Reykjavik Reading

One event at the January/April APS meeting was a staged reading of Reykjavik, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes. Reykjavik is the capital of Iceland, an island country located about 500 miles northwest of Scotland in the North Atlantic. In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev, the Chairman of the Politburo of the Soviet Union and General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, invited Ronald Reagan, the President of the United States, to meet with him. The play Reykjavik, is a dramatic reconstruction of the two-day summit meeting during which the world leaders almost reached agreement on the total abolition of their countries nuclear weapons. The play uses the actual transcripts of the Reykjavik meeting as well as the memoirs of both Reagan and Gorbachev, to dramatize how close the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, came to eliminating their nuclear weapons. The staged reading was performed by the Tonic Theater Company. Charles Ferguson, President of the Federation of American Scientists, as well as the play director and actors, stayed afterwards for a talk-back discussion. The event was produced by Brian Schwartz, CUNY and Gregory Mack, and the APS. It was sponsored by: The Forum on the History of Physics, The Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public and The Forum on Physics and Society.