Ken Mckenzie, former president of the Santa Clara Valley Beekeepers Guild, helps an actor from the play, Queen, how to put a honey frame back in the beehive at Ken McKenzie bee farm in Saratoga, Calif., on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
On a recent afternoon, the cast, director and stage manager of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s production of “Queen” visited the Saratoga home of beekeeper Ken McKenzie to get an up-close look at his backyard beehive.
Madhuri Shekar’s play focuses on scientists studying a bee colony collapse and the ethical issues that arise around a paper that two PhD students are preparing to publish about the causes of the phenomenon.
The “Queen” team gathered around to listen to McKenzie give an engaging presentation about bee colony behavior, focusing in particular on the rise and fall of queen bees, while he passed around illustrative photos as the low-tech equivalent of a slideshow. The visitors, especially director Miriam A. Laube, asked occasional questions pertinent to the issues mentioned in the play.
Then everyone donned beekeeper suits to open up the hive. Sliding trays out of the wooden box where the bees make their home, they got a good look at the queen surrounded by a cluster of worker bees. Soothed by hand-held smokers, the bees seemed relatively calm, only casually flying around the intruders as actor Uma Paranjpe, who plays primary protagonist Sanam, tried her hand at gently sliding the tray back into place.
Interestingly for a play so steeped in the relevant science, the play that became “Queen” originally had nothing to do with bees at all.
“When I was doing my MFA at USC, my roommate was a scientist who was doing her PhD in organic chemistry,” Shekar says on the phone from her New Jersey home. “Just living with her for several years made me get really interested in her world, and it made me realize that scientists and artists are actually a lot more similar than they are different, which was new to me. The way that she would talk about her work with her friends was very similar to how I talk about theater and writing with my friends. We’re all just kind of nerds about it, and we take our work home with us.”
That experience inspired Shekar to write a play about PhD students and the way their friendship is tested by an ethical crisis in their work that puts them at odds.
“I hadn’t seen that many pieces of media that were exclusively about female friendships, and especially female friendships in the workplace,” Shekar says. “So I just took me and my best friend and thought, OK, we love each other. We also constantly read each other’s work and give each other feedback. What would be the worst thing that would happen to us?”
“That’s often how I start thinking about stories,” Shekar adds. “I think about characters, and I think, what’s the worst possible thing that could happen to them? And I thought, what if one day we had to choose between our work and our friendship? What if one day she told me that I wasn’t a real writer? I would never speak to her again,” she says with a laugh.
At first the play was set in an organic chemistry lab, but Shekar found herself having trouble getting into the subject matter.
“When I was in deep crisis, I happened to be visiting another scientist friend of mine in Berkeley,” she says. “I have multiple female scientist friends. I’m Indian. That’s just the way our community shakes out in the U.S. I was hanging out with her and told her I’m hitting a wall on this project. And she said, ‘Well, yeah, organic chemistry is impenetrable. You should do something with environmental science,’ which is what she was doing. And then she said, ‘You should do something about the bees. Everyone loves bees.’ One of her friends studied insect populations, and I just found that whole world very interesting, so I started diving into research.”
As bees fill an essential role in life on earth and widespread colony collapse represents a real environmental crisis, Shekar found a lot to explore with real dramatic potency.
Shekar was born in San Jose and lived there until age 6, when her family moved to Singapore and then to India. Her play “House of Joy,” developed in the Playwrights Foundation’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival, premiered at California Shakespeare Theater in 2019. Some of her other plays include “In Love and Warcraft” and “A Nice Indian Boy,” which has been adapted into a movie to be released this March.
After its world premiere at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater in 2017, “Queen” was originally scheduled to open TheatreWorks’ 51st season in the summer of 2020. When that plan was derailed by the COVID shutdown, it was rescheduled to the summer of 2022 and finally to this March.
“Queen” is set in 2016 at UC Santa Cruz, another element that entered the play nearly by happenstance.
“’Queen’ is literally nothing but a bunch of random stuff happening to me, and then I’m like, I’m going to do that for the play!” Shekar says. “I was visiting cousins in the East Bay, and my aunt one day said, ‘I’m going to take you to my alma mater.’ We were going somewhere and she was like, we should stop here, because the campus is really beautiful. And I just fell in love with the vibe of the campus. It’s so astonishing how you have these redwood forests but also this very stark modernist architecture in the same place. And I thought, this feels like the play. It’s like a set designer made this for me.”
As it happens, former Santa Cruz Shakespeare artistic director Mike Ryan plays the PhD students’ supervising professor in the play.
“You have actual natives in the rehearsal room, and they’re telling me what I got wrong,” says Shekar. “That’s awesome. Let’s fix that. This is such a place-specific story, and I’m really happy that people who live there or live close to there will get to experience it.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com.
‘QUEEN’
By Madhuri Shekar, presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
When: March 6-31
Where: Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto
Tickets: $27-$100; 650-463-1960, www.theatreworks.org
Originally published at Sam Hurwitt, Correspondent