05/23/2026
This year I entered my college’s writing contest and I won third place for scripts! This is a one act play about an imagined meeting between the father of modern philosophy Rene Descartes and the great environmentalist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt’s life was so interesting that there should be a Hamilton-style musical written about him. Here, however, I reimagine only the day he died. Maybe I will expand it one day. There is a critical typo in the republication of my play in the magazine “The Match Factory” (the typo is “yourres extensadeparture”). I suggest through this play that death should be called a “res extensa departure” referencing Descartes’ coined phrase “res extensa” for the material world, rather than using the term “death” meaning an end to life. This play takes place on the last day of Humboldt’s res extensa existence, the day people recognize as the day he died.
Galliard Spirits by Marcy Fiorentino—link to the play below
https://sva.edu/features/galliard-spirits
School of Visual Arts
It is May 6, 1859, a warm spring day in Berlin, Prussia. HUMBOLDT is sitting in his parlor sipping rose-scented tea while ...
