Chimera

A rare transfer from New York’s capricious off-off-Broadway scene, Deborah Stein’s ‘Chimera’ is a remarkable and frustrating play that mixes maddening feyness and mind-blowing science in more or less equal measures.

Jennifer is a geneticist, who becomes obsessed with her eight-year-old son Brian’s hereditary heart murmur: how was he born with it when neither she nor the father have the condition? The answer turns out to be scarcely believable: she was born with chimerism, a rare real-life condition that means she has two sets of DNA – hers, and that of her unborn twin, whom she absorbed in the womb. Her eggs – and a few other parts of her body – have her sister’s DNA, meaning Brian is, from a strictly genetic perspective, her nephew… a revelation that prompts her to walk out on him.

‘Chimera’ is one of the more provocative hours of theatre I’ve seen this year, in part because its refusal to properly explain itself throws up so many questions. In an age of designer babies, does knowing too much about our DNA make us lose touch with what makes us human? Is Jennifer right to not consider herself Brian’s mother? Or is she just a eugenicist whack job?

Sole performer Suli Holum plays Jennifer, Brian, and for some reason a Midwestern coffee lady, all of whom conspire to tell the story with a meandering, fourth-wall-breaking, meta-theatrical whimsy – lots of chatting to the audience, lots of commenting on the structure of the play, lots of disappearing into Jeremy Wilhelm’s deceptively complex kitchen set.

Once you’ve acclimatised to her very New York brand of kookiness, Holum is an engaging and sympathetic performer. But the style of the production – co-directed by Stein and Holum – seems more suited to subverting a conventional story than telling a remarkable one. There is no explanation for Jennifer’s motives or emotions, and one gets the distinct impression that Stein and Holum are more interested in the form of their play than its content. Which would be absolutely understandable in 99 percent of shows. But for all ‘Chimera’s manifold good qualities, it’s hard not to feel vaguely disgruntled at its creators for firing off a slew of fascinating questions only to run off, giggling.