Jim Ottaviani has spent much of his career putting words into the mouths of physics geniuses. Sure, he also used the scientists' own words when penning scripts for graphic novels about Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Richard Feynman since Ottaviani's books are always deeply researched.

But for Last Summer, a new play by Ottaviani, he had to imagine the words exchanged during a summer 1939 private gathering at U-M physics professor Samuel Goudsmit's home following a physics symposium in Ann Arbor.

The Summer Symposia had been happening in Ann Arbor since the late 1920s, bringing together the greatest physicists to share ideas. Nobel laureates and nuclear pioneers Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg were at Goudsmit's place that summer 1939 evening, with the former trying to convince the latter not to go back to his native Germany and help the Nazis with their nuclear program. It didn't work: Fermi went on to work for the Allies and Heisenberg returned to his homeland.

Their discussion is the basis for the 20-minute Last Summer, which will be staged by the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre (A2CT) on December 7 and 11 at the Downtown location of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL).

The Library commissioned Last Summer as part of its Ann Arbor 200 project, and Library Director Eli Neiburger recalls when he first read about Fermi and Heisenberg's encounter.

"The Library's Ann Arbor 200 project is all about telling lesser-known stories from Ann Arbor's history in creative new ways. From the beginning of our bicentennial work, one of the projects I hoped to see happen was a one-act play about this conversation I had read about in Michigan Today years ago," he said. "The Summer Symposia made Ann Arbor the summertime center of the theoretical physics universe between the World Wars."

Last Summer features A2CT actors Chris Grimm as Fermi, Greg Kovas as Heisenberg, Trevor Maher as Goudsmit, and Andrew Schairbaum as graduate student Max Dresden, who graduated from U-M with a doctorate in physics in 1946 and who bartended that evening. According to the 2011 Michigan Today article that intrigued Neiburger, Dresden told Physics Today that scientists at the gathering wondered how a thinker of Heisenberg's stature could work for a country like Germany at that time.

While imagining what two historical figures might be saying in private is a common act in fictionalized accounts, Ottaviani's work is renowned for his extensive research into his subjects, so it's always a balancing act between honoring source materials (if there are any) and injecting dramatic tension.

"The research process [for Last Summer] was pretty typical for me, just a lot shorter than usual," Ottaviani said. "I've written about these people before, so I have a large collection of books by and about physicists. I also went to both AADL and the U-M Library to get more background material to inform the substance of the conversation."

A2CT's Cassie Mann directs the play, using Ottaviani's research as a framework for the characters but with an eye on letting the actors help define them.

"I purposely didn’t review available video or audio footage of the real people because I wanted the actors to create the essence of their characters rather than try to imitate them," Mann said. "I knew I needed adept actors to bring the characters to life and to make choices that would create real, believable characters in a condensed period of time. They also needed to bring a sense of urgency to the conversation, and I think the actors are doing a great job."

Ottaviani knew once he was happy with the words coming out of his characters' mouths, he'd leave it to Mann and Co.—the theater pros—to bring things to life on stage.

"You highlighted what I think was a natural, if unconscious—at least on my part—division of labor here," Ottaviani said. "I spent far more time working on that substance than anything else, since Cassie, Chris, Greg, Trevor, and Andrew know more than I do about how to make it come to life through voice, costume, and setting."

Mann said Last Summer was "riveting to read," which is a nice thing to hear for first-time playwright Ottaviani, though he said he didn't find a huge difference in writing a staged show compared to a graphic novel.

"In some sense, the two types of script are the same. Every story, no matter how long or in what medium, needs a beginning, middle, and end for it to work well," Ottaviani said. "And in both comics and plays, I have to visualize where all the people—and things—are in relationship to each other as they move through that story. I don't feel right about just waving my hands and forcing the artists, either illustrators or directors and actors, to figure out how to make sense of a scene."

But there was one main difference between plays and graphic novels.

"In comics, my scripts err on the side of writing too much about what the reader will see in each panel," Ottaviani said. "Even so, artists know they don't have to draw things exactly as I describe them, which usually works out great. Their imagery is often better than what I imagined. But I suspect that some of that overspecifying, or micromanaging, crept into the play's script, so I know Cassie and the actors had more to potentially ignore in what I wrote. As you guessed, I had a couple of playwrights read and comment on what I came up with, and they suggested many ways to improve it, but some of my comics-centric habits probably wore out their welcome."

While Last Summer is Ottaviani's first play, he has prior experience writing about Heisenberg: The first comics story he ever wrote, 1997's "Heavy Water," appeared in Two-Fisted Science and covered the meeting between the German scientist and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr just before the latter escaped Denmark under Nazi occupation.

Another fictionalized version of that meeting influenced Last Summer.

"The play that came to mind when Eli asked me to do this was Michael Frayn's Copenhagen," Ottaviani said. Like "Heavy Water," Copenhagen also focuses on the meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr. "In some sense, Last Summer could be a prologue to that play—not that Copenhagen needs one; it’s terrific."

Ottaviani wrote on his blog about Last Summer and "Heavy Water": "Like the subjects of this play, we’ll never know for sure what they said to each other, but that didn’t stop me from imagining their conversations."

Skilled, clever, dramatic imaginings are a large part of what makes Ottaviani's award-winning graphic novels so compelling—and the terse Last Summer is no exception.

Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp. 

"Last Summer" will be performed on Saturday, December 7 at 2 pm and Wednesday, December 11 at 6:30 pm at the Downtown Library, with Q&As following each show. No tickets or registration is required and admission is free. For more information, visit aadl.org.