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Life is funny. One night you go to a play about some guy who has 5 days to figure out a screenplay for Gone With The Wind, another night the play's about some guy who has 9 days to figure out why he has 9 days left to live. In the first case, you end up with a collection of deleted scenes from The Producers. In the second case, you start with a refresher course in the Manhattan Project, and then it's down the rabbit hole.
Louis Slotin Sonata at Empty Space Theatre tracks the workings of the mind of real-life physicist Louis Slotin, and the results of a particularly unlucky screwdriver twist. On Tuesday afternoon, May 21, 1946, Slotin was performing a dangerous test in his Pajarito Canyon lab, "tickling the tail of the dragon," as Richard Feynman had put it, and things went pear-shaped. It's an edge-of-your-seat beginning, since you're sure something's going to go wrong, but if you think you're prepared for what comes next, we are reasonably certain that you're not. You have until October 7 to catch the show; tickets are $10-$30.
Our review round-up includes the Seattle Times, P-I, and the Stranger, but the short story is that they all recommend going. The sonata form, as Jen Graves would have you know, is about developing a theme by restating it in different contexts; in the play, moments are literally restated from different viewpoints. This is why some characters say the same lines over again, but as Misha Berson points out, you don't really need to know that. You just need to be willing to go along for the ride of Louis Slotin's life.
Seattle playwright Paul Mullin has a lot cooking on the plutonium rangetop here: Louis Slotin (played to '40s cowboy-scientist perfection by Paul Morgan Stetler, despite against-type casting) has a lot of life to review while his body deteriorates, but the play is also deeply invested in assembling the post-war "time-space" out of fragments. This carefully constructed reality gives Slotin's morphine-fueled excursions into his psyche's realms of fear and trembling a frighteningly vivid presence, like a fever dream you can't wake from. John Langs' masterful direction supports both schematic positioning and unanchored swirling as the 10 characters decoalesce and cohere again.
While he's bedeviled by his role as "Chief Bomb Putter-Togetherer," even imagines himself as a version of the Nazi doctor Mengele, Slotin's human connections are just as important as the relationship between atom and electron. His conversations with his more conservative Jewish father (Philip K. Davidson in a warmly etched performance as a man who's well aware his intellect is surpassed by his son's), his infatuation with his nurse (Kate Czajkowksi, radiating a subtle, compassionate charm): these are the moments when the "hero" (as the official line on the accident went) does struggle heroically with the prospect of his absence, and its effects on those he's closest to.
Lighting by Connie Yun, sound by Mark Nichols, and video by John DeShazo unite with Gary Smoot's versatile set design and Jennifer Zeyl's iconic costumes to create both the stark, spare reality of a government lab and the surrealistic, opiate-laden fantasias in which Slotin questions the purpose of his life, his intentions, their consequences. If ultimately the play bites off more than it can chew, it's undeniable that playwright Mullin has said a mouthful nonetheless.
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Slotin sounds like an interesting dude.