Long Wharf Play Club Gets Statistical

For director Aneesha Kudtarkar, two scenes from Madhuri Shekar’s play Queen stood out as scenes she was most excited to stage sometime in the future. In one, Sanam, a scientist, and Arvind, a Wall Street broker, go out on a first date in Northern California. They’re there because they’re both in their 30s, and in India, their grandfathers apparently played golf together, and while this isn’t exactly a possibility of an arranged marriage, it feels a little like it. In another, Sanam and her longtime scientific colleague Ariel are arguing over the ethical quandaries their years-long project has stumbled into, and it all comes out — the cultural and economic differences between them, the strains of being women in a male-dominated field. They’re the true heart of Queen, and in that scene, the heart perhaps beats the loudest.

Kudtarkar was slated to direct Queen at Long Wharf Theatre this spring, before the pandemic closed theaters across the country for a full year and counting. ​“I am going to be directing Queen someday when I have the chance,” she said.

While Long Wharf has been waiting for the day it can reopen its doors, one of the activities it has developed is Play Club, a monthly gathering in which Long Wharf Theatre members first read a play and then gather virtually with members of the Long Wharf artistic team to discuss it. On Wednesday evening, this month’s installment of Play Club centered on Shekar’s play — and offered a taste of what one of the anchors of the regional theatre scene has in store when it can begin putting on productions again.

Queen tells the story of Sanam and Ariel, two graduate students who, for six years, have been researching why bees across the United States have been dying off at alarming rates. Competing academic studies have come up with inconclusive results. Based on data Ariel has collected in the field and a statistical model Sanam, a gifted mathematician, has devised, the researchers’ project — headed up by a Dr. Philip Hayes — appears to show pretty conclusively that the bee die-off is the result of Monsanto pesticides. An article in the prestigious journal Nature is forthcoming and the results could spark legislation against the use of those pesticides. Dr. Hayes is ready to hit the big time, and promises bright careers for his proteges. The problem, however, is that the latest data don’t show the same results. Is it a coding error with the model? A problem with the data? A frustrated Dr. Hayes gives Sanam and Ariel only a few days to figure it out. That’s when Sanam goes on her date with Arvind, who suggests that it’s possible the study was biased from the start. Is that true? How do they know for sure? And what will the consequences be?

The multi-layered story of the play takes on sexism, racism, and classism in academia, offers a glimpse of what it is to be a South Asian person in the United States, and dives into the very timely topic of the slippery nature of ​“truth,” how it’s defined, and who gets to define it. Where some plays really only come to life when they hit the stage, much of the life of Queen is evident on the page — in the ideas, the humor, and the drama of it all. Guided by Long Wharf literary team members Cheyenne Barboza and Kate Moore Heaney, as well as director Kudtarkar, over a dozen Long Wharf members got to dive in.

Heaney framed the discussion by going over the basic questions dramaturges ask themselves in developing a new production of a play: What is the project of the play? What is the play trying to do? Who is the play for? Who is the intended audience? And she outlined a basic supposition: that there are no mistakes in the play; everything is there for a reason.

For Kudtarkar, staging Queen ​“has been on the horizon” for many months, ​“and it has given me a lot of time to think about the play. It’s unique to have a chance to hear from the audience who is actually going to see it.”

Barboza asked Kudtarkar what drew her to the play to begin with. ​“There are a couple of really hot questions happening all at once, and they’re interacting in interesting ways,” Kudtarkar said, but ​“what drew me in was the relationship between Sanam and Ariel.” The questions that arise from the friction between them as the project seems in jeopardy are big ones. Can you have a personal and a professional life? How do you make ethical decisions, especially when it will affect your career? And there were the larger questions about facts and numbers and the stories they can tell and not tell. ​“Finding one’s moral compass through all of that is incredibly complicated,” Kudtarkar said.

“The relationship between the two women really stuck with me as well,” Barboza said. ​“One comes from a more prestigious academic background and one comes from a more nontraditional background.” And there is the situation of ​“one coming from money and one not coming from money. When they’re angry with each other, that’s what they attack each other about” — money and prestige.

The other participants in the conversation then began to speak. ​“This is a play of miscommunication,” said one. Another brought up ​“how relevant it is at this moment, with the question of science and truth in science,” as well as ​“the impact of private industry and money, which sit as background to the real people we meet.”

The ethical quandaries raised ​“the issue of greater good,” said another participant, when the data didn’t seem to support a claim the characters thought for sure was true. Regarding Monsanto and companies like it, he imagined the characters asking themselves, ​“I know what they’re doing is wrong, but is it worth me lying and losing my soul to win the battle?” And underneath it lay the questions of ​“what is real and what is not. The lines get blurred.”

The conversation got into the fact that the play names Monsanto — a real biotechnology company — rather than making up a company that resembled Monsanto (“it’s kind of thrilling to see it explicitly named,” Kudtarkar said, explaining that it helped ground the play and its characters in the real world). The participants also got into the way the play wades into subjects that are often difficult to dramatize, such as game theory and statistical modeling.

“This is perhaps the most jargon-filled play I’ve ever worked on,” Kudtarkar said. As a director working with actors and crew, ​“the goal for me is to make sure everyone who is making creative choices has the information they need to find their creative freedom. You need to see the play, not the research paper about the play.” While ​“the goal is to get an audience to feel something and talk about it,” she added, ​“I do believe in thorough research and understanding the world” as part of the ​“responsibility of the artist.”

For the participants, though, the academic jargon, even on the page, wasn’t hard to follow. It helped them understand the field the characters were in, and helped illustrate that they were, well, smart. This also applied to Arvind, the Wall Street broker who first gives the impression of being not nearly an intellectual equal for Sanam, but turns out to know his way around a statistical model.

For Barboza, playwright Shekar is really skillful in ​“how she stacks, how she builds the drama,” she said. ​“The layering is so ingrained. We catch up so fast.” She does this by letting ​“the audience follow the human connection, the human thread.”

But for Kudtarkar, ​“the relationship between the two women is the gravitational center” of the play — an opinion participants agreed with. ​“It’s the thing we start and end with. I think it’s the most complex and nuanced in that they know each other so well,” but ​“in their moments of falling out of lockstep with each other, they realize they might not have been so simpatico.” They value their friendship and understand how fragile it is. ​“It’s the beating heart of the play that, as a director, you want to get right,” she said.

The conversation then moved to the final scene of the play, which this reporter will not spoil, except to say that in conversation it came out that the playwright has revised it a couple times, leading to a fruitful discussion of the roles of more versus less upbeat endings, of the balance of humor and drama that permeates the play, and of the need to land Sanam and Ariel somewhere after the trials they’ve gone through. The ending also has something to say about our relationship to nature.

“No matter how much we want to break the code of nature, we never really know,” one participant said. ​“You could do 20 years of studies and still be wrong on the last day.”

As the discussion concluded, Barboza asked the club participants to try to summarize Queen in one word. Among the words on the list were ​“thoughtful,” ​“layered,” ​“weblike,” and ​“complex” — but also, ​“human.”

Visit Long Wharf’s website for information on future Play Clubs.