A Fusion of His Creative Energies
Alan Alda is perched on the edge of a couch, getting fired up about photons. “A photon, a particle of light, bounces off a mirror and goes to your eye; it’s clearly going from the lamp to the mirror to your eye,” he says, gesticulating with sweater-clad arms flying, blue eyes flashing with puckish delight, as he pokes at several random points in space, including one perilously close to a reporter’s eye. “So how could it possibly be true that, at the same time, the photon is also going all over the universe on the way to your eye, going all the way out to some star and coming back?
“That’s one photon going everywhere, not just ba-ba-bum, like that,” Alda continues zealously, his energy filling up the office at the Mark Taper Forum. His long legs, swathed in aptly professorial brown corduroy, are crammed up against a tiny glass table, yet he is expansive. “It’s fascinating!”
Clearly, this is a man with a penchant for particles. “For a long time, I’ve been interested in science,” Alda says. “It’s a hobby of mine to read about science, and I have a science program on PBS, ‘Scientific American Frontiers.’ I’ve interviewed hundreds of scientists, but the reason I do the show is because I’m curious about science.”
It’s also one reason for his current project, a new play about Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. “QED,” which premieres Thursday at the Taper, stars Alda and features Allison Smith in a supporting role. Written by Peter Parnell, it is directed by Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson in his first directorial outing since 1997’s “Nine Armenians.”
Alda admires the late Caltech professor for more than his achievements in the realm of quantum electrodynamics. “For somebody I never met, Feynman comes closer for me to being a hero than anybody because no matter what it is that he thinks about, he tries not to fool himself, and he tries not to fool anybody else, and he tries not to let anybody else fool him,” Alda says. “He feels better not knowing something than believing something that’s not true. And here he is in this play facing the big Not Knowing--death--and he approaches it very courageously, as he did in life.”
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Alda has long been interested in both science and the arts. Of course, he is less known for his scientific leanings than for his work in film, TV and theater.
The son of noted actor Robert Alda, he first began performing as a teenager, in summer stock and with his father. During the ‘60s, Alda was seen on Broadway in a number of productions, including “Purlie Victorious,” “The Owl and the Pussycat” and the musical “The Apple Tree,” for which he earned a Tony nomination. During this period, he also started appearing in films, including “Paper Lion,” and on television, notably in the series “That Was the Week That Was.”
Alda is probably most familiar from his 11-year stint on the CBS TV series “MASH,” for which he also wrote and directed. The actor has appeared in many films, including “The Seduction of Joe Tynan,” which he also wrote, and “The Four Seasons,” “Sweet Liberty,” “A New Life” and “Betsy’s Wedding,” which he both wrote and directed. He was also seen in a recurring role on TV’s “ER” in 1999.
Still, he has never given up the stage. Alda was nominated for a 1992 Tony for his starring role in Neil Simon’s “Jake’s Women,” which was seen in an Ahmanson Theatre production at the Doolittle Theatre in 1993. And he returned to Broadway in 1998 for the American premiere of “Art,” which was seen at the Doolittle Theatre in 1999.
But Alda, now 65, has an affinity for science that predates his career in the entertainment industry. “When I was a kid, when I was 6 or 7 years old, I used to do what I thought were scientific experiments in my bedroom,” he recalls. “My father had just come out to work for Warner Bros., and we were living in Hollywood. I mixed things found around the kitchen. Mainly what happened was I spilled everything all over the bedroom.”
His youthful creativity also found an outlet in tinkering. “When I was about 10 or 11, I invented a five-way can opener,” Alda says. “I invented a Lazy Susan for a refrigerator so you wouldn’t have to reach to the back, and somebody actually made a refrigerator a few years later that had a Lazy Susan in it! But they took it off the market shortly after, I think because people found that there were bottles of ketchup flying around the kitchen.”
Once into his teens, however, Alda focused on acting. “During high school, I thought--it’s a very old idea--that if you were interested in the arts, then you’re not interested in science,” he says.
Still, science has remained in his life. “Ever since my mid-20s, I’ve read almost every issue of Scientific American and hundreds of books and a lot of other science journals,” Alda says. “It’s more interesting to me to read than fiction. I get impatient with fiction if it doesn’t sound as real as a science journal.”
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It would seem Alda was a natural choice for host of the well-received PBS series based on Scientific American magazine. Indeed, he isn’t simply a host, but a participatory inquisitor, setting out on far-flung treks to the Galapagos Islands, the waters of the Mediterranean and elsewhere, and having in-depth, unscripted discussions with scientists about their work.
“When I began meeting scientists, I realized, in fact, that scientists were actually no less creative than artists,” Alda says. “And I began to think that artists were no less rigorous than scientists. The more scientists I meet, the more I think that they don’t work that differently. The rigor is expressed in a different way.”
Shortly after he began his work on the series, Alda came upon a 1991 book by Ralph Leighton called “Tuva or Bust!,” in which the author recounts his and Feynman’s attempts to reach an obscure region near Outer Mongolia. Leighton was Feynman’s friend and collaborator on the previous books “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?,” which Alda had also read.
Feynman, born in Far Rockaway, N.Y., in 1918, served on the faculty of Caltech from the early ‘50s until his death from cancer in 1988. Recruited fresh out of Princeton to work on the Manhattan Project, he became known for infamous pranks, including picking the locks that guarded the secrets of the atomic bomb, simply to demonstrate to the government that it had a big security problem. Later in life, he was again called into service by the U.S. government, discovering that frozen O-rings were responsible for the Challenger space shuttle debacle.
But there was more to Feynman than scientific genius. He was reportedly a charismatic eccentric known for his passions for drumming, particularly bongo, and naked women--whom he loved to draw and visit in topless bars.
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It first occurred to Alda about six or seven years ago that this colorful character might make a good dramatic subject. “I was talking with Gordon [Davidson] and told him that there was a book,” he recalls, referring to “Tuva or Bust!” “What interested me was that it was the last couple of years in the life of this enormously powerful thinker who was clearly one of the smartest people alive, who was spending a lot of the little bit of time he had left trying to get to this little country in the middle of Asia.”
Davidson not only liked the idea, but wanted to direct the project himself. “When I read the book, I was amused and moved by it,” he says. “What interested me was that it was about a journey, not a destination--a wonderful metaphor for both a scientific life and a creative life. And of course Alan was no small component of it, he and Feynman together.”
Indeed, Davidson had encountered Feynman before, having invited the noted physicist to see a 1984 Taper production of Howard Brenton’s “The Genius.” “That was four years before he died, and two years before the play takes place,” Davidson says. “I invited him to see it because it dealt with an American physicist who comes up with an important concept that the U.S. government wants to use.
“When he saw the play, he said, ‘They’ll take it away from you every time,’ meaning that not only will someone else [discover your idea], but one way or another, government agencies will use your ideas in potentially dangerous ways,” Davidson says. “I realize now, having done the research on the play, that he was talking about himself.”
Davidson commissioned Parnell, with whom he had worked on the Taper production of “The Cider House Rules.” Initially, Parnell was to write an adaptation of “Tuva or Bust!,” and through the first several drafts, that’s what the play was called.
But it soon became clear to Alda, Davidson and Parnell that the task they had set for themselves wasn’t just a matter of adapting a single book, but of capturing the essence of a complex character. “I wrote three or four completely different plays to try and find what could work,” says Parnell, who is in his second season as a co-producer on “The West Wing.” “It was largely because Feynman as a character and a person was a very active problem-solver. If you have all the answers, it’s hard to create conflict. You’re aware of all the aspects, pro and con. Therefore, he became a difficult guy to dramatize. I never thought it would have been such a challenge.”
“We’d get together every few months and read a version of the play,” Alda says. “And then Peter would go off and write a whole other version of the play.”
Things that changed from version to version ranged from the number of characters to the central metaphor of the piece. “In an early version of the play, Feynman was delivering a lecture to us, and we only found out late in the play that he was lecturing in his own head and it was occurring moments before his death,” says Parnell, describing a version that called for seven or eight actors. “Other characters were coming in a dreamlike or fantastical way.
“Getting to Tuva is one thing he wants to do, but at one time it was the central action,” Parnell continues. “At another time, the central idea was more about problem-solving.”
The play was originally slated for last season, but Davidson decided to hold it until this year. “I thought we hadn’t found it yet,” he says.
Indeed, the play has changed completely from what it was a year ago, when it was still called “Tuva or Bust!” At that point, it was a multiple-character drama, which is something the creators had agreed upon as a goal from the start. “I remember saying to Gordon, ‘Do we agree that it’s not going to be a one-man play or mostly a one-man play?’ ” Alda says. “And he says, ‘Right.’ So this came as a surprise. But this is the one that worked the best.”
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In “QED,” we meet Feynman in his office at Caltech, as he is both preparing a lecture and wrestling with some important personal matters. “He’s got to make a decision that’s a life-and-death decision about his own life, and it’s fascinating to watch his mind work,” Alda says. “It’s an emotionally charged situation he’s in, and who he is really comes out.”
At one point, a university student visits Feynman, allowing us to see a very different side of the character. “One of the things that makes Feynman so great in my mind is that, in the same paragraph or the same sentence, he speaks to the smartest person in the room and the person who’s just beginning to understand things,” says Alda. “He says the same paragraph to both of them, and they both get it at their level and are excited by it and move up a notch from it.’
Ultimately, however, it is Feynman’s complex yet accessible humanity that the creators hope will shine through. “People could connect to him in terms of the very funny human stories he told about his life,” Alda says. “I think what makes Feynman so interesting is that he can cover all the bases at once. He’s not any less interested in how to get a girl to go to bed with you--even compared to how do you build the atomic bomb.”
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“QED,” Mark Taper Forum, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. No 2:30 performance March 24; on April 29, performance will be at 7:30, not 2:30. Added performance May 8, 8 p.m. Ends May 13. $30-$44. (213) 628-2772.