Author: Marjorie Camarda
It is nearly impossible to classify the one-woman play Blue Lias or The Fish Lizard’s Whore, which came to the Keck Theater last Friday. Written and performed by Claudia Stevens with music composed by Allen Shearer, it is described on the Occidental website as a “postmodern musical” biography of nineteenth century paleontologist Mary Anning. This description, however, does not adequately convey the uniqueness of the performance.
Throughout Blue Lias, Stevens oscillates between playing the character of Mary Anning and that of herself as narrator. In one of her moments as narrator, she reminds the audience that Blue Lias is nothing like its West Side Story-esque notion of a musical. Though Anning is a paleontologist, the piece does not focus as much on her subterranean scientific discoveries as it does on her grim surrender to debilitating loneliness and alcoholism amid a terminal cancer diagnosis.
As if Anning’s personal problems weren’t dreary enough, Stevens also addresses several of society’s more disturbing tendencies. The topics she brings up run the gamut, ranging from sexism, to class relations, to the volatile interplay between science and religion.
But the play is not just a criticism of societal flaws. It is a demonstration of the tragic effects that these flaws can have on human lives. Blue Lias is also an elegy about the ways in which unnecessary exclusion can drive a person to madness and crippling despair.
“I could not marry an equal. So I married remains . . . I am the ichthyosaur’s whore!” Anning exclaimed as she explained her lack of a husband. “I didn’t fabricate any of it,” Stevens said regarding Blue Lias‘ thematic complexity. As for the somber tone, she pointed out that in some respects, society has not made much progress since Anning’s lifetime in the mid-1800s.
“Religion wasn’t as big a deal then as it is now,” she said. “There wasn’t the rift between science and religion that people would have us believe now.”
Though the discordant synthesized music (except for some brief live bassoon and viola) may not have stuck the right note with some of the audience, few can deny that Blue Lias is original, innovative and unafraid of confronting relevant issues. It did have humorous scenes-such as one in which Anning skips across stage singing about fossilized excrement or when she sings “She laughed with every turd they bought/She’d turned it into gold” to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” But the core of this performance was serious commentary about how our world has suffered many casualties due to senseless discrimination.
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