I am delighted to announce that my play The Sequence, which dramatizes the real-life race to decode the human genome, is now available in print from Original Works Publishing.
It has been a long road since that phone call eight years ago when Curt Dempster, then artistic director of Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, offered me a commission to write something about the genome race. He had seen Craig Venter on The Charlie Rose Show and I imagine he recognized a kindred spirit: an arrogant, monomaniacal genius who had the raw guts to want to change the world. I knew nothing about the story. I wanted instead to write a play about scientific investigations into human consciousness (still do, for that matter), but after doing some initial research I was quickly convinced that there really was a play here. The detail that sold me for good was learning that Venter had secretly used his own “genetic material” as Celera’s sample for sequencing. The lofty fog of scientific endeavor suddenly cleared as this act of sheer human outrageousness snapped everything into crisp dramatic focus. There was a story here. Boy oh boy, was there a story!
Curt has since passed on, by his own hand, determined as ever to navigate this life on his own terms or none at all. He never got to see the world premiere of The Sequence at The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena. He never got to see this final script, which he conceived by commission nearly a decade ago. But in my overwrought imagination, I see him thumbing through it, slouched in his hovel of an office at the corner of 52nd Street and New Jersey, dog curled beneath his chair, surrounded as he always was with stacks and stacks of new play manuscripts, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, some of which he had asked for, most which he hadn’t, nearly all of which he would never read (he preferred to watch readings), but every single one of which he believed in; because for Curt, theatre was about making plays, not merely staging those already made.
You can pre-order the script by clicking here.
I hope you like it. I also hope that when you read it, you remember that The Sequence, like all plays, was wrought more than written, and ultimately meant to be watched more than read.
