Mathematician Steve Abbott has found himself
at the intersection of art and science.
By Elisabeth Crean
"What's more romantic than gravity?"
Tess, a smart-as-a-whip physics major, is supposed to be tutoring James, a scientifically challenged actor prepping for a big role as Albert Einstein, but what's occurring right now is more akin to flirting than instructing. "The idea that two bodies are being pulled together by an invisible force," she purrs. "It's incredible."
Tess is actually a character, played by Sarah Jameson '06, in Einstein's Limitations, a charming short play penned by Aaron Gensler '08 for the winter term course Writing Science for the Stage. The play is one of eight being read at a final performance on the last night of the course. Among those laughing heartily at the double entendres (think Big Bang) is the guitarist for the Faculty Lounge, an ad hoc band hammering out thematically appropriate tunes to segue into the readings. He is Stephen Abbott, associate professor of mathematics and co-instructor for the course.
Watching this raucously energetic event, one wonders how the soft-spoken mathematician found himself amid the footlights and greasepaint of the stage, teaching a playwriting class, no less. Abbott's cross-disciplinary journey parallels the story of Einstein's Limitations somewhat, minus the flirting, of course, and the apple-thrown-to-the-head demonstration of Newtonian principles. It's a compelling example of two bodies being pulled together by an invisible force.
About ten years ago, theater professor Cheryl Faraone was directing a production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and was looking for someone to explain the play's mathematical allusions to her cast. She contacted the math department, and Abbott volunteered to coach the students. He found Arcadia intoxicating.
"It absolutely knocked me out on all levels," he says. "The entire process of theater lit up in my mind. ... And it was really exciting to have a specialty that was of some use to a production." Math and science—from simple algebra and fractals to thermodynamics and quantum physics—are integral to the storytelling in many of Stoppard's plays, and Arcadia started a Stoppard reading frenzy for Abbott. At the same time, a rush of new works, like Michael Frayn's Copenhagen (about nuclear physics and the scientists who first developed the atomic bomb) and David Auburn's Proof (involving a complex mathematical theorem), also drew Abbott in.
"The vortex that is formed at the intersection of math and art overwhelmed my pathetic defenses," he chuckles. With the enthusiastic support of theater colleagues, Abbott began teaching courses, writing essays, giving lectures, and attending conferences—venturing into uncharted inter-disciplinary territory and breaching ancient academic walls between science and art.
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Abbott's foray into theater isn't as much of a stretch as one may think. His father was an English professor at Davidson College, where he specialized in modern drama and directed community theater productions. As a student at Colgate, Abbott began to read religion and philosophy texts the way he read mathematical theorems—"looking for the axioms and looking for the structure of the arguments," he explains. "This taught me that intelligence or passion for learning isn't discipline specific. I think these subjects have a great deal more in common than we give them credit for."
After collaborating on Arcadia, Faraone and Abbott taught a winter term course called Stoppard, Science and Spirituality. It became an invigorating cross-disciplinary exercise for everyone involved. "We had math kids and science students who had never read any of these plays, and we had the theater kids who were avoiding the math and science buildings with amazing determination," Abbott recalls. "It was a great meeting of the minds."
For his part, Abbott would set up labs on natural selection or would lecture on number theory, always relating it to the specific plays the class was reading, Faraone says. The professors subsequently developed another course, Science as Art in Contemporary Theater, which they taught in 2004 and plan to teach again in 2007.
Inspired by the Stoppard class, Abbott wrote an essay for Math Horizons, a journal of the Mathematical Association of America; it was the first of four such articles he has published. In the essays, Abbott's humor is charmingly self-deprecating; in one he finds himself to be the metaphorical kid in the theatrical candy store, where not all the jars are labeled legibly for the mathematician. But the insight is spot on. In "Turning Theorems into Plays: The Meaning of Mathematics in the Writing of Tom Stoppard," Abbott concludes that "mathematics and art and science and poetry are related in ways we do not acknowledge and ultimately matter greatly in the way we choose to understand ourselves."
A corollary to this became part of the ambitious mission for Writing Science for the Stage—"science and theater have a great deal to offer each other in their respective searches for truth." Abbott designed and taught the course with playwright Dana Yeaton; each discovered a passionate interest in the perspective offered by the other's discipline. "There are real similarities in the ways artists and scientists think, to the extent that they both observe and draw inferences from what they see," Yeaton says. And Abbott notes, "Scientists are looking for connections and truths and patterns in the world, and that's what artists are doing."
During the term, eight students—evenly mixed between theater and science backgrounds—read several plays, did a handful of lab experiments, and wrote three 10-minute works. Abbott says it was an exhilarating and fast-paced challenge and admits that the teachers had to improvise along the way. "We were laying down the track right as the train was hitting it," he says.
"It took everyone out of their comfort zone," says Aaron Gensler '08, "The teachers, too." Yeaton agrees: "We were essentially students in our own class, willing to say the wrong thing, willing to hazard a guess." Watching the teachers venture outside their areas of expertise motivated the students to risk "neck exposure" in their work, according to Abbott, who was "dazzled by what they did."
On performance night, there are truly lyrical moments. In junior Tad Davenport's sophisticated meditation on relativity, Angled Slices, the world-weary Lady Jay says, "There will always be regrets. I just decided to live the life I'd regret least."
The camaraderie that Abbott remembers from his father's theater productions is also in evidence as the professors and students huddle to debrief after the readings. Clearly, something special has taken place. Abbott muses a few weeks later, "Math classes usually don't end with everybody hugging."
Elisabeth Crean covers theater for the Burlington alternative weekly, Seven Days.