Einstein
I wrote, produced and directed a one character play called "Einstein" that ran on 42nd Street in NYC. It was a
small production that lost money, but word-of-mouth brought an audience every night, so it ran for 8 months.
At left is a flyer from it. To see a review of it (that you might have to enlarge to read, depending on your browser), click here.
Below are the opening lines from it. In the dark, Einstein (performed by Richard Springle) walked to center stage. When a bright, narrow spotlight illuminated him from the chest up, he reached into it and said:
I wanted to touch light. But someone wanted to stop me.
(Area lights rise)
It was November 6, 1919. I was in Berlin, walking in the dark, in the snow, on my way home from work. I was a 40 year old, important though unknown physicist, who dressed as a respectable professor was supposed to dress, laughed a great deal, and believed that from science only good could come. As I walked I was thinking about light. I
was reaching for it - stretching. Every bit of my attention was on it when a shivering, crippled veteran stopped me to sell me damp cigarettes.
"Cigarettes are not what I smoke, but here. Take this."
My attention had been brought back to the street. I heard gunshots, sometimes mortars. They fished with hand grenades here. It was only one year since the end of the first world war, the Great War. Soldiers were everywhere. Platoons stormed houses to steal food and fought each other for it in the streets. Even in universities people battled. In Heidleberg professor Philip Lenard taught classrooms of students to hate me.
I didn't care much about what other people thought. It was easy for me to escape by thinking about light. I seldom had to see Lenard. He spent most of his year in a huge, dark, and ominous laboratory high on the side of a hill. As I walked that night, thinking about light, I was unaware that Lenard and his friends were about to make my world as dark and as ominous as his laboratory.
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