Theater review: Informed Consent at the Unicorn
What matters more: the stories we tell about ourselves or the stories coded into our DNA?
That’s the question at the heart of the Unicorn Theatre’s production of Informed Consent, a modern morality play for an ambiguous age.
Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer was inspired by real events. In 1989, the Havasupai Indian tribe agreed to let a team of Arizona State University researchers draw their blood for genetic testing. The researchers were ostensibly looking for a genetic link to diabetes, a disease that had plagued the tribe.
But when they failed to find a link, they kept digging. The researchers published articles on everything from the tribe’s “inbreeding coefficient” to its migratory patterns, undermining the Havasupais’ creation myths and sparking a lawsuit over the limits and obligations of informed consent.
Laufer’s script traces these contours but adds another layer of complexity. Jillian, the genetic anthropologist studying the tribe, is staring down the barrel of early-onset Alzheimer’s, the disease that killed her mother. Jillian’s own daughter, Natalie, has a 50 percent chance of carrying the same genetic mutation. And her husband, Graham, won’t let her do the testing to confirm it.
Jillian’s struggle for permission to test the tribe’s blood becomes a proxy for the struggle inside her home. “Once upon a time,” Jillian says at the top of the play, “there was a little girl whose mother loved her so much that she would do anything to save her.”
“No matter who got hurt,” another actor chimes ominously.
Informed Consent employs a sort of Greek chorus to tease at Jillian’s worst impulses and to prompt her as Alzheimer’s begins to erode her speech. Their origin is a bit muddy: though most of their comments feel internal to Jillian, they occasionally interact with her husband as well. Director Darren Sextro leans into that ambiguity by placing them at three corners of the set — well-defined and cleverly adorned by Kelli Harrod, who masks DNA ladders inside tribal patterns — giving the chorus the distance of color commentators.
But the Unicorn’s cast is competent enough to steer us through confusion. Teisha M. Bankston and Justin Barron transition swiftly and effectively through multiple characters, aided by lighting designer Shane Rowse, whose looks distinguish between scenes and settings while adding visual texture with patterned gobos. Enjoli Gavin is as confident and composed as Arella, an ambassador for the tribe, as she is as Natalie, the couple’s four-year-old daughter. And L. Roi Hawkins is endearing and vulnerable as Graham, a Dad of the Year type with the patience of Job.
As Jillian, Manon Halliburton makes a strong impression in a tricky role. For much of the play, Jillian is all hard-edged ambition. She misses birthday parties, scoffs at her husband’s ideas, and whips herself into a frenzy over the potential of her work. Halliburton plays her without judgment, painting Jillian’s bullish determination as an act of devotion.
But that single-mindedness is the engine of the play’s conflict. While Jillian purports to deal only in facts, she’s blind to the places where her capital-T Truth butts up against its messy human expression. Some tensions arise naturally through Jillian’s work with the tribe. Others creep in at the margins through the Unicorn’s casting — say, Jillian’s insistence that race is a “myth” while she raises a biracial daughter.
Laufer largely resists the urge to speechify, though Jillian’s final monologue sacrifices some specificity in favor of vague platitudes. Instead, she gives us something much more interesting: complex and well-meaning characters masking flaws like mutations in their DNA.
Although the Havasupai case was resolved nearly eight years ago, Informed Consent feels fresh and startling in its uneasy splicing of two axioms: knowledge is power — and power corrupts.
Informed Consent
Through April 1 at the Unicorn Theatre, Jerome Stage
3828 Main Street
816-531-7529
