FLICKR, DIAMOND GEYSERIn the 40 years since Yale University’s Stanley Milgram first publicized his social psychology experiments that purported to reveal surprising truths about authority, obedience, and human nature, artists have dramatized the infamous research in nearly two dozen novels, films, pop songs, and plays. Playwright Frank Basloe joins the crowd with “Please Continue,” a play commissioned by New York City’s Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in collaboration with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which uses the Milgram experiments to explore the essence of the people who participate in scientific research.
Directed by EST’s William Carden, a nine-member cast skillfully portrayed the personal struggles of those connected with Milgram’s experiments—and, more broadly, early 1960s America—during a First Light Roughcut Workshop presentation last week (February 6).
From 1961 to 1962, Milgram and a few assistants conducted a series of trials involving three people each—an authoritative “experimenter,” a volunteer “teacher,” and a “learner,” who was in on the research setup but pretended to also be an unsuspecting volunteer. The teachers thought they were participating in a study on memory and learning, when in fact it was their own obedience and respect for authority that was being tested. Once their roles had been established—by what the teachers thought was a random draw—the experimenter set the other two participants up ...
