Director’s Diary
Bex Schwartz, director
Einstein Dreaming
CFA Theater 8p.m. Fri and Sat.

Jenny Saranow: How did the play come to be?

Bex Schwartz: Before I went to London, I talked with my designer, Ben Clark, about how I wanted to do a play in the CFA theater using light as the key design element. Light as set basically.

JS: How did you envision it? Any specific colors?

BS: I saw it as very intense blues, but this was before I had a play in mind. The course Light and Design made me very obsessed about the way you could use light in a theatrical setting. My interest really lies in experimental theater and being able to take theatrical conventions that exist and going beyond what is seen as normal theater. I knew I wanted to do a really physical theater piece. I was studying Jezey Grotowski when I was in London and Jaque Lecoq’s works. I was reading like eight plays a day when I was in London and I couldn’t find anything I wanted to do and I’d always been obsessed with the book "Einstein’s Dreams" by Alan Lightman and I was like I’d love to do a play about that because I’ve always been obsessed with Einstein because my grandfather worked with him.

JS: What did your grandfather work on with him?

BS: They were both physicists and they were working on radiation.

JS: In the United States?

BS: Yeah, exactly.

JS: At Princeton?

BS: Yeah, and so my grandfather was a physicist and he had done all of this radiation work and they stood waist high at lab tables with uranium. They didn’t know about radiation then and what it did to you, so everyone got cancer and my grandfather was the youngest member so he managed somehow to survive his first cancer and throughout his life he was always battling different tumors and things that he never told us about.

JS: Did Einstein die of cancer?

BS: No he didn’t. Einstein didn’t do the stuff that my grandfather did because he wasn’t allowed to work on the Manhattan project because he was a security threat because they
thought he was a commie. My grandfather died of Leukemia two years ago and I wanted to write a play about the two of them and I wrote several versions trying to tell story of the
history of the atomic age very movement based and the play is incredibly imagery and movement based. What we do is we physicalize abstract metaphors so anything that is figurative then becomes literal.

JS: Do you do that using the lights?

BS: We do that using the lights. We also have a soundscape throughout the whole thing.

JS: What is a soundscape?

BS: Its constant sound, constant ambiance, sort of like a movie but not really. I am using the theory of the pathetic fallacy, like what Shakespeare uses when things are going wrong in the world and the weather corresponds to it. For example, when in Macbeth’s tale of the king it starts to rain really hard and there is horrible weather so in the play the same thing happens. When bad things happen, people get rained on and the world corresponds to human affairs.

JS: Is that what you mean about things made literal?

BS: That is one of them. It literally rains on stage using, well I am not going to tell what it is using. It rains on stage a lot. Basically, the concept of literalizing things is that we show
through movement instead of through text. There are three main visual metaphors run through the play: water represents radiation, rice represents time, and paper represents fear.

JS: Are you going to tell the audience this in the program?

BS: I am not sure yet. It’s pretty clear without saying it. I’m hopefully giving credit to the audience that they’ll be able to make those connections. So those visual metaphors are actually
physical to be used, played with, and manipulated. There’s a river on the set.

JS: It’s actual water or is it blue light?

BS: It’s a real river. It’s a glowing river, with a black light.

JS: I recently saw a version of Ovid’s "Metamorphosis" where in the center of the set there is a giant, square pool and the actors of the play move in and out of the water.

BS: Nice. Ben, who is fantastic, gave it a great set. The way the play

functions is that it really goes back to Greek Drama and the concept of man vs. God. There are these seven angels that are the seven angels of the Apocalypse who are basically running
World War II. The gig is that God doesn’t want to play with humans anymore so he has given humans over to these angels who are now in charge of controlling human beings. They are
playing this game and the game is World War II. That’s it in a nutshell.

JS: Is a big part of it how the light hits the water?

BS: Not really, it’s that light defines space. The stage is just this big, open space so then lights come up in a certain area of the stage with a very well defined square, like the pool in "The
Metamorphosis," and then the actors move into that and its a new scene. Then the light jumps over here, and the actors move into that.

Jenny Saranow: How did the play come to be?

Bex Schwartz: Before I went to London, I talked with my designer, Ben Clark, about how I wanted to do a play in the CFA theater using light as the key design element. Light as set
basically.

JS: How did you envision it? Any specific colors?

BS: I saw it as very intense blues, but this was before I had a play in mind. The course Light and Design made me very obsessed about the way you could use light in a theatrical setting. My interest really lies in experimental theater and being able to take theatrical conventions that

exist and going beyond what is seen as normal theater. I knew I wanted to do a really physical theater piece. I was studying Jezey Grotowski when I was in London and Jaque Lecoq’s works. I was reading like eight plays a day when I was in London and I couldn’t find anything I wanted to do and I’d always been obsessed with the book "Einstein’s Dreams" by Alan Lightman and I was like I’d love to do a play about that because I’ve always been obsessed with Einstein because my grandfather worked with him.

Jenny Saranow: How did the play come to be?

Bex Schwartz: Before I went to London, I talked with my designer, Ben Clark, about how I wanted to do a play in the CFA theater using light as the key design element. Light as set
basically.

JS: How did you envision it? Any specific colors?

BS: I saw it as very intense blues, but this was before I had a play in mind. The course Light and Design made me very obsessed about the way you could use light in a theatrical setting.
My interest really lies in experimental theater and being able to take theatrical conventions that

exist and going beyond what is seen as normal theater. I knew I wanted to do a really physical theater piece. I was studying Jezey Grotowski when I was in London and Jaque Lecoq’s works. I was reading like eight plays a day when I was in London and I couldn’t find anything I wanted to do and I’d always been obsessed with the book "Einstein’s Dreams" by Alan Lightman and I was like I’d love to do a play about that because I’ve always been obsessed with Einstein because my grandfather worked with him.

JS: What did your grandfather work on with him?

BS: They were both physicists and they were working on radiation.

JS: In the United States?

BS: Yeah, exactly.

JS: At Princeton?

BS: Yeah, and so my grandfather was a physicist and he had done all of this radiation work and they stood waist high at lab tables with uranium. They didn’t know about radiation then
and what it did to you, so everyone got cancer and my grandfather was the youngest member so he managed somehow to survive his first cancer and throughout his life he was always
battling different tumors and things that he never told us about.

JS: Did Einstein die of cancer?

BS: No he didn’t. Einstein didn’t do the stuff that my grandfather did because he wasn’t allowed to work on the Manhattan project because he was a security threat because they
thought he was a commie. My grandfather died of Leukemia two years ago and I wanted to write a play about the two of them and I wrote several versions trying to tell story of the
history of the atomic age very movement based and the play is incredibly imagery and movement based. What we do is we physicalize abstract metaphors so anything that is figurative then becomes literal.

JS: Do you do that using the lights?

BS: We do that using the lights. We also have a soundscape throughout the whole thing.

JS: What is a soundscape?

BS: Its constant sound, constant ambiance, sort of like a movie but not

really. I am using the theory of the pathetic fallacy, like what Shakespeare uses when things are going wrong in the world and the weather corresponds to it. For example, when in
Macbeth’s tale of the king it starts to rain really hard and there is horrible weather so in the play the same thing happens. When bad things happen, people get rained on and the world
corresponds to human affairs.

JS: Is that what you mean about things made literal?

BS: That is one of them. It literally rains on stage using, well I am not going to tell what it is using. It rains on stage a lot. Basically, the concept of literalizing things is that we show
through movement instead of through text. There are three main visual metaphors run through the play: water represents radiation, rice represents time, and paper represents fear.

JS: Are you going to tell the audience this in the program?

BS: I am not sure yet. It’s pretty clear without saying it. I’m hopefully giving credit to the audience that they’ll be able to make those connections. So those visual metaphors are actually physical to be used, played with, and manipulated. There’s a river on the set.

JS: It’s actual water or is it blue light?

BS: It’s a real river. It’s a glowing river, with a black light.

JS: I recently saw a version of Ovid’s "Metamorphosis" where in the center of the set there is a giant, square pool and the actors of the play move in and out of the water.

BS: Nice. Ben, who is fantastic, gave it a great set. The way the play

functions is that it really goes back to Greek Drama and the concept of man vs. God. There are these seven angels that are the seven angels of the Apocalypse who are basically running World War II. The gig is that God doesn’t want to play with humans anymore so he has given humans over to these angels who are now in charge of controlling human beings. They are playing this game and the game is World War II. That’s it in a nutshell.

JS: Is a big part of it how the light hits the water?

BS: Not really, it’s that light defines space. The stage is just this big, open space so then lights come up in a certain area of the stage with a very well defined square, like the pool in "The Metamorphosis," and then the actors move into that and its a new scene. Then the light jumps over here, and the actors move into that.

JS: How many actors are there?

BS: There are nine actors. The two principals play one role each and the other seven play three roles each.

JS: I remember when you were having auditions for it you asked for dancers, singers, performers of all types. Are there dancers in addition to those nine actors?

BS: The people that I cast have the ability to move and sing. There is something like twenty-seven different theatrical styles within the play and so it a very postmodern pastiche from balinese theater to comedia del arte to butoh and Israeli dancing. There’s a huge amount of puppetry and there are all these different styles and my actors, they are normal Wesleyan actors.

JS: In what sense is there puppetry?

BS: Oh, I can’t tell. Literal and figurative.

JS: Are there actual puppets or are the people the puppets?

BS: There’s puppets and there’s people as puppets. The actors have been great. The theater styles that I am doing are not theater styles that people normally in America have the exposure to. For example, I’ve studied all this Polish theater and I have brought that into this play that people wouldn’t necessarily know and all of a sudden, they are physical actors which is great.They’re not dancers and yet they are dancing. The choreography is not choreography like this is a dance, it’s like a movement sequence. We’ve been calling them "Not Dance Dances."

JS: So, did you adapt "Einstein’s Dreams" into a play?

BS: Anyone who has read "Einsteins’s Dreams" will recognize things from it. It’s not an actual adaptation, it’s kind of like inspired by. If you haven’t read "Einstein’s Dreams," it won’t matter. If you read it, you’ll probably be like "oh, I get that. Oh, that’s how that’s working." It works either way.

JS: You are a double English, theater major, right? Does this count for both?

BS: Well, no. I also have a written thesis.

JS: Oh, you do. What is that on?

BS: It’s called "Theater at the eve of destruction: Imagining the Bomb."

It’s about how the atomic bomb completely reshaped the world view of Americans.

JS: Using literature?

BS: Using plays because I have a drama focus within English. It’s about how the bomb is so unthinkable and it couldn’t be expressed within conventional means and so the children of the bomb, the hippies of the sixties, the counterculture, were really rebelling against this kind of futurelessness that had come about because of the bomb and they are using all of these new forms of expression like happenings and protest theater which gave rise to postmodern theater, and how postmodern theater is the only way to express the bomb because you can’t do it literally at all. It’s too unthinkable to see in a conventional sense, you have to abstract it and then verbalize it.

JS: It’s like your play is sort of the conclusion to your thesis.

BS: Yeah, exactly although I do not recognize my play anywhere in my thesis, which is good.

JS: I like your sweatshirt.

BS: Thank you, we have dozens of these running around campus.

JS: Does it say something on the back.

BS: Yep.

JS: Who wants to be in the science club?

BS: It makes a lot more sense when you’ve seen the play.

JS: Are they for sale?

BS: We’ll be taking orders if people want them. We’re not trying to merchandise, but there’s interest. My housemates want them. They are very comfortable and you can pick your castmates out from across the street.

JS: So how do you feel that the process has gone and are you happy with how it has turned out?

BS: It’s been amazing. To me, the process has been the most amazing thing. We’re in version like 18.8 of the scripts, starting at 1.0. I am a very process based director, so that you don’t come in there the first day with your blocking and everything done. You find through the rehearsals, and the actors have amazing. I rewrote the play based on what they had given me. We spent three weeks improvising the characters, relationships, and the situations and ideas and then I rewrote the play for them. It’s come a long way. I am really happy with how it has turned out. It’s been stressful.It’s a really difficult show and it requires a lot out of the actors. Usually in shows there is just light and sound, we use light, sound, and projection so there are three tech elements.

JS: What kind of projection?

BS: We project on the back wall of the theater so that during every scene, different projections come up because of the lack of set.

JS: Are they all pictures?

BS: Usually it is just words and then there are a couple that are just images.

JS: What kind of costumes do people wear?

BS: The important things about the costumes is the contradiction between God and man so anytime anyone is playing a human they wear a naturalistic costume. It’s mostly period. It
mostly takes place between 1938 and 1950 and then it jumps forward. The angels have big shoulder wings, sort of medieval, neofuturistic wings and they all have newspaper on their costumes. There is a lot of newspaper in the show for current affairs. So, everything is a metaphor basically. The entire show is ongoing metaphors. We also have these "mindfuck" scenes where we go from really emotional, powerful sad scenes and then it immediately becomes vaudville. The whole play is a "mindfuck."

JS: What kind of reaction do you want your audience to walk away with?

BS: I want them to be astounded. It’s a hard play to watch. There is a lot of difficult things, the whole history of the atomic bomb is really difficult. It’s pretty vehemently anti-authority,
very anti-army. What is very important is that I wrote the show for our generation because our parents and our grandparents lived through the Cold War, but for us, we only read about it in history books. There is a lot we don’t know that I think is important we learn. When my cast started doing the show, their reaction was "Is this real? Did it really happen?" And I am like, yes, yes it really did. There are a lot of actual testimonies in the play, what people

actually said in reports, diaries, phone conversations.

JS: Sounds great, you definitely persuaded me to go see it.

BS: Well good. It’s crazy. It’s a mind fuck.
What did your grandfather work on with him?

BS: They were both physicists and they were working on radiation.

JS: In the United States?

BS: Yeah, exactly.

JS: At Princeton?

BS: Yeah, and so my grandfather was a physicist and he had done all of this radiation work and they stood waist high at lab tables with uranium. They didn’t know about radiation then and what it did to you, so everyone got cancer and my grandfather was the youngest member so he managed somehow to survive his first cancer and throughout his life he was always battling different tumors and things that he never told us about.

JS: Did Einstein die of cancer?

BS: No he didn’t. Einstein didn’t do the stuff that my grandfather did because he wasn’t allowed to work on the Manhattan project because he was a security threat because they
thought he was a commie. My grandfather died of Leukemia two years ago and I wanted to write a play about the two of them and I wrote several versions trying to tell story of the
history of the atomic age very movement based and the play is incredibly imagery and movement based. What we do is we physicalize abstract metaphors so anything that is figurative then becomes literal.

JS: Do you do that using the lights?

BS: We do that using the lights. We also have a soundscape throughout the whole thing.

JS: What is a soundscape?

BS: Its constant sound, constant ambiance, sort of like a movie but not really. I am using the theory of the pathetic fallacy, like what Shakespeare uses when things are going wrong in the world and the weather corresponds to it. For example, when in Macbeth’s tale of the king it starts to rain really hard and there is horrible weather so in the play the same thing happens. When bad things happen, people get rained on and the world
corresponds to human affairs.

JS: Is that what you mean about things made literal?

BS: That is one of them. It literally rains on stage using, well I am not going to tell what it is using. It rains on stage a lot. Basically, the concept of literalizing things is that we show
through movement instead of through text. There are three main visual metaphors run through the play: water represents radiation, rice represents time, and paper represents fear.

JS: Are you going to tell the audience this in the program?

BS: I am not sure yet. It’s pretty clear without saying it. I’m hopefully giving credit to the audience that they’ll be able to make those connections. So those visual metaphors are actually physical to be used, played with, and manipulated. There’s a river on the set.

JS: It’s actual water or is it blue light?

BS: It’s a real river. It’s a glowing river, with a black light.

JS: I recently saw a version of Ovid’s "Metamorphosis" where in the center of the set there is a giant, square pool and the actors of the play move in and out of the water.

BS: Nice. Ben, who is fantastic, gave it a great set. The way the play

functions is that it really goes back to Greek Drama and the concept of man vs. God. There are these seven angels that are the seven angels of the Apocalypse who are basically running World War II. The gig is that God doesn’t want to play with humans anymore so he has given humans over to these angels who are now in charge of controlling human beings. They are playing this game and the game is World War II. That’s it in a nutshell.

JS: Is a big part of it how the light hits the water?

BS: Not really, it’s that light defines space. The stage is just this big, open space so then lights come up in a certain area of the stage with a very well defined square, like the pool in "The Metamorphosis," and then the actors move into that and its a new scene. Then the light jumps over here, and the actors move into that.

JS: How many actors are there?

BS: There are nine actors. The two principals play one role each and the other seven play three roles each.

JS: I remember when you were having auditions for it you asked for dancers, singers, performers of all types. Are there dancers in addition to those nine actors?

BS: The people that I cast have the ability to move and sing. There is

something like twenty-seven different theatrical styles within the play and so it a very postmodern pastiche from balinese theater to comedia del arte to butoh and Israeli dancing. There’s a huge amount of puppetry and there are all these different styles and my actors, they are normal Wesleyan actors.

JS: In what sense is there puppetry?

BS: Oh, I can’t tell. Literal and figurative.

JS: Are there actual puppets or are the people the puppets?

BS: There’s puppets and there’s people as puppets. The actors have been great. The theater styles that I am doing are not theater styles that people normally in America have the exposure to. For example, I’ve studied all this Polish theater and I have brought that into this play that people wouldn’t necessarily know and all of a sudden, they are physical actors which is great.They’re not dancers and yet they are dancing. The choreography is not choreography like this is a dance, it’s like a movement sequence. We’ve been calling them "Not Dance Dances."

JS: So, did you adapt "Einstein’s Dreams" into a play?

BS: Anyone who has read "Einsteins’s Dreams" will recognize things from it. It’s not an actual adaptation, it’s kind of like inspired by. If you haven’t read "Einstein’s Dreams," it won’t matter. If you read it, you’ll probably be like "oh, I get that. Oh, that’s how that’s working." It works either way.

JS: You are a double English, theater major, right? Does this count for both?

BS: Well, no. I also have a written thesis.

JS: Oh, you do. What is that on?

BS: It’s called "Theater at the eve of destruction: Imagining the Bomb."

It’s about how the atomic bomb completely reshaped the world view of

Americans.

JS: Using literature?

BS: Using plays because I have a drama focus within English. It’s about how the bomb is so unthinkable and it couldn’t be expressed within conventional means and so the children of the bomb, the hippies of the sixties, the counterculture, were really rebelling against this kind of futurelessness that had come about because of the bomb and they are using all of these new forms of expression like happenings and protest theater which gave rise to postmodern theater, and how postmodern theater is the only way to express the bomb because you can’t do it literally at all. It’s too unthinkable to see in a conventional sense, you have to abstract it and then verbalize it.

JS: It’s like your play is sort of the conclusion to your thesis.

BS: Yeah, exactly although I do not recognize my play anywhere in my thesis, which is good.

JS: I like your sweatshirt.

BS: Thank you, we have dozens of these running around campus.

JS: Does it say something on the back.

BS: Yep.

JS: Who wants to be in the science club?

BS: It makes a lot more sense when you’ve seen the play.

JS: Are they for sale?

BS: We’ll be taking orders if people want them. We’re not trying to merchandise, but there’s interest. My housemates want them. They are very comfortable and you can pick your castmates out from across the street.

JS: So how do you feel that the process has gone and are you happy with how it has turned out?

BS: It’s been amazing. To me, the process has been the most amazing thing. We’re in version like 18.8 of the scripts, starting at 1.0. I am a very process based director, so that you don’t come in there the first day with your blocking and everything done. You find through the rehearsals, and the actors have amazing. I rewrote the play based on what they had given me. We spent three weeks improvising the characters, relationships, and the situations and ideas and then I rewrote the play for them. It’s come a long way. I am really happy with how it has turned out. It’s been stressful.It’s a really difficult show and it requires a lot out of the actors. Usually in shows there is just light and sound, we use light, sound, and projection so there are three tech elements.

JS: What kind of projection?

BS: We project on the back wall of the theater so that during every scene, different projections come up because of the lack of set.

JS: Are they all pictures?

BS: Usually it is just words and then there are a couple that are just images.

JS: What kind of costumes do people wear?

BS: The important things about the costumes is the contradiction between God and man so anytime anyone is playing a human they wear a naturalistic costume. It’s mostly period. It
mostly takes place between 1938 and 1950 and then it jumps forward. The angels have big shoulder wings, sort of medieval, neofuturistic wings and they all have newspaper on their costumes. There is a lot of newspaper in the show for current affairs. So, everything is a metaphor basically. The entire show is ongoing metaphors. We also have these "mindfuck" scenes where we go from really emotional, powerful sad scenes and then it immediately becomes vaudville. The whole play is a "mindfuck."

JS: What kind of reaction do you want your audience to walk away with?

BS: I want them to be astounded. It’s a hard play to watch. There is a lot of difficult things, the whole history of the atomic bomb is really difficult. It’s pretty vehemently anti-authority,
very anti-army. What is very important is that I wrote the show for our generation because our parents and our grandparents lived through the Cold War, but for us, we only read about it in history books. There is a lot we don’t know that I think is important we learn. When my cast started doing the show, their reaction was "Is this real? Did it really happen?" And I am like, yes, yes it really did. There are a lot of actual testimonies in the play, what people

actually said in reports, diaries, phone conversations.

JS: Sounds great, you definitely persuaded me to go see it.

BS: Well good. It’s crazy. It’s a mind fuck.
How many actors are there?

BS: There are nine actors. The two principals play one role each and the other seven play three roles each.

JS: I remember when you were having auditions for it you asked for dancers, singers, performers of all types. Are there dancers in addition to those nine actors?

BS: The people that I cast have the ability to move and sing. There is something like twenty-seven different theatrical styles within the play and so it a very postmodern pastiche from balinese theater to comedia del arte to butoh and Israeli dancing. There’s a huge amount of puppetry and there are all these different styles and my actors, they are normal Wesleyan actors.

JS: In what sense is there puppetry?

BS: Oh, I can’t tell. Literal and figurative.

JS: Are there actual puppets or are the people the puppets?

BS: There’s puppets and there’s people as puppets. The actors have been great. The theater styles that I am doing are not theater styles that people normally in America have the exposure to. For example, I’ve studied all this Polish theater and I have brought that into this play that people wouldn’t necessarily know and all of a sudden, they are physical actors which is great.They’re not dancers and yet they are dancing. The choreography is not choreography like this is a dance, it’s like a movement sequence. We’ve been calling them "Not Dance Dances."

JS: So, did you adapt "Einstein’s Dreams" into a play?

BS: Anyone who has read "Einsteins’s Dreams" will recognize things from it. It’s not an actual adaptation, it’s kind of like inspired by. If you haven’t read "Einstein’s Dreams," it won’t matter. If you read it, you’ll probably be like "oh, I get that. Oh, that’s how that’s working." It works either way.

JS: You are a double English, theater major, right? Does this count for both?

BS: Well, no. I also have a written thesis.

JS: Oh, you do. What is that on?

BS: It’s called "Theater at the eve of destruction: Imagining the Bomb."

It’s about how the atomic bomb completely reshaped the world view of

Americans.

JS: Using literature?

BS: Using plays because I have a drama focus within English. It’s about how the bomb is so unthinkable and it couldn’t be expressed within conventional means and so the children of the bomb, the hippies of the sixties, the counterculture, were really rebelling against this kind of futurelessness that had come about because of the bomb and they are using all of these new forms of expression like happenings and protest theater which gave rise to postmodern theater, and how postmodern theater is the only way to express the bomb because you can’t do it literally at all. It’s too unthinkable to see in a conventional sense, you have to abstract it and then verbalize it.

JS: It’s like your play is sort of the conclusion to your thesis.

BS: Yeah, exactly although I do not recognize my play anywhere in my thesis, which is good.

JS: I like your sweatshirt.

BS: Thank you, we have dozens of these running around campus.

JS: Does it say something on the back.

BS: Yep.

JS: Who wants to be in the science club?

BS: It makes a lot more sense when you’ve seen the play.

JS: Are they for sale?

BS: We’ll be taking orders if people want them. We’re not trying to merchandise, but there’s interest. My housemates want them. They are very comfortable and you can pick your castmates out from across the street.

JS: So how do you feel that the process has gone and are you happy with how it has turned out?

BS: It’s been amazing. To me, the process has been the most amazing thing. We’re in version like 18.8 of the scripts, starting at 1.0. I am a very process based director, so that you don’t come in there the first day with your blocking and everything done. You find through the rehearsals, and the actors have amazing. I rewrote the play based on what they had given me. We spent three weeks improvising the characters, relationships, and the situations and ideas and then I rewrote the play for them. It’s come a long way. I am really happy with how it has turned out. It’s been stressful.It’s a really difficult show and it requires a lot out of the actors. Usually in shows there is just light and sound, we use light, sound, and projection so there are three tech elements.

JS: What kind of projection?

BS: We project on the back wall of the theater so that during every scene, different projections come up because of the lack of set.

JS: Are they all pictures?

BS: Usually it is just words and then there are a couple that are just images.

JS: What kind of costumes do people wear?

BS: The important things about the costumes is the contradiction between God and man so anytime anyone is playing a human they wear a naturalistic costume. It’s mostly period. It
mostly takes place between 1938 and 1950 and then it jumps forward. The angels have big shoulder wings, sort of medieval, neofuturistic wings and they all have newspaper on their costumes. There is a lot of newspaper in the show for current affairs. So, everything is a metaphor basically. The entire show is ongoing metaphors. We also have these "mindfuck" scenes where we go from really emotional, powerful sad scenes and then it immediately becomes vaudville. The whole play is a "mindfuck."

JS: What kind of reaction do you want your audience to walk away with?

BS: I want them to be astounded. It’s a hard play to watch. There is a lot of difficult things, the whole history of the atomic bomb is really difficult. It’s pretty vehemently anti-authority,
very anti-army. What is very important is that I wrote the show for our generation because our parents and our grandparents lived through the Cold War, but for us, we only read about it in history books. There is a lot we don’t know that I think is important we learn. When my cast started doing the show, their reaction was "Is this real? Did it really happen?" And I am like, yes, yes it really did. There are a lot of actual testimonies in the play, what people

actually said in reports, diaries, phone conversations.

JS: Sounds great, you definitely persuaded me to go see it.

BS: Well good. It’s crazy. It’s a mind fuck.