Washington Post preview of THE CATASTROPHIST
Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is the subject of a new play. He’s also the playwright’s husband.
As not just the husband of a playwright but the subject of her latest work, virologist Nathan Wolfe knows that when it comes to onstage depictions of real people, the writer gets the last word.
Wolfe surmised as much long before he saw himself in Lauren Gunderson’s “The Catastrophist,” a new one-man play that will be available to stream, starting Jan. 26, in a filmed version co-produced by Bethesda’s Round House Theatre and the Marin Theatre of Mill Valley, Calif. Speaking alongside his wife over video chat from their Bay Area home, Wolfe recalls first learning the power of Gunderson’s pen years ago, when she wrote a “parody” he claims is based on him.
“I don’t even want to admit which one of her plays that is,” he says. Gunderson, America’s most produced living playwright, is quick to retort: “This is literally referenced in [‘The Catastrophist’]. Nathan thinks there was this play about him,” she says, before turning to address her husband. “But it’s not about you.”
Wolfe defends himself, with a chuckle: “I said it was a ‘parody,’ loosely based on me.”
Wherever the truth lies, the 50-year-old virus hunter is right: By re-litigating this long-standing dispute in “The Catastrophist,” a work that can be restaged in perpetuity, Gunderson again gets the last word. It’s an astute observation from a researcher long celebrated for his tracking of such viral outbreaks as Ebola and swine flu, which in 2011 landed him on Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.
The prolific Gunderson, meanwhile, has turned her fascination with scientific minds into myriad plays, including “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” and “Silent Sky,” the true story of 19th-century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt. A decade ago, during the early days of her relationship with Wolfe, she remembers thinking it was inevitable that she would turn her creative eye to her partner.
Read more here.
