By Mark Collins
February 12, 2009

LAFAYETTE — Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day 200 years ago. Feb. 12, 1809, to be exact.

But did you know they were college roommates?

“Darwin was a real party dog. And Lincoln studied all the time.”

OK, so that fake factoid comes from the imaginations of Abbey and Charlotte, two characters in Emily Golden’s new 10-minute play, “The E-Words.”

Abe and Chuck weren’t schoolmates — they lived and were educated on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. But, in “The E-Words,” Abbey and Charlotte share a dorm room at college, and both are playing a drinking game as they try to finish an English assignment.

Lincoln, the 16th president, authored the “Emancipation Proclamation,” which freed slaves in several states in 1862. Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species” set forth a scientific theory of biological evolution.

Each time one of the characters in “The E-Words” says “emancipation” or “evolution,” they’ve got to down a shot. Their English assignment? Write a play about Lincoln and Darwin.

It’s the same assignment Golden, 17, received from Theater Company of Lafayette. “The E-Words” is one of seven short plays — and one full-length work — that make up TCL’s latest venture into play festivals centered on a theme.

“Separated at Birth: The Lincoln/Darwin Plays” opens Friday and plays through March 7 at the Mary Miller Theater in Lafayette. It’s the fourth festival of new plays TCL has produced in the past several years. Other festival themes have included Frankenstein, Sputnik and Wayne Newton.

“I thought Darwin was controversial enough and complicated enough to inspire some interesting plays,” said TCL Artistic Director Madge Montgomery about the origin of the current festival’s theme. “Then as I was doing some research, I realized it was also Lincoln’s birthday. I thought that might be really interesting to put the two together and see what happens.”

The festival includes two different programs, which run in repertory. One program is a full-length, two-act play titled “Monkey Men,” by Colorado playwright Leroy Leonard. “Monkey Men,” which previously received a staged reading through the Colorado Theatre Guild’s new-play series last year, is about the Piltdown Man, a hoax first perpetrated in 1912 about evolution’s supposed “missing link.”

“It’s about how it ripples through this community, and whether it’s real or not and who benefits from it,” Montgomery said. “It poses some interesting questions, like: How do we decide what’s authentic when we don’t have all the facts?”

“It’s also a really funny play.”

The other program, titled “Abe and Chuck,” features seven short plays, including “The E-Words,” which range from five to 20 minutes in length. TCL put out a call for playwrights last year, and received 20 submissions. Both Montgomery and a reading committee settled on the seven shorts.

Montgomery, who directs five of the shorts, said the “Abe and Chuck” shows vary widely in tone, from whimsical to serious.

“There’s sort of a theme that runs through all of them that there are still some big divisions between people, and that people really have to work very hard to understand each other,” Montgomery said. “That emerged in all of the scripts in one form or another.”

Ian Gerber directs two of the shorts.

“Usually, my job (as a director) is to make the actors look good,” Gerber said. “This time, I told the actors I want them to do well to make the playwrights look good. It’s a playwrights’ showcase.”

Local playwright Don Fried had no idea what he was going to write about when he set about researching Darwin and Lincoln.

“The more you work at it, the more it just happens organically,” Fried said of the writing process, which led him to create a short called “The Debate.”

It pits Darwin and colleague Thomas Huxley in an imagined heated scene just after Huxley had subbed for Darwin in a famous debate in 1860 at Oxford.

While Fried has had a growing list of his plays produced, this is the first time for local writer Evan Marquez, who wrote “Beard Pressure” for TCL’s festival.

In researching Lincoln, Marquez discovered the text of a letter the president received from an 11-year-old girl during Lincoln’s election campaign. The young girl said if Lincoln would grow a beard, which she thought would make him appear more distinguished, she could convince her older brothers to vote for the statesman.

“It turns out he wrote back, thanking her for the letter,” Marquez said. “He didn’t commit to anything in the letter, but a few weeks later he started growing a beard.”

Golden wrote “The E-Words” after poring through research materials, too. A senior in high school in Seattle, Golden had another play produced at TCL last summer in the “10,000 Wayniacs” festival dedicated to Wayne Newton and Las Vegas. She plans to travel to Lafayette for “Separated at Birth.”

“They’re very interesting people, of course, and I knew the facts — what Lincoln did and what Darwin did — but I didn’t know anything about their personalities,” Golden said.

It turns out, Golden said, Darwin was adventurous and Lincoln was studious.

Both men, born on the same day 200 years ago, also changed the course of history.

Contact Camera Theater Critic Mark Collins at 303-473-1369 or  BDCTheater@comcast.net.