Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard’s Whore

Friday, Feb. 8, 7:30 p.m.

Keck Theater, Occidental College

Admission is free

323 259 2785 for more information

Produced by the Music, Biology, and Women’s Studies/Gender Studies Departments, with sponsorship by the Remsen Bird Fund.

About the play:

Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard’s Whore is Claudia Stevens’ newest one-person play, with music composed by Allen Shearer (Rome Prize winner) for Stevens’ performance as actor, keyboardist and singer. The play had its first reading during Stevens’ residency at Cornell University in fall, 2005, as a lecturer and performer through the Program on Ethics and Public Life, with participation of distinguished scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Roald Hoffmann, Gerold Meinwald and playwright-director-physician David Feldshuh. It was completed at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center during Stevens’ 2005-6 residency as Visiting Scholar/Artist.

Blue Lias premiered on March 25, 2007 at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, with subsequent productions in Virginia and North Carolina during spring, 2007. Presentation auspices included arts series, symposia on the history of science and on gender, religion and science.

“Blue Lias” is set in the present within an imaginary convention of geologists. The audience is involved in the action, taking on the role of scientists at the convention who are being entertained by a play about the fossil hunter Mary Anning. In one of her most nuanced and dynamic performances, Stevens brings to life this colorful and unique figure of Victorian England, moving the action back and forth between the present and the nineteenth century. Her Anning is at once playful, wistful, sardonic and angry, waiting in the cloak room to receive a small honor while she reviews her life and times and the indignity of her position within the all-male scientific community.

Stevens also portrays Anning’s nemesis, the eccentric, humorously self-important William Buckland, who often helped himself to her work. A clergyman as well as an Oxford geologist, Buckland, like many of his contemporaries, wrestled with the fossil evidence produced by Anning and others, attempting to reconcile scientific discoveries with biblical accounts. Through musical and dramatic performance, and using letters and impressions by contemporaries, Stevens enriches her depiction of complex and significant characters and issues in the history of science. Allen Shearer’s delightful incidental music and visual representations of fossil dinosaurs - ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterodactyl - enhance the play further.

About Claudia Stevens

Claudia Stevens creates unique and complex interdisciplinary pieces for her solo performance as musician-actor. Her recent published solo plays with music encompass topics of bio terrorism (The Poisoner on the Train); science, gender and religion; hate crimes and reconciliation (Dreadful Sorry, Guys). Earlier work draws from literature, history, hidden family past, the Holocaust, and issues of identity. She also has become a recognized thinker and speaker on ethics and the arts.

About Allen Shearer

Allen Shearer, composer, has received many awards in music, including the Aaron Copland Award and residency, the Rome Prize Fellowship (Prix de Rome), a Charles Ives Scholarship, an Alfred Hertz Fellowship, four residencies at the MacDowell Colony, several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, including one for the creation of his first opera The Goddess, and grants from Meet The Composer.

Allen Shearer is artistic co-director of the San Francisco new music presenter Composers, Inc. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley as well as artist diplomas from the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg, and teaches at California State University, East Bay and at the University of California at Berkeley. Also a baritone, he performs vocal music old and new, including his own.