In “The Effect,” two researchers are conducting clinical trials of a new antidepressant, but their experiment stumbles and crashes after two volunteers undergoing the drug tests fall for one another – or at least they think they do. Could what they feel as love be just an effect of the drug?

If the researchers’ experiment is thus, in effect, hijacked, I felt something similar going on in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Lucy Prebble’s thought-provoking 2012 play. In this export from the National Theatre, running at The Shed through March 31, Lloyd’s direction is so stylized and stylish that the stagecraft seems the primary point of the production.

The heart of “The Effect” is a love story,  but Prebble’s script also focuses on the brain. Taylor Russell (a movie actress making her stage debut)  and Paapa Essiedu (a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company best known here as the best friend in the HBO series “I May Destroy You”) portray the two young volunteers, who first meet (comically) carrying their respective urine specimens to the lab. Connie is a guarded psychology student who already has a boyfriend, Tristan a flirtatious free spirit who hasn’t figured out what he wants to do in life.  If they are not an obvious match, they turn out to be attracted to one another. 
It’s not long before Tristan says “I think I’m in love.”

“Are you?” Connie replies. “I’m not sure what it is.”

Their move through some familiar stages of love –anxiety, excitement, exasperation, crisis — is witty and poignant:  “I can’t bear it when you’re sad in case I caused it,” Connie says to Tristan, “and I can’t bear it when you’re happy in case I didn’t.”  The performers are sexy and steamy and stormy together; at times, stunning, Call it chemistry?

The researchers would consider it neurochemistry. Dr. Toby Sealey  (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) the head of the pharmaceutical research lab, has hired Dr. Lorna James (Michele Austin) to help him conduct the trial. We eventually learn that they have a past together,  but their interaction and their individual back stories are less an exploration of the vagaries of love than, ultimately, a harsh judgment on the inadequacy of modern science. “The history of medicine is just the history of placebo,” Dr. James says at one point, “because we know now almost none of it worked.”

When I saw “The Effect” in 2016, in a very different production at Barrow Street Theater directed by that master of restraint David Cromer, I thought the point of the play was to weave in a series of intriguing and important questions, sometimes indirectly through the drama, sometimes directly by having the characters engage in debate. Questions such as: Are human beings more than the sum of their chemistry? Why are we happy to have heart transplants and liver transplants, but we can’t imagine a brain transplant: Is the brain what makes you, you? Is depression curable? How do you know when love is real?

But attending “The Effect” at the Shed is more a sensory experience akin to attending a rock concert. Theatergoers enter a darkened auditorium pulsing with loud music, and take seats on either side of a raised stage that is long and narrow like a fashion runway. Once the play begins, the light and sound are employed aggressively, like a night at a disco — pounding music, intricate flashing lights, a stage floor with a small square of glowing white light that seems to travel with the beat. Much of the dialogue is accompanied by persistent musical underscoring that’s far more common in movies than in plays. 

It’s not just this visual and auditory competition – nor even the characters’ strong working class English accents – that made me struggle to focus on the dialogue. 

The two researchers, dressed all in black, sit at opposite ends of the runway; the volunteers, all in white, sometimes stand back-to-back in the middle, each facing a different researcher. (At the very least, these monochromatic outfits seem the exact opposite of what such characters would choose to wear for themselves in real life; the doctors would be the ones wearing white.)  

None of the actors leave the stage, but they are lit only when they are speaking; otherwise, they sit in the dimness or the darkness.

There are no props; the actors don’t even mime holding those vials of urine specimens.

We don’t see the doctors injecting the volunteers with the drug; Tristan or Connie simply stand in a circle of light that briefly changes in intensity.

I don’t remember the researchers ever even touching their test subjects. The only scenes in which the characters interact naturally are the passionate ones with Tristan and Connie – often lying on the stage, now glowing with the white light that has spread from the initial small square.

A regular laboratory for clinical trials is itself an artificial setting, as is the relationship between researcher and subject, so perhaps there’s an analogy at work here that explains the aggressively artificial staging. The stage pictures can certainly be arresting. But it’s a conceptual imposition, which paradoxically keeps intellectual engagement secondary, at best.  Director Jamie Lloyd’s last gig in New York,  last year’s production of “A Doll’s House” on Broadway starring Jessica Chastain, was also devoid of props and of a realistic set, and also imposed a heavy-handed directorial conceit: The actors rarely stood up from their chairs. Lloyd clearly has a preferred aesthetic – call it minimalist chic – which others have praised as removing distractions so that the audience can focus on what matters. But what matters in a play? Is it only the theatrical effect? 

The Effect
The Shed through March 31
Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $25 – $155
Written by Lucy Prebble
Directed by Jamie Lloyd
Set and costume design by Soutra Gilmour, lighting design by Jon Clark, composer Michael Mikey J Assante, sound design by George Dennis
Cast: Michele Austin as Dr. Lorna James, Paapa Essiedu as Tristan, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Dr. Toby Sealey, and Taylor Russell as Connie
Photographs by Marc Brenner