Girl Science
Drama
Cast 2m, 2w
Synopsis
Dr. Johanna Vernon, a still-active and eminent 80 year PhD water biologist is interviewed for a biography by her grand niece, Dr. Lois Allen, a well-regarded up-and-coming academic historian whose field is history of science. Lois views her aunt as one of the “forgotten women of science” and worthy of a memoir. Her aunt is not so sure. As a reluctant participant at first, and then more and more willingly, Johanna reveals details of her past to Lois, including stories from her seemingly charmed childhood. But was it? As Lois learns more about Johanna’s girlhood, she forms a thesis about a tragic event – the drowning of a teenage friend of her aunt’s — that she believes haunts and inspires Johanna to excel in her field. However, a deeper secret lurks beneath the surface.
Meanwhile, Lois, untangling herself from a personal and professional relationship with her former mentor, discovers how careers are made and unmade by a word. Girl Science explores the clash of generations and our understanding of conflicting ideas of scientific and practical progress. What does it mean to be useful? To be good? Is personal history a useful lens to understanding the present? Who has the final say on how to interpret history?
Press
The play which was runner-up in the EMOS Festival’s playwriting contest—Girl Science, by Larry Loebell, dramaturg of Interact Theater Company in Philadelphia—is an excellent example of this kind of “embedded” eco-drama. In the panel on eco-drama, Loebell said, “Girl Science is like “spaghetti”—a play about the entanglement of people and ideas and inconsistencies as they overlap and twist around—some attempt to thoughtfully engage a lot of stuff is…the model that I have in mind.” With apologies to the playwright, I find it helpful to think of this play as a quiet though intense three-ring circus, with the performers moving fluidly from one ring to the other when the stories demand it. Sometimes two rings are going at once. Ring # 1 is the sexual/professional relationship of a young female historian of science–who wants to write a biography about her important but overlooked microbiologist aunt—and her older professor-lover who wants her to do instead a third project ‘under’ him, and therefore discourages her. Ring # 2 is the arena in which the hopeful biographer—who hopes to get tenure out of this publication—cajoles her aunt into (a) agreeing to the project; then (b) co-operating in interviews which entail her telling everything about her life as a scientist, including the springs of it in the most private corners of her past. Ring # 3 depicts 1925 and the more recent past, when the aunt’s father and her young suitor were alive. Johanna (the aunt) has devoted most of her scientific life to studying pollution in the river which runs in front of her family’s house.
In a series of flashbacks, we learn that a good deal of her dedication to the river comes from her feeling of responsibility for the death of a suitor, a young man who wouldn’t heed her warnings and tried to skate on it when it was only half-frozen: “JOANNA: There was too much coal dust in the river. It lowered the freezing-point.” Strongly drawn by this romantic angle, which she has to drag out of Johanna, the biographer-niece Lois makes it the “thesis” of her book, only to have her ex-lover, who is a senior member of her department and has delayed her consideration for tenure until the academic press reviews the book, hands her a list revealing the names of the coal-investors who were on the Board of Directors at the time of the boy’s drowning. Johanna’s father Samuel turns up on the list. Johanna has failed to mention this critical fact to Lois, which ”makes it look like she covered up a crucial fact, altered the story to protect her family from shame.” Her shot at tenure is lost. When Lois finally gets Johanna to talk about why she lied about her father by omission, Johanna says “ I knew in my heart that boy drowned because of what my father knew but did not say. Some truths are worse than you can imagine. And after all of that, I still wanted to make something good of it. I wanted to fix the broken thing, as if I even could. I have worked on that all my life, every day. This river, its relative health, is my penance.”
Girl Science is, in its realistic surface and in the prevalence of debate about issues as the engine of its dialogue, almost the kind of well-made play one would expect from Ibsen, except there are no act-divisions and several scenes take place in both the past and the present at once, to show how “present” these memories are for Johanna. The pollution of the river cannot be said to be the theme of Girl Science—instead, the struggles of an early woman scientist to be taken seriously as a researcher, the remarkably similar struggle of a modern graduate student in the history of science to get out from under an abusive relationship with her mentor, the correct role of personal revelation in a scientific biography, the struggle of a young woman to reconcile her father’s guilt for the death of her suitor with her reverence for the same father—these are the presenting themes of the play. And yet there is no doubt that by the end of the play, the crime against the river and then the redemption of the river through Johanna’s dedication and unswerving scientific discipline, have presented us with an embedded moral trope of great power: What we have all done to our environment is dreadful, but—so far, at least—much of it can be reversed. In the foreground of the play, Lois’s career as an academic has been arrested, the book will probably get panned, Johanna’s father will be exposed, but in the background, as it were drowning out all this twittering, is the redemptive relationship between this river and the woman who saved it with her life’s work. Thus although the embedded approach eschews an agenda, it is capable of telling powerful stories about our relationship with the natural world. – By Wes Sanders (excerpted from an article about the first Earth Matters on Stage Festival, Humboldt State University, Arcata, California, 2004)
Readings and Development
Round-table reading Playwrights Theater of New Jersey
Rehearsed public reading in Stages Festival, Philadelphia Theater Company
Rehearsed public reading in the Sloan First Light Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre
Development and staged reading at Seven Devils Playwrights Festival
Rehearsed public reading at New Jersey Rep
Reading at InterAct Theater Company
Development and staged reading at Earth Matters on Stage Festival
Rehearsed public reading at Pittsburgh Eco-Drama Festival