Ellie Zimmerman and Melody Hoffmann, who both dabbled in high school theater work, attended Jungle Theater’s 40 & under performance of “The Effect” on March 6. The 40 & under nights are “approachable performances welcoming younger audiences” and include a reception for 40 & under FlexPass ticket holders.

“The Effect” is a play about two young people who fall in love during a clinical drug trial. A separate love story, with depression intertwined, follows the two doctors running the drug trial. The play was first performed in 2012 and written by British playwright Lucy Prebble who went on to write for HBO’s “Succession.”

Ellie and Melody chatted after the performance in the Jungle Theater lobby.

Melody Hoffmann: Ok first off, the stage design was fantastic. The blue-green lighting and the crisp, clean set-up obviously mimicked a clinical setting but also created this eerie feeling right away.

Ellie Zimmerman: It had such a dystopic, sterile feel to it. It wasn’t until the play started that I realized that the images projected on the screen during pre-show were of brain and nerve sections.

MH: Yes! I think we were both struck by the vignettes, as a staging mechanism too.

EZ: The lights came up and two characters performed for a few seconds and then the lights went down and they changed positions before the next snippet. I wasn’t sure how much time was passing between each one.

MH: I loved that. There were so many plot twists, too.

EZ: The audience was super vocal and participatory, which was an added bit of fun. The script was packed with pithy one-liners and life truisms that got some good laughs and murmurs of understanding. Do you think the pharmaceutical company was portrayed as evil?

MH: Yes, that definitely was the tone. That scene where the doctor pulls a brain out of the bucket?  

EZ: In that scene, Dr. Sealey’s character is making a sales pitch to funders, trying to make a buck off of this experiment and improve his own reputation as a doctor, but the question the audience was left with at the end of the show was: at what human cost?

MH: And throughout the play, once you see the two doctors talking to each other about the trials, you notice there's a lot more nuance to what's going on. So is the company actually “evil”?

EZ: The play also addresses what experiences should be cured or even addressed through medicine. The doctor running the trial, Dr. Toby Sealey (played by Greg Watanabe), talked about the “psychopharmacological revolution” of the 21st century and how it’s optimizing humanity for modern life.

MH: Another thing I appreciated about the play is it includes some really interesting tidbits about depression, like most people who are medicated for depression are only mildly or moderately depressed. One of the characters eventually argues against being medicated for what they see as being minimally depressed. Which is something that a lot of people who are depressed deal with. They want to go off their medication because they're just like, numbed out.

Kamani Graham, who plays one of the clinical trial subjects, Tristan, passes by while we are chatting.

MH: Hey, we're actually talking about the show. We really enjoyed the vignette section. Was that fun to put together?

Kamani Graham: Oh my god, yeah, it’s in the script like that too, where there’s black outs like that.

MH: I have to ask, since you've done a couple productions, is the audience always so vocal? People were gasping at the plot twists by us.

KG: Today, it was actually quieter.

EZ: We were commenting on how engaged people were. We thought you got a lot of laughs.

KG: There’s a scene outside that I feel like that's when people start warming up. Because at the beginning there's a lot of information being thrown at you. By the time we get the plot twists I can't hear anything, so I didn't know there were people gasping so that's cool to know.

MH: Thanks for chatting, it was great to meet you.

Kamani Graham leaves

MH: So the commentary about the depression, I appreciated that so much.

EZ: It begs the question of how much of what we see as mental illness is just variance in human brain experience. How much is a disease to be pathologized and cured, and how much is just different ways that people live and interpret the world. Plus, aren't there reasons to be depressed out here?

MH: And what aspects, when you are depressed, or when people think that they have depression, actually help.  I will out myself as somebody who is on drugs for mental illness. And there is this not knowing if you are having reactions because you're on the drug or because it's you.

EZ: You experienced that?

MH: Oh absolutely. My friends and family who are on drugs for depression and anxiety, there's so much conversation about, ‘I'm gonna go off this drug so I can feel like myself again. Oh, but I need to get back on it because now I feel like crap in this other way.’ It’s like the character who says ‘if I'm not on my medicine then I want to disappear.’

EZ: No but she never takes it.

Plot-spoiling argument about whether a character takes medicine during the play.

MH: Whether she takes it or not, it's this ongoing battle that people who have mental illness and mental health challenges often have to go through. Like, is this better? Is this medicine worth it to get all of these thoughts gone? Dr. Lorna James really exemplified and talked very well about the full understanding of depression.

EZ: That character was actually the most interesting to me. The lovers were cool. But I was really taken by her character.

‍The Effect runs through March 30 at Jungle Theater. There are numerous special performances including Sunday performance talkbacks featuring local physician-actors and storytellers with the Center for the Art of Medicine at University of Minnesota Medical School.