THEATER

tell her she is fine, despite feeling terribly sick.

“You do have doctors who think Black people feel pain differently, who assume when a Black person says, ‘I have pain,’ and asks for pain medicine, they’re trying to get drugs,” Langford says. “Because this country has never reconciled with the way it formed and the way it prospered in its early eras on the backs of enslaved people, we never had a chance to challenge those wrong thoughts.”

PREVIEW Medical racism

How Blood Go shines a dramatic light on the Tuskegee syphilis study.

By DILPREET RAJU

In 1932, Green Adair was one of 399 Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, just east of Montgomery, who tested positive for “bad blood.” He and over 600 other Black men were deceived by the U.S. Public Health Service and enlisted to participate in a study originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.”

Those men were told they were being treated for their “bad blood” when, in reality, known treatments were withheld in an e ort to observe how syphilis a ected Black people over time. Late-stage syphilis decimated the participants who survived early-stage symptoms. As the infection grew worse, so did its e ects, resulting in debilitating neurological symptoms and sometimes even blindness.

Over 90 years after the Tuskegee study started, Lisa Langford, a descendant of patient number 001—Green Adair—is preparing for the world premiere of How Blood Go , set to debut at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater as part of the LookOut series this March.

Langford first learned of her ancestor as a child in 1980s Bu alo, New York, when her family received some money from a class action lawsuit settlement the government agreed to pay out in 1974. The payout was quite low; $9 million total, which came to about $37,500 apiece for the then-living survivors who had syphilis, or $15,000 for their estates if deceased.

Presented by Congo Square Theatre Company, which has been staging works by and about those within the African diaspora for over 20 years, the new play spans characters and time to exhibit the struggle Black Americans face with health care. “Who was the first person to die in the Revolutionary War?” Langford asks rhetorically. “Crispus Attucks, a Black man.”

“It’s baked into the country, and we show that period after period of the medical establishment mishandling Black health,” she says, referring to the continuous loss of Black life for the advancement of American progress.

The play’s story follows multiple storylines: in the past, brothers Ace (Ronald L. Conner) and Bean (David Dowd) navigate mistreatment after Bean is recruited into the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Years after their plight, Quinntasia (Jyreika Guest) is ready to get her small business launched, a wellness program called Quinntessentials. But she learns that her healthy body is not a result of her regimen but rather a futuristic, experimental device— activated without her knowledge or consent— that makes her appear white to medical sta .

Quinntasia must reconcile how it was not her own e orts that led her to success but a matter of racial and social dynamics beyond her control. Didi (Yolonda Ross), a close friend, relies on Quinntasia as health-care workers

Langford, director Ti any Fulson, and Ross (known for her role as Jada in Showtime’s The Chi ) have all experienced medical mismanagement. “You Black girls wear your hair too tight,” a dermatologist told Langford as she experienced her hair falling out. She sought another doctor’s opinion and discovered it was actually the onset of a thyroidal autoimmune disease. Fulson was told she had a lazy eye by an optometrist when fluid was actually filling behind her eyeball, which could have led to permanent blindness. “We’re lied to all the time,” Ross emphasizes. “People don’t even care if they’re lying.”

U.S. Public Health Service researchers thought to study syphilis infections by race as it was believed that Black bodies fight the infection di erently from white bodies. In the summer of 1972, Public Health Service social worker Peter Buxtun leaked the Tuskegee study malfeasance to the Associated Press, and on November 16, 1972, the study was terminated after more than 40 years of opera-

How Blood Go

3/ 11-4/23 : Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Tue-Wed 3/ 14 -3/ 15 8 PM; mask-required performance Sat 4/13 PM; 1700 Theater, 1700 N. Halsted, 312-335 -1650, steppenwolf.org or congosquaretheatre.org tion. (As a result of this study and the leak, the U.S. passed the National Research Act of 1974, which outlined general research ethics.)

Psychoanalyst and Yale Law School professor Jay Katz, writing for the panel commissioned to investigate the study, declared that its scientific basis was unethical and that subjects “were exploited, manipulated, and deceived. They were treated not as human subjects but as objects of research.”

If it were not for Buxtun’s whistleblowing after years of his failed internal attempts to close the program, it’s unclear when—or if— the government would have halted the study. By the time the program was shut down, 128 men in the program had died due to syphilis-related complications. By the early 40s, penicillin was found to be an e ective, reliable treatment of syphilis, even curing syphilis if caught early enough. Yet study participants were not provided any treatments. They were withheld to observe the e ects of syphilis— which spread the sickness to partners and sometimes passed it down to children through birth.

Langford brings up the “father of modern gynecology” J. Marion Sims, who—despite discovering valuable treatments still utilized today—experimented on enslaved women without anesthesia. “I and your mom and whoever, we all benefit from what he did, but it was horrible!” A statue of Sims stood in New York’s Central Park for the better part of a century before being taken down in April 2018. “The problem is really rooted in this belief that Black people aren’t fully human,” Langford says. “It’s woven into the DNA of this country that Black bodies do not deserve the same treatment as white bodies.”

Resulting e ects of the way the U.S. healthcare system cares for Black folks are more permanent than just doctor–patient interactions. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the life expectancy of Black Americans in 2021 was nearly six years shorter than that of white Americans.

Though the play grapples with heavy ideas and stomach-turning history, there is still emotional ground to explore beyond the hurt.

“What does it take for you to treat another human being as though they are not worthy?” Fulson asks. “This larger, systemic issue bleeds into every area of our lives, so how can we also find duality here? With a play like this, that has such a dynamic script, we can go so wide and so nuanced, it’s important that we don’t miss the opportunity of the heart in it as well.”

She hopes the project pushes audience members who work in health care to look inward toward their own perspectives and past experiences, and she hopes white audiences will see it as truth. “I hope that health-care workers will see this show and it will inform their practices,” Fulson declares. “I believe that Black people and non-Black audience members will be having different experiences.”