'Queen' takes audience into macro matters of survival through prism of private life

I can't think of many plays where the actors must master characterizations that present them as knowledgeable about arcane matters. "Queen" is an exception, and if it weren't for clarity of context, the audience at Summit Performance Indianapolis's new show might almost need a glossary to understand "bee colony collapse," neonics, threshold effect, oversampling data,  trading derivatives and, for many, the intricacies of poker.

It's taken me a while to understand confirmation bias, but at least I was in the neighborhood of getting it before attending the final dress rehearsal of "Queen," which opens tonight at Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre. And I knew how to interpret "NRDC" because I used to be a donor to the National Resources Defense Council.

Thank goodness for the North Star of All Truth, that's Google, for giving more substance to my quickly processed impressions of this enthralling drama about friendship, academic competition and ambition, and the tension between the sciences of observation and statistics. 

Fortunately, all four performances seemed authentically loaded with the expertise at play in Madhuri Shekar's two-act drama. They were also well filled in as relatable in human terms, thanks to Kelsey Leigh Miller's direction of the intense, well-focused cast. The cross-cultural issues of Indian-American life as well as American class consciousness weave their tangled threads through "Queen" as well. 

Philip, Sanam, and Arial exult in their expected triumph. 

The clearcut layout of the action and the psychological burdens the characters carry drive the mysteries forward toward an authentic happy ending. The production can boast a smooth management of several playing areas, with the atmosphere filled out by Ben Dobler's sound design and Michael Moffat's lighting. Mejah Balam's efficient set design subtly incorporates honeycomb cross-section patterns.

That happy ending happens despite the threat of environmental catastrophe that still hangs over us all, as related to the pesticide-linked demise of essential pollinators: the honeybees that stand as a model of collective wisdom, in the quite defensible view of the beekeeper scientist Arial.

At the start, a deadline closes in upon two post-op students at UC-Santa Cruz and their boss, Philip (given  just the right type-A personality drive by Ryan Artzberger). Much is riding upon a high-profile presentation in Washington that will align sure science with political power. "Queen" moves confidently into the macro realm, so that the audience is definitively enlisted in support of the project. How can anyone be indifferent to honeybees?

Shekar has set up the friendship of the young women so that we suspect it can withstand any pressure. But the bond is dented and nearly smashed by two different perspectives on what the research needs in order to establish that neonics are conclusively responsible for worldwide bee colony collapse. The villain is named — Monsanto — but is the multinational chemical company only a partial villain or an absolute one? A clear answer lies somewhere to the right of the decimal point in the data they have so far. 

Two friends try to work out a research snag.

Sanam (Isha Narayanan) comes at the research from a background as a teenage math prodigy in her native India. Arial (Chynna Fry) comes from a working-class family in the Valley (the same valley that put its pop-culture stamp on "Valley Girl"?), a family that focused much of its time and energy and relationship to the earth on beehives. The actors made this unlikely relationship, forged over years of work on a project that now seems fatally flawed, feel genuine at every point. 

The playwright tucks in elements that might be sentimental if they were not in fact reinforced and then tested on the path to a make-or-break career moment: During a late-night session of wrestling with the data, when Sanam moves offstage to sing a calming lullaby to Arial's fussy baby girl, I knew both that the gesture and its result would not be wasted. 

More problematic was Sanam's rocky connection to a thoroughly assimilated young man on the make, the
securities guru (derivatives trader) Arvind, snappily and seductively played by Nayan Patadia. Their arranged first date (engineered because their grandfathers had played golf back in the homeland) is a hilarious exercise in missed connections. 

Arvind narrates a recent poker victory in excruciating, mansplaining detail; Sanam, who seems to be

Arvind has some explaining to do, and it helps.

tuning out, turns out to be picking up on the statistical probability of each move, and delivers a cogent analysis. The audience witnesses a brain-numbing "meet cute" interaction that actually works because of the smoothly oiled delivery of the dialogue. 

The derivatives trader happens to contribute to the statistician's attempt to solve the research crisis, and, to be sure, stranger ways to generate romance are abundant in life and art alike. But I can't help wondering about the couple's survival prospects. Of course, Sanam has wriggled free of her inheritance of arranged marriages by doing some arranging of her own. And that gives grounds for hope.

As for the career-defining paper, the moral compromise that has to be reached fits the cliche that in a compromise everybody loses. Yet science marches on, arm in arm with statistics, and to no one's surprise seems to find common ground with the flawed world we live in, where queen bees fade into nonexistence, new ones emerge, and the pollinators thrive. That's as long as we don't destroy the whole shebang.

[Raincliffs Photography]