The ninth annual season of the First Light Festival is under way in New York, offering new dramatic works exploring science and technology, commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The centrepiece is the premiere of Serendib, a play by David Zellnik, inspired by two months the author spent with a team of primatologists studying toque macaques in Sri Lanka. The play focuses on scientists George Fischke and Anna Sunilagatte, who try to test the hypothesis that occasional violent takeovers of one troop of macaques by an outside alpha male adversely affects the troop's happiness. But money is short, so the scientists turn to two vaguely disreputable documentary film-makers for some much-needed publicity. The film-makers bring along Dmitri Ramsov, a geneticist who has no use for Fischke's woolly theories about the soulfulness of macaques. The stage is thus set for two mirror-image plays, with Fischke and Ramsov vying for supremacy and the affections of Sunilagatte, and the macaques under observation — puppets controlled by the actors — acting out a parallel drama. The film-makers' search for good television provides comic relief, but the play persists with its themes: the roles of observation and experiment in science, the distorting lens of media coverage, and the debate over the relative importance of heredity and environment in behaviour. It reaches a moving climax as Fischke and Ramsov deliver eloquent tributes to two of the macaques, their words illustrating the differences between humans and our primate cousins, and the powerful, if elusive, similarities.

Credit: C. ROSEGG