ONE-WOMAN SHOW TELLS THE STORY OF OVERLOOKED VICTORIAN SCIENTIST

At 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 5, the museum will feature a free public performance of Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard's Whore, a one-woman show by playwright and performance artist Claudia Stevens. The performance is co-sponsored by the SNOMNH with University of Oklahoma departments of Zoology, Botany/Microbiology and Religious Studies. The performance will take place in the museum's Kerr Auditorium.

Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard’s Whore is Claudia Stevens’ newest one-person play, in which Stevens performs as actor, keyboardist and singer, with music composed by Allen Shearer (Rome Prize winner).“Blue Lias” is set in the present within an imaginary convention of geologists. The audience is involved in the action, taking on the role of scientists at the convention who are being entertained by a play about accomplished Victorian-era fossil hunter Mary Anning, who discovered the first Plesiosaurus fossils in 1823.

In one of her most nuanced and dynamic performances, Stevens brings to life this colorful and unique figure of Victorian England, moving the action back and forth between the present and the nineteenth century. Her Anning is at once playful, wistful, sardonic and angry, waiting in the cloak room to receive a small honor while she reviews her life and times and the indignity of her position within the all-male scientific community. A woman of intellectual and spiritual vision, Anning transcended the perceived incompatibility of religion and science.

Stevens also portrays Anning’s nemesis, the eccentric, humorously self-important William Buckland, who often helped himself to her work. A clergyman as well as an Oxford geologist, Buckland, like many of his contemporaries, wrestled with the fossil evidence produced by Anning and others, attempting to reconcile scientific discoveries with biblical accounts. Through musical and dramatic performance, and using letters and impressions by contemporaries, Stevens enriches her depiction of complex and significant characters and issues in the history of science. Allen Shearer’s delightful incidental music and visual representations of fossil dinosaurs - ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterodactyl - enhance the play further.

Claudia Stevens creates unique and complex interdisciplinary pieces for her solo performances as musician-actor. Her recent published solo plays with music encompass topics of bio terrorism (The Poisoner on the Train); science, gender and religion; hate crimes and reconciliation (Dreadful Sorry, Guys). Earlier work draws from literature, history, hidden family past, the Holocaust, and issues of identity. She also has become a recognized thinker and speaker on ethics and the arts.

Allen Shearer, composer, has received many awards in music, including the Aaron Copland Award and residency, the Rome Prize Fellowship (Prix de Rome), a Charles Ives Scholarship, an Alfred Hertz Fellowship, four residencies at the MacDowell Colony, several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, including one for the creation of his first opera The Goddess, and grants from Meet The Composer.

Blue Lias, or the Fish Lizard's Whore is free and open to the public. The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is located at Chautauqua Avenue and Timberdell Road on the University of Oklahoma Norman campus.