Went to see Melinda Lopez’s play, From Orchids to Octopi.  Problem is, how to describe the experience. That is, how to get my arms around something so unique and large and wonderful in so many ways.  I can begin, of course, with the day and the company, going into Central Square, Cambridge with a posse of girlfriends, who know each other from yoga. Sunday brunch at Café Luna, sitting outside on the plaza.  A perfect antidote for winter, marvelous people watching and a greatly needed change of scenery.  Could have dawdled for hours.

But, the theatre beckons.  A small, modern space, versatile, comfortable and stadium seating, so no peering around the head of the person in front of you.  The staging, movable panels, assembled and reassembled into a carnival arcade, or an artist’s developing mural.  The actors, two men, two women and a child, also versatile and natural, completely at home in their theater space.  All good.

But the play’s the thing.  And here’s where it’s challenging, as the concept of the play is challenging, examining the connections between art and science, imagery and evolution.  The vehicle is the dream-life of a pregnant woman attempting to complete a large mural. The play follows the parallel lives of the mural artist who’s been commissioned to do a work on Darwin, and Darwin, himself as he synthesizes his observations into a theory which comes to be known as natural selection, or evolution. Underlying these quests are the pregnancies of the mural artist and Darwin’s wife, Emma —genetic reproduction in action — with the inherent uncertainties and pressure on the parents-to-be. Interspersed in the dream sequences are characters with a particular point of view: the obstetrician offering the mural artist genetic testing, and a collector from Harvard, in search of the wide range of species on this planet.

A lot of the writing is Tom Stoppard-like, without the British accent – a barrage of words and ideas, requiring close attention and good hearing.  As dramatic as the staging is, this is also a play that would read well, mined for all its rich allusions: “Plus ca change, etc”. Verbal gymnastics, sometimes from the excitement of the ideas, and sometimes just for the fun of it – riffing, as it’s called in music.  At the same time, complex scientific ideas are boiled down to their essences and offered in amusing, palatable ways – a complaining dinosaur, for example or a quarreling double-headed cow. The idea of genes is presented as a game of chance by a carnival barker.  For me, these parts brought to mind Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and The Magic School Bus; and I mean that in the best way.

The challenge of the play is its complexity, which is, I guess, the challenge of life and evolution, so much going on at once and in constant flux.  But the play is never heady or pretentious. To the contrary, it’s down-to-earth and downright domestic in parts, real people dealing with real stresses:  Will the mural get done?  Will the baby in the womb be alright?   The subtitle of the play is “A Love Story” and it’s very much that – love between Darwin and his wife, and their daughter, Annie; and the love between the artist, her husband, chef Charlie, and their unborn baby.  But, does the love come from our highest human ideals, or is it there to ensure the safety and survival of the children and the family unit?  This is not a fait accompli, but an idea that “evolves.” Pun intended.

So, there I am in the audience attempting to comprehend a play about an artist who’s trying to synthesize and represent evolution, which it turns out, is the playwright’s effort to present a marriage of art and science.  Well, it’s a fair amount of work, and an awful lot of fun. Not to give it all away, but by the end of the play, the artist’s mural is complete, and up for inspection, from “octopi to orchids,” all players in the theater of life.