Let's Roll - Dice

A little more than a month ago, I promised that I would present details about Sam's (my son's) play that he is producing for the KC Fringe Festival.

Let the media blitz begin. First off, I was wrong about the title - his play is called Dice, not Einstein's Dice, though the title is a reference to an Einstein quotation. Here, I'll let Sam explain, as drawn from the website for the play:

Hi, I'm Sam Ryan, one of the authors of Dice. Here's a little information about the show.

Chris Plante and I both grew up in Kansas City, where we've been involved in theatre throughout the community and in our high schools. We'd never met, however, until we both went into the dramatic writing program at New York University in the fall of last year.

When the summer rolled around, we realized that we'd both be in Kansas City and that we really wished that we could get a project together. That was the genesis of Dice. We got together with the people who are running the Kansas City Fringe Festival, who have been all too helpful through this whole thing with promotions and getting a venue together, and started brainstorming ideas for what we could possibly do.

The concept which we came up with was doing work based around Albert Einstein's life and theories. When we were doing our research, we stumbled on an old Einstein quote: "God doesn't play dice with the universe." From that, we had our title, and our format - six short plays, and each of us would write three and direct the other's three.

What we did with that concept was far from, well, what a physicist might have expected. Our six short plays run the gamut from a monologue about working in the doctor's office in Weston, Missouri where Einstein's brain was kept for several years, to a scene involving a space monkey and the woman who loves him.

Stay tuned to this blog for more information about the show. If you have any questions, please email us at dice@thestereo.org. Thanks, and we hope that you make it out to it and enjoy it as much as we're enjoying putting it together.

Sam has told me that if they actually make a profit on the play, he's going to use his portion of the proceeds to get a tattoo . . .