Before retiring almost exactly a year ago, I worked on and off professionally in the theatre for well over a quarter of a century. Most of that time was spent as a writer, but I also worked as an actor and producer. (I did not do much directing—maybe two or three shows, tops—as I find that particular job wracks my nerves in ways I don’t like having them wracked, and besides, there are so many folks better at it than I am.) With my experience under many hats, I can assure you, without fear of convincing contradiction, that no one gets more excited about a new poster than the playwright.
Sure, it’s exciting as an actor to see the image that will sell your show, but other distractions and responsibilities tend to absorb you just at the time a poster usually rolls out. As a producer, you were likely so involved with a poster’s design and production that it’s impossible to think clearly about it anymore. You’re a bit like the chef who can’t enjoy the meal once it’s been brought to the table.
But for a playwright, let me assure you that there is no joy as pure and powerful as seeing the new poster for the first time, especially when it’s as good as this one, designed by Sonia Caron for the upcoming World Premiere of Claude Germain’s French translation of my play Louis Slotin Sonata, produced by L’Escadron Creation at the Auditorium du Séminaire inSaint-Hyacinthe in Quebec.
And added bonus: it’s in French. Nothing says “I’m Classy” like hanging a big framed poster in French. I can’t wait for my copy! (God, I hope I get a copy!)
Original Works Publishing has just released a sweet, sexy and sleek new edition trade acting edition of my play The Sequence, about the real-life race to decode the human genome. The new edition features a flat binding, super-gloss cover, larger print, ample margins for blocking, and extra pages for notes.
Original Works is a great outfit, with plenty of new titles from some of the hottest American playwrights including Elizabeth Heffron, Jeff Goode, Gwydion Suilebhan, Adam Szymkowicz and on and on. If The Sequence ain’t your cup of tea, you’ll still likely find something at OWP that is. Head on over and check out their deeply impressive catalog of hard copy and electronic titles.
Last night I got to meet a man I’ve known for 10 years, albeit only in the very arcane and narrow way that a playwright can know one of his living subjects. In addition to being an actual living person, J. Craig Venter is a character in my playThe Sequence, which dramatizes the real-life race to decode the human genome. Venter drove the private side of the race, while Francis Collins, now head of the NIH, drove the public side as then head of the Human Genome Project. Some years ago, I had the honor of meeting Dr. Collins at an early public reading of the play at George Mason University. He came late, sat in the last available seat, in the front row about eight feet from the actor playing him. It was the most nerve-wracking night of my life. But when the reading was over and the bows were taken, Collins graciously, spontaneously joined the post-play discussion. And at the reception after, Collins happily chatted with my all my friends, as well as my mom, brother and niece who had driven down from Maryland to attend. He later emailed me asking for a signed copy of the play to give his mother. Collins impressed me as a deeply affable and approachable person. Dr. Venter, however, proved more elusive—that is, until last night when I attended his lecture at Town Hall Seattle, at which he introduced his new book, Life at the Speed of Light, which details his recent efforts to “boot up” an artificial organism from DNA code “written” by his team.
I learned a lot of things last night. Here’s a sampling, in order of increasing “inside baseball” genome geekery:
“That dust in your house? That’s you!”
This direct quote from Venter came as he described how life is a constant process of renewing worn out proteins. If the trash doesn't get removed, you wind up with some particularly nasty afflictions like Alzheimer’s and Mad Cow Disease
Life happens because of Brownian Motion.
Brownian Motion, the constant random motion of water molecules, theoretically confirmed by Albert Einstein, creates a turbulence within living cells with a force comparable to a Richter 9 earthquake. This constant agitation drives the enzymatic processes that allow life to exist and do all the cool things that life does. Brownian Motion is temperature and phase state-dependent, which is a fancy way of saying life requires water in a liquid state.
Biological teleportation is coming.
Instead of transporting organisms, we will beam their digital genomic code to far flung places, like disease control centers around the globe during a pandemic, or even farther, to places, like Mars. And conversely,when we do find life on Mars (for Venter it’s a “when” not an “if”) we will sequence it's DNA in situ there, then beam back the digital code to earth so that the Martian life-form can be “printed” into terrestrial existence, for… ya know… further investigation.
Artificial life gets watermarked.
“We think it’s very important, when making a synthetic species, to mark the species as synthetic.” Gee, Craig. Ya think?! So Venter’s team inserted “watermarks” into the DNA of their artificial organism: widely recognizable English phrases consisting of quotes from James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman. Shortly after Venter’s team first published their results, they got a call from the Joyce estate demanding to know why permission hadn’t been sought.* My friend attending with me last night, who had also seen a reading of The Sequence at Seattle Public Theatre a few weeks ago, remarked how ironic it is that Venter should be so irked, when back in the 1990’s he was an outspoken advocate of gene patenting. As my buddy put it, “Intellectual property law can be a bitch.”
Artificial life needs kill-switches.
If (more likely when) we introduce human-designed organisms into the wide world beyond the laboratory, which we might do for any number of legitimate purposes — health care, food production, energy production, environmental clean-up, reversal of global warming, etc.— we are going to want to the means to – ahem—un-introduce them.
Venter became an amateur science historian.
In his lecture he frequently referenced the fairly obscure work of 18th and 19th Century scientists and thinkers, the ideas of whom he seems to have used for inspiration and guidance when sailing the uncharted seas of artificial life creation. As an amateur science historian myself, this charms me.
Venter and I share a fascination with a brilliant little book by the guy who gave us the “neither-dead-nor-alive” cat.
What is Life?, was published in 1944 by quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In it, nearly a decade before Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure and mechanisms, Schrodinger posited that the information processing required for the propagation of life might in fact be the result of a simple digital code. Some day I need to write an essay about “What is Life?” It’s an eminently accessible book for the lay reader, and in it Schrodinger goes on to posit theories much more outlandish than digital life. Indeed the entire book seems to point at a potentially universe-reversing conclusion that life might provide a powerful negating counter-punch to the seemingly unbreakable 2nd Law of Thermo-dynamics, such that entropy may not, in fact, have the final word that we have all been taught it must.
Not even scientists get to fudge history.
Both Venter, and the comparable genius who introduced him, the University of Washington’s own Leroy Hood, worked hard at times last night to needlessly and speciously burnish Venter’s legacy. For instance, Hood asserted in his introduction that Venter made his company Celera’s work product freely available during the genome race as a reference for competitors, like Collins’ team at HGP, who were also attempting to read every one of the 3 billion letters of the genome. In fact the opposite was true. The public side HGP data was used by Celera to double-check its enormously long, but doubtfully accurate sequences. (The “Shotgun" sequencing technique which Venter developed was fast, but sloppy.) Celera held their sequences under wraps as private and proprietary information which they hoped to sell in a paid subscription model like Bloomberg Professional Services. That plan never came to fruition.
Venter’s DNA was not God’s gift to humanity.
After getting fired from Celera, the company he founded, Venter publically released the bombshell news that the genome sample the company sequenced was not, as it should have been, from a randomly selected anonymous donor but rather from Venter himself. He had snuck his own DNA into the lab at the very beginning of the process. Last night Lee Hood maintained that Venter’s bizarre action has been widely praised in the scientific community and beyond, when in fact, it is almost universally viewed as an ethically questionable stunt of astounding hubris.
Venter was against junk DNA before he was for it.
Junk DNA is one of the great mysteries of biology. Over 98% of the human genome is noncoding DNA, meaning it doesn’t get translated into proteins. It just sits there, doing what? Maybe nothing. When asked a question about junk DNA last night, Venter said he had always argued against a commonly held notion that junk DNA has little value; but actually back at his first company TIGR, he was indeed dismissive of junk DNA. Here’s a snippet from early in The Sequence, before Craig decides to join the genome race:
KELLIE: So tell me. Why is it so important to sequence the human genome?
CRAIG: It’s not.
KELLIE: It’s not?
CRAIG: No. 95 percent of it is junk. I’m only interested in the five percent that does something. The sequences that make up genes. I don’t care if we ever sequence the other stuff.
Nitpicking aside, I had a delightful evening. If nothing else, seeing Venter up close and personal helped reassure me that I had gotten him right in The Sequence, capturing his brash confidence and brilliance, his impatient pursuit of achievement.
My play is at least a blip on Venter’s radar.
Upon the lecture’s conclusion, I bought Life at the Speed of Light and stood in line to have Venter sign it. I had also brought along a copy of The Sequence which I personalized to him during the lecture. “For J. Craig Venter. Thank you for driving this amazing story, and this astounding achievement in human history. ” When it was my turn to get my book signed I said, “Dr. Venter, my name is Paul Mullin and I wrote this play about you.” I handed him the script along with his book to sign.
“Oh, so you’re the guy,” he said.
“Yes. I am the guy.”
We smiled at each other and shook hands.
“Can I make changes to this?” he jokingly asked.
“Sure,” I countered “Mark it up and sent it back to me.” I wasn’t really joking.
Then he signed my book and we wished each other well. Alas, I didn’t get a picture. Maybe next time.
*The quote was from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.” I could’ve have told them that Joyce’s people are notoriously stingy with permissions. The issue is now moot, however, since most of Joyce’s major works fell into public domain on January 1, 2012. Thank goodness!
You might rightly judge that title to be half fib, depending on how you read it. The upcoming public reading of Philosophical Zombie Killers, happening on September 14 at 7:30 pm at Freehold Theatre, will certainly, and happily, not be the last public reading of a play of mine. The Sequence is scheduled to be read on October 12 at 2pm at the Bathhouse Theater at Green Lake. (More details here.) But Philosophical Zombie Killersis indeed my last full-length play. I have no plans to write another, and no great prospects for future full production of this, or any other play I have written. On September 15, the day after this reading, I will officially step away from the theatre. I have no plans to return. Of course threads of sadness run through this decision, but it is also interwoven with hope, and anticipation of new adventures. I hope you’ll wish me well. And if you can, I hope you’ll come see this reading. Here, below the fold, is the press release with all the info:
Ms. Jolie’s piece in The New York Times echoed for me with a play I wrote a few years ago about the race to decode the human genome, thus gaining access to all sorts of new information which we now have to face with sober eyes.
KELLIE: . . . You discovered the Breast Cancer Gene.
FRANCIS: The BRCA 1 sequence. Helped to discover. Yes.
KELLIE: My mom died of breast cancer.
FRANCIS: I’m sorry to hear that.
KELLIE: Ashkenazi Jew.
FRANCIS: Then you must know Ashkenazi Jew’s are several times more likely to develop the mutation
KELLIE: Yup. And if they have it they face an 80% to 90% chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes, particularly at a young age. And you must know that some women who test positive—and I can’t say as I blame ‘em—elect to under go prophylactic mastectomy.
FRANCIS: Yes I do know that. May I ask: have you tested for the sequence?
My Dec. 29, 2007 journal speculation on why Curt Dempster, now deceased Founding Artistic Director of Ensemble Studio Theatre, commissioned me to write The Sequence, which dramatizes the race to decode the human genome: a race accelerated and sharpened by bio-tech entrepreneur J. Craig Venter.
“Curt wanted me to tell this story ‘cuz he recognized in Craig a kindred spirit: a kinless prickly genius whogetsthingsdone.”
For reasons I would rather not get into I have taken to re-reading all my journals since I started handwriting them into marble comp books back in 1997. (I was typing for a living at the time and wanted to spare my wrists keyboarding my personal thoughts. I never went back to a digital.) The review is a pretty tedious endeavor. I wish I had described a lot less of my career woes and a lot more of my physical delights, but youth is ever wasted on the baselessly self-fascinated. Every so often as I read, however, I run across a little snippet, or string of them, that pleases me such that it prompts a desire to share.
9/26/07
. . . . Surprisingly, I find a deep correspondence between the Gould and the McMurtry. Both maintain—one overtly, the other subtly and subversively and ultimately more convincingly—that life has no plan, no forward progress, not even dominant echoes or themes; just the faintest hints of them. Contingency is all and contingency is one brutal motherfucker.
12/22/2012
People, especially "White" people get all bent out of shape when I refuse to identify as "White"; but genomics genius and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter put it best: "Race is a social concept, not a scientific one." I'd rather stick with science, if it's all the same to you.
Artists love to talk about being “experimental”, and it rightfully drives scientists nuts. We artists obnoxiously brandish that word whenever what we really mean is “avant garde” or “edgy”or “provocative” or “abstruse”. Any actual scientist understands that true experiments have rules and consequences. Experiments are tests of hypotheses hoping to become theories; and theories, in order to prove useful, must be falsifiable. In other words, true experiments by definition contain the possibility of failure. However, all too often in the arts, especially theatre, work gets described as “experimental” that is, in fact, incapable of being “falsified”, because it never had a truthful purpose in the first place. Consequently, the worst kind of “experimental artist” will blame the audience for every failure of meaning or impact.
I promise I will not be doing that this coming Monday evening at the Bathhouse Theater on Green Lake. Instead, with the help of my truly gifted colleagues Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith I will be performing a bona fide artistic experiment by reading aloud my very latest play Philosophical Zombie Killers. I attempt things in this script I have never seen tried before in the theatre, and thus the ominous likelihood looms that some of these things I am trying can, and most likely will, fail.
I am not asking you to come see my greatest latest triumph, which I happen to have dubbed “experimental” cuz it sounds cool. I am asking you to come see my latest experiment, and help me make it better, by watching where it fails, and letting me know.
Here are the details:
The graduate level seminar is about human conscious-ness. Or at least that’s what you thought when you signed up for it. Now someone’s telling you that you’re 45 years old and you’re dying. You certainly didn’t sign up for that. Now this alcoholic professor is asking you to explain consciousness to him. And this depressed ex-cop from Missouri is telling you about the epidemic of decapitations in Seattle. And this weird lady from Omnisoft just wants you to admit that there’s no such thing as consciousness and no such thing as you for that matter. Could she possibly be right? Might make dying easier. Who said you were dying?
Who: Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith
What: Philosophical Zombie Killers by Paul Mullin
Where: The Bathhouse Theater in Green Lake
When: October 15, 2012, 7pm
How: Pay what-you-will, including nothing at all. You’re doing us a favor by giving it a listen.
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