He Puts Bill Maher on TV, and Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy on Stage
Preparing “Discord” for Primary Stages, she said, has been “a constant conversation about the tone and the comedy in it.”
The ideal version of the play, Ms. Senior said, is “one in which you laugh in the beginning
and your pathways are opened up to listen better — then maybe you leave taking account of your own life.”
Likewise the three characters in “Discord,” Ms. Senior said, are “trying, in their own ways,
to find out how to live, how to transcend what makes us petty and vulgar and narcissistic.”
Mr. Carter said he continues to attend the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, though he is not an official member
and does not call himself a Christian; he said he appreciates the church’s organ and the opportunities for inspiration
Having worked on this scene and this play for some time now, Ms. Senior said, “It’s getting closer.”
Mr. Carter replied, “Aren’t we all.”
A polite, thoughtful, intense man, Mr. Carter does not necessarily possess the obvious résumé
of a playwright who would produce a Sartre-style meditation on history and theology.
On an August morning at a rehearsal studio in Midtown Manhattan, three actors portraying these men were working on a scene from “The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens
and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord,” a play by Scott Carter.
(“For him, it’s got action, it’s got drama — it’s not merely a precept,” Mr. Carter said.)
