Cross My Heart and Hope to Die: Eyes, Needles, and the Ethereal World of Isaac Newton

Isaac’s Eye, by Lucas Hnath, is the somewhat unreal story of two very real people. It details violent conflicts both between minds and within them; it makes the audience question their perception of reality; and hanging over the whole piece is a sense of dread, suspense, and fear as the audience waits for someone to stick a needle their eye.

The play tells the story of the vicious rivalry between Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. Newton, at the time of the play, is unknown and almost universally unappreciated--there is one person living who cares about him, Catherine--but has a mind full of brilliant ideas. He writes to Hooke, an intellectual giant of the day, asking for help. Hooke is a very influential man; Newton hopes that with his assistance, he might be admitted to the Royal Society, which would enable him to have a real career as a scientist and put his theories to the test. He sends Hooke his work, and Hooke is horrified--Newton is making many of the same discoveries as he is. Their work is very similar, but with one key distinction.

Newton believes that light is made of particles; Hooke is convinced that it’s made of waves. Being right means a lot to both of them. For Newton, whose relationship with religion is extremely complex, it’s a matter of faith. He believes that his ideas come directly from God; if he’s wrong, he will have nothing to believe in, and feel truly alone in the universe. Hooke is desperate to be remembered. His genius is the claim he’s staking to immortality. And he did a lot to be remembered for: he was the first to describe combustion and petrification, created an artificial respirator, engineered clocks to be more accurate, founded the field of meteorology, discovered cells, devised an early version of the telephone, developed an early version if the theory of evolution, and came up with Hooke’s Law. But have you heard of him?

Newton has an idea for how to test his theory about light as particles. If they’re particles and not waves, he reasons, then the way the eye perceives light must be affected by the eye's shape. If the shape changed, the particles would hit it differently, and the colors it would see colors differently. And as for changing the eye's shape, one could simply insert a needle into the tear duct and use it to gently move the needle a little to the side, squeezing the eyeball. This shouldn't actually do any damage. It's a simple and harmless test--if nothing goes wrong. The two can’t rest without an answer, and the horrifying consequences become intertwined in the lives of two equally fascinating characters, a fictional man named Sam who is dying of the plague, and the aforementioned Catherine, who was just as real as the scientists.

But at least as intriguing as the story itself is the way in which Hnath chooses to tell it. There is a character in the script known simply as “Actor,” who says, at the beginning of the play,

“Isaac Newton knew or thought he knew,

he thought there was something called ether.

He thought there was ether everywhere.

Ether in the air, ether in between the air,

Ether everywhere there was a there…

We know now what Newton did not know then:

there’s no such thing as ether.

But by believing ether was real,

Isaac could see things he could not have seen

if he did not think something was there

that was not really there.

This play is filled with ether.

There are also things in this play that are not true.

There are lots of things that are true,

lots of things,

even things that don’t sound true but are true…

Because we don’t want to lie to you,

anything that’s true, we’ll write on the wall.

If it’s not on the wall, just know, it might be made up.”

And he does. Throughout the play, Actor writes down every fact in the play on the wall of the set. The set itself is very bare; Actor creates the setting through descriptions. He also plays Sam, visibly shifting between that character and his role as a kind of narrator. He often speaks directly to the audience. The audience is constantly reminded that they are in a theatre, that what they are watching is not real. All of these elements point to one conclusion: this is theatre for social change.

I learned about it this summer--all of those alienation techniques are among the hallmarks of theatre for social change, pioneered by artists like Brecht and Boal. Which raises the question: what social change is Hnat trying to effect? I don’t think I’ve figured it out yet. At times funny (“There’s a law named after me. Do you have a law?”), utterly sickening, and tragic, there’s a lot to process. But here’s what I can tell you for sure. The entire play is written in the same style as the excerpt above, just as straightforward, honest, and uninhibited. The emotion is raw and powerful, and even as mere text on a page it feels hauntingly real. 

That makes me really excited to see it. I’m going to, next month. It’s playing at Writers Theatre, which consistently produces amazing shows. So if you can make the trip up to Glencoe, I suggest you do. It will make you think and feel deeply in the way that only great art can, and it though it's just an illusion, it might help you see things that you otherwise could not.

--CMcC