HIGH ANXIETY

The playwright Lucy Prebble is expert at getting inside worried people's heads.

- REBECCA MEAD

Partway through “The Effect,” by the British playwright Lucy Prebble, a clinical psychologist named Lorna James tells a joke: At a conference, a medic is attracted to a woman who pays him no attention. The medic, aware that the release of dopamine is associated with the onset of love, and that dopamine levels rise during novel, exciting experiences, arranges for himself and the woman to go bungee jumping. “They fall headlong into this incredible, adrenaline-filled rush—their dopamine levels go wild,” James says. “He looks into her eyes and says, ‘Wasn’t that amazing?!’ And breathlessly she answers, ‘Yes! And isn’t the instructor handsome!’ ”

James tells the joke to Connie, a subject in a clinical trial for a new antidepressant. Connie is a psychology student, and she knows that the antidepressant affects dopamine levels, but she can’t tell if it’s working—or if she’s taking a placebo. Locked inside a medical facility for weeks, she has few people to talk to except for the doctor and Tristan, another young volunteer. Connie and Tristan—placed in proximity within a charged, unfamiliar setting, and with a powerful drug possibly coursing through their veins—begin a romance. Prebble told me that she wrote the play, which was first produced, at London’s National Theatre, in 2012, because “she wanted to understand, a bit like the play seeks to, what was real and what wasn’t”—about love, and about the brain itself. A revival, which the National Theatre mounted to acclaim last year, arrives in New York later this month, at the Shed.