That's Edutainment!

Different people celebrate the New Year in different ways. As an introvert, I try to avoid loud parties, large crowds, and very noisy events. As December rolled on, my calendar had fewer commitments, allowing me to stay at home enjoying peace and quiet.

To my surprise, YouTube's "recommendations" would occasionally suggest a speech by Barack Obama which (after two years of listening to Fuckface von Clownstick's incoherent babbling) now seems like an exotic gift of intelligent thinking and complete sentences delivered by a messenger from an alien culture. However, Dave Barry's brilliant review of 2018's events hilariously put everything into clear perspective for me.

We all need a good laugh and, with a new Congress (featuring more than 100 women) eager to get to work, we might even get a healthy dose of common sense in the hallowed halls of the United States Capitol. Dealing with problems that are easily identified and can be solved with critical thinking skills is an infinitely more rational challenge than trying to wrestle with abstract concepts that cannot be seen, heard, or perhaps even defined.

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The last performance I attended in 2018 was the world premiere of a new play written and directed by Bruce Coughran and produced by a tiny East Bay theatre company dedicated to "bringing science to life in the theater." Indra's Net Theater impressed me in December of 2017 with its staging of Ira Hauptman's play, Partition. Coughran's new play, A Time For Hawking, focuses on the beloved cosmologist (as opposed to cosmetologist) who passed away on March 14, 2018 at the age of 76.

The action takes place in the back yard of a home in St Albans, Hertfordshire on December 31, 1962 when Hawking was a grad student who had recently been told that, having been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), he might only have two years to live. With his mind racing faster than his body ever could, A Time For Hawking imagines a dramatic moment when a strange meeting of the minds gives a newly doomed man an unexpected source of hope.

Only three characters appear onstage in Coughran's play: Stephen Hawking (Alan Coyne), his close friend and fellow grad student, Jayant Narlikar (Tirumari Jothi), and his sister's friend, Jane Wilde (Adrian Deane), who took several courses in physics but majored in medieval Spanish poetry. She would subsequently marry Hawking and, during the course of their 30-year marriage, raise their three children (Robert, Lucy, and Timothy).

Adrian Deane (Jane Wilde) and Alan Coyne
(Stephen Hawking) in a scene from Bruce Coughran's
A Time For Hawking (Photo by: John Feld)

Part of the dramatic glue that holds Coughran's play together is his ability to let three gifted intellectuals articulate abstract theories in such a way that an average audience can follow them. The social glue, however, comes from the fact that all three come across as introverts who sought out a temporary reprieve from the noise and excitement of a New Year's Eve party in the quiet environment of a small garden where they can probe each other's minds while occasionally hitting a croquet ball across the lawn. The publicity blurb for A Time of Hawking claims that:

"It is a time of change, a time of discovery. One night, at a New Year's Eve party, three young people at the start of their academic careers find themselves asking questions that become unexpectedly personal. What is the nature of time? What do we really know about the world around us? Is it possible to really know the laws of physics, or the laws of the human heart? Cosmology and poetry, East and West, relativity and quantum mechanics all collide and, with a little bit of champagne and some dancing, nothing will ever be the same again for any of them."

Alan Coyne (Stephen Hawking) and Tirumari Jothi
(Jayant Narlikar) in a scene from A Time For Hawking
(Photo by: John Feld)

Hawking grew up in an eccentric family in which each person sat at the dinner table, silently reading a book during meals. At the age of eight, he attended St. Albans High School for Girls for a few months (where he first crossed paths with Jane Wilde). His fascination with classical music became so intense that he missed a critical appointment one day because he decided to stay home and listen to Richard Wagner's entire RING cycle.

What I find fascinating about this play is how successfully the playwright manages to cram 110 minutes of exposition into a 100-minute play without overpowering the nervous intimacy of a budding friendship between three nerds. While A Time For Hawking has a clear and obvious protagonist, there are no antagonists. Instead, the audience sees the shy Hawking begin to blossom in the company of two peers who can provide him with the kind of gentle social support and intellectual intimacy that is rarely depicted onstage. In Coughran's program note, he explains that:

“Time formed a central part of Stephen Hawking’s theoretical work as a cosmologist (working with massive objects that affect time), and was associated with the title of his extremely popular book, A Brief History of Time. His life was, in many ways, defined by a struggle with time. Diagnosed with ALS at age 20, he was told to expect no more than two or three years to live. Throughout Dr. Hawking’s life, his prognosis did not change. He lived almost the entirety of his 76 years expecting to be dead within a year or two. I wondered what such a diagnosis did to a person’s view of the universe and our place in it. This knowledge could not help but affect the way one looks at the question of what to do with one’s time.”

Alan Coyne stars in Bruce Coughran's new play,
A Time For Hawking (Photo by: John Feld)

“I can’t pretend to understand what that might have meant for Stephen, but I do know that his life, lived in spite of his challenges and limitations, has been an inspiration to many, many people. My research for this play took me to some unexpected places, like Hindu mythology, Spanish poetry, and into the depths of 20th-century physics. I could not help feeling that the three characters in this play (named after three real people) are but faint shadows of the actual people they represent -- all of whom have lived extraordinary lives. In the middle of writing this play, the actual Stephen Hawking reached the end of his time, the end of an extraordinary life.”

Of the three actors, Adrian Deane faces the curious challenge of portraying a young woman who keeps her reactions and emotions so closely held as to seem semi-robotic. Only when willing to let down her guard and reveal her intellectual strength does her portrayal of Jane Wilde truly come to life, demonstrating a woman whose warmth and mental acuity could be extremely attractive to someone like Hawking. I especially enjoyed Tirumari Jothi's characterization of Jayant Narlikar (the gifted astrophysicist born in Kolhapur, India who became Hawking's close friend at the University of Cambridge).

Adrian Deane and Tirumari Jothi appear as Stephen
Hawking's friends in A Time For Hawking
(Photo by: John Feld)

Having seen Alan Coyne perform on Bay area stages in both serious and comedic roles, I'm constantly struck by how well he uses his lanky body for farce as well as complex, multi-layered characters. Under Coughran's direction, he brings Hawking to life with a remarkable attention to detail as the young cosmologist struggles to explain intangible concepts while wrestling with a combination of shyness and depression.

Performances of A Time For Hawking continue through January 13 at the Berkeley City Club (click here for tickets).