San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
In ‘Catastrophist,’ playwright Lauren Gunderson spotlights her virologist husband.
Playwright builds script around virologist spouse
When Lauren Gunderson’s agent introduced her to virologist Nathan Wolfe more than a decade ago, the joke was, “Oh, Lauren, you should write something about Nathan.”
“I kind of collect them, because they’re fascinating,” Gunderson says, half jokingly, of scientists.
Indeed, the San Francisco playwright — who was twice named the mostproduced playwright in America by American Theatre magazine — writes frequently about scientists and has a whole circle of physicist friends. (Science and theater have been fused for her ever since her high school physics teacher in Decatur, Ga., Mr. Winterscheidt, let her write tiny plays instead of lab reports.)
But Gunderson didn’t write about Wolfe back then, though he had already worked with a team for years in subSaharan Africa to show that viruses jump between different species much more frequently than conventional wisdom held, a year or two before the New Yorker called him “the world’s most prominent virus hunter.”
After speaking several times long distance — she in New York, he in Los Angeles — they finally met in San Francisco for a first date. “There was a ‘Roman Holiday’ moment, of me on the back of a Vespa,” Gunderson recalls. “He’s a smooth operator, this guy.”
Now they’re married, with two boys, Charles and Asa, and finally Gunderson is writing about Wolfe, who made the July/ August cover of Wired for his almost entirely unsuccessful effort to sell pandemic insurance before COVID19 struck.
“The Catastrophist,” a worldpremiere cocommission from Marin Theatre Company and Maryland’s Round House Theatre, begins streaming Tuesday, Jan. 26, unspooling two narra
tives: how Wolfe came to be a public health Cassandra (the figure of Greek myth cursed to warn accurately of doom but never be heeded) as he also confronted a much more private health danger.
For a long time, especially after they got married, Gunderson thought she’d never write about Wolfe. (“Yeah, where’s my movie? Where’s my play?” he jokes with Gunderson in the couple’s Ashbury Heights backyard.) But Wolfe has previously influenced Gunderson’s work in smaller ways.
For instance, he’s frequently a first audience; Gunderson says that for each script she writes, Wolfe always has “three really great notes.”
And her “Toil and Trouble,” produced at Berkeley’s nowdefunct Impact Theatre in 2012, was inspired by a conversation Wolfe had with a friend about the 2004 Wonga Coup. Her and Margot Melcon’s “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” which premiered at Marin Theatre Company in 2016, also mentions one of Wolfe’s favorite historical scientists, JeanBaptiste Lamarck.
But it wasn’t until the early days of the pandemic, when Marin Theatre Company Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis pitched Gunderson on writing about Wolfe, that Gunderson finally fulfilled the jokey premise of the couple’s first meeting.
At first, “I was like, ‘Absolutely not,’ ” Gunderson recalls. “Of course, a good idea that’s planted just starts to grow.”
Finally, the linchpin came: She could tell the story as a oneman play (William DeMeritt stars, directed by Minadakis) in which the character of Nathan refers frequently to his wife the playwright and resists being caught inside a play. Phrases such as “my wife would like you to know” pepper the script. Allowing herself to be in the play without actually being in it “unlocked” the possibility of writing it, she says.
Gunderson wrote “The Catastrophist” by interviewing Wolfe while she cooked or over dinner and drinks thereafter. In one instance, she made a note on the whiteboard on the couple’s refrigerator of a favorite Wolfe line she wanted to use: “Good science is a definitive result that answers an important question.” Later, he crossed out
“definitive” and wrote “convincing.” That exchange made it into the play.
Gunderson also influences Wolfe’s work. He says he never fully articulated his take on the scientific method, even when he was practicing it, until she drew it out of him. He also sees the conventional division between scientific and artistic minds as a false dichotomy.
“People always have the stereotype of the creative type of artists,” he says. “In addition to Lauren’s creativity, there’s also such a technical mastery. For science, it’s always the focus on the technical. But the reality is, good science is about creativity. You have to be able to see features of the world that are not commonplace — that people have gotten wrong in conventional science,” and you also have to be able to believe in what you can imagine.
“He’s an artistically minded scientist,” Gunderson says, “and I’m a scientifically minded artist.”
When Wolfe saw the first reading of the play, he chuckled at how much his fictional self talks about the statistical concept of relative risk. He also had a key note about costume.
“For a show about anybody in San Francisco who’s a man who’s sciencey,” Gunderson says, the creative team “is like, ‘Let’s give him a hoodie.’ Nathan was like, ‘No hoodies.’ ”
“I don’t wear hoodies,” Wolfe says.
For Wolfe, seeing “The Catastrophist” come to life feels like a bookend to one chapter of his career. He emphasizes that he was never a “lone Cassandra” and that some people did heed his warnings, as when he published his 2011 book, “The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age.”
But still, humans remain bad at assessing risk. He thinks of the difficulty of explaining to his son that running on the stairs with socks on is much more dangerous than the possibility of encountering a venomous spider.
From an evolutionary standpoint, that human limitation could make sense, he theorizes. “Most of the