The Arkansas Science Fair continues this week, with the final activities on Saturday. As part of Saturday’s events, plays about science will be performed in the auditorium of the Carl R. Reng Student Union on the A-State campus in Jonesboro. Associate Professor of Theatre Tim Bohn says several short plays will be performed from ten to four on Saturday. He tells how the idea of science plays started.
“Last summer, Dr. Amy Pearce and I got together over lunch and we started talking about to introduce interdisciplinary activities into the Arkansas Science Festival,” said Bohn. “We came up with the idea of doing a new play experiment. We sent out a call to playwrights from all around the world and we got dozens of submissions that contained short plays about science. We selected a collection of plays that are about 15 minutes or less each and we distributed those plays to be performed Saturday.”
He says students from Valley View High School and the Rough Magic Shakespeare Company have been working with volunteers from Arkansas State University to put the different plays together. He tells about the different plays that will be performed Saturday.
“There is a very wide variety of the plays. They include the personification of planets and discussing their hierarchy in orbit, to people genetically engineering their babies. There are many different approaches to theatre as there are to science.”
He says science is not typically a subject that is written about in plays, which can be difficult.
“I think it was a challenge for the playwrights. Being a playwright myself, I always get very excited when I see the opportunity to write something out of my comfort zone. We read a mountain of these plays and were totally impressed with the quality of the work. Everyone took a different approach and they all tell different stories that revolve around science. I was very excited.”
Bohn says he has been very pleased with the quality of the work of the plays and the performers that will put the plays on Saturday:
“This is our first time to do this and I am very excited about it. I hope we are able to do this in the future. It was exciting to see how they were written and it will be great to see them performed Saturday. It has been great seeing people coming out of their comfort zones. We have theatre students performing plays about science and science students watching plays, so that interdisciplinary things gets me really pumped up about this.”
More information about this is at astate.edu/asf.
