A new perspective on an old debate
by Colin Dabkowski (Arts & Entertainment)
The Buffalo News, p. C5
November 8, 2008
As literary nonfiction, the time surrounding the publication of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” surely makes for one of the most engrossing debates between religion and science in history.
As dramatic quasi-fiction, however, it loses quite a bit of its punch. That’s what we’re dealing with in Alleyway Theatre’s “Tromping on Sacred Ground,” a tightly written and well-constructed look at the fraught atmosphere in mid-19th century England, when Darwin’s divisive treatise had just come out and the entire country was embroiled in a crisis of conscience over the antibiblical nature of his work.
The show, winner of Alleyway’s annual Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition, is by playwright Suzanne C. Dickie, a retired professor of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago. It centers around the British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley (Casey Denton), a vociferous exponent of Darwin’s work, and the debates — both personal and public — in which he engaged to defend the supremacy of science over religion. Dickie has fluidly transposed the public confrontations to Huxley’s personal life, in which the power of religion still has a firm grasp over his intellectually curious wife, Nettie (Kelly Beuth). Huxley is supported in his support, as it were, by fellow scientist John Tyndall (Christopher S. Parada) and vexed by the clerical assertions of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (Dennis Keefe).
