Theater and science have been, and continue to be, entangled. It is telling, for example, that the most produced playwright in the USA during the 2017-2018 season was Lauren Gunderson, who specializes in plays based on narratives from the history of science. We, as historians, also engage with the entanglement of theater and science when we employ the titillating metaphors of historical “actors” who “perform” the experiments in our own stories of science. But the nature of our job requires us to engage with heightened awareness, probing the nodes of intersection of theater and science while testing the variety of ways we can access and interrogate those intersections.
The papers in this panel offer a range of historical examples that highlight the role theater can play in science, and vice versa. Each paper covers a specific moment (between the 1790s and 1930s) when the stage served as a testing ground for scientific innovation or experimentation. Brought together, these histories exemplify the significance of “play” in experimentation and introduce new sites of exchange between scientific thinking and the creative process. The staging of these experiments unites the social, aesthetic, and scientific realms, inviting historians of science to interrogate the metaphors of “performance” in the history of science. Ultimately, this panel aims to catalyze discussion about the profound ways in which theater- both written and produced- has contributed to our stories of science.
