Informed Consent - Opening Night

It’s been fun as a Cohort to watch the play evolve – not just as the actors grew into the characters they were portraying, but as the playwright, Deb Laufer, rewrote whole scenes, and as the director molded the ever-changing ingredients into the terrific show that opened Saturday night.  Gone entirely were the first several minutes that I had watched them rehearse so many times (as witty as the original introduction was, it was perhaps too confusing to convey to an audience).  The play has been distilled to the story of the geneticist, rather than a myriad of story possibilities that settle on the geneticist. That focus has tightened the show considerably; it moves forward at such a fast pace that an intermission would only distract.  When the cast took their bows to a standing ovation, several audience members were choking back tears along with the actors, still fresh from the drama of the final scene.

Pre-performance Toast

Even though I knew some of the jokes that were coming, they were still funny, and I was heartened to hear the rest of the audience laughing with me.  What I didn’t anticipate were the audience gasps at certain character revelations, or the head-nodding in empathy with Arella, the “Native American” character, in her assertions about “the white man.”  The entire cast was wonderful, but I was particularly taken with Larissa Fasthorse’s ability to jump effortlessly between portraying Arella and the geneticists’ 4-year-old daughter.

For a play about science, there is quite a lot of religion and mythology. I suspect, however that the playwright is winking at us, asking, literally, “but that’s just a myth, right?  I mean…you don’t actually believe that.”  At one point, Arella recites the creation myth of her Indian tribe, and its version of the universal ‘flood story.’  Gods creating children out of earth are surely just stories.  Could there be a parallel with the stories of creating a man from dust, talking snakes and a family building an ark for pairs of all the animals to save them from a flood?

Deb Laufer graciously posed with me

This production of Informed Consent deserves a large audience on so many levels – not just for its fine acting and directing and staging, but for the big ideas it wrestles with – how we define ourselves and our society, how we reconcile religious belief with scientific facts, how we determine the ethics that should accompany technological progress.  The show is in Rochester only until April 13, and then it moves to the Cleveland Play House.