The theater sells ideas, and television sells soap. At least that used to be the case. But TV seems to be enjoying a new golden age, as exemplified by playwright Sarah Treem’s chief writing credits for the small screen – HBO’s psychoanalysis series, In Treatment, and Netflix’s acclaimed look at politics, House of Cards.
“I always wanted to be a playwright,” Treem said by phone from her Connecticut home. “The sad reality of playwriting, though, is that you can’t actually make a living at it. So I started writing for television to pay my bills. And then I feel like I got kind of lucky, because it’s become quite a creatively satisfying medium to write for, in addition to theater.”
As smart as her two television series are, Treem insisted, “Television does not really allow for ideas in the way that theater does. Television is about characters and situations, but if you want to get into the philosophy of being human, you do it in a play.”
A play like The How and the Why, now at Delray Beach’s Arts Garage through Nov. 30. Like In Treatment, The How and the Why is a dialogue between two characters, Zelda Kahn, a 50-ish evolutionary biologist and senior professor at Harvard University, and Rachel Hardeman, a woman half her age who is a graduate student at New York University studying the same field. The two women have contrasting theories on the “whys” of menstruation and menopause – questions that men never bothered to study – but their scientific conflict does not explain their awkward behavior up on first meeting.
There seems to be some unacknowledged relationship between them, and rather than address it, they use their scientific jargon as a defensive barrier.
“I think what is interesting about this play, and also makes it a little bit hard to act, is that these women talk about science easily,” Treem said. “It is their vocabulary really, it’s everything that they eat, breathe and sleep, it’s just the way that they are. But when they speak about their emotions, that’s where they have a much harder time. So I think that even if you don’t necessarily understand all the science, the emotion of what they’re talking about is what’s important.”
While most of Treem’s plays focus on women and gender politics, The How and the Why is the only script of hers that specifically deals with science. It stems from a book called Women: An Intimate Geography by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times science writer Natalie Angier. In it, Treem found the theories to which her characters cling. Zelda’s reputation, made with her Grandmother Hypothesis, contends that after their child-bearing years, women gain a new purpose helping to care for the offspring of new mothers, which promotes survival of the species.
In opposition, brash newcomer Rachel posits the less-romantic theory that the function of menstruation is to flush away the toxicity introduced by male sperm during sex.
Treem admits her characters are constructed from parts of herself and her relatives.
“When I started writing this play, I was 28, maybe, so I was right around Rachel’s age,” she said. “I think I was kind of talking to myself through Zelda, giving myself advice. And projecting what it would be like to be Zelda’s age.
“Also, I have a mother, I have a grandmother – both incredibly strong figures in my life – and I’ve worked with a lot of women, older women, in theater,” Treem continued. “Even at 28, I could see that it’s hard, and especially that generation of women before mine, who really were in the vanguard of feminism and had to make some very tough choices.”
While The How and the Why is undeniably female-centric, Treem said its subject matter should speak to all theatergoers.
“I think it’s relatable to anybody who has a mother or whoever did,” she said. “Whoever had a mother or who is a mother. Who understands how complicated that relationship can be.”
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It is hard to imagine another theater company in South Florida other than the inheritor of the mantle of Lou Tyrrell’s Florida Stage tackling such a cerebral, science-heavy play as The How and the Why. And with Margaret Ledford directing well-skilled actresses Laura Turnbull (Zelda) and Elizabeth Price (Rachel), the potentially dry drama rises to its considerable emotional impact.
Treem does indeed have ideas on her mind – genetic destiny, gender politics and the nature of love – but, particularly in the second act, they are overshadowed by the human element.
Turnbull’s Zelda is initially cold and distant, curiously uncomfortable around the nervous intruder in her midst. She remains a reserved academic, but also shows glimpses of maternal impulses underneath.
She is well-matched, as the play requires, by recent Florida Atlantic University graduate Price (who flexed her acting chops so impressively there this summer in August: Osage County.) As Rachel, Price brims with intelligence even as her emotions rage out of control. She looks to have a very promising career ahead of her.
The same could be said for Treem, who already has been discovered by Hollywood. (Intriguingly, she now is working on adapting to the feature film Until I Say Goodbye: My Year of Living with Joy, the memoir of the late Palm Beach Post reporter Susan Spencer-Wendel.) But Treem sounds at least as if she is committed to continuing to write for the theater, as well. Having seen The How and the Why, that is a very appealing prospect.
THE HOW AND THE WHY: Arts Garage, 180 N.E. First St., Delray Beach. Through Nov. 30. Tickets: $30-$45. Call: (561) 450-6357.