Carl Djerassi, a key player in the creation of the of the first oral contraceptive pill back in 1951, is also a playwright, and his play Taboos has just been staged for the Bulgarian audience.

In Bulgaria, Taboos ("Табу", as it is called in Bulgarian) is a production of the Sofia-based Theatre Vuzrazhdane, and was presented for the first time on October 23 2008 in Veliko Turnovo. Djerassi was present for the event.

But why would the professor of chemistry, Emeritus, at Stanford University cross the globe to see the premiere of a show in a language that he does not understand?

It turns that Djerassi is of Bulgarian origin, born in 1923 to an Austrian Ashkenazi Jewish mother and a Bulgarian Sephardic Jewish father in Vienna; he lived the first five years of his life in Sofia. After his parents divorced, he and his mother moved to Vienna, though he returned to spend each summer with his father in Bulgaria. In 1939, after a year in Bulgaria following the 1938 entry of the Nazi regime to Austria, Carl and his mother moved to the United States.

A university degree in organic chemistry from Kenyon College (1942) and a PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison (1945) were accompanied by his first patent, for the antihistamine Pyribenzamine. After World War 2, in 1949, Djerassi, by then an American citizen, went to work as the associate director of research at Syntex in Mexico City. It was there that he was part of the trio that synthesised the first oral birth control pill.

He has been a chemistry professor at Stanford University, in California's San Francisco Bay Area, since 1959, and, in the meantime, has been awarded both the National Medal of Science (for "the Pill") and the National Medal of Technology (for promoting new approaches to insect control).

For the past 19 years, in addition to science and research, he has also been writing. Fiction works like Futurist and Other Stories (1989) and The Bourbaki Gambit (1994). Dramas like Oxygen (2001, with Roald Hoffmann, co-author), Four Jews on Parnassus, or Calculus, which looks at the Isaac Newton vs Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz claims on inventing calculus in the 17th century.

For this latter, Djerassi said at a news conference at Sofia City Library on October 24, he checked every word of the text against the Oxford English Dictionary, and did not use one that had appeared in the English language later than the life of Newton.

The news conference was held in connection with Djerassi's play Taboos, and its October 24 staging in Sofia and October 25 staging in Plovdiv. Along with Djerassi were present play director Georgi Mihalkov, composer Vesselina Dragolova-Danailova and Yaakov Djerassi, Carl's son and producer of the play.

Taboos deals with two couples, illustrating "the two extremes of American society", Carl Djerassi said - a lesbian relationship in San Francisco, and a heterosexual fundamentalist Christian couple. "This is, socially, a complicated and provocative play," he said.

Talking about adapting it for a Bulgarian audience, he said that the lesbian pair translated directly, that "there would be no trouble understanding it, though [the Bulgarian public] might not sympathise with it". It was the extremely religious couple that might not be understandable in this culture.

The problem of interpreting Taboos came in that "culturally, you do not associate with [religious fundamentalism] in Bulgaria - you may even wonder why to spend so much time discussing it", Djerassi said.

Djerassi said that the post-9/11 "explosion" in the US of fundamentalist principles had turned also into a political force, and that he was "very concerned about this problem".

At the September 2008 premiere of the play in New York City, one of the characters, Priscilla, drew comparisons to Republican presidential candidate John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin. "Many people found Priscilla to be an example of Palin," Djerassi said, as regards fundamentalist principles. For example, Palin preaches not having sex before marriage, but her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. "I'm not judging her daughter," he said. "But it is not right to preach one thing and practise another."

"I wanted to illustrate how [the two couples] deal with sex and reproduction, which can be somewhat hypocritical."

Sharing his observations of sitting in the packed auditorium at the Veliko Turnovo performance, Djerassi said that he could only imagine what the actors were doing, given that he does not know Bulgarian. "But in the plays I write, the words are very important." Hearing the audience laugh at various parts pleased him, though he knew not to what they were reacting.

Hours of discussion and talking after the play with director Mihalkov, during which were explained various re-arranging of scenes and the challenges of making it applicable to the Bulgarian public, illuminated some of the blank spots, and Djerassi said that he was anticipating seeing the performance again.