Fruiting Body: What Mushroom-To-Human Conversations Reveal In A New Off-Broadway Play

How do you explain the concept of childbirth to an alien intelligence, such as that of fungi? Are our family — and others — actually part of a colony that extends beyond us?

Communicating with different forms of consciousness is challenging but not impossible, as a young pregnant scientist named Yara (Chloe Mutebi) proves in Fruiting Body, a play that premiered at Brooklyn Art Haus in November as part of the Science in Theater Festival (SIT).

SIT’s mission is to bring ground-breaking research to the stage, pairing scientists with artists. In the era of ChatGPT and the endless recycling of ideas, SIT offers audiences a chance to look beyond conventional thought patterns and, in doing so, break free from programmed and controllable ways of thinking. Each play at the festival explores bold new ideas and concepts for the future.

Fruiting Body takes its name from a multicellular fungal structure, also called a sporocarp, which hosts spore-producing tissues. The play tackles difficult questions such as the fragility of life, the importance of translating the languages of other species and our relationship with the natural world.

Its protagonist Yara reflects on the difference between symbiosis and colonization. She develops a “mushroom computer” connecting her to mycelium network that ends up saving her child’s life. But it is not enough for Yara.

Driven by a self-consuming desire to experiment with the human-to-mushroom connection, she pushes the limits of scientific ethics, alienating her husband Hector (Marlon Quijije).

Embodied by the naturally extra-terrestrial Eureka (Nakano Grimes), fungal intelligence understands more about life than Yara and Hector do, though it struggles to understand human concepts and language.

Created for SIT by playwright Hannah Simms, Fruiting Body is based on Simms’s own experiences with pregnancy and motherhood. At the time she began writing the play, her child was three months old.

“You’re connected in a very profound way to someone you cannot communicate with,” Simms explains. “When I started thinking about scientists exploring the fungal world, it seemed very similar to me. Here are these beings that are expressing themselves, yet we can’t understand them.”

Yes, mushrooms can communicate with us — and some of the scientists who inspired Yara’s character in Fruiting Body are trying to listen and understand.

Simms collaborated with British computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky, a professor in unconventional computing, who has studied the electrical impulses sent by fungi and discovered that they resemble human language.

The premiere of Fruiting Body was followed by a panel discussion featuring Anand Mishra of Cornell’s Organic Robotics Lab, the lead author of another ground-breaking study on the mycelium-to-machine connection.

Mishra’s research shows how integrating mycelium into artificial systems can facilitate interaction between mechanisms and the living environment. In his lab, he has built robots fully controlled by mushrooms that respond to UV light — proving that a symbiotic relationship can be established between machines and fungi.

So mushroom-based computers already exist, and believe it or not, they have an important role to play in the future of robotics.

In Fruiting Body, fungi are a powerful metaphor for interconnectedness and symbiosis. The process of listening to mushrooms leads the audience to some profound revelations. One of them is that separation is an illusion: we are not as disconnected from each other — or from the planet — as we tend to believe.