PHYSICS FROM MY FATHER
A Full-Length Play by Jessica Ammirati
Untethered from time, a woman grapples with key events from her life, shaped by the teachings of her professor father (and with a little help from an enigmatic physicist from the past).
Physics From My Father is a semi-autobiographical play that follows the Catalano family (particularly eldest daughter, Isabella and her father, Thomas) as they grapple with life events both good and bad. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, the play jumps around in time examining ideas of life and death, hope and despair, laughter, family, and love. A manifestation of Marie Curie accompanies first Thomas, and then Isabella on their journey — through medical procedures and scientific conversations, at the birth of the family’s next generation and holding vigil at their parents’ bedsides — as they try to interpret the fabric of time and translate the language of the universe.
Below are some excerpts from Physics From My Father:
Prologue: In the prologue to Physics From My Father, Isabella Catalano brings us into her world and introduces us to her beloved dad — all with some assistance from a physicist from the past…
Act 1, Scene 3: Isabella’s father, Thomas visits his dying mother in the hospital…
Act 1, Scene 6: Isabella gets an echocardiogram and contemplates the make up of her heart…
Act 1, Scene 11: Thomas explains the physics of elevators to his daughters, while at their Grandmother’s hospital bedside…
Act 2, Scene 7: Isabella’s sister, Sofia, is in labor, while her family offers their support…
Act 2, Scene 9: Isabella and Sofia comfort each other as their father’s condition declines…
Act 2, Scene 11: Isabella confronts Marie Curie about the unfairness of sickness, grief, and death…
A note from the playwright:
Shortly after my physics-professor father passed away from a brain tumor, I was going through his papers and I discoverd a journal he had kept when his mother was in the hospital…dying from a brain tumor (no, I’m not making that up). The parallels of his feelings as described in his writings and my own feelings during the late stages of his illness, were eerie…
Long before he got sick, Dad had been writing a textbook (called Physics For My Mother) that presented physics in a way that would make it understandable to the non-science crowd, particularly his mother (who never graduated from high school). Ultimately he abandoned the project, but it was a book I would have loved to read.
After his death, I read the journal he kept during Grandma’s hospital stay, and I thought of that unfinished textbook. I thought of the physics that I had never understood and wondered if I could find a way, using my passion for theater, to make his passion of physics understandable…and so the core idea for Physics From My Father was born.