Placebo Bulletin by Playwrights Horizons

MAINSTAGE BULLETIN

PLACEBO

A NEW PLAY BY

MELISSA JAMESDIRECTED GIBSONBY DANIEL AUKIN

IN THIS ISSUE PAGE 3

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PLAYWRIGHT’S PERSPECTIVE

MIND OVER MATTER

ARTS & SCIENCES

Melissa James Gibson contemplates the placebo effect, and how we make the choices that define our lives.

Unraveling the mysteries of the placebo effect.

Adam Greenfield on science plays and the work of Melissa James Gibson.

FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

DEAR FRIENDS, I was fascinated to learn from Melissa’s restless and plangently witty new play, Placebo, that the derivation of the word stems from medieval ecclesiastical customs. According to one of her characters, Jonathan, a Classics Ph.D. candidate, certain well-to-do families would sometimes hire sham mourners to sing vespers for the dead. Because the first word of these vespers is “placebo,” meaning, “I shall please,” these mourners-for-hire eventually earned the shorthand appellation, placebos. It took several centuries for the steady course of etymology to bring about its current clinical definition. The central storyline of Placebo does center upon a medical drug trial for a “female arousal drug” called Resurgo administered by Louise, a young resident at a pharmaceutical company. A colleague of hers quips: “I heard about it. The female Viagra,” to which Louise responds, “Well, Viagra’s purely about penile mechanics whereas this drug aims to get inside a woman’s mind.” Right off the bat, we enter terrain that resides somewhere in the grey area of the psychsoma split. Should we take at face value that male desire pertains to body mechanics and female desire comes from the mind? If this is the case, wouldn’t the placebo for such a drug trial possibly be more prone to eliciting the placebo effect? The one drug trial participant we meet does seem particularly susceptible to the power of suggestion. It does not take long for the play to assert its thematic implications well beyond the narrative reach of this drug trial. As the bumpy romance between Jonathan and Louise heads towards classic Gibsonesque irresolution, I found myself thinking more and more about this word, “psyche,” which means “soul,” and the Latin translation of “placebo” as “I shall please.” The real precipitating event of the play comes when Louise tells Jonathan about a conversation with her dying mother where she found herself precipitously telling her mother she and Jonathan got engaged. Jonathan agrees there is no reason to take it back. But the real effect of the thoughtless remark runs deeper. It is as if their relationship has taken a placebo and they are suddenly in the middle of a drug trial. Louise told this white lie to her mother to please her, but she has brought a whole new pressure to bear on them. Will their relationship rise to a higher level because they are engaged? Or will they become more keenly aware of the flaws in their relationship that keep it from rising to that level of commitment? Where does desire lie? The myth of Psyche and Cupid tells metaphorically of the link between the soul and desire. Humans try to lasso the profound root of conjugal desire in their souls through rituals and institutions like marriage to try to arrest time and keep the sublimely ephemeral ecstasy of passion alive as a sustainable, eternal flame. But it doesn’t come automatically. The study of desire and arousal Louise works on assumes some kind of link between the soma and the psyche. There must be a drug that can make the desire to desire create desire. But is there? Where does pleasure lie? Placebo: I shall please. But whom do I please? Do I please myself? Do I please you? Placebo Domino? The “placebo effect” suggests our minds affect our bodies. Actually, if it’s a psychosomatic dynamic, it might be more accurate to suggest our souls affect our bodies. I suspect Melissa might squirm a bit at all this talk of souls and “domino.” But there’s no question in my mind that the great, continuous temptation the play describes is the temptation to leap. Sometimes we leap into faith; sometimes we leap into faithlessness. And sometimes, as Melissa says at the end of her piece, we just stand at the cliff edge and cross our fingers.

TIM SANFORD

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Special thanks to the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater for its generous support of Placebo.

Placebo is generously supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts The Mainstage Bulletin is generously funded, in part, by the

LIMAN FOUNDATION

Photo by Christine Gatti

PLAYWRIGHT’S PERSPECTIVE How much does committing to a job, to a life, to a partner, to a path, fix who we are? And how sustainable are these choices in the shadow of forever, in the shadow of mortality? Placebo, in Latin, means “I shall please.” The term “placebo effect” is over sixty years old, and refers to an improvement in a medical condition that can’t be attributed to the medicine, since the medicine in question is medicine-less. How does something result from nothing? Lots of ways, it turns out. Or rather, something results from something other than nothing. The pills might be inert, but the clinical/research environment is not. The physician’s encouraging words, a hand on a shoulder—attention paid!—things like these have a documented positive effect on treatment. We are permeable creatures, we humans. Impressionable. Susceptible. Simple acknowledgment matters more than most of us care to admit.

we wind up where we wind up? With Placebo, as with all my plays, I suppose, I’m trying to shine a light on the pathmaking. A lot of the research tells us that the placebo effect, essentially, comes down to the power of expectation. What is the recipe for expectation? One part knowledge. One part speculation. And then there’s a third speciesspecific ingredient, I think—hope. I mean, in some sense, don’t we all have our fingers crossed pretty much all the time?

MELISSA JAMES GIBSON NOVEMBER 2014

The main characters in Placebo are grappling with questions of identity, both individually and as a couple. In that cuspy place where formal education ends and true adulthood begins, they are trying to reconcile two internal selves: the professional and the private. Their states are liminal, to use another fine Latin word—limen means “threshold.” Humans, consciously or not, keep one eye on the future. How will the decisions and commitments we make now… feel then? It can weigh on a person, or a character in a play. What tense—present or future—is the one to which the most credence should be given? For the ancient eastern philosopher, and his modern disciple, the answer is the present. But anyone who’s spent any time on earth looks into the future, and wonders. How do we choose who and what we choose? How do we make any big decisions about our paths? Of course, we are constrained by our circumstances, financial and otherwise. But when we get beyond these, how do

ABOUT THE AUTHOR MELISSA JAMES GIBSON's recent plays include What Rhymes with America;

This; [sic]; Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance; Brooklyn Bridge (with a song by Barbara Brousal) and Current Nobody. Her work has been produced and/ or developed at Playwrights Horizons, Center Theatre Group, Soho Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, The Children’s Theatre Company, Steppenwolf, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Seattle Rep, Manhattan Theatre Club and the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab among others, regionally and internationally. Current commissions: Atlantic Theater Company; Second Stage Theatre. Honors: Obie Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Steinberg Playwright Award; Kesselring Prize; Whiting Writers Award; Lucille Lortel Foundation Playwrights’ Fellowship; Lilly Award; Jerome Fellow; MacDowell Colony Fellow; NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights; Susan Smith Blackburn Prize finalist. MFA: Yale School of Drama; graduate of New Dramatists. Teaching: Lecturer in the Program in Theater at Princeton University, spring semesters 2011 and 2012. Film: screenplay for All Is Bright, starring Paul Giamatti, Paul Rudd and Sally Hawkins, directed by Phil Morrison (2013 Tribeca Film Festival premiere). TV: seasons 1 and 2 of The Americans; season 3 of House of Cards. This and Other Plays is published by TCG.

Photo by Zack DeZon

PH MAKES HEADLINES “WE CAN AFFORD TO TAKE MORE STEPS TO HELP WRITERS, AND MAYBE INSPIRE MORE THEATERS TO DO THE SAME.”

impact of being named PH’s first Resident Company. This new program will offer smaller NYC companies rehearsal, performance, and office space in our downtown campus at 440 Lafayette Street.

Theater writers are among the least compensated creative artists in America. In November, the New York Times announced our new initiative to offer writers better pay and money for health insurance. As this quote from Tim suggests, we're hoping our peers will join us in this important effort.

OUT OF TOWN BUT NOT OUT OF TIMES

“THE POTENTIAL FOR NEW COLLABORATIONS AND PROJECTS IS BOUNDLESS. WE ARE GIDDY AT THE PROSPECT OF HATCHING THEM.”

In his recent article for American Theatre magazine, Tim reports on his conversations about reviewing shows outside New York with the editorial staff of the New York Times. Read up on all these stories on our website at PHnyc.org/headlines.

So says Maria Striar, Producing Artistic Director of Clubbed Thumb, on the

BACKSTORY

MIND OVER MATTER

Do you remember when you took the training wheels off your bike? At some point in the course of those first exhilarating twowheeled joy rides, maybe you fell down, and maybe you banged your knee, and maybe you cried out for your mom. Who maybe, before she cleaned you up and sent you on your way again, kissed you where you hurt. For many of us, the mysterious healing properties of a parent’s kiss offer one of our first experiences of a placebo effect—“a change in a patient’s illness attributable to the symbolic import of a treatment rather than a specific pharmacologic or physiologic property,” according to one 20th century definition. Put more crudely: you believe you will get better, and so you do. The word “placebo,”—“I shall please,” in Latin—was first used in English in the 14th century to refer to hired mourners at funerals. So named because their remunerated wailings often began with the psalm verse Placebo Domino in regione vivorum (“I shall please the Lord in the land of

the living”), placebos were paid to enact the gestures of a grief not their own. Adapted to a medical context in the 18th century, the word today is most familiar to the average Jane and Joe for its application, for control purposes, in clinical trials. But remarkably, considering their ubiquity in the clinical landscape, there’s a lot about the mechanisms of placebos that even expert researchers don’t fully understand. What we do know: the placebo effect depends on perception and expectation. “Mind over matter” might sound like mumbo jumbo in a medical context, but research increasingly seems to bear out that maxim. A patient who believes that her treatment will work experiences a measurably stronger placebo effect than one who is burdened with doubt. Correspondingly, the manner and bearing of the prescribing physician also plays a role. Patients receiving placebos report greater relief when they perceive their doctors as warm and confident. On some level, it seems what we seek in our doctors is a proxy for the all-

(CONTINUED ON BACK COVER)

IN THE DIRECTOR'S CHAIR DANIEL AUKIN most recently directed Itamar Moses and Michael Friedman's The Fortress of Solitude (Public). Other recent New York credits include Melissa James Gibson’s This (Playwrights Horizons), Bad Jews at Roundabout, What Rhymes with America (Atlantic), Sam Shepard’s Heartless (Signature), Amy Herzog’s 4,000 Miles (Lincoln Center), and Itamar Moses’ Back Back Back (Manhattan Theatre Club). Other credits include A View from the Bridge at Arena Stage, Melissa James Gibson’s Current Nobody at Woolly Mammoth and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine at La Jolla Playhouse, as well as a workshop of Rachel Axler’s new play Smudge at the Eugene O’Neill Conference. As Artistic Director of Soho Rep, Daniel directed Mark Schultz’s critically acclaimed Everything Will Be Done (World Premiere), Melissa James Gibson’s [sic] (World Premiere, Obie Award for Direction), Quincy Long’s The Year of the Baby (World Premiere), Mac Wellman’s Cat’s-Paw (World Premiere), Marie Irene Fornes’ Molly’s Dream (World Premiere), and Melissa James Gibson’s Suitcase 44

(also at La Jolla Playhouse). During his tenure at Soho Rep, he strengthened the company’s commitment to developing iconoclastic new plays. He commissioned over fifty new plays though the Writer/ Director Lab and produced sixteenfull-length productions (including new plays by Adam Bock, The Flying Machine, Young Jean Lee and Richard Maxwell). Accolades for this body of work include eight Obie awards, four Drama Desk nominations, two Kesselring Prizes and one Oppenheimer Award.

Photo by Zack DeZon

THE AMERICAN VOICE

ARTS & SCIENCES

Jane: Why are you sitting in the almost dark Alan: It’s the human condition Jane in case you haven’t noticed – from This, by Melissa James Gibson Few scholarly catchphrases have had as enduring a legacy as “The Two Cultures,” the term coined by C.P. Snow to describe what he perceived as a dangerous rift between science and literary life. A chemist and a novelist—himself a living model of these divergent cultures united—Snow stood before the academic community at the University of Cambridge in the Spring of 1959, and lamented that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” literary intellectuals and scientists, “between them a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Though his accusing finger was pointed in both directions, the blame was largely placed with the literary set: “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of, ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?’ I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, ‘What do you mean by mass, or acceleration?’ which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘Can you read?’—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.” Being a guy who fancies himself at least moderately culturally literate, and who is embarrassed that 55 years later he can’t even fake his way through the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Snow’s point is welltaken. While the artist and the scientist take distinctly different approaches, there’s an undeniable intersection in their pursuit to better apprehend the mysteries of the world; but how to even begin if we’re only half-literate? Addressing the schism Snow articulated, about fifteen years ago the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation developed a nationwide theater program as part of their long-standing aim: “to build bridges between the two cultures of science and the humanities and to develop a common language so that they can better understand and speak to one another—and ultimately to grasp that they belong to a single common culture.” Sloan’s funding encourages stories that place the understanding of scientific principles into our daily lives. Resulting in dozens of new plays staged all across the country, Sloan’s program—of which Placebo is a commission—is well on its way to establishing a new dramatic genre. Not that playwrights weren’t setting foot into scientific territory before the good people at Sloan came along. Chekhov and Schnitzler were both doctors, and Voltaire and Strindberg were no strangers to the lab. The story of playwriting has seen its share of scientific figures; to name just a few: Goethe’s Faust (1808) depicts God’s chosen human being—a scientist, naturally—seduced to strike an unholy bargain; Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1921) introduced the word “robot” to the English language when he imagined a factory for the manufacture of artificial humans; Brecht’s The Life of Galileo (1943) chronicles the life of The Father of Modern Science; Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists (1962) satirizes man’s shaky ethics in the face of wartime technology; and Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) weaves together a whopping number of principles from mathematics, physics, computer algorithms and thermodynamics, to construct a time-traveling, passionate story of man’s appetite for knowledge. On one hand, Melissa James Gibson might seem like the world’s least likely candidate to write a play about science. Her collection of vigorously melan-

choly, brilliantly funny plays seem more interested in pursuing ambiguity and limbo—in the state of semi-enlightenment—than they are in finding answers. “What I was never able to express much to my regret,” one character in her play [sic] (2001) explains, “is that the mistake is precisely what is of Interest.” Melissa’s plays are less concerned with discovery than they are with the in-between state of being stalled and frayed, of inadvertently losing track. Set amidst the hallways and doorways of tiny neighboring Manhattan apartments, the aptly titled [sic] gives us three hyper-articulate, over-educated urbanites in their early thirties—just past any hope, as they are constantly aware, of being recognized as latent geniuses—who go to great measures to avoid inhabiting their own lives. And Suitcase (2004) probes the mind-state of restless nostalgia, focusing on two doctoral candidates who find hilariously elaborate means to distract themselves from dead-end dissertations and unsatisfying relationships. Her 2009 play This (which premiered at Playwrights Horizons) chronicles the messy, cloudy, self-destructive state of a forty-something grieving the death of her husband. And in her gorgeous, most recent play What Rhymes with America (2012), we see a man struggling to connect with his 16-year-old daughter— literally, through a closed apartment door—as both try to live as long as they can in the gasp of hope that comes before defeat. On the other hand, though, Gibson strikes me as precisely the right playwright to take on Sloan’s mission to marry the pursuits of science and literature. In 2009, the British Science Council saw fit to propose an official definition for the word “science” for the first time in history, since Francis Bacon may-or-may-not have coined the word in the 16th century: “Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.” A connoisseur of existential awkwardness, Melissa James Gibson locates the foggiest aspects of ourselves, our doubts and deficiencies, and then athletically, gymnastically unearths the nuances she finds there in the attempt to better understand them. Her characters are hyper-articulate and intensely observant, compulsively parsing their experiences, searching for the words to describe what they least understand. Which is—in her plays—just about everything. In Suitcase, one character considers the nature of a sigh: “semi-verbal, semi-physical, sometimes signaling deflation, sometimes signaling deflation’s antithesis... strange antithetical beasts, sighs are.” Study of the natural and social world is reliant on empirical knowledge, which has proven essentially trustworthy over the centuries. But when it comes to studying what’s inside our minds—our murky, subjective experiences of the world—positivism flies out the window, and we look to artists. “Lives don’t behave. We are porous and susceptible beings,” Melissa said in a 2004 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, “and even when our intentions are definite we ineluctably veer. The veering is what interests me. I just feel such great affection for the evidence of our tragic, silly, smart and stupid selves.” It’s fitting that a playwright so committed to examining imprecision would choose, from a selection of potential ideas as expansive as “scientific thought,” to write about the placebo effect—one of medical science’s more baffling phenomena. In Melissa’s new play, Jonathan observes to Louise: “Seems like a hard thing to wrangle.” “What,” she asks. “Desire.” But it’s this very labor that Melissa returns to again and again; and it may be what ultimately, irreversibly links the arts and sciences. Struggling to understand is the human condition, and no one can accuse her of not noticing it.

ADAM GREENFIELD

DIRECTOR OF NEW PLAY DEVELOPMENT

Leadership support for the New Works Lab is generously provided by the Time Warner Foundation.

PLACEBO SYMPOSIUM

HOW YOU CAN GET THAT “FEEL GOOD EFFECT”

MONDAY, MARCH 23 7 PM IN THE MAINSTAGE THEATER

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The Symposium Series was inaugurated to explore the work we produce in a greater cultural context. Supplementing our regularly-programmed series of post-performance discussions—which provide opportunities for our audiences to engage with our playwrights—Symposium events allow writers to lead a conversation with a panel of unique experts to address topics surrounding their work.

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PERFORMANCE CALENDAR SUN

MON

Melissa James Gibson will be moderating a panel featuring an exciting slate of guests (to be announced). General admission tickets to this event are FREE with your reservation, reserve your seat now at PHnyc.org.

PLACEBO

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POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSIONS

8:00 PM

PPDs with the creative team have been scheduled for the following dates:

2:30 PM 8:00 PM

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25 SUNDAY, MARCH 1

following the matinee performance

2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM

FRIDAY, MARCH 6

We hope you can take part in this important aspect of our play development process. Open Captioned for

l theatergoers who are deaf or hard of hearing

2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM

Indicates post-performance discussion

We recommend Placebo for audiences aged 13+.

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BOOK YOUR TICKETS NOW FOR

PLACEBO Written by

MELISSA JAMES GIBSON Directed by

DANIEL AUKIN

FEBRUARY 20–APRIL 5, 2015

Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater This is the fourth of six productions in the 2014/15 Season.

#PlaceboPH

PHnyc.org

BACKSTORY

MIND OVER MATTER (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4)

powerful healing parent we remember from childhood; we want them to be gods. But amazingly, to whatever extent a doctor fulfills, or fails to fulfill, what could reasonably be categorized as a patient’s spiritual needs, it’s the body that responds. Clinical research continues to demonstrate not only the great extent to which our minds are attuned to symbolism, but also the extent to which our bodies can express responses to stimuli more poetic than pharmacological. “Placebos are not only the archetypal sugar pills but can be anything with the power to impact on the patient’s expectations,” wrote Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti, one of the world’s foremost researchers of the subject, in a recent essay. “Placebos are made of words, symbols, rituals, meanings.” The size and color of placebo pills, for instance, have been shown to make a difference in patient outcome. Warm-colored pills (reds, oranges and yellows) make for better stimulants, whereas cool-colored pills (purples and blues) make better sleep aids. (Notably, a bizarre exception exists on that last score, in the demographic pocket of Italian men, whose unique non-responsiveness to blue sleep aids, Benedetti speculates, might be attributed to their associating the color with their national football team, the Gli Azzurri. Yes, really.) Capsules seem to work better than tablets, heaven knows why; larger pills work better than smaller ones; and sham injections outperform sugar pills, perhaps through some subliminal pain-gain equation. Even the perception of relative cost seems to make a difference. Research shows that the specter of a large price tag can increase the perceived effect of placebo pills, as though we’ve been culturally programmed to expect more bang for more bucks. “Giving a placebo consists of essentially delivering a context without the substance,” explains Benedetti. “It is a wrapping devoid of content. Yet, the 8

empty box itself acts subtly on the patient’s mind.” That is to say, though their basis is not chemical but symbolic, placebos are nonetheless capable of producing actual, measurable changes in the activity of the brain, “just as an active drug would do.” What fascinates me about this knowledge is the extent to which it reframes seemingly absolute concepts—the real and the bogus, the truth and the lie—in terms mystifyingly less certain. If our imaginations have the power to shape our experience at the corporeal level, well, what is a drug? Or, more to the point, what isn’t one? In a placebo-themed episode of Radiolab (worth a listen, by the way, if you’re interested in learning more), Dr. Daniel B. Carr, who researches pain and pain therapies at Tufts University, talks about reality as little more than a story our brains are telling us. “Scientists currently view our whole identity as something that we construct from one fraction of a second to another,” he says. “You are the unfolding of an ongoing narrative. But it’s not just a narrative in words. It’s a narrative that involves touch, color, odors. We use all those inputs to generate the next frame from the last frame.” The characters in Melissa James Gibson’s Placebo are all, in one way or another, trying to better understand—and so attempt to exercise control over—that mysterious narrative of self. Why do we want what we want? How can we be happy? Just how much of life is all in our heads?

SARAH LUNNIE

ASSOCIATE LITERARY MANAGER