Tesla's Letters

Synopsis

The two-act, 4-character stage play set in 1997 in the Balkans is about an American who sets out to find Nikola Tesla's doomsday device only to discover that a machine is not required.

Electrical pioneer Tesla, a Croatian-born Serb, was Thomas Edison's biggest rival.

Daisy Archer, a bright-eyed Ph.D. candidate, arrives in Belgrade thinking she has permission to view a certain cache of letters at the Nikola Tesla Museum.

She is not prepared to face the museum's director Dragan, a Serb with family in Croatia, who has needs of his own and who strikes a dangerous bargain with Daisy.

He will test her willingness to see the letters by having her enter war-torn Croatia to visit Tesla's birthplace and determine whether it has been destroyed.

If she returns with photographic evidence she will be given access to Tesla's letters.

Daisy learns that the bargain is much more complicated than it at first appears, and that she is a pawn in a larger agenda.

The play received its world premiere in New York at The Ensemble Studio Theatre on April 6, 1999, directed by Curt Dempster and funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The cast included Keira Naughton as Daisy Archer and Victor Slezak as Dragan.