Primary Stages' INFORMED CONSENT

In general, I agree although I think the acting (esp Benko and Taylor) was better and some (but not all) of your nitpicks didn't bother me. I did not snooze and actually think there is a worthwhile story there, just not well told. The comparison to Curious Incident is unavoidable.

"The acting is so bad that you never care about any of the multitude of characters portrayed."

I didn't think the acting was bad, just not fantastic. That is, it didn't move me greatly but it was certainly competent. I think what you're talking about might have been due to the direction. I thought Tina Benko and Delanna Studi found some nice moments.

"The dialogue is amateurish and two things kept occurring that annoy me to no end. The first is when a character is changing the setting by saying something like "the dean of the school was not pleased about this" and then the character is in scene and actually says "I am not pleased about this" as if we didn't get it the first time."

I did agree that the material was kind of weak though I thought some of the things that the play wanted to say were interesting. I get recycling parts but there was a lack of trust for the audience in the decision to keep saying things like "the dean of the school was not pleased about this" to get you into scenes. If that's really necessary to figure out who the characters are it's a failure of acting and writing and costuming and direction. I got something out of the play so I wouldn't dissuade people from seeing it. I still haven't seen Curious Incident but it reminded me a bit of The Language Archive. Creative people writing about non-creative academics has mixed results.

I'd be interested to hear how people with and without a background in science responded to the play. I don't think there was anything there that you wouldn't learn in a college (or even high school perhaps) biology class that covered genetics. Some of the science seemed a little wonky. Jillian was definitely a character prone to exaggeration and flights of fancy. It was interesting with the dean's line about letting the English department worry about imagining the future or whatever it was. There were times when I felt like I was seeing a humanities person (the playwright) interpret scientific concepts that she had heard about.

I did appreciate that Jillian wasn't the very stereotypical Temperance Brennan kind of scientist. She was blunt and honest but not unaware of social norms. She was empathetic and emotional and capable of grasping the social and cultural issues at play. She wasn't completely naive or completely callous. It was more like a willful ignorance of her privilege and the significance of racial divisions. At times, she did what scientists are not supposed to do which was use the science to back up her own beliefs instead of letting the facts guide your beliefs and understanding.