Theaterwork's Production of Karen Zacarias's Legacy of Light

I

Emilie du Chatelet (1706-1749) was an Age of Enlightenment mathematician, physicist, and lover of Voltaire.  In the year of her death she translated Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica along with her own commentary.  This is still the standard French text for this masterpiece.  Emilie’s worst fear of dying from the effects of childbirth came true three days after the birth of her daughter who also died days later.

Zacarias takes this compelling historical figure and places her beside an equally brilliant fictional Princeton astrophysicist on the verge of discovering a new planet, Olivia Hastings Brown, who is contemplating hiring a surrogate, Millie, to be impregnated with her decent and enthusiastic teacher husband Peter’s semen. Olivia is wrestling with becoming a mother, though she is a stage IV ovarian cancer survivor and may not have longevity in her future.  Emilie’s optimism in the face of a bleak future is played off Olivia’s humbleness and obsession of how little she really knows.  As with Dark Matter which is “everywhere and unknown,” Olivia is wandering in the dark, unwittingly desiring to embrace Emilie’s soliloquy on the Conservation of Energy: “Everything changes, but nothing is lost—ever” (www.dctheaterscene.com – May 19, 2009 by Rosalind Lacy).

II

The mother of three children under the age of eight, Zacarias received a commission from Washington, DC’s, Arena Stage to write LoL just three weeks before the birth of her third child.  Along with the support of her husband, Rett Snotherly (an International Trade Commission lawyer), Zacarias came to the conclusion that one can’t have it all, and she gave up all of her duties except for parenting and playwriting; this realization resulted in a burst of creativity that led to five plays, including an adaptation of Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and children’s playsLooking for Roberto Clemente and Chasing George Washington (Helen Hayes Award Winner).  One of the most difficult of her day-to-day activities to let go of was the Young Playwrights’ Theater (YPT) that she founded in 1995 to fulfill a promise to Patricia Melton Smith who supported financially Zacarias’s completion of a graduate playwriting program at Boston University; Karen promised to return to Washington and to do something for the community.  YPT teaches 800 students a year the essentials of drama construction and performance (www.washingtonpost.com –May 7, 2009).

Karen Zacarias comes by her interest in the major themes and central characters of LoL quite naturally:  “My family is composed of artists and scientists….[These subjects] were normal dinner table conversation….[And] I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was six years old.”  While writing her 2005 children’s play Einstein Is a Dummy, Karen came across Emilie du Chatelet in a footnote and became interested in her life and career, especially Emilie’s optimism in difficult circumstances: “[She] choose to see the world in a positive light.”  Zacarias also knew that she wanted to write her Arena Stage commission “from the perspective of two women struggling with the challenges surrounding child rearing.”  (I love the author’s observation that babies are both artists and scientists, imagining and testing the world.)  Zacarias admits to a great deal of scientific research “to find the metaphors to make the science tangible” (www.dctheatrescene.com –May 27, 2009 by Lorraine Treanor).

III

In a telephone conversation with TW Artistic Director David Olson on September 15, 2009, I had the opportunity to ask him about his interest in Karen Zacarias’s work, especially in light of his 2007 TW production of her Mariela in the Desert.  David was quite clear on what he admires in Zacarias’s work:  “I am attracted to her world view.   She was here during the production of Mariela and I admired the way she interacted with other people.  She has a good critical eye, but she also knows that we are part of something larger, something unfathomable.  [Zacarias] studies external questions of great substance yet her work also has a deep understanding of internal worlds.”  For example, astrophysicist Olivia is clearly a brilliant woman but she is also deeply conscious of her inability to feel.  One’s success in the public sphere is no guarantee of happiness in one’s private life.  David Olson points out that TW as a company is “searching for pieces that support diverse and individual inquiries into life’s meaning and value.”

Olson also finds Zacarias’s sense of delight original and rewarding:  “I appreciate her sense of taking delight in the foibles of humanity without embracing violence or destructiveness and her obvious delight in her characters’ finding delight.”  He points that even minor characters Lewis and Millie embrace concepts such as “home” and “us” and “generosity.”  Millie’s pride and joy in the knitting of a dress for the baby she is carrying for Peter and Olivia reveals an openness that one might not find in other contemporary authors.

Finally, Olson is impressed with the author’s very unique vision of women:  “Even plays told from a woman’s perspective have been all-too-often about damaged women such as Hedda Gabler.  This might be the first play I’ve ever read about motherhood.”   Furthermore, all the characters are on a search to discover a defining self-identity and to strive for true love.  Emilie du Chatelet’s philosophy informs all the characters such that all become aware at some level that the world offers larger possibilities than can be seen and that things are not bound by time and place.

This thematic position is also borne out in the style that TW establishes in its production of LoL:  “In the First Act, the action shimmers with reality with a sense of something larger that is just beyond behind a veil.  In Act Two, the dialogue becomes more poetic, the sense of space is blurred and, finally, time [is obliterated.]”  Thus, the usual boundaries of realistic linear theater are shown to be deficient, that there is something “other than” with “the capacity for mystery.”  David believes that in the theater this “sense of more can be very immediate.”  and “that artists make things with which audiences can wrestle.”  He provides an example of a recent experience of standing in an apple orchard—an apple is a central metaphor at the conclusion of LoL—and realizing that this sturdy, functional, appetizing object has a degree of complexity beyond its mere surface.  To capture this sense of intimate individual search, TW will create a 90-seat three-quarter audience surrounding an intimate acting space on the main stage of the James A. Little Theater.

In preparing for an upcoming retreat, David Olson has been thinking of the early days of Theaterwork with its roots in Latin America.  He notes that “Karen [Zacarias] is just as much a Mexican writer (she is a native of Mexico and spends part of each year in Oaxaca) as she is a contemporary American dramatist:  “In Latin America, the real contains the mystical, the magical, and the absurd.  There is also the power of the gesture, the word, and the image.”  David wishes in his TW productions “to re-vitalize this sense of something larger [than surface existence].”  In a like manner, David Olson wishes to create a “’Theater for the Hungry’ to make performers and audiences think and to challenge them, to provide them with something to take home with them, not to be complacent.”

Theaterwork is still not producing The Odd Couple.  What TW is doing in its fourteenth season in Santa Fe is creating and mounting compelling work that demands attention and invites dialogue.  LoL is part of this tradition while simultaneously introducing an exciting, entertaining, and soon-to-be-acknowledged major voice in contemporary America Theater.

IV

Theaterwork will present Karen Zacarias’s Legacy for Light at the James A. Little Theater (1060 Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe) on October 16, 17, 22, 23 & 24 at 7:30 P.M. and on October 18 & 25 at 2 P.M.  General Admission tickets are $15 and Student tickets are $10.  For reservations and information, please phone TW at (505) 471-1799 or go to theaterwork.org.

Cast: 
Émilie du Châtelet - Tiffany Roufs
Voltaire - Robert Thorpe
Millie/ Pauline - Angela Janda Goldstein
Olivia - Catherine Donavon
Peter / Du Châtelet - Richard Hughes
Lewis /Saint-Lambert - Drago Sumonja

Staff:
Director - David Olson
Lighting Designer - Steve Carmichael
Properties Master - Richard Gonzales
Photographer - Petr Jerabek
Set Designer - Ilana Kirschbaum
Costume Designer - Deborah Kruhm
Assistant Director - Larry Lee
Assistant to the Director - Monica Lee
Sound and Lighting Technician - Paula Olson
Technical Director - Jack Sherman