The Relativity Series Bonus Episode: Interview with Playwright Alexis Zegerman
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Willie Lohman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived, but he's a human being. So attention must be paid. You can stream the entire LA TheatreWorks catalog of plays. Find out more at streaming.latw.org. Hi, everyone. I'm Susan Loewenberg, producing director of LA TheatreWorks.

Let's dive into The Fever Syndrome with its creator, actor and playwright Alexis Ziegerman. Alexis has a distinguished career on stage, acting in such works as the world premiere of Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt on the West End, and on screen in Mike Lee's Happy Go Lucky, a performance that earned her a British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actress.

As a playwright, her works include Lucky Seven and, of course, The Fever Syndrome. Alexis Ziegerman, welcome to LA Theatre Works. Thank you so much for having me. Well, let's get right to The Fever Syndrome.

How did you come to write this play? So I was in New York. I was having a meeting at the Manhattan Theatre Club and the literary manager there and the associate director was telling me about the Sloan Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supports

arts and theatre and film where it might cover something to do with science. So it's science in the world of art. And they said to me, so if you've got any kind of science ideas buzzing, let us know about it. And maybe, you know, we can send it over to the Sloan Foundation and see if they'd like to support the commission. And I walked away and I thought, you know what? I think I had been sitting on something. Yeah.

Well, what sort of real life inspiration did you have in writing the piece? I mean, did any of your family members make an appearance?

That's funny. I would say no. No, it's quite a distance from my own family background. But I was really interested in the dynamic, you know, particularly of friends or of people that I knew where they had a sort of grand paterfamilias at the centre of the family, a great father running the head of a household, and

And what that does, that sort of fallout that that has on the children and on the family at large. So I had witnessed this from a distance and found that sort of family dynamic really, really interesting. And, you know, from an objective point of view, that sort of weight of expectation that that has on the children as they grow up.

And, you know, do they go into the same field as their, you know, very successful father? Do they rebel against it? No, I mean, I would say my background is probably slightly closer to something like Philip's or Megan's in the play. You know, Philip has this line, which is...

it's one of my favorite things that the actors, you know, say, the actor in the audio drama that you've recorded does it really, really well. But he says, I grew up in a house with no books, but that doesn't make my family stupid. I'm really paraphrasing it, but it's, you know, and I really feel an affinity with that. I was raised by a working class single mother and was the first person in my family to go to college. So it's a world away from

from the family, from the Myers family in the play. But, you know, it comes with its own advantages and disadvantages, I guess. Was Professor Myers based on any real life scientists in particular? Yes, yes, he was. He was...

I'd say I did a lot of research into the work of Lord Robert Winston. He's now, he was Professor Winston, but he's now Lord in the UK. Robert Winston was really instrumental in the early work of IVF. And he was, you know, in particular, he developed pre-genetic testing and pre-genetic diagnosis. He was one of the first people, if not the first person to do that and do that successfully.

In addition to that, he's a wonderful musician. He's a member of the House of Lords now. He's a famous television presenter. He's this sort of renaissance man. Well, there's a lot of science anchoring the drama and the humor in The Fever Syndrome.

So aside from researching him, what kind of other research did you get into to get everything right? So it was enormous amounts of research in order to make sure that you get everything right, because these people in this family do not get things wrong. Or when they do get things wrong, it's on purpose. So you just you really, really don't want to get things wrong. So

Via the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Sloan Foundation did offer a wonderful scientist who himself had worked alongside the very early founders, forefathers of IVF. So he'd worked alongside Patrick Steptoe and Bob Edwards.

And Joan Purdy is a woman who's often forgotten in history. It's another play in itself, probably. But he had some great insight into IVF and into pre-genetic testing that comes up in the play.

And then of course you have to do that thing where you forget all the research in order for it to sort of inhabit the characters and make sure that it doesn't read like Wikipedia article. It really has to come from a very, very organic place. - The presence of Dr. Myers Parkinson's disease weighs heavily over the characters in your play. Did you know much about it before you tackled the subject?

Not firsthand. There's an amazing resource, the Michael J. Fox Foundation. He has an amazing website that

that is incredibly educational. Also, Alan Alda has a podcast. He himself suffers from Parkinson's. And Alan Alda's podcast I found incredibly informative, really refreshing. What was amazing was when the play had its run in London, how many people came up to me afterwards from the audience or wrote to me having had...

partners or family members that were suffering with Parkinson's or had suffered from Parkinson's and how seen they'd felt. That really made me feel like I'd done my job.

The family in the fever syndrome is full of highly educated and accomplished men and women. And boy, are they dysfunctional. I think it's the burden that this family carries, which is this sort of brilliance. And as I've mentioned, this sort of rather brilliant pata familias that heads the family. And it's...

We talk a lot about nepo babies now, about how you have a great or famous parent and how that can be your entrance into their field of work and how easy that would be. It can also be an incredible burden and a sort of albatross around your neck and

I think that's sort of every family in a way. We all have our dysfunctions. I speak for myself, maybe. But I hope what you have is empathy for all of them because you understand how they became the people that they've become, all of them. What would you like people to take away from this after listening to the recording?

Oh, that's really, that's a really good question. I love the idea of people being able to cherry pick, you know, what speaks to them in a play. And there are a lot of things in this play. It's stuffed full of ideas and characters. I guess, you know, there is this family that sort of find themselves in dire straits, really. And, you know, with all their education and their property, you know, this...

brownstone that they have in Manhattan. I guess that the pattern for Milius is dying, the house is dying. And I guess, in a sense, people aren't being cared for. And I guess the larger metaphor is that the world is dying, that America is dying around us. It's, you know, how are we going to care for people when we can't even care for each other?

That's on a very small micro scale and on a macro scale. We have each other. We should care for each other in that sense. Alexis Ziegerman, thank you so much for joining us today and for letting us record your remarkable, insightful play. Thank you so much. Thank you to everybody there. And I can't wait to have it out in the world. So thank you.