Paul Mullin

A plate-glass window and a sudden gust of wind christened Paul
Mullin’s career as a playwright. It was 1990 in New York City, and
Mullin was 23, working as a window washer. “It was the stupidity of
youth times a thousand,” he says, sitting in the backyard of his
Seattle home with a glass of bourbon, soaking his feet in his sons’
inflatable pool. “I was also working as an actor at the time, and as a
night porter, so during the day I was climbing 60-story buildings on
two hours’ sleep. Stupid.”

Hours before the opening of his Ellison and Eden, Mullin was
in a fancy apartment building, cleaning its 70-pound windows. He had to
pop each one out of its frame and lean outside while he washed the
glass. He was struggling to yank one of the windows back into its frame
and called Al, the large Puerto Rican building manager, to help. A
rogue gust blew the window into Mullin, shattering it against his face
and body.

“I asked, ‘How bad is it, Al?’ And he just stood there freaking out,
going ‘uh—uh—uh.'” Blood was pouring out of Mullin’s face,
but he felt oddly calm: He knew he had to get to a hospital
immediately. Fortunately, there was an emergency room kitty-corner from
the apartment building. “Cars were beeping at me as I tried to cross
the street, and I thought: ‘So this is how it is? My face is bleeding
and you’re honking? Fine.’ That’s when I decided to leave New
York.”

He got 40 stitches sewed into his cheek that night and missed the
opening of Ellison and Edison. “We were a young, angry
ensemble,” Mullin says. “Our artistic director—and main
donor—was a call girl.”

Eighteen years, 18 productions, two marriages, and two children
later, Mullin is still angry. He writes bellicose letters to artistic
directors and critics. He rails against regional theaters (“it’s all
based on a high-school drama-
club mentality”), actors’ unions (“I
scab and happily encourage others to scab”), and himself (“I am in the
same shape as theater in general—I don’t have a fucking
clue”).

But his anger is focused and generative, an anger that makes things
happen: “We’re all going to be dead soon,” he says as night falls in
his backyard. “And we’re never going to feel properly
compensated for it. So just do the work. Just do it.” He finishes his
bourbon. “Want another?”

Mullin was born in Jacksonville, Maryland, to a family he describes
as “shanty Irish from the wrong side of the tracks.” His people were
poor, tough, and alcoholic. (Mullin’s father died before he was born,
drunk behind the wheel.) He studied theater at the University of
Maryland and got his actors’ union card at Ford’s Theatre, playing
Young Scrooge during a production of A Christmas Carol. He took
naps in the box beneath the one where Lincoln was assassinated. “You
couldn’t nap in that box,” he says. “It was cordoned off. Besides,
that’d be fucking disrespectful.”

Mullin’s conversation is fast, passionate, and occasionally
bruising—it is easy to imagine him as a Tammany Hall politician.
“I know everyone and I forget nothing,” he says, recalling a story of
an actor who abandoned one of his fringe productions for a union job
and who, years later, came asking to be in one of Mullin’s plays.
Mullin wouldn’t even let him audition.

Mullin’s characters tend to be as tough and smart as he is. Louis
Slotin Sonata—his masterpiece, based on a true
story—begins in a laboratory in Los Alamos, where physicist Louis
Slotin is showboating. He’s performing a “criticality test,” putting
two half-spheres of beryllium around a plutonium bomb core and
measuring the neutron collisions. The test is so dangerous, they call
it “tickling the dragon’s tail.” The spheres of beryllium must come
close but never touch—if they do, the core will react and send a
prompt, fatal burst of radiation through the room. Slotin keeps the
halves separate with the blade of a screwdriver, twisting it back and
forth. Of course, the blade slips and Slotin becomes a walking dead
man, with nine days left to live.

That opening scene is typical of Mullin’s best work: a polychromatic
marvel of science, comedy, and sadness. In eight pages, he whisks the
audience across an astonishing stretch of ground, explaining how
nuclear bombs work, a brief history of the Manhattan Project, the
fraught relationship between the military and its scientists, machismo
in the lab, and his charmingly arrogant protagonist. (Slotin calls
himself the “chief bomb putter-togetherer” and mocks the bureaucratic
pomposity of his military employers by describing wood blocks as
“Custom-Made Pajarito Canyon Criticality Contraption Safety Prototypes
One and Two.”) Exposition was never so entertaining.

The play fractures along with Slotin’s decaying mind. From his
hospital bed, Slotin talks physics with his friends, biology with his
doctors, Yiddish with his father, and sex with a cute nurse. By the
end, Slotin is bantering with the dead, performing a musical number as
Dr. Josef Mengele, and tickling the dragon’s tail with the Lord.

Until the Alfred P. Sloan Fountain gave him some money to produce
Louis Slotin Sonata in New York, Mullin never thought of himself
as a “science playwright.” Which is odd, since special topics in
science and technology drive much of his work: Louis Slotin
Sonata (nuclear physics and radiation sickness), Tuesday (a
kind of amnesia called Korsakoff’s syndrome), The Septarchy (quantum physics and artificial intelligence), and The Ten Thousand
Things (time and the real-life attempt to build a clock that will
last 10,000 years).

“My wife says I’m fascinated by the questions that keep sophomore
college students up and smoking weed all night. The question in
Tuesday is: ‘What if, maaaaan, you were an amnesiac who
just remembered everything, and it turns out you were a dick?'”
Which is exactly what happens to Audie McCall, an alcoholic junk-bond
trader who barely survives a catastrophic car wreck. He wakes up each
morning as a tabula rasa. By bedtime, he’s remembered he used to be an
abusive, neglectful monster. Watching Tuesday is like waking
from one of those dreams where you’ve done something horrible and,
through the haze of fresh consciousness, you slowly and blessedly
realize it was only a dream. Tuesday is like that, except the
other way around. For Audie, every day is a fresh horror.

Mullin’s plays keep a delicate tension between the intellectual and
the human—they are cerebral, but warm-blooded. His plays explore
not just ideas but the effects of ideas. Mullin is, essentially,
a gnostic playwright, drawing out the drama behind the discovery, the
comedy behind the theory, and the knowledge behind the knowledge.