"Survive!': Exploring the future with Swim Pony

Despite its immense popularity in book sales and at the box office, science fiction receives little serious critical consideration. Only a handful of Sci-Fi films have received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, an award that not even E.T. or Star Wars could win.

In theater, few writers even bother to portray social or personal issues in a sci-fi context. Tom Stoppard threaded bits of chaos theory into Arcadia; Caryl Churchill wrote a short about cloning called A Number. But both plays subordinated the science to familial and relationship conflict, the staples of the modern stage.

By contrast, Swim Pony's Survive! puts science at the center of the story. Their production opens on four scientists in 1972, debating the contents of the gold plated message about to be launched on NASA's Pioneer 10 space probe. Will the aliens understand the engraved images of a hydrogen molecule, a map of our solar system, and a human anatomy without a vulva? Since it will take 350,000 years for the Pioneer probe to reach the nearest star, will it even matter?

Rather than answer these intriguing speculations, the lights flicker in and out, an eerie sound seeps into the space, and the production flies forward into the future. Four "fractals" appear to guide the audience through the labyrinthine set in a "choose-your-own-adventure" story.

Here, like the Pioneer probe, we find ourselves venturing through space, but in search of a message rather than carrying one. The real question asked by Swim Pony's show: Could we, as an alien species, come to understand our own lives only through the models and metaphors of scientific thought?

Inside a submarine

The Franklin Institute couldn't have crafted a more engaging, more immersive exhibit to address these questions. From the moment I lumbered down into the Wolf Building's 22,000 square feet of converted space, I felt the entombing sense of traveling inside a submarine. Set designer Lisi Stoessel had honeycombed the ceiling of the central "Hub," coated the walls of a terrarium with creeping flora (even staging a Floral Puppet show), sculpted a cavernous, star-speckled space room, and transformed the dank basement into a pristine empanelled space station.

Swim Pony's attention to detail in the set, Maria Shaplin's lighting and Mikaal Sulaiman's sound reminded me of the golden age of science fiction movies, when the designers of Star Wars shaped each landscape by hand, used puppets to feign alien life, and evoked a greater realism than the computer-generated world of Avatar.

As in the similarly immersive and adventurous Fatebook of 2009, a voice (Wendy Staton) established a few ground rules for he audience (don't stray from the path, come back to the central hub when called, etc). Then, with a symbol-scripted map as a rough guide, the audience could choose which of the four fractals to follow along the adventure.

Life in two dimensions

Wandering into one room would find Bradley Wrenn's "gentle scientist" pondering the differing perspective of creatures who only live in one- or two-dimensional universes, in order to explore the limitations of understanding for humans who live in three. Down another forking path, Jamie McKittrick's "kinetic girl" tap-danced in between riffs on the gelatinous nature of time.

In a room inspired by the Dutch graphic artist MC Escher— where chairs, tables, light fixtures sat on each of the four walls— a trio used choreography to reveal a hidden meaning borrowed from Plato's Cave and Protagoras's "Man is the measure of all things." Throughout, the four actors pepper their ponderings with enough humor to offset any potential tedium. They recite their lines with a sincerity that captures the poetic quality of the scientific metaphors.

From Borges to Nietzsche

Director Adrienne Mackey, writer Tim Sawicki and the cast chose the literary allusions, which also drew from Borges's Garden of the Forking Paths, Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (itself a blend of mysticism and theoretical physics), Edwin Abbott's Flatland, and even hints of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return. In this exploration of scientific themes, Mackey continues the tradition of serious authors—from Huxley and Borges to Don DeLillo and Michel Houellebecq— who worked in the realm of science fiction.

The 1972 committee— led by Carl Sagan— that decided upon the Pioneer probe's message debated the merits of using only science and math to introduce humanity to an alien civilization. Later space probes, like the Voyager series, included human language, art and recordings of Beethoven. Echoing this conflict, the science-fiction writer Douglas Adams suggested in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that only art could justify humanity's existence.

But in this exercise, at least, Swim Pony demonstrates that the metaphors of scientific thought can inform and illuminate our lives as potently as those of poetry. Survive! is a brilliantly executed effort to portray the sci-fi genre seriously on stage.