Does the end result of greater scientific knowledge justify the means used to get there? That’s the question implied during Georgia Perimeter College’s Theatre Arts Guild production “An Experiment with an Air Pump,” which opens this weekend.

Written by playwright Shelagh Stephenson, the play deals with scientific discovery and how scientists in two different centuries handle the ethical challenges they face during their scientific inquiry.

[The play] “offers a whole series of moral problems across two centuries, for it is simultaneously set in the same room at the end of 1799 and the end of 1999, switching from one date to the other as New Year’s Eve approaches,” says Sally Robertson, GPC theatre professor and the play’s director. “The simultaneous staging of similarity and difference, past and present, light and dark results in a drama that grapples with issues of ethics and belief and requires its audience to do the same. This is a play that gathers momentum as a drama and poses questions that each person must answer for themselves.”

Following the April 19 show, Robertson, along with nursing instructor Debra Gogatz and physics and astronomy professor Dr. Jim Guinn, will lead a discussion of the ethics of the science presented in the play.

Shows are 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, April 10-11 and April 17-18 and 3 p.m. on Sundays, April 12 and 19.

The play is suggested for teens 16 and older. Neither children nor infants will be admitted. It will be presented on stage in studio seating in the Cole Auditorium in the Clarkston Campus Fine Arts Building, located at 555 N. Indian Creek Road, Clarkston. Reservations are strongly suggested.

General admission tickets are $15 or free with GPC ID. For tickets, call 678-891-3572, or go to gpctagtx@gpc.edu.