Word: einstein
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Elvis makes his appearance in Steve Martin's new play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, recently arrived off-Broadway after stints in Chicago and Los Angeles. The setting is a bar in Paris. The year is 1904. The chief protagonists are the young Albert Einstein (played by Mark Nelson) and the young Pablo Picasso (Tim Hopper), both of whom stand on the threshold of international fame. The source of the confusion--the reason why Elvis (Gabriel Macht) emerges as a beacon of light--isn't the heady intellectuality of this conjunction of trailblazers but an uncertainty of styles; the play...
...playwright who presumes to team Picasso with Einstein makes an implicit contract with the theatergoer: I'm going to provide intellectual pyrotechnics. As the two engage in their battle of wits, however, the drama begins to feel like a play of ideas without enough ideas. Picasso's one-liners aren't so much fireworks as kitchen matches. Martin has recklessly ventured into the country of Tom Stoppard, whose amazing Travesties (which convenes Lenin and James Joyce in Switzerland) may be seen as a rich ancestor of this poor relation...
...wife of the bar's proprietor, Rondi Reed declaims, but does not convey, the pathos of a woman who bleakly sees through the egotism of much male solicitude. Hopper makes a sweet Picasso: you can believe he painted harlequins but not minotaurs. Most satisfying is Nelson as Einstein; a diminutive figure, he expresses something of an atom's compacted, ferocious potential energy...
...concluded that Nazi Germany was never going to build its own. So he quit his job with the Manhattan Project--the only physicist to do so--believing that only the threat of losing World War II could justify creating so terrible a weapon. Then, in 1955, Rotblat joined Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and six other scientists in signing a manifesto that led to the founding of the annual Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which have lobbied ever since to convince governments that, in Rotblat's own words, "the genie can be put back in the bottle...
When we think of brilliance we see Einstein, deep-eyed, woolly haired, a thinking machine with skin and mismatched socks. High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others. This is where the marshmallows come in. It seems that the ability to delay gratification is a master skill, a triumph of the reasoning brain over the impulsive one. It is a sign, in short, of emotional intelligence. And it doesn't show up on an IQ test...