Rosalind Franklin’s role in DNA discovery, once ignored, is retold in Song

In the summer of 2020, the composer and lyricist Madeline Myers spent hours at the piano in her Manhattan apartment as she struggled to write three songs for her new musical,”Double helix”, about British chemist Rosalind Franklin. The challenge wasn’t strictly about matching words to a score, but conveying the science of a pivotal moment in the discovery of DNA structure – and making the songs entertaining.

Franklin’s experiments, in which she successfully used X-ray crystallography to create images of DNA, became the basis for The groundbreaking 1953 discovery of James Watson and Francis Crick of the double helix structure. The breakthrough aids our modern understanding of genetics and biology, but Franklin was denied credit for years. (She died of cancer in 1958 at age 37; her male colleagues were later awarded the Nobel Prize.)

Fast forward to a recent afternoon when Myers and the show’s director, Scott Schwartz, sat in a rehearsal room high above 42nd Street and faced a new hurdle: how to stage those science-focused songs, including one aptly named “The Problem.” In this scene, six actors are in a lab using an X-ray crystallography machine to try and capture an image of DNA. As they shifted their focus from a makeshift cardboard device to a screen placed above the stage, Schwartz shouted, “We interrupt reality by making the picture appear instantly on the projection screen.”

They were just weeks away from the first previews of “Double Helix,” which begins May 30 at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, NY. Myers and Schwartz try to balance history and science with an emotional and multi-dimensional portrait of Franklin, who attacked her work with zealous dedication while subjected to misogyny and anti-Semitism.

Although Myers knew that “the play shouldn’t be about science,” she was determined to see science as “the vehicle for this story.” After all, that was Franklin’s worldview. “There were dramatic liberties I could take with history, but I just felt I couldn’t tolerate science.”

But she also needed “the science to be simple because what we’re trying to show is the emotional conflict,” she added, “and all the power dynamics and the gender dynamics.”

The production team also brought in some consultants, including Sonya Hansona researcher the Center for Computational Biologyto provide feedback on the script and staging.

“They do a lot of work to really integrate the lab environment into the set,” Hanson said. That’s important, she explained, because “Rosalind was a great experimenter” and any portrait of her life should make that clear.

Although Franklin (played on stage by Samantha Massellwho played Hodel in the Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” in 2015) was involved in the race to discover the structure of DNA, she was the only scientist who didn’t write to her own version by the story. “All these accounts of what happened have certainly been filtered through the preconceived notions that these people had,” Myers said. “And the one voice we really don’t hear is Rosalind’s.”

Myers started reading about the scientist in 2018 and immediately felt a kinship. ‘We are both women. We are both Jewish. We’re both about the same age,’ she said. But the biggest connection “was the way she felt about her work as a scientist, was how I felt about my own work as a musical playwright.”

This isn’t Myers’ first experience bringing history to the stage. She was an original member of the “Hamilton” music department and witnessed Lin-Manuel Miranda’s approach to creating an “arresting and moving” show about a historical figure, Myers explained. So when she started writing “Double Helix,” she wanted to make sure “the emotional stakes were greater than the actual historical stakes.”

A central question: “Can life be defined as biological matter or is life what we live and what we experience? And does Rosalind Franklin sacrifice what we live and what we experience to find that biological matter?” To reinforce the choices Franklin has to make in the musical, Myers turned what in real life might have just been a crush on the scientist, Jacques Mering, into a relationship. Franklin must then choose whether to prioritize the relationship or her work.

Schwartz, artistic director of Bay Street Theater, said he was drawn to the project because of its potential to fill in the blanks in Franklin’s inner world. “That’s what musicals are for,” he said. To use songs “to crack open a character’s psychology.”

As for Franklin’s scientific disapproval, Myers isn’t looking for the public to “wrap into arms.” Instead, she wants people to leave the theater thinking, “What are the two parts in my own life that are competing for my time?” she said. “That’s what the piece is about. It’s about how we use our time without knowing how much we have.”