Five ages of the universe.

Now that the tornado of What Every Girl Should Know is past, I have one nice, full, round, juicy month to complete a commission for The Collider Project. It’s amazing how quickly a project changes when you actually sit down with it. Now the play is named The Pentaeon, after The Decameron on which it’s modeled; it’s set during a hurricane in Rhode Island instead of a redwood forest lodge outside of Pasadena; it features the MIT astrophysics department instead of the Caltech astrophysics department; and there are ten characters instead of five.

These characters, trapped by the storm, pass the time by telling each other stories about the end of the universe. I envision vast themes and poetic language, both of which are new territory for me. I’m reading The Five Ages of the Universe  to familiarize myself with how the universe is going to end: five ages, penta aeones, πέντε αιώνες, The Pentaeon. Not ambitious at all. But why else do I do what I do, you know?