Sam Shepard, the Oscar-nominated actor and Pulitzer-winning playwright, will appear at the renowned storytelling collective The Moth (www.themoth.org) in an event entitled "Toil and Trouble…Stories of Experiments Gone Wrong," as part of the 2008 World Science Festival ( www.worldsciencefestival.com ).
The event will take place at Symphony Space on May 29, 2008 from 7:30-9:00pm. The storytellers will each take to the stage to tell tales of heroic failures, miscalculations, and experiments — scientific and otherwise — gone wrong. In keeping with Moth traditions, each story must be true, must be told live with no script or notes, and must be told in ten minutes.
Other participants include Nathan Englander, whose story collection "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" became an international bestseller, earning him both the PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. Englander's first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, was published in Spring 2007. Jim Gates, known for his pioneering work in particle physics towards a unified description of all physics. A committed researcher and educator, Dr. Gates is the Toll Physics Professor and director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland. Lucy Hawking, a journalist and the author of several novels. With her father, the physicist Stephen Hawking, she has written "George's Secret Key to the Universe," a children's adventure featuring the mysteries of physics, science, and the Universe. Michael Turner, a theoretical cosmologist who coined the term "dark energy." His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation and he has made seminal contributions to the understanding of inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter, and the theory of the big-bang.
Mr. Shepard's best-known works include "Buried Child," "Curse of the Starving Class," and "True West." He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1986, and his plays are performed on and off Broadway, and in regional theaters across America.
The Moth, a New York-based non-profit arts organization dedicated to the art of storytelling, has been called "New York's hottest and hippest literary ticket" by The Wall Street Journal. The Moth features simple, old-fashioned storytelling on thoroughly modern themes by wildly divergent raconteurs. The Moth was born in the New York living room of author George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate the atmosphere and spirit of his friend Wanda's porch on St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and others would gather around good stories, like moths to a flame. Since then, The Moth has sold out every show, and recently completed its first U.S. tour.
The World Science Festival springs from the vision of its two co-founders, Brian Greene and Tracy Day. Brian Greene is a Columbia University professor of physics and of mathematics and host of the PBS series The Elegant Universe, based on his Pulitzer Prize finalist bestselling book. Tracy Day is a four-time National News Emmy Award winning journalist and producer whose credits include Nightline and This Week with David Brinkley.
"The World Science Festival is thrilled to partner with The Moth because what so many fail to recognize is that science itself is a story—a story in which generations of seekers across the world's continents have boldly attempted to understand themselves and the universe we all inhabit," said Festival Co-Founder, Brian Greene. "And to have
Sam Shepard participate in the program underscores emphatically how science is so much more than what many of us experienced in the classroom—science can stir not only the mind but also the soul."
Tickets for this event are priced at $35 and are available at
www.worldsciencefestival.com or by calling 212-864-5400.
Symphony Space is located at 2537 Broadway at 95th Street, New York, NY 10025.
