Did Manhattan Project Director J. Robert Oppenheimer leak A-bomb secrets to the Soviets?  Negative Velocity provides a fictional answer to this question.  The full-length play traces the communist past of Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, the scientist’s association with Communist Party USA leader, Steve Nelson, and the 1954 Gray Board hearing that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance, disgracing the man known as “The Father of the Atomic Bomb.”

Negative Velocity won the 2008 New Playwright Contest of the Fremont Centre Theatre, located in South Pasadena,  and the play was a 2013 Hidden River Playwriting Award finalist.  A one-act version of the play was produced by the Pittsburgh New Works Festival in 2003.