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Science Writing: A Playwright’s Story
I am a playwright and writer with Bachelor of Science and MFA degrees. Years ago at the University of Wisconsin there was an accelerated program for freshmen and sophomores that made no distinction between sciences and the humanities. I took it. I find science fascinating and assume I can get the gist of most scientific writing even if I fail to grasp every nuance. I’ve just finished reading The Invention of Nature about Alexander von Humboldt and other scientists who wrote passionately of nature, quite germane to this discussion and am slogging through Biocultural Creatures in which a humanities professor explains recent biology because I’m interested in permeable boundaries of all sorts. I was fortunate to grow up in nature, as a stable bum, working for the privilege of exercising horses alone in the woods.
Though labels are odious I sometimes call myself an eco-feminist writer. I developed Ecology and Theater courses in the 1990s at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in which students read classical dramas alongside current books about nature, Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, Lovelock’s Gaia, etc. Currently, I teach in the inter-disciplinary Environmental Justice and Sustainability minor at John Jay College for Criminal Justice.
I am a poetic playwright and believe that poetry is wild nature produced by human nature; poetry is how we link ourselves to life. All of my plays, and all fiction, I would hazard, use nature imagery to access the interior life. Insofar as we imperil nature, we risk losing poetic utterance. Without nature, without poetry we can neither live nor know that we live. The fight to save the planet and its creatures from the worst ravages of climate change is equally a fight to save literature.
Two of my seventeen full-length plays make extensive use of science and scientific research. In both science plays plus a short Dogologue: Hermes in the Anthropocene, written in collaboration with one of my Cocker Spaniels, animal characters appear and interspecies communication and creature sentience are topics. The play I am researching now hopefully will move these interests forward—though, at present, I feel completely lost, this lostness is something creative artists share with creative scientists—we wander, despair, work, give-up, dream and wait for the ah-ha moment, the epiphany that suddenly gives form to the inchoate.
Scientists make fascinating characters. They are people who play the game of life for high stakes. Their research matters, not just to them, but often to the public and for the fate of the world.
Extreme Whether is a family drama with public consequence, in the tradition of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. It is an argument about scientific truth versus climate denial, a piece of land with gas deposits underneath, and a forged will. The antagonists are a major US climate scientist, John Bjornson, loosely based on James Hansen, who has read and seen the play twice, and his twin sister, Jeanne, publicist for the energy industry and creator of the ubiquitous “I am an energy voter” ad campaign. The work of Jennifer Francis on Arctic ice and of Tyron Hayes on the herbicide atrazine, also figure prominently. Dr. Francis, too, has seen the play twice, and she helped me with the research.
I came to view climate scientists as heroes in the classic sense. They are fighting money, power, and government censorship in order to avert the worst effects of climate change, struggling to find ways to keep temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. I watch climate scientists bearing evermore unbearable and unwelcome news while furiously continuing their research. I watch them wrestle with the need to become out-spoken advocates for public policy because what they know about climate systems demands they take action in the world.
Extreme Whether is available on KROnline and is also the subject of a series of blog posts I’ve written about our journey to Paris with the play.
An earlier play offered a different a view of science and scientists. Set during the genome mapping and reproductive technology frenzies of the 1980s, Better People is a surreal comedy that critiques mechanistic scientific fixes and financial profit as driving forces of research. Comedy, it turns out, is often best for outrage and there was something outrageous, or so I felt, about the notion that genes could be altered lickety-split, that hybrid animals and seeds could be created and females of any species subjected to all manner of reproductive treatments while scientists at the forefront of these technologies grew rich.
I interviewed lots of geneticists for Better People—from across the spectrum of scientific practice. I looked at the rows of caged rats while an elderly woman geneticist spoke about her research (truly, all I can remember is that she chose rats as her subjects because she “liked mice”); I took notes for several hours in a tiny office at NYU as I was carefully taught the genome mapping process by a geneticist graciously drawing charts who, later while we waited for the elevator, confided that nature is “a mess,” needing to be set right. I sat in Rupert Sheldrake’s English parlor off Hampstead Heath while he explained his far out but fascinating concept of morphic fields.
For a long time, I did not know how to utilize this research. Then, one night I dreamed a large beast said the world “rendezvous.” (Animal dreams, like dreams of the dead, are particularly significant in creative life, I think.) I woke to find our tiger cat standing on my chest staring into my eyes and realized I had the form of my play in my head.
Better People alternates between the frantic reality of four high-powered scientists racing to beat the competition to map the human genome and their bizarre dream lives as they fall into exhausted sleeps in their labs. An extinct beast plays a significant role. The existential question posed by Better People is what truly makes us “better,” the wish for quick, mechanistic fixes or a deepening understanding of and wonder at the complex web of life?
Walter Gilbert, once head of the genome mapping project who became a billionaire, was one inspiration for Philbert Wallace. Better People was actually performed in front of him at a genetics conference at MIT where it caused quite a stir.
The character, Philbert, is a four-time Nobel Prize winner, Chair of the Department at This Great University and the CEO of Generecombo, Inc. He’s a stern task-master in a rush to solve and market gene alteration techniques on the road to “genetic perfection for every American.”
Haila Gudenschmartzer, his cantankerous mentor, is very, very old, a refugee from concentration camp after she refused any longer to participate in the Nazi eugenics program—her son, was born from sperm she saved from a Jewish “idiot” she was made to sterilize. She is bitter about her difficult life as a woman in a world of male scientists, critical of Philbert’s lust for money and his single-minded approach, and fascinated by the problem of memory and where it might reside.
Edward Chreode, Haila’s son, is the odd-man-out, a dreamer, seemingly incapable of getting with Philbert’s program. Midway through Better People, Chreode becomes afflicted with a strange linguistic tic and keeps involuntarily speaking the word “rendezvous.” Then, a beast ambles into his lab (just as she had ambled into my dream). She speaks one word to Chreode: “rendezvous.” She refuses to have her eggs removed to be cloned or fertilized in a dish by something else, a bull, or rhinoceros, perhaps. “You have no right to go extinct,” Chreode reprimands, but she disagrees. Instead, after she and Chreode dance, the beast swallows the scientist. Inside her belly (the puppet expanded to let us see), Chreode tosses in a turns in a magical world and has the holistic vision he’s been searching for. He emerges as a conservation ecologist. His character and ideas and his outsider status are influenced by Sheldrake.
Theodora Forensic is a brilliant post-doc working in Haila’s lab and under her thumb. Theodora is determined to solve gene alteration techniques in order to administer cures for inherited and acquired disease. She is the first woman born from the DNA of two male Nobel Prize winning scientists. Like Athena, who was born form the head of Zeus, Theodora never had a mother and is free, therefore, of “womanly” concerns, like reproductive rights.
Here is Philbert’s speech to Theodora Forensic when he proposes marriage which will come with grants he helps her get and time to pursue her own research in what every female scientist must need: a lab of her own.
I’ll set you up in your own laboratory. You’ll be in complete control of your life. Face it, Theodora, human gene alteration therapy is for those with flaws. Among the intellectual elite, genetic perfection already exits…(he bends lustfully toward her but instead of kissing her he goes to the blackboard and begins to illustrate) Here’s my plan: we harvest a mere ten eggs per month from your ovaries, after multiple ovulation has been induced with injected drugs. We can fertilize those ten eggs in vitro with my sperm, collected fresh, or if I am feeling overworked from the frozen stock already deposited in the Nobel sperm bank. Each zygote would be cultured to the blastocyst stage in vitro, and screened for any unforeseen mutation before being implanted into a surrogate class of women, created from our immigrant or homeless populations, or, as you just said, from our newly dead. Unburdened, Theodora, by childbearing, you would keep on making your genetic contributions to succeeding generations. Practiced monthly for twenty-five years, the strategy I’ve just outlined would produce 2,910 offspring. I know that isn’t much. But coupled with the efforts of an internationally select group of gene donors equal in stature to ourselves, a small, but powerful genetically elite intelligentsia could be created in our lifetime…Theodora, be my wife. I adore you. I want to enter the gene pool with you.
I’m writing these notes in the midst of the Republican National Convention of 2016. I have to admit, Philbert’s fascination with creating an intellectual elite comes across as more desirable than building a wall or censoring science; thus, does eugenics continue to exert its strange (and dangerous) fascination.
Comments from other contributors to the Poetics of Science online discussion:
Dawne Shand: When you’re in Paris, you (as someone interested in the sentience of animals) might find the Musée de la Chasse worth visiting. On the second floor, it has a section dedicated to the intelligence and emotional intuitiveness of hunting dogs. If I’m remembering this correctly, it references Foucauld’s “History of Madness” which points out that Descartes believed that animals were incapable of reason.
This might be an odd and casual insertion into an elevated discussion. Anyway, I look forward to reading Extreme Whether.
L. Shapley Bassen: As also-a-playwright, I read this with great interest/empathy. “Scientists make fascinating characters. They are people who play the game of life for high stakes. Their research matters, not just to them, but often to the public and for the fate of the world.” I applaud your success in getting your plays produced . . . in front of the real players. I’ve written two plays featuring a meta-math fellow [The End of Shakespeare & Co.—a comedy] and an atom-by-atom moving physicist [The 14th Floor] . . . one won a national award, and both were published [out of print] but also successfully ignored. I look forward to reading/seeing Extreme Whether online at KR. I hope Better People gets much more play! “Each zygote would be cultured to the blastocyst stage in vitro, and screened for any unforeseen mutation before being implanted into a surrogate class of women, created from our immigrant or homeless populations . . . Theodora, be my wife. I adore you. I want to enter the gene pool with you.” All that’s missing from that character is a handlebar mustache and some “Nya ha ha’s!” I’m so glad to see others [here at this KR cyber-conference] who are wrestling the same angels/demons/animals. Have you ever looked at Robert Bosnak’s Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming [1986]?
Karen Malpede: I have a question for anyone and everyone who might care to respond: for a project about life in the Anthropocene, including a course I am teaching:
What subjects, scientific, ethical, cultural do you think ought to be addressed as we think about living in the Anthropocene?
Your thoughts, most especially, the issues on your mind, are what interest me most, but also references to publications that have moved or enlightened you would be much appreciated.
I am just now reading Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, a collection just published by Punctum.
I am also interested in the intersectionality of social justice, ecological, and scientific concerns, for instance, the Black Lives Matter Vision Statement and the Pope’s Encyclical, and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything—climate change and racial justice and capitalism—and I plan on teaching all in my Environmental Justice Course. (at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, btw)
Dawne Shand: The Pope’s Encyclical on Climate Change came out the morning after the massacre at the Emanuel A.M.E Church in Charleston, SC. That morning, this tweet appeared in my feed:
Gaudete Theology
@VictoriaGaileMy TL is filled with white Christians talking about #LaudatoSi encyclical & black Christians grieving & raging abt #AMEShooting hate crime.
I bring this up because (1) I do agree with Karen Malpede’s thinking and its urgency; (2) As a writer, I’ve deeply invested in reading and understanding this uniquely American form of literature, the broad genre of nature writing; and (3) I’m a human being alive at a time when a geological age is coming to an end.
But—having read the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, the British explorers and travel writers, the Transcendentalists—I’ve also wondered if a concern for the natural world hasn’t, in some ways, limited the field of vision for its proponents, and for those who choose to write in this field?
The historian Nell Irvin Painter writes, “Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) towers over his age as the embodiment of the American renaissance, but not, though he also should, as the philosopher king of American white race theory.” In her seminal work, “The History of White People,” she draws the intellectual lines between Emerson’s fascinations with Saxon heritage and physical appearance with the racist schools of American anthropology, including Joshua Nott, founder of the University of Alabama’s school of medicine, (Nott’s name is on a main campus building) and Louis Agassiz, founder of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (whose name also adorns today’s Harvard campus). Nott and Agassiz believed each racial type had their own God, their own Garden. Nott made his reputation writing on miscegenation, Agassiz on skull measurement and its correlation with intellect. The scientists’ friends of Emerson left “a dour legacy,” she writes, of “fetishization of tall, pale, blond, beautiful Anglo-Saxons; a fascination with skulls and head measurements; the drawing of racial lines and the fixing of racial types; the ranking of races along a single ‘evolutionary line of development’ and a preoccupation with sex, reproduction, and sexual attractiveness.”
(Dylan Roof’s comments about “raping our women” and “taking over” are not exactly direct quotes of Nott and Agassiz, but they could be succinct summaries of these learned men’s fears.)
Louis Menand also takes up the implications of Agassiz’s line of thinking in “The Metaphysical Club” in a chapter on the intellectual formation of American pluralism. Menand describes the anthogologist, Frans Boas, refuting as “utterly unreliable all 19th century research on racial differences,” i.e. the Notts and Agassiz’ legion followers. While Boas refutes the science, he fails to end the hysterical fascinations with racial purity and the threats to it which immigration and the assimilation of African-Americans represented in the early twentieth century.
Those who follow Emerson in the woods, where “we return to reason and faith,” describe a landscape, where man leaves only his footprint. While I can imagine that the writers did not follow the scientific discussions of Emerson’s followers, I cannot imagine that the scientists ignored the literature. More likely, I think, those scientists would have taken imaginative comfort in the idea of a wilderness, where man barely exists.
And here, I’m still trying to piece together how the white community’s racial fears influenced our need for open space, national parks, and wilderness preservation.
Here are a few data points I’m working with:
In My Seneca Village, the poet, Marilyn Nelson, has written about the black communities razed to form Central Park’s post Civil-War expansion in NY.
Martha Collins’ excellent new book, Admit One, discusses Madison Grant, a leading thinker of the Eugenics movement. He also advised Theodore Roosevelt on the formation of the national parks.
Nell Irving Painter also discusses Grant, his saving of various endangered species, as well as his pseudo-scientific contribution, The Passing of the Great Race, a book which fanned a great deal of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy.
John McPhee’s Encounter with the Archdruid features a large cast of characters, who reveal their concerns about population explosion—an issue seemed to provide polite cover for a great deal of racial insecurities.
Was it coincidence that men of science with unsavory and racially-motivated agendas were also attracted to wilderness preservation? I’m not sure. I think we avoid the unseemly histories of some our best loved concepts at our own peril.
By the twentieth century, this creative vision of wilderness—“an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”—became public policy.
Perhaps the formation of nature preserves where only scientists and eco-tourists can tread represents sound science for protecting biodiversity.
Maybe our belief in the need for wilderness is a holdover from a metaphor, the Garden, a place where man knows no remorse; and the metaphor of nature, the opposite to the city, as the only place were man can grow in virtue. I’m not sure, but I have my doubts.
For all our discussion about the hard science’s being written in turgid and didactic prose, I would argue that their forms make it much harder to hide one’s bias in a metaphor.