The Perfect Detonator

The Perfect Detonator, Professor Jody McAuliffe's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, opens Thursday, November 13 in Sheafer Theater in the Bryan Center. McAuliffe’s adaptation follows Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, as he reads The Secret Agent. In the process, Conrad’s fictional tale of a 19th century anarchist bomb plot in London intersects with Ted Kaczynski’s real life bomb plots in the United States. The Secret Agent follows members of an anarchist cell in 1886 London as they plan to bomb a major symbol of science and industrialization at the time, the Greenwich Observatory. "Like the Unabomber, Conrad saw industrial society as at odds with the human heart,” McAuliffe said.