Predictable: Male reaction to female innovation engenders heroism — American Lives Theatre's 'Predictor'

Taking intimate history a step away from staged documentary into essential theater, Jennifer Blackmer's "Predictor" lays bare the role of power relationships in trying to obstruct medical advancement. There are many ways of telling a real story in theatrical terms, and this new play plunges boldly and imaginatively into a tale of  cultural and marketing breakthroughs, focused on women's health care. The struggle to make widely available a home pregnancy test turns out to reveal social truths even more unpalatable than the laboratory exploitation  of animals that preceded it.

Meg gets used to new work environment.

American Lives Theatre's production, which I saw Friday as its second weekend started on the Basile stage at Phoenix Theatre, is vivacious and funny as well as informative. Under  the direction of Bridget Haight,  the cast is headed by Brittany Magee as Meg Crane, a freelance graphic artist who was absorbed and nearly neutralized after she started working for Organon Pharmaceuticals in the late 1960s. 

The facts of the case have been told here and elsewhere, but Blackmer's notable achievement has been to apply imagination and several styles of presentation to lift the story out of a history-centered account. This premiere production enjoys the benefit of six expert actors, in addition to the multifaceted Magee, who shift smoothly among a variety of clearly defined characters, some of them appropriately close to caricature. They are Christine Zavakos, Jen Johansen, Miki Mathioudakis, Zack Neiditch, Drew Vidal, and Clay Mabbitt.

Some are given more responsibility to portray people central to Meg Crane's story: mother, roommate, supportive boss, hostile boss, sympathetic (and somewhat more) male colleague. Meg's Catholic upbringing in an era openly supporting limitations on girls and women also gets extensive treatment, barbed and satirical as well as simply heartbreaking.

As fascinating as a good documentary — or even a novel's fictionalization — might be, this inspiring, occasionally agonizing, story lends itself well to versatile dramatization. Blackmer has not only probed the competitive interaction among ambitious people in the corporate world (traditionally white men) but also brought in mass media, chiefly in the form of parodies, as in a noisy TV game show  called "Who Made That?". 

That riotous episode sheds light on the original obscurity of Meg Crane's contribution. Her prototype test used a transparent small container meant to hold paperclips.  Scorned as too simple, too enabling, too outside professional control, the fact that it worked didn't seem to matter at first. Her claim to an invention that privileged privacy and convenience is rejected and mocked. Eventually, her magnanimity allows her to sign away patent rights once she realizes there's no other way to get her work validated by innumerable women needing an immediate answer to the question: Am I pregnant?

The game-show episode serves as a window into the campaign of suppression embedded in a pharmaceutical industry Meg had entered as a freelance graphic artist charged with developing marketable presentations of cosmetics for women. The show exposes the culture of misogyny American society once supported with little dissent; its legacy still exerts power more than a half-century after Meg Crane's eventual triumph.

Moving around chairs, desks and other furniture, the cast rotates into countless new set-ups and encounters. As much as I admired the movement and instant assumption of new roles and new phases of action, in the front row I was admittedly self-conscious of the need to keep my feet tucked back toward my chair. So I would recommend sitting on one of the four sides of the playing area up a step or two from stage level. In the front row on the room's west side, things were constantly busy just inches from me, but the illusion necessary to theater prevailed.

This caveat in no way takes issue with the efficiency and pace with which Haight has designed the movement of her actors. They need the full space to play amid Kerry Lee Chipman's brightly designed set, an adult romper room, with a sleek if dated modernism that also accommodates a real-life story to the flashes of imagination the playwright exhibits so well. 

The struggle for respect and taking important landmarks in women's lives seriously doesn't mean entertainment about it should be as hush-hush as merely talking about pregnancy once was. Attendance at "Predictor" is unlikely to have you expecting anything more than the play brilliantly delivers.