Amanda Quaid
Kicking off the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival on Thursday, February 25 will be the first public reading (free on Zoom) of CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE HEAT OF THE SUN'S RAYS, a new play by Amanda Quaid. The play takes its title from the path-breaking 1856 paper by amateur scientist, inventor, and women’s rights activist Eunice Newton Foote. In a two-page report on her innovative experiments, Foote became the first to identify carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and as the principal cause of global warming. A pioneer of climate science, she remains largely unknown . . . until this play. Let’s have the playwright tell us more.
(Interview by Rich Kelley)
Tell us how you came to write this play. When and how did you first hear about Eunice Foote?
I wanted to apply for a Sloan commission, but I didn’t have a topic. I think I actually googled “undiscovered women in science” or something like that. Climate science is a big interest for me, so when I chanced upon an article about Eunice Foote, I knew that was the story I wanted to tell.
What kind of research did you do? Did you use a consultant?
Samuel McKenzie
In my early research, I reached out to the Brookside Museum in Saratoga Springs, where Eunice had lived. They put me in touch with a researcher named Samuel McKenzie, who specializes in Eunice’s life and work. He generously shared many resources with me—a biographical report he wrote for the museum, photographs, letters, maps, and an analysis of the experiments. In addition to being a great researcher, he had a keen sense of story and an intuition about the kind of material that might be relevant to a playwright. I’m beyond grateful to Sam, and when he finally read the play and liked it (with notes, of course), I breathed a sigh of relief.
Why this play? Why now?
It’s interesting. She’s having something of a cultural renaissance. I just read a wonderful new book about women in the climate movement called All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, and it starts with Eunice’s story, portraying her as a kind of founding mother of climate science. From the beginning, women have been pioneers in this movement, and they’re stepping into leadership roles today at an unprecedented rate. This play is a kind of origin story. But hopefully, it’s more than a history lesson. At its heart, it’s about a family’s ambition—hers, her husband’s, her daughters’—and how that pans out for all of them in unexpected ways. I think most people can relate to that on some level.
There are many ways to write a play about a scientist. You chose to tell it very much through her dynamics with her family. Was that your original concept or one that evolved?
It took a lot of different incarnations, and I struggled at first to find the story. Since I was writing most of this during the first COVID lockdown, and I have a toddler, it was a feat just to get an hour of writing behind a closed door. So I started with a scene about Eunice not being able to get the privacy she needed, and it unfolded from there. I’m fascinated by her marriage because her husband was a feminist and her greatest supporter. Their bond was unusual and complex, and it completely upended expectations I had about marriage in the 1800s. I wanted to make it central to the play.
Researchers contend this may be the only known photograph of Eunice Newton Foote
In her book, Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British women in science, 1800–1900, Mary Creese notes that just sixteen papers in physics were published by American women in the 19th century; only two were published before 1889 and both were written by Eunice Foote. So how is it possible that her remarkable contribution to climate science could lay unappreciated for more than a hundred years until a petroleum geologist rediscovered it in 2011?
It's a great mystery. And it does certainly make you wonder how many other Eunice Footes are out there.
Eunice was not only a trailblazing woman scientist but also an early woman’s rights activist who signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Settlements (along with her husband) in 1848. How did knowing that affect your characterization of Eunice?
I think it helps her push herself to publish at a time when women didn’t. It gives her confidence and a sense of herself as a role model. But I treaded lightly with this theme. It’s tempting to read her story—the difficulty she had getting recognized, how her work was overshadowed by a male British scientist—as all about gender injustice—and in a sense, to dismiss it on that account as well, just because we’ve seen that story so many times. I felt strongly that the play have a wider scope. She’s not an activist who happens to be a scientist. She’s a scientist first whose understanding of the state of women’s rights colors the way she maneuvers in her field.
Because Eunice Foote was the first scientist to discover the impact increased levels of carbon dioxide could have on the atmosphere, your play includes ways to call attention to the difference in CO2 levels in 1856 and today. What do you want the audience to take away from CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE HEAT OF THE SUN'S RAYS?
The CO2 levels interest me because people think of the rise of CO2 as such a modern phenomenon. To learn that the level was also creeping up back then and that she was unaware of that, even as she made this crucial discovery—adds a layer of irony to the story. But there’s not one specific thing I hope people will take away. I just hope they’re entertained and leave with something that has meaning for them—whether that’s a story about parents and children, ambition, women’s history, science, or something else entirely.
Chart courtesy of www.sealevel.info https://www.sealevel.info/co2_and_ch4.html
In CIRCUMSTANCES, the character of the glazier introduces the idea that trees are sentient, the theme of one of my favorite books, The Overstory by Richard Powers. You have also written a wonderful online guide to the Great Trees of Central Park. Might we be seeing a play from you about trees at some point?
How funny you should ask! That’s all I can say at the moment. But there’s a great quote by the poet Robinson Jeffers in his poem “Carmel Point:”
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
I’m trying to do a little bit of that. The Overstory is one of my favorite novels, too.
You are also a “not only” in being both an actor and a playwright. How does your experience as an actor influence your playwriting? And does it also work the other way: does your playwriting inform your acting?
Being an actor probably helps with writing dialogue. I can tell if a scene is working by reading it out loud—though I’m sure other playwrights who aren’t actors also do that. As for playwriting informing acting, it’s always humbling to be in another seat in the room—you see the process from an entirely different angle. It makes me a more informed colleague.
Poster for the Heartbeat Opera workshop production of The Extinctionist
What’s next for Amanda Quaid?
An opera libretto I wrote called The Extinctionist, based on a short play I had in the EST Marathon, is having a public workshop at Heartbeat Opera this May.
The 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.
