Thursday, August 24, 2006
Willing Suspension
A new play, "Darwin in Malibu" by Crispin Whittell had its American premier at Long Island's Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor the other night and is scheduled to run through September 3rd.Starring Hal Linden (of "Barney Miller" fame among the geezers), the plot revolves around a supposed reunion of Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel ("Soapy Sam") Wilberforce to rehash the famous Oxford debate between Huxley and Wilberforce, ending in the perhaps apocryphal exchange where Wilberforce asked Huxley if he was descended from an ape on his grandmother's or his grandfather's side and Huxley reportedly replied that he would rather have an ape than a bishop for an ancestor, if the bishop was going to inject ridicule into a serious scientific debate.
I don't really have anything to say about the play but I wanted all the science geeks out there to know that you can too have beautiful women fawning over you . . . once you're dead 120 years or so.
