Chimera, Gate - theatre review

What if the DNA in your body wasn’t entirely your own? No, this isn’t the plot of David Cronenberg’s The Fly but the subject of a new one-woman show from New York playwright Deborah Stein based around a medical disorder called chimerism.

Microbiologist Jennifer Samuels finds she has the rare condition which means she merged with her twin sister as an embryo and so carries more than one person’s worth of genetic material. To make matters weirder, this “sister” (though never anything more than a mess of cells inside her) is the genetic mother of her child, Brian. He isn’t especially fussed to learn this —“I’m monster spawn,” he announces, proudly — but the strain is too much for Jennifer.

Suli Holum, who co-directs with Stein, flicks between the characters of Jennifer and Brian with clarity, and her third character, an aggressively chirpy narrator (think The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders meets Sarah Palin), is responsible for some of the play’s funnier moments: “It’s easy, you know, to take a DNA sample from your loved ones. Everyone should do it!”

Equally impressive are the show’s mesmerising visual effects which complement the play’s theme of skewed identity, most memorably when Holum dances behind a pane of glass in a duet with a video projection of herself.