Ben
Brantley

March 20, 2016

How much do you love me? Do you love me as much as I love you? Are you happy that you love me? How happy? Children, testing their parents, aren’t the only ones who ask these childish questions; grown-ups do it ad nauseam, and never get satisfactory answers. Though our calculated use of emoji these days would seem to indicate otherwise, it remains an exasperating and thrilling fact of life that emotions cannot be quantified, particularly love. The irreducibility of love is the subject of “The Effect,” Lucy Prebble’s very clever — and ultimately more than clever — play, which opened on Sunday night at the Barrow Street Theater, artfully directed by David Cromer. Ms. Prebble, the British author of “Enron,” has come up with an ingenious variation on one of the more common romantic formulas in fiction: Put two attractive people in an unfamiliar hothouse environment, and see what blooms. Usually such a premise involves an exotic vacation, a sleep-away camp or perhaps enforced confinement due to war, natural disaster or zombie apocalypse. In “The Effect,” boy (name of Tristan Frey, played by Carter Hudson) meets girl (Connie Hall, portrayed by Susannah Flood) at a medical research center in which they are guinea pigs in a four-week pharmaceutical trial for a new antidepressant.