Entertaining With Science

It’s a fair. A science fair. “Science Fair: An Opera With Experiments,” starring Hai-Ting Chinn, a mezzo soprano with perfect diction who has sung Mozart, Purcell, Glass and now Schickele. That’s her husband, Matthew Schickele, son of Peter Schickele — you know, the fellow who can actually play notes on a garden hose. 

The opera’s libretto was written by a variety of physicists, astronomers, physicians, a neurologist and a biologist. 

Sound dry? Not a bit.

“I am among those who think science has great beauty,” Chinn told the audience during a recent performance at Simon’s Rock’s Daniel Arts Center in Great Barrington, Mass., quoting Marie Curie. “A scientist in the laboratory is not merely a technician, but also a child faced with natural phenomena that dazzle like a fairytale.”

Or dazzle like Chinn. She is small, witty and puckish with black straight bangs, the rest of her hair wound into two little knots on the top of her head, dressed variously as a great sweeping cloud of dusty matter that coalesces into the universe; then as a model of our solar system with a hoop skirt of rings supporting the planets about us; and, later, in a short dress, tall boots and a starchy white lab coat.

Chinn conducted a number of experiments. She turned water a luminous, phosphorescent green, and she slid her finger around the rim of a glass, changing the tones by adding and subtracting the liquid in it accompanied by an aria on the particulars of harmonic overtones. 

And she extracted the DNA of strawberries. “If you try this at home,” she told the crowd, “and you should, do not worry. Nothing’s toxic. But don’t drink the solution we are about to create. Just for your own good.”

As she set up the experiment, she delivered a brief history of deoxyribonucleic acid. She told us about Rosalind Franklin who, using X-ray crystallography, discovered the helix and rings, giving Watson and Crick a model of the molecule’s structure and the basis for their findings in 1953.

She mixed water with detergent and some salt in a sealable plastic bag. She added a few strawberries and called upon a volunteer from the audience to mash it into a foamy mix, which was poured through a strainer into a beaker. She added chilled rubbing alcohol, and in a few moments she picked viscous strands out of the beaker with tweezers.

“Voila,” she says. “Strawberry DNA.” 

My husband, Tony, and I ran the strawberry experiment. It worked. And it was a lot of fun. The recipe is at www.hai-ting.com/science-fair, along with details on the show.

Chinn is planning a nationwide tour of “Science Fair: An Opera With Experiments.” Don’t miss it. It is wildly imaginative and entertaining, and sometimes quite moving.