Einstein: A Stage Portrait

“So here I am, ‘Relativity himself.’ … I wonder if they called Sir Isaac Newton ‘Gravity himself’ or Louis Pasteur ‘Rabies himself.”’ Albert Einstein mutters this aloud one evening to a houseful of guests he’s invited over so he can counter false stories about himself in the press and set the record straight. That’s the premise of Willard Simms’s 1984 Einstein: A Stage Portrait, a one-man show that actor Tom Schuch has been performing for four years. Not surprisingly, in 2005, the World Year of Physics, Schuch has been in heavy demand across North America in schools, physics departments, and professional society gatherings.

A chalkboard is covered with calculations on unified field theory. A violin lies on a table. A few family photos sit on shabby furniture. Letters are piled everywhere. A 67-year-old Einstein wears a suit but no socks. He finds an apple in his jacket pocket, takes a bite, and puts it back. He demonstrates his trick of taking off his vest without removing his jacket. And all the while he talks.

Einstein talks about having learned to talk late, having been a slow learner, and getting kicked out of school. He talks about the physics he was doing while working in a Swiss patent office. About his two wives, and how his love letters included references to parallelism, the kinetic energy of molecules, and Boltzmann’s theory of gases. He talks about leaving his job in Berlin in the early 1930s because of the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, and about coming to the US. He remembers going for ice cream with his son. He talks of the letter he wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging the US to build an atomic bomb, and of his night-mares that mankind will destroy itself with the bomb. He tells of Israel’s inviting him to be its first president, and says, “I am deeply committed to helping the cause of Israel in every way possible, and one of these ways is never to be its president.”

The hour-and-a-half-long play is woven largely from actual quotes and facts from Einstein’s life; for schoolchildren, Schuch performs a condensed version, minus the politics. “Einstein was such an icon. We all know his crazy hair and E = mc ²,” Schuch says. “The play puts his feet on the ground and shows that he had to work hard at what he did. That he had a great sense of humor. That he loved his sailboat. He neglected his family. All of these elements coagulate and give a sense of Einstein as a person.”

Besides playing Einstein, Schuch’s main tie to physics is his birthplace: Los Alamos. Schuch’s father worked as a technician at the New Mexico weapons lab; earlier he had made the carbon bricks for the first nuclear reactor, built by Enrico Fermi beneath the football stadium at the University of Chicago.

As a lifelong actor, Schuch says he had been perpetually seeking work. “I was looking for something I could grow into, and one day, in an industry rag, I happened on a list of one-man shows. I tracked down the author of Einstein, and I liked the script. Einstein found me.”