My favorite unproduced play?

Might be this one, THE SADNESS OF EINSTEIN.. It came close to a major production in Seattle, scheduled to open a new play festival at The Empty Space, but financial problems led to cancellation of the festival and eventual closing of a very fine theater company. Close but no cigar and all that.

 It opens this way ... which my late friend and actor Ger Moran called  the best opening scene he'd read in ages ... he was in Arizona when I sent him the play for feedback, and his excited input came by return mail. A nice moment, to write something so far out that gets appreciated. But Ger and I had similar sensibilities. I miss him.

THE TIME:

Autumn, 1927

THE PLACE:

Brussels, Belgium

THE SET:

A hotel room in Brussels. Entrance is stage left. A bed is stage right. Upstage, a window

looking down on the street. The bathroom is shared and located in the hall (exit stage left).

(AT RISE: ROBERT and LEONORA are in bed, making love, Leonora on top with her back to the audience and a sheet around her. She frantically rides Robert below her. HENRY is at the window, looking across the street with a pair of binoculars. Leonora's sexual frenzy will increase to the orgasm indicated below.)

   HENRY:   The paper this morning called it The Copenhagen Interpretation.   Niels Bohr debated Einstein and won. Poor Einstein, nobody believes him any more. The   city fathers welcome him as a hero, the greatest genius of his time, they celebrate  Einstein Day, but his peers prefer to listen to an unknown from Denmark. The Copenhagen Interpretation.                                                                                                                                          

(Henry turns to the bed.)

   HENRY:   For God's sake, woman, aren't you finished yet?

This is the famous conference of physicists where Bohr and Einstein debated about quantum physics, and Einstein lost ... hence his sadness. And the loss of a view of reality in the bargain. Unrealized human sadness.

It's a pretty far out play, if I say so myself. This was supposed to be the first of a quartet of plays, The Quantum Quartet, but I got hijacked by hyperdrama, which is where the "real" qauntum writing would evolve. This was an early "linear" work in this area of interest.

Einstein and Bohr in Brussels

Play published in this collection.

I met Ger on a summer day in the early 1980s. I was sitting outside, sipping gin and tonics and listening to jazz, at what was then the Lovejoy Cafe in NW Portland. This tall gentleman comes to my table (I'm sitting alone) and asks if I am Charles Deemer. I am. Well, his lady friend is a big fan of my plays, would I like to join them? Sure. Ends up, he was living in Seattle, soon to move to Portland to be closer to her, and he had an acting background, primarily in SF, so we had a lot in common.

When he arrived a few months later, I took him under my wing and introduced him to my favorite watering holes, and our friendship blossomed from there. He became my best friend living in Portland. By the time I wrote Sadness, he was living in Arizona with a different girl friend. He was quite "a lady's man," at least in his own eyes ha ha. But he did have a lot of girlfriends. 

He died shortly after he'd retired into the perfect living situation for him. Very sad, very bad timing. The big C. Happened quickly.