GENETIC SELECTION > THE GIFT > SYNOPSIS

THE GIFT - SYNOPSIS

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Barbara Kaye

Carrier of a defective copy of the gene for Friedreich’s ataxia, a genetic disorder. Mother to Annie and Ryan.

Annie Kaye

A keen footballer in her teens, who inherits the genetic disorder, Friedreich’s ataxia, with profound consequences.

Ryan Kaye

Annie’s younger brother, who is also a carrier of the rogue gene, but not directly affected. Ryan grows up to marry Jennifer.

Jennifer Kaye

A radical opponent of genetic engineering, who is, however, also carrying a copy of the same rogue gene as Ryan. They have a son called Mark.

Mark Kaye (16)

As a result of his parents’ actions, Mark is clear of any genetic disorder and is now trying to make some big decisions about
what to do with his life.

TIMESPAN OF THE PLAY

The play tells the story of three generations of the Kaye family. The action of the play shifts between 2025, 2010 and the present day.

SCENE 1 - 2028

RYAN KAYE discovers his son, MARK KAYE (16) packing a bag to run away from home. MARK is unhappy at the competitive sports college where his father sent him to become a tennis professional. He is angry that, while all his year group are undergoing routine medical genetic profiling, he is not being tested. This is because his parents used genetic screening and in vitro fertilization to select his embryo before he was born. MARK feels resentful that his whole life has been mapped out for him. RYAN KAYE (45) discovers MARK preparing to leave. They argue. MARK angrily shows his father his genetic print out - it is blank.

MARK: See this? This print out from the medics. I’m sixteen, Dad! And what happens when you’re sixteen - at schools all over Eurasia. Do you know? Yes, you do don’t you? Come on Dad, you’re the demographic geneticist.

Gene profiling. Yes! Gene profiling. Everyone else is going through gene profiling, seeing the college medics. So I was a bit puzzled when I wasn’t called up. But that was nothing to how puzzled the medical unit was when I asked why. But Mark, they said - Mark - didn’t you know? You don’t need it, lad. You were screened neonatally. Here’s your print out - see Dad! A big bloody blank. You know why? Because you’ve got the original. My life at sixteen - a bloody blank. It all belongs to Daddy.

MARK says he is leaving to try and lead his own life on his terms. He goes.

SCENE 2 - 1998

RYAN (now aged 14) is getting trashed at football by his sister ANNIE KAYE (16) a promising girl footballer. About to score, ANNIE suddenly loses balance and falls for no reason. This alarms their mother BARBARA KAYE (45) who is ANNIE’S coach and was herself a keen girl footballer in the 1960s but thwarted in her dreams of playing because the Football Association didn’t allow girls teams in her day.

SCENE 3 - 1998

ANNIE knows something is wrong with her balance and coordination.

[Annie is practising football skills.]
ANNIE: It’s not wobbly muscles anyway. What is it? What is it that feels wrong? It’s not all the time. Look, I can usually do this till...till the cows all go to McDonald’s ...one, two, three, no...there it is again. Sort of a gap...a gap opens up...I go to do something. I think I’m doing it...but it doesn’t happen...kind of -

Her mother is told she is being overprotective by the doctors they visit. BARBARA is worried that ANNIE’S symptoms are actually her way of saying she doesn’t want to play anymore, perhaps BARBARA has pushed ANNIE too much to live out her own unfulfilled dreams. RYAN says his sister is just crazy.

SCENE 4 - 1998

ANNIE KAYE is diagnosed as having an inherited genetic condition known as Friedreich’s ataxia, a wasting disorder of the nervous system that attacks the cerebellum - the balance part of the brain.

DOCTOR FISHER: I’m sorry to tell you that Annie has Friedreich’s ataxia - an inherited disease of the central nervous system -

ANNIE: An what?

DOCTOR FISHER: Inherited. Something you’re born with.

BARBARA: No. She can’t. How can she be born with it? None of us have had it. Look at your notes doctor. It’s a mistake. I’ve never even heard of it.

DOCTOR FISHER: Friedreich’s ataxia is passed on in families in a way known as recessive. A recessive disorder is going to be relatively rare as you need both parents to be carriers.

BARBARA listens carefully to the neurologist’s sad news and tries to find grains of hope. She cannot accept that ANNIE had inherited such a thing from her. There is no cure for the condition. ANNIE is devastated.

ANNIE: You’re giving me a death sentence. No - worse. A life sentence. I’d rather keel over and die next week!

You’re telling me twenty, thirty years of what? Getting worse and worse with this - [realizes] Oh God! I’ll be in a wheelchair!

SCENE 5 - 2028

Desperate about the situation with MARK, RYAN tries to call his wife JENNIFER KAYE at work. Gets through to her cybercall, an opinionated 21st-century answering machine with a mind of its own.

SCENE 6 - 2012

RYAN and JENNIFER, wanting a child are going for neonatal genetic screening. This is at RYAN’S insistence - he is a geneticist. JENNIFER goes along to please her husband but with misgivings. RYAN and JENNIFER get results of their screening.

Remarkably JENNIFER is a carrier of Friedreich’s ataxia - like RYAN. RYAN assumes they will now proceed to IVF selection to screen out the condition. But JENNIFER is against this. JENNIFER and Dr Burnside debate the issues of ‘playing God’. They leave the doctors. RYAN and JENNIFER argue fiercely. JENNIFER tells him if he wants a perfect baby, find a perfect woman. In the end JENNIFER argues with RYAN who wants to have their baby selected against Friedreich’s ataxia.

SCENE 7 - 1998

ANNIE is trying to come to terms with what the doctor has told her, RYAN tries to get her to explain what the doctor told her.

ANNIE: All our cells are full of DNA - thousands upon thousands of little pairs of genes. One’s from our mummy, and one’s from our daddy. Now sometimes one half of one of these pairs of genes is broken - OK. Like you know an aeroplane has two engines....

RYAN: Yeah - so if one fails at 50 000 feet, you don’t crash.

ANNIE: Right - well a recessive disorder is like that - it has to hit both engines before you’re in trouble. Both my engines are blazing Ryan - I’m shot down in flames.

RYAN is confused and frightened. Has he inherited the condition too? He tries to talk to ANNIE but she doesn’t want to talk to him. BARBARA returns and the tension builds to a crisis when ANNIE cracks. This allows everyone to express their feelings.

BARBARA: What use is a lovely day to my daughter now that we know what tomorrow will bring? And all the time, you know what haunts me of what the doctor said - “born with”. “She was born with this”, that’s the first thing I see in the morning written through everything like a slogan in seaside rock. Because she got it from me you see. My little girl is falling apart like a broken clockwork toy, because of something in me...

And my baby - my Ryan. Supposing he was born with it too? It’s too terrible to think about.

ANNIE: And what about Ryan? What if he’s got it too? How could we bear it. Ryan - my idiot brother - I love you so much.

RYAN: I’m frightened too.

SCENE 8 - 2028

MARK waits at the bus station. He is surprised to see his father. Even more surprised when his father instead of trying to get him to come home begins to try and explain why he did what he did i.e. select MARK by telling him the ‘real’ story
of his family. Not just the story of the progress of the disease but how the family fought back against it - which has shaped all RYAN’S subsequent attitudes to life.

RYAN: Yes - we couldn’t fight with drugs or therapy. But we fought back as a family in the only ways open to us, and in our own way we beat it in the end. It was Annie who started it. She pushed me to go and get tested myself. Our doctor had told Mum that I couldn’t be tested myself. Our doctor had told Mum that I couldn’t be tested, that I was too young. So Annie and I got all the books, all the leaflets we could on the disorder, on genetics, and we learned it all - inside and out. Looking back I can understand now, that it was how Annie came to face the Friedreich’s ataxia herself, by learning through me...

SCENE 9 - 1998

ANNIE begins to face the facts of the disease through RYAN. Deferring her own feelings and anxieties in a crusade to get her little brother tested - she wants him to be in the clear. RYAN wants to be tested, wants to understand what’s happening. Through a game of tossing coins, ANNIE explains the 1:4 statistical risks that RYAN will have the condition.

ANNIE: Any kid of two carrier parents has the same odds. Whether they have one child or twenty-one children. Each child is like a new throw of the coins, a new lottery ticket. We all start with the same odds.

RYAN:[tosses coin] Which is 1:4 -

ANNIE: Which is the odds that two coins tossed together will land as two tails.

RYAN [ tosses second coin]: Two heads!

RYAN becomes interested in the workings of genetics and wants to know more.

SCENE 10 - 1998

ANNIE is struggling to come to terms with issues of her self-image, her growing disability. She has bought herself a pink walking stick and worries how to do her nails with shaky hands. RYAN is determined to be tested. ANNIE rehearses him,
drilling him in preparation for facing the doctor. RYAN wants to have all the genetic facts to back up his argument for testing because he knows it is medical policy not to test anyone under 16 in cases where there is no cure. ANNIE warns RYAN that the doctor will try and discourage testing. Their mother BARBARA arrives, dismayed to discover their plan. She cannot bear the idea that RYAN may become ill too. ANNIE tells her mother that it’s a political issue since NHS reorganization; where you live and what your Hospital Trust fundholders choose to purchase, affects issues of testing. This fires up BARBARA’S spirit. She will take RYAN to the doctors.

SCENE 11 - 1998

BARBARA and RYAN’S doctor refuses testing for RYAN. He warns RYAN about negative consequences such as mortgage and insurance data protection issues etc. But RYAN is adamant. BARBARA stands up to the doctor. Warns him he has not heard the last of this.

SCENE 12 - 1998

The family fight their local authority and the received wisdom about testing young people to win RYAN’S right to be tested.

ANNIE argues that sometimes knowledge is a cure in itself.

SCENE 13 - 1998

RYAN is tested and found not to have the Friedreich’s ataxia. However, he is a carrier for it, meaning that he has a risk of passing the condition on to his children. He has mixed feelings about this diagnosis undergoing ‘survivor syndrome’
i.e. guilt at having escaped when loved ones have been struck down.

ANNIE: It’s like when people have been in a plane disaster, you know, but against all odds, they survived. At first they’re over the moon. Feel great. But then they start to think - why me? Maybe they lost people in their own family, and they get obsessed with thinking - why did I escape and not them.

RYAN: Yes! I feel like I’ve abandoned you in the wreckage or something.

[ANNIE hugs RYAN.]

ANNIE tells him his role is now to fight on to take the fight further to beat the gene. RYAN resolves to study genetics. ANNIE talks about her feelings as the condition develops.

SCENE 14 - 2028

MARK, having heard his father’s story understands better why both his parents had opted for selection to screen out the rogue gene. However, MARK cannot accept that it was right for RYAN to secretly choose a ‘bundle of cells’ that were to grow into him.

RYAN: I had this chance. That you would have talent, have a gift.

MARK: But you lied to Mum.

RYAN justifies his actions by referring to MARK as the ‘final victory’ over the rogue gene and that both BARBARA’S and ANNIE’S sporting gifts have realized themselves in MARK.

RYAN: In you, through you - our family could beat the gene for good.

MARK: Now I see it. You’ve made me to live out YOUR dreams for you.
As his bus arrives MARK tells his dad that he (MARK) still has a free will.

MARK: You can give me this or that gene - but you can’t make me think like you. Can you? I am me after all, aren’t I? I’ve still got my free will, and that part of me that’s free is saying NO…

MARK leaves on the bus. RYAN is left to think and MARK…

MARK: Look Dad, I have to go away and get my head round this. It’s a bit weird finding out at sixteen that you’re not the person you thought you were.