The Pleasure Trials
The promo copy that calls Sarah Saltwick's play a "delicious comedy about what and who we want, and when and how we want it" is one of the only missteps here. There are laughs to be had in this story of a (female) doctor's attempt to develop a drug that will address what her overeager and ambitious (female) assistant has termed Female Desire Deficit Disorder (the doctor herself states merely, "I know we were built all wrong"), because sex and its discontents are funny. Example: an early success at the animal testing stage gets normally monogamous voles to "screw like rabbits." Ha! But even that throwaway line hints at the real and dramatic difficulties of medicating desire — you have something acting like something else, something it is not. The play's presentationis full of these thoughtful touches: the lovely flowering tree beside cellist/accompanist Sharon Taylor is hooked up to an IV; nature, but tinkered with for a more pleasing effect. Comedy can of course treat serious stuff, but when you get trial patients coming in and very earnestly pleading that they hate feeling like a failure, that they just want to be normal, and that they don't want to lose the way their man looks at them, well...a zany laff riot, it ain't. (All those trial patients are played by one actor, Andrea Agosto, and the range of both character and performance she puts acrossproves a highlight without becoming a distraction.) I would argue that the play is less about "what and who we want," etc. than it is about what the sympathetic doctor calls the "hundred obstacles between yourself and pleasure." It's a complicated business —even the trial's data chartshave to be adjusted as the investigation proceeds — but Saltwick & Co. are very much up to the task. The result is not a tragedy, but it's definitely a drama, one that is not afraid to mix science, psychology, and philosophy in its pink-lit pharmacy, and perhaps arrive at something profound.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, September 11, 2022
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm-4pm |
| Thursdays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Fridays, 8pm-10pm |
| Saturdays, 8am-10pm |