The Morning Line
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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Wednesday, August 19, 2015 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary Katie Aramento, Zoe Edelman PAGES: 11, including this page. C3 August 15, 2015 C1 August 19, 2015 Review: ‘Informed Consent’ Tests the Ethics of Genetic Research By Charles Isherwood In “Informed Consent,” a thoughtful and engrossing play by Deborah Zoe Laufer, a research scientist specializing in genetic diseases finds herself embroiled in controversy when her fierce dedication to her work, and her deeply personal reasons for pursuing it, lead her into murky ethical waters. Jillian, played with take-no-prisoners intensity by Tina Benko, is a genetic anthropologist whom we first meet in a rare moment of repose. She’s writing a letter to Natalie, who we soon learn is her young daughter. Trying to cast what she has to say in child-friendly terms, she begins on a storybook note: “Once upon a time ... There was a mother. Who had a monster sleeping inside her.” Realizing that this is perhaps a little too scary, she discards the idea and, at the urging of voices inside her head, tries a softer approach. (The voices are provided by the rest of the play’s cast of five.) “There was a mother who loved her little girl so much,” she writes, “that she would do anything to save her.” An ominous voice from the chorus chimes in, “No matter who got hurt.” The play, which opened on Tuesday at the Duke on 42nd Street theater, a co-production by Primary Stages and Ensemble Studio Theater, then moves back in time, to Jillian’s years at a university in Arizona. Here she proselytizes (directly to us, whom she jokingly calls her “cousins”) for the wonders of genetic science with the fervency of an evangelical preacher. “Now that we can trace our genome, we’re finally able to read the greatest story ever told,” she says with excited awe, “the history of our species, written in our cells.” Race is a “myth,” she adds. “All of the things we see as ‘race’ are about migratory patterns.” Jillian’s enthusiasm, and her obsessive dedication to her work, earn her the professional equivalent of a lottery win: Ken (Jesse J. Perez), a social anthropologist, enlists her aid in trying to help a Native American tribe in the Grand Canyon that has displayed alarming levels of obesity-related diabetes. The tribe has only 670 living members, so the matter is of some urgency, and the tribe members’ isolation from the world makes them an ideally uncorrupted gene pool, which thrills Jillian. (The play was inspired by real events.) During this conversation, we also learn that Jillian hopes to ultimately specialize in Alzheimer’s disease research. The reason is personal: Her mother died in her 30s with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Jillian knows that she has probably inherited the gene mutation that caused it, and may have passed it along to Natalie. “Informed Consent,” directed by Liesl Tommy (“Appropriate”) at a lightning-quick pace — a reflection of Jillian’s race against mortality — unfolds the story of Jillian’s eventually contentious interaction with the tribe and its representative, Arella (played with moving gravity by Delanna Studi), as well as with Ken and the university’s dean (a forceful Myra Lucretia Taylor). The director and excellent cast smoothly handle the play’s complex structure, with narration and choral commentary slipped into the dramatized scenes. The first step in the study, obtaining blood samples, proves a battle because the tribe’s members believes their blood is sacred. Jillian persuades Arella — her translator and the only tribe member who speaks English — to intervene and convince as many members as possible to give up their blood, which she duly does. And here’s where Jillian’s dedication to finding the key to the epidemic of obesity (beyond dietary matters) becomes corrupted by her belief that the study could lead to other genetic discoveries. Without giving too much away, I can say that her interest in exploiting the data for all its potential uses runs into conflict with Arella’s — and Ken’s — understanding that she was authorized to use it only for the diabetes study. The affecting ancillary story — of Jillian’s Type-A personality and the problems it causes in her marriage — is woven neatly into the plot. Her husband, Graham (played with gentle wariness by Pun Bandhu), a children’s book author, does more parenting than the work-obsessed Jillian, which causes her anguish because she knows her time with Natalie could be cut short. Staged on a handsome set by Wilson Chin that wittily uses a quartet of staircases in the same general shape as DNA spirals, “Informed Consent” has some speechy moments. But it raises provocative questions about the potential conflicts between scientific discovery and religious beliefs. Advances in science, Jillian firmly believes, are sometimes accidental, and sometimes controversial. “They think we single-mindedly do experiments, know what we’ll find, and then we get the answer,” she says. “But real science is in the mistakes.” “Informed Consent” is a reminder that some mistakes must be paid for. Informed Consent By Deborah Zoe Laufer; directed by Liesl Tommy; sets by Wilson Chin; costumes by Jacob A. Climer; lighting by Matthew Richards; music and sound by Broken Chord; projections by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew; production stage manager, Robbie Kyle Peters; production supervisor, Mind the Gap. Presented by Primary Stages, Casey Childs, executive producer; Andrew Leynse, artistic director; and Ensemble Studio Theater, William Carden, artistic director; Paul A. Slee, executive director. At the Duke on 42nd Street, Manhattan; 646-223-3010, primarystages.org. Through Sept. 13. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. WITH: Pun Bandhu (Graham), Tina Benko (Jillian), Jesse J. Perez (Ken), Delanna Studi (Arella/Natalie) and Myra Lucretia Taylor (Dean Hagan). C2 August 19, 2015 Review: ‘Grey Gardens’ Is Revived in Its Real Setting, the Hamptons By Laura Collins-Hughes SAG HARBOR, N.Y. — Here in the manicured Hamptons, where affluence parades in the summer months, “Grey Gardens” counts as a local story: the Camelot relatives — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s elderly aunt and middle-aged cousin — whose spectacularly mangy living conditions, in their wreck of an East Hampton mansion, grabbed headlines in the 1970s. The neighbors, naturally, had complained. So there’s a doubleness to seeing the musical at Bay Street Theater, in this prim enclave of towns and villages where the eccentric Edith Bouvier Beale and her unhinged daughter, Little Edie Beale, failed so flagrantly to fit in. “They can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday,” Little Edie (Rachel York) grouses, and the audience laughs in recognition, never mind the jillion cats and assorted raccoons bunking in Grey Gardens, their tumbledown home. But the potent emotional undertow of this production, directed by Michael Wilson, has nothing to do with geographical proximity and everything to do with the formidable Betty Buckley, whose determinedly cheerful, thoroughly heart-bruising Edith will win you over, pull you under and cast you out to sea. Based on David and Albert Maysles’s 1975 cult documentary, “Grey Gardens,” the musical — with a book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Michael Korie — teases us in a prologue with a glimpse of Edith, circa 1973, in all her dotty decrepitude. Then she disappears until Act II. As on Broadway, where Christine Ebersole won a Tony Award for best actress in 2007 for the twin roles of midcentury Edith and middle-aged Edie — while Mary Louise Wilson got the featured-actress trophy as late-century Edith — this is mostly a younger woman’s show. The first act, set in 1941, gives us an Edith (Ms. York) who is glamorous, tuneful and forever banging against the bars of her gilded cage, which keeps her in East Hampton when what she really wants is a stage. Edie (Sarah Hunt), an eligible debutante engaged to Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. (Matt Doyle), is mortified by her mother’s extroverted behavior, but Edith’s young Bouvier nieces, Jacqueline (Gracie Beardsley) and Lee (Dakota Quackenbush), adore her. Ms. York does a fine job of tracing a through line from this Edith to the willfully myopic woman she will become decades later, with Grey Gardens decaying around her. More problematic is the groundwork laid for Little Edie, who comes across in Act I as a model of propriety, with not even a hint of wildness. Ms. Hunt has a splendid voice, and she is pleasant to watch, but she does not help us fathom how this Edie transforms into the deluded, self-dramatizing creature who so beguiled the Maysles brothers. This is the Edie Ms. York channels in the musical’s far stronger second half. It’s as if she were slipping on Edie’s skin, and bursting into song. The two parts Ms. York plays add up to a giant job, and at Sunday’s matinee, her voice sometimes sounded frayed — which detracted not at all from the slightly boho elegance of her outrageous young Edith or the tethered torment of her Little Edie, furious to be stuck at home yet not equipped to survive elsewhere. Ms. Buckley goes her own way with the elderly Edith, who seems somehow untouched by the surrounding filth. Her long gray hair is wonderfully fluffy (the wigs are by Paul Huntley), and her offbeat outfits (by Ilona Somogyi) so vividly colored that they could star in a detergent commercial. Her cane and halting walk notwithstanding, she radiates vitality. It’s perfectly clear why Jerry (a delightfully sweet Mr. Doyle), the handsome young man who helps out around the house, would enjoy Edith’s company.