TROUBLING A STAR, an ode for Earth Day

Troubling a Star

Dear Ones,

This year for Earth Day, I went to Antarctica from my living room chair. Madeleine L’Engle brought me there, through the novel Troubling a Star.

Troubling a Star

The book, the final in the Austin Family Chronicles, opens with a teenaged, terrified Vicky clinging to an iceberg in the ocean. Before we read about any rescue operation (or even how she came to be floating alone at the bottom of the globe), we travel to the bottom of South America, to a fictitious nation with seriously sketchy plans for the icy continent. From there, Madeleine weaves a dramatic tale of danger, strange and not altogether noble characters, and a little romance. It’s great.

But more, Troubling a Star is proof that storytelling does so much more for activism, for environmentalism, for our imaginations than facts alone can.

Her story is less “here are pictures of trash in the ocean” and more “(the icebergs) seemed to have an inner light, to contain deep within their ice the fires of the sun from the days when the planet was young.” More awe, less clickbait; more feeding the imagination, less doomsday. It’s just the thesis Madeleine writes about in her nonfiction: story goes a lot farther than facts. For one, stories personify greed and then dares its heroes not to be indifferent — and so, then, the reader. Second, Troubling a Star shows us the beauty of a place most of us won’t ever go; and we’re more likely to care about a place if it’s not just an abstract idea.

In short, you could tweet lines from the book now and sound just as relevant as Madeleine did in 1994. All that’s missing are some hashtags: “Greed is always nearsighted,” and “Without our angels, I believe we would be in a worse state than we are.” And this song — how true:

All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling a star.

Madeleine visited Antarctica before writing Troubling a Star, so the details Vicky sees are legitimate. A nonfiction book was born not long after the trip, too: Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places.

What a strange thing, to visit a place where tourists just don’t go in big numbers, where animals are threatened and icebergs are melting … all because of the way we use the planet and its resources thousands of miles away. But it’s for this, I think, words she gives a scientist in Troubling a Star.

“The planet has been sending us multiple messages, and the powers that be have ignored them. So it’s up to us, and my guess is that when you finish this trip you’ll feel as protective of this amazing land as I do.”

Tesser well,

Erin F. Wasinger, for MadeleineLEngle.com.

/by

Black holes, Einstein, and the gift of questions

My mind went to Madeleine L’Engle last week when I saw the first picture of a black hole.

Science, astronomy, physics, quantum mechanics — all those things caught her imagination. In And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, Madeleine writes about how she and her husband (Hugh Franklin) would gaze at the stars, “seeing out to the furthest reaches of space and time.” The “wild and wonderful universe” was a familiar topic in her fiction and nonfiction.

 

“Everything changes with every major scientific discovery,” Madeleine L’Engle said to a forum audience more than a decade ago.

She mused on black holes in that speech, which was called “Searching for Truth Through Fantasy.” “We don’t understand black holes,” she said. “But maybe if we get through one, we would come out into another universe, something quite different, yet it would still be God’s universe.”

The news was another confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. As the New York Times reports, “General relativity led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl like a mix-master and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole.” (I don’t really understand it, either.)

To Madeleine, Einstein was a theologian of the highest esteem. Madeleine often found herself defending the role of science in religion. Science “won’t do anything to change the nature of God, any more than Galileo’s discoveries changed the nature of God,” she wrote in And It Was Good.

The picture of the black hole only brings up more questions. For one thing, what happens to stuff that falls into a black hole? What’s the force in the black hole?

I think Madeleine would’ve loved it.

“I like things that do not have explanations,” she said to that audience so long ago.

Madeleine continuously spoke and wrote about the importance of asking good questions, and not being hung up on answers. For her, the mysteries of science were a window onto creation. In A Rock That Is Higher: Story as the Search for Truth, she says:

When we human creatures opened the heart of the atom we opened ourselves to the possibility of terrible destruction, but also—and we tend to forget this —- to a vision of interrelatedness and unity that can provide a theology for us to live by.

She continues later.

The discoveries made since the heart of the atom was opened have changed our view of the universe and of Creation. Our great radio telescopes are picking up echoes of that primal opening which expanded into all the stars in their courses. The universe is far greater and grander and less predictable than anyone realized, and one reaction to this is to turn our back on the glory and settle for a small, tribal god who forbids questions of any kind. Another reaction is to feel so small and valueless in comparison to the enormity of the universe that it becomes impossible to believe in a God who can be bothered with us tiny, finite creatures with life spans no longer than the blink of an eye. Or we can simply rejoice in a God who is beyond our comprehension but who comprehends us and cares about us.

The new glimpse at the universe given to us last week is a reminder to be open to revelation and to keep asking questions.

— Erin F. Wasinger for MadeleineLEngle.com.

/by

A WRINKLE IN TIME tessers audiences at local stages

Michigan State University

Meg saved the world again last week in East Lansing, Michigan.

Michigan State University’s theater department transformed an intimate stage into Camazotz for the occasion, bringing to campus a stage adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time.

Photo Courtesy of Michigan State University.

This was a book-lover’s show: a tribute to the story and its truth, not a high-tech reproduction of detail-by-detail world-building.

“The reader is very present in this adaptation,” said A Wrinkle in Time director Ryan Welsh, assistant professor of theatre at Michigan State. Student actors reading copies of the Newbery Award-winning book step into and out of the imagined reality playing out on stage. Sometimes the actor-readers narrate when internal thoughts make the action go silent. Parts of this adaptation is right from the novel, dialogue verbatim.

“The cast is comprised of readers that are living in 1962 and they crack open this book and it’s through their collective conjuring of their imaginations that the story comes to life,” he said.

Tracy Young adapted the novel for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival about five years ago. The script is available through Stage Partners, along with a few other adaptations, each one suited to different cast sizes, audiences, and other needs. (To read or download the script, see Stage Partners’ Wrinkle in Time page here.) Theater troupes from Seattle Pacific University to a community group in Australia will perform Young’s play in the next year.

In Michigan State’s production, the audience had an intimate spot. Every scene from the Murrys’ house to Camazotz and back were performed in a round, and entering the theater was an immersion in the production before it even began.

A man in a red flannel shirt swept a part of the stage, surprising some of us by later playing Fortinbras the dog, among other roles. A student sat at a stool, reading from a big book. A woman held up paint swatches to a pillar in the corner of the stage, then “painted the wall” with a dry brush. A boy dressed like a teen from the ‘60s bounced a basketball just off stage; a woman lingered by the stove.

All this happened while audience members were finding seats, using the restroom, finishing snacks. Unless one was paying attention, the cast’s comings and goings could be mistaken for the normal comings and goings of an excited crowd.

Eventually, they all settled in scattered spots around the room, reading copies of A Wrinkle in Time. The lights dimmed; the play began.

How do you create a magical, otherworld on stage (without the budget behind, say, The Cursed Child)? Welsh used the “sandbox idea”: they used what they had and let imaginations take over the rest. The narrative was entrancing enough. The movement-driven, ever-changing ensemble cast made the play soar. Somehow, the low-key components — Aunt Beast, the act of tessering, even IT — were more engrossing because they lacked flashiness.

When they needed a dog, one of the actors crouched with an origami-looking dog’s head in one hand. When they needed to convey tessering, lights did the heavy lifting. A white sheet became the Brain. Best, most convincing, was Charles Wallace under IT’s power. Inspired by a Japanese dance theater move called Butoh, his shoulders, neck, knees all moved in odd, jerky, horrific ways, amping up the terror for the audience.

My copy of A Wrinkle in Time suggests that readers be 10 or older; the play had the same recommendation. Though Wrinkle is considered children’s literature, Welsh said he didn’t want to do a play for kids. Instead, his philosophical approach was to let the actors create an illusion that would let the audience’s imaginations take over.

Welsh, who has a film background, said he knew the danger of adapting a well-loved book for the stage — especially this one, what he called the “grandmother of young adult fiction.”

“There’s so much credit owed and due to that book,” he said. So he didn’t want to simply tell the story; he wanted the audience to join actors on the adventure.

A Wrinkle in Time on stage “invites (the audience) to engage with it in order for (the story) to feel valid, magical and special and all the things we want it to feel,” he said. Magical and special aren’t usually words reserved for grown-up theater, but Welsh said they should be.

“(We adults are) so wrapped up in the grind that we forget how to fantasize,” he said. This adaptation says, “Come, imagine with us, in a similar way a book does.”

I felt that permission to let my imagination romp around during the production. Right after landing in the twins’ vegetable garden, right before the cast bows, a small, holy spell hung in the air. Meg may have saved the world, but the audience? We tessered right with her.

— Erin F. Wasinger, for MadeleineLEngle.com.

/by