QED (play)

QED is a play by American playwright Peter Parnell that chronicles significant events in the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. It presents scenes from a fictional day in Feynman's life, less than two years before his death, interweaving many strands from his biography, from the Manhattan project to the Challenger disaster inquiry to more personal topics such as the death of Feynman's wife and his own fight with cancer. The play, which grew out of a collaboration between Parnell, actor Alan Alda, and director Gordon Davidson, premiered in 2001. The original production, directed by Davidson and starring Alda as Feynman, was performed first at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and, from late 2001 to mid-2002, on Broadway.

Set in June, 1986, fewer than two years before Feynman's death, in Feynman's office at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the play follows Feynman through a day of his life. As the real Feynman does in his books What Do You Care What Other People Think? and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the stage character talks directly to the audience; we learn from this and from phone calls with off-stage characters that Feynman is to appear that night playing his bongo drums in a student production of the musical South Pacific, that he is expecting a delegation from the Russian Republic of Tuva, which Feynman is whimsically determined to visit (as detailed in Ralph Leighton's book, Tuva or Bust!), and that he is eager to make his views known in the final report of the Rogers Commission charged with the Challenger disaster. From phone conversations between Feynman and his doctors, we also learn that Feynman's cancer has returned, and that his doctors are urging him to undergo further surgical procedures, which are not without their own risk. Feynman's conversation with the audience also touches on a number of additional topics well-known to readers of his autobiographical writings: the Manhattan project and safe-cracking, how he learned to draw, his father, as well as musings on physics and, more generally, on the nature of science and knowledge.

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