By: Deborah Stein & Suli Holum | Scenic Design: Jeremy Wilhelm | Sound Design: James Sugg | Video Design: Kate | Light Design: James Clottfelder | Costume Design: Tara Webb
CHIMERA tells the story of Jennifer Samuels, who has just discovered that she is her own twin. A high-tech voyage into the cellular structure of one woman, CHIMERA explores the phenomenon of medical chimerism, the condition of containing two different sets of DNA within one body. Part Twilight Zone, part academic lecture, and part family drama, CHIMERA asks: what happens when technology shatters our idea of who we are?
CHIMERA begins in a simple white kitchen, where things are not what they seem. A genial Midwestern narrator—part mother hen, part Rod Serling—welcomes you into her kitchen, which is also the theatre. She offers you coffee, makes sure you’re comfortable. Soon, however, you realize that the kitchen is not what it seems. As she tells her story, the kitchen becomes a magic box, unfolding and reshaping itself, revealing secret tunnels and passageways that take you to the edge of the solar system and inside the cellular structure of the human body.
Within this landscape of architectural and digital wizardry, Holum’s astonishing performance—physical, intimate, funny, visceral—anchors the science in a heartbreaking story of a woman torn between being who she is and who she wishes she could be.