Explore Jane Goodall's remarkable journey
“Becoming Jane” runs through April 19 at Discovery Place Science
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on Feb. 22, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. And check out this link for Toppman’s archive of reviews in the Ledger.
Review: ‘Becoming Jane’ – A deep dive into a deep mind at Discovery Place
Jane Goodall, 35 years after her original observations, finding great joy in watching the Gombe chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. (Michael Nichols photo)
By Lawrence Toppman
She lay down with earthworms and rose up to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees. To learn what happened during the eight decades in between, visit “Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall.”
The exhibit stays at Discovery Place Science through April 19, courtesy of National Geographic and the Jane Goodall Institute. The animal rights icon will turn 91 during the last month of the run, so the life-size hologram in it may be the closest you’ll come to seeing her in person.
I saw her in the spare, tanned flesh about 20 years ago, when she spoke at Belk Theater. What I remember most is not her insight, curiosity or compassion, all evident in the exhibit at the uptown museum, but her patience: She sat in Founders Hall and signed books good-humoredly, until every person in a queue the size of a Blue Line train had been satisfied.
In a way, her whole life has been about patience. As a girl, the exhibit tells us, she spent five motionless hours in a henhouse to determine how a chicken lays an egg. She made meticulous drawings of the front and side views of insects’ heads. (Her mother had long since found 18-month-old Jane lying in bed with earthworms to observe their behavior.)
When Goodall got to Gombe Stream Game Reserve in 1960, shy chimpanzees tested that patience. She spent 12 hours a day sitting quietly, eating a prisoner’s diet of bread and coffee, to win their trust. After some months, they let her watch them grooming. Much later she could touch them, play with them, eat with them — all things researchers no longer do, keeping their distance, but behaviors that gave her unprecedented access to chimps’ thoughts and feelings.
That chimps had thoughts and feelings, distinct personalities that made them easily identifiable, stunned the scientific world. (They share 98% of humans’ DNA, so perhaps it should not have.) That they used implements to accomplish tasks caused an uproar: Man was no longer the world’s only toolmaker. And as Goodall painstakingly amassed data and anecdotes for a quarter-century, the world often had to revise its thinking.
The exhibit covers all this ground thoroughly and interactively: You watch short films, listen to her talk about her work, even learn to reproduce chimp calls from a video, if you lack inhibitions. Yet the freshest part for me came in the pre-Gombe years.
We meet the little girl whose mother encouraged inquisitiveness at every extreme. (Parents, please note.) We see the avid reader who devoured “Dr. Dolittle” and “Tarzan of the Apes” and, later, Tolkien’s fantasies. “I fell in love with Tarzan and was very jealous when he married the wrong Jane,” she recalls in one of the helpful wall panels.
She labored as a waitress and secretary and chauffeur to an orangutan: Annabelle, who travelled between the London Zoo and the film studio where Goodall chose music for documentaries. A photo shows Jane in her early 20s in the driver’s seat, even then regarding her companion with an expression that questions the rightness of Annabelle’s treatment.
By the time she got to Gombe at 26, accompanied by her mother as chaperone and an African cook, her personality had fully been formed and her dream of living in Africa realized. Her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey, worked on the northeastern side of Tanzania, digging up evidence of the oldest humans at Olduvai Gorge. Goodall worked on the northwestern side, digging up facts about our simian cousins with Leakey’s financial backing.
She married a National Geographic photographer, had a child she nicknamed Grub, divorced the photographer and remarried a man who would become director of Tanzania’s national parks system. And though we think of her first as a researcher, she spent only the first third of her scientific life that way. She has devoted the last four decades to the protection of chimps and the preservation of their environment.
The final room of “Becoming Jane” strikes a careful balance between peril and promise. We learn about the dangers facing chimps today: deforestation of their home, illegal trapping to sell them as bushmeat or pets or abused animals in unlicensed zoos, diseases chimps and humans pass between each other in unregulated encounters, the harsh effects of global warming.
But the exhibit closes with hope. The Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania has helped replenish native forests. And Goodall, smiling her serene smile in a video, offers five reasons for her belief that things will get better: the indomitable human spirit, social media, the resilience of nature, the adaptability of the human brain and the power of young people. She believes yet-unknown kids who are becoming Jane all over the world will pull us out of our ongoing global mess.
If you go…
➡️ “Becoming Jane” runs at Discovery Place Science, 168 W. 6th St., through April 19; admission to the exhibit is included with your ticket. Parking tip: I paid $18 for two hours in the adjacent Discovery Place parking garage, after a 25% discount offered to museum guests. I could have parked a block away on the street for less than $4 for the same length of time.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about three times each month in the Charlotte Ledger. Check out this link for Toppman’s archive of reviews in the Ledger, and you can listen to him talk about being an arts critic in this recent episode of the Charlotte Ledger podcast.
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