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Yeast Nation

Urinetown's creators return with a taste of primordial soup at the American Theater Company.

By John Beer

Illustration: Paul Spadone

WHAT Yeast Nation, a new musical from the creators of Urinetown
WHEN Sept 10–Oct 18
WHERE American Theater Company, 1909 W Byron St (773-409-4125, atcweb.org)

For their follow-up to the unlikely Broadway hit Urinetown, former Chicagoans Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann turned to the life sciences. In Yeast Nation, making its Midwest premiere at ATC, yeast cells (check out the costume sketch, right) bicker and flirt while the world’s first multicellular organism waits in the wings. Based on an advance look at the script, we asked Rabiah M. Mayas, Ph.D. and director of the science programming series Science Chicago, to comment on Yeast Nation’s cellular accuracy.

Yeasty attribute the Strictures
The yeast community lives subject to a strict set of rules that forbids the production of any new yeast to avoid food shortages.
Mayas says “The rules here work. When yeasts are in rich media with a lot of nutrients and low cell density, they happily divide in a logarithmic growth phase. But when they reach saturation, they stop dividing and enter a stationary phase.”
Grade A

Yeasty attribute cannibalism
Hero Jan-the-Second discovers a new food source: muck, a mix of wayward yeast jellies and membrane fragments.
Mayas says “Yeast aren’t really cannibals, but common yeast media used in labs contains ground-up yeast extract. So in essence, we really do feed other yeast to cells when we grow them.”
Grade A

Yeasty attribute reproduction via mitosis
Jan-the-Famished precipitates a crisis when she gives birth to a new yeast, in violation of the Strictures.
Mayas says “Hilarious! Jan’s ‘pregnancy’ seems to represent a haploid yeast about to form a full bud daughter cell through mitosis. But nutrient starvation causes diploid, not haploid, yeast to generate haploids through meiosis. So either ‘famished’ is not quite right, or Jan is actually a diploid yeast.”
Grade B

Yeasty attribute first living organisms
Yeast Nation is set in 3,000,458,000 B.C., in the primordial soup from which the first life on Earth emerged.
Mayas says “Yeast, or any eukaryote for that matter, are not believed to be the first living organisms. Those were most certainly bacteria…as the play itself briefly admits.”
Grade C+

Yeasty attribute swimming as transportation
The yeast move nimbly, and Jan-the-Second engages in a heroic swim to the ocean’s surface.
Mayas says “Yeast…cannot swim.”
Grade F

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