The Sadness of Einstein

One of my grandiose projects that never got finished I thought of as The Quantum Quartet, four plays about two young male physicists, lovers, with one getting a sex change operation in the middle of the sequence. In the 1980s I got a lot of press even for projects that were gestating, and the quartet, or plans for same, got a surprisingly large write up in The Oregonian. I had just finished the first of the four, called THE SADNESS OF EINSTEIN. "Two students track down Einstein at the Solvay Conference in 1927 in order to tell him The Oregon Interpretation of the new quantum physics." A poet friend thought it was my best play. (Hard to imagine there was so much interest in my work in progress then, considering how invisible I would become soon enough. Ah, fame is fickle.)

A theater in Seattle had selected this play for a grant-supported "new play festival", and I was excited to get a premier production there. Alas, at the last minute the expected grant did not materialize and the festival was cancelled. The play never has been produced.

I didn't finish the quartet because writing it coincided with a new obsession for what is now called hyperdrama. I discovered my infatuation with the New Physics was better served there than in this quartet of traditional "Newtonian" plays. So Sadness ended the project.