slotinaccident Louis Slotin, “just a schmuck bomb-putter-togetherer,” would just as soon have been forgotten by history. But when his cavalier nature met a slip of a screwdriver, he was destined to go down in the annals of history as one of the peacetime casualties of the Atomic Age. And, perhaps, as the antihero of Paul Mullin’s  Louis Slotin Sonata, which explores the motifs that may have played out in Slotin’s mind during the last nine days of his life, as the radiation to which he exposed himself took its inevitable toll.

Louis Slotin Sonata is the second part of Cal Rep’s self-styled duet of nuclear-themed plays, following hard upon their production of Carson Kreitzer’s The Lovesong of J. Robert Oppenheimer, utilizing the same stage (though less so), some overlapping casting, and much of the same Los Alamos backstory.

Moreover, the two plays are easily linked by their speculations about why we humans do what we do. With Lovesong, the question concerns a death instinct, whereas the query of Sonata regards why life plays out as it does (and whether the chronological sense of “playing out” may be illusory).

Despite the motifs that become almost too easily heard in Act Two, Sonata somehow feels too loosely constructed. It shouldn’t feel that way—its flights of fancy are tied clearly enough to the “This is the character’s psyche” school of digression that Cal Rep has come to favor of late (Sonata is the third of the company’s last half-dozen productions employing this device), and the guy-dying-in-a-hospital stuff (also featured in the same afore referenced three shows) unfolds rather predictably—and yet that’s the feeling with which I came away. Was the action and philosophic musing insufficiently compelling? Maybe that’s it, but I’m not sure. It’s a critical itch I can’t quite scratch.

The fault doesn’t seem to lie in the production itself. Director Eberhard Koehler does his best to keep things lively, and generally he succeeds, though portions of the script seem overly static. Deserving particular praise, though, is a bold choice made in a relation to a musical number. I do not know if this choice (to explain it further would be a spoiler) is in the script, but whatever the case, it expands the thematic reach of the play, while at the same time providing a jolt that effectively shifts the emotional tone.

I’d dish out some praise for the actors by name, but for inscrutable reasons the script identifies the characters as “Man 1, Man 2,” etc.—even though they all have names in the play. Josh Nathan is listed Man 1—and presuming that’s Slotin, Nathan starts off nicely and ends by showing a lot more range than you thought he was going to get to show. Everyone else is good, too, but I’d love to single out the fellow who played Slotin’s father, because in his few scenes he both truly touches us and makes us laugh. Kudos, whoever you are.

Slotin laments that if he’s remembered it will be for his “arrogance and stupidity,” but Sonata should help us associate with his name a needful question that is important fallout in an atom-split world: “What happens when the novelty wears off?”

Nuclear power is no longer the new kid on the block. Sonata sings of the tragedy of taking it for granted.

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