Sarah Treem's "The How and the Why' by InterAct

Advancing a brand-new, controversial scientific theory is difficult enough, but it's a grueling life's work if you happen to be a woman— especially if your theory claims that "Adam never lost a rib." In other words, women, not men, hold the key to homo sapiens' modern existence.

So theorizes Zelda (the well-grounded Janis Dardaris), an experienced evolutionary biologist, to her young acolyte Rachel (an achingly volatile Victoria Frings) in Sarah Treem's The How and the Why, now receiving its Philadelphia premiere by InterAct Theatre Company.

Treem, the acclaimed writer of the HBO series "In Treatment," rapidly unpacks a world of interpersonal aspersions, thwarted love, feminist struggle and scientific theory. Her play is so dense with themes and ideas that the dialogue occasionally verges on glib in order to fit so many bubbling notions into one performance.

Two career tracks

From the moment we meet her two women in a well-adorned academic office— prestigious diplomas vying with an evocative brood of tribal masks— Treem sets the audience to the instantly engrossing task of discerning the relationship between Zelda and Rachel. Both of them happen to be evolutionary biologists, one in the twilight of a significant career and the other on a cusp of a life-changing discovery.

Since an epiphany at age 28, Zelda has spent her career promoting her hypothesis on the evolution of modern humans. She has found an explanation for the development of an extremely rare condition in the animal world: menopause.

To those who wonder what good is a member of the species who can no longer reproduce, Zelda argues that human babies cared for by infertile yet long-lived grandmothers gained an evolutionary advantage— one that led to the development of modern society. As she puts it, an ape that must peel his own bananas while his mother births more apes must focus on survival. But an ape whose grandmother peels his banana for him gains an opportunity to exercise his brain beyond mere survival.

Impugning motives

Zelda has opened the previously unexplored territory beyond how menopause happens, broaching the question of why it happens at all. But Rachel, who is about to clinch a coveted spot at a prestigious biology conference, is also making inroads on the modern mysteries of female biology. She has a radical new theory not on how menstruation happens, but why it evolved in the first place"“ a theory that threatens to dismantle her elder's cherished hypothesis.

Such topics provide especially fertile ground for many a potent meditation on sexism among scientists. By the time the sharpening personal dynamic between Zelda and Rachel expands to include arguments on marriage, pregnancy, parenthood and career, the play brims over while Zelda and Rachel continue to impugn each other's intentions, as only two women on stage can.

When the fabled loneliness of a life of scientific research arises inevitably among the play's themes, one gets the sense that Treem is injecting needless clichés among perfectly interesting ideas. ("I don't want to be alone with my research in 30 years," Rachel worries.) If scientific greatness and a personal life really were as mutually exclusive as Treem's script assumes, Zelda and Rachel wouldn't have nearly so much to discuss.

Two fast hours

Despite the intellectual weight of Treem's script, Dardaris and Frings— no doubt guided by director Seth Rozin— deliver a thoroughly character-driven performance that makes two scenes of crackling dialogue the fastest two hours I've ever spent at the theater. Meghan Jones offers two ingeniously realized sets.

Still, I left the Adrienne ruminating not on the characters' fraught relationship but on the evolutionary theories advanced in Treem's script. I wanted to corner the playwright (or some unsuspecting biologist) and pepper her with questions about evolutionary theory. That provocation alone made the evening worthwhile.♦


To read a related comment by Jim Rutter, click here.