Playwright’s Note:

This play was originally written for a science playwriting competition and its first performance was in front of a room full of physicists. The premise of the play is that Aby Warburg and Gertrud Bing’s 1921 art history theory (that all societies develop at a relatively similar and interconnected rate despite their differences across both time and space) is spookily similar to the phenomena of quantum entanglement. Entanglement, developed out of ideas from physicist Erwin Schrödinger in the 1920s, is the theory that two particles, once entangled, move and change at the same moment despite distances placed upon them across space and time. Schrödinger famously came up with his most important ideas during a two-and-a-half week sexual spree in the Swiss Alps with an unknown woman who was not his wife. In my theoretical retelling, it is Bing in the Alps who influences Schrödinger’s discoveries.

Under the careful guidance of Radio on the Lake Theatre’s John Watts and Caroline Breder-Watts, and director Christine McBurney, adapting this stage play to the genre of radio has turned challenges into artistic opportunities. The play has three separate settings and it moves somewhat freely between them, additionally, the play ends with a stage image. These challenges prompted our team to create innovative sound motifs, aural cues, vocal effects, and the addition of new dialogue, to help better establish place and create mental images. These reconsiderations have allowed us to deepen the play’s themes that ultimately are not just about art and science, but about the connections that we make with one another, and how those connections stay with us, no matter what.

— Les Hunter