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Sympathetic Magic
Liz Barnard is an anthropologist studying West Coast gangs for behavior similar to African tribes. Her son, Don, is a homosexual Episcopal minister whose parishioners are poor and many sick with AIDS. Liz's daughter, Barbara, is a gifted sculptress whose current breakthrough show launches a stellar career. Barbara lives with Ian, a brilliant young astronomer and popular university professor who, along with his colorful colleague Mickey, stumbles upon a spectacular discovery at the edge of the galaxy. They want to study the find further, but the chairman of their department, Carl Conklin White, a by-the-book administrator, snatches up this startling find before all the facts are in. Along with this discovery, Ian and Barbara find that despite all precautions, Barbara is pregnant. Having agreed to no children, Barbara prepares for an abortion, but Ian wants to hold off as he has new thoughts about children and carrying on the human race. The mysteries of the universe and of human and artistic creation begin to mix for Ian and his friends. But when Barbara has the abortion, Ian becomes a person he never expected, and in front of friends and family, he attacks Barbara. His actions change everyone around him, mirroring the change in life when discovery leads the way.
- GenresPlays
72 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1998
12 people want to read
About the author
Lanford Wilson
54 books26 followersLanford Wilson was an American playwright, considered one of the founders of the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 23, 2022
[I wrote this in 1997, when the play was first produced.]
In physics, there's a theory called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says that you can never know both the location and speed of a thing because as soon as you try to measure one of these attributes you will change the other. Lanford Wilson's play Sympathetic Magic is a sort of dramatization of Heisenberg's Principle: eight people, in random, unexpected, often unexplainable ways, affect each other every time they make contact. The couple at the center of the play are Ian "Andy" Anderson, a brilliant university astronomer, and Barbara De Biers, a successful contemporary sculptress. They live together and are presumably in love but so wrapped up in their work are they that their paths seem only sometimes to intersect. When Barbara becomes pregnant and decides to abort, a series of events is set off that impacts not only her and Andy's relationship but also their immediate circle, which includes Barbara's brother Don, their mother Liz, Don's ex-lover Pauly, Liz's assistant Susan, Andy's associate Mickey, and their boss Carl.
Early in the second act, Wilson gives us a memorable stage picture: each of the eight characters stands around a table, spinning a dinner plate over his or her head, and spinning around his or her axis (as it were) as well, following one another in a circular procession around the table. It's ostensibly a living model of the local galaxies, constructed by one of the play's three astronomy professors as a teaching exercise: eight random bodies in space, orbiting some common center but stuck in their own individual orbits as well. But this image shows much of what Wilson wants to say about American life as we head toward the millennium. He asks: where is the grand, unifying principle in our lives? But he finds no answer: in a civilization ravaged by AIDS and street violence and poverty and the endless narcissism of the powerful--all of which are touched upon in the course of this work--life does indeed seem random and incomprehensible.
In anthropology, "sympathetic magic" is the name given to the rituals we enact in our lives to influence the cosmos, such as rain dances to summon rain or fertility rites to summon life. In this new play, Lanford Wilson hypothesizes that our lives have become sympathetic magic: acted-out versions of what we hope for or think we need, false and illusory shadows of reality. This is a difficult work, although not as bleak or bitter as I have perhaps painted it here. I'm not sure I completely understand all that Sympathetic Magic has to say. But this is a fascinating and thoughtful work, the musings of one of our theatre's great poets on the end of an American century that seems about to implode.
In physics, there's a theory called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says that you can never know both the location and speed of a thing because as soon as you try to measure one of these attributes you will change the other. Lanford Wilson's play Sympathetic Magic is a sort of dramatization of Heisenberg's Principle: eight people, in random, unexpected, often unexplainable ways, affect each other every time they make contact. The couple at the center of the play are Ian "Andy" Anderson, a brilliant university astronomer, and Barbara De Biers, a successful contemporary sculptress. They live together and are presumably in love but so wrapped up in their work are they that their paths seem only sometimes to intersect. When Barbara becomes pregnant and decides to abort, a series of events is set off that impacts not only her and Andy's relationship but also their immediate circle, which includes Barbara's brother Don, their mother Liz, Don's ex-lover Pauly, Liz's assistant Susan, Andy's associate Mickey, and their boss Carl.
Early in the second act, Wilson gives us a memorable stage picture: each of the eight characters stands around a table, spinning a dinner plate over his or her head, and spinning around his or her axis (as it were) as well, following one another in a circular procession around the table. It's ostensibly a living model of the local galaxies, constructed by one of the play's three astronomy professors as a teaching exercise: eight random bodies in space, orbiting some common center but stuck in their own individual orbits as well. But this image shows much of what Wilson wants to say about American life as we head toward the millennium. He asks: where is the grand, unifying principle in our lives? But he finds no answer: in a civilization ravaged by AIDS and street violence and poverty and the endless narcissism of the powerful--all of which are touched upon in the course of this work--life does indeed seem random and incomprehensible.
In anthropology, "sympathetic magic" is the name given to the rituals we enact in our lives to influence the cosmos, such as rain dances to summon rain or fertility rites to summon life. In this new play, Lanford Wilson hypothesizes that our lives have become sympathetic magic: acted-out versions of what we hope for or think we need, false and illusory shadows of reality. This is a difficult work, although not as bleak or bitter as I have perhaps painted it here. I'm not sure I completely understand all that Sympathetic Magic has to say. But this is a fascinating and thoughtful work, the musings of one of our theatre's great poets on the end of an American century that seems about to implode.
Displaying 1 of 1 review