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.
Denne historien er fra March 11, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra March 11, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.