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How quantifiable such things actually are, if at all, is the most intriguing question of the many that Laufer asks during her 95-minute play, which has been directed here by Liesl Tommy. For Jillian (a stern, steely Tina Benko), the answer is clear and absolute: If she can convince the members of an isolated Native American tribe that lives in the Grand Canyon to donate their blood to her, she might be able to determine what's causing the unusually high epidemic of diabetes that's afflicting them. And that blood, largely untainted because of the people's isolation, could do all manner of good for billions of people the world over once it's in her hands. Just one problem: For the members of the tribe, who are represented by the young and smart Arella (Delanna Studi), blood is holy. If you're not buried with it, you'll never attain the highest levels of afterlife holiness, and that's a sacrifice too grievous to consider for even the best of causes. But if there's a chance that the blood may lead to a cure, even if it requires dealing with the same sorts of people who ran them off their land of nearly 1,000 years in the name of Manifest Destiny some two centuries earlier, isn't it worth doing? Jillian naturally thinks so; Arella isn't quite so sure. Regardless, when it comes to the forms needed to make everything happen, for all intents and purposes they're not speaking the same language at all. Jillian and Arella's battle of wills, and the terrifying places it leads both of them, is a fascinating subject (Laufer based the play on actual events from the early 1990s, per a program note), and it's well handled by everyone while Laufer keeps her focus tight. Seeing the bond of trust and action that forms between Jillian and Arella as they come to know each other (they're both mothers and both intellectually minded, among other things) and struggle to work past their inherent differences to attain their mutual goals is compelling, not least because both are waging their own battle against time. (Jillian, a proponent of intimate personal genome knowledge, knows from her own sequence that she's prone to early-onset Alzheimer's disease, and may already be infected.) But Laufer has so much to say that this energizing core does not get the consistent airing it should. Because Informed Consent is structured as a memory play, complete with intermittent interruptions into the narrative of half-formed thoughts and quarter-considered stories, it gets off track easily, and because everyone except Benko plays multiple characters, the question of whom you're following and why often becomes murky. Worse, digressions into Jillian's courtship of and marriage to Graham (Pun Bandhu), and the daughter they produce, as well as more pointed explorations of matters of faith, storytelling, and the indistinct boundaries that separate them, tend to be lengthy, rickety, and heavy-handed. Some ambiguity is introduced by way of Jillian's mind apparently disintegrating, suggesting that her problems go beyond a steel-ribbed unwillingness to seriously consider others' views, though Laufer also strains at connecting this to the tribe's epidemic (as is a strong attempted) through line. But you need more. Even were it treated with fiery commitment to originality and specificity of character (which it's not), this is a dry topic that quickly becomes preachy; Laufer raises interesting issues, but would do best forsaking some of her social-consciousness plot points in favor of the nuance that could make this more rewarding as a play. Tommy's staging, on Wilson Chin's staircase-lined academic-office set (the rear wall is lined entirely with file boxes) and utilizing nearly nonstop projections from Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew that more often than not of DNA base pairings, matches the writing step for chilly step, and doesn't immerse you in the action so much as keep it as distant as if it were unfolding in a real-world operating theater. It's not as straightforward as it should be to care about Jillian's plight. Bandhu tries to balance deep thinking with deep feeling, and gets most of the way there in the more tender scenes, though Graham's emotional involvement with Jillian generally comes across as something more akin to desperation. A similar problem afflicts Myra Lucretia Taylor, who earnestly plays a series of warm, authoritative supporting roles that fall just short of either warm or authoritative. Rather better is Jesse J. Perez as Jillian's colleague, who has a lengthy personal history with the tribe, and particularly Studi, who injects Arella with a heady mixture of passion and suspicion that further underscores how she's close spiritual kin to Jillian. That Benko doesn't reciprocate is one of the finer elements of her commanding performance: Her Jillian doesn't need anyone, and has structured her life that way, and you see her increasingly struggling to maintain her composure as she comes more and more apart at the seams. Equally convincing in the traditional romantic scenes with Graham as in the barter sessions with the tribe and the scientific speeches that outline her own deterioration, Benko brings everything that's best and worst about Jillian right to surface so you're forced to deal with it. It's almost enough to make Informed Consent fly, but there's too much holding it down for it get completely off the ground. Only if it were honed to an excess-free state would this captivate you without making more of an appeal to your heart than your head; Laufer just seems more interested in the latter. Such intellectual approaches can indeed work, but as Informed Consent's biggest plot complication revolves around whether non-lawyers know the intricate legal details of a contract, a little more feeling might not be a bad thing.
Informed Consent
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