American Scientist

On July 14, 1960, Jane Goodall arrived at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, located on the northeastern bank of Lake Tanganyika in Africa. With support from famed paleontologist Louis Leakey, she planned to embed herself within a local community of chimps to study their behavior and, she hoped, to gain new insights into the connections between humans and other primates. That same day, by no coincidence, the Gombe site also received a visit from a second Goodall: Vanne Morris-Goodall, born Margaret Myfanwe Joseph but best known these days as “Jane Goodall’s mother.”

When playwright Michael Walek heard about this odd pairing in Tanganyika, he was instantly intrigued. “The idea of a scientist bringing her mother on her first expedition sounded like a play I wanted to write,” he explained. What would compel a headstrong 26-year-old English woman, striking out on a career-making journey to a remote African outpost, to bring her mom along as her chaperone? And what happened during this six month session of highly unusual mother-daughter bonding?

Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother?, a new play written by Walek and directed by Linsay Firman, is currently running at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City and provides Walek’s answers to those questions … sort of. He delivers on the promise of its title, examining in detail the loving, interdependent, and sometimes tumultuous relationship between the two Goodalls. But his play also stretches into an exploration of British colonialism and African self-determination, and plunges into deep themes of pride, self-doubt, love, repression, homophobia, and the fickle process of discovery.

Walek has assembled a winning set of characters, and he gives them great leeway to roam where they will. In addition to Jane and Vanne, there is David Lancaster, the British warden in charge of the Gombe reserve; Adolf Siwezi, a local activist for Tanganyikan independence who also monitors Jane’s activities; and Soko “Short” Wilbert, a hunter and animal-tracker. These three are literary composites rather than specific figures, but they largely mirror the true details of Jane’s Gombe expedition, as documented in her diaries and in her subsequent writings.

Recognizing the difficulty of recreating a realistic African jungle on a small New York stage, Walek chooses to go the other way with a minimalist, geometric set design. He gleefully jettisons many conventions of staging and direction as well. This aspect of the theater experience is impossible to capture properly in a written review, but there is a special joy in watching talented actors throw their full weight into the shattering of the fourth wall. The cast members nimbly break characters to explain themselves to the audience, to add scientific context, and even to fact check the play’s own accuracy.

Much of Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother? centers on the anthropological narrative of Jane Goodall and her studies of the chimpanzees of the Gombe. She arrived in Tanganyika seeking a missing “evolutionary link”—not an ancient, transitional fossil, but a modern behavioral association clarifying the relationship between ourselves and our Great Ape cousins. Jane’s efforts began spectacularly, as she spotted 10 chimpanzees on her initial field outing. Right from the start she broke with the academic tradition of the dispassionate observer and gave names to the chimps as soon as she could reliably identify them as individuals, starting with the one she called David Greybeard.

Then came a painful realization that her first encounter was beginner’s luck. Jane waited long weeks before she was able to get another good look at her chimpanzees. She had to make peace with the reality that field science often involves excruciating stretches of seeing nothing and doing nothing besides waiting and watching. She wracked her brain trying to figure out how to avoid alerting the chimps to her presence, seeking to “break the smell barrier” that allowed them to sniff out her approach long before they came into view. Ultimately Jane succeeded, mostly through patience and determination. She made herself a continuous part of the landscape, until the chimps came to regard her as an object of curiosity rather than one of danger.

Eventually, Jane was able to watch the chimps up close and record a series of behaviors that transformed our ideas about primate culture, setting the template for the rest of her career. She noted complex social interactions and distinctive personalities within the Gombe’s chimpanzee community. She witnessed a group of chimps hunting and eating bush pigs, a shocking discovery about the allegedly peaceful, vegetarian primates. (“Chimps eat meat, mummy! Isn’t that incredible?” she exclaims to her mother.)

Most shocking of all, near the end of her stay, Jane watched as David Greybeard stripped a twig, inserted it into a termite mound, and used it to draw out some of the insects for a tasty snack. There was no ambiguity about the act. A chimpanzee had created a tool and used it with a deliberate goal in mind. Up to that time, scientists were quite confident that tool use was a uniquely human trait. The play quotes Leakey’s famous response to Jane’s discovery: “We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!”

Brittany K. Allen, portraying Jane Goodall, gives a vivid performance that makes all of these historical moments feel fresh and urgent. Her take on Jane is playful, vulnerable, occasionally naïve or even reckless, cunning and methodical, hooked on curiosity like an addictive drug. Playing Vanne, Kristin Griffith proves an able foil. She gives Jane’s mother a breezy English charm that conceals an underlying loneliness, but also an unbreakable resilience. Vanne provides a sense of safety for Jane when they first arrive, then recedes to let her daughter find her own way. The banter between them, which at times verges on the tone of screwball comedy, makes a compelling case that, yes, Jane really did choose the ideal travel companion.

Michael Walek lavishes plenty of attention on his other characters, too. Tommy Heleringer plays David Lancaster as an unmoored British expat who develops an unexpected bond with Vanne. Adolf Siwezi exists partly as a device to discuss the contemporary political upheaval in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, as the British colony prepared for a vote to embrace independence; Jordan Donaldson provides a cheery sincerity to the character that makes him much more than a symbol. Even Short, the most thinly developed of the characters, allows actor Rami Margon moving moments to reflect on the wrenching ways that political revolutions like the one in Tanganyika can coexist with reactionary social values.

If there’s a flaw with Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother?, it’s that Jane sometimes recedes into a secondary role in her own play, especially as the second act unfolds. But that caveat comes with a caveat of its own. By refusing to craft his play as a tidy, linear tale of mother-daughter bonding, or of an intrepid young researcher’s breakthrough moment, Walek endows his ensemble with the same messy emotional complexity that Jane was finding in her chimps. The play’s various strands come together at the end, when David Greybeard makes a surprise appearance (via a lyrical act of puppetry), pulling Jane and her primate insights back to center stage.

Walek ends his play on a wistful note, with Jane contemplating her chimpanzees and reflecting, “I hope they’re better than us.” That conclusion reminded me of a more optimistic take on human culture by the primatologist Frans de Waal, from an interview with him I ran in Discover magazine many years ago. Asked to compare chimp and human cultures, de Waal responded:

“I'd prefer to live with humans. I think humans are marvels of conflict resolution and cooperation. Look at New York City, which has more than 7 million people living crowded together. I don't think you could put 7 million chimpanzees in a city and have anything decent going on.”

The text of Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother? is not currently available for purchase, but you can read an interview with the author here, and read more about the play’s background here and here.