“You want to take my place on her wings—that’s why you’re miffed. Want to be the first!”

Maybe Wilbur Wright didn’t actually lob this accusation at his brother Orville on the beach at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1900, but he did so onstage at New York City’s Ensemble Studio Theatre in November 1997. This was the debut of Flight, a play by Arthur Giron which, like the Wright Brothers’ fateful experiment, also marked the beginning of something big. Flight was the modest kickoff of a long line of science-themed plays supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in a unique funding program that continues to this day and shows no signs of stopping.

Its seeds can be traced to the 1995 hiring of Doron Weber, who joined the Sloan Foundation to head its program for Public Understanding of Science and Technology. The arts hadn’t previously factored into the organization’s grantmaking; as Weber told me of the foundation’s late namesake, “It’s not that Alfred P. Sloan didn’t value the arts, but he said they were too unpredictable.” Weber, on the other hand, had an arts background, and believed that diverse media—not just theatre but books, radio, TV, and film—could be a critical way to weave science and technology into the cultural conversation.

In the quarter century that followed, the Sloan Foundation has supported the development and dissemination of hundreds of plays on scientific and technological themes through commissions, rewrite grants, and production support. 

Quick references to the program usually cite a pair of early, celebrated successes, both of which opened on Broadway in 2000: David Auburn’s Tony- and Pulitzer-winning Proof, whose Manhattan Theatre Club production was supported by Sloan; and Michael Frayn’s Tony-winning Copenhagen, which Sloan helped to introduce to U.S. audiences after its success in London by sponsoring a symposium about the piece’s creation, as well as giving PBS a $1 million grant to film the play.

What really sets the program apart is the sheer number of artists and audience members its grants have touched in some way. To date, the theatre program has funded more than 450 of the 3,000-plus proposals it has received for new plays, and has supported more than 100 productions, not just in New York (the heart of its operations) but at some 50 theatres around the world. 

Many have been produced at the foundation’s closest partner theatres: Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST), Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and audio producer LA Theatre Works (LATW). (London’s National Theatre is another current partner; previous partners include Playwrights Horizons and the Magic Theatre, and seed grants administered through EST have recruited numerous other theatres across the U.S. to produce Sloan commissions.)

In terms of volume alone, it’s fair to say the Sloan Foundation’s quest to whip up public interest in science has made a substantial contribution to contemporary dramatic literature. But can these plays be considered collectively as a body of work—a canon, even? Over the past year or so, in an attempt to answer this question, I’ve read, watched, and listened to 80 of these plays. I didn’t set out to evaluate individual plays, but I did go in looking for patterns at this busy intersection of science and theatre. (I may as well confess that this is my idea of fun. Not incidentally, the two places I’ve worked the longest are this magazine and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) 

Happily, the arts are just as unpredictable as Mr. Sloan believed. Still, I came up for air convinced that successful “Sloan plays” do three things:

1. They remind us that science and engineering aren’t abstract concepts, but fields of work performed by human beings whose powerful intellects come packaged with complex motives and imperfections.

2. They prime us to learn more about the scientific and technical issues that shape our world and that affect the lives of people both like and unlike ourselves.

3.  They surprise us with stories we rarely see onstage, drawn from a bottomless well of content that needn’t be intimidating but often is.

Here Be Metaphors (Also, Research)

What do relativity, continuity, infinity, and completeness have in common—besides all being titles of Sloan plays? Each word has technical definitions in math and science, while inviting any number of figurative associations.

I’d wondered which aspects of science and engineering have exerted the strongest pull on playwrights over the past few decades. It didn’t take long to notice this particular attraction. These disciplines are teeming with irresistible nouns: codes, hearts, constellations, hives, collisions. If black holes didn’t exist, a playwright probably would have had to invent them. Some metaphors are better resisted, but, when deftly handled, they can provide the framework for an entire play.

Take Proof and Copenhagen, which have received numerous productions in the more than two decades since the Sloan Foundation put its weight behind them. Both showcase the appeal of a juicy scientific metaphor. Proof is a play about mathematical genius and mental illness that gets dramatic mileage from the many meanings of its title. And Copenhagen fleshes out physicist Werner Heisenberg as a complex character, while borrowing Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle from its original quantum context to comment on the slippery nature of memory and motives.

Metaphors must be earned, as Weber told me. When he convenes panels of scientists and theatremakers to evaluate proposals for Sloan support, they expect applicants to demonstrate that the technical aspects of any such conceit are intrinsic to the science in the story.

This can be accomplished beautifully. Take Jennifer Maisel’s Out of Orbit, whose central character, Sara, is a member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory team sending rovers to Mars in 2003. She is a scientist at the pinnacle of her career, in “a job that didn’t even exist when I was making the what-I-want-to-do-when-I-grow-up lists,” but at home she struggles to connect with her teenage daughter. Sara’s protective concern for a robot landing on a planet millions of miles away, the way she speaks of it like an extension of her own body, the unexpected detail that she wears two watches to track Mars vs. Earth time—all put parenting in a fresh light. The parallels work in both directions, helping me relate to a character whose work is utterly different from mine.

It’s one thing to reassure audiences that there’s no prerequisite coursework to attend a science play. Inviting playwrights to create them seems more complicated, however, given how critical accuracy is to science—and that we live in an era when rampant misinformation about science is a threat to public and planetary health. 

Yet the majority of Sloan theatre grantees lack a formal background in science. There are some exceptions: Bob Clyman, a clinical psychologist, may well have applied insights from his field in dramatizing Secret Order’s workplace intrigue (though the workplace in question involves cancer research). Carl Djerassi, whose discoveries in chemistry helped birth the birth control pill, wrote An Immaculate Misconception about the ramifications of reproductive technology. Longtime science journalist Dava Sobel turned her book about Nicolaus Copernicus into the play And the Sun Stood Still. Do writers with such credentials have a leg up in the application process?

“The key thing, honestly, is how good a playwright you are,” Weber said. “A lot of what we do is based on finding talented people and supporting them. If the working playwright sees this as compelling, dramatic material to tackle—as legitimate as any other dramatic subject matter—that, to me, is success.”

Applicants are encouraged to pitch ideas they’re not quite sure how to pull off. The program pairs grantees with advisors in related fields to help them get the details right. For example, when Carla Ching decided to write Fast Company, about a young woman who learns game theory to one-up her con-artist family, she consulted with Columbia University economist Qingmin Liu. Liu’s explanation of game theory principles regarding the credibility of threat and commitment ended up shaping the second half of Ching’s plot.

Is This the Real Life? Is It Just Fantasy?

If pressed to name the largest Sloan theatrical sub-genre, I’d cite historical biography. The Wright Brothers, Heisenberg, and Copernicus aren’t alone in getting their own Sloan-supported plays—so too have Turing, Franklin, Newton, Feynman, Curie, Tesla, Bell, Erdös, and Oppenheimer, among others you might recognize on a last-name basis.

Each chronicle comes filtered through its writer’s unique sensibility. Lloyd Suh’s very funny Franklinland covers several decades; it begins with a key and a kite, and namechecks the founding father’s many inventions, from bifocals to odometers. But it gets most of its zingy energy from the strained relationship between egomaniacal Ben and his son William, who became Royal Governor of New Jersey while his father was beating the drum for American independence. The comedy’s modern banter made me wonder how much of it could be true. Was Ben really planning to create a commune called Franklinland, devoted to his brand of brilliance, in Nova Scotia? The historical record confirms he owned land there, but you’d have to dig for more details at the bottom of a post-show internet rabbit hole.

Each of these bio-plays raises the same question: How much are we actually learning about science history, and how much is creative license? The script for Giron’s Flight requires that wherever it’s performed, the program must include a disclaimer: “This play, inspired by the Wright Family, is not a documentary, but an exploration of their lives in theatrical terms.”

Lucas Hnath’s Isaac’s Eye takes this disclaimer a step further. It opens in a young Isaac Newton’s workshop with a direct address from actor to audience, which goes in part:

Isaac Newton knew or thought he knew,

he thought he knew there was something called ether.

He thought there was ether everywhere.

Ether in the air, ether in between the air.

Ether everywhere there was a there.

And because he thought there was ether everywhere,

it helped him imagine how things moved.

He could imagine that things moved on ether,

in his head, that’s how things moved. 

We know now what Newton did not know then:

there’s no such thing as ether.

But by believing that ether was real,

Isaac could see things he could not have seen

if he did not think there was something there

that was not really there.

With these lines, Hnath handily earns his “ether” metaphor. He also meets head-on the quandary of fictionalizing science and history. Hnath suggests that imaginative gap-filling has its role in science too, because human understanding of the world is a work in progress. Still, he doesn’t leave us hanging: As a later part of the speech promises, throughout the play actors scrawl facts on the wall when something is definitely true. “If it’s not on the wall,” the opening explains, “it might be made up.”

Every Possible Path

Within this historical vein, there’s a Sloan sub-subgenre: spotlighting real people, but with names less familiar than those above. Not all are women but, unsurprisingly, that demographic is strong in the “often overlooked” category. These include 18th-century astronomer Caroline Herschel (Comet Hunter by Chiori Miyagawa); forensic science pioneer Frances Glessner Lee (Nutshell by C. Denby Swanson); chemist Rosalind Franklin, whose contributions to the understanding of DNA were overshadowed by those of her male colleagues (Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler); Irene Pepperberg, whose work with African gray parrots bucked accepted wisdom about animal cognition (Laura Maria Censabella’s Beyond Words, currently running at Central Square Theater in Massachusetts); Martha Goddard, inventor of the first standardized rape kit (The Kit: Made by Martha by Jeanne Dorsey, part of the 2023 EST First Light Festival); and Egyptian scientist Sameera Moussa, who dreamed of finding a nuclear treatment for cancer (Sameera’s Shadow by SEVAN, one of the newest EST/Sloan commissions announced in 2022).

That’s a far-from-complete catalog of plays about women in STEM, let alone of the women themselves. But imagine the discussions these scripts could kick off about how and why women work in a sphere that, to this day, is often unwelcoming (or worse) to them.

In Amanda Quaid’s Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays, there’s an affecting scene in which Eunice Foote has learned that her titular 1856 paper—which identified carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas—will be the first published in the American Journal of Science and Arts under a woman’s name. When Foote’s husband encourages her to present her findings at an upcoming convention, however, she demurs, suggesting a male colleague do so in her place. The issue isn’t modesty; she divulges that her “deepest fantasy” is seeing her name engraved over the entrance to Yale. But she prioritizes the value of her work over her hunger for credit. “If I make a speech, then it’s all about me,” she tells her husband. “If it’s good, I’m a show. If I choke, I’m a failure… They won’t hear it if they see me.”

It’s not difficult to guess why Foote became involved in her era’s suffragist movement. In light of her story, it’s fascinating to fast-forward a century to the onstage representation of engineer Frances “Poppy” Northcutt, cutting a glamorous figure as she helps bring home the crew of Apollo 8. In the final scene of Susan Bernfield’s Sizzle Sizzle Fly, Poppy admits how lonely it’s felt being the only woman in the room. Another actor, representing the present-day Northcutt (now 80), gazes at this version of her younger self sitting at her console in Houston back in 1968.

“You, you, just look at you, ha!” the older woman marvels. “Sitting there calculating your hundreds of thousands of trajectories, think you can predict every possible path, don’tcha—’cept this one, you just get a load of this.” She reveals that she left engineering to become what her real-life LinkedIn profile calls a “one time rocket scientist, some time lawyer, full time women’s rights activist.” Like Foote before her, Northcutt turned her formidable brain toward the problems she saw in society.

Science Theatre, Not Science PR

Look back at my list of three characteristics of Sloan plays and you’ll notice I haven’t suggested these plays, as a group, build trust in science. They make a visceral case for its power, its excitement, its essential place in dialogue about virtually any important issue. They help us understand how thoroughly science has transformed the world and how it offers tangible solutions to problems facing humanity.

At the same time, not everyone has experienced the wonders of new inventions and discoveries in the same way. In Relativity by Cassandra Medley, a fictional researcher causes family strife by pushing back against her late father’s championing of melanin theory, which posits the genetic superiority of those with darker skin. The theory clashes with mainstream Western science, but its proponents in the play observe that people of color have ample precedent for believing the scientific establishment isn’t always on their side.

Charly Evon Simpson’s Behind the Sheet vividly dramatizes one such example. The play is based on 19th-century gynecological research that led to treatments for fistulas, a serious condition in postpartum mothers, but it gives voice to those who paid the price: the enslaved women who, without choice in the matter, endured rounds of unsuccessful operations without anesthesia. In one exchange, Philomena objects to her treatment from George, a character modeled on real-life physician and plantation owner J. Marion Sims:

GEORGE:       I know you are anxious to put this behind you and get back to work.

PHILOMENA: I am anxious for a time I do not have to sit on this table.

GEORGE:       Surgeries can be tedious.

PHILOMENA: They can be painful.

GEORGE:       You have always been a little more sensitive than the others.

PHILOMENA: Have I? I think I am about as sensitive as the others, Master George. They just don’t say as much to you.

In a similarly unsettling vein, EST’s next Sloan production, Nelson Diaz-Marcano’s Las Borinqueñas, is based on 1950s clinical trials of oral contraceptives with a population of Puerto Rican women who weren’t fully apprised of the risks. In an EST interview about his research for the play, Diaz-Marcano explained: “The demand for a contraceptive pill was high at the time, so women flocked to the trial thinking they would be safe. Little did they know the scientists were using them to find out what the actual side effects were and what needed to be tweaked in the formula to make it safe for consumption on the mainland.”

Inspired by real-life events decades later, which came to a head in a 2004 lawsuit, Deborah Zoe Laufer’s Informed Consent follows a researcher’s decision to analyze blood samples from an isolated Indigenous community beyond the agreed-upon scope of her studies. The character is frantically seeking a cure for early-onset Alzheimer’s, to which she and perhaps her daughter are vulnerable, but her actions still constitute a betrayal.

Another group of Sloan plays prods at the tensions between ecological and economic interests. Michael Hollinger’s Tooth and Claw asks how conservation efforts in the Galápagos Islands bump up against the livelihoods of local fishermen, while Hannie Rayson’s Extinction deals with the politics of conservation funding in Australia. Tectonic Mélange by Deborah Yarchun and Spill by Leigh Fondakowski show how the extraction of resources causes environmental havoc, including in the case of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe documented in Spill.

None of these issues are simple. Few of these stories feature a hero in a lab coat or any other guise. That the Sloan program doesn’t shy away from supporting such explorations is one of its greatest strengths, ensuring that playwrights are advancing the difficult conversations we need to be having in a society driven by science and technology.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Science

Of the many themes I encountered in my perusal of Sloan plays, one other seems to be on a disproportionate number of playwrights’ minds: science and religion.

Often these are portrayed as opposing sides. See Copernicus’s reluctance to publish his heliocentric and, at the time, heretical model of the universe in And the Sun Stood Still—though, in the play, church authorities are more preoccupied by the threat of Lutheranism. The explosive orations of Peter Goodchild’s docudrama The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial, portions of them lifted verbatim from the historical record, pit the teaching of evolution against the values of fundamentalist Christianity. In Catherine Trieschmann’s How the World Began, echoes of the Scopes trial plague a present-day science teacher whose glib dismissal of creationism ruffles feathers in a Kansas town.

Quite a few other Sloan plays depict science and faith as metaphysical paths with more in common than not. How can a scientist possibly cling to belief in God? is a recurring refrain, but so is, How can you view the world that science reveals to us as anything short of a miracle?

Nikki Brake-Sillá’s work-in-progress ReWombed, presented during EST’s 2023 First Light Festival, follows a fictional candidate for a uterine transplant: a pastor named Rachel who never, unlike her deeply conflicted doctor, questions her religious faith. For Rachel, science is a manifestation of God’s power. “By His grace and glory, I’m gonna get a womb,” she announces to her congregation. “There are a team of doctors who are going to make sure that the skills He has given them through science will be used to give me and Isaiah our own child.”

The protagonist of Miyagawa’s eloquent Comet Hunter, Caroline Herschel, shares with her brother an affinity for astronomy. But while he looks upward seeking evidence of God, she is looking for evidence that she exists.

“How many more nights of stargazing are allowed me in my life? Each time I sweep the heavens, I can’t believe the glory of the gift of lights,” she says raptly. “I am a small person. How is it possible that I should be part of the enormity of the universe? How much time is allowed me before this dream ceases?” Her reverence would not be out of place in a cathedral.

The counterpoint is when science fails to supply the answers its acolytes are seeking. In Jacquelyn Reingold’s String Fever, protagonist Lily has latched on to physics to provide her with the meaning of life. “The thing is—with the String Theory, I’ve read more and it isn’t that simple,” Lily reports. “I thought strings, that’s simple, that’s the whole idea, to make it simple, but it turns out it isn’t.” After rattling off what’s she’s gleaned—there are actually five different string theories, plus an M theory that “kind of encompasses all five but not really”—Lily concludes in bitter disappointment, “That’s not so simple so elegant so theory of everything to me.”

Later she carries the thought to its natural conclusion: “When it’s someone you love, who makes things make sense, who you hold onto, when that person disintegrates, what’s left? Invisible strings? Theories? Concepts? That don’t hold up? I know it’s my little life, I know it’s a blink a flash a breath, but doesn’t it matter, I mean how well we love, isn’t that it? Shouldn’t that matter?”

Playwrights Wanted

Not all science plays are Sloan plays, though there are plenty of the latter to be found if you know where to look. By my rough tally, at least 40 of the Sloan-supported oeuvre have appeared in print, and I located another 25 or so on the National New Play Network’s digital New Play Exchange. And LATW’s Relativity Series, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, comprises 45 audio productions of science plays, nearly all of them accompanied by supplemental interviews. (After airing on public radio stations across the U.S., they remain available for free listening via LATW’s website and podcast.) 

A new batch from LATW is slated for release in 2024, starting with Jessica Dickey’s Nan and the Lower Body, about the inventor of the Pap smear and his ambitious assistant (Dickey’s real-life grandmother), and Alexis Zegerman’s The Fever Syndrome, about a fictional IVF pioneer and his dysfunctional family. Sloan-supported new works onstage this season include Censabella’s Beyond Words, the aforementioned Nelson Diaz-Marcano’s Las Borinqueñas (at EST in April), and David Valdes’s Mermaid Hour (at Arrow Street Arts in April). EST is slated to once again present its annual First Light Festival beginning in April, featuring readings of several full-length Sloan commissions in progress.

Still, a deeper search on the New Play Exchange turned up another 500-plus scripts tagged “science” and 375 tagged “technology” that have no apparent connection to the Sloan program. I’ve seen gorgeous, thoughtful theatre about everything from ocean science to theoretical math that didn’t credit the Sloan Foundation. If more science and tech plays are being written and produced now than in the 1990s, I don’t have the data to lay that accomplishment directly at Sloan’s door.

In short, I found no scientific way to measure the program’s success; an inevitable byproduct, perhaps, of the artistic unpredictability that once gave Alfred Sloan pause. Though I set out to consider the plays supported by Sloan as a dataset, it might be more useful to view the program as a force, steadily applied within a larger system of conversations, headlines, creative endeavors, and shifts in public opinion.

If nothing else, we know that a playwright interested in writing about such themes has an avenue to seek support in the form of money, expertise, and validation. More encouraging still, I see that there are an increasing number of playwrights of color working on Sloan commissions in recent years. 

Sloan grantees have only begun to scratch the surface of the disruptions artificial intelligence and climate change are bringing our way, or the lessons learned from COVID. Each time I read the news, I come away with more questions. Will I live to see nuclear fusion power plants, autonomous vehicles, and space tourism become as commonplace as solar panels, SUVs, and transatlantic flights? How will notions about cities, food, communication, mental health, and privacy shift for coming generations?

I want to hear scientists’ and engineers’ thoughts on these topics, of course. But as I sort out how to feel about their answers, and how I’ll live my life as a result, I’m eager for playwrights to weigh in too.

Nicole Estvanik Taylor is a freelance writer and a former managing editor of this magazine.