The initial idea for the project came from Pino Donghi, director of the Fondazione Sigma Tau in Rome. He knew that Luca Ronconi - director of the Teatro Piccolo in Milan - was looking for new scientific ideas for the theatre that did not follow the usual pattern of drama involving scientists, as in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, where the science is somewhat incidental and all the drama is human. Donghi then approached several people to provide scripts following a public programme on the expression of science at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina in 1998.
The work that I provided under the title Infinities was enthusiastically taken up by Ronconi and our collaboration began. I chose this subject because, despite being abstract, it is nonetheless familiar to everyone, or at least so they think. Ronconi told me early on in our discussions of an extraordinary space in Milan that he believed would provide a natural home for the production. It allows five adjacent theatrical sets to be created with radically different shapes and sizes that naturally evoked the subject matter.
Needless to say I had no idea whether the production would succeed. But in the end it was an almost overwhelming success. Every seat was sold for the first season in 2002 and Infinities won the Premi Ubu for the best play in the Italian theatre that year. The second season in Milan, which has just finished, ran 10 performance cycles each night to meet demand but all seats for the run were sold more than two months before the opening night.
There have been performances in Spanish to inaugurate the Ciutat de les Arts Escéniques in Valencia and Infinities has been the subject of symposia at the Theatre Populaire in Lyons and the Spoleto Festival. It is hoped that there will be a production in Arabic at the restored Library of Alexandria in the future.
