Most plays about science are not written by scientists but by playwrights whose background is in theater. Perhaps for this reason they generally deal with scientists rather than with scientific ideas. An idea is not often as effective a protagonist as a human being.

An interesting exception to this, on both counts, is "Infinities", a theater piece written by John D. Barrow, and staged by Luca Ronconi. John Barrow is professor of mathematical sciences at Cambridge, with a vast span of additional research interests including cosmology, astronomy, fundamental physics, history and philosophy of science. He is also the author of many books about math and science aimed at the general public. [1]

Barrow organized and chaired a discussion about different ways of expressing science in the public domain as part of the 1999 Spoleto Arts Festival. The festival was organized by the Fondazione Sigma Tau. Pino Donghi of the Fondazione suggested Barrow write something about science in theater, and brought him together with Luca Ronconi, an Italian theater and opera director of international renown. Ronconi had just become creative director of the Teatro Piccolo in Milan, a theater famed for its groundbreaking productions under director Giorgio Strehler. Ronconi is a director interested in concept and ideas, and in new forms of theatrical production, rather than literal presentation of plays to the public. He became interested in finding theatrical expression of scientific ideas, and the meeting with Barrow gave rise to the production of "Infinities." As its name suggests, this is a play about infinity, a mathematical concept, which carries with it intuitive associations to which anyone can respond.

The play was performed in March 2002 in Milan, and then in Spanish in Valencia in April and May, and then was again revived in Milan. It received rave reviews and won Italy's prestigious Premi Ubu award for best play. Its success was undoubted, and the exhilaration expressed by reviewers makes it plain that it was a striking and effective theater piece. This success was achieved despite the fact that it was written by a scientist, and dealt with an abstract idea. In addition, Barrow and Ronconi have just been awarded the Italgas Prize for the Promulgation of Science, in Turin on March 8th of this year.

The aim of the production was to find visual and theatrical ways of expressing the idea of infinity. The audience did learn some math, but the main impact was at the experiential level. This was due to the successful collaboration between Barrow the scientist and Ronconi the artist, which matters. We do not in fact have a play written by a scientist (these are usually not very good theater ), but an example of the scientist clarifying a complicated idea, and together with the theater artist expressing it in the theatrical medium. This seems an ideal combination which overcomes the limitations found earlier in plays written by non-scientists, which generally deal superficially with the scientific concepts, or plays written by scientists who are not masters of the dramatic art.

To my regret I have not had the privilege of seeing the production, and the following description is garnered from reviews and verbal descriptions. The play was produced not in a conventional theater venue, but in a large warehouse, formerly used by the Piccolo Teatro for scenery. There were five different sets, and the audience could watch the five different parts of the play in arbitrary order. The audience was admitted in groups of about 70 people at a time every 15-20 minutes. Each group saw the first scene, and then went on to watch another, while the next group was admitted to the first. In this way eventually the five scenes played simultaneously to the different audiences in the five different places. Audience members could see the scenes in any order they wished, and revisit them if they so desired.

The scenes each concerned aspects of infinity. The first showed Hilbert's hotel. This is a hotel with an infinite amount of rooms. Even if each room is occupied, it can accommodate a new guest: each of the present guests move one room along the line. This does not make life easier for the hotel owner, but is clearly possible given the concept of infinity - which may nonetheless be too complicated for efficient hotel management! The hotel was seen as endless doors lining the wall stretching into the rafters of the warehouse. The actors explained the mathematics to the audience while the relevant equations appeared on a huge monitor, and apparently the scene was interesting and even funny; after all the very idea of Hilbert's Hotel sounds like a humorous riddle.

Another scene deals with eternal life. The audience sees very, very old people in wheelchairs or under hairdryers, reading and trying to pass the time. The surroundings are black and enclosed, so that a stifled, monotonous atmosphere is created. Barrow describes it thus: "It makes us think about living forever, exploring the social, religious and human implications of infinite life for everything from life insurance, how to set punishment for crime and recompense for negligence when an infinite future is taken away, and what to make of religion that promises everlasting life. There are the divisions of society into the manically active who seek to accomplish everything and those who see the future of unending tomorrows as a good reason to do nothing today. They are described by a word like manana but which lacks the same sense of urgency. There are the perils of making a decision when you can get plied with advice from every past generation of your family. The action takes place mostly above the audience with old chrones conveyed in chairs on monorails." [2]

The third scene takes place in a large space full of corridors with mirrors at the end, dramatizing Jorge Luis Borges' parable of the library of Babel. The audience wanders through the corridors which are filled with empty bookcases, and the actors around them are identically masked and clothed, repeating the same words, seemingly an endless amount of identical people. The audience feels they are wandering through an infinite universe where anything that can happen will happen.

The fourth scene (finally, the mathematicians will sigh) brings us Georg Cantor himself, the father of our modern concept of infinity. Set in a hospital, it dramatizes Cantor's conflict with Kronecker about the nature of infinity. Cantor, covered with bandages, sits in a wheelchair as Kronecker rants at him. The audience as if in a classroom sits at tables along with real students. The cast included a dozen professional actors as well as several dozen students. Huge white sheets of paper hang on the walls, and the students paint equations and mathematicians' names on them.
Other actors climb on the tables, speak while suspended upside down from a conveyor belt. They wear face masks and black and white costumes. Such theatrical expressionism must have lent excitement and vividness to the abstract ideas.

The last scene - if one happened to see them in this order - takes place in a huge open space. The subject here is time travel. A train carriage is suspended in midair, a grandmother and grandson narrowly miss each other, expressing the paradox that you cannot go back in time and kill your grandmother. The actors march in circles, the idea is that time like a circle has no end but is finite. Barrow writes: "This last scenario tackles the paradoxes of time travel: could I have been handed the script for Infinities by a time traveler, who saw it today and traveled to the past, to pass it to me?" [2]

Ronconi's theatrical expressionism is not new. His productions are famous for it and he is a master of the genre. This style dates back to the 1960's, when Polish director Jerzy Grotowski shocked and entranced the western theatrical world with his "poor theater", where the actors and not the literary text formed the central event, with their superb acrobatic expressiveness. Though not new, it seems here to be a wonderfully effective way of merging abstract ideas with immediate personal audience experience. Till now plays about science have generally been written in realistic format. Perhaps for that reason, the presentation of ideas has often been dry and ineffective, with the main impact of the plays stemming from the human dramas [3].

This production seems to be the exception, and that is due to the theatrically expressionistic format. One may conclude that such a style is better adapted to convey abstract ideas than the more common realistic format. "Infinities" attempted, and apparently succeeded in conveying to the audience an intuitive personal understanding and a clarification of concepts of infinity. We all understand infinity in some sense, but we do not generally trouble to elaborate the implications. This play dramatizes the idea and its implications in a powerful form. The audience did not emerge with new expertise at mathematical equations - instead the play succeeded in dramatizing the abstract mathematical concept. This was due to the theatrical virtuosity of its director - but also because he chose to work with a real scientist, because his respect for the complexity of the ideas led him to collaborate with somebody who really knew and did not just emotionally feel what they meant.

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REFERENCES:

• [1] http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/members/barrow.html
• [2] Barrow, John D., "Upstaging the Infinities", New Scientist, 27th Sept. 2003, pp.34-37, also online at http://www.newscientist.com
• [3] Kupferman, Judy, "Science and Theater", www.physicaplus.org.il, Dec. 2003
• [4] (website in Italian about the play) http://www.piccoloteatro.org/infinities

Reviews of the play:

• http://physicsweb.org/article/review/16/7/1
• www.nature.com from Nature, Vol.416, April 2002
• Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten, Hilbert's Hotel, Other Paradoxes, Come to Life in New "Math Play", SIAM News, V.36, no.7, September 2003