Stage

Issue Theater
An Immaculate Misconception. By Carl Djerassi. Directed by Edward Hastings. Produced by the Eureka Theater in association with Dale Djerassi. Starring Denise Balthrop Cassidy, Peter Vilkin, Paul Sulzman, Maxine Wyman, and Zach Kenny. At the Eureka Theater, 215 Jackson (between Sansome and Battery), through May 2. Call 788-7469.

Playing Juliet/Casting Othello. By Caleen Sinnette Jennings. Directed by David Gassner. Produced by Teatro Shalom. Starring Eloise B. Chitmon, Chris Pflueger, Toran McGill, Stephanie Taylor, Barry Levine, and Lewis Sims. At the Exit Theater, 156 Eddy (between Mason and Taylor), through May 1. Call 602-4387.

An Immaculate Misconception isn't political theater, but it manages to feel as overweening as a bad day in front of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, for the simple reason that Carl Djerassi, the chemist who wrote the script, chose to work out a few scientific-ethical issues on paper without bothering to consult his characters. So instead of Political Theater, let's invent a new category and call it Issue Theater, which will be our theme for the week.

Djerassi has solid credentials as both a chemist and a figure in history; in 1951 he isolated the active ingredient of the first commercial birth control pill. But for about 15 years he's also been writing fiction, where his credentials aren't as solid. An Immaculate Misconception is the stage version of Menachem's Seed, his recent novel about three scientists involved in a new method of conception called intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI (pronounced "icksy"). A team of scientists in Brussels developed the procedure in 1992 -- a tricky process of planting a single sperm in a single human egg -- but Djerassi has reimagined the discovery and turned the story to his own designs. Instead of an all-male team in Brussels he's invented an American woman, Dr. Melanie Laidlaw, who implants her own egg with sperm from an Israeli scientist, Dr. Menachem Dvir. Melanie has an assistant who assists a little too much, a Dr. Felix Frankenthaler, and the clinical love triangle that erupts in the Laidlaw laboratory also becomes a clinic in which to discuss the ramifications of new child-engineering technology.

Fair enough. Djerassi writes what he calls "science-in-fiction," as opposed to science fiction, to deal with real science in a public way; and as far as that goes he's useful, because the lack both of scientists who can write and of writers who keep up with science leaves a chasm in public debates over ethics. But Djerassi is not Primo Levi and his method in Misconception is artless. The heroine, Melanie, meets Menachem at a convention, and they have an affair. She's 37 and single; he's in his 50s and married; she falls in love anyway, and one evening she sneaks a used condom into her purse in preparation for her self-administered ICSI experiment. Most of Menachem's sperm are dead, though; he was irradiated years ago by accident. Dr. Frankenthaler wonders why Melanie is using such a poor sample, but she won't tell, so he substitutes his very vigorous sperm for the Menachem sample in half of the petri dishes, and by the end of the experiment Melanie has implanted herself, all unaware, with fertilized eggs from two men.

For a string of ethical questions, it's very neat. No. 1: Should Melanie be experimenting on herself? No. 2: Should she tell Menachem about stealing his seed? No. 3: Should Frankenthaler be whacking off in the lab and using his own sperm without consulting Melanie, who's in charge of the experiment and who will also have to carry the child (which Frankenthaler, to be fair, doesn't realize)? No, yes, and no, you might think, but Djerassi has them argue about it anyhow.

The scientists' ethical misbehavior should make them human, but what they do is transparently forced, and it puts a visible strain on the cast. When Menachem and Melanie nuzzle in bed, Peter Vilkin and Denise Balthrop Cassidy sound like they're reading lines from a teleprompter. Paul Sulzman has to push Frankenthaler's male-ego hang-ups to a ridiculous extreme, especially when he insists on a DNA test to determine who really fathered Melanie's kid. And in general there are so many scientific wrinkles that the actors wind up educating the audience by explaining everything -- biblical stories through experimental procedure -- to one another, the way people do in commercials. The result is deeply unconvincing.

On the rear wall of the Eureka Theater a round screen shows what the scientists do under their microscopes, and these black-and-white films of eggs and sperm on petri dishes are the best part of the show. The ICSI process requires a microscopically thin pipette with a sharp tip and eye-dropper suction to suck in a single sperm, navigate it to the egg, pierce the rubbery wall, and squeeze the wriggling sperm into the egg's fertile cytoplasm. Absolutely enthralling. It would even be pornographic, but "the only prick," as Melanie says, "is a gentle one by a tiny needle ... in a dish."

The best writers (say Bellow or Shaw) know how to dramatize their Issues in flesh and blood. What Djerassi needs to learn before he becomes a viable playwright is that character motivation, in drama, is like experimental proof in science; forced motivations make a story as uncompelling as a report with bad research. Some critics have spun jokes from the title word "misconception," but that's not quite accurate: The idea of this play is interesting. It's just been badly consummated.