Review - Informed Consent

I went with a former co-worker last night to see Primary Stage's production of Deborah Zoe Laufer's Informed Consent.  I know Deb and love her, so I'm probably incapable of disliking her play.  I guess you should take my thoughts with a grain of salt...

Informed Consent uses a real-life legal battle as its inspiration - a Native American tribe living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is dying off due to diabetes and a genetic scientist was tasked with performing research to find out why.  The scientist, however, took more license than the tribe permitted and it set off a long-lasting court case that impacts science and the notion of 'informed consent' even today.  The battle of science vs religion/beliefs is always a compelling subject to me and so this play hit a lot of my 'like' buttons right off the bat...

In the play, the genetic scientist is also racing against time - she has discovered that she has inherited the gene for early-onset Alzheimer's, the disease that claimed her mother at a young age.  Throughout the play, you can feel the desperation that drives her.  She is so consumed with the idea of finding out the 'truth.'  To her, science is the truth and there's no room for anything else, not even the husband and daughter she loves and for whom she's ostensibly doing this for, but she's lost sight of them.

Memory, stories, faith, truth - all of these things that are considered absolutes but are never completely absolute - are rendered beautifully throughout the play.  The way the play is constructed, it's as if we're in the mind of the scientist, which may be slowly disintegrating due to the Alzheimer's, so we see the fractured memories, the stops and starts, the grasping for words and concepts.  But we see them through this woman who is so intense and so prickly, yet really interesting.  There's a sort of perverse charm about her complete lack of social skills (and there's a running joke about that, too) that you root for her, even when she's doing and saying something that's completely wrong.  The dialogue is smart, sometimes funny, but never over your head (even the science stuff).  The relationships are realistic and the pacing of the plot is terrific.

photo credit: Paula Lobo

Putting a person of total science vs an entire community who live their lives according to their faith is a wonderful contrast that keeps the play moving.  A Native American tribe with a creation myth up against a scientist who thinks she should be able to 'prove' their migratory patterns (that completely negates their myth) is a powerful metaphor.  It was just so nice to have a smart, passionate play featuring a smart, passionate female lead character, who is also flawed and complicated.  Just like life.  It was also nice to see such a racially diverse cast.  The play, like the world, was no one thing.  I liked that.  I will say that some of the performances left me a tad cold, but the writing is so consistently good, and the story was so fascinating to me, I got over it.  Informed Consent runs another couple of weeks and you should definitely go see it.

After the performance, there was a talkback with Deb and a neuroscientist who could speak to the play's accuracy and validity.  It was hysterical to me, though, that the neuroscientist was also this gorgeous woman who could've been a supermodel and she just happened to be married to a rapper and they just performed a show together at the Edinburgh Fringe Fest.  Not that all that necessarily means anything, it just cracked me up.  The scientist was quite engaging, though, and was very good about explaining rather complex theories in a very understandable way.  When the audience questions started to lean towards the 'anti-science' point of view, she was very quick to give explanations about how hard it is to balance hard science with subjective human experience.  There were several audience members who had first hand experience either with genetic testing or Alzheimer's or Native Americans, so it was a very lively and interesting conversation that was the perfect ending to a lively and interesting play.  Thumbs way up.