Development of a Science-Theater collaborative platform

Science and technology have transformed our lives and will disrupt and reshape jobs within our community. Yet, from genetic modifications to quantum computing, science remains enigmatic to the public. In recognition of this problem, the National Science Foundation has required every scientific proposal to incorporate elements of outreach. One way to reach wider communities is live theater. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supports production of plays about science. The creation of plays about science, however, remain challenging because it requires non-traditional, cross-disciplinary collaborations too elaborate for junior investigators or emerging playwrights.
Our project will develop a collaborative model that draws on the expertise of research faculty in Science, Theater and the Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities. We will test this approach by developing a play about retroviruses to be performed at the International Retrovirology Conference at Snowbird Utah in September of 2023. Our team has identified a local playwright, Rachel Bublitz, and director, Assistant Professor Alexandra Harbold (Theatre), who, will collaborate with Dr Anna Skalka (Fox Chase Medical Center in Philadelphia), Dr Saffarian’s lab, and health sciences faculty to explore the golden age of molecular biology and the ethical and social implications of retroviral research. This process will be documented to serve as a model for future investigators.
Opportunities for extramural funding include:
1- Allowing junior faculty to propose science-theater collaborations as outreach mechanisms in their NSF proposals. This retroviruses play will be directly incorporated into the next NSF proposal from Dr Saffarian’s lab.
2- Allowing playwrights to develop plays with the potential to seek additional development and production support from arts, cultural and science education foundations.

Current Status

2024-07-31
Our primary goal was to understand the challenges to collaborations between and creative artists and scientists who are interested in creating narrative projects for general audiences to communicate complex ideas about science. With this expanded understanding, we aimed to develop guidelines for a productive collaborative process that might anticipate potential pitfalls and emphasize the strengths of the partners in a particular project.
As a pilot, we created a stage play that demonstrated complex concepts through a compelling story and characters. In September 2023, we premiered “Emergence,” which explores aspects of retroviral research, with a staged reading at the 12th International Retroviral Symposium: Assembly, Maturation and Uncoating. Our audience of approximately one hundred people included retrovirus researchers from across the globe who participated in a lively question and answer session after the show. Our creative team included the playwright, dramaturg, scientific advisors, director, and professional actors. We documented the creative process, which demanded thoughtful compromise between teaching concepts and creating an engrossing plot and included several complete revisions. Our early findings included the importance of introducing both scientists and artists to the ethos of the respective disciplines and identifying parameters for a creative project. We plan to disseminate the lessons we learned so that other creative teams can see how to succeed at working across what might seem to be broad disciplinary divides. We appreciate the opportunity to conduct truly interdisciplinary research.
To view a videorecording of the September 2023 performance: https://ramm2023.utah.edu/emergence/