The world of experimental medical research might not seem like it has much to say to the world of theater, but Lucy Prebble sees connections. Both require subjects and observers, both take place within a carefully controlled environment and both depend on a certain amount of luck.
“The more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘That’s kind of what we do,’” said Prebble, a British playwright and screenwriter.
In 2006, Prebble became fascinated with one botched medical trial in particular, in which six healthy young Britons experienced multiple organ failure after taking a novel drug. The incident partly inspired “The Effect,” Prebble’s play about two participants in a drug trial that alters the course of their lives. First produced in 2012 at the National Theater in London (and performed in New York at the Barrow Street Theater in 2016), it was revived there last fall and will come to New York on March 3 for a limited engagement at the Shed.
Like the London revival, the New York run will star Paapa Essiedu (“I May Destroy You,” “Black Mirror”) and Taylor Russell (“Waves,” “Bones and All”) as Tristan and Connie, two people from different class backgrounds with near opposite personalities who are given an antidepressant with the potential to induce feelings of love. When the drug proves stronger than expected — testing the boundary between love and mania — the trial’s administrators (played by Michele Austin and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) struggle to keep it from spinning out of control.
“They know what they feel but they don’t know why they feel it,” Essiedu said of Tristan and Connie. “Are they experiencing something that’s 1 in 1 billion? Or will it be here today and gone tomorrow?”
Prebble wrote the play while dealing with her own heartache and what she described as a bout with depression.
“I became very interested in what was real and what was not, what was love and what was a false high,” she said. “I wanted to see if I could replicate that feeling in a theatrical experience.”
Directed by Jamie Lloyd, known for his bracingly modernist style (“A Doll’s House” with Jessica Chastain, “Cyrano de Bergerac” with James McAvoy), the revival is as slick and gleaming as a pill capsule. Thanks to a jettisoned intermission and other edits that Lloyd made in collaboration with Prebble, the show is now a trim 100 minutes, nearly 20 percent shorter than the original production.
There are few props and no costume changes, and lighting design, by Jon Clark, augments a bare-bones set, with a combination of spotlights and illuminated floor panels creating the impression of multiple rooms.
“What’s great about Jamie is everything comes from this deep, authentic desire within him to find what is necessary,” Russell said. “It’s never, ‘Let’s be radical in this way or that way.’ It’s, ‘How can we let our imaginations be the focus here? What gives or takes away from that?’”
Before the London run, Russell had never performed on a stage professionally. She pursued the role after falling for the script, and read for Lloyd in New York during his Broadway production of “A Doll’s House” last spring.
Coming from a film background, where every day on set is different from the last, Russell worried that she would find the repetition of theater stultifying. But, to the contrary, she said the experience has brought a new sense of freedom to her work.
“You walk onstage and you have no idea what’s going to happen,” she said. “It doesn’t matter whether you feel good, or you feel ugly, or you didn’t do enough prep, or you hated your last performance — you just have to go on.”
Essiedu, who, in 2016, became the first actor of color to play Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, said he was attracted to the play’s rigorous ambiguity. It is suggested early on that either Tristan or Connie may be receiving a placebo, leaving the audience to guess whose feelings are “real” and whose are being chemically enhanced.
When that mystery is resolved, others emerge. What was this drug really designed for, anyway? And what’s going on between the two administrators?
“I couldn’t quite work out whether it was a tragedy or a triumph,” Essiedu said of reading the play. “Even now, having done it for two months, I never quite settle on what I believe — sometimes I think it’s one, sometimes I think it’s the other.”
Prebble, who was a writer and executive producer on “Succession” — a show famous for its volatile brew of tragedy and comedy — said she tends to lean toward tragedy in her own writing.
“There is an argument that tragedy is the more optimistic art form,” she said. “Comedy essentially doesn’t allow for change because it has to constantly reset itself. But in tragedy, change is possible. In the end, everything is different from where it began.”
The characters in the play have undergone some evolution since it was first performed more than a decade ago. Connie and Tristan, originally from Britain and Ireland, are now from Canada and East London, where Russell and Essiedu each were raised. And a pivotal dance that Tristan uses to charm Connie has been changed from Irish tap to a hip-hop shimmy, modeled by Essiedu (working with the movement directors Sarah Golding and Yukiko Masui) after the stage shows of Childish Gambino and Tyler the Creator.
For the New York run, Prebble said she will make a few additional changes — to contextualize some culturally specific references, for example — but preserve fundamental character and plot details. (Is there a difference between American audiences and British ones? “In Britain, they laugh a line earlier,” Prebble said. “It’s almost pre-emptive — like they want to do the joke in their own head, or let you know they see what’s about to happen.”)
And as with any play — or science experiment — the real breakthroughs are the ones you don’t expect.
“It has to be allowed to change and be specific to the moment,” Essiedu said. “If you’re chasing the high that you had before, it’s never going to work.”
