San Jose native’s play takes on environmental issues in nature, academia

Honeybee research tests friendship in Madhuri Shekar's 'Queen.'

In scientific terms, colony collapse disorder is the phenomenon of worker bees leaving a honeybee colony, leaving behind a queen bee, lots of food and some nurse bees to take care of the immature bees.

These dangers threaten the existence of many components of life as we know it. The pollination of plants alone accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars in the economy–plants that not only nourish society but provide opportunities for other food sources to thrive.

In Madhuri Shekar’s play “Queen,” two Ph.D. candidates at UC Santa Cruz are knocking on the door of a major breakthrough. Best friends Sanam and Ariel are from India and the United States, respectively. As their research reaches a conclusion that commercial pesticides are the culprit, and on the cusp of publishing their findings, the numbers inside the conclusion are telling a different story.

Ethical dilemmas abound in the play, beginning previews on March 6 and opening March 9 at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in partnership with Sunnyvale’s EnActe Arts. Sanam faces a critical choice: Does she move forward with the environment’s health as the No. 1 priority, or does she follow the science, which will put her career and friendship in peril?

Shekar, whose plays are produced often throughout the country, made some deliberate choices with her narrative that she began writing in 2014, the play receiving its world premiere at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater in 2017. The play is set in 2016, which is where Shekar says it will always stay, putting the story in a sort of stasis. While the play’s major plot point is a perilous phenomenon that still carries resonance today, it is the critical nature of humanity and connection that informs the play’s universality.

“The thing that still resonates is people are genuinely trying to do the right thing in a very complicated world, which I feel is what people are drawn to in this play,” Shekar said. “The characters believe deeply in what they’re doing and fundamentally have a shared view of the world. But even with that, there can be a passionate disagreement about what is the right thing to do.”

Shekar carries a few personal touchstones for the region the play is set in. She was born in San Jose and resided in the Blossom Valley neighborhood until she was 6 years old before moving to Singapore. While she later lived in India, Shekar still had one more West Coast stop to go: Los Angeles, where she earned an MFA at the University of Southern California. She now resides in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons.

The play has many intersectionalities at its core. There are conversations about privilege, including how that impacts each woman. Both have specific approaches to accessing higher levels of academia, forcing their way onto some spaces not always afforded to women. Diversity dynamics also play a strong role in the story’s power struggle.

“Diversity is nonsense without sacrifice,” Shekar said. “The head of their department is very supportive of the women on his team until they ask him to sacrifice something for the greater good, and he refuses because he still has the power and refuses to sacrifice anything. Even when you have progressive organizations willing to have honest conversations, those conversations are (nonsense) without sacrifice.”

Sacrificing is also a critical aspect of any solid friendship. While the play has lots to say about environmental and ecological concerns that society continues to wrestle with, the story is based on a much more basic principle.

“Ultimately, it’s a play about friendship, and that’s what I feel will always resonate. How do you figure out how to move forward together? I think people really feel that, which is kind of what I think about when looking at where the play is now.”

“Queen” runs March 6-31 at Lucie Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $27-$82 at theatreworks.org.

David John Chávez is chair of the American Theatre Critics Association and a two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2022-23). @davidjchavez