandberg ’70, who served as a judge for the competition, said in an email.

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“It may seem unusual to have science plays,” Sandberg said, but he added that “it’s actually a field that’s received some significant attention in the world of professional theater.”

“The Sloan Foundation has been funding science plays for many years and there are numbers of contests through theaters and universities, including one sponsored by UCSB that offers a $10,000 prize,” he said. “There are also theaters like the Underground Railway Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., which have science plays as part of their missions. URT has an ongoing collaboration with MIT.”

Princeton’s competition, which was sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation, was organized by the physics department and the Lewis Center for the Arts. This year was the second in which the contest was held, and prizes for the winners included $500 for first place, among others.