Brown Box Theatre has a dual geographic focus: Boston and the Delmarva peninsula. They exist to offer high-quality theatre directly to communities, and to do so for free, soliciting donations from patrons who find the works they present meaningful and impactful. In their sixth season, they are currently presenting Patrick Gabridge's intriguing two person play "Lab Rats."
The action centers on two young people, a man and a woman, both marginalized and subsisting on the small stipends they cobble together as they are paid for being subjects in an ongoing series of clinical trials. As Mika (Brenna Fitzgerald) and Jake (Marc Pierre) keep encountering each other in the waiting areas as they fill out applications, hoping to be chosen, they begin to build a tentative relationship. Jake claims he is doing these trials to earn money to finance his world travels. Mika needs it to pay the rent and apparently to support her drug habit. As the action builds, we see these two human guinea pigs - lab rats - interact with each other and with the challenges that life presents.
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| Brenna Fitzgerald as Mika Marc Pierre as Jake "Lab Rats" Brown Box Theatre Through 11/15 at Atlantic Wharf Photo by Nile Hawver/Nile Scott Shots |
Ms. Fitzgerald and Mr. Pierre are excellent in portraying the fears, cautiousness, desperation, and resignation that fuels their day-to-day lives and their hand-to-mouth existence. We see them react in a variety of ways to the medications they are testing. There is a scene in which Jake is manifesting an aggressive manic mode as a side effect of a trial drug. The crazed demeanor and actions make him comical, human and vulnerable - to Mika and to the audience. At one point in the play, Mika has been thrown out of her apartment by her roommates. She brings her paltry worldly possessions with her to the medical center as she applies for the big prize in the clinical trial world: a 73-day sleep study that will pay $10,000 upon completion of the study. She and Jake both are desperate to be chosen and to earn that big payday, but they find ways to sabotage one another's chances.
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| Brenna Fitzgerald as Mika "Lab Rats" Brown Box Theatre Through 11/15 at Atlantic Wharf Photo by Nile Hawver/Nile Scott Shots |
The lab rat and clinical trial metaphors suggest that the real medicine that each of these lonely souls needs is simply to find someone to know them, to understand them, to accept them and to love them.
As they apply to become lab rats one more time, they are hoping to check off the right boxes and provide the right answers so that they will be chosen as subjects in the next clinical trial. In parallel, they are subtly trying to check off the right boxes and provide the right answers to each other so they may be chosen as fellow lab rats in the longitudinal study that is called "life." They begin to make a deeper connection with each other. And despite the toxic side effects that they impose upon each other, they keep coming back for more doses of the taste of love that they have experienced at the hands of one another, hoping eventually to reach a level of therapeutic dosage. And that mutual caring and understanding is no placebo. They eat up one another's forays at affection and ham-fisted caring with the same gusto with which Jake attacks the cupcakes that Mika bakes for him.
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| Marc Pierre as Jake "Lab Rats" Brown Box Theatre Through 11/15 at Atlantic Wharf Photo by Nile Hawver/Nile Scott Shots |
It is an intriguing play wonderfully executed by these talented actors under the firm-handed direction of Kyler Taustin.
The play runs this Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Atlantic Wharf location, 290 Congress Street. It will continue in Maryland later this month. It is a fascinating play well worth watching. Why not try an experiment and come to see this show this weekend to see what kind of after effects you will feel from the medicinal elixir of being moved to laughter and to empathy.
For tickets, click on the link below:
Brown Box Theatre Website
Enjoy!
Al
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