Australian playwright Alana Valentine has been selected by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning judges as the winner of the 5th Stage International Script Competition for the best new play about science and technology. She spoke to Michelle Hanna days before collecting her award.
Valentine's play, Ear to the Edge of Time, is about a female radio astronomer and the gender and work politics that occur around a discovery she makes.
"A poet is writing a poem about her, and she at the same time discovers what is a double pulsar," explains Valentine. "And before she has a chance to look into the data, someone else looks in and finds the discovery, so they kind of take that moment from her."
Valentine uses this incident to explore the demise of the 'sole genius' figure in science.
"When I spoke to a lot of scientists, they all said to me, 'Look, twenty-first century science is extremely collaborative - particularly radio astronomy - because at the moment, if you have a telescope, the whole world kind of collaborates in it'. So the this kind of romantic idea of the sole genius is kind of really dated, but as a playwright I thought, 'yeah, but where does the human ego come in that?"
Valentine traveled the world to research and find answers to her questions, such as "how attribution affected their lives and when they did discover something in a group, what was that like? And when attribution was related to the politics of who got the funding, how did that affect them?"
The idea for the play came about when Valentine visited the international science facility at Parkes in the ACT to write a radio documentary about what it was like for residents to live so close to 'the dish'.
"The scientists were like crazy and intense and obsessive and wonderful, and I thought these are really characters for a play."
Valentine had heard of the STAGE competition and thought entering would be a good way to draw attention to her work, but says never in her wildest dreams did she think she would win.
"I was delighted when I got shortlisted because all these Nobel prize-winning scientists such as Tony Kushner were the judges. I thought thank goodness I work in verbatim where I record things, because that's the only way I'm going to get the science exactly right, I had it recorded so I could check 'oh my goodness, what happens inside a pulsar? I better listen again!'.
Valentine's play was selected from almost 200 international entries by a judging panel made up of the best in their fields in arts and sciences: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Tony Kushner, David Lindsay-Abaire and Donald Margulies; Nobel Laureates in Physics, Robert C. Richardson and Frank Wilczek; and Dr. David J. Wineland, winner of the U.S. National Medal of Science and the Franklin Medal.
Valentine found out about her win live on BBC radio show Science in Action while being interviewed as a finalist for the award. STAGE (Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration) is based at the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The award will be presented in Dublin as this year marks Dublin City of Science 2012.
Alana will collect her award, including $10,000 prize money, at a ceremony on 21 October, when the play will have it's first staged reading by professional Irish actors at Trinity College Dublin's Samuel Beckett Theatre.
When asked if the accents for the reading needed to be Australian, Valentine replied: "'With all due respect, the kind of accents the British and Irish do of Australians are often just a little broad,'" she says.
"So I said a neutral educated Australian accent. But I also said there's no reason they couldn't be Irish, Italian - the head of Parkes is an Italian astronomer… International science is about your status as an astronomer, rather than your nationality."
She has previously won awards for her plays depicting Australian life and communities. On the eve of her departure, Valentine was in her home-town Sydney for the opening of her new play Tarantula about an older woman and younger man starring actors Zoe Carides and Michael Whalley, exploring the life of Irish 'Spanish' dancer Lola Montez.
