
Think Big – Start Small. That’s what they say. And that’s what we did.
What’s bigger than infinity? What’s a bigger ambition than to “save the world through science and theater”?
What’s smaller than one evening in January?
We started with a party.
In January 2010 we first partnered with the Seattle University Physics Department to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the night Galileo first saw the moons of Jupiter through his telescope – with food, wine, Galilean telescopes, a reading of Tom Stoppard’s “Galileo” screenplay – and good conversation about Science and Society. After celebrating the Galileo Dialogues for a decade with plays by Mary Jo Salter, Dava Sobel and others, we finished off with Part Two of Natalie Copeland’s “Time and Time Again.” We hope to bring Galileo Dialogues back. We call it an Evening of Science and Society.
The name Infinity Box was also taken from a mid-1970s collection of speculative fiction stories by Kate Wilhelm. In 2011, we produced an adaptation of another of her stories from that period, Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Your Crisis! – about reality TV – and Way ahead of its time.
We began Psychlotron (smashing ideas together at high speed, just to see what happens) at the Fireside Room in the Sorrento Hotel in 2011. Two people from unrelated backgrounds talking about whatever fascinates them. Then the audience has the smart fun of trying to make connections. We did two dozen of them over several years, and, of course, hope to bring them back.
Our annual signature piece, Thought Experiments on the Question of Being Human began as part of the Seattle Science Festival in 2013. Scientists and playwrights exploring the human consequences of progress in a different area of science or technology each year. Then there was this pandemic and…. We’re working on a reboot now.
In 2016, we spun up Centrifuge (Science News Meets Science Fiction) for the first time. Science writers, theater artists and a whole lot of random leads to 5 short science plays in five days – each with its own short science talk. As more than one audience member has said, “that’s how I like to learn about science.”
But wait, there’s more. We look forward to the sixth annual InVerse Functions, our theatrical evening of science poetry. And also more of our occasional events, Faraday Cage Match (an evening of competitive science improv) and Matters of Gravity (our NPR-style science game show).
Things have been busy at Infinity Box. Our strategy of starting small and building toward sustainability has served us and our mission well so far. But now we want to take some big steps forward and build Infinity Box Theatre Project into something grander and more influential.
We need your help imagining what Infinity Box could become and what it could accomplish – and then building that grander, more sustainable Infinity Box.
So we invite you to join us in the Think Big part as we continue to Build Infinity Box. We invite science people and theater people to hang out and be creative together. We invite them – and our wider community – to think about what it means to be human – to think about the future – to imagine what the world could be like – if….
