Coming to a city hall near us: the theater of today’s politics is pausing for the theater of the past. The new play “No Recombination Without Representation” will bring to life the 1976 public hearing that debated the safety of DNA recombination research at Harvard University. Throughout June, six performances will take place in Sullivan Chamber, where the original hearing occurred 50 years ago, and where Cambridge City Council still gathers for business.
A collaboration between MIT Museum and Central Square Theater, the production promises an “immersive” experience that takes audiences back to the 1970s — a time when trust in institutions was at a historic low.
Playwright Patrick Gabridge says he has always been drawn to stories of social struggle, and is particularly interested in the history of science.
“Science has always been a part of my blood,” says Gabridge, who attended MIT in the 80s and whose father was a microbiologist. “I kind of grew up in a biology lab.”
But Gabridge had never heard of the 1976 recombination debates, which pitted fearful Cambridge residents and wary older scientists against younger researchers enthusiastic about the prospects of blending DNA from different sources.
As Gabridge read transcripts of the hearings and reviewed materials from historians, he felt a responsibility to get the history right, but he also needed to make it digestible as a play.
“How do I take this five-hour meeting and turn it into a one-hour play that makes sense?” he wondered.
In the end, nearly every line in the play is a line from the hearing transcript. While the hearing posed many questions, the play is driving at one: “Who should make the decision about scientific research that has the potential to harm the people around it?”
Making this question feel real and urgent to the audience is part of the work of the play’s director, Debra Wise.
“It’s hard for us to grasp how surprising it was for a group of laypeople to challenge the ongoing work of the scientific community,” she says.
To highlight this, the production will take place in Cambridge City Hall.
Gabridge specializes in site-specific productions — plays performed outside a traditional theater and in a location that is important to the story. He’s launched productions at Boston’s Old State House and Old South Meeting House, as well as Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. Gabridge says he finds these locations useful for “fleshing out” stories from the 18th and 19th century that have otherwise been “mythologized or flattened.”
This time, looking back only 50 years felt fresh. When the production team visited Sullivan Chamber, its high ceilings, dark wood paneling, and historic portraiture lent itself well to the project. It both helps and hurts that the space hasn’t changed much since the 70s.
“There was no air conditioning back then,” says Wise. She notes that the first night of the hearing happened on one of the hottest nights of the year and audiences may experience some of the same New England mugginess that residents endured back then.
Sullivan Chamber is a public space and she says performing a play there is part of that. But rehearsing site-specific productions is not straightforward. Although public commenters sometimes disagree, City Hall is still a functioning workplace. And actors will only have two rehearsals in the space before they have a full audience.
Wise says current city officials have been welcoming and helped advise the team on the customs of the council. For instance, she asked if councillors would have discussed how they felt about recombinant DNA with their colleagues beforehand. Wise said Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui told her no, hopefully not. The point of a hearing is to have all matters of discussion be available to the public and discussing opinions or preparing for a vote ahead of time would have been inappropriate, if not unlawful under Massachusetts’ open meeting law.
When it comes to the councillors who played a role in this historic debate, Wise says channeling them has been “moving.”
“Some of them have passed and they were so big, in spirit and personality,” she says.
Councillor Saundra Graham, for example, died in 2023. It wasn’t until working on this production that Wise learned more about Graham’s life as an activist. She, along with other local housing activists, stormed the stage at Harvard’s commencement ceremony in 1970, demanding that the university build affordable housing in Riverside where it was planning to build a dorm.
And there was Mayor Al Vellucci, who died in 2002, and was the most visible and vocal figure of the recombination debates. He famously called for Harvard Yard to be paved into a parking lot and for the Harvard Lampoon office turned into a public urinal. He was anti-recombination, too. But, Wise learned that when Vellucci was young, his father died from inhaling toxins at his factory job. Vellucci left school after that and although he never earned a formal education, he ultimately became mayor.
This was a time when more public servants were “townies” — antagonists of the elite institutions nearby, rather than graduates of them. That dynamic is on display in the play’s dialogue.
Learning these personal details weren’t just helpful for actors getting into character, Wise says. They were “moments of discovery” for the team, especially those who live in Cambridge.
At the end of the play’s first act, the public will be invited to participate in the discussion — a nod to the role of citizens in the original debate. Audience members will be given short biographies of people who lived in Cambridge at the time, and invited to act as them for a discussion on if recombinant DNA research should happen locally.
The civic process, Gabridge says, is “not always beautiful.” In fact, sometimes it’s ”goofy or boring.” But, in this play and in life, “there is a way for the public to get involved in making decisions that affect them.”
A stronger
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