Bruce Coughran

Bruce Coughran

Bruce Coughran is a freelance director and playwright based in Berkeley, California, as well as being the Artistic Director of Indra’s Net Theater, which specializes in plays about science. He has been nominated for BATCC Awards for Best World Premiere play (for ‘The Secret of Life’) and Best Overall Production of a Play, as well as being a nominee for a TBA Award for Best Direction of a Play. He is a member...
Bruce Coughran is a freelance director and playwright based in Berkeley, California, as well as being the Artistic Director of Indra’s Net Theater, which specializes in plays about science. He has been nominated for BATCC Awards for Best World Premiere play (for ‘The Secret of Life’) and Best Overall Production of a Play, as well as being a nominee for a TBA Award for Best Direction of a Play. He is a member of Directors Lab West and Directors Lab Chicago, recipient of a SDC Observership, a TBA ATLAS fellow, and a Titan award finalist. He is a proud member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

Plays

  • a Time for Hawking by Bruce Coughran
    Cast: 
    3
    ·
    Genre: docudrama/historic, drama + 1 more
    ·
    Keyword: science, physics + 7 more
    Genre: docudrama/historic, drama, period
    Keyword: science, physics, cosmology, romance, opera, Spanish Poetry, ALS, Indian Mythology, Stephen Hawking
    At a New Year's Eve party in the waining hours of 1962, three young students meet and discuss their budding academic lives. After a night of intellectual exploration that ranges from opera to quantum mechanics; poetry to Einstein; and Indian mythology to the nature of time; it appears that two of them might be falling in Love. But will the frailty of the human body derail the meeting of the minds and...
    At a New Year's Eve party in the waining hours of 1962, three young students meet and discuss their budding academic lives. After a night of intellectual exploration that ranges from opera to quantum mechanics; poetry to Einstein; and Indian mythology to the nature of time; it appears that two of them might be falling in Love. But will the frailty of the human body derail the meeting of the minds and hearts? Will the sparks end here, or will a great force of 20th century physics overcome all odds?
  • The Secret of Life by Bruce Coughran
    Cast: 
    5–6
    ·
    Genre: comedy, docudrama/historic + 1 more
    ·
    Keyword: science, dna + 6 more
    Genre: comedy, docudrama/historic, drama
    Keyword: science, dna, Rosalind Franklin, Watson and Crick, double helix, Cavendish, Kings College, Pauling
    It is early in 1951. In Cambridge, England, a precocious 23-year old American, James Watson, arrives to work as a guest at Cavendish Laboratories and is put into a shared office with 36-year old English graduate student Francis Crick. Several miles away in London, a brilliant British crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, comes back from 3 years in Paris to work at Kings College Laboratories, and is given an...
    It is early in 1951. In Cambridge, England, a precocious 23-year old American, James Watson, arrives to work as a guest at Cavendish Laboratories and is put into a shared office with 36-year old English graduate student Francis Crick. Several miles away in London, a brilliant British crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, comes back from 3 years in Paris to work at Kings College Laboratories, and is given an assignment to work with a new sample of pure DNA, unknowingly intruding on the work of Dr. Maurice Wilkins at the same lab.

    The two groups, put together by chance, will clash and chafe, both within themselves and between each other, and within a year, one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century will emerge; the structure of the DNA molecule. The discovery will be called one of the most important in the history of Biology. Francis Crick referred to it simply as "The Secret of Life".