Sweet Sweet Motherhood
Sweet Sweet Motherhood played from July 8-31, 2010 in the Mainstage Theatre.
Show Press
- “An outrageous, provacative and timely new play, by a fearlessly imaginative and seriously funny new American Playwright.”
- — David Auburn
About the show
Shelley McCann is a bitingly intelligent undergraduate student at a top
university. Although Shelly covets a spot in a top graduate program, she
would rather party and get laid than build up a respectable GPA. Professor
Henry Stein is an eminent biotechnology researcher and professor at
Shelley’s university. One afternoon, Shelley stumbles into Stein’s office
to propose a senior thesis. Yet this is no ordinary research proposal:
Shelley wants to fertilize one of her eggs with the sperm from a chimpanzee
and carry the hybrid “humanzee” to term – in her own womb…
Sweet Sweet Motherhood lays bare the ethical and moral quandaries
associated with biotechnology today. The human imagination has always
dreamed up fantastic creatures, but now biotechnology is making it easier
to actually create forms of life that have never existed before. What are
the consequences of this type of research, and when can we as humans go too
far? What is too far? What are the consequences of science used for
personal gain?
The play is the hybrid child of its own experiment, the Two-Headed
Challenge, where the Guthrie Theater and the Playwrights Center
commissioned playwright Jeremy Kareken to collaborate on a play with
molecular biologist Lee M. Silver, author of the controversial Challenging
Nature and Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will
Transform the American Family.
Credits
Featuring Caroline Cooney* and Michael De Nola
written by Jeremy Kareken
in collaboration with Lee M. Silver
Directed by Michael Bigelow Dixon
Costumes by Kari Love
Sound by Bruce Ellman
Set by Ray Neufeld
Video by Zoe Woodworth
Lighting by Christopher Brown
Production Stage Management by Emily James Durning*
Produced by Matthew Kreiner
Consulting Producer Rachel Ford
Associate Producer Sarah Bisman*
Jim Baldassare is the Press Representative
Photographer Carol Rosegg
* Appearing courtesy of Actors' Equity Association