Central Kentucky theater has been getting decidedly left-brained recently with several productions addressing scientific theories and issues that would make most of our heads spin.

Einstein: A Stage Portrait is finishing up a four-weekend run today at the Thoroughbred Theatre in Midway. Next month, Copenhagen, a play about a meeting between two elite physicists, opens at Natasha's Cafe. Early next year, evolutionary science and creationism will be onstage with Inherit the Wind at Harrodsburg's Ragged Edge Community Theatre.

But fear not, gentle liberal arts friend. The science nerds have not taken over theater.

In fact, numerous artists involved in these and other science- and math-based productions freely admit to strained relationships with the subjects in high school and college. But the plays still resonate with them because all that science illuminates very human traits and issues.

"This play is not about physics," says Natasha Williams, director of Copenhagen. "It is not a lecture about physics. We are forced to understand physics to understand how they relate to each other. It sounds really academic, but it's really very human."

Of recent works dealing with science, Copenhagen has been one of the most popular, but it is hardly alone. It won the Tony Award for best new play in 2000. The next year, David Auburn's Proof, a psychological drama set in the world of high-level mathematics, won the same prize. At Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays, recent offerings have included Kia Korthron's Slide Glide the Slippery Slope, addressing cloning, and Toni Press-Coffman's Touch, which relates astronomy and human relationships. Both plays have been produced around the country.

"Theater takes these things off the shelf, dusts them off and adds people to them," says director Ave Lawyer, who brought Proof to Studio Players in 2003. "It adds immediacy."

Making physics human

That immediacy comes in different ways.

For Einstein: A Stage Portrait, actor Bob Singleton, who plays the legendary genius, says he consulted with a graduate student in physics to try to learn more about Albert Einstein's work, but he took something else away from those meetings. "It was his passion for it," Singleton says. "It made it easier to understand."

The actor found the scientist's passion for his work was similar to his own enthusiasm for theater, helping inform his performance. In portions of the show where Einstein talks about his work, the pitch of Singleton's voice rises, he speaks quickly and his eyes light up.

The play is ultimately a portrait of the man, more than an exploration of his theories. Like many other one-person shows about famous people, Einstein tries to convey who the man was, what made him great and how he felt about that. Einstein actually laments being too associated with his work, scoffing at a letter addressed to "Relativity himself." But, in contemplating the atomic bomb, he also laments what his work might have wrought.

In Copenhagen, a large part of the discussion is about the implications of atomic physics. Michael Frayn's play focuses on a real-life mysterious meeting between German physicist Werner Heisenberg and Danish physicist Niels Bohr that took place in German-occupied Denmark during World War II. It was a risky trip for Heisenberg, and for years, people in the scientific community have speculated about why the two old friends met then and why the meeting apparently ended in a heated disagreement.

In Frayn's version of the event, the men discuss a variety of issues, from their friendship to the implications of atomic science, all through the lens of physics.

That context has been the cause of long rehearsals and discussions, with the actors trying to grasp the script.

"You have to sit down and instead of talking about character arcs, it's a science class," says Ryan Case, who plays Heisenberg. "You can't understand if you are arguing or agreeing without understanding the science."

When the Proof actors were preparing for their show, set in the academic world of a university math department, they visited graduate-level math classes at the University of Kentucky. There, they found details -- including that there were no calculators in class, but there were plenty of inside jokes.

"The class would burst into laughter, and we didn't get it," Lawyer, Proof's director, says.

And that, she says, is part of the appeal of shows like Proof and Copenhagen. Just as plays can pull back the curtains on worlds such as royalty and law, theatergoers are also interested in peeking into the world of academic math and science, where people are thinking on very high levels about subjects with huge human implications.

Why go there?

Somewhere in the rehearsal process for Copenhagen, director Williams wondered why there was a rash of science-based plays in production. She sees stressors such as the Iraq war, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, raising questions.

"People wonder about humanity and how it relates to the greater universe," she says.

The answers to many questions lie in science and have very human implications. Both Copenhagen and Einstein, for instance, deal with the development of the atomic bomb. Einstein worries he will be remembered for contributing to man's most destructive creation.

In Copenhagen, Williams points to the irony of Heisenberg and Bohr's work with atoms helping them understand the basis of human life, while also contributing to the creation of the most efficient instrument for destroying it.

"It's very cerebral, more cerebral than anything else I have ever done," says Adam Luckey, who plays Bohr. "But there are times in rehearsal where we say, 'My God, physics makes sense now.'"

That's an insight that should rub off on audiences.

After all of these science plays, Inherit the Wind director Eric Ryan Seale says, "People are going to be really smart."

Reach Rich Copley at (859) 231-3217 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3217, or rcopley@herald-leader.com.