Fox Valley Rep Blog

In my play The Pentaeon, nine MIT astrophysicists find themselves stranded in a retreat house during a hurricane. To pass the time, two perky undergraduates act out the lifespan of the universe. The snapshot above is of Jeanae (Kelly Sloan) and Nadine (Ariana Dziedzic) performing “Act I: The Primordial Era.” In the entire mini-development process at Fox Valley Rep, I was so impressed with the actors’ inventiveness, insight, and willingness to be completely ridiculous. Including turning the primordial era into a Black Power salute.

Left to right: Prianka (Anupama Bhatt), Michaela (Annie Prichard), Dominic (Aram Monisoff), Wendy (Lauren Pizzi), Jeanae (Kelly Sloan), Nadine (Ariana Dziedzic), and Phineas (Aaron Rustebakke). 

And my director was Reshmi Hazra. I don’t know what auspicious alignment of the stars matched us up, but we got along like old friends from the get-go. The whole experience made me so much more excited about a script I’d found so difficult to write—their confidence gave me confidence, and I’m very grateful.

So here’s to the next step for The Pentaeon! The thing’s got legs now.

Last night I worked on my play from this balcony in Miami Beach. It was lovely. After awhile I was distracted by the moon rising over the ocean and put down my pen.

I’m piling up a good word count with my rewrite, but still, THE PENTAEON is proving difficult. I’ve become really good at the “well-made play,” meaning one that has a nice narrative arc, rising tension, a denouement, and all that. But like always, I don’t trust what’s easy for me. (See: forsaking writing for science for ten years.) I want to make an un-well-made play. After all, the entire point of THE PENTAEON is that the universe is a-narrative. I want to manifest that alien aesthetic. I at least want to be brave enough to try.

But I’m afraid it’ll just come out looking like sloppy writing. 

There’s nothing to do but keep going, and hope that I write my way into the answer. The universe usually rewards such acts of faith.

-Monica Byrne, Collider Playwright

Collider New Play Project is a part of the St. Charles Summer Theater Festival (July 6 – 22, 2012).

Liz and Gloria at 'the heart of the matter'

I had a most fantastic day at Fermilab on Monday!   With help from several other remarkable engineers and physicists, Liz lead me on a tour of her world.    Liz and her colleagues are truly generous souls,  gracious with time and knowledge.    Since the CDF (Collider Detector at  Fermilab) is off-line,  a true highlight,  was when Steve Hahn, a particle physicist who has been with Fermilab for over twenty years,  took us into the heart of the detector.  (See picture of  me & Elizabeth Buckley-Geer, “my physicist!” )  I was closer than most humans ever get to where particles actually collided.   The journey provided a telling new lens for understanding Alex’s world and the dynamics that drive the characters and the story in QUARK.  What became tangibly clear was the resonance between the great and the small!  This enormously complex structure, spread over acres and acres,  was created to help us understand the smallest of particles.  Hopefully, their efforts will help us more clearly understand the universe and how it all functions as a unit.   Perhaps, metaphorical,  their insights will provide lessons on how we,  as a world, might better work together.  It was awesome!

-Gloria Bond Clunie, Collider Playwright of “Quark”

Collider New Play Project is a part of the St. Charles Summer Theater Festival (July 6 – 22, 2012).

Since the play I’m working on will include long passages in verse, and I’ve always had an antagonistic relationship with poetry, my friend lent me The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky. I read it while lying in the grass in Madison Square Park. The text was very elegant and easy to follow. In the opening chapter, Pinsky introduced a line of poetry, and encouraged me to read it aloud. I did, three times. I felt pleased and happy. And then he went on to break down the rhythm of the line in a completely different way than I’d read it, and moreover, qualified his interpretation with words like “unmistakably” and “clearly.”

I was like, See, here, this. This is exactly why I have an antagonistic relationship with poetry. It’s like when a sommelier tells me a certain wine has a “pepper finish” or something like that. Or like what astrology does, in surveying the vast field of stars and picking a few out and saying “This is a constellation that has this accumulated meaning,” whereas I could just as easily draw another constellation and make up another meaning. Discussions of poetry feels the same to me: arbitrary.

I like some poets—my father, especially—but I get impatient with almost all others. But I can’t believe that an entire branch of literature will remain forever beyond my liking. That’s part of why I’m writing a lot of it for THE PENTAEON. Before, I wrote poems very rarely. Fittingly, one of them is about burning a book of poetry.

Louise Glück in the Fire Pit

Nothing against
the poetess,

but it did my soul
such good to burn
her First Four Books of
Poetry. A gift

misgiven, by
one who thought
I “should get into”
poetry. I watched

the pages curl and
burn, turning in,
black rose closing
up again.

-Monica Byrne, Collider Playwright

Collider New Play Project is a part of the St. Charles Summer Theater Festival (July 6 – 22, 2012).

The play I’m writing now, THE PENTAEON, has a cast of ten characters. Most of them are onstage most of the time. I didn’t quite appreciate how hard that would be. To help me, I roamed the house looking for action figures or, in any case, little objects that could stand in for each character so that I could keep track of them in each scene. From left to right, we have:

(1) My Wellesley Class of 2003 rubber duckie (number #13, of course),

(2) The “M” from my block set of “MCB,” my initials,

(3) My Peruvian sex taliswoman,

(4) Sheila from the He-Man universe—my most ancient action figure,

(5) Captain Picard,

(6) My Peruvian sex talisman,

(7) My Virgin Mary carved out of lava from Mount Vesuvius,

(8) Ensign Wesley Crusher,

(9) A Troll, which was a gift my father got me when I was ten, after I’d broken into his cabinet to find the hidden stash of Valentine’s Day candy, but the cabinet was an antique and stayed broken, and Dad was angry, and I felt so bad I went and hid under my bed because I felt I wasn’t good enough to lie on my actual bed, and then called Abby the dog in and tied a note around her neck that told Dad how sorry I was, and told her to “go see Daddy,” which she did, because she was an awesome dog, and ten minutes later she returned with another note tied to her neck, that said that Dad loved me and that saying you’re sorry was a sign of strength, not weakness, and was signed, ‘Your friend, Dad’; and when I got my Valentine’s Day candy that year, this Troll was in the basket, holding a sign that said Friends Are Forever, and

(10) Yes, my upper retainer from eighth grade. I knew it’d come in handy again.

-Monica Byrne, Collider Playwright

Collider New Play Project is a part of the St. Charles Summer Theater Festival (July 6 – 22, 2012).