Original Works Series Reading: Kinda Human by Anne Valentino

Kinda Human

by Anne Valentino

Performed by Theatre off the Square (March 16)

In 1982, 61-year-old Barney Clark received the first-ever permanent artificial heart. Behind the scenes is a little-known laboratory where data-driven scientists experiment on Holstein calves implanted with mechanical heart prototypes. It is in this lab where Diana, a research fellow, confronts the parameters of humanness—the patient’s, the cow’s, and her own. Diana is unsure about her place in this “men’s only” club. Trying to find her voice within this context becomes increasingly difficult. Couple that with her silent struggle to come out to her family, and Diana seems to find herself at more than one crossroads. Her personal desires repeatedly get pitted against her professional ambition. Along the way, Diana gets a little perspective from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the resident laboratory cow slash reincarnated Victorian poet, as well as from the outspoken and often comical Lesbian Chorus. This is the era when the fear of AIDS calls homosexuality into question: human or deviant. This “question” plays out in the lab, in the women’s home, and in a bookshop that after hours represents a lesbian safe space. Using the mechanical heart as a metaphor, the play asks the question, what does it really mean to be “human?”