The Relativity Series Bonus Episode: Interview with Playwright Amanda Quaid
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Willie Lohman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived, but he's a human being. So attention must be paid. You can stream the entire LA TheatreWorks catalog of plays. Find out more at streaming.latw.org. Hello, everyone. I'm Susan Loewenberg, producing director of LA TheatreWorks.

Eunice Newton Foote was a scientist, inventor, and advocate for women's rights who made groundbreaking discoveries about Earth's atmosphere in the 1850s. And thanks to our guest, we have a lively, fun portrait of Foote's life at the time of her experiments.

She's the author of Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays, as well as a poet, author, and teacher. Amanda Quaid, welcome to LA TheatreWorks. Thank you, Susan. How did you encounter Eunice Foote, and what inspired you to write a play about her?

It was 2020 and I was applying for an EST Sloan commission and I didn't have a topic. For those who don't know, EST Sloan commissions are for, it's a collaboration between Ensemble Theatre Works and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and they give grants to playwrights to write plays that center on scientific topics. And I think I

literally Googled undiscovered women in science or forgotten women in science or something like that. And I came across this extraordinary story of Eunice Foote, who was the first person on record to discover what we now know as the greenhouse effect of

And her discovery was really lost for decades and over 150 years until it was discovered by a retired geologist in Oklahoma in 2010. So I was fascinated by that narrative. And I set out to write a play about her and her life.

So she didn't get any credit for the discovery until you came along. She was credited when her discovery was published in 1856. She was actually the first woman to be published under her own name in an American scientific journal, which was a pretty astounding achievement. Like a lot of experiments at the time, it was published and then not really published.

capitalized on, it was sort of forgotten until John Tyndall came along three years later and published in Europe similar findings in a similar experiment. And Tyndall has been known as sort of the father of climate science in that way when we now know that Eunice Foote was doing that work much earlier. I see.

And what did your research tell you about the life of a female scientist in the 1850s? I mean, was Foote fortunate to get published or even recognized at all? She was fortunate to get published or recognized. A lot of her story is...

due to her circumstances. She was a white woman of means in the 1850s. They weren't rich, but her husband was a judge, and they sent their daughters to expensive private school. And she had leisure time. She had domestic help. She had a room of her own, as it were. And she had access to new people at these journals in order to submit her findings and help them be published.

Actually, her husband is also published in the same volume with an unfinished experiment published just after hers. So she was pretty well connected. And that was certainly to her advantage and a big part of her achievement. How true to life was your depiction of the family? I mean, did you take artistic liberties in creating these sort of wisecracking, intellectually curious characters or characters?

It was an astounding family. And what was really most unique about it was the core of this marriage, which was a husband who very much encouraged women's rights. He was one of the signatories, I believe, on the declaration at Seneca Falls demanding equal rights for women. So he was very much a feminist.

And he encouraged her and they had a, I believe a kind of sparring relationship together where they really encouraged each other's growth.

So there was a lot of intellectual curiosity in the house. Both girls, as I said, went to private school and went on to be remarkable achievers in their own way. So it did take me a long time to find what for me was the core of the story. But eventually I started focusing on each family member's ambition. And for me, the play really took shape around this question of ambition and how people grapple with the idea of legacy.

So what was Eunice Foote's involvement in women's rights? Well, she was a friend and neighbor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was a leader in the suffrage movement at the time. Eunice Foote, though she was not a public speaker, she was a signatory, along with her husband, of the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848, demanding equal rights for women. And she was a great supporter of women's suffrage.

In the play, we learn that Eunice's daughter Augusta wrote a comprehensive study of marine life. How was that received in real life, and did her work go unrecognized like her mom's?

So in 1901, Augusta came out with a book called The Sea Beach at Ebb Tide, which you can still get. I have a copy of it. It's an enormous document of drawings, these intricate little drawings, descriptions of marine life and also poetry and quotations from literature.

And it was actually promoted in the most popular children's magazine of the time. And it was very widely read and, in fact, influenced a generation of American naturalists who now credit that in their bibliographies as a real seminal work for them. She did go on to write cookbooks after that. She wrote two cookbooks. Really? Yeah. So that was her only scientific book that she wrote. But it had a big impact.

We meet a character in circumstances called the Glazier who believes in trees, sentient trees. How do his spiritual leanings fit into a science story?

Great question. So the glazier is the only invented character in the play. Everybody else is a historical figure. And at the time, I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass, which I recommend so highly. She is a scientist, a botanist, and she wrote this book, which is...

essentially about the need to have a conscious, loving, reciprocal relationship with the natural world and puts humans in a kind of web of reciprocity with the natural world while coming at that still from a scientific standpoint. And of course, proving that the idea of reciprocity with the natural world is not mutually exclusive with the scientific method.

So I was really drawn to the spiritual aspects of nature, of nature observation. And I wanted that to be a voice in the play, sort of as a counterpoint to this maybe more, so to speak, masculine approach to science as a quest to understand and master the information of the world.

I saw that in Augusta's work in the sea beach at Ebtide. I saw a very spiritual approach to science. Science is a kind of wholly watching or witnessing and a detail appreciation. And I see that as a real break from her culture's inclination to patents and putting a stamp on everything. So I introduced the glacier to

to pique that interest in Augusta and to have a spiritual voice in the play. I'm fascinated by the idea of spiritual and science. They seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, as it were. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Well, my favorite scientific readings, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer's books, really lead you back to wonder. They start from a place of wonder, and then the more deeply you go into the science, the more wonder there is. And rather than saying that to study the natural world is to understand everything and take mystery away, I think the more deeply we look, the more mystery there is to be found. And to me, that's a profoundly spiritual experience.

Finally, what do you want people to come away with after meeting Eunice Foote and learning about her groundbreaking environmental work? Whenever I get asked what I want people to come away with, I'm always hesitant to answer because I think I'm always more interested in hearing what people do come away with than in prescribing something for them to learn. But I think the

For me, what was most interesting off the bat about the story was that this was somebody who had been sort of undiscovered for a long time or whose legacy had been forgotten. And it piques my interest to think about how many other stories like that are out there and what we can do to uncover them. So, Amanda, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you, Susan.

We've been speaking with Amanda Quaid, author of Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays.