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A white plastic bucket sits on a spare stage on the Shed, the place the director Jamie Lloyd’s stark, riveting manufacturing of “The Effect” opened on Wednesday evening. By the time its content material — a human mind — is revealed, Lucy Prebble’s heady and scintillating drama is already interrogating the biology of need.
What begins because the drug trial of an antidepressant shifts into extra slippery territory when a flirtation develops between two of the contributors. As they circle one another, neurons blazing, questions swirl about whether or not their attraction has been chemically engineered — and if love controls the thoughts or the opposite manner round.
The simplicity of a mind plopped in a pail for scientific analysis turns into one thing of a mordant sight gag.
Previously staged Off Broadway in 2016, “The Effect” digs into what one of many research’s architects calls “nothing wanting a revolution in medication”: drug intervention that considers the psyche a plastic side of the self. Lloyd’s manufacturing, which premiered in August on the National Theater in London, poses the play’s philosophical inquiries on a stark and minimal airplane that feels each cosmic and atomically intimate.
During the experiment’s consumption, we be taught that Connie (Taylor Russell) will get unhappy however isn’t depressed (“once I’m unhappy, I’m unhappy,” she says) and that Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) has a playful swagger, half-flirting with the research’s administrator, Dr. Lorna James (a sport and frank Michele Austin), whereas she asks about his medical historical past.
When Tristan meets Connie, he gives to show within the urine pattern she’s holding: “How about I take your piss for you?” (Props, other than the bucket and mind, are mimed.) “You must drink extra water,” she observes, his personal.
Their exchanges are framed, on an elevated platform with the viewers seated on both facet, as a behavioral research stripped of context and identification markers. Dressed in lumpy, cloud-white sweatsuits, and infrequently confined to separate glowing squares on the stage, they relate to one another — and to Lorna’s surveilling questions — from inside a pressurized void. (The set and costumes are by Soutra Glimour, the lighting by Jon Clark.)
The intricate and mesmerizing character portraits that emerge are solely relational, outlined in response to exterior stimuli. (The presence of different trial contributors goes unremarked upon.) The medical setting and escalating doses are tightly managed by Lorna and her supervising colleague, Dr. Toby Sealey (a suave and gravel-voiced Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), fixed observers seated at both finish of the platform. But what in regards to the response between two individuals?
Essiedu’s Tristan is roving, loose-limbed and solicitous. A Hackney native and a daily on the pharmaceutical trial circuit, he instinctively goads the extra watchful and regarded Connie, a psychology scholar from Ontario who’s finding out in London, the place the play is about. Russell’s Connie is discerning, logic-driven, heat and curious.
Even because the play explores the conundrum of its causation, the affair between Tristan and Connie bristles with warmth, its personal pure phenomenon.
Both performances are very good, notably because the characters progress by way of a fast-burning romance. The first time they contact, he’s inviting her to bounce with no music. Ribbing and affectionate, they mimic one another’s accents — additional collapsing the space between them. Essiedu is sly and agile, like an amorous cartoon cat sauntering on hind legs. Russell has the softness and onerous will of Viola or Juliet, her voice pillowy with grace and acuity.
Lloyd, whose austerity despatched a pulsating present by way of final season’s Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” casts Tristan and Connie’s love story as a sci-fi thriller, emphasizing contrasts between gentle and darkness, hard-edged information and the messy unknowns of erotic impulse. Lingering billows of fog point out the uncertainty of notion, whereas a faint, propulsive rating by Michael Asante (and sound design by George Dennis) appears decided to sync the center charges of everybody in earshot.
The arguments that gasoline Prebble’s rapid-fire dialogue display a razor wit — she was a author and producer on “Succession” — and a deft hand at splicing idea and conduct. And she excels at articulating ineffable states of feeling. (Connie says the drug’s results are “like having the climate inside.”)
A soapy again story between the 2 psychiatrists, although excellently conveyed by Austin and Holdbrook-Smith, feels a bit contrived. But their debates in regards to the ethics of manipulating the thoughts — and whether or not an individual’s nature is even prone to alter — deepens the stakes of their inquiry. The ex-lovers’ positioning at both finish of the stage underlines the notion that need is as a lot about separation — not having the factor you need — as it’s achievement.
Science, like love, is an infallibly human endeavor. Whatever we predict we all know, notably in regards to the nature of consciousness, is formed by our subjectivity. But we will solely actually know ourselves in relation to different individuals. Otherwise we’d as nicely be a bunch of brains floating in area.
The Effect
Through March 31 on the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
