Harvard is using theater to transform the culture of science, with mixed results.

Amy Maxmen

Historically, theater has been used to entertain; more recently, directors have been using plays to challenge social norms and instigate change. Now, the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University is testing how plays representing life in the lab might stimulate similar sorts of change in the often criticized culture of academic science.

Last Thursday, a group of current and former Harvard grad students, sponsored by the center, performed the interactive play, “Trouble in the Lab,” for Harvard’s Physics Department and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The play delivers strikingly realistic portrayals of the struggles of a principal investigator, postdoc, and two students. Its aim is to get the audience to question the current culture of science.

“We want to plug into the all-boys network, to reach minorities, women, and anyone who isn’t comfortable with the current social milieu,” says John Girash, a Harvard astrophysicist and associate director of the Derek Bok Center.

The Bok players are funded in part by a Harvard initiative to increase diversity in the science faculty. This mandate was part of reports issued by the Women Faculty and the Women in Science and Engineering task forces, which were created after former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ notorious comments about women’s inherent abilities in science. Those faculty committees explored why, for example, women comprise only nine percent of the tenured science faculty at Harvard. The task forces recommended improving the climate to encourage women and other underrepresented minorities to stay in academic science.

Unspoken conflict

The 10-minute skit—based on the real experiences of Harvard science graduate students—shows the interactions among an untenured, stressed-out principal investigator, a scatterbrained postdoc, a male graduate student with a short fuse, and a passive first-year female graduate student who is lost in the chaos around her. They struggle on their own as the lab’s PI, Lillian Chase, is preoccupied with a pressing grant deadline.

The performance last week was followed by a discussion among the approximately 20 people in the audience—most of whom were Harvard grad students—and the actors, who remained in character. The goal was to explore the larger issues raised by the play, such as its depiction of gender bias in the laboratory. While the play succeeded in bringing such issues into the light, comments about gender were entirely lacking during the forum.

For example, when a male student in the audience asked the actor who played Barbara, the young female graduate student, why she didn’t tell her disruptive lab mates to quiet down and take their argument elsewhere, “Barbara” delicately responded that she didn’t feel comfortable intervening. For a fleeting moment, the hint of gender issues wafted by, but the underlying reasons for Barbara’s discomfort went unaddressed.

It’s difficult, even for a play, to get people to open up about touchy topics, says Girash. “This play brings up uncomfortable issues, but in an indirect manner. People are wary of bringing up sensitive issues on racism or sexism.”

But without frank discussion of the issues, some audience members missed important subtleties. One Harvard graduate student in the audience said after the show that he wasn’t impressed with the characters’ dilemmas. “It’s not obvious to me how this matters. The problems in the play weren’t real problems, like faked data,” he said.

“Some people say [the play] is exaggerated, others say it’s just scratching the surface,” said Marc Hirsch, a former Harvard sociology graduate student who played the role of a postdoc with a sick child to care for. “My suspicion is that it’s probably closer to the latter.”

Changing times?

This was the second performance by the Bok players on the Harvard campus. If future skits the Bok Center has planned for students and faculty are to succeed in raising awareness of social issues, then it has some work to do in promoting attendance. The audience last week was predominately female. None of the male professors from the more than 90 percent male faculty in the engineering school and physics department attended. Invited male faculty had scheduling conflicts, said Girash.

Harvard isn’t the first to use theater to change academic culture. Lee Warren, associate director of the Bok Center, trained with a similar troupe at the University of Michigan that performs across the country. The players from the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching have gained popularity over the past decade and now receive funding from the National Science Foundation for advancing diversity.

But it’s not clear whether a similar approach will succeed in Cambridge. “As an old, private Ivy League university, Harvard has a different set of cultural norms that will be challenging to penetrate,” says Mara Skidmore, who received her master of fine arts at Harvard and directs the Bok Center players.