Big Pharma is not only big, it’s growing bigger by the panic attack, by the back spasm, by the botched terrorist attack.
We want that pill that makes us happy because that happy is our latest knight in shining armor come to whoosh our blues away.
The Effect, now playing at Studio Theatre’s Stage 4, plunges its audience right into that next toxic brew: the newest, latest anti-depressant guaranteed to leave you happy.
And we are all part of the experiment.
Lucy Prebble is our playwright: The Sugar Syndrome and Enron, fame, with Enron reaching Broadway in 2010.
With The Effect, she combines the stimulus of sugar with the infinite corporate greed that Enron embodied, and then she goes after Pharma.
But it’s truly a play about love and the choices we humans make, and the brain that affects those choices, whether that brain is on anti-depressants or not.
And it’s that ethical dimension that gives The Effect its effect. For love is the biggest drug of all, and it’s constantly playing trickster on our neuro-pathways.
Hubris seems the psychological disease that affects every generation. With Big Pharma, it is the grandiose assumption that we understand the mysteries of the brain while ignoring the mind. Hence, “we have a drug for that, and that, and that, and that…”
And business is booming. Whether we are talking about opioids, where on an average day in America 650,000 prescriptions are dispensed, or psychiatric drugs, where one in 6 Americans take one or another, with antidepressants being the most common.
We want that normal; we want that happy; and we want it no matter how strange, terrifying, or disturbed the world is.
After all, if you have the money, it’s all so easy. And if you can’t get that prescription, there’s always the street corner.
And then, of course, there’s love, which is what The Effect is really about, not the spiritual kind, and not just the romantic kind either. The Effect is also about that love that binds us together and won’t let us go.
Studio has put together a stellar cast, led by Gina Daniels who plays Dr. Lorna James, the consummate professional with an almost fatal flaw. Daniels navigates that flaw to perfection.
The young couple, Connie and Tristan (Katie Kleiger and Rafi Silver), are almost polar opposites. Kleiger and Silver fan that polarization to a red heat, as their chemistry with one another keeps sparking.
Eric Hissom’s Dr. Toby Sealey rounds out this cast of couples as the slickest pill pusher you’ll ever meet.
David Muse directs.
Love enters the mind as drugs enter the brain, so the mind has no choice but to raise havoc in the brain, while the brain, in turn, turns the mind to jelly.
And yet we continue to think we know how to control these forces of nature and the chaos-effects of technology.
We do, indeed, have no pill for that.
Running Time: Two hours 10 minutes, including one intermission.
The Effect plays through October 29, 2017, at Studio Theatre’s Stage 4 – 1501 14th Street, NW, in Washington, DC. For tickets call (202) 332-3300, or purchase them online.
