Parnell’s play is set in Feynman’s California Institute of Technology office on a Saturday in 1986, two years before the scientist and teacher died at age 70, and it packs a lot into one professorial day off. Feynman works on a lecture titled “What We Know,” furiously scratching key words on a blackboard. He waxes about the Russian republic of Tuva, which he hopes to visit with friend Ralph Leighton. He bends our ear about the Manhattan Project, on which he worked in his 20s, and his dissent from the commission investigating the Challenger space-shuttle disaster. He confides that he enjoys drawing women naked, sometimes in the topless bar where he honed the skills that fed the famed Feynman Diagrams. And in the time-honored tradition of one-man shows (which this is not quite), he makes and takes a lot of phone calls, talking to, among others, Leighton and the doctors who are treating what will prove a fatal cancer.
As portrayed with an energetic, likably scattershot bluntness by Keith Jochim, Feynman is as much a force as a describer of Nature, exhibiting equally enthusiastic inquisitiveness about the behavior of atomic particles, Tuvan throat singing, the regalia in which he is to play the Chief of Bali Ha’i in a student production of South Pacific, and his own cancer. A brief late-night visit by an attractive female student provides an ambiguous and uncomfortable touch. But for the most part, QED is a portrait of a gloriously indiscriminate inquiring mind. Curiosity seems to have had the opposite effect on Feynman than on the proverbial cat, not killing but enlivening him.
Related:
Royal fun, Free fisticuffs, Dream team, More 
- Royal fun
As You Like It accomplishes what every production of a Shakespeare comedy tries to do.
- Free fisticuffs
After last year’s Hamlet , Commonwealth Shakespeare Company artistic director Steven Maler decided he wanted a play “with life and character and vitality to it — an upbeat type of spirit” for this year’s offering of free Shakespeare on Boston Common.
- Dream team
The fairies are creeping on their bellies along the carpet of the Wang Theatre rehearsal-hall floor.
- Let’s get physical
Shakespeare’s super-dainty Kates become cannoli in The Taming of the Shrew on Boston Common.
- Twin peaks
The bay of Ephesus laps Collins Avenue in Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's Latin-tinged, frisky if over-frenetic The Comedy of Errors (at the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common through August 16). It is not across sands of subtlety but through a spray of salsa that the perpetrators of this 1930s-South-Beach-set riff on Shakespeare's early comedy pratfall.
- Balloon moon
Sometimes less is more when imagination rules.
- Senior years
These are the BU Evergreeners — chatty and well-dressed, brandishing ballpoints and Starbucks.
- Brave new world
Regardless of what’s in her name, biographies of Ms. Hathaway are scarcer than hens’ teeth, and no wonder: we know even less about her than we do about her husband.
- Et tu Brute?
"The whole theatrical event is sort of . . . a much more mysterious one."
- It’s a man’s world
It’s hardly Shakespeare’s most frequently produced work, but in the Bard’s early career, Titus Andronicus was one of his most popular plays.
- Moonbeams
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a dizzy dance of a drama, meandering mystifyingly between May Eve and Midsummer Eve under a moon that goes from new to full swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow.
- Less
Topics:
Theater
, Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AS YOU LIKE IT, More
, Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AS YOU LIKE IT, Sciences, Physics, William Shakespeare, Fred Sullivan, Jon Lipsky, Stan Strickland, Larry Coen, Less
