• • Tesla was responsible for the development of alternating current (AC), the mode of electricity we use today, whether to turn on a light bulb, a dishwasher, an air-conditioner or a computer.
• • Tesla invented the radio before Marconi, but only got patent credit when the matter was settled after his death.
• • Tesla's mother was barely literate but was an inventor of many household gadgets and had an incredible memory -- two things she also fostered in her son who, as a kid, devised a small water wheel and also learned long passages of Serbian poetry.
• • For some time, Tesla, who lived in New York, hobnobbed with the rich and famous. Among his friends were Mark Twain and the Astors. But he died in poverty in a room in the New Yorker Hotel. You now can see a plaque to his memory there, as well as one in Bryant Park at 40th Street and Sixth Avenue, where he often fed the pigeons and took sick birds back to his hotel room to nurse.
Stanley's play, first produced by New York's Ensemble Studio Theatre in 1999, and directed here by Nick Bowling, begins many decades after Tesla's death, with a scenario that is deeply entangled in the more recent history of Tesla's homeland, the former Yugoslavia.
The time is 1997 -- just after the Dayton Peace Accords put an end to the brutal civil wars among the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. That also is when Daisy Archer (Tien Doman), an American doctoral student, travels to Serbia to do research at the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia. The museum is run by Dragan (Joel Huff), whose mother, Biljana (Janet Ulrich Brooks), serves as his secretary. Daisy's quest for primary documents leads her to make a potentially dangerous exploit as she heads to Croatia, along with the mysterious Zoran (Jason Karasev), to discover whether Tesla's birthplace has (or has not) been destroyed in the war.
"My first encounter with Tesla came in 1993, when I was a graduate student in the dramatic writing program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts," said Stanley. "I wrote a screenplay about him, sort of a biopic, and it eventually won a prize. By that time, the Dayton Accords had been signed ... so I decided to take the prize money and go to Zagreb [the capital of Croatia]. ... But the screenplay didn't really interest me anymore, and I started the play about what I'd experienced during my travels."
The play went into production in New York at the very moment that another unsettled issue in the region -- Serbia's control of Kosovo -- exploded.
"The show was almost canceled for fear of offending Serbs, Croats and/or Americans in this country, but the theater was very brave and totally cool, and everything went ahead without incident," said Stanley.
So what has continually drawn him to Tesla's story?
"He was really a fantastical figure, a kind of folk hero of science," said Stanley. "And he was somewhat mad, too. He believed in life on other planets. He also was a serious scientist who believed in a spirit world -- something that Edison also believed in, but was too savvy and aware of public relations to talk about. In many ways, Tesla was his own worst enemy.
"And there is a Chicago hook with Tesla, too," said the playwright. "The 1893 World's Fair in Chicago was entirely lit by alternating current. And its success helped blow away Edison's preference for direct current."