Toil and Trouble

Program Excerpt

Stories of Experiments Gone Wrong

Throwing a uniquely personal and intimate spotlight on their relationship with science, renowned researchers, writers, and artists, including Sam Shepard, Jim Gates, Nathan Englander, Lucy Hawking, and Michael Turner, took to the stage to tell stories about heroic failures, miscalculations and experiments — scientific and otherwise — gone wrong.

This captivating evening of live stories was presented in partnership with New York's extraordinary storytelling collective, The Moth. In keeping with Moth traditions, each story must be true, must be told live, and must be told in ten minutes.

Sam Shepard is an Oscar-nominated actor, screenwriter, director, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. His best-known works include Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, and True West. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1986, and his plays are performed on and off Broadway, and in regional theaters across America.