Before Nixon formally declared war on cancer in 1971, Ted Kennedy had begun his fight for increased cancer research and funding in the Senate. But Kennedy’s personal battle with brain cancer ironically turned out to be the battle that would end all his previous battles. His death three weeks ago begs the question: Have we at all progressed in the fight against cancer?

Not that much, the play Secret Order tells us. Staged by the Kitchen Theatre Company and sponsored by Cornell, Secret Order by Bob Clyman reveals the malignant tumor that is lodged at heart of the very institutions that claim to be fighting the disease.

The obsessive search for the cure to cancer drives the play’s characters on a collision course with one another. Dr. William Shumway (Tony Roach) is a brilliant but socially awkward cancer researcher who is on the brink of discovering that Holy Grail. He would also rather spend hours compiling data from his laboratory mice than schmooze with the slick and suited board members of the prestigious research institute that is funding his work. Brock (Greg Bostwick), the director of the (fictitious) Hill-Matheson Institute in New York, functions as his diabolic mentor, teaching him how to play to a world that is anxious and watching, and how to sparkle in the limelight.

Moving cinematically, the play has the tight, dramatic structure of a TV thriller — and as in all TV plots, something terrible has to happen. Of course, Shumway’s experiments go wrong. Crumbling under the pressure to deliver, he remains silent about his failed research. In the background, the world spins, the media rushes to publish his findings, the scientific community is abuzz. When Alice Curiton (Kelly Galvin) — an over-enthusiastic and precocious research intern — discovers his deception, what ensues is a tizzy of negotiations, calculations and ethical dilemmas as the characters decide whom to scapegoat for the fiasco. Should it be the scientist — who very well might still produce a cancer cure — or the research institute’s director — the face of a powerful organization that holds the key to funding for research?

Like so many plays about science and technology, sacrifice is an overriding theme of Secret Order: Something has to give in the march of progress and mankind’s greater good. But the play’s characters don’t just pay the price of progress. They are victims of other people’s ambitions, and are left without the promise of a better world. The cure for cancer remains elusive. This is where the world of the play merges with that of the audience, uniting everyone.

The tension of the play turns the small, box-like space of the theater into a psychological hell that is absolutely claustrophobic. One leaves the performance entirely exhausted. (Thank goodness for the Kitchen Theater Company’s move to West State Street later this year.) The script is entirely manipulative too. One is completely aware of how the play forces the watcher under the thrall of its fast and intricate plot, yet one can’t kept help but surrender to that emotional roller coaster hurtling at break-neck speed along the play’s tragic arc. At the end of everything, the audience has to grudgingly admit that the play’s overflow of menacing lines, ominous portents and unbelievable twists worked quite brilliantly.

Even the comic moments that lighten the psychological intensity of the piece have been perfectly timed and calibrated. At work in the research laboratory, Alice and Shumway talk God, science and philosophy, hunched over mice specimens. Both have a touching innocence about them. Shumway is a scientist who never quite learned to navigate the world of institutional politics; he is escaping into that logical, eternal universe of cells and science. Alice is on the brink of adulthood, but still a child in her idealistic zeal to change the world. The intellectual banter drops abruptly and she asks the older scientist, “Do you think we should have sex?” Shumway blushes. A deep silence cuts between them like a knife. The audience waits for the coin to drop. “Well, that was awkward,” she says, cringing. “Rain check?” he asks in earnest — to a room that erupts in nervous laughter.

With her forwardness, brightness and youth, it is Alice to whom power unexpectedly falls upon at the end. She can choose to keep her silence on the vicious politics she has witnessed, or break it in the name of defending the truth. The play ends with the ball in her court: She can to bring down an entire research institute in order to defend a condemned scientist, or let that individual fade away in order to save an institution — and the future — of cancer funding.

While Clyman’s play reveals the difficulty of finding moral signposts to guide us in science, he also suggests that, like Alice, we still have choices. According Gina Kolata from The New York Times, the Cancer Institute has spent $105 billion since Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971. Yet only small changes in cancer death rates have been observed since then. We have all been touched by cancer in some way or the other. What could you do for health reform today?