Sydney Zarlengo: Hi, everybody! Welcome to the 3Views 3-in-1 discussion on D.A. Mindell’s On the Evolutionary Function of Shame, which closed at Second Stage Theatre earlier this month. I'm Sydney, my pronouns are they/them. I am a nonbinary person and a disability media scholar, and this show deals with a lot of disability and gender issues.
Esmé Maria Ng: Hi, my name is Esmé Maria Ng. I use they/he/she pronouns interchangeably, and I am a playwright/dramaturg/producer. I’m thinking about this play’s exploration of how experiences of pain inform one's identity and how I see my future as a genderqueer, nonbinary person.
travis tate: Hi, I'm travis tate. I'm a playwright. I use they/them pronouns. Some things I've been thinking about after seeing this play are children and marriage. I’m considering my obligation to a nuclear family that includes transness, queerness, and nonbinaryness.
Esmé: So let’s start with some context about the show. On The Evolutionary Function of Shame follows two sets of Adam and Eve. The first set is the apple-eating, Book of Genesis couple—Adam 1 (Jordan Barbour) and Eve 1 (Elizabeth Ramos). The second set consists of modern-day twins, Adam 2 (Cody Sloan) and Eve 2 (Kayli Carter). Adam 2 is a trans man who is pregnant and seeks prenatal care from his sister, Eve 2, a scientist researching the genetic marker for gender dysphoria. As Adam 2 navigates his pregnancy, he must contend with the ethical dilemma of Eve 2’s work, which could eliminate that marker in utero.
Upon arriving at the theater, we were greeted with the word “Eden” shaped out of vines and shrubbery—a physical representation of the garden where the play begins (set design by You-Shin Chen). The two halves of “Eden” were then pulled apart to reveal the core (haha) of the play—the stark white cube of The Eden Project, a high-tech genetics research lab where Eve 2 works. Later, when we see Adam 1 and Eve 1 again, their lush paradise has been replaced by a desert, represented by buckets of sand poured onto negative spaces outside The Eden Project.
Prior to this, I had never read or seen a play centered on a pregnant trans man, and I found it incredibly impactful. It’s something many cis people don’t consider, but it’s something I think about a lot, especially recently. In my journey with gender, I’ve often questioned: What am I leaving behind? For a while, I struggled with the idea that separating myself from femininity—or no longer identifying as a woman, particularly an Asian woman—was a loss. The nuclear family was central to my understanding of womanhood growing up, and childbirth felt like the culmination of that. This play made me reflect on what family means and whether transitioning and having a family could coexist. This play presents a world where anything is possible—for better and for worse. Because the scientific exploration at its core is also incredibly dangerous.
travis: I resonate with that too. It's the first play I've seen featuring a trans man that's pregnant. Everything seemed commonplace in their interactions, as if the world of the play was letting us know, this is all “normal”. This is the status quo of this world. His sister is a famous scientist who's doing evolutionary work, and there are different dynamics with his partner and parents. It was refreshing to see this normal situation just off the bat. It could be seen as speculative or sci-fi, just with the scientific work the sister is doing. Even the image of a trans-masc body with a baby bump was very striking to me. There’s a specific physicality of that body that we usually don't see but it lets you imagine new ways your body can work and be presented. That made me feel good. I can have my long nails and my beard, obviously those are silly contradictions that lie in more masculine dichotomies. But I can have control over my body.
Sydney: Mindell did a nice job of not acting as if this is normal and perfect and great and what the world looks like. It wasn't utopic. The show acknowledged that transphobia exists; the modern-day Adam has a hard time finding medical care because the last time didn't go so well and people don't understand his situation. And I liked that Mindell is saying “yeah, this is a typical thing that exists, even if you don't see it all the time, and that's fine. But also it's not the easiest thing in the world.” Mindell balanced those two different narratives in a way that felt realistic and plausible.
Esmé: In response to what travis said about seeing a pregnant trans man...That's something that, in our media, has been laughed at. There have been instances where it was a total joke. To see it in this genuine way was fascinating. It exposed possibilities. To me, that's what transness is all about, and one of the reasons why the ruling class wants to control it. It's about possibilities and self-determination with your body and yourself.
travis: As a playwright, I like to pick with images. Like “what if men could get pregnant?” It doesn’t come off as a joke or as a comedic bit or something, and I wonder where Mindell was coming from? Cause that would be like, “oh, I'm going to start this joke and then like go into this realm where we have these conflicts and different actual emotional things happening”. Mindell’s writing, though at times didactic, firmly places you into the world of the play that celebrates queerness to the highest degree. Then, the Eden Project is doing genetic engineering work to help eliminate certain disabilities while the baby is in utero. One specific area that becomes a major point of conflict in the play, is eliminating body dysphoria. The same dysphoria that Eve watched Adam go through as a child. This segues well into the possibilities of transness, and the Eden Project.
Sydney: In regard to possibilities, I felt like there was a lot of room for growth with Margot (Imani Russell), Eve 2’s autistic research assistant. She had a monologue in a conversation with Adam 2 about whether she would want her autism cured if given the option that I felt was pointing to a lot of ideas but did not explore them with much complication or depth. I also felt that there was a missed narrative opportunity there, knowing that Russell is non-binary, to talk about Margot’s ethical quandaries as a trans disabled person working on the Eden Project.
I overall felt Evolutionary was missing grounding around disability rights which, as genetic engineering and eugenics are inherently rooted in disability issues, it required in order to really work as a piece. It would also fix the issues with suspension of disbelief– one particular line that popped out to me was the claim that the Eden Project has made it possible to prevent Alzheimer’s in children, something that would require a minimum of about 70 years of clinical trials, yet at the same time we know that Fox discovered queerness after hearing Born This Way as a young person, which puts us firmly in the present. And it was hard for me to decide what universe we were in and what was and was not possible there.
Margot as a character also heavily fell into the narrative device of the Autism Voice (a narrative voice demarcated as “other” using minutely detailed narration, describing emotions in a disconnected and emotionless way, and utilizing verbal tics to indicate high emotion), along the lines of Rain Reign or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. As the play progressed, the voice became a little more relaxed and developed more depth, likely because the earlier scenes were trying to clearly mark Margot as different, but I wish it had been consistent throughout and had primarily used the version of her voice we saw in one of her final scenes.
travis: I was grounded by the brother, Adam, and sister, Eve, and Adam’s partner, Fox (Ryan Jamaal Swain). I just felt comfortable and the sci-fi elements broke up some of the play for meIt's complicated. It made the show leap forward into speculative sci-fi. And I love near future stories and robots, but it was not believable, and I felt we lost some of the nuance needed for a story about genetic engineering. Why aren't we talking about disabilities or race or parenthood?
There's a lot of ways that genetic engineering could potentially be harmful. That it jumped me into this world where it's sci-fi, if that makes sense? Like I just felt grounded and then the main character has a Black partner and there's no conversation about race when we're talking about genetic engineering, which to me gets close to eugenics. Why aren't they having a conversation about that as an interracial couple? These big questions left me wanting the play to dig in deeper into those potential conflicts. Outside, in the backyard of the sibling’s father’s birthday, there were some moments that moved and vibrated with emotion. These moments were often deflated by slow moving set pieces and less effective interludes with the original Adam and Eve.
Sydney: There's two different things that we're talking about here that I want to specify– we have the “I wish there was more conversation into this” things and then there's just the “if this line were phrased differently it wouldn’t feel fantastical” things. When discussing Alzheimer’s, the play could say “we are in the process of figuring this out” and that would have been plausible. With the gender dysphoria gene, they could say “we think we found genetic markers that are similar among all people who experience gender dysphoria” and it would have done the same. The autism gene is not a thing that we're probably ever going to find, so that one is a bit more difficult to suspend disbelief on, but they could have discussed it in the theoretical and it would have packed the same emotional punch. There were other things, like picky eating, that they mentioned being able to fix that are not entirely, if at all, genetic– which gets us into a nature v. nurture argument– that thus felt completely fantastical.
Yet genetic engineering ethics and issues are not just theoreticals in the disability community; they are real discussions about real situations that we are currently having. And when it comes to intersectionality, trans and queer people were, technically, a part of the disability community until very, very recently. TGNC people are also six times more likely to be autistic. So there is so much overlap in these concepts and issues that it seemed like a missed opportunity, if not actively ignoring the elephant in the room, to not explore that further.
travis: My head immediately, unfortunately, goes to... our current political and social climates, though I hate that phrase. When you mentioned anything with genetic engineering, my head kind of moves towards these conversations that we're having now about conservatism and tradwives and childrearing. When there is a much more beautiful conversation to be had around queerness and transness and what that kind of family looks like. I really wanted to hear more about what having children and a family looks like for this queer couple, especially as someone in a long-term relationship getting older and watching my cis friends have kids.
Esmé: I don't know a thing about genetic engineering. When Eve 2 says, “Oh, we could genetically engineer out picky eating.” I was like yeah, I believe you when you tell me that. But it opened a line of questions for me where I was wondering if that would actually make life better? For the child? For the parent? For who? The essence of eugenics is eliminating difference and framing it as improvement. And that leads me on a train of thought about how capitalism likes to frame itself as a system that begets improvement, and we see even through this conversation, how every marginalized group is a part of that “improvement”, but perhaps a better word is target. And then the question becomes how does one respond to that, when you are tasked with creating the next generation, what choices do you make? And that’s what I see as the primary connective thread between the two sets of Adam and Eve is that they’re deciding what an improvement is.
Sydney: As a parent, you want to make the world easy for your child and you would do anything that makes life easier for them. But we can't eliminate all pain from life. Life is hard and no matter what, things aren't always going to be great. And so if we eliminate all of these things that we think are the reasons that people have a hard time in the world, we're going to discover that there are other reasons why people have a hard time in the world. There is an interesting ethical discussion around how much pain we should try to avoid versus how much is impossible to avoid, that was poked at several different times in the play and never expanded on. Particularly while we're talking about looming parenthood and being worried about the safety of your child and about being able to carry the child to term.
Esmé: That really resonates with me. I think that was a big part of my coming out and trying to get my parents to understand my identity. The common phrase was “I don’t have an issue with anyone being queer, but I’m your parent and I want your life to be easy, and one negates the other.” And now, sometimes I do think there’s an optimal level of pain that feels authentic to my experience, but also, doesn't limit me, if that makes sense.
Sydney: This piece had a lot of incredible conversations and incredible representation that meant a lot to me and got me thinking, but I also feel that it has a lot of room to grow with regard to intersectionality. I hear the queer conversation really, really clearly. But some of the other topics needed a lot more dramaturgical depth.
travis: I completely agree. And I’m glad that we're talking about this play. I found some moments of the play funny and interesting, the topics interesting, I definitely think, you know, there's some there was some work that could have been done but I am now excited because I'm a playwright and I'm excited and now y'all are talking I'm like, “oh my god, we've got this detail and this detail” and now I'm thinking of ideas for other plays. We all saw this, had different thoughts about it, and now have had a conversation. It was there. That is the most important thing.
Esmé: I just want to echo that and say that I really am hoping to see more plays that are not concerned with being universal, if that makes sense. A lot of playwrights worry, actually I would say, theaters worry, about their subscribers not relating to the work. But that's a fear that holds theater back. It underestimates audiences. And I'm really excited to see more things that aren't preoccupied with being “relatable” and instead just tell an audience - these are the circumstances of my experience and I invite you to witness. You might not relate, but you can learn.
Sydney: And each one of us individually said that when we went to see the show, it was completely packed. There was interest in this. People wanted to go see it. A lot of people were talking about it. I remember looking it up several times before being asked to go and write about it because of the word of mouth. So this was a successful venture and we should be clocking that.
travis: I'm glad that Second Stage Theater took a chance. The playwright D.A. Mindell is still in grad school and that's so exciting. As a playwright, you need production experience.Workshops are fun, but there is a big learning curve when you mount a professional production. And it's really good that young and emerging playwrights are getting that opportunity.
Sydney: What a nice note to end on! Amazing!
travis: Perfect.
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On the Evolutionary Function of Shame closed at Second Stage Theatre on March 9, 2025.
