Margot Connolly
At 3 PM on Thursday, March 12, as the final event in this year’s First Light Festival, the EST/Sloan Project is presenting the first public reading of HELLO, WORLD, a new play written by Margot Connolly and directed by Alex Keegan. The play takes us inside two teams of teenage girls as they compete to see who can code an app that could change the world for the better. As we watch them, we have to ask: who decides which app and cause are most worthy of winning? We had even more questions for playwright Connolly.
(Interview by Rich Kelley)
Where did the idea for HELLO, WORLD come from?
Alex Keegan, my director and collaborator, and I have been interested for a while in creating a play about girls who code. We were originally inspired by a photo of Margaret Hamilton, one of the women who worked on the guidance software for Apollo. In this picture, she’s standing next to a tower of binders taller than her. It’s all the code for the Apollo mission, written by hand. The image is so compelling—this idea that not only have women been working in these fields for so long, largely unrecognized, but also the sheer amount of work that goes into creating all these basic things. We batted around that image for a while but never had a compelling story to go along with it. Finally, we put together the idea of girls coding. There are these real-life all-girl coding competitions that are meant to encourage girls to get involved in tech. From there we were able to come up with a rough idea for a story. Last year, I turned that outline into the first draft of HELLO, WORLD.
Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton poses with the Apollo guidance software she and her team developed at MIT in 1969. Photos: MIT Museum
Why this play? Why now?
We live in a world in which teenagers are more and more empowered to change the world around them. Look at Greta Thunberg, at Emma Gonzalez, and the other gun control activists from Parkland, Florida, etc. A huge part of what they have achieved is due to their access to technology: how fluent they are in social media and how that translates into media savvy, how having access to the internet opens doors and worlds that wouldn’t have existed for them fifty years ago. At the same time, the world around them is in desperate shape. These kids are forced to fight for themselves because they have no faith that adults will fight for them—and the matters they are fighting for are literally about life and death. So looking at coding as a means of resistance for these girls, as a way for them to be able to engage with and change the world around them, especially as teenage girls who are historically not taken seriously, was most of what we were interested in while working on this play.
In a lot of ways, this play has been harder for me to work on than others because it’s so of the moment. Both the situation in Flint and the situation with abortion legislation in America are constantly changing, so it’s been interesting to figure out how to address that and make sure the information in the play is accurate, but not to the extent that I have to do a full rewrite every time a restrictive abortion bill hits the news. The specifics are less important than the need. Now more than ever, we need to be giving teenagers, particularly young women, a voice and to empower them to feel like they can make these changes to their world, and that’s what HELLO, WORLD is about.
What kind of research did you do?
Girl Code with authors Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser
I’m not a science-brained person, so I went to the library and found a bunch of books about coding meant for kids to try and wrap my head around the subject. I played some online games that teach coding to kids too, like CoderDojo. I basically treated myself like a fifth grader to get a hang of the basics. I was also super-inspired by the organization Girls Who Code and used their websites and the book Girl Code (written by Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser, who went through the Girls Who Code summer program and made a really awesome game, Tampon Run, to de-stigmatize menstruation! I also love documentaries, so watched a lot of those. The most useful was CodeGirl, about the real-life Technovation Challenge for Girls, but I also watched Flint Town and After Tiller, among other docs, to try and get a glimpse of the worlds of these girls.
The apps your two teams develop—one related to abortion, the other to clean water—are actually quite compelling. Where did the idea for them originate?
The team from Moldova whose Pure Water app won the Technovation Challenge in 2014
Part of our process was looking at the apps developed in the documentary CodeGirl, all of which serve some sort of need in their environment. One of the winning teams from previous years of the competition was a group of girls from Moldova who made an app to track contaminated well water in the community. That led us to think about how this isn’t just an issue for girls from third world countries. This was a kind of app that people in our own country could benefit from, like people in Flint who have spent the last six years dealing with uncertainty about their water supply. That led us to the idea for the team of girls from Flint, whose app is meant to track the nearest locations to collect clean, bottled water.
Heather Booth, who founded the Jane Collective in 1965 as a 19-year-old University of Chicago student
For the Iowa team, I was particularly interested in the history of the Jane Collective, a group of women in Chicago pre-Roe v. Wade who helped connect women in need to underground abortion providers, and who eventually taught themselves to administer abortions in order to provide all women with affordable and safe abortions. After Roe v. Wade, they disbanded, but when we considered that many states are down to one abortion clinic and when the financial strain and time commitment of getting to and from that clinic makes getting an abortion difficult if not impossible, we started thinking about what the modern-day equivalent to the Jane Collective would be, and that’s where the idea of the app from the Iowa team was born.
What do you want the audience to take away from HELLO, WORLD?
That teenage girls are amazing and can do more than most people give them credit for! Also, it’s worth thinking about what function these competitions actually serve. Their goal is to encourage young women to get involved in tech, which is great, but they do so by creating a competitive environment as opposed to encouraging these girls to collaborate and support each other. This focus on competition furthers the idea that there can only be one winner—-that there is room in this field (or any field) only for the most exceptional women and that you must, therefore, be in direct competition with other women for your spot. If they succeed, it means you’ve failed. What do we gain by pitting young women against each other like this? Both of these apps are good ideas and both of them could do an enormous amount of good—so why pick only one? Who gets to decide what is most important, whose need is greater? Why is this an all-or-nothing game? We’d like people to be thinking about those questions when they leave the play!
When did you first realize playwriting was your thing?
I went to a very small middle and high school that did three shows a year: a straight play in the fall, the musical in the winter, and in the spring, the student-written and -directed one-act plays. I started acting in those plays in seventh grade and by the time I hit high school I was desperate to take the playwriting class, which was a group of maybe six students sitting on couches in the teacher’s office (which also doubled as the green room.) I ended up taking it seven times and wrote seven plays by the time I graduated— two of them were produced in the spring one-acts—and from there I never looked back. I’ve been writing plays now for more than half my life, and I feel super fortunate that I was able to find my passion at fourteen years old. Maybe that’s part of the reason that I also feel so drawn to these girls in HELLO, WORLD. I know what it’s like to be a teenager: to know what you want to do and to just have to figure out how to do it!
What’s next for Margot Connolly?
I’m currently in my last term at Juilliard, so I’m working on my last play there (based on a real-life disappearance from my college town in the 1940s) before I graduate in May! In the past five years, I’ll have gotten an MFA, an artist’s diploma from Juilliard, and written twelve plays, so next for me is to be out of school at last!
The 2020 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from January 16 through March 12 and features readings and workshop productions of ten new plays. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-second year.
