A conversation with Jonathan Levi (author) on Falling Bodies music by Bruce Saylor presented in conjunction with the Celebrations for Galileo Galilei and Italian Language Week: L'Italiano tra Arte, Scienza e Tecnologia".

Two Italians. Two Scientists. Two men punished by two inquisitions, one in Rome, the other in Auschwitz. 

Galileo Galilei, the 17th-century Florentine was called The Father of Modern Science by Albert Einstein.  He is best known, perhaps, for his experiments with falling bodies, dropping different weights from the Tower of Pisa and disproving Aristotle.  He also turned his telescope to the heavens and came too close to the sun for the religious politics of his day. Condemned by the Inquisition in Rome for his writings in support of the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun, he was forced to spend his waning years under house arrest. Primo Levi, who won honors as a chemistry student in Turin in the 1930's, even under the anti-Semitic racial laws of Italian Fascism, continued to work as the manager of a paint factory, his scientific progress interrupted by WWII and deportation to Auschwitz. Celebrated internationally for his memoirs If This Is a Man and The Truce, as well as for his poetry and short stories, Levi was found dead in 1987 at the base of the staircase of his apartment house, a falling body. Written and directed by the American Jonathan Levi (no relation to Primo), Falling Bodies imagines these two persecuted, Italian scientists encountering one another in an indistinct present. Dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa, watching soccer on TV in a bar, listening to a concert in a village caf�, the two ponder their own searches for truth during lives marked by inquisition and despair, the price one pays for survival, and the restorative power of celery. As the two wander and share scientific experiments and difficult memories, they are joined by a trio of musicians who "speak" the music of American composer Bruce Saylor. Together, the five performers explore questions of faith and politics, science and art, combining the tools of theatre with the intimacy of chamber music.