Sloan Group Is Lab Partner to the Arts

Ms. Ziegler’s play, which is being staged at the World Science Festival in New York in June after other recent runs in Manhattan and in Washington, is one of many to benefit from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s efforts to use art to improve the public’s understanding of science and technology. This year alone Sloan is distributing about $5 million to commission, develop and present plays, films, television shows, books, radio programming, lectures and more. It spends another $5 million supporting public television and radio.

Sloan, for instance, is backing Alan Alda’s work in progress about Marie Curie, “Radiance,” which is having a reading at the science festival. It commissioned Matt Schatz’s play “The Tallest Building in the World,” about the engineering of the twin towers, which is enjoying its world premiere at Luna Stage in West Orange, N.J., and Itamar Moses’ “Completeness.” The story of a romance between a molecular biologist and a computer scientist, “Completeness” has its last performances at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., this weekend and opens at Playwrights Horizons this fall.

Aside from the $5,000 grant Mr. Moses received, Sloan’s involvement helped make the play more authentic, he said. “Having it was one of the most helpful things for getting the science right,” he said.

The professional scientists who served on his selection panel vetted material for him. “They were able to tell me ‘That’s not true’ or ‘That problem she claimed to be working on has already been solved,’?” he said.

The Sloan program has coincided with — and helped to popularize — a mini-boom of science-related plays, music, films and books that began in the late ’90s. In 1998, for example, Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen,” about a meeting between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, made its debut in London and later won the Tony for best play in New York. That same year the director Darren Aronofsky released his first movie, the hallucinatory “Pi.” (Mr. Aronofsky, who most recently directed “Black Swan,” and the actress Rachel Weisz have signed on as producers of a film version of “Photograph 51” that Ms. Ziegler is writing.)

Among the hundreds of projects the foundation has supported in the last dozen or so years are the films “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “Flash of Genius”; the Pulitzer-Prize-winning play “Proof”; and books like Dava Sobel’s “Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love,” and the forthcoming “Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius,” by Sylvia Nasar, the author of “A Beautiful Mind.”

“The real payoff may not arrive for years to come, because we’re systematically exposing an entire generation of artists to this subject matter for the first time,” said Doron Weber, who oversees the arts program, “but it’s always nice to have a few big hits, like ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ so people understand what you’re talking about.”

Most of the Sloan awards are given through partnerships with theaters like the Manhattan Theater Club and Ensemble Studio Theater, film schools that include those at New York and Carnegie-Mellon Universities, and film festivals like Tribeca and Sundance.

“When there’s money for something, it happens,” Mr. Weber said. Last week he was at a small Manhattan theater during the Tribeca Film Festival to watch readings from six screenplays that Sloan is helping to finance, including Ms. Ziegler’s.

“We’re trying to find projects that already have a producer or a writer behind them and launch them to the next level,” said Beth Janson, executive director of the Tribeca Film Institute, which uses Sloan money to hold panels, screenings, workshops and give out prizes and stipends for science-theme scripts. “There can be a bit of bias in the film world, thinking that these are going to be very niche films that might not have the potential to break out and be mainstream.”

But she noted that crossover successes like “A Beautiful Mind” and “Memento” have both reached wider audiences and adhered to “scientific truth.”

In addition to the Rosalind Franklin story, for which Ms. Ziegler received $25,000 to develop, scripts at last week’s festival dealt with the race to invent television, a mathematical algorithm that brings a basketball team to a championship, and a swarm of deadly squid.

Plays need much less money than films do to get off the ground, so grants in the theater world go a long way. The $567,000 that Sloan gave Ensemble Studio this year paid not only for the staging of “Photograph 51,” but also for a second production at Theater J in Washington; the distribution of seed grants to other theaters; and Ensemble Studio’s annual First Light festival , where new plays are workshopped and presented.

Writers, producers and theaters often develop many projects at the same time, Mr. Weber said, and offering a little money can push the science-oriented piece to the top of the pile.

That is what happened with Verne Thiessen, whose play “Lenin’s Embalmers,” about the two scientists who were ordered by Stalin to embalm Lenin after his death in 1924, was staged last year at Ensemble Studio.

Mr. Thiessen attended a Sloan orientation panel a few years ago without a particular play in mind, but after listening to scientists who attended, he suddenly realized that an idea that had been “noodling around in my head” — the embalmers story — could qualify for a grant.

“The grants encourage writers to go outside their comfort zone,” said William Carden, Ensemble Studio’s artistic director. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

“If a writer ends up worrying more about the science than the story,” he explained, “then it won’t work.”

Mr. Thiessen was successful, Mr. Carden said, because the scientific subject meshed with personal stories that the playwright had heard from his parents, who had emigrated from the Soviet Union to Canada.

To get Sloan financing, Mr. Thiessen said that the script’s scientific content had to pass muster with the foundation, but that balancing the artistic and scientific demands “was by no means the play’s biggest problem; try doing a live embalming onstage.”