letter from Artistic Director Martha Lavey We open our season of belief with Fake, a new play by ensemble member Eric Simonson. Fake follows two narratives: one set in 1914; the other in 1953. Both narratives take place in East Sussex and in London and are linked by the story of Piltdown Man. Piltdown Man was the artifact, discovered in East Sussex, purported to be the "missing link"—the evidence of an evolutionary link between Cro-Magnon and Modern Man.
4
In the earlier story, set at the time of the artifact's discovery, the characters are historical personages, gathered together by the novelist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Like his most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, Doyle gathers a cast of characters in a drawing room, confident that the pressure of their being together will uncover the truth of what he believes is a hoax. The 1914 story is an inscription of the whodunit structure of Doyle's famous novels. These scenes from 1914 alternate with scenes from 1953, the year that Piltdown Man was revealed to be a fake. The characters in the 1953 story are analogues to their 1914 counterparts and, although they continue the narrative of the Piltdown Man discovery and unmasking, the focus of their story shifts to the interpersonal: the questions of authenticity, the tension between religious and scientific belief, the questions about what is known and what is impossible to know take on a decidedly personal cast. In Piltdown Man, Eric has discovered a potent symbol by which to test our convictions about belief/authenticity/science/the spiritual. What do we do, as a species, as individuals, when reality feels discontinuous, when a leap of evolutionary development demands evidence or a leap of faith? Because both of the stories in the play—the one set in 1914 and the one set in 1953—are constructed as mysteries, I resist describing their plots and their outcomes. Rather, I alert you to the multiple dualities in the play that form the central core of the play's theme. The central image of the play is the Piltdown Man artifact itself. The skull is a hybrid structure: the cranium suggests an evolutionary advance over its lower part, the mandible, which is closer in structure to the jaw of an ape. The image of the skull, suggestive of the evolution of human consciousness, becomes a potent symbol of man's dual nature—a residue of our animal past, a suggestion of our capacity for higher-level thought and ideation. Eric mimics this conjoining of past and present in his structure of the play. He gives us two moments in history and allows the story to oscillate between them. The narrative of the play is not a simple chronology: we move back and forth in time with the present moment of your receiving it a double-vision: as an audience we are watching two stories in parallel, each informing the other. Like the skull of Piltdown Man, the story of Fake allows us to see the past and present conjoined in a single creation.