I mention this because in Bite the Hand, readers will journey through a diametrically opposed kind of science, which not so much as blinks at placing fast and powerful four-hundred-fifty-pound dolphins, known for their sociability, into permanent isolation in five-foot-deep tanks - and at adopting protocols demanding 'numbers, no names.' If that were not enough, lab workers in Bite the Hand must race the clock to meet conditions set by a grant-awarding commission, in an environment of shrinking availability of financing for their kind of research. So, with jobs and careers hanging in the balance, they drive the animals relentlessly toward their limits, exploiting them for every ounce of productivity that can be extracted. For the lab workers, 'It's all in the repetitions; that's where the truth lies,' and they make the dolphins pay in spades, until something snaps.
Inspired by the real-world heist of two dolphins from a marine mammal research laboratory, their release into the open ocean, and the subsequent trial of those responsible for the 'liberation,' Bite the Hand gives readers a fascinating front-row view of the arcane workings of experimental behavioral psychology as practiced on marine mammals. The reader feels a bit disadvantaged at not seeing the action on a stage, particularly since Bite the Hand requires one to accept the idea of human beings performing as dolphins; but the images that emerge from the page - of dolphins following their trainers around the tanks, snapping up fish that is given to them as rewards, porpoising and leaping - are wonderfully seductive (WATCHERS, who function as a Grecian chorus, interpolate some truly memorable descriptions of dolphin sociability). And this enables Daws to succeed in writing the story from two perspectives, the human one and the cetacean one.
For the former, Daws makes effective use of a major character whose presence is always felt but never seen - a Darth Vader-like chief scientist, who was 'present at the creation,' but who now rules in absentia because of 'pressing obligations...in the higher reaches of the profession.' The humans on stage, a long-time trainer sympathetic to the animals, a conscientious and opportunistic young scientist, and a no-nonsense laboratory manager, must dance to his tune. In the climax of the play, after events have overturned their world, only the trainer seems to have moved on to other and better things (though temporarily impeded by a jail term). In an interview with the MEDIA following his incarceration, he provides a haunting description of his first encounter with dolphins - a spotting that takes place at a high school outing, in which a small dolphin swims toward him and his buddies on shore, leans against his leg, and eventually dies. He realizes that the young dolphin 'wasn't looking for a beach. It was looking for company...for comfort.' And, in retrospect, he awakens to the fact that this experience was his 'Road to Damascus.'
The dolphins in the play, christened ONE and TWO, have developed contrasting survival strategies, the former 'never bucking the system,' the latter doing everything to subvert it. They have been in captivity for over ten years, and are serving life sentences. ONE engages in 'stereotyped behavior,' circling her tank constantly in a counterclockwise direction; TWO finds that his trainer will respond to a chirrup and enjoys an occasional illicit 'happy hour' with him. But none of this releases ONE and TWO from the grip of the principal scientist's protocol. It takes a major blowup in the outside world to intrude on these arrangements.
Crucial points in the play are punctuated with a dolphin dance, first slow and simple, then growing more complex and striking as the action progresses, finally climaxing in a joyous Dance of Life. Throughout, as the pace of the experiments is ratcheted up, one wonders what the purpose of this experimentation is. The WATCHERS explain: 'After thousands of repetitions; its threshold will have been reached; the animal will have been tested to its limits...what has been learned from this experiment has been learned...and a new experiment can be designed and begun.' In a nutshell, this is the life to which the dolphins have been condemned, their punishment for being dolphins. Bite the Hand will cause readers who have never considered the issue of animal rights to give it a serious glance. This is because, for all of their concern about the purity of data, uncontaminated by human empathy and 'loss of control of reinforcement of behavior,'the scientists in Bite the Hand appear blind to a basic contradiction in their work. Here, we turn again with profit to Jane Goodall: 'Behaviorists...maintained that animals were little more than machines, incapable of feeling pain or any human-like feelings or emotions...there was...no inkling of the fact that the use of stressed animals could affect the results of an experiment.'
Gavan Daws has written a marvelous and eye-opening play that deserves a wide reading.
Gavan Daws's compellingly innovative first play is a heady mix of language and movement: a verbal and physical comedy of control capsizing, with interspecies pratfalls, and at the same time an active meditation on nature and science, freedom and subjection--all energized by the powerful theatrical force of the dolphins' presence.