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Play offers engaging look into Darwin

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By Kaitlyn Rico, Contributing Writer 11:21 AM Thursday, November 5, 2009

Two Miami University professors and Oxford residents will take center stage next week in “Re: Design,” a play by Craig Baxter, which is being hosted by Miami’s Art Museum.

The play was chosen in collaboration with the museum’s Darwin Correspondence Project and its exhibition, Darwin’s Firsts, said art museum Director Bob Wicks.

“We wanted something a little bit different, something more engaging to help people understand Darwin’s views and ideas of natural selection,” Wicks said.

“Re: Design” dramatizes 30 years of correspondence between Charles Darwin and Asa Gray.

Darwin — famous for his scientific work and book on evolution, “The Origin of Species” — is played by professor emeritus of communication Luke Utter.

Gray, a Harvard scientist and a contemporary of Darwin’s, is portrayed by Howard Blanning, an assistant professor in Miami’s Theatre Department.

Blanning said the play focuses on the conflicts surrounding science and religion in the 19th century, and the views of both Gray and Darwin.

“Asa Gray is a religious man and Darwin is not, so Asa is trying to understand ‘Origin of Species’ from a point of view inside his theological context,” Blanning said.

The production is an interesting exchange between the characters, Utter said, and is an example of a reader’s theater because “neither of us will have memorized our lines.”

The conversation between the characters is done through a series of letters written to one another beginning in 1855.

Utter said that using this type of theater will allow the audience to better understand what kind of man Darwin really was.

“It will humanize Darwin and, through this correspondence, make him more accessible, perhaps, and allow people to see that he is a very interesting guy in addition to his scientific work,” Utter said.

For more information, call the museum at (513) 529-2232 or visit arts.muohio.edu/artmuseum.