The Feel-good Reproductive Tragedy of the Year: Theater at Southern Methodist

There’s something to be said for theater with general admission. This year’s dip into the emerging artist shows at SMU ended up as Darwin’s Cousin by Christin Siems. The direction and much of the performance weren’t a surprise for this venue, but the writing is something else altogether. This piece asks a lot of questions. It’s kind of an odd story: Fertility doctor’s wife gets pregnant with quintuplets through IVF, and he tries to persuade her to reduce their number to two. This is complicated by the arrival of her forever-young great aunt (the gorgeous Olivia Williamson,) a dog breeder and eccentric tycoon that carries deep scars of a eugenics program from the inter-war twentieth century. While the positioning of the aunt to straddle such a long span of time seems a bit forced, it works here. Seims circumnavigates the topic through social Darwinism, eugenics, abortion, artificial fertilization, rape, sterilization, and almost a whole catalog of hot topic feminist issues. Yet, surprisingly, the piece never dumbs itself down into advocacy. There are moments – scenes – phrases – where the position-paper logic seems about to roll out; you brace yourself saying, “here it comes,” but she always backs down from the brink and refuses to provide an easy answer to complicated and deeply personal events. Is it murder to kill if it means the survival of others? (The trolley-track ethics question again.) How much personal pain is acceptable for the greater good? Exactly how epistemologically sure do we have to be of our science before it warrants action?

These are the questions asked, and they are important ones.