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This summer, the Rattlestick Theater in New York City’s West Village produced Boise, by David Folwell. The play liberally quotes Bertrand Russell and raises issues he was concerned with – marriage, truth, and Judeo-Christian morals versus a more rational code. But the protagonist takes Russell’s ideas further than they want to go. (Interesting, at the same time, and further uptown on Broadway, another play, a revival of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, also invoked Russell throughout. The main character, a moral philosopher named George Moore – no, not that one – ponders: “Do I say ‘My friend the late Bertrand Russell’ or ‘My late friend Bertrand Russell’? They both sound funny.” To which his wife retorts: “Probably because he wasn’t your friend.”) In Boise, the main character, Stewart, is a married thirtysomething office worker in the throes of a mid-life crisis. In addition to being dissatisfied with his work, he has lost sexual interest in his wife. He meets and becomes intrigued with Tara from human resources. He is partly attracted to her because she makes him think – she quotes Bertrand Russell. When Stewart asks who Russell is, Tara replies, “Philosopher, mathematician. He’s a cool guy.” Tara and Stewart quote Russell throughout the play. The first invocation is from Tara: “Well, Bertrand Russell said that public opinion is an unnecessary tyrant and we should respect it just enough to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison.” She recites, “One symptom of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” Stewart goes out and buys a Russell book (it is not named in the script but on stage he carries around the Liveright paperback edition of Marriage & Morals). “He’s so funny,” Stewart says, and quotes, “Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.” Most relevantly to the play’s theme, at one point Stewart quotes Russell, “We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach.” Stewart coaxes Tara out for a drink. (“We both like Bertrand.”) They discuss marriage and cheating. Stewart argues that it’s okay to cheat out of biological need. He says that, like Russell, he is arguing for marriage, though it seems more a ploy to get Tara in bed. Tara says she is opposed to marriage and instead argues in favor of hedonism. Marriage makes people liars, she says. Tara and Stewart start falling for each other. But she refuses to sleep with him unless he informs his wife. This he is loathe to do. Meantime, Tara hooks up with Stewart’s friend Owen. Tara is evidently Russell’s St. Paul, because Owen too is soon quoting the philosopher. (“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”) At one point Stewart is in a bar with his wife and encourages her to cruise the bar (“This is what the Judeo-Christian ethic doesn’t take into consideration,” he says. “That we are still animals, really. These are all strictures enforced on us by an outmoded dogma”). Stewart becomes increasingly unraveled to the point that, in the climax, he makes a play for his unlucky-in-love sister, Jackie. When he conjectures that ancient roaming tribes probably slept with family members, Jackie says, “Those were SAVAGES!” To which Stewart replies, “YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE SO JUDGE-MENTAL.” When Jackie cries, Stewart says, “It’s hard. It’s all new. We are in a new world.” After smashing a computer monitor on a co-worker, Stewart ends up in jail where he continues to read Russell. He says he is happy there and quotes Russell, “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.” Anita Gates’ review of the play in The New York Times said, “It’s not clear whether Mr. Folwell simply enjoys the ridiculous or wants to say something about contemporary values, the limits of rejecting them and the semiquiet desperation of middle-class white American men.” In early August, David Folwell did a phone interview with the BRS Quarterly about his play and Russell’s role in it. Following are excerpts. THOM WEIDLICH: When did you first become aware of Bertrand Russell? DAVID FOLWELL: I had my first experience with Bertrand Russell in the back of a cab. I was in New York and somebody left Education and the Social Order in the cab. So I took it home and I just started reading it and I thought it was really interesting. Like Stewart in the script it made me laugh. Not derisive of course. The stuff he said was so commonsensical and logical and the things that we don’t like to think about every day. And just for somebody to say it out loud I really appreciated it. TW: How long ago was that? DF: I would say about three years ago maybe. It wasn’t that long ago. In college I studied a lot of philosophy. I didn’t study any Bertrand Russell because I went to a Catholic school [the University of St. Thomas in Texas]. They didn’t want to talk about him. It’s a liberal arts school in Texas. As part of the core curriculum you have to study philosophy and theology. And you had to have like 24 credit hours, which is a lot. So I took more philosophy than I did theology. So I’ve got a little bit of a background in philosophy but it’s one of those things. I don’t even acknowledge it very much. It’s just kind of there. And then every once in awhile I can say something that makes me sound intelligent to people. TW: How integral is Russell to the theme of the play? DF: Actually the Russell stuff came in very late. I’d been working on the play for maybe three years and it started off just as an examination of sexuality. I just wanted to write a dirty play. I wanted to write something my mom would be ashamed of. I was married maybe five, six years at the time. I started having these conversations with people. I guess when we get into our thirties we just have these very frank conversations about sex. I remember I met this one lady who was a poet and she started telling me about her dom. She had just gotten into town and she had met this guy from the Village Voice. And she was really excited about this dominant-submissive relationship. Which I thought was fascinating and kind of funny too. I tried to joke with her about it, you know, once she finally broke up with the guy, I said, “Can you do that?” [There is such a character in the play. -TW] We were getting to this point in our lives where sex is something I just really wanted to examine. It was becoming obsessive. And also a theme that I like to think about a lot in my stuff is this idea of people – who they are and what they want to become and this idea that we’re kind of just a few steps out of the cave but we have these high ideals for ourselves and we’re so disappointed and guilty when we can’t achieve them. In the play, it was good but I think most people’s reaction was it was a play about a sex addict, which I didn’t want. I didn’t want it to be about a disease or a disorder. I just wanted him to be a regular guy. I started working with [playwright] Craig Lucas on the play and he really urged me to broaden it, to make it more about a person’s mid-life crisis and more of an existential crisis that he’s going through. And I think that was right. That’s really what I was trying to go for. Really the way Russell came into it was I was looking for something clever for a character to say. So I started looking up quotes and I found a quote and I put it into Tara’s mouth. And then I was looking for other things, just random things for people to say. I kept on going back to the Russell quotes. The Russell stuff just worked so perfectly. It’s an appealing philosophy to a guy like Stewart because it strips away all the superstitions and what he would consider just bullshit about society. And Russell is somebody who states it plainly and cleverly and I think it really appealed to Stewart. So it just really worked. TW: But also I was thinking especially with the book, Marriage & Morals, that Stewart was carrying around on stage, that’s a book where Russell was talking about creating a new morality. Do you see that as a big part of the play? DF: Yeah, I do. I think that’s what Stewart ultimately wanted. All of a sudden he wakes up and sees the world in a new way. In the original version of the script I had him go off – y’know, he makes love to his sister and he goes off and he starts a new society in Boise. They start this whole cult. And people just thought that was too weird. So when I got up to that point I just kind of changed it. It’s actually more reasonable if [Jackie says], “What the hell are you doing, you’re trying to drag me down with you.” I haven’t read Marriage & Morals, I have to say. I’ve only read several essays and parts of books and things like that. TW: I was wondering about that. I’m not exactly sure where most of the quotes come from. And I was wondering if most of them come from Marriage & Morals. DF: I’m not sure. They’re random quotes that I found on the Internet and things like that to tell you the truth. So I am a bit of a fraud. But I think a lot of them had to do with the strictures that societies impose on us. And I think that was appealing to Stewart. But in the end it also was a cover for just bad behavior and having him let his id take over and justify anything by saying, “It’s going to be a new morality” and he’s going to create something new. I think that’s where it kind of goes awry for him. TW: It’s interesting that you say that because that goes further than Russell would go. Do you agree with that? DF: Oh, I do. And this was one of my concerns because I really like what Russell had to say. I don’t want people to think I was blaming Bertrand Russell for this guy’s downfall. Because I don’t think that’s the case. It’s a case of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. What I suffer from as well as the character. TW: I think the main thing Russell was trying to do in Marriage & Morals was create a new morality. He was mostly opposed to Christian morality. Which didn’t mean anything goes. Which I think is more where Stewart is heading. DF: Yes I think so. I think he would have gotten there if he could have. If he could have just looked at it rationally. I think there was so much emotion involved and also guilt. But he didn’t really have the mechanism for it. He couldn’t really look at it rationally because he was so angry and bitter. And he felt entitled. I think he feels entitled to a better life without having to really work for it. That was a big part of the hubris too. TW: Right. And that’s not something that Russell would agree with. DF: Oh, no I don’t think so at all. TW: Any other thoughts? DF: I’m going to be better about reading more Russell. Especially now with all that’s going on. I mean, I was watching CNN this morning and it’s all about terror alerts and Tom Ridge was on there. This kind hysteria that’s building up right now, I think Russell might be a good person to turn to. He’d come up with some sort of solution. Better than just creating this illogical superstition and fear. I was reading in Unpopular Essays about how the [clergy] came out against the lightening rod. It was God’s domain only to be able to strike people down, and for someone to thwart that is morally wrong. We tend to as human beings slip back into superstition. And I think that’s what Russell was trying to do, to strip away those things and force us to look at things logically. We could use a little Russell right this very minute.
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