Science Theater: Women, Math, and High School

[I'd consider this a cultural studies of science kind of post, which isn''t philosophy of sience proper, as the psot is officially categorized, but is science, technology, and society, which I'll treat as this category's more general frame, for the time being.]

There's a play being produced in New York, at the Julia Miles Theater (not that I know where that is) called "Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen." I heard about this on Talk of the Nation Science Friday today. They interviewed the writer, Playwright Kathryn Walat, and it seemed eminently intriguing.

When pressed, she said it had a similar feel -- in terms of setting, and high school charm -- to The Breakfast Club or Mean Girls, although she'd written it having not even seen Mean Girls. Also, this focuses on a girl who has to join the Math Team secretly, lest she offend her cheerleader friends, and not on the other side of that standard story (the side where it's about moving from lack of popularity into the popular crowd, and what gets lost along the way, and blah blah so on, and you've seen it in twelve different versions, I won't go on about that here...). This one is part of The Women's Project, a theater group in NYC, and from what I heard on the radio, it deals with gender issues, science, math, education, stereotypes, etc. Someone should go see it and write a review for the blogs. I'd love to, were I near.

Here's the summary:

When uber-popular Vickie Martin joins the all-male math team, chaos theory becomes the rule at Longwood High School. Can this goddess of Pi possibly make the mathletes victorious? Totally.