I've recently been wanting to make a play/musical. Nothing like Hamilton obviously, but just a small one that I can perform at my high school with a few friends.
So I wanted to make it over The Manhattan Project. I find physics fascinating and aspire to be a physicist one day, so I already knew about it but not much. I started looking into it a bit and I figured I could make a good play out of it.
So, I was wondering if there was any books or anything I should check out to get it as accurate as possible. Obviously I'll include Oppenheimer and his "luminaries", however I wanted to find out what other scientists roles were, such as Feynmans. A biography, autobiography maybe?
If it helps close the gap, I want to base the play on how the scientists felt as they were creating a atomic bomb, albeit not knowing that it would be as destructive as it turned out. How they interacted with each other, daily lives, stuff like that.
Sorry if I said something ignorant, I'm young and inexperienced. Thanks in advance.
Good places to start:
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (the standard story)
Denise Kiernan, The Girls of the Atomic City (focus on the laborers as opposed to just scientists)
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus (great Oppenheimer biography)
Cynthia Kelly, ed., Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (great combination of perspectives)
The literature on the Manhattan Project is vast. Heck, the Manhattan Project itself was vast. So you'll need to pare it down a bit if you want to fit the narrative into a few hours. But the above will give you a view of many different aspects of that vastness, and help you pick a focus. Is it the scientists at Los Alamos, building and testing and using the bomb? Or those at the production sites, like Hanford or Oak Ridge, dealing with their own problems and the secrecy they found themselves wound up in? Or some small site, like the Dayton Project, which was hidden in a playhouse in a suburban Ohio neighborhood for cover, while they developed some of the most radiologically toxic materials on Earth? Or maybe the University of Chicago, where the "problematic" scientists were kept after the initial work was done, who had the time to think about the consequences of their actions? Etc. etc. — lots of angles!
Most musical/creative presentations of the Manhattan Project have had to do with the Oppenheimer story (there is even an opera!). It's an interesting one, to be sure. But it's a big project. There are other stories there to be told. If you want to focus on one person, find the right one. I've toyed with the idea that one could write something around Robert Serber, who is sort of an "everyman" compared to Oppenheimer or Feynman's eccentricities (both of whom are in my opinion kind of unrelatable in their "genius"), but he did practically everything: he was a student of Oppenheimer's who was recruited to the project, he went to Los Alamos and did lots of high-profile stuff there, and he eventually was part of the group that went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to survey the damage, to see the results of his work. But you're the creative: try out a lot of ideas in your head. It's half the fun of this kind of thing.