The title, Photograph 51, refers to Dr. Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray diffraction photograph of the B form of deoxyribonucleic acid that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix, referred to in the play as the secret to life.

Photograph 51 is not to be confused with Area 51, the top-secret military base in the middle of the Nevada desert that has been the subject of much speculation as to its possible contents, including spacecrafts of aliens who, some would suggest, actually are the secret to life on earth.

On the other hand, ever since I was taken on a research tour of pizza places in the early 1970s by one of the eventual founders of Rocky Rococo Pizza and Pasta, it has always been my understanding that olive oil is the secret to life, though there also is support for yogurt in that regard, and the nucleic acid drink available prior to the performance at the Court Theatre wasn’t too bad either.

As to the play, Chaon Cross, whom I have seen in the last few years as Ella in Life Sucks and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, once again gives a strong performance, this time as Dr. Franklin.

The set of Photograph 51 includes two not too subtle spiral staircases and a second level walkway between them that reminded me of the set of Jailhouse Rock, which reminded me that the name of another prison, Attica, sounds a lot like the name of the great 1997 science fiction movie Gattaca, whose title letters G, A, T, and C, stand for guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine, the four nucleobases of DNA, thereby bringing us back to where we started, except that I would be remiss not to also mention Fahrenheit 451 and Dick Butkus as other famous 51s. Now you know why I don’t get much sleep.