In McClintock's Corn

By Carolyn Gage

The entire play is set in a cornfield. The play is about gender-non-conforming geneticist Barbara McClintock and her companion/partner Harriet Creighton, and McClintock’s revolutionary quest to understand diversity in nature and to reframe “deviance” as an expression of natural variance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716626531

Book preview

In McClintock’s Corn

A Play

By Carolyn Gage

Copyright Page

In McClintock’s Corn copyright 2019 Carolyn Gage

ISBN: 978-1-716-62653-1

All Rights Reserved

Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that In McClintock’s Corn is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this play by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured in writing from the author or the author's representative. No amateur or stock performance or reading of the play may be given without obtaining, in advance, the written permission of the Author.

All inquiries concerning professional and amateur performance rights should be addressed to the Author via her website at www.carolyngage.com .

Back cover photo by Jonathan Spath.

Summary

The entire play is set in a cornfield. The play is about gender-non-conforming geneticist Barbara McClintock and her companion/partner Harriet Creighton, and McClintock’s revolutionary quest to understand diversity in nature and to reframe deviance as an expression of natural variance.

The cornfield—the land—is the constant. We see the two women driven from the fields of Cornell by discrimination and the Great Depression. We see McClintock returning from an aborted fellowship in Berlin in 1934, shattered by the horrors of rising Nazism and the co-opting of genetics for fascist theories of eugenics and propagation of a master race. Harriet joins the Women’s Army Corps in World War II, leaving Barbara in the cornfield of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where monastic isolation is the price for her patch of corn.

In the 1950’s, her cornfield is literally and figuratively invaded by Jim Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and proponent of the Central Dogma that was supposed to have cracked the code for understanding life. In this era of homophobic witch hunts and nuclear weaponry, McClintock’s work is considered obscure and obsolete. Finally, in her eighties, Barbara is working in her cornfield when Harriet comes to tell her that she has been awarded a Nobel prize for the work that was despised and ridiculed for decades. The major movements of the world have buffeted and washed over this woman who stood her ground—literally—for sixty years, planting her beloved corn year after year, entering its cellular world via the microscope, and teaching us that life is infinitely more adaptive, more complex, and more to be revered than our dogmatic and arrogant theories would allow.

This is a play about the physical land that women and minorities are and are not allowed to occupy, and the theories that justify displacement. It’s also about the metaphysics of place, the bodies we occupy, the cellular realities, and our relationship to nature—the final arbiter of whose land it will ultimately be.

5 women, 2 men

Single set (cornfield)

Two hours

Introduction

Science fiction author Ursula Le Guin said, Every story must make its own rules and obey its own rules. This aptly describes my orientation to In McClintock’s Corn, my eighty-third play.

The play follows the fifty-year career of geneticist Barbara McClintock, through her fifty-year intimate friendship with former student Harriet Creighton. Each of the seven scenes takes place in a cornfield, and each of these scenes follows a traditional dramatic structure of rising conflict, crisis, and resolution.

The overall play, however, does not follow this structure. In this regard, it is the exception to my canon, and it has resisted my attempts at restructuring. In McClintock’s words, "If something doesn’t fit, there’s a reason and we find out what that reason is."

The reason turned out to be a revelation. Many aspects of Barbara McClintock’s life have led researchers to characterize her as neurodivergent, and—more specifically—as a woman with Autism Spectrum Disorder.  During the writing of the final scenes of the