A white plastic bucket sits on a spare stage at the Shed, where the director Jamie Lloyd’s stark, riveting production of “The Effect” opened on Wednesday night. By the time its content — a human brain — is revealed, Lucy Prebble’s heady and scintillating drama is already interrogating the biology of desire.
What begins as the drug trial of an antidepressant shifts into more slippery territory when a flirtation develops between two of the participants. As they circle each other, neurons blazing, questions swirl about whether their attraction has been chemically engineered — and if love controls the mind or the other way around.
The simplicity of a brain plopped in a pail for scientific research becomes something of a mordant sight gag.
Previously staged Off Broadway in 2016, “The Effect” digs into what one of the study’s architects calls “nothing short of a revolution in medicine”: drug intervention that considers the psyche a plastic aspect of the self. Lloyd’s production, which premiered in August at the National Theater in London, poses the play’s philosophical inquiries on a stark and minimal plane that feels both cosmic and atomically intimate.
During the experiment’s intake, we learn that Connie (Taylor Russell) gets sad but isn’t depressed (“when I’m sad, I’m sad,” she says) and that Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) has a playful swagger, half-flirting with the study’s administrator, Dr. Lorna James (a game and frank Michele Austin), while she asks about his medical history.
When Tristan meets Connie, he offers to turn in the urine sample she’s holding: “How about I take your piss for you?” (Props, aside from the bucket and brain, are mimed.) “You need to drink more water,” she observes, looking at his own.
Their exchanges are framed, on an elevated platform with the audience seated on either side, as a behavioral study stripped of context and identity markers. Dressed in lumpy, cloud-white sweatsuits, and often confined to separate glowing squares on the stage, they relate to each other — and to Lorna’s surveilling questions — from within a pressurized void. (The set and costumes are by Soutra Glimour, the lighting by Jon Clark.)
The intricate and mesmerizing character portraits that emerge are entirely relational, defined in response to external stimuli. (The presence of other trial participants goes unremarked upon.) The clinical setting and escalating doses are tightly controlled by Lorna and her supervising colleague, Dr. Toby Sealey (a suave and gravel-voiced Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), constant observers seated at either end of the platform. But what about the reaction between two people?
Essiedu’s Tristan is roving, loose-limbed and solicitous. A Hackney native and a regular on the pharmaceutical trial circuit, he instinctively goads the more watchful and considered Connie, a psychology student from Ontario who is studying in London, where the play is set. Russell’s Connie is discerning, logic-driven, warm and curious.
Even as the play explores the conundrum of its causation, the affair between Tristan and Connie bristles with heat, its own natural phenomenon.
Both performances are superb, particularly as the characters progress through a fast-burning romance. The first time they touch, he’s inviting her to dance with no music. Ribbing and affectionate, they mimic each other’s accents — further collapsing the distance between them. Essiedu is sly and agile, like an amorous cartoon cat sauntering on hind legs. Russell has the softness and hard will of Viola or Juliet, her voice pillowy with grace and acuity.
Lloyd, whose austerity sent a pulsating current through last season’s Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” casts Tristan and Connie’s love story as a sci-fi thriller, emphasizing contrasts between light and darkness, hard-edged facts and the messy unknowns of erotic impulse. Lingering billows of fog indicate the uncertainty of perception, while a faint, propulsive score by Michael Asante (and sound design by George Dennis) seems determined to sync the heart rates of everyone in earshot.
The arguments that fuel Prebble’s rapid-fire dialogue demonstrate a razor wit — she was a writer and producer on “Succession” — and a deft hand at splicing theory and behavior. And she excels at articulating ineffable states of feeling. (Connie says the drug’s effects are “like having the weather inside.”)
A soapy back story between the two psychiatrists, though excellently conveyed by Austin and Holdbrook-Smith, feels a bit contrived. But their debates about the ethics of manipulating the mind — and whether a person’s nature is even susceptible to change — deepens the stakes of their inquiry. The ex-lovers’ positioning at either end of the stage underlines the notion that desire is as much about separation — not having the thing you want — as it is fulfillment.
Science, like love, is an infallibly human endeavor. Whatever we think we know, particularly about the nature of consciousness, is shaped by our subjectivity. But we can only really know ourselves in relation to other people. Otherwise we might as well be a bunch of brains floating in space.
The Effect
Through March 31 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
