The Role for a Lifetime
Before the actress Kaiulani Lee played Rachel Carson, she appeared in plays on and off Broadway and in films like “The World According to Garp.”
For the last 25 years, actress and playwright Kaiulani Lee has traveled the world performing her play “A Sense of Wonder,” which tells the story of science writer Rachel Carson. American Experience recently premiered a film about Carson, and took the opportunity to interview Lee about what drives her life’s work.
Dramatizing the life of a writer presents certain inherent challenges. This is especially true if the writer had no well-documented drug problems, no predilection for big-game hunting in Africa, no penchant for fistfights with literary peers or torrid love affairs, but was, rather, a shy, private person who preferred the company of the sea and the conversation of the birds.
And then, if the dramatizer chooses to forgo the few obviously dramatic scenes in the writer’s story — the powerful congressional testimony, the national television appearance — in favor of a small, intimate, one-woman play, most of which takes place in a study, well, she should be prepared for a great deal of skepticism.
“You can’t do this as a one-person show,” William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, told the actress Kaiulani Lee. Lee was working on a play (her first) about the science writer Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring challenged the nation’s overuse and misuse of chemical pesticides and illuminated a new way of thinking about the natural world.
Paul Brooks, Carson’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, concurred. “Where,” he asked, “is the drama?”
”The end of the world?’ Lee remembers answering.
Apparently, that was enough. Lee has been performing her play, “A Sense of Wonder,” for the last 25 years. “I never knew it would go on like this,” she says. 05-12-24
