The Accidental Playwright

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The Accidental Playwright - 

or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Join The Creative Class

Two years ago I would have laughed at the idea of me writing a play - and also would have laughed if you told me that in two years time there would emerge a major movie star named Benedict Cumberbatch.

Yet here I am two years later, with a planned theatrical production of my first play - and Cumberbatch has an Academy Award nomination for best actor. More about that later.

Aside from a few haikus, I had never written anything creative in my life.

But then something happened. It all starts and ends with an apple, the forbidden fruit. 

It also starts and ends with a writer and science historian named George Dyson.

Let me explain. About three years ago, I read a fascinating book about the early days of computers called “Turing’s Cathedral” by George Dyson.  Several years earlier I had read a brilliant biography of Robert Oppenheimer (“father of the atomic bomb”) called “American Prometheus”. His story struck me as a tragedy of Shakespearean, even mythic proportions. But Dyson’s book inspired me to re-read the classic biography of Alan Turing, “The Enigma” by Andrew Hodges.

Then it hit me. Turing and Oppenheimer led remarkably parallel lives, yet never actually met. But they were connected - connected by an apple! Many people are now aware that Turing committed suicide in 1954 by eating a cyanide-poisoned apple. Few know that in 1926 while Oppenheimer was studying at Cambridge, he attempted to poison his tutor with a cyanide-laced apple!

And fewer yet know that the tutor was Patrick Blackett, who went on to become one of the principal instigators of the Manhattan Project (which Oppenheimer was chosen to lead), and after the war became a colleague of Alan Turing at the University of Manchester.

On occasion, truth is actually stranger than fiction. This story needed to be told; these men’s stories needed to be told - their towering achievements and subsequent persecution by their own governments. Maybe put them together - two broken men, meeting for the first time, sharing memories and spilling their guts to each other…

But how should the story be told, and by whom?

I submerged into deep research mode, read about ten books, and emerged with a mountain of notes and the faint beginning of a story line. From this I created an outline to organize my thoughts. But should it be a book? A screenplay? A stage play? Some knowledgeable friends advised that this was best suited for a stage play. 

I entertained no thought of writing it myself; I would either hand it off to an interested skilled writer, or perhaps collaborate with one. I tried to find a potential collaborator, but with no success. I even tried to interest prominent local writer Lawrence Wright, who politely declined. A relentlessly positive friend said, “Just write it yourself - it will come out great!” 

I ended up trying to write the play myself, out of sheer necessity. So, how do you write a play, anyway?

I read a few books on the subject, somewhat informative but mostly uninspiring - then read a great one by David Mamet, “Three Uses Of The Knife”. That got the blood pumping!  I joined a local playwrights organization called Scriptworks, and the national Dramatists Guild, so I could become a card-carrying playwright before I had even written a play. Then I bought Final Draft software, which promised powerful scene outlining and slick formatting.