Physics From My Father
An original play written by Jessica Ammirati
Untethered from time, a woman grapples with key events from her life, shaped by the tachings of her professor father (and with a little help from an enigmatic physicist from the past).
The quickest encapsulation of the play is the logline above. But, as with most loglines, that blurb is crafted to intriguingly hint at ideas the play explores rather than strictly summarize the show. In more detail, Physics From My Father is the story of Isabella, a young woman who, after losing her physicist father tries to understand: him, the physics he taught, and the world around her — but not chronologically. Through a series of vignettes that move around in time, we explore key experiences of Isabella's (and her father’s) life as she delves into questions of what it means to love and lose in a world of entropy where ultimately everything will decay and die. On her journey, Isabella is accompanied by a version of Marie Curie, who provides much needed scientific insight into the events Isabella faces. All the while, the show upends our normal view of time. Instead of seeing time as a straight line moving in one direction, the play portrays time (as many physicists envision it) as a vast landscape where all events exist at once and we merely have one perspective from which we view our lives. In the play, the audience finds themselves easily sliding between past and present and future and back again, ranging throughout that vast landscape at will.
The inspiration for the play, Jessica’s Dad, Tom Ammirati, in his Physics classroom.
Over two acts, the play explores big and small moments in the lives of the Catalano family. Woven throughout, sequential scenes follow an 18 hour period when the youngest Catalano daughter labors and gives birth. During the play, a version of Nobel prize winning physicist and chemist, Marie Curie, accompanies, Isabella, our protagonist, explaining the physics that surrounds us all at every moment of our lives. With Marie’s help, Isabella (and the audience with her) starts to understand the physics her father loved as she slowly becomes fluent in “the language of the universe.”
In October of 2025, Physics From My Father, was selected as a presentation at the Theatre About ScienceConference in Coimbra, Portugal. Two actors: Daria DeGaetano as Isabella and Patricia McConnell Lawrence as Marie performed three scenes from the play.
Production Photos from performance at the Theatre About Science Conference in Coimbra, Portugal
Origin of Physics From My Father from writer/director Jessica Ammirati
