EINSTEIN! A Genius in Tumultuous Times is an award-winning, inspirational and true solo play about the younger Albert Einstein fighting to prove general relativity against all olds against him, personal and professional, meanwhile he comes up with a theory that changes the way we live our lives today.
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You spent three years researching Einstein and drew on thousands of documents released by the Hebrew University. What did you discover that most dramatically changed your own idea of who Einstein was?
What changed most was discovering how human, flawed, vulnerable and besieged Einstein was during the years before he became “Einstein” in the public imagination. Before, he was just an empty icon: a bobble head and a t-shirt, but when researching I found a the human. We tend to inherit him as a myth: the benign wild-haired genius, the kindly face on posters, the man reduced to E=mc². But in the documents, I found a younger man under enormous pressure — physically ill, professionally doubted, emotionally conflicted, trapped in a painful marriage, isolated as a pacifist during wartime, and still trying to hold onto a revolutionary idea that almost no one believed. The theory was not born in serenity. It was born amid chaos, loneliness, resistance and enormous personal cost.
The play focuses on Einstein between the ages of 35 and 42, before he became the familiar “wild-haired genius” of popular culture. Why did this particular, less familiar period of his life feel so theatrically compelling?
This part of the story was “relatively” unknown before the 2007 Hebrew University document dump which shed light on his early years in Berlin trying to prove general relativity despite great odds against him, personal and professional. Also, it’s important to remember between 35 and 42, Einstein is not yet the untouchable symbol of genius. He is still fighting to be understood, fighting for his theory, his wife, his colleagues, the war around him and his own contradictions. Dramatically, that is far more interesting than beginning with the legend already complete. The audience meets him while everything is still at risk. He does not know if history will vindicate him. He does not know if general relativity will be proven. He does not know if his family life will survive. That uncertainty gives the play its engine. It lets us watch a human being become an icon, rather than simply admire the icon after the fact.
How did you balance explaining general relativity clearly enough for an audience to follow while keeping the emotional story moving — and did the science ever resist being turned into theatre?
The key was never to make the evening a physics lecture. The science had to matter emotionally. General relativity is, of course, a profound scientific idea, but theatrically it becomes a story about vision: one man seeing the universe differently and trying to persuade the world that reality is stranger, deeper and more beautiful than it appears. I try to give the audience enough to understand the stakes — light bending, gravity not as a force in the old sense but as the curvature of space and time — without stopping the human story. And yes, the science resisted theatre at times. It is abstract, mathematical and enormous. But once I found the human pressure underneath it, the science became dramatic. It’s science history. The equation became a conflict. The proof became a need.
The play presents Einstein not only as a brilliant thinker, but as a husband and father struggling through war, family conflict and professional doubt. How did you approach the more difficult parts of his private life without either judging or excusing him?
That was one of the hardest balances in the writing. I did not want to make Einstein a saint, and I did not want to put him on trial. I wanted to show him as fully as I could: brilliant, funny, impatient, tender, selfish, visionary, wounded and sometimes deeply difficult. His private life was complicated, especially his marriage and his relationship with his children. The responsibility as a dramatist is not to excuse the pain he caused, but also not to flatten him into his worst moments. I tried to let the contradictions stand. The audience can feel his genius and his failures in the same breath. That, to me, is more truthful. We don’t understand great people by polishing away their flaws. We understand them by allowing the whole human being to appear.
As the writer, researcher and sole performer, you have an unusually close relationship with the material. When you step onto the stage, do you feel that you are impersonating Einstein, interpreting him or entering into a conversation with him?
It feels less like impersonation and more like entering into conversation with him. Maybe even “channeling” him. Of course, there are physical and vocal choices, but I’m not interested in doing a museum-piece imitation of Einstein. I’m trying to get inside the pressure of his mind and the emotional weather of those years. Because I wrote and researched the piece myself, I have lived with him for a very long time — his letters, his humor, his anger, his loneliness, his contradictions. Onstage, it feels as if I am both channeling and questioning him. I admire him deeply, but I don’t worship him. I’m in dialogue with him. Every performance asks: what does genius cost, what does it excuse, and what can the audience take with them after the show? Can they apply what Einstein went through to their own lives?
Einstein! has been performed for many years and will now meet London audiences at a particularly unsettled moment in history. Have current events changed the way you perform its themes of war, displacement, scientific responsibility and the personal cost of genius?
Yes, absolutely. The world has changed around the play, and that changes the way the play lands. Einstein’s story takes place during war, rising nationalism, antisemitism, public hysteria, scientific upheaval and moral isolation. Those themes do not feel remote anymore. They feel painfully present. His pacifism, his Jewish identity, his discomfort with nationalism, and his belief that imagination and moral courage must survive in dark times all speak differently now than they did when I first began performing the show. I don’t change the facts, but I feel the weight of them differently. London audiences will also hear their own history to the piece — Eddington, the eclipse, European war, The British Royal Astronomical Society, all play important roles in the show. The play now feels less like a historical portrait and more like a warning, and a hope.