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From Pill to Quill
July 2002

Scientist turned playwright Carl Djerassi

It's 11.30 on a Saturday morning and Carl Djerassi, professor of chemistry at Stanford University, is gesticulating dramatically in front of a giant projected image of a human penis. Exchanging slingshot wisecracks with a young female colleague from the human biology department in between detailed monologues about the process and implications of reproductive science, the diminutive, white-bearded academic seems to be enjoying every moment of his performance.

"Lectures are monologues in which a professor preaches and pontificates for an hour," he tells his audience, before his presentation begins. "They rarely involve real human interaction and debate." That's why theater has become an integral part of Djerassi's lectures - bringing science alive for students in much the same way as Miracle Plays made the Scripture accessible to the illiterate masses in Mediaeval England.

Djerassi is under no illusion that his didactic little two-hander about the ethics of procreation performed script-in-hand for the benefit of 150 prospective Stanford undergraduates, will win a Tony Award. Yet outside academia, Djerassi harbors rather different literary ambitions. In the mid-1980s, the man who earned the National Medal of Science for the part he played in the invention of the contraceptive pill, turned his attention to writing novels, autobiographies and, more recently, plays.

Working in a genre he calls "science-in-fiction", where the page or stage serve as vehicles for his ideas about science and scientific culture, Djerassi's literary oeuvre explores the social implications of scientific discovery as well as the obsessions of the science community.

It was the realization that his novels were full of dialogue that made Djerassi turn his attention from novels to playwriting. "In science there is very little opportunity for dialogue," he says. "My novels and plays are a reflection of the fact I like to talk to people and tell stories." Seeing Steven Poliakoff's play about nuclear science, Blinded By The Sun, also served as a turning point: although Djerassi admired the first act, the second act disappointed him because of the playwright's inability to explain science effectively to a general audience. He left London's Royal National Theater that night vowing to write a play himself.

Unlike plays such as Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and David Auburn's Proof, which use science for metaphorical purposes, science takes center stage in Djerassi's plays. Hence, The entire plot of his first play, An Immaculate Misconception, revolves around an intricate bio-chemical artificial insemination process known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). A single human sperm almost becomes a character in "his" own right when the scientists in the play argue over the identity of the fertilized egg's father.

Meanwhile Djerassi's more recent plays, Oxygen and Calculus, concern themselves with scientists' ambitions and the perennial academic war over "who discovered what first." In Oxygen, which Djerassi co-wrote with Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann, the Nobel committee argues over who should receive the first "retro-Nobel" for the discovery of oxygen. The drama darts between 2001 and 1777 as members of the committee argue about whether the invention of oxygen should go to the man who first dreamed it up, the man who first published it, or the man who first understood it. Calculus presents a similar kind of argument as a group of eighteenth century characters investigate Isaac Newton's claim to have invented calculus.

Much like his mission in the classroom, Djerassi sees playwriting as a way to impart important scientific information to a lay audience. "I am a scientist," he declaims. "I want to use theater for my science as opposed to science in my theater." But while his lectures are little more than sugar-coated pedagogy, Djerassi aims to be less didactic on stage. "The incentive to go to the theater has to be the story," he says.

But to what extent does he succeed? Bryan Bevell, who directed the world premiere of Oxygen at the San Diego Repertory Theater in 2001, feels that for all its good qualities, from the "clipped, smart-ass style of the dialogue" to the dramatic changes between the two time periods in which the play is set, Oxygen ultimately falters theatrically. "Scientists see theater as a means to an end and not an end in itself," he says. "That kind of approach is always going to be limited dramatically."

Yet according to Bevell, Oxygen had a powerful effect on the scientists and science students who came to watch the production. "The scientists who saw the play loved it," he says. "People like to see plays about themselves: there are a lot of plays written about science, but there aren't many plays written for scientists."

Djerassi doesn't want his plays to be a niche market and the fact that his plays are being aired all over the world suggests otherwise. Oxygen and An Immaculate Conception have been performed in Off-Broadway-sized venues in such cities as London, Vienna, Stockholm and New York and adapted for BBC Radio. Calculus received its inaugural staged reading at the Aurora Theater, Berkeley in May.

Still, the relationship between science and theater is proving in some ways to be a caustic one for a budding playwright with a background in the pill and pesticides. Djerassi says he owes a debt to Copenhagen for giving the genre of science-in-theater sex-appeal, but he says that literary and theater people are suspicious of scientists who write plays.

Despite numerous efforts to promote himself as a "playwright for the intellectual mainstream theater," Djerassi's dramas often end-up being supported and appropriated by the scientific community. When Djerassi sent An Immaculate Misconception to the theater publisher Nick Hern, he received a short reply: "we don't do this sort of thing." Instead, Imperial College Press, the publishing wing of the London-based science, technology and medicine institution Imperial College, took the job, having never published a play before. Similarly, because theatres are so strapped for cash, industrial giants like Pfizer and British Oxygen end up co-sponsoring Djerassi's productions.

While some of Djerassi's critics balk at his need to "wash dirty lab-coats in public," Djerassi says bringing the ambition and competition that fuel scientific discovery out into the open is both dramatic and therapeutic. "We scientists are the most collegial and competitive of people. This is our passion and our poison," he says. "I'm not an investigative reporter digging up dirt on another culture. I would be lying if I said I hadn't lived the things I write about."

Djerassi's own life - his ambition to succeed as a scientist over decades of research, awards, honorary degrees and international travel, is matched by his drive to become a widely produced playwright. This professor emeritus will only consider himself successful when one of his plays is premiered at the National Theater in London. At the not-so-tender age of 78, Djerassi is impatient to make things happen. "I find theater's long lead times particularly frustrating," he growls. "I don't want to have to wait till I'm 90 to see my plays performed."

Visit http://www.djerassi.com