Luna Theater's "Sick' at Walnut Studio 5

Talk to some pediatricians about how best to raise your kids, and they'll tell you to let them play in the mud and eat dirt. Their theory, called the hygiene hypothesis, holds that a child's immune system can't develop properly without early exposure to a variety of pathogens and microbes.

The parents in Zayd Dohrn's Sick— now receiving a disturbingly intense and provocative Philadelphia premiere from Luna Theater— take the opposite approach entirely. Here, Maxine Krebs (Sally Mercer, hidden behind a SARS mask) has converted a rent-controlled New York townhouse into a bacteria-proof bunker, where hazmat suits hang on the coat rack and a filtration system ensures the air's pristine quality.

When Maxine's college professor husband Sidney (David Hutchman) returns from playing squash (he's the only one who goes out regularly), she imagines that he's tracked fecal matter all over the floor and struggles frantically to clean it up. With Andrew Cowles' flood lights beating down oppressively on Dirk Durosette's set design of plastic-coated white hues, who can tell if she sees something we can't?

Fragile teenagers

But when dad brings home a stray in the form of a poetry grad student named Jim (Gregg Pica), the dangerous, polluting world definitely begins to seep inside.

Jim can't resist gaping along with the rest of us when Maxine and Sidney's teenage twins Davy and Sarah descend the stairs in an entrance I won't soon forget. Notwithstanding their sterile environment, the children suffer from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome— i.e., severe allergies. As Davy, Michael Tomasetti looks and acts like the guy serving Kool-Aid at the Jim Jones ranch. The fragile Bethany Ditnes, as Sarah, wearing Alison Johnson's flowing white robes with braided hair draped behind her virginally white features, looks like she stepped out of a painting by John William Waterhouse.

Heavy-handed script

Greg Campbell's direction creates a consistently disturbing atmosphere, but it mirrors the air filtration system that clicks on and off throughout Dohrn's play. One minute, the intensity ebbs so much that the pacing appears obvious; the next, the tension's texture pervades enough to bristle against my skin. Some of this imbalance rests on Pica and Hutchman, neither of whom seems able to sustain any dramatic interest without one of the women present.

Dohrn's script— more of a conceptualized event than a full-length drama— compounds this problem by over-complicating the "clean home in a dirty world" analogy. Although he attributes Maxine's germ phobia to post-9/11, he pollutes his otherwise clean dialogue with references to the difference between academic and lyric poetry, the sterility of marriage and any other institution, the perils of home schooling, the division between high art and the sewer of pop culture, and leaving the nest vs. finding a protective haven. Dude, we get it already.

But Dohrn definitely succeeds in his play's parable about the dangers of isolating one's children from outside ideas and influences. Sick demonstrates that differing ideas, like allegedly offensive art, function as a kind of health-building pathogen. Put the taste of dirt in a kid's mouth, and he might just develop sufficient immunity to grow up healthy.♦


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