Dialectics of the Heart

Synopsis: DIALECTICS OF THE HEART is a forbidden love story set within the academic world of philosophy. ELIZABETH DREWER, a forty-year-old philosophy professor, knows exactly who she is. She loves her work, is at the top of her field, and is a rationalist to the core. Her personal life, however, is less certain. Recently divorced, her marriage to fellow professor, MARSHALL HEUGHINS, broke up over another woman. Her colleague, PHILIP MONOHAN, against whom she testified in front of an ethics committee for his affair with a student, seems, oddly enough, to be holding it against her. Her best friend, anthropology professor, BARBARA BIDEN, wants her to stop burying herself in her work. But none of these people disturb her complacency quite as much as the "new kid in town," her TA and graduate advisee, RICHARD AMADO, who has just arrived on campus. Richard, 28, is a spirited, charismatic Latino with a mind of his own. As the semester commences, we see Elizabeth's straightforward lectures juxtaposed with Richard's much more unorthodox discussion groups. Elizabeth calls a meeting with him, but finds the iconoclastic young man not so easy to rein in. And to add to it, he admits to a long-standing admiration for her. Other meetings follow, both professional and casual, during which a growing mutual attraction develops, an attraction which eventually causes Elizabeth to seriously question her image of herself as a rational and ethical being. This intense "dialectical tension" forces each of them, in the end, to act most unusually, she plummeting into emotion, he taking the more rational road. It is only when Elizabeth emerges from this struggle, re-evaluating not only her world view, but the people within her world she had once so carelessly judged, that this woman of the mind finds the synthesis that allows her to unite mind and heart into a new whole.

Notes: Originally produced at Edgemar Center for the Arts, starring three time Emmy nominee, Sharon Lawrence. Winner of Jewel Box Theatre's Original Playwriting Competition