From the Playwright: Deborah Zoe Laufer
Deborah Zoe Laufer on the origins of ‘Informed Consent,’ her personal connections to the story, and writing about science.
Before writing her first play, Deborah Zoe Laufer moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career and to work in stand-up comedy. While working with major American playwright Marsha Norman, Laufer was encouraged to see herself as a writer, and applied to Juilliard. She got her MFA in playwriting, and was Juilliard’s playwright-in-residence. Laufer‘s work has since been produced at more than 80 theaters in the U.S. and abroad and been awarded several prizes, including the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award and the Lilly Award. Informed Consent was written as an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commission in partnership with Ensemble Studio Theatre; this partnership aims to inspire and produce original works about science.
You wrote Informed Consent after reading a New York Times article about a real-life court case. What was it about the story that told you this was what you wanted to write about?
I was fascinated by the friction between science and religion that is at the heart of the piece, but then I also saw the video included in the online Times article. You can look at the video of the tribe collecting their blood…they come in their native garb, because they’re performing a ceremony and collecting their blood. Their blood is sacred; they don’t give it for really any reason because they believe they need to be buried with their blood or their spirit won’t go to the spirit world. And so it was a huge, huge act of trust for them to give their blood, and it was very emotional for them to come and reclaim it. And at the lab they were forced to put on goggles, gloves, and lab coats over their native garb when they came in to collect the blood, and that clash of cultures was so stark, as if the metaphor was right before me, and I knew I had to write the play.
Here’s the video that inspired the play:
You write about science a lot.
I feel like my job is to write about what it means to be human right now, and science is a big part of our evolution as people. It’s changing who we are, and it’s making us ask questions we’ve never asked before, and it’s answering some of the questions that we’ve asked for thousands of years. So it’s just continually fascinating. I could write about science exclusively and never run dry.
Can you talk a little bit about the development of Informed Consent?
This play has evolved so much. It started really with storytelling, and who gets to tell your story. Does your blood tell your story? Does your history tell your story? Do you decide what your story is? And as I’ve learned through the years of my relationship with this play, whose story do you have the right to tell? And do I have the right to tell this story? And if it is me telling this story, it needs to be very clear that it’s from the perspective of me. I happen to be a white woman, and so that’s been a real evolution in how the play is made up.
There used to be a huge choral component of the play, which I actually loved, and it was very delightful, and added humor and warmth to the play and made it something much bigger. But the more I learned about the tribe that the play is based on and all they’ve gone through, I realized I was taking even more focus away from them, and that it was somewhat disrespectful to make the play as fanciful as it was, and that I needed to just buckle down and tell the story as closely as I could.
What was it that brought you to Alzheimer’s as a part of the motivation for Jillian, the scientist in the play?
Marsha Norman used to say “When you’re stuck, write about the thing that terrifies you most.” My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s, and I knew it was something I wanted to write about; it is the thing that terrifies me most. And if I’m going to write about the genome, it’s the thing that my mother and I are constantly wondering about, if we’re genetically prone to Alzheimer’s. And so when I was first contemplating the play, I wanted to have a personal story that sort of mirrored the global story that the scientist was part of…I decided she [Jillian] has a daughter. She’s four years old. She wants her to be tested and her husband doesn’t, and then I found the real conflict of the play: a conflict that was alive and immediate and gave her impetus to do things that maybe she wouldn’t do if she weren’t under so much time pressure.
Have you thought about, working on this play, whether you would do the test? Whether you’d want to know?
I always wonder…I don’t know. I believe everyone should do it — except me.
To see Deborah Zoe Laufer’s play onstage, join us for Informed Consent at Lantern Theater Company, January 12 — February 12. Visit our website for tickets and information.
