TN: Rob Ackerman Esquire, welcome to The Strange Recital. We’re glad to have you here, even though you are not here.
 
RA: I think I’m even gladder than you.
 
BR: And thank you for your play Fritz, which we’ve just aired.
 
RA: Well your skills never cease to amaze me, Tom. I mean I sang in a doo-wop group and a glee club and a choir when I was a kid, and I learned to love music and sound and overtones and churches, but I have always found technical stuff to be really daunting - and you’re so good at it.
 
TN: Well thank you. We’ve known each other a long time - over twenty years now I think, as colleagues in the film business. And all that time you’ve also been a playwright.
 
RA: Well I started writing plays after the suicide of a dear friend when we were in our early 30s - before I met you, Tom. And theater has always been the love of my working life from preschool and grade school in central Ohio to college in Middlebury, Vermont, to stage directing degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. But when my wife and I moved to New York, my time got swallowed up by the work I had to do to pay the bills, to have kids. Which was wonderful, but I was also getting kinda sad inside. So when we lost this friend, I had a sort of premature midlife crisis, and just stopped doing everything and started doing theater again. And I think it saved me. I mean if I hadn’t gone back to making plays, I really don’t know what would’ve become of me.
 
TN: Well, I'm glad it saved you. I’ve seen only one of your plays performed on stage and that was Tabletop. I loved it - a humorous look at the film business, focusing on one of those mom and pop production companies in the 80s with that tyrannical director. I saw it twice. The second time I took my son, so he could understand what I did at work. Now of course he’s in the business himself and knows only too well.
 
RA: I love you and your son, and I admire your polymath capacities, Tom, as an author, musician, producer, performer, engineer and craftsman-- you inspire me. And though I... you do... and though I have had the pleasure of working with your son, I can never hire him because he’s always busy.
 
TN: Yep.
 
RA: You know as far as Tabletop goes, it took me about nine years and 35 drafts to get that play up and running and I'm not exaggerating. I labored over every syllable as if it were poetry, which is what it sort of is, actually. Plays are more poetry than prose, and poems are basically music. We should never read plays in the silence of a library. That’s like asking someone to sit down and read the score of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. It doesn’t work. You have to hear it.
 
BR: Let’s get back to talking about Fritz.
 
RA: Yes! Please! Stop me before I digress again!
 
TN: I’ll admit I’d never heard of Fritz Haber, in America sometimes pronounced Hay-ber, though I think I'll stick with Haber  - I'd never heard of him until I read your play. So you are a disseminator of knowledge as well as a prop guy and a playwright.
 
RA: I really just write about what upsets me. I mean plays are problems that have no answers. And in this case, a theater company called Core Artist Ensemble has been asking me to write a short play for them every year for the past few years. It's a very democratic and utopian group of actors, directors, and writers led by two women, both named Rachel—Rachel Lee and Rachael Casparian—and last year’s assignment was incredibly specific: the Rachels wanted us to write about an episode of RadioLab, any episode. It's a science podcast that I do like to listen to, and it just so happened that I’d been haunted by this one episode about a man who was the epitome of both good and evil.
 
BR: Yeah it’s such a tragic story. A brilliant man who saved so many lives with one invention, and took so many with another.
 
RA: He makes the single greatest scientific discovery of all time, and then he creates the world’s first weapon of mass destruction.
 
TN: Well, I’m not sure he saw that as a problem. He said that in peacetime scientists should work globally and in wartime they should work for their own countries. He also said death was death, no matter the cause. Since I read this play I looked into him a bit. He was a German-Jewish chemist but he identified more with his German nationality than with his Jewish religion. He even converted to Christianity, as did his first wife Clara and I think his second wife as well. Maybe that was a career move - in those halcyon days. What do you think Rob?
 
RA: All of his talk about the Fatherland... Look, I too am of German-Jewish descent. My grandfather’s family came from a town called Gemunden. But Jews can be anti-Semitic, whether it’s out of fear or self-hatred, it gets ugly. And I don’t buy any excuses for this man and his nativism and his jingoism. When you align yourself with a tribe instead of with all of humanity, you are in the wrong. And by all accounts, Robert E. Lee was a charming gentleman. He was also the greatest American traitor of all time. If General Lee had accepted President Lincoln’s invitation to oversee the Union Army, he could have prevented the slaughter of 750,000 Americans. In most tragedies, the hero’s flaw is arrogance and shortsightedness and pride, and the Haber story is no exception.
 
BR: It’s a double tragedy that Haber also created Zyklon, the gas the Nazis used against his people including some of his family members.
 
TN: Yes, but I don’t think he was personally responsible for that. Zyklon A was invented by scientists in the 1920s at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, of which he was the director. So I suppose you could assume he knew about it. I think the gas the Nazis used was Zyklon B.
 
RA: Yes but Zyklon B is just a further evolved version of Zyklon A, and both exist because of Haber’s leadership. He is the father of chemical warfare and killing gas. You can’t explain that away or sugarcoat it. Poison is poison.
 
TN: The Haber-Bosch process, creating ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen under high pressure, for which he won a Nobel prize, is today feeding half the world’s population through the fertilizers it has made possible. But he also did pioneering work in electrochemistry and in chemical thermodynamics, whatever that is.  And he's known as the father of chemical warfare because of the chlorine gas he created in World War I, and for which he was awarded an Iron Cross. He even spent a lot of time trying to extract gold from seawater. You just can’t get away from alchemy can you?
 
BR: Maybe not... We’ve been talking about Fritz so far but his wife Clara, who has such a big role in your play, is a tragic figure too. I liked the way she could see into the future, into our times, through her calculations. At least, as you depicted her in the play. So what else can you tell us about her?
 
RA: I love her. I really do. She’s so calm and resolute. And in fact she was the first German woman ever to earn a PhD in chemistry. I didn’t feel like I wrote Clara; she sort of wrote herself. And that's... There’s something about that quiet poise and strength that really gets to me. Women listen better than men generally. So they really ought to be ruling the world.
 
TN: Maybe her suicide was the result of Fritz’s grim war work or maybe it was due to underlying depression. Their son Hermann killed himself, as did his daughter. That suggests that genes might have been involved.
 
BR: Or epigenetics. Emotional trauma passed down through families.
 
TN: Hmm. That's a slippery slope don't you think? Epigenetics involves genes doesn’t it? Just no mutation of DNA.
 
RA: But, you guys, this was not a pathology! Any sentient person whose life partner is blithely killing thousands of young men by making them choke on their own snot might be tempted to blow her brains out. The men who justify the mass murder: they are the ones who are mentally ill!
 
TN: So Rob, there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about — you’ve always seemed to me to be an optimistic, upbeat kind of guy. Tabletop was a humorous play. Maybe it was a social commentary too, but this play Fritz is a much darker tale. What led you to write it?
 
RA: Well, Tabletop, at least on certain nights, could get dark as hell. The kid who's at the center of that play gets metaphorically and almost literally killed. It's so true that only by going into the dark can we really appreciate the light. And when people ask me what kinds of plays I write, my answer usually is: “I write about people trying and failing to work together.” And that’s both funny and sad.
 
TN: Yeah. If Tabletop was a comedy, then Fritz is a tragedy. That word has come up quite a bit in this discussion. What exactly is tragedy? It sounds Greek to me.
 
BR: A dramatization of suffering that an audience can enjoy -- through catharsis, which is a purging of negative emotions. So it's good for your health! And you’re right, it did come from Ancient Greece and has rippled outwards ever since. You could say that it sort of underpins Western civilization.
 
TN: What? You mean Western civilization is based on people enjoying watching other people suffer? I could go to town on this.
 
BR: Yes, I'm sure you could, but we don’t have time for that.
 
RA: I’m happy to sit here and listen all day! I am. Really.
 
TN: Well Rob, what I draw from your play is the danger of technology without morality, where difficult questions can be avoided by justifying the means to an end. It is like deliberately being blind. It happens all the time and has always happened. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later his munitions minister, was blind to the moral turpitude of using slave labor. It was only after spending a number of years in Spandau prison that he publicly acknowledged remorse. And what good was that, except to him?
 
RA: When my dad was a student at Princeton University, he actually stood up during a lecture by a Professor named Albert Einstein and asked the man, this physicist, if he felt any guilt about the fact that his work was essential to the development of the atomic bomb. And Einstein’s answer to my father was that he felt like a caring parent whose child had turned into a delinquent. He had done the best he could! But, when you’re aware that your actions are about leading directly to mass death, you have to take responsibility. I mean that’s what happens in Arthur Miller’s masterful play All My Sons. It’s our duty to own up to the stuff that we do to one another, so we don’t keep doing it.
 
BR: The story also suggests the dangers of nationalism. Fritz saw himself as a patriot. Ultimately he was spurned and despised by the country he loved. And then his conversion to Christianity didn’t help. Another layer to the tragedy. The message of this play is very pertinent today.
 
RA: This is a scary time. A hundred years ago Warren Harding became our president by deploying the slogan: AMERICA FIRST. And my next play takes us to that time and to the people of that time. The title is Loyalty, and that cuts two ways. That show is going to have three performances at a festival in New York this October in a theater in Chelsea called The Hudson Guild.
 
TN: Well, I shall look forward to seeing that and making it the second play of yours that I've seen. Anyway, we must wrap it up now. Thanks again, Rob. This is the first time we’ve aired a play on The Strange Recital and I’m happy it was one of yours.
 
RA: I'm deeply honored. And I just love what you guys are doing. I enjoy it all the time, every episode, so please keep doing it.
 
BR: Yes thanks Rob. And all you future Fritz Habers who may be listening, if you’re not off studying - BEWARE!
 
RA: And be careful—in every sense of the word.