Theater Review: The life and times of Buckminster Fuller

Curiosity, awareness, initiative, and the fragility of Earth are the themes at the heart of Douglas W. Jacobs ‘s play R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe , which opened last month at Arena Stage in Crystal City, Virginia. The final performance is this weekend.Listen to a Physics Today interview with Jacobs .

An accurate portrayal

Jacobs, who also directs the production, and Rick Foucheux , the actor who plays Fuller and spends the entire 2 1/2-hour performance solo on stage, have done an exemplary job capturing Fuller’s personality and life’s work—a view shared afterward by some of Fuller’s relatives in the audience, including Allegra , Fuller’s daughter, and Joseph, his grandson.Fuller was renowned for his academic lectures in which he would stand silently for hours before launching into a 2-to-4-hour conversation that would captivate his audience on such topics as the electric car or the ecosphere. A prolific writer, Fuller published more than 28 books on science, poetry, and philosophy.”The way the play was carried out, it was easy to believe that you were in a live audience with Fuller himself,” said University of Maryland physicist John Layman, who attended opening night.

A long gestation

A series of devastating family tragedies influenced both his career and his outlook on life: Fuller became bankrupt during the great recession, and his daughter Alexandra died young, an event that led to his severe depression. At his lowest point, admirably captured by Foucheux’s portrayal, he contemplated suicide, only to decide instead to try “an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”

A tough challenge

Trying to take an audience through Fuller’s extensive life, and yet make it accessible, was a challenge, said Jacobs, who had spent years working on the script. “I pulled the play together from a wide variety of sources,” he said, “including some video tapes that [Fuller’s] family gave me.” Although the first script was 240 pages long, the final version is 68 pages.Jacobs said he realized that Fuller kept circling around the same themes throughout his life, but “primarily I was trying to focus [the play] on how Fuller helped people see ways to reinvent themselves into something that was truer to what they really meant to be doing.”A classic example of the difficulties of translating Fuller’s research into theater lies with the proton and the neutron. “When I talked to people about this,” explained Jacobs, “they always start by saying ‘Oh, you mean the proton and the electron?’ but Fuller was talking about the nucleus rather than the atom per se, as he was talking about structures.””When I was younger I was always interested in science and math,” said Jacobs, “but I veered off into literature and theater, and so it was nice to go back and wrestle with some of that with this play.”

An education

The play was written so that the audience will at times feel overwhelmed by Fuller’s concepts but, shortly afterward, will grasp them, said Jacobs. “I wanted to push the envelope of what the public could understand,” he added.One advantage to translating Fuller’s ideas into a play, said Jacobs, is that a lot of Fuller’s demonstrations were visual and, from Jacobs’s perspective, fun to create. They were a vital tool in keeping the audience engaged, if not with the ideas, then emotionally with the story, he added.”Fuller was trying to give us the tools to protect ‘Spaceship Earth,’” said Jacobs. He could see the dangers of technology in the 20th century that could result in mass extinction, and tried to develop alternative technologies that were more sustainable and less damaging to the planet. The risks of doing so are high, said Fuller, as “nature doesn’t hold a committee meeting to decide what it’s going to do. It just happens.”