Hello, everyone, and welcome to the April 26. Ask Me Anything Edition to the Mindscape podcast. I'm

your host, Sean Carroll. Back when I lived in Chicago, one of the great things about living in Chicago,

the food was my favorite aspect. The restaurant scene was really good, but also good was the

theater scene. I mean, live theater, like plays that you would go to and see people on stage, acting.

It's my favorite theater scene in the United States.

Not that I'm a super expert, but compared to, you know, Los Angeles, where there's an actor on every street corner, but most of them want to be in TV and movies for obvious reasons.

Or even New York, where there's a lot of live theater, but you know, you want to be a

Broadway star or whatever or have your one episode arc on Law and Order.

Chicago doesn't have a lot of either Broadway style theater or TV movie production going on.

So the people who were there to act in plays were really about acting in plays.

And there were a lot of relatively small-scale independent theaters,

some relatively big ones like Steppenwolf and the Goodman,

but also a bunch of smaller ones.

It really added to the cultural dimension of living in the city.

And I got to know some of the different places, and I even was involved in a play now and

then, not as an actor, believe me, but sometimes plays like modern movies have science

themes, and either I could help talk to the actors or the director about the science in their play,

or I could give a little talk in front of a performance to the audience about the science that was going on.

And I remember one play, I forget the name of it.

I'm really sorry that I forget the name of it, but there's a point to

the story anyway. The central protagonist of the play was a physicist, and he was a physicist

who specialized in black holes, and there were various metaphors in the play about black holes

...