InterAct's 'Reinventing Eden'

When scientists play God

DAN ROTTENBERG

Pity the poor scientist— a Galileo, say, or a Darwin— who is reviled and ridiculed by a world that won’t accept his ideas until long after he’s gone. Pity the genius who yearns to rescue humanity but can’t relate to individual people, Pity the visionary in a society whose nostalgia conveniently forgets that the good old days lacked antibiotics, anesthesia, birth control and pasteurized milk.

The arrogant scientist who dares to tamper with nature— usually with disastrous results— has been a popular literary target at least since Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein appeared in 1818. The scientist who alters the human body is scolded, “Who gave you the right to play God?” But when his experiments cure smallpox or polio, or extend the human lifespan, or enable childless couples to conceive, we thank God for the gift of the human brain, not to mention the gift of human arrogance.

This is no frivolous issue in an age when new discoveries in genetics and transplant biotechnology hold forth the prospect that virtually all disease and perhaps even death may some day be eliminated. Everywhere you turn these days, it seems, you see “miracle babies” who wouldn’t exist but for the grace of in vitro fertilization. But you also find parents and siblings who harbor guilt feelings about the fetuses that had to be eliminated to enable those IV babies to survive to full-term. Issues that were once left to chance and God now seem, for better or worse, increasingly to rest in the hands of scientists, doctors and even ordinary individuals.

Take me, for example

But in fact such ambiguities are nothing new, as I can personally attest. I am walking this planet today because, in November 1915, a two-year-old boy in Brooklyn named Arthur Goldstein died of tubercular meningitis, and his parents, in their grief, resolved to conceive a consolation baby: my mother. I’m also here because, in June 1877, a 25-year-old woman in Hungary named Lottie Rottenberg died of typhus. Three months later Lottie’s widowed husband, in desperate need of a new mother for his five-year-old son, remarried; and over the next 16 years that second marriage produced eight children, the very last of whom was my grandfather.

Am I keenly aware of how lucky I am to be here? Yes indeed. Am I happy that medical science has eliminated the scourge of typhus and meningitis? Of course. Do I feel sad about the tragically abbreviated lives of Arthur Goldstein and Lottie Rottenberg? That’s a tougher question: If they hadn’t died when they did, I wouldn’t be here, and neither would my children or grandchildren. Life does get complicated, doesn’t it?

Two sons: One 'normal,' one not

So it’s gratifying that Seth Rozin’s Reinventing Eden offers us a more nuanced look at medical scientists than we’ve seen in theater or film in some time. Rozin’s protagonist, Jonas Tuttle (Tim Moyer) is a brilliant biochemist obsessed with advancing human knowledge and frustrated because his need to conduct genetic experiments on humans is blocked both by law and by the biotech industry’s public relations concerns. He’s probably not someone you’d enjoy hanging out with, but if you carry aberrant genes and worry about passing them on, Jonas is your man.

Jonas and his wife Lizzie (Nancy Boykin) have two sons in their 20s: Paul (Matt Pfeiffer), who suffers from an unspecified hereditary mental disorder, and Jason (Ahron Potratz), who is “normal,” bright and eager like his father to save the world. When Jason learns that he is in fact the first human product of his father’s genetic experiment— which has saved Jason from his brother’s fate— he (and we) are battered with conflicting emotions: “I don’t want to go through life knowing I was manipulated to be all the things Paul couldn’t be,” Jason shouts at Jonas. “I don’t want to be some genetically modified tomato.”

The Barbra Streisand conundrum

But is Jason really “better” than Paul, whose very frailty and dependence renders him more appealing and accessible in many respects? To paraphrase Barbra Streisand, aren’t people who need people the luckiest people in the world? Rozin’s script presents the issues even-handedly, cross-cutting between the Tuttle family (for the emotional piece of the puzzle) and Tuttle’s confrontations with his boss and a federal investigator (for the theoretical piece). Hovering over the whole conflict (even throughout the intermission) is the presence of Jonas’s Russian grandfather Boris (John Morrison), a solitary Arctic ice-fisherman who spends his entire life at the mercy of nature’s caprices, without complaint. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the play’s two most attractive characters are the two who seem least in control of their fate: the gentle but retarded Paul and his equally gentle but limited great-grandfather Boris.

It’s no easy task to dramatize intangible intellectual issues, and for the most part Rozin’s script succeeds. I had any number of small quibbles: We are told, for example, that Jonas favors his healthy son Jason over the handicapped Paul, but we don’t really see evidence of that. The play’s two non-family characters— the investigator and Jonas’s boss— are essentially props for the necessary ethical arguments. In the second act, the speechifying and the shouting get a bit ponderous— which, to be sure, seems to be a common problem in plays trying to portray intelligent people behaving unintelligently. But Reinventing Eden, like individual people themselves, is greater than the sum of its parts. Rozin’s script and director Harriet Power’s capable cast kept the action moving, held my attention throughout and provoked my thoughts long after the lights went down. Perhaps that’s because, as I mentioned above, I’m a “miracle child” myself. And, as Reinventing Eden may remind you without the least bit of religious blather, so are you.



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