SOPHIA ROOKSBERRY
Staff Writer
When the grounds of Chautauqua Institution are excavated centuries from now, futuristic archaeologists will remember July 10, 2026, as the opening of the first FutureNow New Play Lab at Chautauqua Theater Company: The Bone Wars, written by Sarah Saltwick and directed by Liz Fisher.
“Bone Wars follows the true story of two paleontologists between 1870 and 1890 who were rivals, and the play asks, ‘Did this competition lead to their best work? Did it destroy them? A little bit of both?’” Saltwick said.
The inception of the script began when Saltwick’s daughter went through a dinosaur phase about four years ago, during which Saltwick spent a significant amount of time with her nose in dinosaur encyclopedias.
“I saw in one of the pictures this little thumbnail about Edward Drinker Cope … and his discovery of the Elasmosaurus, and there was a reference to the Bone Wars,” Saltwick said. “Something about that phrase — Bone Wars — caught my interest. I looked it up later on Wikipedia, and I couldn’t believe the scope of the story.”
Although The Bone Wars observes the lives of two nemeses, the duo sharing their work are far from rivals. The NPLs required directors and playwrights to submit applications as a team, resulting in a collaboration between Saltwick and her friend of nearly two decades, Fisher. Fisher and Saltwick comprise one of the two teams pioneering the inaugural season of NPLs.
“The newness of the program in some ways fits very well with the newness of the play, because there’s a lot of flexibility as we’re trying to figure out what the play is and what this program is,” Fisher said.
Emma Battle is the stage manager for the upcoming NPLs, both of which will be presented at Roe Green Theater Center. Battle is also experiencing some of the quirks of working on brand-new programming in a brand-new building.
“What we decide for this production will probably be used going forward for other productions,” Battle said. “… There’s so much creativity going into it and it’s exciting to be those first people paving the road for others who come into this space after us, but it certainly is a challenge because weird things you wouldn’t think you have to think about crop up here and there.”
The NPLs are particularly interesting for Battle when compared to other forms of new play development at CTC. While the New Play Workshops are conducted at music stands with a primary focus on the script, the NPLs involve Design Fellows who offer more dimensions to the presentation.
“As a stage manager, that’s really cool because I really get into those design elements and I love tracking where things are going and seeing how they work,” Battle said. “It’s like a big puzzle [and] we’re the first ones ever putting it together.”
The puzzle of The Bone Wars encapsulates not only the factors of design, but also the script, as it enters one of its first public presentations.
“It feels beautifully organic that one thing feeds into the next, because sometimes even when I’m reading a page, I may discover, ‘Oh, this makes perfect sense, but then when the actors start walking around the space and doing it, that doesn’t make sense anymore,’” Fisher said. “Those moments where we can stop and have a conversation with not just me and [Sarah], but the whole room … have helped Sarah and I shape what this play wants to be.”
In a script like The Bone Wars where the audience is an active participant and character in the play, this ability to take notes on the crowd reactions and factor them into the mid-run rehearsals is vital for both Saltwick and Fisher.
“The opening lines of the play are spoken directly to the audience,” Fisher said. “… I’m really excited for audiences to be in that world, to watch each other watch the play and see how they help feed our actors and help us develop this magical world that Sarah has written.”
Saltwick is looking forward to sharing her play with the audience not only for the sake of developing the script, but also to share the world she has created with Chautauquans.
“I hope people enjoy it and think about time a little differently,” Saltwick said. “I think there’s an undercurrent of the play that is thinking about deep time and millions of years ago and the story of the earth … as well as this super engaging … juicy historic gossip.”
