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LITTLE DID I KNOW that I had already
been beaten to the punch. As Hawkeye Pierce was to surgery, so Richard
Feyaman was to physics. And it is a sign that there is something right
in the universe that Alan Alda is Richard Feymnan in QED, Peter Parnell's
wonderful new play now onstage at New York's Lincoln Center Theater.
It is less a mystery of the universe than of the zeitgeist
that QED is the latest in a string of well-received mathematics and physics-inspired
theater productions. David Auburn's Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning
Proof is still packing them in on Broadway. But, like its predecessor
Copenhagen, in QED we have yet another play partially structured by the
mysteries and paradoxes of quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics is the physical theory that describes
the strange world within the atom using the language of probability and
statistics. This theory tells you not how and where an electron is, but
the chance that it could be so, by representing the state of the electron
as a cloudy amalgam of more and less likely possibilities, which become
crystallized only at the moment of observation.
The implicit indeterminacy of quantum mechanics is neatly
summarized in Heisenberg's infamous uncertainty principle, which, simply
stated, means that it is impossible to know exactly both the location
and the momentum of a charged particle. The legacy of quantum mechanics
is both greater knowledge and the limits of what we can know.
QED takes its title from the abbreviation for quantum electrodynamics,
the quantum-mechanical explanation of the interaction of charged particles,
in particular electrons, and the electromagnetic field. In terms of predictive
power, it is one of the most successful of physical theories, and accounts
for most of our understanding of nuclear and molecular interactions. Feynman
received his Nobel Prize for the creation of Feynman diagrams, the mathematical
tools that make possible the probabilistic calculations that the theory
of QED requires.
Quantum mechanics, science's current best explanation of
the phenomenology of light that simultaneously behaves as particle and
wave, is a milieu of duality that seems to have been a predestined playground
for Feyoman, a physicist who was forever mixing the high and the low,
working out the grand laws of nature on cocktail napkins under the low
light of a topless bar, telling bawdy jokes to royalty, wrapping explanations
of the universe in a raspy Dead End Kid vernacular.
In QED we visit with Feynman, in a spare set that is the
pitch-perfect re-creation of a working theoretical physicist's office,
as he is preparing a lecture titled "What We Know," to be given at a library
dedication. QED shows Feynman as the charged particle that he was, with
but scant interruptions by brief interactions with a different field,
Miriam Field (played by Kellie Overbey), a student, indicating the magnetic
attraction that Feynman held for the opposite sex. The play is a two-hour
near-soliloquy that is not so much a stream but a waterfall of consciousness,
a rush of explanation and memory that spills forth and tumbles over itself
in a jumble and wash of emotion. Alda--son of Robert Alda, the man who
brought to the Great White Way that gold-hearted crapshooter Sky Masterson,
of Guys and Dolls--gives a bravura performance as the man whose dice-playing
science is helping to make sense of the Milky Way.
THE PLAY OPENS with its own Big
Bang, as Feynman explodes onto the stage in a cacophony of song and drums,
a shaman-like scientist about to tell us the secrets of nature, resplendent
in the robes of the chief of Bali Ha'i, his role in a local production
of South Pacific. In the first three minutes, we see the fundamental threads
(strings?) that will entwine to create the tapestry of Feynman's life.
This is a syncopated fugue comprising jazzy drumbeats and
barroom ditty, women and science, truth and beauty, pedagogy and epistemology,
mortality and morality. He dances around the office to collapse into his
chair and play for us a recording of a Tuvan throat singer simultaneously
singing in two voices at once--a physics throat singer marveling at a
physical throat singer.
Parnell's script (inspired by Ralph Leighton's Feynman
biography, Tuva or Bust!, and containing snippets of actual Feyaman lectures)
has a bit of a "greatest hits" feel to it, using the device of Feyaman's
lecture preparation as an excuse to touch on his seemingly bottomless
pit of great achievements.
We careen up and down, from top to bottom, across the life
and career of this strangely charming man. We are reminded of Feyaman's
wartime years as a section leader at Los Alamos, spent cracking safes
and building bombs, all the while caring for the one great love of his
life, Arline Greenberg, who was then dying of tuberculosis in a sanitarium.
We revisit the postwar rebirth of his love for physics and the winning
of the Nobel Prize; his late career as a consultant to the Thinking Machines
Corporation and the building of the first massively parallel computer,
a neurally inspired wiring of tiny computers that, it had been hoped,
would mimic the power of the human brain; and finally his work that revealed
the truth behind the Challenger disaster. Those and other events are hung
on an arc of worry over the cancer slowly enveloping him during preparations
for what was his final unrealized dream--one last journey into the unknown,
through a trip to the seemingly unreachable real-life Bali Ha'i that is
Tuva.
It is almost too much information in too short a time.
But as we wander with Feynman through his life, we see that perhaps this
is the way it must be explained. Once again, we have the metaphor (and
the only real pedagogy within the play) of Feyaman's great breakthrough,
the quantum-mechanical explanation of the reflection of light. The seemingly
direct path that light takes, a "principle of least action," is in fact
light's taking not one path, but all possible paths at once, of which
we are witness to only their probabilistic average.
This is Feynman's famous "sum over histories" interpretation,
and indeed Parnell helps us to see Feynman's life in the same way, as
an illuminating intelligence that explored every possible crazy path within
his, and our, own physical constraints that make up the human condition,
leaving us with a collection of adventures that are, in retrospect, ultimately
seen as a single average path, dedicated to a revelation of truth in all
its guises. Feynman as amateur artist rendering nudes, Feynman as scientist
using all of his wiles to seduce Nature into shedding her clothes.
This one bit of staged pedagogy is but a nod to Feynman's
great legacy as teacher and expositor. He was the Bard of physics, capable
of revealing truths of nature, a modern-science twin of that original
Bard, whose left-side genius illuminated the laws of human nature.
Indeed, Parnell's script has small Shakespearean echoes,
from the Hamlet-like pondering of the efficacy of surgery (to cut or not
to cut, that is the question . . .), to Parnell's play within a play,
and Feynman's wry reflection and remembrance that for each of us bit players,
"the best thing about a walk-on part is stealing the scene."
All the world's a stage, but every stage can be a world,
and as the lights come up and Hawkeye's voice retreats offstage, I slowly
return from my boyhood visits and vistas. In an alchemy of theater, the
badinage, blackboards, books, and cinderblocks have, once again, worked
their magic.
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