In advance of the event, Guy Glass has had the opportunity to speak with Margo Weishar about her play: 

Guy: 
Hello Margo. It is such a pleasure to speak with you. For anyone who may be deciding if they want to come to the reading, can you tell us a bit about the play and the subject matter? And about how you became interested in writing about Elizabeth Blackwell. 

Margo: 
What really interests me is people who break out of the norm. 
People who do things that are completely extraordinary, and what motivates them to do that, and what is their personal cost in doing that. 
Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and then she had a career in promoting women in medicine. But I also wanted to show her as a human being. The only pictures we have are of an old woman, but she was a vital, curious, intelligent, daring, brave person who fought against incredible odds to get where she was. And so that’s who I really wanted to investigate. You know, we all rely on these pioneers to break barriers down so that people like me can walk through them. But what does it take from them to do that? What are the choices they had to make in your own lives to make that possible? So that was the question that really ended up fascinating me. 
 

I got a theater degree because it was something I’ve always done in my life, and I decided I really wanted to formally go and learn. And when I started working with playwright Michael Hollinger, I took a class on solo performance. 
I always loved historical fiction, and I liked plays that were based on historical women. And so, I thought I’ll look at Elizabeth Blackwell as a subject for this solo performance. I started researching and found there was a wealth of primary source information. Not only she, but also her sister Emily became a doctor, and then a lot of her other family members were prominent. There are letters between the nine brothers and sisters in collections at Harvard and at Oxford which I could read online. The more I read and the more material I looked at, the more I felt, wow…this woman had an amazing life! After I did the solo performance, I started developing it as a play. And I really liked where it was going and refined it to the point where I had a public reading at Villanova in May of 2024. 

Guy: 
As you know, I am also a physician-playwright. There are not all that many of us! Can you say something about what it was like as a doctor transitioning to becoming a playwright? Do you feel like you have a special perspective because of being a doctor?  

Margo: 
I feel like my life has had two parallel tracks because I grew up around theater and performing. My father was a scenic designer who was a graduate of Yale Drama School. I am the first and only doctor in my family. I was always that kid who was good at science, but also the lead in the play. I produced and directed the first musical production at Penn med school ever: Sondheim’s Company with a full orchestra, which we put on with all the med students. So, it was always part of my life even during my medical training, although there was a time when I had to kind of put it on the back shelf. 

As far as playwriting, I feel very passionate about telling certain stories that haven’t been told. And now as a woman who has lived a life, had a career, raised three children, and now has a grandchild, I have a lot of life experience. I felt like that kind of voice is somewhat rare in the playwriting world, especially telling stories about women. And especially about women in science. I’ve had the opportunity to play on stage Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who is credited with developing the first computer and the first computer language. 
I’ve played Maria Sibylla Merian, an artist and biologist in the 1700’s, who drew beautiful studies of insects and plants.
I directed a play about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a Harvard astronomer in the early 1900’s. I’ve always been fascinated by these incredibly accomplished women who history has ignored. I really felt like that was my impetus for trying my hand at it. I didn’t know if I’d be any good at it. But having my work read by others I could see it was starting to reverberate with people. People were liking it and I was liking what I was hearing. The whole skill was very new to me and quite surprising. 

Guy: 
One of the things I don’t think people who are outside the theater world realize is just how long the development process of a play can take. In what way do you hope the reading at the College of Physicians will help you, and what do you expect will happen next? 

Margo: 
I have another amazing mentor, Ed Sobel, a professor at Villanova and a professional dramaturg. Ed has been working with me on focusing and refining the play. And it is just an amazing thing for me to work with somebody who is so great at what he does. Because he’s asking me questions and really trying to focus on what the essential story is that I want to tell. Having good actors is another good thing. The way people say things will help me to streamline.  

And of course, the last and most important element is how it plays to an audience, somebody who’s seeing it and hearing it for the very first time, what they will come away with and whether I can achieve the emotional impact of what I’m trying to say. As you know, things can be back to the drawing board after that experience. I might hear certain things that really hit perfectly or other things I never even considered. It’s not like a novel, where you finish it, you publish it, and it goes out in the public. You can have multiple full productions before you publish a script because sometimes something doesn’t work in a production. Maybe it’s just the wrong actors. And then you go see it somewhere else and you think, no, that scene was great. You have to see it. It’s a collaborative art, and we need all those people, designers and directors, to interpret what we wrote before we can say, yes, this is the final version. 

It’s interesting. I was in London last week and I got to see a Tom Stoppard play called Indian Ink. This play had been produced 30 years ago. 
And when Stoppard went back to it, he changed the ending. 30 years later! So even Tom Stopford can say yes, I think I can do it better now. 

Guy:  
Thanks for talking to me today, Margo. And best of luck on the reading. 

Margo:  
Thank you! 

4:48 Psychosis raises the question of what constitutes theater. Is this a case study in psychotic depression, a work of art, or both? Can one call language without boundaries a play? What direction remains for contemporary theater to take following total fragmentation?  
 

These concerns have not stood in the way of 4:48 Psychosis being produced - if anything, it seems to be gaining in popularity. What could be stumbling blocks are seen by directors as a challenge to be met creatively. The play’s initial production, at London’s Royal Court (2000) divided the words among three performers. All three initially learned the whole text, and although most lines were eventually allocated, others were voiced spontaneously by different actors from performance to performance. The “action” appeared to take place within the mind of the protagonist. Projections onto a mirror helped create a Rorschach-like effect. As evidence that the play encourages a wide variety of interpretations, in the celebrated TR Warszawa production, six actors embodied discrete characters, creating encounters between a central character and her doctor, family members, or friends. This production, brought to New York in 2014, employed a Polish translation with English surtitles.  Another production, by Theatre du Pif of Hong Kong in 2016, purported to bring “an Asian sensibility” to the play, using a Korean designer and Hong Kong musicians.”  

In conclusion, 4:48 Psychosis is clearly not everyone’s idea of entertainment (one critic likened watching it to being locked in a freezer). However, it provides a beautiful, albeit brutal, window into the depressed, suicidal mind.  

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.  

Primary Source Sarah Kane: Complete Plays 
Publisher Bloomsbury Methuen Drama 
Place Published New York 
Page Count 43 
Web Art: File:4.48 psychose.JPG – Wikimedia Commons 

Attending plays is not always just a passive experience. Through various means playwrights, producers, composers, choreographers, set designers, and others have available to them, they can make plays immersive and interactive for audiences. A good example, among many, is Florian Zeller’s play, The Father. 

The Father is the story of an older man with Alzheimer’s disease (André) and his progression through first living on his own, then living with his daughter (Anne), and finally living in a nursing home. Or, is it? It’s hard to tell, and that is the intention of the playwright, Florian Zeller, who in a 2021 interview with Forbes Magazine,* said his aim was, 

to tell the story from the inside and put the audience in a unique position as though they were going through a labyrinth—questioning everything they’re seeing. It also was a way for me to play with the idea of disorientation because I not only wanted The Father to be a story but also an experience. The experience being what it’s like to lose everything, including your own bearings as a viewer and to be uncertain of what is and isn’t real. It was a way for the audience to experience a slice of dementia.

The director, Doug Hughes, creates the audience experience through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated scene sequences, and time loops as circumstances for various behaviors like memory loss, paranoia, anger, and lasciviousness. All the scenes take place in one room that serves at different times as André’s flat, Anne’s flat, and André’s nursing home room. The furnishings of the room change based on the supposed setting, but the walls are exactly the same for all of them. In different scenes, André is not always sure where he is, and neither is the audience.  

Early in the play, André hears Anne tell him she’s relocating from Paris to London with her lover, but she is present to him in most of the scenes thereafter and until the end of the play when he’s told by a nurse that Anne had moved to London some time ago. Had she really left Paris and was never actually there in all those other scenes? He wonders and so does the audience. In other scenes, the way characters from the past and present enter and exit distorts time for André, and so while audience members know the linear trajectory of the disease course, they can’t be sure of where they are in that course during a given scene. With the last scene taking place in André’s nursing home room with the same walls seen in his flat and Anne’s flat, the audience can’t be faulted for wondering whether all that came before was just one of André’s hallucinations. 

The Disorienting Is Clarifying

If the play had been staged as the customary audience view of outside looking in, the audience would have merely witnessed the familiar manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease and a familiar progression of events. This view would have afforded a new appreciation for the trauma it causes to those who are not closely acquainted with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, while those who are familiar with them could possibly achieve a measure of catharsis. Zeller endeavors to do much more by offering a view of Alzheimer’s from the inside looking out and a means to grasp the actual experience of it. He is successful when audience members find themselves working as hard as André is to discern fact from fiction, past from present, and here from there.   

This can be no easy feat for the stage, and no wonder then that the Broadway production team enlisted an “illusion consultant” (Jim Steinmeyer) and a medical advisor (Dr. Randi Diamond). The intimate experiences the actor playing André (Frank Langella) and the director (Doug Hughes) have had with Alzheimer’s disease through family members no doubt contributed to the production’s authenticity as well.  

Zeller doesn’t leave the audience members defenseless in their efforts to orient themselves. He associates André’s grasp of his own situation with the whereabouts of his watch: “I need to know exactly where I am during the day. I’ve always had this watch, you know. If I were to lose it, I’d never recover.” As André’s dementia progresses and his powers of perception weaken, we see fewer objects in Anne’s flat. In the end, Zeller is hoping that confusing and disorienting the audience members will clarify the dementia experience for them.

Notes:
*Dawson A. Florian Zeller takes viewers into the labyrinth of dementia with The Father. Forbes. March 30, 2021.
This essay is based on a live performance of The Father presented by the Manhattan Theater Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in New York City that ran between April and June of 2016. 
Translated from French by Christopher Hampton.
Brain photo:  Processing language, left brain hemisphere (sagittal view). Stephanie Forkel, NatBrainLab. Source: Wellcome Collection
License: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Watch photo from Wikicommons images and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Carrie Coon, Letts’ wife, plays Agnes White, a lonely server living in an Oklahoma motel who falls in love with Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood), an AWOL Gulf veteran. Peter becomes increasingly convinced that he is the subject of clandestine experiments, and that he is infested with government-planted bugs. These bugs are, of course, invisible, yet he drags Agnes with him into a seeming folie à deux—a bedlam of flypaper, aluminum foil, and bug zappers.  

Peter’s delusions (and, in turn, Agnes’s) eventually cross a line into a realm in which logic no longer applies. By spilling so far into excess, even occasionally veering into bizarre spoofiness, Bug risks trivializing Peter’s paranoia—a risk especially fraught now that the part is played for the first time by a Black actor.  

Initially, Peter cites a real case of government experimentation: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which poor Black sharecroppers were never told they had syphilis. The experiment ran from 1932 until 1972—long after penicillin became the standard treatment in the mid-1940s. To observe how the disease naturally progressed, researchers deliberately withheld the antibiotic, ending the study only after a press leak. 

This gross violation of ethics is widely believed to have damaged Black Americans’ trust in the medical establishment. But according to medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington [1], “that narrative is flawed and untrue.” While Tuskegee certainly contributes to that distrust, the larger impetus is “four centuries of abuse in the medical arena,” which Washington chronicles in her 2007 book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. “In fact, one study indicated that African Americans who had never heard of Tuskegee were more likely to fear vaccine administration and medication design.” 

What if Bug had dialed down Peter’s paranoia and explored it within this broader historical context instead of reinforcing the singularity of Tuskegee? Overemphasizing Tuskegee because of its infamy (or because of one’s ignorance) serves to obscure other historical ethics violations as well as systemic racial inequities that persist today. For instance, what if Peter struggled to access mental healthcare because of structural barriers? 

In her 2021 book Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent, Washington mentions an experimental anthrax vaccine that soldiers were required to receive beginning in 1998. “Soldiers of all races were affected,” she writes, “but Blacks were overrepresented because they constituted 12.3 percent of Americans, but were 24.5 percent of the 1.7 million ground troops deployed to the Gulf in 1990 and 26.2 percent of Army reservists in 2001—twice their representation in the population at large, and so at twice the risk of being forced into military research.” 

Many service members reported autoimmune conditions after getting the jab, but the Pentagon attributed their symptoms to “emotional issues,” Washington continues. “The military subsumed vaccine-related illnesses under the nebulous symptomatology of ‘Gulf War Syndrome.’” What if Bug had dramatized that ‘nebulous symptomatology’? 

Peter also references another example of government research: the Edgewood Arsenal experiments. After World War II, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps tested chemical weapons on American soldiers at a secluded research facility on the Chesapeake Bay, exposing volunteers to more than 250 different chemicals, including LSD, mustard gas, and sarin. The studies ended after researchers were accused of ethical transgressions, including issues with informed consent and recruitment. Archival footage, unearthed in a 2022 documentary, shows men “going temporarily blind, reduced to babbling or completely dysfunctional logs, or worse, ready to commit violence upon themselves.” [2] 

Washington argues in Carte Blanche that “the medical crimes that were denounced and punished at Nuremberg have American analogues.” 

“Although not perfect parallels,” she notes, “they share a violent, nonconsensual, and largely racial disparate nature, as well as the frequent invocation of military expedience.” 

In this light, Peter’s condemnation of his doctors as neo-Nazis feels less outlandish than the play permits. Letts may hint that Peter is not entirely psychotic—that his madness holds some truth. But that seed never grows.  

The play ultimately bubbles over (spoiler alert: self-harm, violence, and fire). A future iteration of the three-decades-old play, if there is one, might benefit from taking Peter’s delusions more seriously—and leaving open the possibility that they are, in fact, real. 

Bug will get under your skin, but to what end? 

Bug, through March 8th at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York; manhattantheatreclub.com/shows/2025-26-season/bug/.  

[1] “Harriet A. Washington on the Narrative Around Vaccine Hesitancy in the African American Community: In Conversation with Andrew Keen.” Keen On from Literary Hub, 19 Mar. 2021, lithub.com/harriet-a-washington-on-the-narrative-around-vaccine-hesitancy-in-the-african-american-community/. 
[2] Simonpillai, Radheyan. “‘It Affected a Great Number of People’: Inside the World of Shocking Military Drug Experiments.” The Guardian, 9 June 2022, theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jun/09/dr-delirium-and-the-edgewood-experiments-documentary. 

Web image by Matthew Murphy.