Caroline Cooney and Michael de Nola
Sweet, Sweet Motherhood has a red herring at its heart. The supposed central issue of the play is the ethical questions raised when Shelley McAnn (Caroline Cooney), an undergraduate molecular biology student, enlists Prof. Henry Stein (Michael De Nola) as her thesis adviser in her project of creating a "humanzee," a chimp/human hybrid that she will carry to term within her own body.
However, before long, the moral complications of breeding chimeras slips away as the play slides into the narrative rut of an aging dispirited tenured professor with an estranged wife and a dead child attracted to (and, for some reason, attractive to) a college junior with great breasts and unrestrained brashness. And, as these stories usually run, after much back-and-forthing, the joie of the younger female saves the life and soul of the older male.
It's a shame that playwright Jeremy Kareken lets the sentimentality of a May-to-December romance elbow out his initial gambit, which was to "lay bare the ethical and moral quandaries associated with biotechnology today." Mr. Kareken does present some of the controversy at the beginning of the play, but it's done through the device of a lecture-with-slides (i.e., a monologue) and some sparring between Henry and Shelley as she outlines for him what she wants to do. But the issues never come alive dramatically, feeling more like obligatory exposition than exploration, and by the time Shelley announces her pregnancy (with what may be one of Henry and estranged wife's frozen embryos -- the script isn't clear on this), quandaries have been replaced by quests and complaints and, eventually, reconciliations.
Part of the inert feel of the play comes from a feeling that it's not yet finished. Mr. Kareken tries out all sorts of devices to tell the story, relying on projections, lighting shifts to indicate inner versus outer states of being, direct address to the audience, even direct address to a video projection (as when Henry keens a lament to a blurry video of his now-gone wife). But all they do is provide information -- they don't forward the story, and they put a drag on any dramatic conflict generated in the more "real" scenes between Henry and Shelley in his office.
And that dramatic conflict is itself tepid, consisting mostly of exchanges like "You can't do this" and "I won't let you tell me what to do" and "But have you thought about...?" and "I can make whatever choices I want." Ms. McAnn does her best to make Shelley a kind of lovably foul-mouthed (if morally clueless) straight-shooter who has only wanted one thing in life: to escape being "a stupid suburban kid from a stupid house" and become something "sensational."
But her effort is hampered by Mr. De Nola's struggle to make Stein a compelling figure of flawed moral wisdom that can balance Shelley's hubris -- a struggle he mostly loses as he never quite finds the character's center (in part because Mr. Kareken has drawn Henry without much of a center to begin with).
The baby that Shelley brings to term (though born two months premature) turns out to be a healthy boy, not the humanzee. (The script is never clear about whether the humanzee experiment was ever attempted, by Shelley or anyone associated with her -- another reason the script feels unfinished.) After a two-year absence, during which Henry has "dropped out of the race" and is "not a variable," Shelley returns with her son, invites Henry to be the son's father, which Henry accepts, and, hand-in-hand, they face the future together.
Sweet, Sweet Motherhood has some sparks, and the play is well-served by its production crew and director Michael Bigelow Dixon, but in the end it doesn't deliver what it promised, and what it does deliver feels very much like a jaded middle-aged man's reverie about how a young woman can enter his life and, through her groundedness in the body and emotion, revive his spirit and renew his joy. For a play presenting itself as cutting-edge, this dénouement is incredibly retro.
(July 2010)