LSU’s Theatre department recently put science in the spotlight for its latest SciArts Festival, a festival created to highlight the benefits of intersecting the arts with science.

The festival ran from April 15 to 17 and showcased three science plays, selected from over 150 submissions across the nation. Marina DeYoe-Pedraza, a graduate student at the School of Theatre, explained how the festival only features plays that explore scientific concepts or science that is integral to the play.

“Sometimes science is used as a metaphor to understand humans better and sometimes the play is straight up about the science,” DeYoe-Pedraza said.

DeYoe-Pedraza is one of the SciArts organizers who helped transform how the public receives scientific ideas. She envisions collaborations among different academic fields and believes that the SciArts Festival can help to foster interdisciplinary collaboration at LSU.

“I think one of the benefits of a festival like this is we’re not just showing general audiences, but we’re also showing colleagues in the college of science that this is another way to communicate your ideas through theater and through performance,” DeYoe-Pedraza said.

“Better Living”, a play written by Rich Rubin, was one of the plays featured amongst the SciArts lineup.

“Better Living” tells the story of Connie and Paul, former coworkers who help with the development of Scotchgard. The play shifts between present day scenes where Paul is living in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s and flashbacks to 30 years earlier when Paul was Connie’s supervisor.

During her visits to Paul at the nursing home, Connie tries to remind Paul of their past and their role in creating PFAs, which are chemicals that contaminate air, water and bloodstreams. In the flashbacks, Connie discovers the environmental harm caused by PFAs and encourages Paul to take action but Paul dismisses her concerns, threatens her job and ultimately demotes her position after she refuses to stay silent.

Paul never acknowledges the harm of these chemicals even in old age. After his death, Connie confides in Paul’s caretaker at the nursing home that she has renal cancer. Her illness along with Paul’s Alzheimer’s were likely caused by the PFAs and Connie admits that she regrets not speaking out sooner.

The play explores themes of guilt, denial and environmental responsibility. In the end, both characters faced the consequence of their creation, by dying from the chemicals that they created.

Rich Rubin, the 78-year-old playwright, is a retired primary care physician that started writing plays in his 60s. He said his experience is a great example of how unpredictable life can be.

“I really had no theater background,” Rubin said. “I really enjoyed them and maybe something in the back of my mind even way back then was ‘this looks like fun’, and ‘maybe I’ll try my hand at this.’”

Rubin took inspiration for “Better Living” from an investigative article by Sharon Lerner called “You Make Me Sick”. He admires the reporting that Lerner did and decided to base the plot on it.

“There are certain cancers, reproductive irregularities and immune irregularities and dysfunctions associated with PFAs,” Rubin said. “A variety of things that we’re learning can be found in the blood of very young children and newborns even, because mothers pass it on to their newborns. So, Sharon Lerner wrote about this in some detail, and told a specific story about this in real life terms.”

Rubin hopes that his play educated the audience about PFAs and provoked discussions about scientific ethics. He said that the SciArts Festival is exactly the platform needed to spark interdisciplinary conversations for spreading awareness for topics like these.

“It’s easy for us to be isolated in our own silos of information, and for scientists just to speak to other scientists, and theater folks just to speak to other theater folks. So I think it’s great that this festival is a wonderful attempt to bring various groups together and really initiate rather deep and really interesting conversations.” Rubin said.

Rubin’s journey from medicine to playwriting proves that the two fields are more fluid than we think. Mixing the two disciplines helps to educate audiences in a way that is informative but still entertaining. LSU’s SciArts Festival was a great example that science does not have to be in a lab.