Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68 (left) performs as Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

Julian Lopez-Morillas ’68 has played in or directed every one of the 38 plays that make up William Shakespeare’s canon. He passed the mark in June 2008 with a performance as Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

“I started there in the summer of 1966—my first really professional theater,” Lopez-Morillas says. “I went out to Colorado every summer thereafter for eight or nine years.”

By 1984, Lopez-Morillas had done all but three or four of the Bard’s plays. “I thought, why not go the whole hog? By 1988, I’d done Timon of Athens; that left only Henry VIII. It took 20 years to find a production.”

Speaking of his accomplishment, the Berkeley, Calif., actor is wry: “It’s interesting that some people make a fuss over it. It is a curiosity. [Actor and Oregon Shakespeare Festival dramaturg] Barry Kraft’s the only other one in my acquaintance who has done it. We had a competition over it for a while; he got there first. I don’t expect people to jump up and down. There’s nothing stellar about it.”

Being a little less dismissive, Lopez-Morillas says, “I do believe being in a production of a play gets you to know it, rather than just reading it. In the practical experience of staging his plays, you get an idea how Shakespeare works, how his plays function in performance.”

Lopez-Morillas was born in Providence, R.I., where his father, a Spaniard who emigrated just before the Spanish Civil War, founded the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. When he arrived at Swarthmore, Lopez-Morillas says he “was thinking I was going to be an archaeologist.” He began acting halfway through his sophomore year and decided theater would be his career. At the time, there was no theater major at the College, so, after graduation, he went to Yale, eventually receiving
an M.A. in directing at Carnegie Mellon in 1972.

Lopez-Morillas soon moved to the Bay Area, where he has lived at various times in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. In the 1970s, he began a long association with the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, now known as the California Shakespeare Theater (CalShakes). “Without being associated with a festival long-term, I never would have picked up all those performances,” he says. During a period as associate artistic director, he directed Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, King John, “knocking off some of the more obscure ones.”

“It really thrived in the ’80s,” Lopez-Morillas says of the festival, which eventually built a 545-seat amphitheater in the hills above Berkeley. He remembers a 1991 outdoor performance there of King Lear: “The wind just howls out there and there were both cows and coyotes on the hillside. If I came out as Lear and cried ‘Howl, howl, howl!’ I didn’t know whether I’d be met by yips or moos. I guess the yips were better; they sounded wild.”

This spring, Lopez-Morillas played Escalus, Prince of Verona, in Romeo and Juliet at CalShakes, directed by artistic director Jonathan Moscone—his first role with the festival since 2000.

“In the meantime, I’ve directed at San Jose State and Solano College and acted at Marin Shakespeare and San Francisco Shakespeare, where I played the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear and Prospero, the ousted Duke of Milan, in The Tempest,” Lopez-Morilla says. “If there’s a role in Shakespeare I really feel proprietary towards, it’s Prospero. I feel I bring something personal, something special to it.”

Lopez-Morillas blogs about his theater experiences on PlayShakespeare.com, a Web site created by actor and creative designer Ron Severdia. One piece of correspondence he passed along from Robert Hurwitt, theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” Hurwitt wrote, “if newspapers, which have predicted the death of theater for so long, went first?’”

This article first appeared in The Berkeley Daily Planet. It is reprinted with permission.

Malka Kramer Schaps ’69 (formerly Mary Elizabeth Kramer)

What has been pushing my professional life can be summed up in a single sentence: My father was a university professor who did not get tenure and a writer who never published a book. I didn’t quite grasp the significance of all this until I was a 16-year-old honors student about to finish high school and he told me, “Well, of course you will get your Ph.D.”

Although that key sentence may describe what I did, I never thought of it as defining my aspirations, which I summed up on request as a 15-year-old: I want to be the sort of person people are happy to have known, and I want to raise my children well. That slant, I am sure, came from my mother. To this day, when my daughters-in-law speak to my mother on the phone, they hang up with the feeling that they have just been talking to me.

There is, however, a cream filling between the career layer and the family layer of my cake, which comes from somewhere deep inside. One winter day during my senior year at Swarthmore, I walked into one of the rooms in Bond, wearing a turquoise dress, with my auburn hair down to my waist. The three Swarthmore professors in formal attire, who were interviewing me for a Danforth Fellowship, asked various questions about my hopes of joining my husband David ’67, in graduate school at Harvard, and continuing into university teaching. Then the chair of the committee cleared his throat uncomfortably and the other two fidgeted in their chairs. He leaned forward and asked, “Now, Mary, for the Danforth, we have to ask. Do you have any spiritual leanings or perhaps a commitment to social action?” Everyone hung on my answer.

“Oh, yes,” I said brightly. “I recently converted to Orthodox Judaism.”

All three members of the committee sank back into their chairs with relief. It shows how things have changed that, for a fellowship originally set up for Episcopalian boys, this was a more than satisfactory answer.

This “cream filling” may seem like the most un-Swarthmore-like thing I did at the College, but it actually started in a very Swarthmore-like way—with a search for intellectual honesty. I was raised with a commitment to honesty in all its senses—telling the truth, not stealing or cheating—but as I worked my way through a self-imposed program of reading one book by each of the great philosophers, I was hard put to find a solid reason for being “good” in modern secular philosophy.

I had a lot of Jewish friends, and their religion—even for the most assimilated among them—seemed to have a staying power to which the rather liberal Protestant denomination in which I had been raised did not even aspire. One of them—a fellow female counselor for the girls in a math summer camp—even taught me how to sound out Hebrew and passed on some of the fundamentals of keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath.

In my junior year, I asked to speak at College Sunday—the first Sunday of winter break—where college students active in our church’s youth group were invited to address the congregation about their college experiences. This was an unusual request, because most upperclassmen have forgotten their way to the church.

After two freshmen had, indeed, explained that religion played no role at all in their college lives, I stood up with my “J’accuse.” We had theoretically been taught about all the major religions. We had visited a Catholic church, a synagogue, and a mosque. However, the subliminal message had been that religion is a crutch, inappropriate for intellectuals. “You have made it impossible,” I claimed, “for us to believe in G-d.”

My manifesto had three immediate consequences. The director of religious education resigned, saying that I was absolutely right. The minister resigned, having decided that he would rather be a social worker. And I asked myself, “Who are these people to decide what I can or cannot believe?”

My actual decision to convert to Judaism was made during the following spring, which I spent as a foreign student in Germany, in the shadow of the Holocaust.

A fancy cake like that, with two layers and a cream filling, ought to have chocolate frosting, right? Here it comes. I had to race through Harvard because my husband had started two years before me, and we wanted to get our Ph.D.’s together, in order to have a better chance of solving the “two-body problem” of getting academic jobs in the same city. We both got jobs in Israel, as we wanted, but, like my father, neither of us got tenure at our first jobs, for reasons which looked to us at the time like prejudice.

When I finally did get tenure at my second job, I spent the summer writing a novel about prejudice. Over the following decades, I wrote other novels about the kidnapping of our foster baby, about conversion, about a court case to protect a different set of foster children, about arranged marriages, about cultural divides. Most of them, in essence, are about prejudices of various kinds and their effects on people.

I publish in a “niche”—the thriving haredi (ultra-Orthodox) publishing industry—and write for no more than one hour in the evening, to protect my mathematical research time.

How do I manage my striated life? Mostly by keeping the layers separated in time and space. We live in Bnei Brak, a very religious community across the highway from our university. About 40 women get up at five in the morning to pray in the synagogue down the street (along with 200 men), and sometimes I join them. Many of the ladies don’t know my name, but those who do surely think of me as Rabbanit Schaps rather than Professor Schaps. (A “rabbanit” is a rabbi’s wife. It is an honorific: Raising a Jewish family on high scholarly standards is a project for both husband and wife.) Those who know that I work at the university can’t figure out what I am doing there eight hours a day, five days a week when I actually teach only six hours a week, six months a year. I am also “Rabbanit” to the men in the daily Talmud class that David teaches.

Once I cross the highway on the pedestrian bridge, I land among a population equally clueless about my private life. In Israel, you cannot get dressed in the morning without making a political statement, so everyone I meet knows from my long sleeves and the beret I wear over my wig that I am religious. It is, in fact, a religious university, so this is not even scandalous. I teach my classes, give talks in seminars, serve on committees, all without any reference being made to my religiosity. Once someone did ask my husband, “How can you walk into an international conference wearing a black hat and sidelocks?”

“Well,” David answered, “first I move my right foot forward, and then my left. Before you know it, I am through the door.”

My father passed away more than 30 years ago. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, I light a 24-hour candle and take out one of the files of his old letters or amusing articles, like the one titled “Why I Won’t Send my Daughter to College.”

When I stand on a podium at Hebrew University, introducing former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers to members of the Harvard Club of Israel, does my father know about it? When, as chair of the Mathematics Department, I opened a new program in financial mathematics, was he somehow aware? Has he “seen” the covers of my novels? I don’t know; but if he does, I’m sure he is pleased, just as he was always pleased when I baked a layer cake for Sunday afternoon tea.

Paul Crowell ’86

Paul Crowell ’86 was recently named a fellow by the American Physical Society (APS). The nomination was made by the topical group on Magnetism and Its Applications, citing Crowell for “the application of elegant optical and transport techniques to the study of spin dynamics and transport.” Crowell is a professor at the University of Minnesota, where his research focuses on spin dynamics and transport in ferromagnets and ferromagnet-semiconductor heterostructures. In the past, he has been a McKnight Presidential fellow and a McKnight Land Grant professor at the University of Minnesota as well as a Sloan Foundation fellow.

With good reason, one should hesitate before describing an ethnography about those with an incurable disease—and the broken health care system that attempts to treat them—as “wonderful,” but such is the elegant scholarship of Carolyn Moxely Rouse on the topic of sickle cell, a disease that disproportionately affects African Americans in the United States.

Uncertain Suffering is an ethnography—the study of a people. Most of us assume that “a people” are bound together by geographic space or tradition, filial or religious ties. The people of Rouse’s study are bound by their association with sickle cell disease (SCD), whether they have the disease, are related to persons that have it, or treat it. In this study of SCD culture, we learn how people with the disease cope with pain, how they are treated by others, how and why pain is occasionally uncoupled from suffering, what specifically is and is not working for them in the health care system, and how a vulnerable but unpitied group outside of hospital walls is treated when they meet up with the supposedly objective and evidence-based protocols to treat their disease found within hospital walls.

Rouse—like the best students I have had at Swarthmore—attempts to accomplish two dozen things at once. She describes the disease, the social location of those who suffer from it, the responses from the professionals who treat them, and how treatment differs when the racial makeup of a treatment center’s professional staff differs. She uses social theory to interrogate taken-for-granted medical concepts such as “evidence-based” and “objective;” offers rich observations and nuanced quotations from her interviewees; and posits recommendations for social philosophers, the federal government, and the SCD community.

Precisely because Rouse accomplishes so much in this book, it will have its detractors. Let me anticipate their complaints. The book often reads like a weighty conversation in which quite a bit of background knowledge is assumed. As someone who’s done the background reading, it was a pleasure. That said, I want Uncertain Suffering to be read by policy wonks, physicians, nurses, and nonprofit directors—and it’s pretty dense for a wide audience. Still, it’s crucial reading for anyone in the helping professions.

Rouse also takes for granted the intelligence, humor, and insight of the mostly poor, all black, mostly adolescent patients that she got to know during the course of this study. By taking their point of view as a starting point, she treats those at the margins as if they were at the center—reversing, upending, and overturning the paradigms in which we’ve been trained.

Rouse lays out her thesis early, and some detractors will assume that she reached her conclusion before she began the research. To the contrary, she brings readers along on her journey, revealing the limitations or errors of her hypotheses along the way. She writes, for example: “In spite of a growing consensus that began in the 1980s that pain, particularly for cancer, should be treated aggressively, almost 30 years later sickle cell patients remain the exception…. Physician discretion still plays a key role in patient access to medications.” Her outrage is clear. But three pages later, she writes, “After switching research field sites, I was forced to challenge my rather two-dimensional perspective….”

Rouse comes to learn, she says, that helping patients manage pain is the subject of much disagreement. SCD centers that have majority black staffs have a different approach than those with majority white staffs, but the differing approaches do not correlate with her initial expectations. Increasing quality of life is not necessarily a conclusion that can be reached via statistical analysis—and quality of life, rather than pain eradication only, she learns, informs the approaches of SCD clinics with majority black professional staffs.

For all of us struggling to understand how discourses of rationality, fairness, and compassion respectively could lead us to the Iraq War, the response to Hurricane Katrina, or the health care reform debacle, Rouse offers some complicated answers. She reminds us that too often we live with competing contradictions while simultaneously forfeiting power to professionals whose prose confounds us. And when we’re the professionals, we’ve often taken our own professional baptism without remaining suspicious of our socialization and without continuing to question the art and science into which we’ve been socialized.

—Sarah Willie-LeBreton,
Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology

MORE BOOKS

In the River They Swim by Marcela Escobari Rose ’96

Michael Fairbanks, Marcela Escobari-Rose ’96, Malik Fal, and Elizabeth Hooper (editors), In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty, Templeton Press, 2009. This collection gathers a unique mix of participants who reflect on their experiences portraying the struggle to close the global development and poverty gap. The foreword is by evangelist Rick Warren.

Ann Buttenwieser ’57, Governor’s Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor, Syracuse University Press, 2009. Using never-before–published photographs, blueprints, architectural plans, and interviews with former residents, the author—an urban planner and waterfront historian—creates a striking portrait of the island. The future of Governor’s Island, which is owned by New York City, is the subject of much debate.

Rio Akasaka ’09, A History of the Swarthmore Fire Company, lulu.com, 2009. Compiled while the author—a passionate young firefighter with a close attachment to the Borough of Swarthmore—was an undergraduate, this work uses rare pictures, anecdotes, and detailed stories to depict the company’s history.

Governor's Island: The Jewel of New York Harbor by Ann Buttenwieser ’57

Jane Jaquette ’64 (editor), Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America, Duke University Press, 2009. This collection examines the response of Latin American women to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes of the last 20 years.

Meredith Anne Skura ’65, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness, The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Showing that a writer’s thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her language, Skura offers a glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experiences that challenge assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period.

Abbott Small ’67 D, Into the Turquoise: Poems, Dennis Small, 2009. Through images of Nature, fused with human needs, hungers, fears, and joys, this poet of faith transcends the Judaic and Catholic avenues of his spiritual pilgrimage to attain insight into both the terrors and rewards of our common human heritage.

The Regulars (introduction by Jonathan Franzen ’81)

Cécile Whiting ’80, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, University of California Press, 2006. This award-winning work offers an in-depth examination of Los Angeles as a focus of and inspiration for art, photography, painting, and sculpture.

Sarah Stolfa, The Regulars, with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen ’81, Artisan Books, 2009. Franzen provides a dazzling introduction to this book of photographs by a former bartender who found inspiration in the very setting from which she longed to escape. Franzen starts: “I didn’t like these pictures at first sight. They reminded me of several personal defeats that I prefer not to dwell on, particularly my failure to survive in Philadelphia….” Yet, he later continues: “Stolfa’s images have the quality, shared by the city in which they were taken, of rendering the very concept of unsightliness nonsensical.”

OTHER MEDIA

Second Skin, a film by Victor Piñeiro ’00

Victor Piñeiro Escoriaza ’00, Second Skin, Liberation Entertainment Inc., 2009. This film takes a fascinating look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the genre of games that allow millions of users worldwide to interact simultaneously in virtual spaces.

Bennett Lorber ’64 joined with three other painters to show some new paintings, including little gee 4, in an exhibit titled 4 Artists—New Work in the Muse Gallery in Olde City, Philadelphia, during the month of August. Lorber, the Thomas M. Durant Professor of Medicine and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital, is one of two physicians who exhibited works in the show.

Abigail Donovan ’92 completed a large-scale permanent sculptural installation for the University of Oregon’s new HEDCO College of Education building. A public commission for the state of Oregon, the piece is titled The Cloud of Disquiet: Stanza Second.

4 Artists–New Work includes Bennet Lorber ’64. (Shown: little gee 4)

Large-scale sculpture at U. of Oregon by Abigail Donovan ’92. (Shown: The Cloud of Disquiet: Stanza Second)