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When playwright Hannah Moscovitch approached physicist Lee Smolin she’d developed plot and characters, but he ended up writing an eight-page backstory for one.Chloe Ellingson/The Globe and Mail

Einstein famously suggested that time is an illusion since the distinctions between past, present and future are all relative to the observer, but some contemporary physicists are challenging that notion, articulating theories that arrive at the more comforting conclusion that time is real.

Fascinating development, but how in the world would you turn that into a good play?

That is the challenge that Toronto playwright Hannah Moscovitch has been working on for seven years, since theatre director and producer Ross Manson first approached her to write a play about time. He had read an article about competing physics theories on time and handed the idea to Moscovitch, the award-winning playwright behind East of Berlin and This is War who often writes about subjects well outside her own experience by relying on deep research.

"I spent a lot of time working out how to write about time," Moscovitch recalls. "It's a huge topic, like death or love. You have to think of very specific, original things you want to say about it."

In the end, Moscovitch's solution was to get deeply personal for the first time in her playwriting career – and to bring in an honest-to-goodness theoretical physicist to help with the research. Manson's Volcano theatre company is co-producing Infinity with the Tarragon Theatre, where the play opens on Wednesday, thanks to a big assist from Lee Smolin, the American physicist who helped found the prestigious Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ont.

"I was interested and very flattered," Smolin says of his reaction when Moscovitch first approached him, soon after the appearance of his 2013 book Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. "I love the theatre world, it's much more interesting than my own world. I love what I do; I love being a scientist but you do have to spend a lot of time with geeky guys." Smolin, who lives in Toronto with his wife, arts-producer-turned-urbanist Dina Graser, was already well acquainted with the theatre: his mother is the American playwright Pauline Smolin.

By the time Moscovitch approached Smolin, she had developed her plot and characters, an older couple – he's a physicist; she's a composer – and a young female mathematician, a trio inspired by herself and her parents, an Ottawa economics professor and a writer and researcher in the union movement. The play is partly about love; it's Moscovitch's notion that time is a large issue in relationships as couples battle over their differing expectations about how much time they should spend together.

But it is also a play about physics.

Reading Smolin's theories about the realness of time she found the drama she needed. She approached him to help shape the character of the physicist and develop for the fictional scholar an intellectual and emotional revelation drawn from Smolin's own revelation in his book. He wound up writing an eight-page backstory for Moscovitch's character, giving him a series of purely fictional scientific discoveries that shape his great career.

"My life is not the character's life; my crisis is not his crisis, but somehow Hannah captured the emotional experience of going through that change of mind," Smolin said during an interview in his Toronto home.

"Lee is being kind," Moscovitch replied. "I try very hard and sometimes it goes okay."

Smolin sees both the physicist and the mathematician as good representations of certain personality flaws common to their professions – the mathematician is too literal-minded; the physicist is obsessed with his work – and says "all three characters are really striking people."

For Moscovitch they represent a surprising departure: "With this play I am venturing into the zone of the confessional. I'm in David French land; I am writing about my family," she says, referring to the Canadian who created a cycle of plays based on a family of displaced Newfoundlanders in Toronto. "Time was an incredibly broad topic, abstract and oblique: I ended up going personal to try to find a way into it."

It is that emotional element that Smolin warms to: The play fits well with his belief that the sciences should be rehumanized to escape the determinism of traditional physics that place us at the whim of physical laws or those contemporary metaphors that cast people as computers.

For Moscovitch, the play wound up being a perfect combination of big ideas and real people.

"I like broad systems of thought, big, central ideas, but I like arriving at them through the personal. I start with character."

In the end, they agree that science and theatre are both collaborative professions driven by intensely focused individuals who share a willingness to take risks.

"I have a colleague who, when we get into arguments, likes to remind us of the basic rule of improv theatre," Smolin says: "Always say yes, never say no."

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