In advance of the event, Guy Glass has had the opportunity to speak with Margo Weishar about her play: 

Guy: 
Hello Margo. It is such a pleasure to speak with you. For anyone who may be deciding if they want to come to the reading, can you tell us a bit about the play and the subject matter? And about how you became interested in writing about Elizabeth Blackwell. 

Margo: 
What really interests me is people who break out of the norm. 
People who do things that are completely extraordinary, and what motivates them to do that, and what is their personal cost in doing that. 
Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and then she had a career in promoting women in medicine. But I also wanted to show her as a human being. The only pictures we have are of an old woman, but she was a vital, curious, intelligent, daring, brave person who fought against incredible odds to get where she was. And so that’s who I really wanted to investigate. You know, we all rely on these pioneers to break barriers down so that people like me can walk through them. But what does it take from them to do that? What are the choices they had to make in your own lives to make that possible? So that was the question that really ended up fascinating me. 
 

I got a theater degree because it was something I’ve always done in my life, and I decided I really wanted to formally go and learn. And when I started working with playwright Michael Hollinger, I took a class on solo performance. 
I always loved historical fiction, and I liked plays that were based on historical women. And so, I thought I’ll look at Elizabeth Blackwell as a subject for this solo performance. I started researching and found there was a wealth of primary source information. Not only she, but also her sister Emily became a doctor, and then a lot of her other family members were prominent. There are letters between the nine brothers and sisters in collections at Harvard and at Oxford which I could read online. The more I read and the more material I looked at, the more I felt, wow…this woman had an amazing life! After I did the solo performance, I started developing it as a play. And I really liked where it was going and refined it to the point where I had a public reading at Villanova in May of 2024. 

Guy: 
As you know, I am also a physician-playwright. There are not all that many of us! Can you say something about what it was like as a doctor transitioning to becoming a playwright? Do you feel like you have a special perspective because of being a doctor?  

Margo: 
I feel like my life has had two parallel tracks because I grew up around theater and performing. My father was a scenic designer who was a graduate of Yale Drama School. I am the first and only doctor in my family. I was always that kid who was good at science, but also the lead in the play. I produced and directed the first musical production at Penn med school ever: Sondheim’s Company with a full orchestra, which we put on with all the med students. So, it was always part of my life even during my medical training, although there was a time when I had to kind of put it on the back shelf. 

As far as playwriting, I feel very passionate about telling certain stories that haven’t been told. And now as a woman who has lived a life, had a career, raised three children, and now has a grandchild, I have a lot of life experience. I felt like that kind of voice is somewhat rare in the playwriting world, especially telling stories about women. And especially about women in science. I’ve had the opportunity to play on stage Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who is credited with developing the first computer and the first computer language. 
I’ve played Maria Sibylla Merian, an artist and biologist in the 1700’s, who drew beautiful studies of insects and plants.
I directed a play about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a Harvard astronomer in the early 1900’s. I’ve always been fascinated by these incredibly accomplished women who history has ignored. I really felt like that was my impetus for trying my hand at it. I didn’t know if I’d be any good at it. But having my work read by others I could see it was starting to reverberate with people. People were liking it and I was liking what I was hearing. The whole skill was very new to me and quite surprising. 

Guy: 
One of the things I don’t think people who are outside the theater world realize is just how long the development process of a play can take. In what way do you hope the reading at the College of Physicians will help you, and what do you expect will happen next? 

Margo: 
I have another amazing mentor, Ed Sobel, a professor at Villanova and a professional dramaturg. Ed has been working with me on focusing and refining the play. And it is just an amazing thing for me to work with somebody who is so great at what he does. Because he’s asking me questions and really trying to focus on what the essential story is that I want to tell. Having good actors is another good thing. The way people say things will help me to streamline.  

And of course, the last and most important element is how it plays to an audience, somebody who’s seeing it and hearing it for the very first time, what they will come away with and whether I can achieve the emotional impact of what I’m trying to say. As you know, things can be back to the drawing board after that experience. I might hear certain things that really hit perfectly or other things I never even considered. It’s not like a novel, where you finish it, you publish it, and it goes out in the public. You can have multiple full productions before you publish a script because sometimes something doesn’t work in a production. Maybe it’s just the wrong actors. And then you go see it somewhere else and you think, no, that scene was great. You have to see it. It’s a collaborative art, and we need all those people, designers and directors, to interpret what we wrote before we can say, yes, this is the final version. 

It’s interesting. I was in London last week and I got to see a Tom Stoppard play called Indian Ink. This play had been produced 30 years ago. 
And when Stoppard went back to it, he changed the ending. 30 years later! So even Tom Stopford can say yes, I think I can do it better now. 

Guy:  
Thanks for talking to me today, Margo. And best of luck on the reading. 

Margo:  
Thank you! 

I am glad to report that Playground is a success on this count. In this most recent novel, Powers turns to the ocean as a backdrop for his story. He weaves together the narratives of three main characters. Todd Keane, who is the son of a successful businessman, grows up privileged in upper-crust Chicago. As a high school student in a top-tier private school in the 1970s, he is captivated by the relatively crude computers of the time, mounts the technology wave and feverishly rides it to professional success as an adult. Evie Beaulieu is literally and figuratively thrown into the water at a young age by her father, a deep sea explorer, and becomes obsessed with everything watery. She is more comfortable swimming deep beneath the ocean surface than walking on land. With the support of a gentle and self-effacing husband, she becomes a world famous oceanographer who achieves renown because of her ability to convey the magic and mystery of the ocean equally well to her scientific colleagues and young adult readers, echoes of Richard Powers himself. Finally, Ina Aroita grew up on the Pacific island, Makatea, but moved to the United States to pursue studies in the creative arts and becomes a sculptor. In college, she meets Todd and through him she is introduced to an important fourth character, Rafi Young, who pulls together the Keane-Aroita story lines.

Rafi grew up in the Black neighborhoods of South Side Chicago. He is a voracious reader from the first day of school and, defying the odds,  wins a scholarship to attend the same high school as Todd Keane. They meet over intense games of chess, advance to the ancient addictive game of Go, and develop a powerful but vulnerable friendship. They both choose to go to college at the University of Illinois, and Ina is drawn into their orbit.  Powers pulls all of these characters into a tight web that centers on the ambitious plan of an American company  to build a self-sustaining city that will launched from Makatea and will be submerged under the surface of the water. The residents of the island are being asked to weigh the pros and cons of the “seasteading” initiative and decide whether to approve it. The rationale offered by the proponents is that life in such a unique environment will enable the occupants of the submerged city to live in a realm outside the jurisdiction of any company and be free to pursue their intellectual pursuits and dreams about expanding the use of artificial intelligence, free of government interference and restrictions.

Extreme libertarianism meets AI wonderland.

Powers populates his literary world with characters we come to know well and grow attached to. It is a strength of Playground that they are believable and not simply spokespeople for a point of view. Powers explores many themes in this book. Games, those that people play casually for leisure, like chess, and those that they play intensely for success in life figure prominently in the novel. Todd and Rafi’s obsession with the ancient board game of Go, with its infinite number of possible outcomes branching out from a simple 19×19 linear grid, becomes an incubator for their ideas about computing capacity. Go provides an alluring framework to explore human behavior and model it for use by programmers of life-like computer surrogates. The game provides the initial inspiration for Todd to design powerful AI systems that can mimic humans and beat them at their own games. There is an appreciation of the growing potential for unpredictable outcomes as computer systems become more complex, machine learning diversifies, and neural networks become denser. The example that most impresses Keane (and Powers) involves the game of AlphaGo, an actual computer program, which was designed to play Go at championship level. Todd recounts his feelings of awe when the program  made an inexplicable move in a game against Ke Jie, the number one ranked player in the world at the time, that sealed the computer’s victory in a three-game match. This was something that was thought to be beyond the power of any computer (this same episode features prominently in the book Maniac by Benjamin Labatut).

In this novel, the inventiveness of nature and the unpredictability of human interactions far surpasses anything that AI accomplishes. The complexity of the natural world, its wondrous diversity, its unexpected vitality, is captured in incandescent prose as Powers describes the glowing colors of the deep-sea creatures. Can and will computers achieve a sense of stewardship and legacy? Will they develop an attachment to the environment around them and struggle to sustain it and pass it on whole to the next generation of computers in the same way that links people across and with future generations?

The novel reaches a climax and the ending involves an unexpected plot twist. The book is too much of a fun read for me to reveal it and spoil it for you. One hint — keep in mind that Todd Keane is an extraordinarily complex person. That said, what is striking is how marginally AI actually influences the actual outcome of the novel. It is more of a gadget play than an active player in the narrative. It is as if Powers himself is unsure how AI will impact those of us alive today and the generations that will come after us. If this is true for Powers, then it suggests that all of us should stay modest in our predictions of the future of AI. Reading Playground, I think he would remind us to keep in mind that however things turn out with AI, it will probably work out best if we remember the grandeur of nature and the human capacity to care deeply for one another and our environment, qualities that Powers describes with an expansive intelligence and poetic beauty.

Playground
Richard Powers
W. W. Norton & Co.2024.
381 pp (paperback)

Web image by Medhum.org

Then one day Dymov develops diphtheria, evidently contracted by “sucking up mucus through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for?  It was stupid… just from folly.”  Dymov soon becomes seriously ill and then dies. Suddenly, Olga is overcome with guilt and grief. Too late, Olga realizes that her husband was a hero.

Chekhov based this story on the real-life love affair between his good friends Isaak Levitan, a well-known (and married) artist, and Lika Mizinova, a young unmarried teacher, who had for many years been infatuated with Chekhov while he toyed with her affection.  In this interpretation, Chekhov bases the character of Dymov largely on himself, portrayed as a dedicated and disciplined worker who has no time to spare for frivolous romance. However, in reality, Chekhov had playful relationships with many women, but eschewed commitment until late in life. 

Another way of looking at the story is the dramatic tension between practicality (science, public health, and social consciousness), as exemplified by Dymov; and emotion (art, adventure, romance), as exemplified by Ryabovsky.  Olga at first chooses the latter, but Dymov’s death turns the tables.  After he becomes a martyr to science, she suddenly finds him more interesting and mourns her loss.  Was his death the result of a foolish mistake?  Did her infidelity play a role, perhaps by distracting him while he was aspirating the pus?  Or might Dymov have deliberately performed the foolish procedure, realizing that the infection would cause his death?  

The Wife & Other Stories. The Tales of Chekhov. Volume 5, New York, The Ecco Press, 1985.
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.  
Shelby Foote (Ed.) Chekhov’s Later Short Stories. 1888-1903, New York, The Modern Library, 1999.
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.  

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

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