Rivera, Kahlo, and Detroit: The Artists

[The City of Detroit declared a financial emergency in March 2013 and in July filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history.  The Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan declared Detroit bankrupt in December citing $18.5 billion in debt and declaring that negotiations with its creditors were unfeasible.  In November 2014, the court approved a restructuring plan allowing the city to begin exiting bankruptcy.  Detroit successfully left municipal bankruptcy with all its finances returned to city control in December 2014.

[After Detroit declared bankruptcy in July 2013, creditors targeted the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts as a potential source of revenue.  The state-appointed emergency manager hired Christie’s, the art auction house, to determine the market value of the art purchased with city funds.  To prevent the sale of the works, DIA supporters developed what was dubbed “the Grand Bargain,” under which the museum and the State of Michigan would raise sufficient funds to keep the museum afloat and guarantee municipal workers’ pensions.  In return, the City of Detroit would cede ownership of the collection and the building to the non-profit entity that already operated the museum.  Though this plan was challenged by some city creditors, last November, a judge approved the Grand Bargain which didn’t require DIA to sell any art.  Thousands of art-lovers in Detroit and elsewhere breathed a huge sigh of relief.]

[On 15 March, a new exhibit, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, opened at DIA, and while the show was conceived nearly a decade ago, its opening came right on the heels of the happy outcome of the anxious 20-month bankruptcy scare.  (The show is scheduled to close on 12 July.)  In part one of “Rivera, Kahlo, and Detroit,” I’ll discuss the two fascinating artists and set the scene for the creation of the great murals Rivera painted on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932-33.]

In 1932 and ’33, revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, painter Frida Kahlo, were living and working in what was then the home of the world’s largest manufacturing industry, Detroit.  He was creating the now-beloved and -esteemed murals known as Detroit Industry on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts.  Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, the new exhibit at that very DIA, throws a spotlight on the murals and 70 other works by both painters showing the evolutions of their careers as well as the tensions between their separate styles and approaches—which the New York Times characterizes as “a kind of contest between a hefty hare and a tiny tortoise”—a tension that was also manifest in their personal relationship as well. 

Diego Maria de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez (1886-1957) was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, to a prosperous family.  (He was a twin, but his brother, Carlos, died when they were 14 months old.)  Raised a Catholic, Rivera acknowledged his heritage as a Converso, Mexicans whose Jewish ancestors had been forced to convert during the Inquisition in 15th- and 16th-century Spain and Portugal, passed down through his mother’s line.  (I posted an article on ROT on Chicano Americans in New Mexico who discovered their Converso roots in the 20th century, “Crypto-Jews: Legacy of Secrecy,” on 15 September 2009.)  Though he never practiced Judaism or affiliated with the Jewish community in Mexico, in 1935, the then-famous painter wrote, “My Jewishness is the dominant element in my life.  From this has come my sympathy with the downtrodden masses which motivates all my work.”  As an avowed communist, of course, Rivera was an atheist. 

The future muralist began drawing the year after his brother died, using the walls of his family’s home as his platform.  His parents, rather than getting angry, merely lined the house’s walls with canvases and chalkboards and encouraged their son’s budding artistry.  At the age of 10, Rivera was sent to Mexico City to study at the Academy of San Carlos until 1905.  In 1907, the governor of the State of Veracruz sponsored his further art studies in Europe, first in Madrid and then in Paris, the modern-art capital of the western world at that time.  Like many young artists before him, Rivera settled in Montparnasse, the bohemian center of Paris’s art scene, where he became friends with such artists as Russian painter Chaim Soutine, Frenchman Henri Matisse, Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani (who painted his portrait in 1914), French painter Robert Delaunay, Spaniard Pablo Picasso, and French Cubist Georges Braque. 

Under the influence of Picasso and Braque, both working in the cubist style at the time Rivera arrived in Paris, the Mexican painter began working in the new form, too.  Between 1913 and 1917, the young artist painted cubist canvases until, inspired by Paul Cézanne, he switched to Post-Impressionism.  (In 2004, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., mounted The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera: Memory, Politics, Place, a small exhibit of Rivera’s cubist works.)  With this shift in style, Rivera’s art began to attract notice and he exhibited in several Paris shows. 

My impression of Rivera’s art of this period, however, is that he began trying out all the current styles, the Cubism of Picasso, Braque, and Marcel Duchamp; and the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne and Auguste Renoir, for brief periods, trying to find his own voice.  (Rivera also experimented with Surrealism in the early ’40s, but it was a short-lived exploration.)  None of these experiments lasted very long, and there weren't many cubist works in the NGA show—and most of them were interesting only as curiosities the way Picasso's realistic works as a young artist are.  They merely contrast with the more identifiable works of the maturer artists—in Rivera's case, the murals and Mexican history and folklore he worked with for most of his career.  In any case, the Mexican painter left Paris in 1920 and traveled through Italy to study the art there, particularly the Renaissance frescoes of Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, and Masaccio. 

Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 to take part in the government-sponsored mural project planned by the new Minister of Education.  Also involved in the effort were José Orozco, David Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, all among Mexico’s most renowned artists today.  (Among my favorite pieces in my parents’ art collection is Personaje de Perfil, a 1980 Tamayo print.)  In January of the next year, Rivera painted his first important mural, La creación, in Mexico City’s National Preparatory School.  

Upon his return home, the young artist immediately joined the revolutionary movement, even claiming to have fought with Emiliano Zapata against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to enhance his bona fides.  (Zapata was a leader of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-20, but Rivera never bore arms in the struggle.)  In 1922, the painter helped found the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors and subsequently joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), eventually becoming a member of its Central Committee.  The painter’s first wife, Russian émigrée Angelina Bellof, had introduced him to communism in Paris and he remained loyal to the party all his life—even if the party wasn’t always loyal to Rivera. 

(Disenchanted with Rivera’s independence and individualism, after having invited the artist to Moscow for the 10th anniversary celebration of the October Revolution in 1927, Joseph Stalin expelled him from the Soviet Union for “anti-Soviet” activities.  When he returned to Mexico, Rivera was commissioned to paint a mural for the Secretariat of Public Education, but the Mexican party saw in its depiction of a Trotskyite leader who was assassinated in Mexico City evidence that Rivera knew about the crime beforehand.  The muralist was labeled a Trotskyite himself and ousted from the Mexican party for ideological “deviation.”  Leon Trotsky, who became an adversary to Stalin in Russia, was a friend of the Riveras and even spent 1937 as the houseguest of Rivera and Kahlo, who was also a PCM member.  Trotsky  is reported to have had an affair with Kahlo when he lived in her home.  The Russian revolutionary and his wife moved to their own house near Kahlo’s in 1940 and he was assassinated there by Stalin’s agents in 1940.  The artist, a somewhat fractious party member from the beginning, though expelled by the PCM, spent the rest of his life trying to get back in.) 

Rivera’s domestic life was also tumultuous.  He was famously married to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, but she was his third (and fourth—he married her twice) wife.  Rivera’s first wife, Angelina Beloff, seven years his senior, was a Russian artist he met in Paris the year she arrived there, 1909, and they married almost right away.  The couple had a son, Diego, in 1916, but he died in 1918 (possibly a victim of the Spanish influenza pandemic).  When Rivera left Paris in 1921, he divorced Beloff and left her behind—though she moved to Mexico herself in 1932 and did most of her painting there.  She died in Mexico City in 1969, at the age of 90.  (While he was still married to Beloff, Rivera had a daughter, Marika, with Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska, a Russian-born Cubist painter.  Marika became a French film actress in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s and died in England in 2010 at 90.) 

In 1922, after he’d returned to Mexico, he met and married Guadalupe Marín, a model and novelist.  She figured in several of her husband’s paintings, and was even the subject of a portrait by Kahlo, whom Rivera met while he was married to Marín.  Rivera and Marín had two daughters, Guadalupe (born 1924) and Ruth (1927); Rivera divorced Marín in 1929, the year he married Kahlo; she died in 1983 at 87. 

When Rivera met Kahlo, she was an art student of 22 and he was 43.  They’d already been corresponding, as Kahlo reached out to Rivera for advice and guidance for her career as an artist.  They had a tempestuous marriage, and they both had numerous affairs and dalliances.  (Some of Kahlo’s relationships were with women, notably Josephine Baker.)  They divorced in 1939 but remarried a year later.  Kahlo pursued her own career, frequently living separately from her husband (though often near him), and a year after her death in 1954, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent for eight years. 

Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón (1907-54) was born in Coyoacán, a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City that’s now part of the metropolis.  Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a German-born photographer (his birth name was Carl Wilhelm Kahl; when he arrived in Mexico, he hispanicized it) and her mother, Matilde Calderón y González, part Mexican Indian, worked in a jewelry store.  Frida Kahlo was the third of four sisters; there were two older half-sisters from her father’s first marriage (which had left him a widower). 

When Kahlo was but three years old, the Mexican Revolution broke out, lasting for the next ten years with sporadic gunfire erupting in the streets of Mexico City.  (She often gave the year of her birth as 1910 to indicate that both she and revolutionary Mexico had begun life in the same year.)  At six, Kahlo contracted polio which left her right leg thinner than her left.  She took to wearing long, brightly-colored peasant dresses, for which she became famous, to cover the deformity.  She nonetheless participated in several sports. 

In 1925, the teen schoolgirl was riding a bus which collided with a streetcar.  Kahlo was badly hurt, suffering a list of serious injuries almost too daunting to read.  Undergoing dozens of operations, she spent three months recovering in a hospital encased in a full-body cast.  Her injuries healed and she ultimately recovered her ability to walk, but Kahlo suffered bouts of extreme pain periodically throughout her life which forced her return to a hospital, and several of the injuries permanently destroyed her ability to bear children.  (As part of the DIA exhibit, on display is Accidente, a pencil sketch of the collision drawn in 1926 while the then-novice artist was still recuperating.)

Kahlo had been heading for a medical career before her accident but she abandoned that pursuit after her hospitalization.  She taught herself to paint to pass the time during her recuperation and she took to art professionally after her discharge.  She was isolated for so much of her convalescence, unable either to go anywhere or to see other people, that her principal subject was herself.  The predominance of self-portraiture in Kalho’s work was the result: “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”  Her mother devised a special easel on which Kahlo could paint in bed while she recovered and her father lent her some of his brushes and paints, and the young patient used painting both to occupy herself while she was sequestered and to convey her pain.  Her best-known works—over 50 of her 140 paintings—are her self-portraits, usually in the colorful peasant dresses she favored and frequently incorporating some kind of text in a banderole. 

The portraits often continued to depict her persistent suffering, including her inability to bear children, frequently in symbolic representation.  (Kahlo didn’t flatter herself in her paintings, either, usually portraying herself with a slight mustache and a bristling unibrow.)  One of Kahlo’s works in the DIA show, for example, is Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying Bed) (1932), painted while she was in Detroit, showing the artist bleeding in a hospital bed after the painful end of one of her pregnancies, either from a miscarriage or a termination.  Made soon after her hospitalization, Henry Ford Hospital depicts Kahlo as “glassy-eyed, with a frightened and drawn expression,” writes Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post.  Painted on metal to provide an industrial quality that reflected the Detroit she’d come to hate (while Rivera admired its industrial strength and productiveness), it depicts the looming skyline of Ford’s River Rouge Plant in the background.  Kennicott describes the painting as showing “a woman in a hospital bed, with the date and place inscribed on the bed rails.  She lies naked and supine, yet connected by cords to small anatomical, zoological and industrial images, including a fetus or baby, a snail and a rendering of the pelvis.”  (The exhibit also includes a pencil sketch of the same image, displayed next to the painting.) 

It was Kahlo who first approached Rivera, already a well-known artist in Mexico City.  While he was at work on a mural in 1927, Kahlo went to him and showed him some of her work, asking if he thought she was talented.  According to the common account, he recognized her gift immediately and encouraged her and advised her.  Though he was 18 years older than she, Rivera was a frequent and welcome visitor at La Casa Azul (The Blue House), the Kahlo home in Coyoacán.  The tyro painter had long admired the famous muralist, whom she first met when she would watch him working on La creación at the National Preparatory School the same year Kahlo became one of only 35 girls—among 2000 boys—enrolled there.  Rivera never imposed his style on her, rather encouraging Kahlo to find her own vision.  She never deferred to him nor tried to compete with him, either.  Like her mentor, however, Kahlo was very taken with indigenous Mexican folklore and culture and often incorporated its imagery in her paintings, most notably the monkey figure, a symbol of lust in Mexican mythology but seen as protective by Kahlo (Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1945; oil on masonite).

Having abandoned Cubism as too “elitist,” Rivera painted his murals and canvases in a Mexican-infused (he was heavily influenced by Mayan and Aztec imagery and well as Mexican folk art) form of Socialist Realism, the official art style of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Kahlo’s work was much more fanciful.  Often compared to Surrealism, an artistic movement that drew on dreams and the unconscious, Kahlo rejected the label, arguing that her work was less informed by her dreams than her reality.  (She’d seen a historic show in New York before going to Detroit, the Surrealist group show at the Julien Levy Gallery which displayed works by Picasso, Max Ernst, Duchamp, and Salvador Dalí.  Six years later, Kahlo had her only solo U.S. exhibit at Levy’s gallery, a well-received introduction of her work to this country and a number of prominent artists who viewed the show.  Surrealist icon André Breton wrote the introduction to the exhibit’s catalogue—and then invited Kahlo to Paris in 1939 where she exhibited her work again.)

The artist gained an international reputation in her lifetime—one of her self-portraits, The Frame (oil on aluminum and glass, 1938), was bought by the Louvre from the Paris show, the first artwork by a 20th-century Mexican artist purchased by the Paris museum—but mostly among cognoscenti and devotees of her husband’s art; after her death at 47 in 1954, however, her fame and popularity increased.  Mexican art became known to the public in the 1970s and ’80s, with exhibits in big museums around the world, featuring indigenous Mexican artists including Kahlo.  Interest in and knowledge of Latin American art increased in galleries, museums, and auction houses; Sotheby’s and Christie’s reported, for instance, increases in sales from an average of $2.25 million in 1981 to $20.65 million in 1989.  (The opera Frida by Robert Xavier Rodriguez premièred in Philadelphia in 1991 and the bio-film of the same name directed by Julie Taymor came out in 2002, with Salma Hayek portraying the artist and Alfred Molina as Rivera.  Other works about Kahlo have appeared in recent years, focusing attention on both her life and her art.) 

Kahlo also became a potent symbol of female independence and empowerment during the late 20th century in recognition of both her artistic output, which always followed her own vision, and the way she lived her life, from her style of dress to her intelligence and intellectual independence to her candor and honesty to the hardships she endured and triumphed over to her strength in adversity to her sexual unconventionality.  Her style of dress made her something of a fashion star as well, the subject of a Vogue pictorial in 1937.  (In 2012, a trove of Kahlo’s clothes, including 300 dresses plus bathing suits and accessories, was discovered at the Casa Azul museum, secreted from public view for 50 years by Rivera’s instructions.  They went on exhibit in November of that year.)

Kahlo’s art, which combined the folk-art styles of Mexico and South America with classical and modern European forms (her early paintings have been compared to Renaissance portraits), explored her private experiences while also making political and social points.  In addition, as Hayden Herrera, author of Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (Harper & Row, 1983), wrote, “Although her paintings record specific moments in her life, all who look at them feel that Frida is speaking directly to them.”  In the words of the Times’s Roberta Smith, who also compared Rivera’s paintings to “a kind of cathedral,” while Kahlo’s are “portable altarpieces for private devotion,” “Her work is everything Rivera’s art is not: small in size and suffused with personal emotion and existential torment.”  Like Rivera, she used broad areas of vibrant color and a consciously naïve painting style.  She frequently incorporated elements of Mexican archaeology and pre-Columbian art in her self-portraits, juxtaposing them with fantastical and strange images.  She shocked many with the depictions of her fantastic images—Surrealism was still a new form—and her frank display of sexuality.  Her works are still seen as “graphic and groundbreaking,” in the words of the Detroit News’s Louis Aguilar on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Rivera’s DAI frescoes.  (She was commissioned by Clare Booth Luce in 1938 to do a portrait of the publisher’s wife and her friend, actress Dorothy Hale, who’d just committed suicide.  It was to be a traditional portrait as a gift for Hale’s grieving mother but instead, Kahlo painted the story of Hale’s suicidal jump from a New York high rise.  The finished painting, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1939, horrified Luce—though critics praised it.) 

(Another disturbing work, My Birth, 1932, is part of a series depicting significant events in Kahlo's life which Rivera had encouraged her to create.  Kahlo wrote in her journal that the painting shows her giving birth to herself.  It’s a gory scene in which the artist’s grossly oversized head is emerging from the mother’s womb as a puddle of blood forms between the mother’s spread legs.  Her chest and head are covered by a sheet and over the bed’s headboard, a portrait of Our Lady of Sorrows weeps.  The New York Times characterized the painting as “a bloody depiction of childbirth whose candor [is] astonishing even in today's unprudish world.”  Now owned by Madonna, one of Kahlo’s best-known fans, My Birth can be disquieting and the singer has said she uses it to determine who will be a friend and who won’t: anyone who doesn’t like the painting won’t be welcome.)

Despite the influences of movements such as Surrealism and other artists, including her husband, Kahlo’s style was uniquely her own, immediately distinctive and emotionally evocative.  She’s become recognized today as an artist of daring and originality.  According to the Post’s Kennicott, the couple’s yearlong sojourn in Detroit was a turning point for Kahlo.  When she arrived in the city, Kennicott observes, she was painting in her husband’s “shadow,” exhibiting simplicity and naïveté; while in Detroit, her art gained depth and complexity.  While her subject often remained herself (she also did portraits of others and still lifes), her paintings explored ideas beyond the personal to the world around her.  The inclusion of her vision of the cold, industrial Ford plant behind her naked, bleeding body in Henry Ford Hospital, Kennicott points out, demonstrates this expansion.  (The image of the plant doesn’t exist in the earlier pencil sketch of the scene.)  Many of the symbolic figures Kahlo put into her canvases also reveal a cognizance of wider social and political issues almost as emphatically as Rivera’s portrayals of workers, peasants, and radicals.  Using her own life as a vehicle, Kahlo’s art championed the struggle of women to overcome the traditional barriers of gender.  Upon her arrival in Detroit, in answer to a reporter’s question whether she, too, was a painter, Kahlo said unabashedly, “Yes, the greatest in the world.”  As if to confirm this, the Mexican government declared her art to be “cultural patrimony of the nation” in 1984 (an honor also bestowed on her husband).  In the late 20th century, Kahlo became an inspiration and model for a whole generation of artists from many different communities: Chicanos, Latinos, feminists, LGBT’s, and young Mexicans. 

Rivera’s communist leanings led him to sympathize with the struggles of the Mexican workers and peasants.  The revolutionary artist insisted, in fact:

To be an artist, one must first be a man, vitally concerned with all problems of social struggle, unflinching in portraying them without concealment or evasion, never shirking the truth as he understands it, never withdrawing from life.

For Rivera, all art was a form of propaganda—or education, depending on the viewer’s perspective—and his art made people take sides, regardless of their original point of view.  “Rivera thought that art could change the world,” says Lynn Zelevansky, curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at the time it hosted a Rivera retrospective.  “So when he did this work, he did it to communicate real values.  They were teaching tools.”  Zelevansky adds that

one of his major thrusts is going to be this sort of diary of Mexican daily life told from the view of the lower classes, and he has a vision in his art of a kind of utopia that is a multiracial, multicultural utopia, and these figures are the embodiment of that vision.

(It was a sentiment that, when he put it into practice in the United States, got him into difficulties at times.  Notes Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art: “Diego would always affirm that it didn’t matter who sponsored the mural as long as the mural itself was ideologically correct, or at least truthful to his convictions.”  The DIA murals caused not a little consternation among Detroit’s capitalist and religious leaders, and the artist’s view of truth and history so angered his sponsors at New York’s Rockefeller Center, the über-capitalist Rockefeller family, that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., ordered the mural Man at the Crossroads, which he’d commissioned from Rivera for the main lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, destroyed in 1934 before it was completed.) 

The artist had quickly risen in the esteem of his countrymen and in Mexico he became “a legendary figure on the order of George Washington, Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh” here in the States.  For his people and even the government of Mexico. Rivera was seen as the “definer of Mexico’s national myth, a champion of its popular uprisings and its fertile mix of races and cultures.”  In the rest of the world, however, he was yet to be recognized as anything more than a minor Cubist from his days in Paris or a sidelight to contemporary art and “a master propagandist for the new Mexican state.”  Zelevansky asserts that Rivera became

one of the great innovators of 20th century art, because what he does is he takes everything that he’s learned in Europe from European modernism, and he melds it with the art of ancient Mexico, Mayan and Aztec art, to come up with a new form that will allow him to express social and political ideas on a broad scale.

After his death, however, the art world was beginning to catch up with Rivera’s native country in its estimation of his importance.  By the time of DIA’s 1986 Diego Rivera: A Retrospective in celebration of the centennial of his birth, his status had elevated to somewhere around the second rank of world artists.  For a time in the ’70s and ’80s, his reputation as an artist was eclipsed by that of Kahlo’s.  Following the Cleveland show (which subsequently traveled to Los Angeles, Houston, and Mexico City), some art critics changed their tunes.  Steven Litt of the Plain Dealer wrote that “Rivera’s art is still politically useful . . . .  It’s also very, very good, which amply justifies all the renewed attention.”  Co-organizer of Art and Revolution, Luis-Martín Lozano, a Mexico City-based independent curator, asserted, “[N]ow it’s time—however belatedly—to reconsider Mexican artists’ role in the international scheme of Modern Art, and Rivera is a good place to start.”  In the Austin Chronicle, Gerald E. McLeod affirmed that the Houston exhibit “takes the artist’s varied talent out of the shadow of his great murals and reveals the full range of his remarkable career.”

One reason for the slow development in critical esteem is that Rivera’s masterworks are universally considered his murals, few examples of which exist outside of Mexico and which, by their very nature, can’t travel to exhibits around the world so that viewers, critics or the general public, can see and appreciate them.  Rivera’s easel paintings have been given short shrift as representatives of his art—until, that is, such shows as A Retrospective, Cleveland’s Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution (1999), and now Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit.  (I don’t count NGA’s The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera because it was a very small show and narrowly focused.  In addition, by 2004, any reevaluation of Rivera’s significance had already been effected.)  At the end of the 20th century, two important new biographies of the Mexican artist, Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera  by Patrick Marnham (Knopf, 1998) and Diego Rivera  by Pete Hamill (Harry N. Abrams, 1999), were issued in this country, helping to focus attention on his art.  Another explanation for the reexamination was that by the turn of the 21st century, Mexico had finally moved past its revolutionary past (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, lost the majority in the Mexican congress in 1997 for the first time since its founding and lost the presidency in 2000), communism was largely dead (except for a few notable pockets), and the dawn of the age of industrialism was a distant memory.  Rivera’s art could now be looked at for its aesthetics rather than its political and social commentary. 

[I have deliberately elided over some of the more complex and problematic elements of the life and work of both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo here.  To have broached these topics, such as their embrace of Stalinism (notwithstanding a friendship with Trotsky), Rivera’s conflict with the Rockefellers over Man at the Crossroads, or Kahlo’s belief (despite later genealogical research to the contrary) that her father was a Jew, would have expanded this summary to twice its present length.  

[Please come back to ROT in a few days for part rwo of “Rivera, Kahlo, and Detroit,” in which I’ll describe the famous Detroit Industry murals and some of the impact they had on the people of the city and on the arts (and some of the politics) of the whole country in the ’30s and beyond.]

We Get Letters

A kind of odd thing happened on a recent evening in mid-March.  I was in the Washington, D.C., area and, unlike the New York Times, the Washington Post comes with Parade, that dinky, mostly junky magazine some newspapers circulate on Sundays.  I leafed through Parade as I was watching some TV before dinner that night.  The main subject that week was letter-writing and the main article was “Letters That Changed Our World” by Liz Welch.  It made me think of a conversation I’ve had with some friends and relatives recently.

In her article, which Welch sub-heads “The missives that move us, shake us and, sometimes, alter the course of history,” the author refers to a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt which prompted the president to launch the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb.  She also writes about another letter to President Roosevelt, one written by Fidel Castro when he was 14 years old, “requesting $10 and Groucho Marx’s advice to Woody Allen.”  An illustration accompanying the article shows a note 23-year-old writer Eudora Welty, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, sent to the New Yorker proclaiming, “How I would like to work for you!”  Welch also refers to a book, Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving a Wider Audience (Chronicle Books, 2014), which is an anthology of letters that reveal surprising aspects of historical events and figures.  All this is what made me recall my discussions.

I used to do research for scholars from universities outside New York, finding references and documents for them.  I used to do a lot of digging up of old letters sent from one historically important figure to another—Tennessee Williams’s and Elia Kazan’s letters were among the largest collections of correspondence through which I had to pore.  It’s made me think: What’s going to happen to collected letters for the generations of famous (not to mention the not-so-famous) people to come?  (I touched on this question in my ROT post “Books in Print,” 14 July 2010.)  First of all, most of their correspondence will be electronic—e-mails and tweets and texts—which may or may not even be saved, much less printed out on paper for filing in traditional archives.  (While letter-writing has declined, the average e-mail account sends or receives about 100 e-mails daily, according to one study.  Eighteen- to 29-year-old Americans send as much as 100 texts a day.)  E-mail is basically ephemeral; I know it can be saved, and offices and agencies are required to keep significant messages, but electronic communications are just evanescent.  What’s more, they can’t easily be passed along later to repositories like libraries.  As writer John Coleman expressed it, “Email is ‘permanent’ in its own way; our electronic messages are easy to keep and search in huge volumes.  But they aren’t tangible and enduring in the same way those old notes are.”

Second, even those old electronic letters and notes that are kept—on disks or hard drives somewhere—will eventually be impossible to access and read as the technology changes (which, in the computer world, can happen in a matter of a few years).  I already have old disks that I can’t read now, like old Betamax videotapes no one can play anymore unless you dig up an old machine.  (That’s not even counting the e-mails and other files I’ve plain lost from technical mishaps, like when I fried my hard drive years ago or when my last machine got a virus and I had to wipe the drive before transferring everything left to a new one.  I also changed e-mail providers a few years ago and lost all the old stash before I realized I could have transferred it.)

Since nearly no one writes letters much anymore—the postal service estimates that in 1987 the average household received a personal letter every two weeks, whereas by 2010 the average had dropped to once every seven weeks—there’s nothing to keep.  Author Jessica Kleiman admitted in Forbes magazine, after finding a cache of old letters and notes, “Had those been sent to me via email or text, I definitely would not still have them.”  I’m not casting aspersions on the quality of on-line correspondence in contrast to paper letters.  (I’m not really a Luddite: I use e-mail all the time and I compose on a word processor; I even maintain a blog.  This isn’t about disparaging the existence of electronic media, which has many benefits.)  I’m also not lamenting the loss of the art of writing letters which declined long before computers arrived on the scene.  I’m just contemplating the durability of electronic writing versus the paper kind, how it’ll last and be accessible in the future. 

Libraries keep old books and periodicals we can get to when we want them.  There are archival collections that contain the letters and papers of the Tennessee Williamses, Max Lerners, Jo Mielziners, Cheryl Crawfords, Brooks Atkinsons, S. N. Behrmans, and Elia Kazans (to name just a few with whose papers I’ve worked) and scholars, writers, and historians consult their holdings all the time.  Who keeps electronic publications?  Where would I go in the future to work with the e-mails or e-publications of a current figure I want to write about?  Nancy Reagan kept her husband’s letters (and my mom and dad kept each others’); who’s keeping Barack Obama’s private e-mails?  One of the projects on which I worked was The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (New Directions, 2000 and 2004).  The two published volumes cover correspondence from 1920 to 1957.  Would an editor or a biographer 80 years from now be able to find e-mails, tweets, blog comments, and so on from today?  Someone saved Williams’s early letters (he was nine in 1920; his grandfather apparently kept some of his letters) and they’re amazingly revealing to look back at!  My parents (and, apparently, my own grandfather, too) kept some of my old letters from high school, college, and the army, but if I ever become famous, would any of my friends and colleagues have retained old e-mails for a researcher to look at? 

Even if they’re not erased, old e-mails or word-processor files will be stored on some obsolete hard drive somewhere, maybe irretrievable even if someone could find it.  Technology obsolesces while paper and ink always remains accessible.  Even if letters are stashed somewhere, someone can find them and read them.  We frequently hear reports of centuries-old documents that have been discovered hidden away.  Back in 2003, members of the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan who were cleaning out some rooms in the basement of the church stumbled on two sermons exhorting the congregation to support the American Revolution.  The historic sermons were written in 1776 and survived tucked away in the pages of a ledger, easily legible again after 227 years.  If the Rev. John Rodgers, the church's pastor during the late colonial period, had written his sermons on a computer, it’s doubtful they’d have survived 25 years, much less 225!  Will 200-year-old e-mails be available for anyone to reread in 2215?  I wonder.

Some of Williams’s correspondence (and all of Kazan’s)—including postcards, telegrams, and random notes—are in the various archival collections of his correspondents’ papers in libraries and document repositories scattered around the country from New York City to Los Angeles and Cambridge to Key West.  Would e-mails ever end up in those kinds of places where they could be retrieved by writers of the future?  Many e-mail systems don’t even save messages older than a week or so.  They’re just erased, gone, sent out into the ether.  What will happen to the next Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, or Ronald Reagan (whose letters are published in I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan; Random House, 2000)?  Those letters are often fascinating and revealing.  If newspapers are the first drafts of history, then letters may be the notes for that draft.  That kind of thing may not be available for future writers and scholars.  They’ll either be lost altogether or deposited somewhere in a pile of old storage media that no one can read even if someone found them.  I mean, you find an old letter, telegram, or postcard, it doesn’t take any special technology to access it.  (In addition to the old letters of mine to my parents and my grandfather I’ve found, I also recently came across a collection of letters from my father to my mother while they were apart for a month when my dad was abroad before my mother joined him.  My dad also collected and bound the letters he and my mom exchanged during World War II.  And I can just read them!  Who’s keeping the electronic love messages of today’s courting couples, the latter-day Reagans and my folks?)

The same would be true of Tennessee Williams’s journals, selections of which (as well as those of artist David Wojnarowicz) have been published and, like the letters, reveal a great deal about his development as a playwright and how he formed many of this principles and concepts.  (I drew on one entry in Williams’s journals, later released as Notebooks; Yale University Press, 2006, for my essay “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” republished on ROT on 9 May 2012.  Wojnarowicz’s journals were published as The Waterfront Journals; Grove Press, 1996.)  I have paper journals that go back to my high school days, including travel diaries from trips to places like the Soviet Union (1965) and China (1980) that I can still read and reminisce over (or use for a blog post, as I did with my travelogue of Istanbul on 24 June 2010).  My friend Kirk Woodward has kept journals for most of his sentient life and has generously let me publish parts of them—or he’s written articles based on selected entries, in some cases along with old letters—on ROT (see, for example, “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4 June 2010, or “A Year in Korea,” 18 January 2011, among others).  Today those would also be kept on computer.  Whether they’re word-processor files or an on-line blog like this one, they’re subject to disappearing into the ozone one way or another.  All those accounts of early experiences, travels, and ideas would be lost to us—and I can’t be the only one who finds those looks back tremendously fascinating and telling—when all there is is electronic media, as ephemeral and technically precarious as they are, like those old floppies I have that I can’t read anymore! 

Of course, it’s not just e-mails and computer journals that are perishable.  Websites in general are also, despite the myth that nothing ever disappears from the ’Net.  I can’t say that anything I post on ROT is worthy of saving, but let’s imagine that it is.  In 50 years, will anyone be able to find copies of my old posts?  I’ve published a few articles in on-line periodicals which don’t have paper editions.  Will my articles and anyone else’s in those cyber journals still be available for someone doing research in 10 or 20 years?  (Believe it or not, a few of my essays have been cited by later writers—and one on-line essay was even republished, albeit in a bowdlerized version and without my knowledge, as I described in “The Case of the Purloined Paper,” 5 February 2010.)  At least one of my contributions has already disappeared from an on-line journal’s site because the publication changed format.  Even the more prominent Internet writing, in e-journals like Huffington Post, Slate, or Politico: will anyone be able to research old articles on those sites in half a century like I can with old newspapers, Time magazines, or books?  It doesn’t seem as though any of those outlets, whose content includes significant writing and opinions that should bear on future accounts of our time, will be available for study and research.  (I’ve done many research projects, like “The Lost Première of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” 20 March  2010, or “The Washington Square Players: Art for Art’s Sake,” 21 and 24 June 2012, which required digging out old reviews.  I quote reviews in my current ROT play reports, and I include the Internet press in my survey.  Will a future researcher be able to find the old on-line reviews for a reconstruction of, say, Charles Mee’s Big Love, which I saw a few weeks ago, or Beth Henley’s Laugh, a world première on which I reported earlier this month?  It’s problematical at best.)

Kirk wrote me, when I broached the inclination to write this rumination, “When I put together my ‘autobiography’ [Kirk’s written an extensive memoir], based on letters and journals, I found that the amount of material for the most recent couple of decades was miniscule compared to that for the previous years.”  (Kirk estimates that less than a quarter of the memoir covers almost 45% of his life—since the mid-’80s, when home computers became common—“illustrating the point about fewer written sources.”)  My interpretation of this remark is that the recent record is lacking because it had all been inscribed electronically and has evaporated.  He also once sent me a copy of a wonderful memoir his grandfather wrote covering his life as a frontier lawyer for the first 60 years of the 20th century.  (Kirk wrote “A Lawyer and a Life” for ROT on 11 November 2010 based on that memoir.)  Today that chronicle would be written on a computer and, unless the author printed a copy on paper, it would exist only as electronic blips on some disk somewhere.  The same is true of the diary of Kirk’s late wife, Pat, which recounted her obsession with the Beatles in 1964—and which Kirk shared with us on ROT on 8 January 2013.  He could do that because it was on paper and he could access it.  I donated my copy of the reminiscence of Kirk’s grandfather to the local history division of the New York Public Library (“Obiter Dicta: Some Experiences During Sixty Years Practice in Kentucky Courts” by Ernest Woodward, call no.: ITY 01-10556) so that someone interested in that bit of Americana can find it.  What would happen to a latter-day counterpart?  (In 2005, I wrote an impromptu memoir of my 2½ years as an army intel officer in Berlin, but I wrote it on my computer.  Will it still be around in a readable form in 20 or 30 years?) 

This is a particularly topical subject at the moment because of the issue of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.  Though most of the coverage of the Clinton brouhaha focuses on the “gotcha” aspect, the desire to use the e-mails to find blame someone can pin on her for, say, Benghazi or some other things her adversaries can tar her with, in fact, one of the stated reasons for archiving official e-mails and electronic communications, just like the paper kind, is for the historical record.  Now and then, you hear someone mention that point in passing in a report of this story.  That, of course, is exactly the same thing as digging through Tennessee Williams’s or Elia Kazan’s letters and notes—historical (in that case, literary/artistic) research.

The issue with Clinton’s potentially missing correspondence, of course, is that it was either deliberately or carelessly discarded/not saved.  That can happen with paper mail as well.  What I’m considering is less conscious—the loss of the whole record of someone’s thoughts, ideas, ruminations, expressions simply because the format, that is, electronic blips on a storage medium, is innately ephemeral and obsolescent.   (As I said, writing on paper never goes out of date—it can be deciphered as long as it exists—barring, of course, everyone forgetting how to read the language, which can happen but takes centuries, not decades.)

There is, of course, another technical vulnerability that effects e-mails and other electronically-generated documents, whether on line or on a word processor: hacking.  Any computer system can be hacked sooner or later.  We mostly know hacking from the leaked documents that have made the news, such as the recent Sony incident and the thefts by U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea), posted on WikiLeaks, and NSA consultant Edward Snowden, but hacking can result in the alteration of electronic records as well, of course.  There are frequent stories of some student who’s hacked a school’s computer system and changed grades, and the same thing can happen to electronic memos and letters.  Paper documents can, of course, be forged or altered, too—the embarrassment at CBS in 2004 when Dan Rather took at face value some memos purporting to show that George W. Bush had gotten special treatment during his Air National Guard service is a prime example.  The memos turned out to have been latter-day forgeries and the exposure discredited not only the 60 Minutes Wednesday report but Rather’s entire career.  But that’s not easy to accomplish or get away with.  Electronic forgery or alteration is much harder to detect and can screw up someone’s research with false information or the deletion of important facts.  E-mails are far more susceptible to this kind of manipulation than paper letters, but I’m focusing here more on the loss of access to a letter-writer’s entire correspondence—or a large chunk of it—due not so much to nefarious acts but the innate realities of electronic writing.

(There’s a sidelight to the issue of e-mail hacking.  To protect against it and maintain security and privacy, some e-mail users employ passwords.  That may safeguard the e-mail but it’d be a bane for a subsequent researcher if the password remains secret after the writer’s death.  You can’t really lock someone out of a paper letter unless you secure the file in a vault.)

Unfortunately, I don’t know the solution to this impending problem.  We can hope that e-mails and other electronic documents will be preserved—and safeguarded—somehow, that some kind of archival system will be devised so that researchers, scholars, and students can retrieve them in the future, and that there will always be some way to read those old e-documents.  But I don’t see any movement to assure that any of that wishful thinking will see realization.  The government may have a system of preserving and archiving official documents created by computers, and perhaps some corporations do, too, for their own uses.  (Among my research projects, not a few have required work on the collected files and papers of such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation; the New York Shakespeare Festival; New Directions Publishing Corporation; the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center; the Gotham Book Mart; and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.)  Right now, however, it’s just haphazard whether someone saves and stores ordinary old electronic writing, the kind that you and I create—or the next generation’s Tennessee Williams or Elia Kazan—or not.  It’s just dumb luck that they can be located and then accessed again decades hence.  Like Kirk when he was trying to find resources for his autobiography, the next generation of researchers and writers may find the record from the last few decades into the coming ones lacking.  Will we ever see the collected letters of the great 21st-century writers, artists, business leaders, military commanders, politicians?  I fear we won’t—or that the output will be so meager it will amount to a few slim volumes of spotty correspondence.    On the New York Times blog Opinionator, for example, author Mason Currey wrote:

In recent years, a number of journalists and critics have lamented the death of the literary letter.  The publication of Saul Bellow’s letters in 2010 [Saul Bellow: Letters; Viking] and William Styron’s last year [Selected Letters of William Styron; Random House, 2012] were accompanied by waves of speculation about how many more such collections we can expect.  There was also no small amount of hand-wringing about how “The Collected Emails of Dave Eggers” (or whomever) will never cast quite the same spell.

I’ll say one thing for sure: I’m glad I won’t have to be doing the digging for those elusive letters.  It’ll be someone else’s job.  He or she has my condolences—though it’s doubtful anyone will know I felt this way: this message, too, exists only on computers!

'Laugh' (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)

I seem to be having a run of plays that have made me think the authors all came up with a gimmick or a plot idea first and then devised a theme or point as an excuse to use it.  Back in January, it was Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. (gospel singing); early in March, it was New York’s Signature Theatre Company’s Big Love by Charles Mee (modernizing Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women); and now it’s Beth Henley’s Laugh, a world première presentation also at Washington’s Studio.  (The ROT reports on Choir Boy and Big Love were posted on 24 January and 18 March, respectively.) 

On Sunday, 22 March, I drove into the District from suburban Maryland to see the matinee performance of Laugh at Studio’s Logan Circle base.  It’s Henley’s first outing since The Jacksonian in 2013; her previous script was 2006’s Ridiculous Fraud (about which ROT contributor Kirk Woodward posted on 20 November 2014).  Laugh started previews on the thrust stage of the Mead Theatre, Studio’s largest space at 218 seats, on 11 March, and opened on 15 March; the production’s scheduled to close on 19 April.  Though I suspect that Henley and director David Schweizer, the writer’s longtime friend, have their eyes on a New York transfer, no plans have been announced.

Henley, 63 this May, was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1974 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in acting.  A member of the university acting troupe (Henley’s mother, Elizabeth, was an actress), she also wrote her first play at SMU, a one-act called Am I Blue.  From 1975 to 1976, she taught playwriting at the University of Illinois in Urbana (now UI at Urbana-Champaign) and the Dallas Minority Repertory Theater.   In 1976, Henley moved to Los Angeles, where she currently lives, and now teaches playwriting at Loyola Marymount University in LA.  

The playwright has been identified as a “Southern” playwright all her career.  (This is partly what Kirk examines in “Beth Henley and Ridiculous Fraud.”)  Her first professionally produced play was Crimes of the Heart, which débuted as the winner of the Great American Play Contest at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1979.  It was produced Off-Broadway by the Manhattan Theatre Club the next year and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981.  (The production won or was nominated for several other awards, including a Tony nom for Best Play, and the playwright’s film adaptation in 1986 garnered Henley an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.)  Henley has also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, adapting her own play for Miss Firecracker, 1989, and writing the scripts for True Stories and Nobody's Fool, both 1986.  Through the late ’70s and the ’80s, Henley wrote essentially naturalistic tragicomedies about the small-town South, among them The Miss Firecracker Contest (1979) and The Wake of Jamey Foster (1981), emphasizing the female characters, but in the later ’80s and the ’90s, the writer branched out and began experimenting, though somewhat under the public’s radar.  (Like Laugh at Studio, many of her premières have been in small rep companies outside New York City.)  As Studio artistic director David Muse says, “If you haven’t paid attention to her work lately, I have a surprise for you: Beth Henley is a genre-defying stylistic innovator.”  The Jacksonian, a play about the ’60s civil rights movement in her native city, Mississippi’s segregated capital, has been described as a noir play with a twisty and fragmented plot that depicts extreme violence; Ridiculous Fraud was dubbed a “crackpot comedy” by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times.

The gimmick in Laugh is that it mimics the antics of old movies, especially the silents and the early talkies.  The leading characters are Mabel and Roscoe, named for silent-film legends Mabel Normand (1892-1930) and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle  (1887-1933).  Other characters are composites or parodies of Hollywood figures in the stars’ lives and the early film industry.  After the work on The Jacksonian, a play the Washington Post’s Nelson Pressley describes as “a pitch-dark noir comedy with sex and drugs and a 1964 Mississippi murder,” Henley says, “I was exhausted to the extent I wasn’t sure I wanted to write another play.”  After living with The Jacksonian, which American Theatre senior editor Rob Weinert-Kendt calls “bottomlessly bleak,” the playwright thought, “I just want to laugh.”  (There was a seven-year gap following Ridiculous Fraud, the longest lay-off of Henley’s career, because the dramatist reportedly had to come to terms with her rage at the subject matter of The Jacksonian, based on her own experiences as a young girl in her hometown.)  Making people laugh, she adds, “is the most subversive thing to do,” and one thing that makes Henley laugh are old movies.  “I just love the world of film, silent film, and of vaudeville,” she confesses, so she began experimenting with “the world without any language.”  She was especially inspired by Normand and Arbuckle—Normand’s “rebellious spirit, her zest for life” and Arbuckle’s pratfalls (which are limned in Laugh by Roscoe as well as other characters).

Watching the silent comedies of Max Sennett and Hal Roach “just made me feel so good,” Henley asserts, and she became fascinated with a world that was just inventing itself.  She also wanted to “explore identity,” the way we reveal and disguise ourselves to others, especially the way actors take on alternative personas.  “So I imagined an ensemble of actors to tell this story,” Henley continues, “and I have two main characters who take on disguises themselves.”  Thus was Laugh—which follows the adventures of Mabel, recently orphaned and independently wealthy, as she moves in with her greedy aunt who requires her nephew, Roscoe, to woo Mabel to control her fortune—conceived, and Schweizer’s production at Studio includes multiple disguises (including a few quick changes), falls, pies in the face (a gag Arbuckle pioneered in film), and other staples of vaudeville, music hall, and old flicks.  Normand and Arbuckle, who made many film together, also both worked extensively with (and for) Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.  The staging shows quite a few instances of one actor or another channeling Chaplin and, it seemed to me, Stan Laurel and Margaret Dumont.  As director Schweizer, whom Henley affirms she’s known and admired for many years and with whom she did a workshop in Palo Alto, California, observes, “It’s derived from a deep affection for silent movie and early talkie culture.”

As a tribute to old movies, the two-hour, episodic Laugh (which includes one intermission) is twice too long to sustain its internal humor.  Unless you’re an indefatigable fan of old flickers—and I’m not all that fond of the silents, myself—the conceit wears thin before the first hour ends.  But Henley purports to have other ideas on her mind.  In her interview with the Studio literary director, the playwright states that Laugh “is a play about love, and about understanding yourself.”  It’s also about greed and power—and who wields it (Normand was one of the first female movie stars to take control of her own career and start her own production company)—and the disparity between the illusion of Hollywood glamour and glitter and the gritty, sometimes nasty reality.  (The play includes a slo-mo orgy, certainly a reference to the scandalous party that derailed Arbuckle’s career, and a shooting much like the one that tarnished Normand’s reputation.)  The problem I had was that Henley’s purported themes seem secondary to the set-up and aren’t all that strongly delineated.  They’re also not really topics that aren’t often explored in other plays, stories, films, and even TV shows.  The result is that the theatrical framework, the homage to old movies and old Hollywood, overpowers the dramatic content.  To borrow a line I quoted in the report on my last theater experience, Charles Mee’s Big Love, if the movie parody is Henley “scaffolding” the way Greek tragedy was for Mee, and she “threw away the scaffolding” as he says he does, Laugh would simply collapse because there’s not enough substance left to keep it standing.  (Unless, as I said, you’re really queer for old flicks.)

None of this is the fault of the performances (unlike, say, the problem I had with the Studio production of McRaney’s Choir Boy).  Schweizer’s six actors do yeoman’s work and more as the director seems to have encouraged his talented company to reach for the rafters.  Not only do they execute the technical demands of Schweizer’s Laugh, the physical comedy, but they handle Henley’s overbaked lines, which she herself describes as “influenced by the written dialogue cards between the scenes in the silent films,” with conviction and grace—if that’s the word to describe what transpires in Henley and Schweizer’s slapstick universe.  I don’t know the work of any of this cast, so I can’t say if Laugh marks a stretch for any of them or if they are all accustomed to this kind of extreme acting, but in either instance, they all did magnificent jobs with their roles (and four of the actors play multiple roles over the span of the play). 

As Mabel, the ward of a prospector in the California Gold Rush who’s suddenly orphaned in a mining explosion that also leaves her wealthy, Helen Cespedes starts off as a crude, simple pumpkin, though one with native wiles that come in pretty handy soon enough, and ends up a Hollywood sophisticate who calls herself Masha Snow.  Throughout, however, she’s self-reliant, strong, oddly pure (even as she nearly gets roped into a “pornographic Valentine” scheme that she essentially turns to her own advantage), and true to herself.  Cespedes’s hillbilly miner comes off a little over-the-top, but since all the personas are caricatures and travesties anyway, this is a small cavil.  Opposite her is Creed Garnick’s Roscoe, the butterfly-chasing sissy ward of the brother-and-sister team of Uncle Oscar and Aunt Octobra Defoliant who’s about to be married off to a presumed heiress, the ludicrous and monumentally unattractive Miss Bee Sunshine (until Aunt Octobra discovers the fiancée doesn’t actually have any money!).  As Roscoe admits, he’s a devout coward but he’s devoted to movies and if some of Roscoe’s transformations seem inexplicable, Garnick, whose versatility seems boundless (he comes mighty close to Jefferson Mays’s turn as Montague Navarro in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love & Murder; see my report on 16 October 2014), executes them with panache and glee, papering over many a small defect in the writing. 

Mabel, too, is captivated by the movies and she and Roscoe spend all the ready cash she’s brought with her on them when she, too, becomes a ward of the Defoliants (to keep her around and happy, Aunt Octobra offers to subsidize her movie tickets).  The two cinephiles essentially learn about life by imitating the movie scenes they seem to channel.  But while Mabel transforms herself from rude bumpkin to Hollywood star, essentially taking on a new identity, it’s Garnick’s Roscoe who takes on the many disguises and temporary personas of, say, Chaplin in many of his films.  (Consider 1925’s Gold Rush, for instance, in which Chaplin played The Lone Prospector, who in turn played an explorer, waiter, valet, millionaire, dancer, and lover, among others.)  Some of Roscoe’s changes take place in view of us, so we get to witness his alteration.  (Mabel’s shift happens off stage, during the intermission.)  In performance, the main difference between the transformations is that Mabel’s is a change of character to a degree—Cespedes essentially plays two different ones, Mabel and Masha, even though her core remains unaltered—while Roscoe’s are merely disguises, so Garnick’s character remains visible throughout even as his role alters (however superficially—after all, this is a farce, not a tragicomedy!).  Both actors handle the demands flawlessly.

It’d be nearly impossible in a relatively short report to detail all the roles and characterizations handled by the four-actor ensemble, but I’ll spotlight a few, with the understanding that this selection is not a judgment of their quality.  Evan Zes starts off as Curley P. Curtis, Mabel’s uncle and the miner who dies discovering a rich strike in California that precipitates the events that follow.  Near the end of act one, Zes does a turn as a succession of women auditioning for that pornographic Valentine series.  (One reviewer affirms that this “is an actor having some serious fun with his roles.”)  He dons a series of outrageous costumes, revealing his masculine chest and muscular legs (think Corporal Klinger on MASH or the dancers of Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo), each more outré that the preceding one.  He’s also Masha’s mentor and director when she becomes a silent film star in act two and he’s as demanding as any fictional parody of von Stroheim while at the same time, (literally) madly in love with his creation.

Felicia Curry first shows up as Miss Bee Sunshine, Roscoe’s one-time fiancée, a grotesque with missing teeth, dressed in a preposterous yellow dress only a costume designer with a peculiar sense of humor could have devised.  She also embodies the pornographer’s rifle-slinging cowboy assistant (there must be something in the juxtaposition of a female actor in drag in the same scene as Zes’s female drag turn—but I can’t suss it out) with considerable swagger (all the more noticeable because Curry’s a small woman) and a panoply of other characters such as the film director’s angry wife.  (A quick note here: the supporting ensemble of Studio’s Laugh is the product of color-blind as well as gender-blind casting.  Just as women play men and vice versa, the roles aren’t assigned with any consciousness to race.  It’s simply irrelevant.)

As the Defoliants (named, I suppose, because their rapaciousness and greed operates at a scorched-earth level—but that’s just a guess), Jacob Ming-Trent and Emily Townley depict perhaps two of the most eccentric characters I’ve encountered on any stage in recent memory.  Ming-Trent, a portly man, never moves without an armchair attached to his butt (possibly a comment on “Fatty” Arbuckle who refused to perform roles in which his size—he, too, was a large man—was the source of humor, such as being stuck in a doorway or a chair).  Ming-Trent also appears as the pornographer, whom Mabel blackmails into becoming her butler in Hollywood, and later as a Hollywood dowager in the mold of Margaret Dumont.  (It’s he, not Townley, who seems to have channeled Groucho Marx’s foil.)  Townley’s Aunt Octobra  may be one of the nastiest villains on any current stage and the actress portrays her with a single-mindedness that suggests you don’t want to get in her sights.  She may be poisoning Uncle Oscar and she certainly intends to do away with the wealthy Mabel—after marrying her off to the now-eligible Roscoe.  Octobra’s demise comes when she starts scarfing down bon-bons, initially brought out for Roscoe to woo Mabel with, and accidentally swallows the diamond ring she gave her nephew to propose to Mabel with.  The look of realization on Townley’s face when she understands what’s happened—Roscoe, Mabel, and Oscar have all fled—is almost priceless.  Townley handles many other roles as well.

Schweizer keeps the proceedings moving apace, but they lack the sharp edges and split-second timing that this kind of slapstick parody needs to be really effective.  The director imparted the requisite style to his cast, and they seem to have gotten into the world of the play, but it's soft and mushy overall.  Schweizer, who’s directed both opera and performance art as well as theater for 40 years, should have the wherewithal to get this right, but he seems to have missed the bull’s-eye by several inches. 

In another nod to classic silent films, Henley includes a score of original piano music in her performance text for Laugh.  Composed and performed live on stage (albeit on the periphery of the action) by Wayne Barker (2012 Tony nomination and 2011 Drama Desk Award for his music for Peter and the Starcatcher), who also acts not so much as Narrator (as he’s credited in the program) than as a living title card announcing the time and settings or little labels for scenes, the music is so reminiscent of the accompaniment for the silents that I thought at first Barker was using existing music.  (According to the Washington Post, this gig came out of early readings of the play, presented last August at Vassar College’s New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater with Schweizer already in the director’s chair, and apparently stuck.  Assuming there are revivals of Laugh, I can’t imagine Barker himself will play them—except maybe a New York première.)  Barker’s playing and discontinuous patter helps keep Laugh flowing and smoothes over the gaps in the sometimes disjointed action.

Andromache Chalfant’s set, a changing but essentially unit environment that evokes the locales—the mine, the Defoliants’ rural home, the porn studio in the middle of nowhere, a train car, and so on—and still lets us imagine a silent-movie set, is open enough to permit plenty of movement, including pratfalls and a couple of stage fights (Joe Isenberg is the fight director and Elena Day is the movement consultant) on the Mead’s smallish stage.  (Set pieces are changed in view of the audience by stagehands who behave much like movie-set grips: noisily and unapologetically.)  Paired with Michael Lincoln’s lighting, the performance environment is effectively apt.  Add the often outrageous costumes of Frank Labovitz, of which Miss Bee Sunshine’s absurd yellow dress and Zes’s three crazy sex-worker outfits were standouts, and the look of Laugh is perhaps the best part of the whole show (with the possible exception of the acting). 

The press was decidedly mixed nearly across the board.  Nearly all the reviewers praised Henley’s invocation of the old movies and her revival of slapstick, but almost all of them also remarked that Laugh is episodic and disjointed, barely holding together as a play.  Headlines and subheads read “Equal parts funny and peculiar” (Washington Post) and “Though the laughs in Studio Theatre’s ‘Laugh’ may be strained at times, the quirky play is pleasant” (Washington Life Magazine).  The sentiment was just about universal.  The Post’s Pressley, for example, after reporting “zest in the wordplay and some brave over-the-top performances,” laments, “The absurdities don’t always cohere.”  Labeling the play “oddball,” Pressley adds, “The fussy throwback stagecraft feels as if it is jostling with Henley’s writing,”  and concludes, “It’s intriguing, and yes, there are real laughs.  But it all keeps hitting jarring potholes; it’s pretty peculiar.”

In the Washington City Paper, Chris Klimek, calling Laugh a “throwback” (a word Postman Pressley also used), describes the production as “a Muppety assemblage of outrageous zut alors! accents, awful fake beards, pendulous fake boobs, and cream-pies-in-faces.”  Schweizer’s Laugh is “staged and performed with a vigor and precision that frequently gels into a persuasive illusion of effortlessness,” continues Klimek in probably the area’s most positive notice, “and unless you’re an incurable sourpuss you’ll probably have a good time.”  (I guess that tells me, huh?)  The cast’s “energy never wanes, even when what seems like it would make a delightful 85-minute one-act stretches out to a mildly enervating two hours and 15 minutes.”   Chuck Conconi acknowledges in Washington Life Magazine that “without question, ‘Laugh’ is quirky, but in spite of all the pratfall antics, it is pleasant, but the laughs are often strained.”  Conconi concludes, “‘Laugh’ is disjointed, sometimes funny, sometimes strained” and that Schweizer’s “direction lacked the split-second timing necessary to take advantage of the play’s madcap demands.” 

On Examiner.com, Kyle Osborne labels Laugh “a love letter to pratfalls and props, to double-takes and dreams of Hollywood and striking it rich.  And pies in the face.”  Praising the performances and some of Schweizer’s and Henley’s bits, however, Osbourne reports, “But these bits of brilliance feel more like vignettes than a cohesive story, which makes it hard to get inside the proceedings.”  The cyber reviewer explains that the audience seemed more amused by “the meta tone” (by which I assume he’s referring to the recreation on a live stage of silent-movie scenes and business) and also observes (as did several other reporters) that pianist-composer-narrator Wayne Barker “may have gotten more laughs than anyone else onstage.”  Jayne Blanchard opens her review in DC Theatre Scene by stating that playwright Henley “slips on the banana peel trying to recreate the side-splitting in Laugh.”  Though she says, “It’s worthwhile to dodge the myriad potholes along P Street to take in Laugh,” the DCTS reviewer goes on to note that the “florid dialogue often sounds like it was composed with a calligraphy pen” and that the play “lurches along episodically” to the extent that it “doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a sendup or a stylistic experiment.”  Blanchard sums the experience up by asserting, “Aside from some daffy bits—and you don’t know whether to give credit to Henley or the cast’s demented inventiveness—Laugh is more strange than funny.”

MD Theatre Guide’s Roger Catlin warns that Studio’s première of Laugh is “not always a smooth road to laughter,” opining, “It almost feels like she’s trying anything that works after a while, and in comedy such perceived desperation can dry up the mirth.”  After a litany of ideas that don’t quite work, Catlin concludes, “Laugh is good for one or two, even if it strings things a bit too long.”  In the first paragraph of his DC Metro Theater Arts review, Robert Michael Oliver asserts that the play “elicits laughter, a good deal of it—nay, an excellent amount if the play were only 100 minutes long and tight as a pair of lips suppressing a laugh.”  Then he goes on, “Unfortunately, Henley’s new farce reaches 2 hours and has too much air, not enough invention, and way too many scene changes to gather any momentum.”  Oliver does back off slightly, though, to concede, “Now, none of this is to say that there isn’t a lot to like about Laugh,” naming the design team and the cast as high points, but then he comes back to complain, “What Laugh doesn’t have is the clarity and joy that a farce requires.”  The DCMTA review-writer finds that director Schweizer doesn’t pace the performance “quickly enough” but admits that “Laugh is a pleasant enough theatrical experience,” even though “you’ll find no humor-catharsis in” the production.

In the New York-based cyber press, Pamela Roberts writes on Broadway World that “Laugh, like a frontier tumbleweed, is a bit aimless, loosely formed and messy.”  Roberts expected “movement and pace to be at the forefront,” she explains, but found “the play is far more rooted in language.”  Describing the Studio production as “over-long” for something labeled “slapstick,” it “needs to be trimmed,” Roberts believes.  Nonetheless, given Henley’s talents for “heightened language and quirkiness,” the BWW reviewer acknowledges, “Laugh has some fine moments.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Susan Berlin writes that Laugh “is a valentine to early cinema” that includes Henley’s “familiar way of finding humor in the outrageous” that Studio premières “with a sincere heart.”  Berlin expressly praised the “solidly entertaining and heartfelt performances,” especially of Cespedes and Garnick. 

I probably shouldn’t make predictions (I’m usually not good at them), but I’ll dare to say that if Laugh makes a move to New York off of this début, it won’t fare well.  One reason Henley (and others) sometimes première their new plays in small, out-of-the-limelight theaters (and that’s not a comment on their quality) is that it’s safer than a New York City preem (or even a Chicago, San Francisco, New Haven, or Cambridge opening) because, first, it’s less heavily scrutinized and, second, the press is kinder (that’s particularly true in comparison to New York City).  You can see that the Capital area reviewers weren’t well-disposed to Laugh; if you know the New York scene, you can imagine how our theater desks will cover the play.  (Personally, I can’t see why any major theater in New York would want to produce Laugh as it now stands.  My companions at Studio that Sunday afternoon asked the Big Question directly: why did David Muse, Studio’s artistic director, choose to put Laugh up at his troupe?  Did he read it and say, ‘I really have to do this play,’ they wondered.  Despite that response, however, he did, and some AD in the Big Apple might make the same decision—because it’s a Beth Henley script, a new play, an actors’ play, or any other nonce rationale.)  Should any theater present Henley’s play, without substantial rewrites and—sorry, Schweizer—a change of director, it’ll get lambasted in the reviews and disappoint audiences and subscribers in droves.  (It may be revealing that several Studio spectators left at intermission and I heard others contemplating that choice.)  The author said she needed to write the play essentially to decompress from her previous effort.  Well, now she has.  I hope it worked for her, because I don’t think it’ll have much of a stage life after its Washington run.  If I were a betting man . . . .

Perspectives on Science

[I’m no scientist.  I even stopped being any good at it in school when we hit physics in my junior year.  But it’s always fascinated me—especially when it comes to things like new discoveries and using the techniques of the arts and humanities to teach or communicate science.  People who ignore or even disparage science are another interest of mine—I don’t get how even moderately educated people can take that attitude.  So the two recent articles below, one from the Washington Post and the other from the New York Times, caught my attention.  So I downloaded them saved them for use on ROT, and now’s a good opportunity to share them with the blog’s readers.] 

“WHY AMERICANS ARE SO DUBIOUS ABOUT SCIENCE”

by Joel Achenbach

[The article below first appeared in the “Outlook” section of the  Washington Post of 15 February 2015.]

The Post’s Joel Achenbach says the evidence often conflicts with our experience

There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview — and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol” — to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force.

Ripper: “Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?”

Mandrake: “Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.”

Ripper: “Well, do you know what it is?”

Mandrake: “No. No, I don’t know what it is, no.”

Ripper: “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?”

The movie came out in 1964, by which time the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established and anti-fluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy. Yet half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013, citizens in Portland, Ore., one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking-water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay — a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brushers or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

To which some people in Portland, echoing anti-fluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative.

Science doubt has become a pop-culture meme. In the recent movie “Interstellar,” set in a futuristic, downtrodden America where NASA has been forced into hiding, school textbooks say the Apollo moon landings were faked.

In a sense this is not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable and rich in rewards — but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

We’re asked to accept, for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people, the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok — and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein,” they talk about Frankenfood.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy. Should we be afraid that the Ebola virus, which is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids, will mutate into an airborne super-plague? The scientific consensus says that’s extremely unlikely: No virus has ever been observed to completely change its mode of transmission in humans, and there’s zero evidence that the latest strain of Ebola is any different. But Google “airborne Ebola” and you’ll enter a dystopia where this virus has almost supernatural powers, including the power to kill us all.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle, that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing and sometimes hard to swallow. In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense — because it sure looks like the sun’s going around the Earth, and you can’t feel the Earth spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later, Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people.

Even when we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions — what researchers call our naive beliefs. A study by Andrew Shtulman of Occidental College showed that even students with an advanced science education had a hitch in their mental gait when asked to affirm or deny that humans are descended from sea animals and that the Earth goes around the sun. Both truths are counterintuitive. The students, even those who correctly marked “true,” were slower to answer those questions than questions about whether humans are descended from tree-dwelling creatures (also true but easier to grasp) and whether the moon goes around the Earth (also true but intuitive).

Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They nest in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics. We might get a prostate-specific antigen test, even though it’s no longer generally recommended, because it caught a close friend’s cancer — and we pay less attention to statistical evidence, painstakingly compiled through multiple studies, showing that the test rarely saves lives but triggers many unnecessary surgeries. Or we hear about a cluster of cancer cases in a town with a hazardous-waste dump, and we assume that pollution caused the cancers. Of course, just because two things happened together doesn’t mean one caused the other, and just because events are clustered doesn’t mean they’re not random. Yet we have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. They, too, are vulnerable to confirmation bias — the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them. Once the results are published, if they’re important enough, other scientists will try to reproduce them — and, being congenitally skeptical and competitive, will be very happy to announce that they don’t hold up. Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or an absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.

That provisional quality of science is another thing a lot of people have trouble with. To some climate-change skeptics, for example, the fact that a few scientists in the 1970s were worried (quite reasonably, it seemed at the time) about the possibility of a coming ice age is enough to discredit what is now the consensus of the world’s scientists: The planet’s surface temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 130 years, and human actions, including the burning of fossil fuels, are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause since the mid-20th century.

It’s clear that organizations funded in part by the fossil-fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics. The news media gives abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses. Not so. The (boring) truth is that science usually advances incrementally, through the steady accretion of data and insights gathered by many people over many years. So it has with the consensus on climate change. That’s not about to go poof with the next thermometer reading.

But industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why so many people reject the scientific consensus on global warming.

The “science communication problem,” as it’s blandly called by the scientists who study it, has yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe — and why they so often don’t accept the expert consensus. It’s not that they can’t grasp it, according to Dan Kahan of Yale University. In one study he asked 1,540 Americans, a representative sample, to rate the threat of climate change on a scale of zero to 10. Then he correlated that with the subjects’ science literacy. He found that higher literacy was associated with stronger views — at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce their worldviews.

Americans fall into two basic camps, Kahan says. Those with a more “egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change. In contrast, people with a “hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to — some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.

In the United States, climate change has become a litmus test that identifies you as belonging to one or the other of these two antagonistic tribes. When we argue about it, Kahan says, we’re actually arguing about who we are, what our crowd is. We’re thinking: People like us believe this. People like that do not believe this.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. “We’re all in high school. We’ve never left high school,” says Marcia McNutt. “People still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science.”

Meanwhile the Internet makes it easier than ever for science doubters to find their own information and experts. Gone are the days when a small number of powerful institutions — elite universities, encyclopedias and major news organizations — served as gatekeepers of scientific information. The Internet has democratized it, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, the Web has also made it possible to live in a “filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.

How to penetrate the bubble? How to convert science skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t help. Liz Neeley, who helps train scientists to be better communicators at an organization called Compass, says people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values. She has personal experience with this. Her father is a climate-change skeptic and gets most of his information on the issue from conservative media. In exasperation she finally confronted him: “Do you believe them or me?” She told him she believes the scientists who research climate change and knows many of them personally. “If you think I’m wrong,” she said, “then you’re telling me that you don’t trust me.” Her father’s stance on the issue softened. But it wasn’t the facts that did it.

If you’re a rationalist, there’s something a little dispiriting about all this. In Kahan’s descriptions of how we decide what to believe, what we decide sometimes sounds almost incidental. Those of us in the science-communication business are as tribal as anyone else, he told me. We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community. When I mentioned to Kahan that I fully accept evolution, he said: “Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”

Maybe — except that evolution is real. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines save lives. Being right does matter — and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences, as seen in recent weeks with the measles outbreak that began in California. The people who believe that vaccines cause autism — often well educated and affluent, by the way — are undermining “herd immunity” to such diseases as whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong since a prestigious British medical journal, the Lancet, published a study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously said on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The University of Google is where I got my degree from.”)

In the climate debate, the consequences of doubt are likely to be global and enduring. Climate-change skeptics in the United States have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming. They haven’t had to win the debate on the merits; they’ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.

Some environmental activists want scientists to emerge from their ivory towers and get more involved in the policy battles. Any scientist going that route needs to do so carefully, says Liz Neeley. “That line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,” she says. In the debate over climate change, the central allegation of the skeptics is that the science saying it’s real and a serious threat is politically tinged, driven by environmental activism and not hard data. That’s not true, and it slanders honest scientists. But the claim becomes more likely to be seen as plausible if scientists go beyond their professional expertise and begin advocating specific policies.

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else — but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

[Joel Achenbach is a science reporter at the Washington Post. A version of this essay appears on the cover of National Geographic’s March 2015 issue.]

*  *  *  *

“NEW STAGE OF PROGRESS IN SCIENCE”

by Kenneth Chang

[This report was originally published in “Science Times” of the New York Times on 3 March 2015.]

STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Martha Furie stormed into the room and huffily sat down in a chair.

“Well, you know, I’ve been working really hard, studying Lyme disease,” she said, her voice tinged with disdain, to the woman sitting in the next chair. “It’s been a long process. It’s hard to talk about it.”

The other woman, Bernadette Holdener, was somewhat befuddled. ”How does it make you feel?” she asked.

“Lyme disease?” Dr. Furie sneered. “It can have all sorts of bad things.”

The two were participating in an improvisational acting exercise a couple of Fridays ago [20 February]. But they are not aspiring actresses or comedians. Dr. Furie is a professor of pathology at Stony Brook University [State University of New York at Stony Brook], Dr. Holdener a professor of biochemistry and cell biology.

“Anyone have any inkling what is going on?” asked one of the instructors for the session — Alan Alda, the actor who played Hawkeye in the television series “M*A*S*H” more than three decades ago.

The exercise, called “Who am I?,” challenges one of the participants — Dr. Furie, in this case — to convey an unstated relationship with another, and everyone else must try to deduce the relationship. “She sounded very angry,” Dr. Holdener said.

People guessed variously that Dr. Furie was a Lyme researcher who had contracted the disease, that she just been denied tenure and was venting to the head of her department, that she was expressing passive-aggressive anger toward her spouse.

“You’re so close,” Mr. Alda said.

Dr. Furie explained that Dr. Holdener “was my long-lost sister who stole my husband away.” The other participants laughed at the convoluted, unlikely setup.

Mr. Alda said that Dr. Furie, focusing on her role as a wronged sister, intently observed her audience — Dr. Holdener — and the effect of her words. “What I find interesting about this is you’re suddenly talking about your work in a way you’ve never talked about it before,” Mr. Alda said.

The idea of teaching improv to scientists came from Mr. Alda, now a visiting professor. The objective is not to make them funny, but to help them talk about science to people who are not scientists. The exercises encourage them to pay attention to the audience’s reaction and adjust. “Not jokes, not cleverness,” Mr. Alda said. “It’s the contact with the other person.”

Mr. Alda has long held a deep interest in science. In the 1990s, he collaborated on “QED,” a play about the physicist Richard Feynman, with Mr. Alda playing Dr. Feynman.

He also hosted 11 seasons of the PBS program “Scientific American Frontiers.” In interviews with hundreds of scientists, he found that he could draw out engaging explanations. ”I didn’t go in with a list of questions,” Mr. Alda said during a public lecture at Stony Brook the night before the workshop. “I just listened to what they had to say and asked them questions that would help me understand what their work was.”

But he recalled one scientist who would switch from conversing with Mr. Alda to lecturing to the camera. “And immediately, the tone of her voice changed,” Mr. Alda said. “Her vocabulary changed. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.”

Mr. Alda started suggesting to university presidents that they teach scientists how to present their research to the public.

No one expressed interest until 2007, when Mr. Alda visited Stony Brook and met Shirley Strum Kenny, then the university’s president. “I thought, here’s my chance, I’ll go into my pitch,” Mr. Alda said. “I said, ‘What do you think? Do you think both could be taught at the same time so you can graduate accomplished scientists who are also accomplished communicators?’ And she was interested.”

The next year, he tested his improv idea at the University of Southern California on 20 graduate engineering students. The students first talked briefly about their work. “It was O.K.,” Mr. Alda said.

Then came three hours of improvisational acting exercises. At the end, the students talked about their work again. “The difference was striking,” Mr. Alda said. “They came to life, and I thought, ‘This is going to work.’ ”

Stony Brook established the Center for Communicating Science in 2009 as part of its journalism school. In addition to classes, the center started the Flame Challenge, a contest seeking compelling explanations of seemingly simple phenomena. The first year, the question was “What is a flame?” Mr. Alda asked his teacher this when he was 11, and the answer — “oxidation” — was his first experience with confusing scientific jargon. This year, the question is “What is sleep?” The winners will be named at the World Science Festival in New York in May.

In 2013, the Stony Brook program was officially named the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.

Howard Schneider, the dean of the journalism school, said science departments were initially skeptical, with many thinking improv would be a distraction.

That has changed. Two graduate programs now require students to take the center’s classes. All medical school students receive 10 hours of training.

“This is a big cultural shift,” Mr. Schneider said. In addition, four organizations — Dartmouth College, the University of Vermont, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey and the American Chemical Society — have become affiliates of the center. Other universities, inspired by Stony Brook, are considering setting up similar programs.

The ability to describe science effectively could prove key to winning research financing in the future. Last year, Stony Brook ran a competition among its younger scientists for a $200,000 prize. The four finalists, who were coached at the Alan Alda Center, pitched to a panel of distinguished scientists. The winner was Laurie T. Krug, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, who proposed studying herpes viruses associated with cancer and using nanoparticles to deliver molecules that act as scissors to cut up viral DNA.

The recent workshop was for about 40 members of the Stony Brook faculty. For the improv sessions, the group with Mr. Alda threw around imaginary balls of varying weights, mirrored one another’s movements, tried to explain a smartphone to a time traveler from the past, and talked of cherished photographs while holding up a blank white folder. In the afternoon, they broke into smaller groups to talk about how to distill and describe their own research.

Dr. Furie, who directs the graduate program in genetics, said she had started the day unsure the center’s offerings were a good use of time for her graduate students.

“Now, I’m convinced,” she said. And she got to play the role of the wronged sister.

“That was crazy,” Dr. Furie said. “I’m actually not a person who puts myself out there. I can’t believe I did that.”

[Kenneth Chang is a science reporter for the New York Times, covering chemistry, geology, solid state physics, nanotechnology, Pluto, plague and other scientific miscellany. He attended the science writing program at University of California at Santa Cruz. He worked at The Los Angeles Times, the Greenwich Time in Connecticut, The Newark Star-Ledger and ABCNEWS.com prior to joining the Times in 2000.]