‘On the Evolutionary Function of Shame’

There’s a moment about three quarters of the way through D. A. Mindell’s On the Evolutionary Function of Shame that’s a pretty good microcosm of the whole play: A brother and sister are attending their father’s birthday party, though we never see the father or the party, just a bit of what goes down out on the porch. Tensions are running high and the brother, Adam (Cody Sloan), has come outside to avoid his sister, Eve, played by Kayli Carter. (Yes, the names are intentional; we’ll get there.) He’s carrying some kind of ceramic object — the script told me it’s a bowl shaped like a pomegranate, though I’d thought it was a dip plate shaped like a crab. His sister’s colleague Margot (Imani Russell) comments on it and he has no response. Eventually Eve comes outside and they start bickering—it’s what they do—and Adam gets more and more testy, gesturing with the bowl the way TV cops do with visibly empty cups of coffee, until finally he boils over into a rant that climaxes with the words, “Everything breaks.” I probably don’t have to tell you what happens to the bowl.

Mindell’s play often feels like one of those ill-fated kitchen endeavors where a dish comes out burnt on the outside and raw in the middle, somehow both over- and underbaked. There are the obvious gestures like the shattered bowl, which would land with an even heavier hand if its identity were clear on stage: It’s the birthday present Adam, a potter, has been making for his father, and the pomegranate is supposed to ping us back to the Garden of Eden. But — why? Other than the transparent reason that Mindell also sets part of his play in the days following the original Adam (Jordan Barbour) and Eve’s (Elizabeth Ramos) expulsion from paradise, and such echoes and repetitions hint at theatrical significance even when they’re not really paying their rent. Which, here, they’re not. Shame is too slackly constructed, too apt to lean on ready-made scenic arcs and desultory research for its symbols to cohere into something really profound. It’s not cynical, but the well-meaning curiosity that it does possess is too frequently eclipsed by the easy outs of its writing. It wants to move and provoke, but its tools just aren’t sharp enough.

At this point, I feel compelled to back off a bit. Mindell is a third-year student in Columbia’s playwriting MFA, and On the Evolutionary Function of Shame is receiving a full production as part of Second Stage’s Next Stage Festival, which is dedicated to supporting early-career writers. That’s great — and, at the same time, even given space to breathe on Signature Center’s big Irene Diamond Stage, the play still feels like it’s searching for itself. Along the way—and this is the real rub—it’s too eager to show its work while, at the same time, not having done quite enough of it. Under Jess McLeod’s direction, the ensemble plays things broadly, which does few favors to Mindell’s tendency to write emcpimters like siblings’ extended spats with the tone already cranked up to maximum cattiness. In content, the arguments between Sloan’s Adam and Carter’s Eve are manifestly high-stakes—pointed, personal, and political—and yet those scenes quickly hit a one-note stridency that puts us off where it should pull us in.

This second Adam and Eve are at odds because Adam, a trans man, is pregnant, and his sister, a scientist and genetic researcher, has volunteered to be his off-the-books OBGYN, helping him and his partner Fox (Ryan Jamaal Swain) through the pregnancy. But she’s also got an agenda. “You’re at the world’s preeminent institute for genetic engineering,” she tells her brother (an example of Mindell’s expository tendencies), and more than that: Eve and her research partner Margot have just successfully isolated the gene that causes gender dysphoria, implying that said gene can be switched off should parents so choose. In her misplaced fervor, Eve thinks she’s helping her sibling: “You cried every night,” she reminds Adam, “loud enough that I could hear it through the walls. You shouldn’t have had to cry like that. Nobody should have to cry like that … All I wanted was to make things a little easier for kids like you.”

Of course Adam is horrified — it’s pretty horrifying. “She’s doing eugenics,” he erupts at Fox, and it’s certainly easier to get in Adam’s corner than to suspend our disbelief around Eve’s apparent wall of cis naïveté. This is a smart lady who loves her sibling: Would she really be so blinkered to the implications of her own work, so in need of reminding of the political reality that, in the wake of a discovery like hers, would probably rain down much more harm than good on people like Adam? But Shame is the kind of play where characters do what the playwright needs them to. In the course of a single conversation with Adam, poor Fox is saddled with revealing information through the old Oops, did I just say that? strategy not once but twice. First, they blatantly give away that Eve has told them the sex of the baby, even though Adam has expressly demanded not to know. Then, even less subtly, they confess that they’ve known about the details of Eve’s research for much longer than Adam has. “Alright!” says Fox as Adam condemns his sister, “What she’s doing is bad. But she was never supposed to tell you about it.” Beat, says the script in response. That’s the moment where we’re all supposed to go, “Oh, snap” — but how can we, in the face of this kind of contrivance?

Mindell’s authorial groundwork is often first-thought-y enough that it can be a struggle even to buy into the characters’ basic circumstances. To wit, a moment with Margot at the party for Adam and Eve’s father: Margot, who’s autistic, is worried she’s said something awkward to her colleague’s dad, who’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. “He probably won’t remember, anyway,” Eve tells her, at which Margot—supposedly a specialist in Alzheimer’s at, lest we forget, the world’s preeminent genetic engineering center—responds with, “Memory loss is the most common symptom associated with early stages of Alzheimer’s.” Did we need reminding? Did she? Over and over, there’s a forced cluelessness in these characters’ reactions that feels less like the truth of specific humans and more like the motions of a writer who needs to supply exposition. The play’s engagement with early pregnancy, especially, is giving Wikipedia.

Perhaps Shame’s sorest thumb, though, has to do with the other Adam and Eve, the ones we intermittently catch up with as they wander the desert east of Eden. Though Barbour and Ramos have an appealing chemistry, and Ramos does some of the show’s most sincere and committed work, their scenes feel parachuted in — a conceptual twist rather than a dramaturgical necessity. They get some fun leafy costumes (by Hahnji Jang) and their presence lets Mindell do things like have contemporary Adam sculpt a pomegranate bowl or name his sister’s institute the Eden Project; but the play as a whole never sufficiently fleshes out the greater thematic links between its story’s halves, the resonances that its title (inadvertently provided to Mindell by Lynn Nottage) hints at. Nor does it give us any new revelations about its biblical figures as characters. Their debates over eating the fruit and their budding philosophical quandaries around “Dad” and his eternal judgment feel fairly standard-issue. Shame walks right up to the edge of a deep pool—perhaps intimidatingly deep—but in spite of earnest and expansive aspirations, it contents itself with skimming the surface.

On the Evolutionary Function of Shame is produced by Second Stage at Signature Center through March 9.