"The Ten Thousand Things" | A scientific approach to the art of playwriting

"It takes place in three or four different worlds that are deeply divided by time but intimately connected by ideas. It starts out 6,000 years ago in the wilderness, then we're at a cocktail party right now, with a playwright and Hollywood producer, then we're in the future. We kind of bounce back and forth."

That's Paul Mullin's synopsis of his new play, "The Ten Thousand Things," which premieres tonight at Washington Ensemble Theatre (WET). And while its epoch-spanning premise will be hard to pull off, that doesn't faze Mullin.

The author of a rough dozen plays produced in Seattle and around the U.S., Mullin is a dramatist who won't hesitate to devise time-bending scenarios meshing aspects of science, history, philosophy and politics.

Consider "Louis Slotin Sonata," the collage-style story of a Los Alamos nuclear physicist's fatal lab accident, with hallucinatory tangents involving heinous Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, big-band music and President Truman.

"Louis Slotin Sonata" played in Seattle, Off Broadway and L.A. and brought Mullin a batch of awards — including an L.A. Drama Critics Circle honor — for its combustible melding of nuclear science and spectacle.

"Not all my plays are about science," notes Mullin, who resides in Seattle with his wife, classical singer Heather Curtis Mullin, and their two young sons. "But I think it's a really great place to mine for ideas. And I'm also attracted to science philosophically.

"In the theater," he elaborates, "calling something 'experimental' just means it's weird. But a scientist says, 'I'll do this experiment and if it fails, I'll have to change the formula and work harder to get it right.' I like that attitude."

A strong work ethic has kept Mullin in the playwriting game since he penned his first script, "Philosophes," as a 19-year old student at the University of Maryland.

"It was about five teenage boys, and became a semifinalist in the New York Young Playwrights Festival," he recalls. "The festival flew me up to New York and gave me a mentor, [noted playwright] Thomas Babe. And I got to meet incredible writers, like Stephen Sondheim and Christopher Durang."

He adds, with self-deprecatory wryness, "I thought, 'This is so great! I'm here! I've arrived!' "

But Mullin, 40, soon learned that theatrical glory waxes and wanes. He left college early to toil in New York as a journeyman actor, help start a theater group ("with a bunch of other fervent young people") and write.

In 1990, he and his then-girlfriend moved to Seattle "sight unseen. I found the theater scene here was both not as good as what I'd been told, and a whole lot better."

The downside: He couldn't support himself with Equity acting jobs. The upside: Companies wanted to produce his unconventional scripts — including Annex ("Tuesday"), Book-It Rep ("Grendel") and Empty Space ("Louis Slotin Sonata").

It's indicative of American arts funding that Mullin, despite his many prizes and credits, works a day job as "a glorified secretary" at the biotech firm Amgen to pay the bills.

But he swears he's at peace with that. "I had my times of feeling bitter and angry that people didn't recognize my 'genius' and offer me a hundred grand to write a movie. Now I think, 'Hey, my stuff gets produced.' In the realm I'm playing in, things are great."

The idea for "The Ten Thousand Things" took root after a chat with gadfly writer-ecologist Stewart Brand at an L.A. reading of another Mullin play, "The Sequence."

Brand told him about his futurist Long Now Foundation, which, according to its Web site, serves as a "counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mind-set" by attempting to "creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." One Long Now project is the building of a symbolic, deca-millennial clock to encourage long-range thinking and problem-solving, which fascinated Mullin.

To coincide with WET's debut of "Ten Thousand Years," the playwright organized "What Is Deep Time and Why Should You Care?" at ACT Theatre on May 31; it will benefit a possible San Francisco run of the play. The event includes a talk by Brand, and panel discussion with Brand, Mullin and Pulitzer Prize author Richard Rhodes ("The Making of the Atomic Bomb").

"Forget the Hollywood thing," Mullin says. "I'm more excited by the Stewart Brands and Dick Rhodes of the world, who do things I'm really interested in."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com