Laura Maria Censabella (Photo: Jeff Colen)
How much do we really know about the intelligence of our fellow creatures? On Thursday, March 18 at 3:00 PM the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first reading (by invitation only) of BEYOND WORDS, the new play by Laura Maria Censabella. The play dramatizes the achievements and travails of Irene Pepperberg, the scientist responsible for breakthrough communications experiments with parrots, especially with Alex, the African Grey parrot she worked with for thirty years and chronicled in her books, Alex & Me and The Alex Studies. The playwright tells us more.
(Interview by Rich Kelley)
Take us through how BEYOND WORDS came to be.
Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex (Photo: David Carter)
I heard Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s beautiful monologue about her 30-year relationship with her African Grey parrot research subject Alex on The Moth podcast while I was working on my play Paradise. In the way that always happens when you’re struggling with one play, I thought to myself I would love to write a play about Irene and Alex, that play would be so much easier and more fun. I mean who hasn’t longed to communicate meaningfully with an animal? To my great delight the Columbia biologist I was consulting with on Paradise, Dr. Stuart Firestein knew Irene and I asked him for an introduction. Of course, actually writing the play was not easy!
Your play is unusual in chronicling the life and work of a living scientist. How closely did you work with Dr. Irene Pepperberg in writing the play? Has she seen each draft? Many of the scenes are deeply personal. Did you have any disagreements about what to include?
Irene read one draft of the play to vet the science—that is the extent of her oversight per our contract. When she hears the newest draft of the play on March 18th, she will once again give notes about the science. But before Irene gave me legal permission to write the story of her life, I had already written her a detailed letter about why I thought I was the one to write her story. We then met for lunch in Cambridge to talk about the project. After she gave me verbal permission to go ahead and I received a Sloan grant, I spent days in her lab observing her work with her birds. I had already read many of her scientific writings and had detailed questions for her so she saw that I was attentive to the facts. Additionally, before giving permission, she attended a workshop of my play Paradise which was presented at Underground Railway/Central Square Theater (prior to its world premiere there), and she liked it. I’m sure she also spoke to Dr. Firestein about me. In other words, she vetted me. She learned that I completely believed in her scientific enterprise and that I am an advocate for women’s untold stories. I told her, however, that I would have to write her faults as well as her strengths. Would she be up to that scrutiny? Irene loves the theatre and she is no novice when it comes to what makes a true and good play. She agreed but I believe she also knew that I would do everything possible to represent her in her full humanity.
Dr. Stuart Firestein
Irene and I also had other emotional connections. I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens as did Irene. Mine was a working-class family that did not have educational opportunities and yet I wound up with an Ivy League education as did Irene. Like Irene, I had a parakeet when I was young that I trained and cared for deeply and that I knew possessed intelligence. Like Irene, I have a parent who suffered from PTSD brought on by World War II. And like Irene I work at a university where I have given my heart and soul but where there is no path to tenure and therefore perpetual economic uncertainty.
Why this play? Why now?
If ever there was a time for science plays, it is now. We’re continuing to live through the tragic effects of science denial with our COVID pandemic. Irene’s life’s work is another wake-up story: the animals we live among are feeling, intelligent beings. They possess forms of intelligence that we don’t. We are all a part of this living web of consciousness, a loss of one form of intelligence is a loss for us all. Every day 150 species of plants and animals go extinct due to human activities. We have damaged and continue to damage entire ecosystems. What will it take for us to wake up? Floods, hurricanes, and ice storms of Biblical proportions beset us and we still choose to ignore the signs. The earth and animals are speaking to us—we just don’t listen.
You have decided to keep this first reading of BEYOND WORDS private. What concerns factored into that decision?
This is a play that calls for physicality from the actor playing the parrot Alex, which will call for highly abstracted bird movements created with the actor and a choreographer. We can’t convey that on Zoom. Additionally, there are a lot of shifts in time and place very quickly and we also wondered how that would translate in a reading. We wanted to protect this next step in the play’s development. However, we do have an invited audience to test the play with.
Poster for the West Coast premiere of Paradise at Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles in 2019
Another play of yours, PARADISE, has also received an EST/Sloan commission and has had productions in Cambridge, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. How did the development process for that play differ from the development process for BEYOND WORDS?
First Light is the very first reading of BEYOND WORDS outside of the EST Playwrights Unit where I bring in drafts of my work to be heard around the table and to be critiqued. I also run the Unit. It’s a safe environment composed of caring and incisive professional playwrights where we share work in its early stages. At a certain point, the play must leave that room, and I was grateful to get Linsay Firman’s and Graeme Gillis’s (co-artistic directors of EST Sloan) input on the play, and then my director Melissa Crespo’s thoughts. Beyond that, it hasn’t had any formal development. This first reading for EST/Sloan with professional actors is the beginning of that process.
In addition to working with Dr. Pepperberg, what other research did you do in writing the play?
Dr. Diana Reiss with dolphin
I’m grateful to the animal scientists I spoke to such as Diana Reiss, dolphin expert, who was generous with her time, the science, her perceptions of Irene, and her own theatre background. I then read, read and read—anything connected to animal science or animal behavior, including many scientific experiments in scientific journals. I also interviewed Elizabeth Hess, the author of Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. She helped me think about the entire animal behavior field in provocative new ways. And of course, Irene was always there to ask questions via email.
One of the scientists in the play, Howard Towers, does not get a very flattering portrayal. How do you think he’ll react to his characterization?
Luckily, Howard Towers is not a “real” scientist. All the scientists in the play are fictions with the exception of Erich Jarvis who is presented briefly and those are not his actual words. Even Irene is a fiction in that she is my Irene. However, I strove constantly to tell the scientific and emotional truth of her life.
As for the Howards in the world of science (and there are plenty of them): they have had years of accolades and exponential advantages not accorded to women scientists and scientists of color. If they recognize some negative aspects of themselves in the character of Howard, that would be a good thing although I believe they are psychologically defended from introspection or things would have changed a long time ago!
By the way, I like the character of Howard. Not in the sense that I want to hang out with him but in the way that he makes an excellent stage character. He’s relentless and charismatic in what he will do to get what he wants. He’s also, I hope, complex. He’s at a stage in his life where he is looking back and just barely allowing himself to wonder what he lost and what he damaged to get where he is. Not just by affecting other people’s careers but by affecting and damaging animals.
Dr. Pepperberg’s work involved so many breakthroughs in our understanding of the intelligence of birds and how they communicate. What did you discover as you wrote the play that surprised you the most? Was it about the science or about what’s involved in being a scientist?
Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex and his colored shapes (Photo: Jeff Topping)
I already knew about the challenges a bench scientist faces from my play Paradise so the uncertainties in the life of a scientist—and the parallels with being an artist in terms of a scientist’s creativity—were familiar to me. However, Irene’s story brought home the point of how contemptuously scientists can treat one another, especially when a colleague’s discoveries contradict their own, and the far-reaching repercussions such enmity can have on the ability to do one’s work.
One of the ongoing arguments in the play is whether Dr. Pepperberg’s close relationship with Alex undercuts her scientific findings. Where do you stand on this?
In this instance, when we’re talking about a helpless captive animal, I come down on the side of love—bearing in mind, of course, that love can cloud our judgment. However, my argument in the play and the argument of Irene’s life’s work is that she had enough outside controls and non-biased observers verifying her work. Also, for many years she treated Alex like a colleague and was completely unsentimental. It was only in the later years of Alex’s life that the emotional bond deepened so that he became the great love of her life. To be clear, her work has continued with other birds, birds that she has not had such an intense bond with, and in many cases, they have exceeded what Alex achieved. However, there are still some scientists who deny Irene’s groundbreaking accomplishments and that is what made this such a rich play to write.
You mention the organization HONOR ROLL! in your bio. What is HONOR ROLL!?
HONOR ROLL! is an action and advocacy group for women+ playwrights over 40. I’m sure you’ve heard the dire statistics about how few new plays by women are produced. As of the last count, the portion of produced plays by women is still under 25% and even lower for trans women and women of color. Although things are getting better, and numbers are slowly rising, experienced women playwrights like myself and others are now encountering ageism. Denied a seat at the table when we were younger, we are advocating for a seat at the table now that we have lived and really have something to say—and the craft to say it with.
What’s next for Laura Maria Censabella?
I just finished writing the polish for the film version of Paradise. I am also in the early stages of researching a new play partly based on my aunt who was also my godmother. She was severely disabled and had approximately 90 surgeries in her lifetime. At a certain point, against the wishes of the family, she signed up to have 12 more so that she could walk down the aisle unassisted at her son’s wedding. I want to tell the story of how she was infantilized in a close-knit Italian family, how she was cut off from disability activism and had to go it alone, and how her life changed all of us.
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.
