THE EXPERIMENT follows the lives of two 1950s housewives and the pioneering psychotherapist who engaged them as test subjects in early LSD research. In and out of sync with changing times, these oddly-paired explorers examine and reconfigure their values, commitments and wildest dreams.

In the 1950s, LSD, a promising alternative to lobotomies, internment and daily drugging, enjoyed a therapeutic heyday. Then came the '60s. Psychedelics left the laboratory and spilled onto the streets, giving rise to a defiant counter-culture. Criminalized in 1971, LSD research came to an abrupt halt.

THE EXPERIMENT, a theatrical crazy-quilt of period icons from Marilyn Monroe to Albert Einstein chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of one forward-looking psychiatric clinic and the people whose lives were forever transformed by a single dose of a humble fungus.

A Personal Note From the Playwright:

My mother was a troubled woman who depended on a Byzantine healthcare system to ease her mental anguish and bipolarity. Shuttling from one doctor to another, popping a rainbow assortment of pills, she finally landed in a psychiatric clinic, where she willingly underwent twenty shock treatments. This brutal therapy left her docile and childlike, no less adrift than before, and certainly no more fit to navigate life’s challenges. Had Richard Nixon not declared war on Timothy Leary, might my mother have gained access to more enlightened and humane treatment? Might she have seen beyond the “pink ghetto” that imprisoned her and enjoyed a more purposeful and fulfilling life? THE EXPERIMENT ponders the human cost of politically motivated prohibitions on psychedelic-based therapies.