The How and the Why is a menstruation drama. More correctly, a mother-and-daughter menstruation drama.
Sarah Treem’s play, now running at the Beverly Hills Playhouse (after several productions back East) is a two-hander about Rachel Hardman, a 28-year-old evolutionary biologist who was given up for adoption at birth .
Now, when the play opens in a professor’s office in Cambridge, MA, Rachel comes face to face with Zelda Kahn, her birth mother, for the first time. The confrontation is not a happy one. Rachel has a huge chip on her shoulder for having been rejected by Zelda; it’s so large and heavy that she can barely speak without spitting out her words in a mad fury.
Rachel is also neurotic, unstable, and prone to anxiety attacks. As she herself admits at one point, she’s a real mess. But she still manages to go out of her way to connect with Zelda, for professional as well as personal reasons. Zelda, you see, is also an evolutionary biologist, much respected in the field, a tenured professor with status and clout.
Much as she hates to admit it, Rachel needs Zelda’s help. For years now she has been working on a revolutionary hypothesis about women’s physiology, namely that menstruation occurs in women as a defense against the toxicity of sperm. If women didn’t menstruate they’d not only run the risk of becoming pregnant, they’d be made sick by all the nasty, poisonous things in sperm.
What irks Rachel—in addition to seeing her birth mother’s face — is that the largely male biology world has refused to take her new theory seriously. She’s being rejected as an adult just as she was as a child. But Zelda could change all that by using her influence to allow her to speak at a forthcoming biology conference. If she can present a paper there her theory might finally be treated with respect by her peers. This would enhance her reputation and lead to career advancement.
To Zelda’s credit, she doesn’t let Rachel’s anger and rudeness dissuade her from listening to her far-out hypothesis in an equable way, even though she personally disagrees with it. Without question, Rachel’s ideas should be heard, she feels. Should be put out there to be discussed and argued. That’s what science is all about.
There are complications, though. The insecure Rachel thinks it would be best if her boyfriend was given co-credit for the paper; having a male attached to it would improve its chances of finding acceptance. Zelda blows up at the idea, having once done the very same thing to advance herself. The days of feeling inferior and kowtowing to men are over, she tells Rachel. Stand on your own two feet. Have confidence in yourself, in your hard-won ideas.
But Rachel fears that if she cuts Dean out, he will dump her. Zelda argues with her about that - --and about other male/female things as well. In the course of these increasingly acrimonious exchanges, both women begin to reveal things about themselves, dark secret things. But at the same time by opening up like that they also find things that are meaningful and liberating, leading to a kind of rapprochement, a bonding.
Zelda and Rachel are two complex, highly intelligent but combative characters. They aren’t easy to play but the actors - Andrea Nittoli Kelly (as Zelda) and Faye Viviana (as the tempestuous Rachel) are more than up to the challenge. Together these two skilled performers breathe fiery life into The How and the Why.
