In the new play ‘Empathitrax,’ a pill gives you empathetic superpowers
Plus, “Thurgood” and “Wuthering Heights” come to area theaters.
Sometimes conflicts bog down our relationships, especially if it is someone close. “All the walls are up,” playwright Ana Nogueira said, “and we just don’t get them.
“But what if,” she continued, “there was a pill that allowed you to feel what the other person was feeling just by touching them?”
That question forms the foundation of Nogueira’s play, Empathitrax, at the Philadelphia Theatre Co. In the opening scene, a pharmaceutical sales rep shows up at a couple’s door proffering a pill that he says will help repair their broken relationship.
“When you take someone’s experience into your own body,” Nogueira said, “I don’t think you have any choice but to soften to it.”
Nogueira, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, grew up in East Falls and attended Friends Central School in Wynnewood. She studied acting but found herself drawn to playwriting, believing that her experience as an actor helped her to connect to the characters she was creating in a more intimate and realistic way.
Nogueira said young playwrights are often advised to start writing as soon as they have an idea, but she sits “with it for a long time, like months … I just let it slowly marinate in the reality of my life.”
For Empathitrax, what was marinating was a couple in conflict, looking for a way back to a better relationship. When Nogueira came up with the pill angle, she began to write.
Did she ever wish she could order a pill for her marriage? Nogueira laughed. “My husband and I are extremely verbal and really communicative,” she said. “I don’t think we struggle to express our feelings. We might need the opposite pill — to repress them.”
Nell Bang-Jensen, artistic director at Norristown’s Theatre Horizon, directs, and Claire Inie-Richards and Makoto Hirano play the couple, known as Her and Him. Matteo Scammell is the pill salesperson.
Through March 5, “Empathitrax,” Philadelphia Theatre Co., 480 S. Broad St., 215-985-0420 or philadelphiatheatreco.org
‘Wuthering Heights’
Novelist Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is all bleak and dark, not quite evocative of puppets, live music, dance, and a promise of “impish irreverence.” But that’s all on tap in British theater-maker Emma Rice’s adaptation. Her company, Wise Children, will be on a national tour with the production that will make its first stop at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre.
(Feb. 23-March 12, “Wuthering Heights,” McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, 609-258-2787 or mccarter.org)
‘Thurgood’
As a child, Thurgood Marshall watched trials at the Baltimore courthouse with his father. Later, as a lawyer for the NAACP, he went on to present 32 civil rights cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, winning 29.
People’s Light explores the life of this remarkable jurist — the first Black man to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice — in Thurgood by George Stevens Jr. Actor Brian Marable plays Thurgood, who was known as “the great dissenter.” Steve H. Broadnax III, associate artistic director at People’s Light, directs.
(Feb. 22-March 19, “Thurgood,” People’s Light, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, 610-644-3500 or peopleslight.org)
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