The chatter dies down in The Ex, the intimate black box theater housed in the Loeb Drama Center. The atmosphere is clinical: two metal hospital beds, creaky-wheeled and almost rusty under the fluorescent lights, occupy center stage. The screen reads, “The experiment is about to begin.” Finally, the performers enter. There are only four roles in the cast, but each embodies the complex personas—handling subjects like mental illness delicately and with attention to realism—and muddled personal relationships of Lucy Prebble’s The Effect.
On the surface, The Effect revolves around a simple plot. Two drug trial participants fall madly in love with each other, but it is unclear whether their love is authentic or manufactured by the study’s dopamine-increasing drug. The first half of the play springs into action with two parallel medical interviews, qualifying the gray sweatsuit-clad Connie (Tia KwanBock ’25) and Tristan (Robbie Owen ’25) for an experimental drug trial.
Immediately, the audience witnesses two major motifs of the work: mental illness and sexual and relationship politics. Connie is a college student somewhat reminiscent of those at the College; she is initially obsessed with portraying a levelheaded and composed facade, the cracks of which are revealed throughout the trial. The doctor conducting the trial, Dr. Lorna James (Sophie Garrigus ’25) asks Connie, “Have you ever suffered from depression?”
At first, she is adamant that she is “sad, not depressed,” but Dr. James’ probing proves otherwise. During this initial conversation, it is easy to view Dr. James as being overly prescriptive or rushing to conclusions. Considering the second half of the play, in which Dr. James’ own struggle with depression and suicidal ideation becomes a central plot point, her conversation with Connie resonates much more greatly. Dr. James knows what it is like to be depressed, from a clinical as well as personal standpoint. The question of what this drug trial, and mental illness at large, really means to each character is more nuanced than it appears.
Tristan, on the other hand, does not seem depressed. He is free-spirited—taking part in a long list of drug trials for cash to go globetrotting, tap dancing across the stage, and sneaking cigarettes and cellphones into the trial. He is also a bit of a player. He tells Dr. James, “You’re an attractive woman,” immediately and makes several advances at Connie throughout the play. His first attempt at seducing Connie comes in the form of attempting to hold her urine sample. Tristan does not present as a particularly complex character off the bat; in fact, he seems rather careless and sleazy. But the audience grows in both endearment and detest of Tristan over the next two hours.
He’s…complicated. Audience members flinch when Owen towers over KwanBock as Connie, spitting as he argues with her, throwing a phone on the ground in an act of rage and desperation, and eventually knocking her to the ground. Or maybe when he describes his violent sexual thoughts to Dr. James. But many also cannot help but shed a tear when Connie slips a pill into his mouth and he falls to the floor in the latest of his long history of seizures, or when his amnesia prevents him from remembering the day of the week or the woman whom he loves (Connie).
The love story between Tristan and Connie prompts the audience to wonder, who is under the influence of the drug, and who is experiencing a placebo effect? This question, which seems to occupy a great deal of the play, is a sort of drug—the opium of the masses. While the audience focuses on questioning which character truly loves the other, and which is just under the influence of a mind-altering substance, the real question of The Effect is hidden in plain sight: Does it even matter the motivations of love, if it is out of our control?
Tristan certainly doesn’t think so. “People fall in love in all sorts of ways, doesn’t matter what starts it. I’m sure there’s a rush of something chemical if you meet on vacation or… on a bus with a bomb on it, doesn’t mean Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock aren’t really in love,” he proclaims to Connie.
The parallel love story of Dr. James (Sophie Garrigus ’25) and Dr. Sealey (Benjamin Crawford ’25) seems to present the opposite case. They met at a work conference, where the young and impressionable Dr. James sleeps with Dr. Sealey, who is “this notorious fuckaround on the conference circuit” with whom “younger, less astute girls would” sleep with, according to Dr. James. This is a pivotal moment portrayed by Garrigus.
In the opening scenes of The Effect, she is poised, cold, purely concerned with the science. But sharing the story of her own messy relationship with Dr. Sealey with Connie is the first of many moments of vulnerability. Garrigus sits gingerly on the hospital bed—the practitioner becoming the patient—and looks musingly off to the distance. This is the first of many emotionally compelling moments delivered exceptionally by Garrigus, including an impassioned monologue that captured sympathy from every audience member present.
At the onset of her monologue, Dr. James stands confidently, smiling sweetly and grasping a model of the human brain. She points at the different parts of the brain, which Garrigus memorized specifically and accurately in preparation for the role and matches them with their function. Different parts, she says, are responsible for her love for “meringue” and her memory of her “father [holding her] on a jungle gym.”
Then, Garrigus makes a masterful transition. She points to one part of the brain and proclaims, “Here’s my impulse to kill myself.” Her smile falters, but her cavalier tone remains. Garrigus’ delivery of Dr. James’ confession evokes the kind of complete silence from the audience which underscores both her talent and the weight of the subject matter. Audience members hold their breath while she goes on to explain the difficult realities of living and appearing externally happy as someone who is depressed.
The parallel love stories in The Effect raise significant themes about what it is to love. For Connie and Tristan, love itself is a drug. They are addicted to each other, and they ultimately conclude that it does not matter why. Their relationship is dangerous, volatile even, which prompts audience members to ask difficult questions. In the end, Tristan and Connie wind up together, presenting the problem of whether Tristan can even consent in his current state to be with Connie and why Connie has decided to take him home with her. Love for Tristan and Connie is not necessarily good, but it is the only option. Perhaps it is even a drug which renders us powerless and incognizant to its effects.
For the doctors, however, love is something different. Doctors James and Sealey are not together in the end. Crawford does a convincing job playing Sealey, expressing a different form of love for Dr. James. He is engaged to another younger woman, but he visits her every day when she is hospitalized, presumably after a suicide attempt. Crawford is visibly desperate, trembling slightly, as he pleads with Garrigus’ character to take her medication. “I love you, Lorn. And it’s not romantic with the lies of that, and it’s not family, like a genetic trick…I’ve built a bit of my brain around you. And it’s important to me,” he proclaims.
James and Sealey’s love is nearly agapeic. They are not (or at least Dr. Sealey is not) romantically in love; their relationship is something deeper and more complex than that. Perhaps Sealey’s proclamation lightens the burden of his admittance to Dr. James earlier in the show—that he broke up with her because of her depression. To him, romantic love is full of “lies.” Perhaps caring for her, even in the depths of her depressive episodes, is love even without the romance because it is real. Then again, audience members may recall the reality of the pain expressed by Dr. James in accusing Dr. Sealey of causing the depression itself by leaving her.
Perhaps that is the overarching point of The Effect, that nothing is straightforward, and everything is paradox—and that is what makes reality real. The play is quite Hegelian in that the characters themselves embody the contradictions of some of our most challenging problems. In the play, antidepressants are at once the cure and “the effect.” As Dr. James asks, “What if it’s a symptom? Not a disease. What if it’s a useful pain that’s throbbing saying, ‘change your life, change your life’ and you come by with pills and take that all away?” Love itself is simultaneously the cure and the disease; it drives us to madness, and it is the only thing that matters. It is unavoidable and oppressive and necessary. The line between the experimenter and the experimented on is even blurred when we learn the experiment is double-blind.
In brief, The Effect is a series of contradictions that compel audience members to consider issues with their due complexity in pursuit of a higher truth. Two things at once can be true: that the script effectively tackles some of the most difficult issues of our time, and that it is brought to life by a cast skilled in emotional intricacy and realism.
Maddie Proctor (maddieproctor@college.harvard.edu) ’25 cried a little bit during Sophie Garrigus’ monologue. Chidimma Adinna (cadinna@college.harvard.edu) ’25 fell deeper in love with theater that day.