Written by
novelist, playwright and Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Stanford
University, Carl Djerassi, and directed by Vienna-born Isabella Gregor,
An Immaculate Misconception revolves around the issues
of reproductive technology - in particular, Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection
(ICSI). Dr Prudence Tam (played by local actress Beatrice Chia) is a
pioneer researcher of this reproductive technique. With age catching
up, Tam desires a child and is desperate to conceive. With both desires
being complementary, Tam decides that the best specimen of ICSI technology
would be herself. She steals sperm from her long-distance lover Nigel
Turner (played by Briton Oliver Tobias) in one of her many sessions
of passion and gets her co-researcher, Dr Felix Frankenthaler (played
by Briton Joe McGann), to assist her in injecting the single sperm into
the egg. The comedy of errors begins when Frankenthaler decides to inject
his own sperm into another of Tam's eggs both of which are later reinserted
into her uterus. The resulting birth of Adam, the first ICSI baby (the
allusion to the first Adam is apparent), sparks off a controversy over
such reproductive technology which then forms the central concern of
the play.
It would be fairly justified to claim that An Immaculate Misconception
was somewhat dry, monotonous and even jargonistic (with scientific terms
being employed extensively throughout the performance). The play started
off somewhat slowly with a general lethargy both in the acting and performative
atmosphere. The audience was compelled to follow the intensely dialogue-driven
performance which at moments became tedious and weighty. However, the
"foreignness" of this scientific issue is also the play's
strength - Djerassi employs art to educate about science; a seeming
antithesis that finds synthesis in the play. Scientific terms were defined
by characters and what could have been an intensely scientifically driven
script was nicely balanced by the strong humanist and ethical issues
raised in the later acts of the play. The second half intrigued the
audience with the controversies of ICSI - humanist considerations
similar to abortion and genetic engineering. To Frankenthaler, Adam
is merely an icon of scientific supremacy; to Tam, he is a successful
scientific project turned object of affection. For Turner, Adam is a
son regardless of the procedures by which he was conceived.
While the play had a captivating theme, the acting paled in comparison.
Chia's actions were often unnatural and awkward with exaggerated hand
gestures and expressions reminiscent of high school performance styles.
Though lucid and eloquent, Chia did not manage to evoke the complexity
that is Prudence Tam and could not portray the character convincingly.
Tam is a character of depth that grows, develops and changes as the
play progresses (particularly with her response and reaction to ICSI).
However, Chia did not seem to be able to embody and corporealise that
change.
The cast also lacked chemistry and a sense of being an ensemble though
the individual characters of Turner and Frankenthaler were sufficiently
portrayed. The experience of watching was one of merely witnessing a
verbal interaction between the actors. The dynamics of the relationships
between the three characters - the subtleties and the non-linguistic
signals - were woefully inadequate and weak. Although the actors
seemed to have warmed up in the second half, resulting
in an increase in intensity and rhythm of the performance, much of the
performative potential was lost.
However, what makes the play appealing is not
only the provocative issues it raised but also the witty script. Djerassi's
puns and allusions to the sexual act (the injection of the sperm into
the embryo, in the ICSI sequence, is constantly compared to the "thrust"
and "insertions" more commonly and ordinarily understood)
often broke the monotony of the dialogue and stirred humour, although
there was a surfeit of this at times. Djerassi's context-specific script
also makes for closer identification with the audience. The play
is set in Singapore and many of the prevailing issues such as the greying
population and low birth rates were cleverly interwoven into the central
ethical concerns about reproductive and scientific research.
What was most engaging, yet disturbing at the same time, was perhaps
the way in which the performance constantly reiterated the notions of
"mechanical reproduction/reproducibility". The subtitle of
the play, "Sex in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction", is,
as Djerassi affirms, an allusion to Walter Benjamin's essay, The
Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction. While the
play's focus is on the ways in which sex and human reproduction are
no longer synonymous, and how human reproduction can now be a mechanical
and technical process, the play itself, as a work of art, exemplifies
the tenets of Benjamin's essay. The notions of mechanical reproducibility
were accentuated not only thematically, as seen in the long-distance
email romance between Tam and Turner, but also illustrated in screenings
of the email conversations and the hypnotising tap-sounds of the keyboard
which were intelligently fused with the soundtrack. The sets, music
and digitised soundscape were all processes and products of mechanical
reproduction used to create the work of art. In addition, the screening
of ICSI procedures in Scene 5 (as Tam and Frankenthaler perform the
procedure themselves), based on actual fertilisations, reinforce the
notions of reproducibility - in not just science but art as well.
The play was thus engaging because it meta-dramatically performed its
thematic concern. Then again, the disturbance comes with the realisation
that the play opens itself to further questioning: Benjamin remarks,
in his essay, the loss of an "aura" - the phenomenon
of distance - that which withers in the face of mechanical reproduction.
The unique existence is lost in the face of a plurality of copies. What
is the "aura" which is lost as a consequence of ICSI? Is it
a mere detachment from the domain of tradition? What is the "tradition"
that is severed here then? What is the "aura" of the work
of art that is the play since it is now mechanically reproduced -
not merely exemplified by the processes but by the various stagings
of the play as well?
In all, if one were to ignore the above questions that the performance
itself had evoked rather than provided answers to, An Immaculate
Misconception was entertaining and enlightening, and the issues
raised provoked much thought about the direction of scientific research
today. |
"What could have been an intensely scientifically driven script
was nicely balanced by the strong humanist and ethical issues raised"
Previous Reviews by Marcus Tan
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