EDINBURGH 2023: OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW! Q&A

BWW catches up with Dahlia Wilde and Mick Perrin to chat about bringing OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW! to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW!

OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW! aka OMGPS! is a live theatrical one-woman show that will have its international premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe 2023 Festival. I am producing the show with Mick Perrin and Gilded Balloon. Consider the OMGPS! to be AN EVEN MORE DIVINE COMEDY that explores the creative, physical, mathematical and responsive nature of a universe that may be meeting our minds halfway!

The theme of the OMGPS! is the discovery of the Higgs Particle, nicknamed ‘The God Particle’ and responsible for connecting everything in the universe. It is a love story based loosely on Dante’s Inferno, but this Smashing Particle Physics version is about a woman named Beatrice who is hunting for her long-lost love Dante and the ‘The God Particle’ in Geneva, at the Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN). Sometimes more Wizard of Oz than Dante’s Inferno, she travels deeper and deeper through the Large Hadron Collider hunting for the God/Love particle, and through the entire scientific method, complete with doubt and fear that she may find nothing. She is terrified of the Inferno, like Dante, and that the beginning of time and all of life will be meaningless. To her surprise, she finds everything she ever wanted. Peace, love, an understanding of the magical God Particle and ultimately the experience of love that unites us all… Her discovery is that it is all actually inside of her, and in that way, she is connected to the entire universe.

As the entire universe was born from a single event that we call the Big Bang, she is relieved to find that in fact we must all be connected, as we are all made of the same star stuff. As she falls in love with life… life falls in love with her. She finds that what she was seeking was actually seeking her and that all the universe is a beautiful interconnected design of great intelligence.

What was the inspiration behind writing the OMGPS!?

I studied science at Bronx High School of Science in NYC and went on to attend Duke and Oxford University as a Truman Scholar in Public Service. I was always fascinated by the design and structure of nature. When I won the Walt Disney Writing Fellowship and moved to Los Angeles from New York City, I started to write more about where art and science meet and how they are two different languages trying to explain the same mystery of life.

I was acting a lot and doing theatre, especially comedy, and I still had a lot of spiritual questions about the universe. I knew I was the happiest when I opened my mind and laughed. When I won the New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship I was able to research and develop OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW!. I reached out to brilliant mentors at the US ATLAS Large Hadron Collider team at the Centre for Research Nuclear in Geneva, Switzerland and I was invited to go to CERN and go inside the Large Hadron Collider.

I wrote 25 drafts of my play as the universe is a large topic! I was awarded generous grants from incredible organisations like the Dramatists Guild, PEN, Actors Fund, etc. that encouraged me to keep going with my quest to create a one-woman show that made science fun and encouraged everyone to think about our place in the universe in a light-hearted way.

When I won the iHEART Next Great Podcaster Award, I created a podcast also called OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW!, based on the big ideas of my stage play. I interviewed incredible scientists and artists, including a lot of incredible women scientists at the Large Hadron Collider. I have been lucky to have been supported by Will Pearson, the President of iHEART Podcast Network, who also attended Duke University. My podcast airs every Wednesday on the iHEART Podcast Network. It has been a really creative experience that has helped me define and strengthen my voice in the world, especially after spending the pandemic alone with my amazing dog and losing so many close people.

I was very lucky to have connected with Mick Perrin in the UK and his incredible team at Mick Perrin Worldwide to bring my OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW! one-woman show to the Edinburgh Festival with the equally stellar team at Gilded Balloon. I have followed Mick Perrin’s worldwide producing work for a long time especially as he produces the absolute best one-person shows with genius talent like Eddie Izzard, Trevor Noah, etc. who they discovered. I love that Mick Perrin and his team work to connect the world through laughter. I had been brainstorming with their North American producing colleague, Arnold Engelman at Westbeth about my particle physics one-woman show, and he has been kind enough to read through the many drafts with me. I can genuinely say that the work that Mick Perrin and Arnold Engelman have done to bring the absolutely brilliant one-person shows to audiences worldwide inspired me to write and perform my own shows.

Where might we have heard you before?

• I won the New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship
• Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman) directed my previous one-woman show GANGSTA LOVE, for which I won the Walt Disney Feature Writing Fellowship
• From GANGSTA LOVE, my boxing play, I made a short film called RUMBLE at Fox Searchlight, which was shown at many film festivals and is now in the Miranda July Getty Center Archive.
• I am an iHEART Next Great Podcast Host of the OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW! podcast, published every Wednesday on iHEART/Apple/Spotify.

Here are some links to the OH MY GOD PARTICLE SHOW! Podcast. Have a listen! ?

• Omny
• iHeart
• Apple
• Spotify

Who would you like to come and see it?

Anyone and everyone who inhabits the universe!

What would you like audiences to take away from it?

We are all made of the same stuff so we could all get along!

We can all do science!

Everyone please use your amazing imaginations, invent, create and have fun being part of the universe!

Keep looking up! We are the stars!

Tickets are available here: 

Photo credit: Lewis MacLeod 

 

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