Ethington's season opener computes with math, science, romance

Photos by Ralph Freso / Slideshow

Summer is over, students are back on campus, and Grand Canyon University’s Ethington Theatre, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is ready to open its doors for another adventurous season.

“It is always fun for me to watch the audience watch a piece of theatre they have never seen,” said Michael Kary, theatre professor and director of "Ada and the Engine," the season opener, premiering at 7:30 tonight and continuing through Sept. 22 for a two-weekend run.

Playwright Lauren Gunderson’s show is based on a true story and focuses on the creation of the first computing machine and how the two people responsible for it fell in love with each other.

“This is a great story to tell about people who have been overlooked by history,” Kary said.

Charles Babbage, played by history major Ben Sparling, is an inventor known for creating the physical framework of what will soon become a computing device. He is working on a Difference Engine when he comes across fascinating and incredibly intelligent mathematician Ada Byron Lovelace, played by theatre major Cora Epton.

They quickly start working together, and at a later point, Babbage is invited to give a big lecture about his machine, for which Lovelace ends up doing the translation. She also writes three more volumes of notes about what the machine could do and its other possibilities.

“This show challenges our narrative,” Epton said.

“We oftentimes look at history, and the women are the shadows of man’s creation. The reality is, so many incredible females in STEM have created many of the things we are thankful for today that we don’t know about," she said.

“I think it brings light to these shadows that we haven’t seen before, and it brings these women we don’t think about to the forefront of our mind.”

From cast and design team to tech and production crew, students have been preparing for the season opener since the end of the previous semester.

To make a show that features math and science come to life accurately, the theatre department sought the help of engineering and math professors and students. The crew created STEM-related props that appear in the play. Some of these feature Ada’s translation notes, chalkboards displaying mathematical equations, a gear-shaped base of the stage with revolving abilities, and, most importantly, the Difference Engine.

Charles Babbage invented and designed the Difference Engine, a method of dividing differences. Its intention is to change and order functions using a small set of polynomial coefficients.

The engine features intricately organized gears connected with cables and motors, all of which senior theatre major and prop designer Reese Tate created from scratch using a sketch book, 3D printer, spray paint and lots of time in the campus engineering shop.

“I am a very visual person, so I draw everything out before I do anything,” Tate said. “I looked up the Difference Engine, I had to start drawing it and what I saw. I would look at the picture and go back and forth and draw it in a way that makes sense in my brain.”

Tate began designing in May, printed her first gear in June, and tirelessly worked until opening day on a perfect replica of the Difference Engine.

“Even though this is Babbage’s idea and machine, in a way it is still my work, and I am excited to see it on stage,” Tate said.

While the story greatly centers around math and the building of the engine, it focuses on relationships and hardships even more.

While working together, Babbage and Lovelace fall in love and build an undeniable connection, even though she is a married woman.

“This is an important play to have at GCU to show that everything is linked,” said Kylie Boggus, student assistant director. “It is showing how people connect through the little things we may never even think of as interesting.”

The story is about the engine, but one could go as far as interpreting that the engine is really about Babbage and Lovelace and how they work together, how people work together.

“It’s more than meets the eye,” Sparling said. “It’s not just the retelling of how the first computer was made. The romance, how their relationship changes over time, what happened in reality, there is so much to the show, and that is what makes it for everybody.”

GCU staff writer Izabela Fogarasi can be reached at [email protected]