Past Shows

Theory of Nothing
April 30, 2018
Pasadena Playhouse

If Marie Curie stopped by your tree house, would you let her in? Tough-as-nails physicist Brit Swanson has been married to the well-known sculptor Chuck Swanson for over thirty years. The play begins as their son Max (a condensed matter physicist) and their daughter Sugar (a designer) return to their childhood home to pack up the house on the eve of their parents’ divorce. But when the characters reveal shocking truths about themselves, the entire family is forced to confront questions of honesty, allegiance, and madness. In one wild night of discovery, complications of love and memory in multiple dimensions change their paths.

Theory of Nothing is a visceral and exciting theater experience written by Lolly Ward, whose play Mate: The Untouchable Bobby Fischer premiered at Caltech in 2012, directed by Brian Brophy, Director of Theater Arts Caltech. Her play 72 Objects was a 2014 semifinalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.

Out There Right Here
May 7, 2018
Pasadena Playhouse

It’s Autumn, the Santa Anas are blowing, and L.A. is on fire again. Jasper Molloy is an aging Apollo astronaut diagnosed with Alzheimer’s who has been stashing Oxycontin in the bookshelves until the day he has enough to off himself. Daughter Lucie used to be an archeologist until her son was killed by a philandering neighbor’s pool man and she found the Lord; while son Hubble is a SETI researcher and Atheist who spends his days searching for life in the multiverse. Then in walks Randy, a contractor Lucie meets online, who shakes things up with his open heart and mind. Out There Right Here takes place at the intersection of science and faith, and asks, “What does it mean to believe in anything?”

Lie After Lie After Lie
May 14, 2018
Ramo Auditorium, Caltech

In the late 1840s, before the age of Pasteur and Lister and the knowledge of sepsis, a Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis found that the simple expedient of hand-washing could help physicians reduce maternal death by up to 90 percent. His discovery was rejected by his superiors — indeed by the whole western world — and he went mad. Lie After Lie After Lie is about science denial, male power over women’s bodies, and the backwardness of living in a post-truth world.

Vavilov’s Garden
April 22, 2017
Ramo Auditorium, Caltech

After the March for Science in Pasadena, the Caltech Earth Day event began in the lobby of the theater at 6:00pm with a lobby display and conversation with the playwright titled “Science Under Siege: The Politics of Seed Banking and War.”

Leningrad, December 1941. During the seige of the city by Nazi Germany, a group of Soviet scientists struggle to preserve a seed bank started by Nikolai Vavilov, a prominent plant geneticist. As starvation sets in, the scientists split into two factions, one that wants to eat the seeds and tubers to survive, and the other that sees the preservation of the genebank as a nobler goal to be achieved at all costs. Aside from German bombing, the scientists face another enemy: Vavilov has been arrested and held incommunicado, for opposing Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s chief geneticist and proponent of genetic pseudoscience. The seed bank therefore finds itself under close watch and political scrutiny. Based on a true story, this play examines science and scientists under incredible political and physical pressure.

In the midst of mass hunger in Russia, biologist Nikolai Vavilov “scoured the world for crop specimens that might grow in the harsh Russian climate or provide genetic material to make existing plants hardier,” Playwright Mark Eckard explains. Yet he ran up against the pseudo science of Marxist Trofim Lysenko, who was embraced by the Soviet propaganda machine. Eckard says, “We see the same conflict today over the question of climate change. Ideologues persist in their denial in the face of overwhelming evidence, delaying the crucial action needed to prevent catastrophe. Men like Lysenko, and politicians like Stalin who support them, live in a world where facts are irrelevant and anyone who dares disagree is labelled an elitist or an enemy of progress.”

Somber Science
April 30, 2017
Theater Lab, TACIT House, Caltech

Aurora Apolito is a theoretical physicist and mathematician working at a research institute in Germany. Her graduate assistant, Hamid al-Nashi, is a graduate student from Baghdad who escapes bombings at his university to travel to Germany to work with Dr. Apolito. The head of Aurora’s department, however, is a swaggering, self-aggrandizing know-it-all who ultimately taunts and torments her until she escapes to California, leaving the fate of al-Nashi in jeopardy. Somber Science is a timely play about the difficult alchemy of scientific collaboration and mentoring, the pitfalls of narcissism, and the beauty of science.

Faustus, PhD
May 5-7, 2017
Ramo Auditorium, Caltech

Jack Faustus is a struggling third-year graduate student, frustrated by his lack of accomplishment. He decides to make a deal with the Devil: 24 years of knowing exactly which experiments to run and how to run them in exchange for his soul. Faustus soon begins to regret the deal, but will he find redemption or at least a way out? Romance, loyalty, and the price of ambition: this play examines graduate school and academic research through a tragicomic lens.

Written by Caltech graduate student Mark Kozlowski, Faustus PhD is a dark comedy about selling your soul for science, fame, fortune, and a Nobel prize at 35!

The Chisera
April 22, 2016
Ramo Auditorium, Caltech

The play is set in both 1903 and the present. In the past: Mary Hunter Austin, a real-life California nature writer, wages a campaign against Mulholland and his land-developer cronies as they try to steal water from the Owens Valley to create the modern city of Los Angeles. Austin was a woman ahead of her time, who understood the fragility of the desert, and learned from the Paiutes about the cycles of drought and the potential for devastation of the land. In the present, Alice, a geologist, is on assignment to do a field study for a project in the Owens Valley that may threaten the already tenuous ecosystem. As an added complication, she is now raising her estranged daughter Lily after the death of her ex-husband.

As Mary Austin takes on the struggle to save the Sierra water, she goes up against Fred Eaton, an engineer working for Mulholland (but who also is falling under Mary’s spell) and her mother Susanna, who has been left to take care of Mary’s disabled child. In the present, Alice finds herself challenged by her teenaged daughter—and also by a lawyer from the local band of Paiute whose land will be threatened if the company she works for is successful in their planned project.

The borders of the desert and the boundaries of past and present blur as the characters come to terms with love, memory, and a connection to the earth.

Paula Cizmar is an award-winning playwright whose work combines poetry and politics and is concerned with the way stories get told in a culture — and with who gets left out of the discussion. Cizmar is one of the writers of the documentary play Seven, which has been translated into 20+ languages and has been produced internationally including in Turkey, Lithuania, Argentina, Nigeria, and Serbia to generate dialogue about human rights. Two of her plays, January and The Chisera, were nominated for The Kilroy List.

Cizmar is a Profesor of Playwriting at the USC School of Dramatic Arts. At USC, she founded the Deep Map Theatre Project, which allows her undergraduate playwrights the opportunity to write and perform pop-up plays about current events issues in a street-theatre style. 

Planet Between the Stars
April 30, 2016
Beckman Institute Auditorium, Caltech

In Planet Between the Stars, historical fiction combines with astronomical fantasy to bring Pluto’s epic discovery to life. Over the course of a century, five uncommon characters struggle to overleap obstacles both human and scientific. Even in the face of death, nothing stops the search for truth when planets and passions align. 

In the play, we meet Percival Lowell—astronomer, cultural diplomat, poet, and founder of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona—who is certain that his calculations will lead to the discovery of a ninth planet, Planet X. His imminent death in 1916 triggers two bitter quarrels, one with his beautiful wife Constance over the distribution of his fortune, and the second between Constance and Wrexie Leonard, Percival’s beloved assistant (and astronomer in her own right).

We also meet self-taught astronomer and Kansas farmer Clyde Tombaugh, who arrives at the observatory in 1929 and is assigned by its director, Vesto Melvin Slipher, the task of completing Lowell’s search for Planet X. The work is both thrilling and devilishly arduous, causing Clyde to suffer self-doubt and instigating fights between Vesto and Constance. Clyde’s mother, Adella, helps him gain the perspective he’ll need to weather the alternating frustration and joy of discovery and the pull of earthly obligations. 

Hillary Bhaskaran is the Caltech Y’s annual-report editor and a freelance writer. She was Caltech Public Relations’ associate editor of Caltech News. In her spare time, she blogs about the arts, tutors, dances, choreographs, and collaborates with her dad, co-writer Gerald Pops. For this great playwriting opportunity, she especially thanks her family and John and Greta Davidson, Arden Thomas, Brian Brophy, and editor Sonia Bhaskaran. 

Gerald Pops is a Professor of Public Administration at West Virginia University and the author of Ethical Leadership in Turbulent Times: Modeling the Public Career of George C. Marshall. Once upon a time, he tried med school but switched to law and became a judge advocate with the U.S. Air Force and a legislative analyst with the California state legislature. He’s now writing a George Marshall play and discussing ethical leadership from coast to coast. 

Heart of the Stars
May 14, 2016
Hameetman Auditorium, Caltech

In the early 1930s, a young scientist travels from Madras to Cambridge to test the limits of physics, humans, and the stars. What he discovers will not be accepted for nearly forty years.

They Promised Her the Moon
May 3, 2014
Hameetman Auditorium, Caltech

They Promised Her the Moon received its world premiere Off-Broadway at the St. Clement’s Theater, produced by the Miranda Theater Company in March 2017 (directed by Valentina Fratti).

NASA 1960: Thirteen accomplished women pilots pass the grueling NASA tests for astronauts, and when LIFE magazine gets ahold of the story a few of the women shine as minor celebrities heading for space. Yet the macho culture of the NASA program resists. Vice President Lyndon Johnson even scribbles a memo, “Let’s stop this now!” It would be twenty more years before Sally Ride blasts off in Challenger 3. They Promised Her the Moon tells the true story of Jerri Cobb, one of these women who—for a short, thrilling time—thought that she would be the first female astronaut in space.

Award-winning actor and playwright Laurel Ollstein received the Faith Broome Playwright-in-Residence award at the University of Oklahoma, which commissioned and produced an earlier version of They Promised Her the Moon.

Theory of Nothing
May 10, 2014
Hameetman Auditorium, Caltech

If Marie Curie stopped by your tree house, would you let her in? Tough-as-nails physicist Brit Swanson has been married to the well-known sculptor Chuck Swanson for over thirty years. The play begins as their son Max (a condensed matter physicist) and their daughter Sugar (a designer) return to their childhood home to pack up the house on the eve of their parents’ divorce. But when the characters reveal shocking truths about themselves, the entire family is forced to confront questions of honesty, allegiance, and madness. In one wild night of discovery, complications of love and memory in multiple dimensions change their paths.

Theory of Nothing is a visceral and exciting theater experience written by Lolly Ward, whose play Mate: The Untouchable Bobby Fischer premiered at Caltech in 2012, directed by Brian Brophy, Director of Theater Arts Caltech. Her play 72 Objects was a 2014 semifinalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.

Capture the Sun
May 17, 2014
Hameetman Auditorium, Caltech

What if someone created a non-polluting form of energy that was cheap and inexhaustible? In 1989, Dr. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Dr. Martin Fleischmann of Cambridge claimed to have done exactly that. They invited journalists from around the world to a press conference in which they announced their discovery—a discovery the media soon began referring to as “cold fusion.” After several highly respected universities began announcing successful replication of the Pons/Fleischmann experiment, all hell broke loose, and everyone everywhere began to believe that the Earth’s energy problems had been resolved forever.

Through interviews and records provided by academic researchers—many from Caltech—this latest play from George D. Morgan shines a light on the dramatic story of two scientists whose rise to fame, and subsequent humiliation was played out in front of the entire world.

Sila
May 18, 2013
Theater Lab, TACIT House, Caltech

Sila is a powerful, gripping, and poetic play about climate change and its consequences for the people and animals living in the Arctic Circle.

Chantal Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator who has embarked upon a writing project dealing with climate change called “The Arctic Cycle”—a six-play cycle that explores six regions of the Arctic: the United States, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Russia.

The Washing of the Water
June 1, 2013
Beckman Institute Auditorium, Caltech

The Washing of the Water is about issues of ecology and community in the Hahamonga Watershed Park and the Arroyo Seca waterways. “Dramatic writing depends on conflict,” says playwright Marcus Renner, “but this play aims to bring Altadena, La Cañada-Flintridge, and Northwest Pasadena closer together.”

A Pasadena native, author Marcus Renner set out to write a play about the Arroyo Seco and Hahamongna Watershed Park. He studied the ecology of the park, read local history, and interviewed over 60 people to understand the issues current residents grapple with. Two years later, he had a play that weaves together the stories of an artist-activist, a homeless teenager, and a divorcing mother as they fight a polluted past and search for a fresh start amidst the wilds of the park.