‘Queen’ loses its hum on the way to saving hives
Lolling on a picnic bench in Santa Cruz, in the opening scene of the eco-play “Queen,” two grad students who study honeybees savor a big triumph: They’re about to have their findings on colony collapse disorder published in the prestigious science journal Nature.
There’s a lot at stake — from the potential devastation of the world’s food supply and a bruising indictment of a Monsanto pesticide to congressional funding and career-making boosts for the two women and their alpha male professor. In a deftly staged TheatreWorks Silicon Valley/EnActe production that opened March 9, at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, Ariel (a friskily jubilant Kjerstine Rose Anderson) and Sanam (Uma Paranjpe, beaming in a more measured key) are queen bees for the day, happily poking fun at their (unseen) male counterparts who chose the wrong lab and missed the big score. The two temperamental opposites strike an appealing rapport.
But the buzz is about to dim. It happens when Sanam, a math phenom who designed the statistical model for the research, discovers that the latest data set skews the results in a way that might undermine the central premise of the paper — that a single pesticide caused the bees to disappear.
From there, Madhuri Shekar’s script portrays the push-pull pressure to publish at all costs, even if it means retrofitting the data to support the thesis, or
“Queen”: Written by Madhuri Shekar. Directed by Miriam A. Laube. Through March 31. One hour, 40 minutes. $27-$100. Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. 877-662-8979. theatreworks.org
pull back and possibly delay or torpedo the project in the interest of scientific rigor.
“Queen” raises issues of confirmation bias, the “threshold effect” of recent versus older data, and the specter of outright fraud. Anyone who’s followed recent reports on the increased scrutiny of academic research will register the real-world currency of the story. A few references to nearby Stanford University sent a ripple of nervous laughter through the Palo Alto audience.
Unfortunately, once “Queen” has laid out its themes, it develops and resolves them in a largely formulaic way.
On a set of perforated panels that doubles as a stylized hive and visual metaphor for the scientifically porous study (design by Nina Ball), Sanam remains uneasy about the data, while Ariel and the students’ professor and lead researcher (a shouty, blunderbuss Mike Ryan) urge her to “just make it work.” The scenes tend to reiterate rather than deepen the characters’ positions. Even as Miriam A. Laube’s fluid direction propels the scenes and mobile set pieces, “Queen” turns static.
Shekar, a prolific playwright and screenwriter, sketches in backstories for the two women. Ariel is a divorced single mother with working-class roots; Sanam’s Indian parents are eager to marry her off to a well-to-do Indian suitor. In the evening’s most synthetic thread, Sanam meets Arvind (Deven Kolluri as a sexist, self-centered derivatives trader) for dinner and then takes him back to her lab to see if he might help her with her data dilemma. What ultimately transpires between them is both abruptly unconvincing and unnaturally crucial to the plot.
In a coda played by the two women alone, “Queen” touches the feminist chord it sounded at the outset. Fittingly, Ariel and Sanam are outdoors again, away from the men who take up so much air in the room. The women talk about a fresh report on hive collapse and they contemplate the daunting prospect of starting over on new research. That whirring sound they hear: That’s the soft sound of hope.