Thursday, September 26, 2024 11:30am
About
R. Haze Hunter Conference Center, 301-557 W University Blvd, Cedar City, UT 84720, USA
https://www.suu.edu/apex/Lauren M. Gunderson is one of the most produced playwrights in America since 2015 topping the list thrice including 2022/23. She is a two-time winner of the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award for I and You and The Book of Will, the winner of the Lanford Wilson Award and the Otis Guernsey New Voices Award, a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Arthur L. Weissberger Award, and John Gassner Award for Playwriting. Her musical adaptation of The Time Traveller’s Wife premiered on The West End last year. Revolutionary Women, her new anthology of five plays, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. She studied Southern Literature and Drama at Emory University, and Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School where she was a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. Her play The Catastrophist, about her husband virologist Nathan Wolfe, premiered digitally in January 2021 and is now in The COVID Art Capsule in the Library of Congress. She co-authored the Miss Bennet trilogy with Margot Melcon. The Half-Life of Marie Curie premiered off-Broadway and at Audible.com. Her work is published at Playscripts (I and You; Exit Pursued By A Bear; The Taming and Toil And Trouble), Dramatists Play Service (The Revolutionists; The Book of Will; Silent Sky; Bauer, Natural Shocks, The Wickhams and Miss Bennet) and Samuel French (Emilie). Her picture book Dr Wonderful: Blast Off to the Moon is available from Two Lions/Amazon. She is the book writer for musicals with Dave Stewart and Joss Stone (The Time Traveler’s Wife), Ari Afsar (Jeannette and I and You), Joriah Kwamé (Sinister), Kira Stone (Built for This) and Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk (Justice and Earthrise). She is a board member of The Playwrights Foundation, and a member of the Aspen Institute Science and Society cohort. LaurenGunderson.com
Synopsis
The SUU Eccles APEX presentation on September 6th featured Playwright Lauren Gunderson. Her presentation was titled “Theatre as Thought Experiment: Timeless Discoveries in New Plays”.
Lauren Gunderson is one of the most produced playwrights in America. She is a two-time winner of the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, winner of the Lanford Wilson Award, and many more. Gunderson also serves as a member of The Playwrights Foundation.
Gunderson began her presentation sharing her love of theatre, specifically “it’s conversation and tension, creatively speaking, with the ideas and the history and the process of science”. She began outlining the difference between a ‘playwrite’ and a ‘playwright’. She says, “although yes we are full of creativity, we are full of vision, we are full of poetry and sometimes song, what we really are are builders, we are makers of story, we are story engineers”. She discussed the process of engineering a play, and stated that “plays are basically people versus problems”.
She dove into what a ‘thought experiment’ is, and presented a slide that said Einstein would call his daydreams “thought experiments”. She also presented the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy definition: “thought experiments are devices of the imagination used for hypothesis, exploration, analysis, or just entertainment”. She stated that stories as thought experiments works because “stories are tools to understand, build, and sustain society through safe, meaningful—and for plays—embodied imagination.”
She discussed fiction, and why we create fiction at all, saying that the thought experiment allows us “To live all lives. To test all choices. To feel all emotions. To conquer all devils. To taste all victories. To love all loves.” She stated that we get to feel so much with the tool of theatre, quoting Einstein who said, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions”. This, she argues, is the tool.
She presented dramatic structure as scientific method, saying “dramatic structure can also be understood in terms of scientific method because the thought experiment works in both fields”. She did point out one difference, though, which is that in engineering a play “unlike in science, I get to design the experiment toward the proof I want”.
She said that theatre “allows us to do some incredible things”, and that through thought experiment we are able to time travel, life-travel, love-travel, grief-travel, hate-travel, and danger-travel. She also stated that “theatre allows us to emotionally resonate with consequences of potential action and inaction”, and that “theatre is a preview and review of life’s critical explorations of the heart and state”.
She finished her presentation saying, “I hope that all of those timeless themes and all of the wonder that theatre allows, you feel welcome in the experiment”.
The event finished with a Q&A with SUU Executive Director for Community & Workforce Development, Melinda Pfundstein. Gunderson expanded further on ideas of building and facilitating empathy in her plays, creativity and the creative process, collaboration, the intersections of art, science, and history, and the progress of theatre.