Doran grew up in London and studied at Cambridge University. She was a contemporary of Robert Webb and David Mitchell and her first job as a professional writer was comedy sketch writing for their BBC2 show Bruiser. She then worked for several years as a comedy writer, writing for shows like Smack the Pony and TV to Go. In 2000, she moved to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University
Doran’s work has been developed by the O’Neill Playwriting Center, Lincoln Center,
She was nominated for a 2012 Writers Guild Award for her work on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. She also wrote episodes for season 2 of the NBC show Smash. She is a writer and co-producer of season 2 of the Showtime show Masters of Sex.
During Jonny’s absence, her parents grill her about her relationship. Charlotte hints that they are serious. Her dad reminds her that she passed on going to Yale and when he saw he was upsetting her, he backed down saying, “I never met a single person who went to Yale who wasn’t an asshole.” Asshole is always good for a laugh. Howard is a successful novelist who writes cheap detective stories. At one point Jonny asks Howard if he could interview him for a term paper. The eventual outcome isn’t exactly what Howard expected. One could argue, however, that Howard’s multiple trips to the bank more than assuages his guilt feeling of not writing the great American novel. Amidst all the one-liners, mom turns to Charlotte and says, “Listen honey, grandma die.” A big non-sequitur laugh.
Jonny, who is African American and Charlotte, a spoiled Jewish princess, have been friends since they were children, but they never crossed the line into becoming lovers. She decides that they should have sex and strips off all her clothes standing there naked as a Blue Jay. She jumps into bed and waits for Jonny to join her, shouting “Get over here and @#@**& me right now.” Jonny declines leaving her stranded naked in bed saying no for two reasons: 1) She’s drunk and it would be like date rape, and 2) He’s seeing a girl named Monique. Being a Baptist, he claims he’s saving himself for marriage. Or is he? So, instead of sex, they dance. Here’s a shocker. Jonny has a sense of rhythm while Charlotte dances like someone who is physically and rhythmically impaired. Eventually, he finally fesses up to being gay and confesses that he had sex with a man. One of the few lines with any honesty, Charlotte wants to know why he never told her. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want it to be true.” Later on, they have a confrontation in Charlotte’s back yard at which time he says, “You make being your friend a job.” A word about the back yard: Sorry, but when two large branches with dead leaves were lowered indicating the backyard, I couldn’t help but laugh at Takeshi Kata’s set design, which are usually quite wonderful. I don’t know if it was intentionally comical but one has come to expect a certain level of excellence in set designs at the Taper. I accepted the minimalistic designs of the other scenes, which the cast executed in choreographed rhythm. The rest of the technical team consisted of Karl Fredric Lundeberg’s uneven original music and sound design, and Rui Rita’s adequate Lighting Design.
As we move through the mire of slick laugh lines, we find out that Jonny’s mom is quite ill and Charlotte is having a sexual identity crisis. She has a crush on a girl named Claire, a macho-type woman with a shaved head. Poor Charlotte. Vagina or penis? Eventually, in a contrived piece of direction, Jonny, too, strips down declaring, “This is who I am.” Not sure what being naked illuminates who he is, but I suppose it’s an eye-catching theatrical device. That said, there is one very authentic comical moment by an actor with a walk-on role.
After all the go-for-the-laughs in Act 1, Act 2 does a 360 from sitcom/soap opera to sometimes high drama. Let’s sum it all up. A year has passed, and what a year! Charlotte has broken up with Claire. She is going to marry Martha who is a doctor. Mom’s advice: “There’s nothing to be nervous about. You can always get a divorce.” Jonny’s mother has died. He is in love with a pilot, and has volunteered to be the sperm donor for Charlotte and Martha. Mom and dad have split. Dad has a girlfriend named Carol. Jonny has gotten an advance on a book deal. Howard does not receive the news in a warm way as the book is based on an analysis of Howard’s characters, which is not very complimentary.
While you can’t hold a director responsible for the script, you can hold him responsible for the direction. Robert Egan’s direction highlighted the weakest part of Doran’s writing pandering to the built-in laugh lines and going for the shtick. He did not reign in Mae Whitman’s vocal performance, which consisted of a whole lot of yelling. Perhaps the most honest performance came from York Walker who delivered an unencumbered performance without using a bag of acting tricks.
At one point, after over indulging Charlotte since she was a baby, dad says, “Jesus. Having kids is exhausting.” My sentiments exactly about sitting through this play.
Bathsheba Doran gains clarity in writing ‘The Mystery of Love & Sex’ | LA Times | Feb 8, 2016
Some play titles make you guess what you’re in for. Not “The Mystery of Love & Sex.”
The sheer improbability of meaningful connection with another person is daunting enough, says the play’s author, Bathsheba Doran, let alone the odds of it deepening into commitment, even marriage. “It’s insane,” she says, “but we can’t stop doing it. Which is kind of lovely.”
She puts that philosophy front and center in her play, a drama with a funny bone. The piece had a high-profile premiere at Lincoln Center Theater in New York a year ago with Diane Lane and Tony Shalhoub headlining a cast directed by Sam Gold. In Los Angeles, the play begins previews Feb. 10 at the Mark Taper Forum and opens Feb. 21 with Sharon Lawrence and David Pittu in a cast directed by Robert Egan. Another production is scheduled to open in April at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va.
The back-to-back productions by two of the country’s leading regional theaters should further propel Doran, whose most prominent plays until now were “Kin,” introduced at New York’s Playwrights Horizons in 2011, and “Nest,” given its premiere at Signature in 2007. Television watchers also may have seen her work. She was a writer and co-producer for the Showtime drama “Masters of Sex” in 2014, and she wrote for HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” in 2011. One of her “Boardwalk” episodes was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.
“The sky’s the limit for her,” says Michael Ritchie, the Center Theatre Group’s artistic director, who chose “The Mystery of Love & Sex” for the Taper season.
Rehearsal at the Taper had just wrapped for the day as Doran, in town for a week in mid-January to huddle with the cast, sat down to chat. Bash, as she is known to friends and colleagues, is friendly, forthcoming and sincere. She is slightly built, with short, ash-blond hair. At 40, she looks eternally young. London-born, she lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her wife, Katie, a former stage manager, and their 3-year-old son, Hugo. A curve in her clothes reveals her to be pregnant with their second child.
Hugo was just a few months old when Doran began writing “The Mystery of Love & Sex.”
“I’m a big believer in the subconscious,” she says. “We dream in story form; stories are inside us. So it’s really about creating the circumstances to let them out.
“I don’t start writing with a conscious agenda or story or even characters. I just go. And I often write pages and pages and pages that tell me nothing about what this play might be, that are discarded until there is a moment where something clicks and I’ll realize that the story has begun to present itself to me via the voices of characters.”
In this case, the voices belong to a family in the present-day South: 21-year-old Charlotte, her lifelong friend Jonny, and Charlotte’s parents, Lucinda and Howard.
Charlotte followed Jonny off to college, and at the start of the story, they are hosting a dinner party in her dorm room for her parents. The gathering doesn’t go quite as anyone expected, especially once the parents begin to wonder whether the young people have moved beyond friendship.
“What is the relationship between love and sex?” Doran asks. The play “is exploring a friendship that is trying to figure out whether it should have a sexual dynamic, and it’s dealing with a lead character, Charlotte, who is very uncertain about her sexuality.”
As Charlotte delves ever more adventurously into those feelings, she sets off a chain reaction in those around her.
Ritchie says the play reflects what’s “happening in our country right now. The classic construct of a family is changing, and this play addresses that very directly and in a very humorous way.”
André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, credits Doran with “intelligence, social awareness, wit and a deep and tender heart.”
The New York reviews, however, were mixed. Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily News said “the story alternately entertains and frustrates,” and Jesse Green in New York magazine found the play “engrossing in theory, a botch in practice,” but the New York Times’ Charles Isherwood said it’s “packed with humanity.”
Doran credits her family with her early development as a writer. Her parents are Susan Doran, a historian who has written extensively about the Elizabethan era, and Alan, an economist who specializes in the developing world.
“My father read to me a lot, and he did really good voices,” the younger Doran says. “It was a huge part of my life.
“I naturally wrote. It was very intuitive, very instinctual — little poems, little plays.”
Her parents restricted her access to television and films, but that merely fueled her inquisitiveness.
“We had only about three videos, which I would watch again and again and again, and I would learn something new each time.”
A great uncle was managing director of the London Palladium when she was young. “I was given access backstage,” she says. “I met actors, and I really fell in love with that world. … I got to see the same show again and again. If you’ve seen ‘Barnum’ 23 times, you start to understand how a show is put together.”
Doran studied English literature at Cambridge, where she became involved with the Footlights, a hotbed for comedy.
“I knew all these really funny, brilliant people that had come out of that and were now living together in a really dirty flat in London trying to write, and I joined them,” she says. “My first professional work was writing for what became their TV shows.”
Those colleagues were the writer-performers Robert Webb and David Mitchell. The show was their sketch-comedy program “Bruiser” on BBC Two.
A lifelong fan of the States, Doran landed a Fulbright in 2000 to study at Columbia University, where she fell in love with writing for the theater, then landed a coveted spot in Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program, coached by Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang.
Until now, Southern California has caught just glimpses of Doran’s work. South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa commissioned her to write “Ben and the Magic Paintbrush,” presented as part of its Theatre for Young Audiences program in 2010, and “Kin” played at little Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills in 2013.
Reflecting on “The Mystery of Love & Sex,” Doran says: “I realize now it’s no coincidence that this is the play I wrote after my son was born, because I think that by becoming a parent, it allowed me to look on my own childhood from a completely fresh perspective, with a degree of distance and amusement and compassion. … And it also allowed me to look at the experience of being a parent from a completely different perspective.”
Another factor: “I had had a rift with a very dear friend of mine. And part of me was so confused that I could feel such intense mourning for a relationship that was not my marriage.”
The upshot, she says, is love. “It is a play that explores all different types of love.”