Robert Andersen
The Tea House Serves The Bomb: A Repast for Year 75
Edith Warner and Tilano are back for one night only, serving a ragout of reflection and rue on the eve of the 75th anniversary of The Bomb. At her famous Tea House by the Otowi Bridge, down the road from wartime Los Alamos, Ms. Warner and her Native American helpmate Mr. Montoya welcome back Tea House regulars Mr. Baker (Niels Bohr) and Mr. Opp (Robert Oppenheimer), as well as Hans Bethe and Edward Teller. This reunion of revenants is telling. A chance to settle old scores as well as ponder anew the saga of their creation, this repast is one to remember in light of the reactivation of the Doomsday Clock. How I came to conceive The Tea House at The Otowi Bridge, my play in progress, affords the requisite backstory to the histrionics themselves, in this case a reading from Act One, the Bohr-Oppenheimer tete-a-tete.
Robert Andersen is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Physics Today, Naval History, and many other publications. Born and raised in San Francisco, he served four years in the US Navy before matriculating at the University of California as a physics major. At Berkeley he was a Veteran For Peace and a Science Student for Social Responsibility. He was present at the creation of American bioethics as an intern, editor, visiting scholar, and journalist-in-residence at The Hastings Center. He was a visiting scholar there again in 2011, and a visiting scholar at Notre Dame in 2015-16. He is at work on a study entitled The Bitter Ironies: The Moral Imagination of the Atomic Scientists, 1944-54; a play titled The Tea House at the Otowi Bridge; a novel titled The Tongue of the Ocean, about the Navy during the Vietnam War; and a miniseries titled Los Diablos: Los Angeles 1846-76.