The Relativity Series: The Fever Syndrome (Part 5)
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I learned early on that theater made possible the art of being someone else. You can stream the entire L.A. TheatreWorks catalog of plays. Find out more at streaming.latw.org. Now, L.A. TheatreWorks continues with The Fever Syndrome by Alexis Ziegerman, directed by Sarah Drew. Hey. Went to the meeting. Stayed to talk to a newbie.

She looked terrified. I wanted to reassure her. Walked back through the park. Along the reservoir, you look south at the skyline right on the water. There's nothing to block the view of the buildings. Ah, yes. The illusion of space. Breathtaking. You couldn't walk through the park when I was a kid. It was a no-go. Your stepmom's right, by the way. There's Japanese knotweed everywhere. Uh-huh. Hey,

I wanted to say something. You promised I'd get late. I'll cut to the chase. You always turn into this mega shit whenever you're gearing up for a show. And I know that's part of you. And I buy into that. The whole of you. In a way that I hope you buy into me. The whole package. I forget. You take this truth serum every time you go to an NA meeting. I prefer to call it Enlightenment.

I also know that it turns you off to know that I buy into the whole of you. Your selfishness, your erratic moods, all the parts of yourself you don't like. Selfish? I'm here for my dad, for his award. I should be in the studio right now. We're all things that kind of get in the way of you being alone. I didn't realize this was going to be a roast. But I don't see it as a fault in me that I love you.

I don't. I'm just beat. I think we should get married. I've been thinking about that a lot recently. And as I was walking back through the park, entirely at peace in the middle of this city... Okay, nobody is at peace in this city. Everything became very clear, and I realized that if I'm waiting for you to propose, it might never happen. So I should just do it. Please don't.

Do not get intoxicated by the skyline or the Upper West Side house by the park. You know it's not mine, right? I'm proposing to you, Tom. Right. I'm sorry. You think I want to marry you because I'm impressed by the house? No.

You know, sometimes you really push it. Sorry. Push the limits of me loving you. I don't know why I said that. It's not just self-sabotage. It's just being a total asshole. I don't want your dad's house. I have my own apartment. I have been to New York many a time. I know I was being an asshole. I want a family with you. I want kids, Tom. I want it all with you. We've talked about kids. Not really.

No. I like kids. I like our friends' kids. I don't want any of my own. You know that. What about our own? Because this isn't just about you. I don't know. Fuck, I wasn't prepared for this conversation. We've been together nearly three years. That's enough time to get prepared. There's a lot going on with Dad. Why is everything so compartmentalized for you? Because it has to be. Because that's how I survive, Philip, okay? I can't have things bleeding into one another. I'd never get any work done.

Our friends in New York with kids, they always say, Tom, please come stay. What they mean is we're exhausted. We have no space in a former life. We'd love you to stay, but please do not come. Can I sleep on it? Sure. You're right. Mega shit. Sorry. I promise we'll talk about this when we get home. I'm truly humbled to be here.

Thank you all for coming. Oh, cut that. I know you think you made the decision to come here out of free will. But those of us in the baby-making business know we're all slaves to our genes. We're all slaves to our parents' genes. Trick or treat!

I don't have any candy. Elona never let me keep it in the house. What happens if I say trick? How about a ghost story? A really scary one. Oh, no. Oh, once upon a time, there was an evil scientist named Professor Myers. And Professor Myers decided that following the birth of the first healthy petri dish babies, he would go a step further. He wanted to create babies...

Without disease, without deformities, without sickness. And people called him Frankenstein and murderer and said he was dabbling in Nazi eugenics. I know what PGD is, Dad. You do? Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. A grade, Dorothea. Top of the class. Can I go to the dinner with you? Oh, it's going to be a bunch of boring men chest puffing and...

sniffing each other's backsides like dogs in the park. Trust me, award ceremonies are only exciting if you're the winner. Even Alona found an excuse not to come with me. You have my permission to stay up.

Watch a movie. Friday the 13th. Or that guy with knives for fingers. What's his name? Freddy Krueger. Right. I'm guessing he's a misunderstood anti-hero. He slices up kids. He does? Hangs them by their veins like Pinocchio and Geppetto. Nice analogy. I want to go back to mom's. I want to go trick-or-treating with my friends.

But you're staying here. This is our weekend. Then why don't you take me trick-or-treating? I have this awards dinner. Alona would have, but she's stuck here at home with the twins. Yeah, if the twins weren't sick, she'd be going to the dinner with you. That's true. So who the hell was gonna take me out on Halloween? This is an important award. Oh yeah, because you won. It's just Halloween. You're old enough to see it for what it is. Commercialization at its worst. They may as well call it Hallmarkween. It's effin' Halloween, Dad. Hey, young lady.

You know, I'll just go out on my own. So go on your own. That'll build some fortitude, some metal. Go out. Hustle for candy. Mom said the park is dangerous. You bought a house next to a dangerous park where women get beaten and raped. She told you that. She said that you're too cheap to buy somewhere safe. You screwed her out of her penis. I bought this house for you, Dot, so that you could have your own room. That isn't my room.

She won't let me keep anything in it. And she takes down my posters and... Her name's Ilona. She says the sticky tack hurts the walls. Her name's Ilona. I don't care.

what her name is. Let me tell you something about your mother. Mom says that you fathered thousands of babies and you won't even look after one. She's a hysteric and she'll turn you into one too. You know, she used to slather you with zinc oxide, the merest hint of sunshine peeping through a cloud. You'd be totally whitewashed. I kept telling her, a bit of sunshine isn't going to kill you. I had

A cancerous mole removed from my armpit. Did you know that? You know how much sun that armpit saw? Zilch. Nada. Darker than a nun's crotch. You cannot grow up being afraid of the world. Dad, I don't care about your armpit. I hate you. Now you do sound like her. I hate you. Well, there's a club you can join. Some of the founding members will be there tonight. I said I hate you. Go to your room, now. That is not my room. Dad? Dad?

Where's Ilona? Ilona died, Dad. Right. You remember? Of course I remember. Christ. You have three wives. You're going to mix them up from time to time. I meant Megan. I have this photo of Lily as a baby. I carry it in my purse. I think she looks a lot like you in it. It's the thinning hair.

She lost all that baby blonde. Can't remember when exactly it happened. Now it's so dark. All of you are blonde. No, it's for you. You should keep it. Lily, she looks like you. I never knew how much love or abject fear I could feel until I had her. She terrifies me. I need a trust fund for Lily, Dad. Mm-hmm.

I want to know she'll be okay when we're gone. Lily will be taken care of. By whom? Anthony has it all in hand. My half-brother is a carpetbagger. Do you realize how sick Lily is?

This disease has robbed us of our lives. Anthony's doing something truly groundbreaking. I don't have time for Anthony to overthrow the market forces of capitalism. I want to have another child. I want Lily to have a sister or a brother. Another child is not an insurance policy. We're going to screen the embryos. Your own embryos? For Lily's disorder in the pyrene gene. You.

Want to screen embryos for the disorder? The fever syndrome, yes. The extraction of an embryonic single cell isn't always...

There's a risk of contamination, mosaicism. It's certainly not a weapon against a predisposition to any other disease. I don't need a lecture. I won't give you a lecture. How about a ghost story? A couple came to see me at the clinic. Let's call them Jane and John Doe. Jane was the carrier of a...

terrible disease, Lesch-Nyan syndrome. It's carried by females on the X chromosome, yet girls do not present with the disease. It affects every boy who carries the defective gene. Jane and John's son

was fully spastic by eight years old. Most don't make it to adulthood. Death often comes from self-inflicted injury. Jane and John were caregivers to their son every hour of every day, desperate for another child, but they couldn't face going through this...

savage disease again. I know, you're doing no speech, Dad. Jade went through a round of IVF. Eggs were collected. Embryos formed on the second day. Early in the morning, I remember we had to work real fast to remove a single cell from each of the five embryos. That's one cell. Invisible embryos.

The naked eye which had to be identified?

then pipetted into a tube. I was terrified of damaging myself, destroying it, ending up with a false negative and implanting an embryo into Jane that would accidentally grow into a boy with this disease. So after testing, we thought we had a number of embryos with no Y chromosome. That would appear to be female. And we transferred two into Jane's uterus.

And they didn't take. A few months later, we tried the whole process again. This time, she got pregnant. A scan at six weeks showed she was carrying twins, and an amniocentesis confirmed that both babies were female. Now, by this point, word had gotten out about Jane Doe, and I was battling accusations of creating designer babies.

Forced to argue the morality of sex selection whilst a heavily pregnant Jane Doe sat watching her son Eric in the ICU after he broke his neck throwing himself out of his wheelchair and down the stairs. He nearly died. And I knew at that moment we'd done the right thing. Okay. Okay.

The day before Jane's planned C-section, there was an interruption of one of the baby's blood supply. The baby died. The pregnancy had been unremarkable. There was no indication anything was wrong. A post-mortem determined that it had nothing to do with the PGD, with the removal of a cell. There I stood, delivering a baby girl.

whose cry filled the operating theater, and another baby girl that was silent. We stopped one heartbreak only for it to be replaced by another. That is the defining principle of making babies. There's no guarantee. And I have a child sample of N equals 3, which is... Which is publishable. Mm-hmm.

So you're saying I shouldn't do it? You can't have control over everything. Life is full of anomalies. You only wanted certainty. From the man with three wives. Same with science. You didn't like the failure. You wanted everything straight away. No patience. Dissatisfied, just like you were as a child. Please, tell me how much I've disappointed you. You never wanted to get messy, get yourself in the game. In your ego-driven world, no. So you write about other people's scientific discoveries that you've settled with now. What?

Wow. Go on. Hustle for candy. Dad, I need something from you in writing. Time to plug you in. Megan, please. You need your carbidopa or you won't be able to make your speech. And you've been practicing, haven't you, Richard? Practicing so hard. What are you doing? Lily, where did you get the phone? Dad gave it to me. He did, huh?

Hand it over, please. Ma, I am in the middle of conversation. This is a conversation, Lily. What you are doing is not a conversation. You were supposed to be resting. You're getting ready for the award. I am resting. Your brain will be stressed and overstimulated. Give yourself some downtime. If you're tired, you'll get more seizures. Ma, I don't need downtime. Then you'll have to stay here. Okay.

You think it's okay to miss your grandpa's award? I don't want to go to the award. You want me to go to the award. For your father to miss the award, he'll have to stay back with you. That's pretty selfish. I can stay home on my own. You can't. All my friends are left on their own. Leanne's parents go out all the time. She has her own account at Domino's. You can't be left. You can never be left. Do you understand? What if you have a seizure in your sleep? What if you stop breathing? Think. Think how much we have to care for you.

I'm gonna take a shot every day. I'm gonna do it. I'll do it myself. I've been practicing on the oranges and then I'll be able to be left. The medicine's gonna work, isn't it? I mean, that's the one, right? It's one of the ones. Yeah. We'll see. So there are others to try and then that will work, right? I mean, if the other doesn't. Okay, then.

This is L.A. TheatreWorks' production of The Fever Syndrome by Alexis Ziegerman. Our story continues next time. I'm Susan Loewenberg, producing director of L.A. TheatreWorks.