Robert Leslie/World Science Festival

Can you tell me a little bit about Radiance?

Alan Alda: [Brian and I] have been working together on the World Science Festival since the beginning. In the second year, I thought it would be fun to get actors together for an evening for one of these events and read letters from Marie Curie to the people in her life. And then I found out her letters are still radioactive, so I switched to Einstein, and we did an evening of Einstein's letters. That worked out very well. And then I realized that I really wanted to write a play about Marie Curie. Her story is so powerful and so dramatic, and it's such an image of science itself and the human desire to push forward the horizons, to try to understand more, no matter what the cost isand she paid a great cost. Three years I've been working on it.

What period of her life are you looking at?

The play takes place between the two Nobel Prizes she won. They were dramatically different experiences. They didn't even want to give her the first prize. They wanted to give it to her husband, Pierre. And Pierre worked on it a little. But it was unfairI think she had done most of the work, and had most of the insight. And they said, "We'll give it to you and Antoine Henri Becquerel, three people sharing it. But Pierre will get up and accept the prize, and [you'll] sit in the audience and listen." It's an infuriating situation. When she won the second Nobel Prize, nine years later, they almost didn't want to give it to her again; this time she was involved in a scandal, based on who she was in love with. And that time, she didn't take s--- from anybody. Even though they said, "Stay away," she said, "I'm coming!" And she declared it as hers. I use some of her speech at the end, because she really claims her place. The play is the progress of her being able to arrive at that point in spite of the fact that she's getting weaker and weaker from radiation. It's an incredible story she lived.

How much research did you do into the science, and into her life?

A lot. I've read several biographies, her papers and papers from people at the time, trying to understand what she did. And then I went to Paris, and went to her lab. In her lab, there's a paper on display, a page from a notebook the day she discovered radium. It's on a wall behind glass, and the guy showing me around opened up the glass and held a Geiger counter up to the page, and it went [makes a sound like a Geiger counter! So I backed out of the room.

Hopefully not in a straight line.

It can't get you if you don't move in a straight line! It's the feng shui of radiation.

How much science is in the play?

Alda: There's a lot of science in it. As a writer, what was very important for me to do was to make sure that there wasn't a line of science or anything else that didn't move the story forward. When they're talking about the science, it's not casual talk. The characters are active in trying to accomplish what the goals are, which keeps it dramatic. And therefore, even if some people in the audience don't follow the science, they're following the story, and nothing is opaque as a result of that. Part of the reason for this is to be able to understand something about science you might not have known before through the story of a real person. To humanize scientists is one of my goals, and it's one of the goals of the festival.

Brian Greene: One of the downfalls I find in a number of wonderfully dedicated, earnest attempts to put science and art together is that the typical approach is to have the story, and then every so often step out to talk about the science in a way that completely takes you out of the dramatic narrative. In Alan's approach, it's all seamlessly together, so you don't ever feel like a science lesson is happening.

Alda: Science is the greatest detective story you could ever read. It's exciting to see people trying to solve these problems. It's almost as though some terrible crime has taken place and you're trying to find who did itto get to the bottom of it and make things right again. You look for clues; you disregard things that are not real clues. Instead of telling the story backward, as it often ishere's what was discovered, here's how it was discovered, here's what problem it might solve, or how it might increase our understandingI'm more interested in knowing what the problem is. That's the more dramatic question. What could we know if we could understand something about a standard candle in the universe? What exciting thing could happen? And then, what false turns did we take? That's really important, because that's the human part of it. We tried this, and we didn't get anywhere, and we were disappointed. That's emotion, and people get caught up in emotion.

Greene: And that's the approach that's taken with the festival as a whole. What is the story? What is the arc that will keep an audience member on the edge of their seat, because they want to know what will happen and what will be discovered?

In film and TV, I've found that science is incorporated with varying degrees of success. Did you find that aspect of the writing difficult?

Alda: I've had a lot of experience writing, and I try to be very careful not to stop the show to do a number. The story has to go forward, so I just naturally gravitate toward that when I write about science, too. But I want to make the science accuratethat's extremely important to me. So sometimes you have to work really hard to decide what to leave out so that you don't become boring with too many details too soon, and yet tell it truly, tell it accurately. But often, the steps the scientists took to arrive at some great discovery are the dramatic steps. If you can tie that into what was happening in their lives, you have a really interesting story.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io