“Science exists because people can love.”Epigraph, from the script
In a lab, a scientist has built a machine that can reach into a mind after it has gone dark and pull back what is left of it: fragments of language, flashes of feeling, memories with nothing attached. She hires a young assistant, and together they run the experiment on two lost brains who wake in an inky void with no idea who they were.
As the two strangers piece each other together, the woman running the machine is doing the same thing to herself. Her son died. Everything she has built since is an argument with that fact. The play ends where the science can't reach, at the moment she has to choose whether to keep the machine running or let go.
The Scientist is exhausted and completely consumed by her own experiment, brilliant enough to be feared and grieving enough to be reckless with it. Playing her meant keeping the grief underneath the work rather than on top of it, so that the moment she finally puts her hands on the machine and cries, it lands as a scientist's discipline breaking, not a mother's.
Photos by Jonathan Ke
Photos by Jonathan Ke
“Nayara Gonzalez, Amaya Makhni, Rosaria Star, and Silas Webb star in the science-fiction production.”
“Nayara Gonzalez as Scientist … navigate the shifting boundaries between experiment, memory, and identity.”