News: Article: Watching wisdom
- From: "Robert Karl Stonjek" <rstonjek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:59:39 -0400 (EDT)
Watching wisdom
Posted by Elie Dolgin
[Entry posted at 12th June 2009 04:47 PM GMT]
As young assistant professors in the Harvard biology department of the
1950s and 60s, the eminent biologists James Watson and Edward O. Wilson
famously didn't get along, to say the least. Wilson once called Watson "the
most unpleasant human being I have ever met." Watson, in turn, dismissed
Wilson as little more than a "stamp collector." Over the past few decades,
the two have made amends, and that rapprochement came to a dramatic climax
last night (June 11) at the World Science Festival in New York City.
MacArthur-winning actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith reenacted
interviews she had conducted with the two researchers, in her piece entitled
"Watching Wilson and Watson," and she breathed into her performance all the
genius, humanity, and brutal honesty that exemplifies these two luminaries
of the natural sciences.
"It was a big deal to get a chance to meet what you in science would
call giants," Deavere Smith, the New York University dramatist, told The
Scientist. "It was incredibly memorable and an important part of my
journey."
The lights came up to reveal Deavere Smith, who's best known for her
documentary-style acting in which she melds journalism and theater to create
verbatim extract performances of the subjects she interviewed, seated on a
stately wooden desk chair. Dressed in a white collared shirt, a beige
jacket, hitched-up black slacks, white socks and tan sneakers, she embodied
the grandfatherly warmness and wisdom of Wilson. With pursed lips and a deep
Southern drawl, she pontificated on Wilson's "hardscrabble" childhood (his
words), his Harvard days, the backlash toward sociobiology -- the discipline
he founded -- and his fragmented relationship with Watson. Through one
seemingly unending sentence, Deavere Smith-cum-Wilson leapfrogged though the
naturalist's eight prolific decades (Wilson turned 80 on Wednesday), yet
always returned to the original source of Wilson's fascination: ants.
"You get the sense of a grand man of science," Deavere Smith said of
interviewing Wilson in his Harvard office ahead of the show. "In many ways,
he's like a southern gentleman. He used twists of phrase that reminded me of
Tennessee Williams."
Source: TheScientist
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55761/
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek
.
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