Alan Turing was a crazy, brilliant (and crazy brilliant) British mathematician who helped defeat the Nazis by cracking their hellaciously complex code-generating machines with a useless-sounding logical theorem (from any contradiction, you can deduce everything). Turing was also the father of computer science and believed that machines could someday not only think, but feel. And he was gay, for which a British judge sentenced him to chemical castration. He committed suicide two years later. This production about Turing’s life is exquisite—the text is rich and clever, and director Sheila Daniels has pulled awe-inspiring performances from her cast, especially actor Bradford Farwell as the stuttering, thorny, and enigmatic Turing. Go. (Strawberry Theatre Workshop at Erickson Theater Off Broadway, 1524 Harvard Ave, 800-838-3006, 7:30 pm, $15 half-price Thursday)
Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua.... More by Brendan Kiley
While I love the Stranger and SLOG, I should point out there’s a Free or Pay-What-You-Can theater, music, dance, arts festival being sponsored by the Weekly in October, and this week has an insert where it lists all the many fine performances.
If you’re broke or a student, you should really check it out. Lots of all ages things too.
We now return you to your usual Weekly-despising SLOG …
By “chemical castration”, what you really mean is a synthetic estrogen that had never been subjected to any kind of legitimate testing for this purpose, and which caused men to grow breasts and become grossly fat and bloated, and which had no business being injected into anyone, let alone your NATIONAL HERO WHO DEFEATED THE NAZIS FOR YOU. It was an appalling treatment worthy of Dr. Mengele, not the UK. Turing saved the world and to thank him they destroyed his body and his mind.
There’s a very moving statue of Turing in a park in the gay district of Manchester. He’s sitting on a park bench, holding an apple, like the one he laced with cyanide to poison himself with. It’s a terribly sad, terribly infuriating story.
Computer history geek here pushing my glasses up & raising my hand in class to timidly point out that the jury is still out on whether Turing actually committed suicide, since he was not the most with it guy and was known to keep lab chemicals like cyanide in the same fridge as his afternoon snack? (And she sinks back into her chair while all the cool kids roll their eyes and the teacher says, “Thanks for that interesting anecdote,” and goes on … this is why I don’t talk in class.)
On another note, I really, really wish I was in Seattle right now & could go see this.