A winning formula: tales tied to science on stage and screen

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"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
— Albert Einstein

Exit the comical absent-minded professor. And the sinister European lab-lizard, with the thick accent and diabolical intentions. And the gawky nerd, sporting a bad haircut, a plastic pocket protector and no discernible social skills.

Today when you see scientists and mathematicians portrayed in new films or plays, they are more likely to be protagonists than bit players, figures of complexity and fascination rather than walking "geek" jokes or dotty legends.

Take the handsome math genius John Forbes Nash Jr., played by Russell Crowe in the new movie "A Beautiful Mind." Or dashing code-cracker Tom Jericho in the upcoming film "Enigma."

Or the Broadway-stage version of the late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, an ebullient soul depicted by Alan Alda in "Q.E.D."

Playgoers are also encountering the conflicted young numerical whiz Catherine, in David Auburn's Tony Award-winning "Proof" (which began its national tour at Seattle Repertory Theatre recently), and the real-life World War II physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in Michael Frayn's lauded "Copenhagen."

Hollywood has long churned out the odd screen-bio of a famed scientist (i.e., Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie), and relished the evil antics of crazed imaginary ones (i.e., Drs. Frankenstein and No).

But this current dramatic trend is something different — and less formulaic. Jump-started by such popular efforts as Tom Stoppard's math-suffused 1993 play, "Arcadia," (to be mounted by Boomer Classics at Kirkland Performance Center, March 7-17) and the 1997 hit movie "Good Will Hunting," with Matt Damon as a janitor and secret math whiz, it's still gaining steam.

Such works (from the indie film "Pi" to the cult bio-play "R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE," seen last summer at Intiman Theatre) vary in the actual amount of mind-twisting hard science and new math they impart.

But high number quotient or not, they belong to a realm of intellectual discovery and ethical implication that is a relatively untapped wellspring of human drama — especially compelling in an age when little is certain but the progress of science and technology.

"This trend in plays and movies is generally a good thing, because people have been largely oblivious to the existence of mathematicians," suggests Robert Osserman of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif.

Osserman, a Stanford University math professor emeritus, has been closely tracking the changing image of his peers on stage and screen: "Math was considered a dead subject in school. Unless you were in the field, you probably didn't know how creative it was or how much people were doing with it. That's changing."

"The math world is good territory to mark, and I'm surprised more plays haven't explored it," says "Proof" author Auburn. "It's a competitive, eccentric, passionate subculture that's inherently dramatic in many ways."

Infinite source of drama

In addition to the possibilities for dramatic conflict, mystery and suspense the sci-math milieu affords, it can also yield fresh metaphors for creativity and new moral insights, says Gordon Davidson, who staged "Q.E.D" (the title is an abbreviation for quantum electrodynamics) in Los Angeles and in New York (where it reopens in February).

"In a period of spiritual unrest and upheaval, science is where we can ask the big questions about the universe we need to ask," suggests Davidson, an electrical engineer-turned-theater artist. "I've always thought of the great scientists as the poet-philosophers of their times. They understand more than the rest of us about the physical nature of our world and can express it eloquently."

Such explorers, who seek to understand and manipulate natural phenomena through equations and experiments, may also serve as can-do heroes — at a time when heroic figures are in short supply.

"It's hard to find heroes among politicians because we have such mixed feelings about them," suggests playwright Constance Congdon, author of the dawning-of-the-nuke-age play "No Mercy."

"And social causes are so complex now that social reformers don't move us en masse the way they once did. But you come away from a good play about a mathematician or scientist feeling empowered. It's about the power of the mind — not to bend spoons or levitate something, but to change our perceptions of the world."

Brilliant — and eccentric

Not all the new sci-math dramas have such lofty aims or yield deep insights. They vary considerably, in format and emphasis.

Most prevalent are the personality studies, viewing scientific geniuses as either admirably eccentric or (at the extreme edge) certifiable. This may feed into an overly facile link between madness and scientific talent, as Osserman contends. But there are enough colorful true-life and make-believe examples to have fueled several popular works.

Exhibit A: "A Beautiful Mind," a big-budget Ron Howard film based loosely on Sylvia Nasar's absorbing biography of Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr.

Adorned with an Oscar-showcase star turn by Crowe, it celebrates the math achievements of Nash (an innovator in the influential field of game theory) and the heady ambience of the Ivy League math scene.

Less true to fact is the movie's overly tidy view of the paranoid-schizophrenic breakdown that crippled Nash's career and personal life for decades and his surprising recovery.

By contrast, the fictional "Proof" sensitively views the mental illness of a lauded Chicago math prof, and its impact on his gifted daughter, without resorting to melodrama or stereotype.

As for the more benign charms of brainy oddballs, they abound in "Q.E.D," scripted by Peter Parnell. Alda portrays fun-loving Nobel physicist and California Institute of Technology prof Richard Feynman in 1986, as he parries with colleagues, pounds on bongos, dances with a student and applies his superior intellect to the acute problem of advanced cancer. (Feynman eventually died of the disease.)

A more controversial eccentric is honored in "R. Buckminster Fuller," Doug Jacobs' touring one-man play about the folk-hero inventor of the geodesic dome. A mock lecture, with glimpses into Fuller's past and offbeat theories of architecture and ecology, it was a hit here, in San Diego and in San Francisco — proving there is an audience for such "esoterica."

Looking for truth

Meanwhile, other prime sci-math dramas are less personality-centered and more immersed in suspenseful intrigue.

Frayn's "Copenhagen" speculates about a documented but enigmatic meeting in 1941 between Werner Heisenberg, a leading physicist in the employ of the Nazi regime, and his old friend Niels Bohr, a scientist for the Allied cause.

Did Heisenberg tip off Bohr about Germany's A-bomb plans? Or was he a spy sent to glean secrets about America's atomic program? "Copenhagen" can't give hard answers, but it pursues the puzzle in a searching, elliptical style that artfully mimics the process of scientific inquiry.

Another World War II sci-math motif in drama: the unraveling of Nazi military-code language by intrepid British sleuths. The topic surfaced in Hugh Whitmore's fine 1986 play (and 1997 TV movie) "Breaking the Code," about mathematician Alan Turing.

The theme is more squarely addressed in the new suspense-thriller "Enigma," a film based on the Robert Harris novel. Here a Brit math wonk (Dougray Scott) races to head off a German naval attack by unscrambling the famed Enigma code. It's scripted by Stoppard ("Arcadia"), directed by Michael Apted ("7 Up") and produced by rock star Mick Jagger.

A casual poll ranks Stoppard's celebrated play "Arcadia" as a model for how science can inform and amplify drama in resonant ways. An intricately layered, multicentury meditation on landscape architecture, romantic poetry, the geometry of love and the mystery of a female math genius far ahead of her time, "Arcadia" is a brain teaser and heart-tugger.

"For me, it's the most successful math drama on all levels, and it has the most real math in it," says Osserman.

But when "real math" is integrated into drama, does it leave behind all of us mathematical dolts? "No, because we can all relate to the creative aspects of the field," says Osserman. "In math and science, there's no cookbook method for proving anything — you have to come up with an ingenious argument and invent something new. It's somewhere between being a poet and an engineer."

The new math-sci drama cluster has justifiably been hailed as a welcome trend. By investigating this terrain, one can address all the standard passions — love, competition, jealousy, benevolence, evil — while tackling issues of philosophical and social importance. And maybe teaching us a little something to boot.

In a world where anthrax and cloning, global warming and cancer remain hotbeds of mystery and controversy, there should be a wealth of subject matter to inspire writers and directors. And to entrance a public that may at last be ready to stretch beyond the anti-intellectualism of much of '90s pop culture and bond with the wonks.