Jeremy Daniel Photos
Srinivasan and Janssen.
Researchers Sanam Shah and Ariel Spiegel are presenting the findings of a project that may, once and for, stick it to the man. Their advisor is watching with eagerness as Spiegel turns on the fire, cutting straight to the chase about how they’ve uncovered evidence, real evidence, of corporate wrongdoing, creating active ecological harm. She’s flush with her commitment. That’s when Shah gets worried. Isn’t her presentation maybe a little too subjective? Her advisor disagrees; if anything, he suggests, Spiegel should lay it on thicker. After all, the passion is backed up by hard data. Isn’t it?
That’s when Shah suddenly looks worried. She’s found an anomaly. But she can fix it. She knows she can. In that moment, it’s hard to tell whether she’s reassuring them or herself.
Queen – a play currently at Long Wharf Theatre through June 5 — tells the story of graduate students Shah (Avanthika Srinivasan) and Spiegel (Stephanie Janssen), who are nearing the end of a six-year-long study in Central California on what has been killing bees across the United States. The study has gone well; its results are being published in Nature — effectively kickstarting their careers as academics — and the students’ advisor and head researcher, Philip Hayes (Ben Livingston) is slated to win an award for his work. The study is garnering such notoriety because, between the data Spiegel has collected and the statistical model Shah has developed to analyze it, it appears to present evidence that a Monsanto pesticide is the sole significant cause of hive destruction. Academic and even political clout await them all imminently.
Moodilar.
Except that Shah has found a problem: with the addition of the most recent data, the model no longer points the finger at Monsanto’s pesticide. Is there a problem with the data? Is there a problem with the model? It falls to Shah to sift through it all, with only days to figure out what the issue is before the team presents its results. In the meantime, she agrees to meet for dinner a suitor her parents have arranged for her — Arvind Patel (Keshav Moodilar), a too-suave Wall Street type who at first glance appears to be unsuitable for Shah, except that he turns out to have real chops as a statistician. On their first date, she takes him back to her lab to look at her model. He points out that the problem might be bias, that is, unconsciously all three researchers designed the study to find the results they wanted to find, which the data then confounded.
The numbers don’t lie. But will the people? The careers of all three of them are riding on the success of the study. Will they fudge the results to eliminate the inconsistency? Or do they let the chips fall where they may?
Livingston.
Queen, and the actors cast in it, excel at navigating this tricky terrain, especially as the comedy gives way to drama, the tension mounts, and the characters begin to say what they really think about one another. As Shah, Srinivasan retains her laser-like focus on the science, even as she conveys how she subtly begins to doubt her commitment to it. She also conveys, in the pattern of her speech and the way she carries herself, her privileged upbringing in India and the independent streak that brought her to study bees in California. Moodilar pours on the charm as Arvind, making him carefree and likable when he could be just shallow and smarmy, and he gives us enough early on to show both that Arvind is smarter than he lets on and that he could be a suitable match for Shah after all. Livingston takes Hayes on a journey from magnanimously avuncular to ruthlessly manipulative as the study that was to define his career starts to come unmoored. But it’s Janssen who really digs into the role of Spiegel, a single mother who clawed her way into graduate school from community college and marries a fierce intellect with an activist’s passion and a youth spent doing actual labor. While all the other characters are playing a game of cat and mouse in some way or another, Spiegel is all raw honesty, and Janssen fully inhabits her in her exhilaration and devastation, making her the play’s emotional core.
The stage set is perhaps ever so slightly too clever, with hexagonal lighting and a hexagonal table in the center of Long Wharf’s theater so that seating is set up in the round. (It is unclear how effective this is, particular for people seated in the back in the earlier scenes of the play, which often face forward.) But a luxurious set piece at the end of the play, with a beekeeping scene swathed in honeyed light, more than makes up for it. Aneesha Kudtarkar’s direction also helps to ensure that Queen remains light on its feet whenever possible, which is quite often; despite the description above, the play is often quite funny.
Without giving too much away about the twists and turns in the plot, there is a moment at the end of the play in which Shah and Spiegel pick apart all that has happened to them. Spiegel speaks of the chance for new ideas, new beginnings; moments later, Shah is stung by one of the subjects of their study. It’s an apt closer to this chapter of Long Wharf’s history, as it embarks on a new path, full of ideas but also risks. For the moment, however, Queen — comedic and dramatic in equal measure, full of smarts and heart — is ensuring that Long Wharf leaves the space it has inhabited for decades on a high note, and reminds us that it’s the talent of the people involved, from the page to the stage, that has made the company great.
Great review of the play it sounds exciting, but I am very confused about if Long Wharf is folding this is the end of it’s reign, or is it moving and if so where to….— “is ensuring that Long Wharf leaves the space it has inhabited for decades on a high note, ….that has made the company great”????.