''Calabi-Yau'' is a 2001 play written by playwright Susanna Speier with songs and music by

Stefan Weisman Stefan Weisman (born 1970) is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He composes opera, chamber music, orchestral music, as well as music for the theater, video and dance. Raised in East Brunswick, New Jersey, Weisman credits his p ...

, based on physicist

Brian Greene Brian Randolph Greene (born February 9, 1963) is a American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. Greene was a physics professor at Cornell University from 19901995, and has been a professor at Columbia University since 1 ...

's national bestseller ''

The Elegant Universe ''The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory'' is a book by Brian Greene published in 1999, which introduces string and superstring theory, and provides a comprehensive though non-technical asses ...

''. The musical play is a

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

sub-subatomic adventure story about a documentarian lost in an inner loop of an abandoned track of the

New York Subway The New York City Subway is a rapid transit system owned by the government of New York City and leased to the New York City Transit Authority, an affiliate agency of the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Opened on October 2 ...

system. He encounters MTA workers who are attempting to prove

string theory In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interac ...

by building a

particle accelerator A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams. Large accelerators are used for fundamental research in particle ...

in abandoned subway tunnels beneath downtown

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. The MTA track workers lead the documentarian to a gatekeeper named Lucy and her grandfather, who is engineering the particle accelerator. A string explains string theory as a Calabi-Yau tells the story of

Alexander the Great Alexander III of Macedon ( grc, wikt:Ἀλέξανδρος, Ἀλέξανδρος, Alexandros; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the Ancient Greece, ancient Greek kingdom of Maced ...

cutting the

Gordian knot The Gordian Knot is an Ancient Greek legend of Phrygian Gordium associated with Alexander the Great who is said to have cut the knot in 333 BC. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (untying an impossibly tangled knot) sol ...

. It premiered as a workshop production at the

Lincoln Center Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (also simply known as Lincoln Center) is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to 5 millio ...

and

HERE Arts Center HERE Arts Center is a New York City off-off-Broadway presenting house, founded in 1993. Their location includes two stages specializing in hybrid performance, dance, theater, multi-media and puppetry in addition to art exhibition space and a cafe ...

sponsored American Living Room Festival in 2001. Calabi-Yau was produced and performed at HERE in 2002. Eugene Calabi and

Shing-Tung Yau Shing-Tung Yau (; ; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau announced retirement from Harvard to become Chair Professor of mathem ...

, for whom Calabi-Yau manifolds are named, attempted to attend the play but were not let in since no one believed they were who they said they were.

References

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External links

http://www.susannaspeier.com/scripts/calabi-yau/
at Susanna Speier's website
HERE website
2001 plays Plays set in New York City Fiction about physics Plays based on books Multimedia works {{2000s-play-stub