Don’t you hate those plays and shows, supposedly about science, in which the scientists are endearing geeks or quirky geniuses – and science itself never actually steps onstage? I do. So one day last autumn, when my morning’s e-mail trove included the announcement of a playwriting competition for “10-minute plays with a substantial science component”, I bolted upright. It was sponsored by the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. I have been writing about science for three decades, and covered some dramatic tales. Knocking out a script? Piece of cake!

Several stories that have interested me over the years involve the collision between science and politics. In 1954, for example, some residents of the Marshall Islands – which was then officially a US “Trust Territory” – had been accidentally exposed to fallout following a bomb test. Two decades later, controversies arose about their medical treatment, with scientists and doctors saying one thing about life-and-death matters, and activists and politicians another. I wrote an essay about the episode 10 years ago for a book called Science and Other Cultures, but felt that I had not fully explored what had happened. I also continued to feel disturbed at the breakdown of trust between the activists and the scientists, with the activists viewing the scientists as uncaring, and the scientists regarding the activists as dishonest.

I’d always felt that turning this story into a play would let me work out why each group felt the way it did about the other. But I kept putting it off. I’d never written a play before, didn’t really know how, and my professional commitments were always on “overload”. So when the e-mail from the Simons Center popped up, I thought: “Now or never!”

Tough work

Actually, writing a 10-minute play was incredibly hard. After a few frustrating attempts I consulted a friend, the playwright Jeffrey Sweet. He warned me that playwriting was unlike any writing I had done before. “The basic unit of theatre is not the word but the actor,” he said, handing me lists of plays to watch on DVD for their structure and teaching me some tricks. “Don’t spell everything out; make the audience work,” he added. “If you say ‘2 + 3 = 5’, people shrug. If you say ‘2 + n = 5’, their immediate impulse is to fill it in. Keep the audience active.”

Sweet’s handbook about playwriting, The Dramatist’s Toolkit, says little about science plays, and I asked if these were especially difficult to write. He nodded. There are several obstacles, he said. One is that theatre is about observing people interacting in social situations. But the core even of collaborative science is thinking – and, as he put it, “you can’t observe thought”. This makes it hard to dramatize science.

Another problem, Sweet said, is that scientists speak to one another in “high-context communication” that assumes a shared background and expertise and uses jargon. But when scientists talk to reporters, lawyers or others with whom they share little, they use “low-context communication”, which is different in tone as it involves a lot of explaining. As a result, scientists onstage are only believable if their dialogue with each other is high-context, but only understandable to an audience if their dialogue is low-context. This tempts poor writers to commit the basic mistake of having people who should be speaking high-context speak to each other low-context, saying things that each person knows the other person already knows.

Sweet’s advice made me see that, in many ways, crafting a play is like mounting an experiment. In both an experiment and a play, a series of actions trigger each other. The experimental craft, like the playwright’s, involves knowing how to create and connect these actions. Just as at the start of an experiment, we do not know what the end result will be – that’s why we perform experiments! – so at the start of a play we in the audience do not know how it will turn out (unless we’ve seen or read the play already). But looking backwards from the end of a good experiment or play, we can appreciate the logic and even inevitability of the chain of events. In an experiment the actions are physical events, while in a play they consist mainly of people talking. And, like any good physics experiment, a play can point to some deeper truth, albeit about human nature rather than nature itself.

This insight didn’t make playwriting any easier. Thanks to Sweet’s coaching, reading more books about playwriting – David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards was helpful – and a lot of other reading and DVD-watching, I rethought and revised the play. I worked on it almost every day for two months, and entitled it Trust Territory. To my surprise – I was competing with 26 other playwrights – it won first prize. In April the four winning plays were given a “staged reading”, where the parts were read by students and professors. (You can watch this reading of Trust Territory online at http://ow.ly/mXFtP.)

The critical point

Several websites exist to help new playwrights of all kinds, the most useful of which I found to be http://playsubmissionshelper.com/blog. The Alfred P Sloan Foundation also works with the Ensemble Studio Theatre to encourage science plays, challenging artists “to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination” (http://ow.ly/mPaOu).

So the next time you groan at a lousy play about science, don’t get mad – try it yourself!