`The fields of theater and science have never been easy bedfellows,” says Tina Landau, the New York-based author and director of “Space,” an intense and unusual piece of conceptual theater playing at the Steppenwolf Theatre through Jan. 24.
Even though a cerebral chemist might make an unconventional tragic hero, it’s surprising that there are so few modern dramas dealing with the pursuit of factual knowledge. After all, playwrights never seem to tire of translating the plots and characters of narrative literature, or providing dramatic biographies of visual artists and philosophers, or attacking business or the government of the day, or pondering the limits of aestheticism.
So why is a new play about the very nature–and the limits–of scientific exploration so rare?
“Maybe science and theater each use two different parts of the brain,” muses Landau, a frank and energetic woman with an intense gaze. “Perhaps there’s a causal logic to science that is fundamentally at odds with the dreams upon which theater is always based.”
Or is there?
That, fundamentally, is the dramatic, philosophical and, well, scientific question posed by “Space.”
Set on a campus modeled on Harvard University, the plot of this free-wheeling new drama revolves around the mental and emotional journey of neuro-psychiatrist Allan Saunders, who runs across three therapy patients who all claim–separately–to have been abducted by aliens. This experience leads the professor, who has denied the very existence of paranormal phenomena throughout his career, into a complicated but intense relationship with research astronomer Bernadette Jump Cannon (Amy Morton).
Part of something called “Project Meta,” Morton’s character spends her time listening for extraterrestrial radio signals that would indicate the existence of life in outer space. For much of the play, the slowly declining Bernadette (who suffers from lupus) tries to persuade her disbelieving colleague to open his mind.
“This is not a play about aliens,” says Landau. “I don’t believe we have ever been visited by people from outer space. This is the story of someone who initially believes only in an exterior world, but who gradually awakens to the possibility of the existence of an internal and spiritual consciousness.”
That someone is the central character of Saunders (played by Tom Irwin), a man who learns that scientific awareness leads not to more power (as he had previously assumed), but actually to increased humility.
“Allan’s journey,” says Irwin. “takes him from a sense of absolute knowledge to complete ignorance. He comes to realize that he must accept that new state, and find his way to a simpler, more innocent place. He learns to let go of his fear, to let go of his attempt to control the universe.”
Thanks to a grandly realized production with a stark but arresting set by James Schuette that turns the Steppenwolf Theatre into a veritable planetarium, the show has a striking amount of spectacle. But Landau is not trying to create high-tech, science-fiction theater as much as probe the connection between science and the humanities, art and fact, data and dreams.
“When I started working on this piece,” Landau says, “I had no idea that I was going to get so far into the world of science. But if there is anything that I learned from running around in this territory, it’s that all disciplines are grappling with the same questions and the same fundamental problems. `Why are we here?’ `Where did we come from?’ “
Landau, of course, is better known as a director (she was responsible for the shrewdly staged version of Charles L. Mee’s “A Time to Burn” at the Steppenwolf last season) than a playwright, although she did co-write the musical, “Floyd Collins.”
(She has also just been commissioned to write and direct the film version of Rita Mae Brown’s “Rubyfruit Jungle.”)
“Space” began as a weeklong graduate theater workshop project of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., three years ago. Landau’s assignment? Walk into a room and use the simple word “space” as a starting point for a bunch of young actors. She did exactly that. The group started discussing people from outer space and reports of extraterrestrial interactions with the contemporary world. “Alien interventions,” says Landau, “were what everyone kept coming back to.” So she began writing down these ideas and preoccupations.
“I had also seen a Harvard doctor named John C. Mack on television,” Landau recalls. “He was discussing how he had been approached by people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. He talked about his own difficulty in accepting the possibility that there is something out there that cannot be explained away.”
Mack and his mental journey eventually became not only the model for the central character of Saunders, but also the major theme of “Space.”
“The first draft of the play,” Landau says, “was chock full of statistics about space, time and light. I was so excited about everything I was learning that the piece had become overly didactic. But I kept obsessing on the subject of space and reading more and more.”
The draft then sat for two years.
But when Landau was discussing with Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey what Landau should direct this year, Lavey suggested that she do something about which she could feel real passion. Landau brought out the unfinished musings on “Space” and received the go-ahead to develop further this project for Chicago.
“I didn’t have any kind of finished script in front of me,” Lavey says. “I just had Tina’s idea and her obvious enthusiasm: `Space’ seemed the thing that turned her on the most.”
Does Steppenwolf typically schedule new work for its mainstage without anyone actually seeing a finished script?
“I wouldn’t do that with many people,” says Lavey. “But I have a lot of confidence in Tina. And it was important that this theater cement its relationship with her.”
Thus began a lengthy series of rewrites and close collaborations with a group of designers whom Landau trusts to share her vision.
“Usually, directors talk to designers on an individual basis,” Landau says. “We spent time together as a complete team. I gave everyone as much freedom as possible. This is a very three-dimensional epic, and we all felt that the design work was essential to the telling of the story.”
Thus John Boesche designed a series of interactive projections–so that when an actor throws a star into the universe, one actually lands on the cyclorama. And Scott Zielinski came up with a design scheme that included briefly shining, overpoweringly bright lights in the face of the audience.
“I always considered sound to be a character in the play,” Landau says, explaining why she removed a budgeted actor from the show so that Steppenwolf could allow her to set up a full sound system (complete with a computer and a sampler) in the rehearsal room for Rob Milburn’s complex matrix of noises and music.
Throughout the process, characters came, went and diminished in stature. That initial tendency toward the overly didactic was exorcised, as were most of the boring statistics. An amalgam of multiple type faces, the latest copy of Landau’s script indicates some 20 different revisions.
The play made the Tribune’s Top 10 list for 1997, and Time magazine’s Top 5. But not everyone has been thrilled with the result. There are those, Lavey freely admits, who consider it overly sentimental and romantic–the work perhaps of a dreamer, not a hard scientist.
“But there are many people,” Lavey says, “who find the pool of scientific and other allusions in this work a real starting point for discussion and rich thought.”
“For me, the theater functions as a graduate school for life,” Landau says, “a vessel through which I ask about things. There’s no way to enter a subject like science more deeply than to do a play about it.”
After all, as the character of Allan Saunders learns to appreciate, any decent lecture is inevitably one part fact and two parts theater.
“Just like artists, scientists grapple with creativity and mythology,” Landau says. “There is no single answer to most factual questions: Science and the arts are both a mixture of faith and the spirit.”
