Melisa Tien on coding, launching a FemTech app, VC sexism, and DISRUPTED

Melisa Tien Photo: Joseph O’Malley

How much of a game changer for women is the ability to code? What are the challenges in developing an app about women’s health? In her provocative new play DISRUPTED, Melisa Tien explores how two women join forces to create a brand-new app—one that tracks the menstrual cycle—and form a partnership that gets tested to its limits.

DISRUPTED will have its first public reading this Thursday, May 23 at 3:00 PM at the Ensemble Studio Theater as part of the 2024 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free and reservations are encouraged.

Melisa generously found time between rewrites and rehearsals to talk to us about the play and her process.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did DISRUPTED come to be?

 I’ve had an interest in FemTech for a while, initially as a consumer, and then as a female freelancer participating in work environments that are traditionally male-dominated. All of this was on my mind when I proposed a narrative based on the origins of the first menstruation-tracking app for EST’s Sloan commission. The play has changed a lot since that proposal, in terms of what the crux of the conflict is, and what’s at stake. I’m exceedingly grateful to EST for being so helpful and encouraging through all the permutations. 

Why this play? Why now? 

Ida Tin, Danish entrepreneur who invented Clue, the first menstruation-tracking app in 2013, and also coined the term “FemTech” for technology designed for women’s health. CC2.0

I diverged from the true story of the first menstruation-tracking app in significant ways. One of them was that I changed the setting from Denmark to the U.S. I’m more familiar with the workplace culture, gender gap, and history of tech in the U.S. To me, these topics are as germane to contemporary life as they were a decade ago when the play is set. I also elected to change the ethnicity of the named characters to those of Asian descent. A decade ago, I would have considered this a sure-fire way of killing any chances of the play being produced. Today, it feels like an invitation to an ever-growing pool of actors of Asian descent, and an ever-growing audience that embraces work featuring predominantly Asian casts, to engage with thoughtful and thought-provoking storytelling.  

What would you like the audience to take away from DISRUPTED? 

That they’ve seen something engrossing unfold between two people, and they’re unsure whether either one was 100% in the right or 100% in the wrong. Also—how apropos it is that the context is the trial-by-fire world of tech and app development. 

Do you code? Have you ever developed an app yourself?

I’ve taken a couple of free HTML coding courses through the New York Public Library’s TechConnect program. We didn’t go as far as app development; we only created very basic websites. I do have a friend who’s a musician who has successfully developed apps geared toward music-making.

A screen from the menstruation-tracking app Clue

Did you work with a consultant? How did that change the play?

I got the chance to speak at length with the person who coded the apps that my musician friend published. He provided a ton of insight—he assured me that the way the story plays out is believable, he offered details on what constitutes “good” and “bad” code, and he explained how databases associated with apps can often be more valuable than the users themselves, among many other things. All of this impacted what I put into, and how I told, the story.

As you present it in the play, coding seems to offer truly disruptive power. It can be a tool for good in enabling a socially enriching app or it can be a means of mischief, even destruction. Does the ability to code change the game for women who code?

Today there are organizations whose mission is to get more women (and any non-male-identifying folx, for that matter) into coding; there’s still a pretty stark gap in the industry. Because of this, if you’re a woman who can code, and code well, you stand a good chance of getting hired over a male with similar abilities. I’d add that being a coder is thought of as the lowest level of a hierarchy that places developers above coders, and software engineers above developers. Any of these levels is available to women (or anyone non-male identifying) for the taking.

How did you make the scenes Juni has with the venture capitalists so sadly, comically on the nose? Did you interview any VCs as part of your research? 

As it turns out, I did not interview any VCs or angel investors, partly because I didn’t want them to feel like I was pointedly criticizing them—though I do have criticisms about their approach. Instead, I dug around and found the kinds of comments the real founder of the first menstruation-tracking app received when she went through her first round of pitching. She pitched only to men (unsurprising for the time), and though their feedback was given in good faith and intended to be helpful, it seems patently absurd from my perspective as someone who menstruates and uses a menstruation-tracking app religiously. That vast disconnect—of experience and understanding—is sad, funny, and also fascinating to me.

From left, Jennifer Tsay (Shin-Yi) and Jaime Schwarz (Juni)

In your recent rewrite of DISRUPTED, you begin with Shin-Yi and Juni onstage reflecting on their journey together so that it becomes something of a “memory” play. Why make that change?  

I’m interested in seeing them tell their story as a team, up to the point where the app gets massive amounts of funding and really explodes. Then I’m interested in seeing how their narratives begin to diverge.  I’m intrigued by how different perspectives translate to different accounts of how an event happened, and how and why things went wrong. 

What message does DISRUPTED have for those interested in launching a successful app?

Launching an app is not unlike putting a work of theater out in the world, insofar as if you have an idea, and the will to bring that idea to fruition, then you’re well on your way. Both require insane amounts of hard work to realize, but just about anyone with a good idea, tenacious will, and decent-to-exceptional ability can do it.

You’ve written as many librettos for operas—and had them produced—as you have plays. How is writing a libretto different from writing a play? Do you have a preference? 

When I write a libretto, I start with a detailed outline prior to writing the first line of text. The outline indicates every plot point and every moment where one or more singers will sing a big number. After I finish a draft of a libretto, much of the revision happens within the songs; I focus on fine-tuning the lyrics. When I write a play, more likely than not, there’s no outline and I’m going on instinct, forging ahead with only a vague notion of where I’m headed. Once I’ve got a messy draft down, I’ll revise—plot, structure, characters, whatever needs revising. I like writing plays and librettos equally, as both are such different processes; they exercise different parts of my brain.

What’s next for Melisa Tien? 

In June, with support from The Assembly, I’ll be showing an excerpt of a piece about autonomous driving technology and its impact on the long-haul trucking industry and long-distance truckers in particular. It will have movement and text and is based on interviews I did with truckers along Interstate-80 over the course of a cross-country research trip. Next year, I’m premiering a couple of short operas, one with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and one with American Opera Projects here in New York City. And somewhere in between, I’m hoping to make a short film.

DISRUPTED is one of six readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 17. All readings are free, but reservations are encouraged. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.       

Jacquelyn Reingold on fear, neuroscience, sexism, playwrights over 50, and FEAR LESS

Jacquelyn Reingold

What would life be like if you could not experience fear? How much fear do we need? Which part of the brain governs fear? FEAR LESS, the compelling new play by Jacquelyn Reingold, tells the story of Orva, whose damaged amygdala prevents her from feeling fear, and Nadine, the neuroscientist who spends years studying her. What transpires is an investigation into fear, fearlessness, boundaries, friendship, and the struggle to survive.

FEAR LESS will have its first public reading this Thursday, May 16 at 3:00 PM at the Ensemble Studio Theater as part of the 2024 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free and reservations are encouraged.

Squeezing in time between rehearsals, rewrites, and other commitments, Jacquelyn Reingold kindly agreed to tell us more.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for FEAR LESS come from?

The idea for FEAR LESS came from reading about a real person, studied for decades, because she was “fearless.” There was a brief explosion of articles, social media, about a woman with this unusual condition. The more I read, the more questions I had, and the more intrigued I was. It got me thinking about the role of fear in women’s lives. I wondered what would happen if two women: one “fearless,” and one “fearful,” were put together, dramatically. That’s where the play began.

FEAR LESS covers so much: the neuroscience of what happens when someone has a damaged amygdala, the complex relationship that can develop between a researcher and her subject, the power politics of scientific research. What research did you do to write this play?

I talked with several neuroscientists about fear, which, I quickly learned, was infinitely complex. I read articles and books that discussed conflicting, changing, theories. The research was, for me, a way to find questions to write to, and themes to dig into. At a certain point the play took over. I then cared about the characters, their lives, their arcs, and I hoped the audience would, as well. The play became the thing. I tried to find these two women’s stories, best I could.

I also heard from neuroscientists about sexism and racism in the field, and in academia in general, past and present. One story about the male professors in a department lunching at a strip club without the one female professor, stuck with me. In addition to many anecdotes of biased practices around funding, hiring, assignments, credit, promotions, grants. It was a long list.

What do you want the audience to take away from FEAR LESS?

My hope is that people will leave the play thinking about the experience of fear — for Orva, a white working-class woman, with a damaged “fear center,” and for Nadine, a Black neuroscientist, with a sensitive “fear center.” And I hope people will think about the role of fear in all our lives, but especially for women. How much do we need? How much is too much, or too little? And how, like Orva and Nadine, are we different, similar, allied, impossibly apart, and how we might come together. Or not.

Your play String Fever about string theory, the Theory of Everything, and other string-related subjects, was an EST/Sloan Mainstage Production in 2003. What makes writing an EST/Sloan play different?

The specific challenge for me, in writing an EST/Sloan play, is finding how to make the science personal. If I don’t find a personal way in, I can’t write it. If I can’t find a story I care about, I don’t want to write it. I write plays because I love to explore characters I love, so if I can’t find that piece of their heart that moves me, and makes me want to imagine their stories, I won’t write the play. And science doesn’t necessarily lead to that. At least not for me.

Evan Handler with Jacquelyn Reingold at the Lillys in 2023

You received a Lilly Award last year for your work as a playwright and for co-founding Honor Roll!, an advocacy group for women playwrights over 40. How did Honor Roll! come about? Have you been able to measure its impact?

Yes, I received a Lilly Award last year, as a playwright and as an advocate. It was thrilling. Honor Roll! an organization I co-founded, received a monetary award as well. Honor Roll! is a grass-roots group that advocates for women+ playwrights over 40. Since its founding, I’ve discovered it’s women over 50 that are (mission statement:) “the generation once excluded because of sexism, now overlooked because of ageism.” Playwright Cheryl Davis and I are on a campaign to meet with every theater in New York to advocate for greater inclusion for women playwrights over 50. Future seasons will tell us if we’ve succeeded. We are not giving up.

In his speech introducing you at the Lilly Awards, Evan Handler (who was in String Fever at EST) attested that you are his favorite playwright, noting “I love Jackie’s plays because they mine a life that’s full of truths stranger than fiction, to create metaphors more perfect than poetry.” He then went on to say that your plays are “shockingly underproduced.” Why do you think that is?

I was so happy when EST member Evan Handler, who directed my first play, and was in String Fever, introduced me at the Lillys. Why are my plays, as Evan said, “shockingly unproduced?” I guess you’d have to ask theaters. Maybe I said, and did, too many stupid things when I was younger. Or maybe there were too few opportunities then, and at a certain point, I wasn’t marketable. I didn’t go to an elite MFA program. I never had a mentor. I don’t care about fashion; I write what interests me. Or maybe theaters don’t like my writing! But once I passed my mid-40s, almost all of the small-theater opportunities I’d had, disappeared, and never returned. Happily, I was embraced by TV, where I had fun getting paid, writing for some great shows, and working with some amazing people. But I always missed what I most loved: writing plays.

What’s next for Jacquelyn Reingold?

What’s next for me? Another play.

FEAR LESS is one of six readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 17. All readings are free, but reservations are encouraged. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.       

Las Borinqueñas: The Science and History Behind the Play

The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the science and history behind Las Borinqueñas, the 2023/2024 Mainstage Production of the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in collaboration with the Latinx Playwrights Circle & Boundless Theatre Company.  Las Borinqueñas began previews at the Ensemble Studio Theatre on April 3 and ran through May 5.

An essay by Rich Kelley

The United States in the 1950s was an unlikely place to develop the first oral contraceptive. The U.S. Federal Government and 30 states banned birth control. The NIH, the National Science Foundation, and the WHO refused to support reproductive research. Pharmaceutical companies considered testing an oral contraceptive too risky: They would need healthy women of childbearing age as test subjects. Why would those women want to take part?

Birth control activists wanted to fund the development of a “simple, foolproof birth control method,” preferably a pill. They approached Dr. Gregory Pincus, whose work studying fertility had earned him a reputation as something of a “mad scientist.” As a researcher at Harvard, Pincus garnered national attention when he developed the first test tube rabbit embryo. Scare headlines about “fatherless babies” followed and Pincus was denied tenure.

Pincus accepted the challenge to develop a birth control pill. He focused his research on progesterone, “nature’s contraceptive.” When an egg is fertilized, progesterone prepares the uterus for implantation and shuts down the ovaries, so no more eggs are produced. Could progesterone be put into a pill, effectively tricking a woman’s body into thinking it was pregnant?

From left: Celson-Ramon Garcia, John Rock, Gregory Pincus (seated) in 1957. Source: Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research

Pincus began doing animal studies using synthetic progesterone with promising results. For the first human tests, he partnered with Dr. John Rock. Rock had been working on curing infertility by injecting women with progesterone and estrogen to pause ovulation and allow the reproductive system to reset. In one study, after stopping the hormones, 13 of 80 patients became pregnant within four months, an effect gynecologists called the "Rock rebound." At Pincus's suggestion, Rock tried the same experiment with the new oral contraceptive, with similar success.

For their first large-scale clinical trial, Pincus and Rock chose Puerto Rico, where the population had surged by 18% in a decade, a growth which caused concern among American politicians and activists (often, but not always, motivated by xenophobia and racism) as well as some of the Puerto Rican upper classes. Unlike the mainland U.S., birth control was legal in Puerto Rico. Sixty-seven family planning clinics promoted the rhythm method, provided diaphragms, spermicides, or condoms, and also referred patients to hospitals for sterilization. Many physicians and reformers believed sterilization was the solution to population control. Hospitals had policies urging maternal patients to have la operación after delivery; some required it after the third child. One survey in 1953-54 found that 40% of all women who had practiced some form of contraception had had la operación. But Puerto Rican women were often not informed by their doctors that sterilization is permanent. 

Dr. Edris Rice-Wray consulting with low-income women in the 1950s Source: Henrylee Marlo CC4.0

Oral contraceptive trials began in Rio Piedras in 1956, directed by American Dr. Edris Rice-Wray and Puerto Rican social worker Iris Rodriguez. They selected a group of 100 women and a control group of another 125. Participants had to be under 40 and must have already had two children to ensure fertility. The trial targeted economically disadvantaged women in Puerto Rico, who were often marginalized and lacked access to adequate healthcare. Many of these women were not adequately informed about the potential risks and benefits of the pill. Some were not aware that they were participating in a clinical trial and taking an experimental drug. 

Rice-Wray gave each woman a 20-day supply of the pills, known as Enovid. "When the bottle is over and you start menstruating," she told her participants, "you count one, two, three, on your fingers, and when you have counted all your fingers, that is the time to start again" on a new bottle. If birth rates went down among participants taking Enovid compared with those in the control group, the pill could be deemed effective.

Enovid, the first birth control pill from G. D. Searle Source: G.D. Searle & Co.

The pills used in the first trials contained an extremely high dose of hormones: more than 10 times the average dose of the pill today. Many participants experienced extreme, sometimes debilitating, side effects. Rice-Wray recorded her findings: among the first 221 women in the study, about 17% had negative reactions and 25 withdrew because of those reactions. There were complaints of dizziness, nausea, headaches, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Pincus considered most of these psychosomatic. Some women reported severe complications, such as blood clots and strokes. The high incidence of adverse reactions raised concerns about the safety of the pill and the adequacy of monitoring and oversight during the trial. Even more troubling, three women died during the trials, but because there were no autopsies, it was never learned if the pill was a factor in their deaths. After the trial concluded, there was limited follow-up and long-term monitoring of the participants to assess the lasting effects of the contraceptive pill. 

By the end of 1958, more than 800 women had enrolled in tests of the pill, but only 130 had taken it for a year or more. To disguise this shortfall, Pincus presented his data in terms of the number of menstrual cycles instead of the number of women. "In the 1,279 menstrual cycles during which the regime of treatment was meticulously followed,” Pincus wrote, “there was not a single pregnancy.” 1,279 menstrual cycles sounded more impressive than 130 women. 

In 1957, the FDA approved pharmaceutical giant Searle’s application for Enovid as a treatment for menstrual disorders and infertility. The FDA finally approved Enovid as a contraceptive in May 1960. By 1965, more than 6.5 million married women and an untold number of unmarried women in the U.S. were using the pill.

The introduction of the birth control pill marked a revolutionary turning point in women's reproductive rights, societal roles, and economic empowerment. With the ability to control when and if they became pregnant, women gained unprecedented freedom to make decisions about their bodies and futures. This autonomy extended beyond family planning to encompass educational pursuits, career advancement, and personal fulfillment and to challenge traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor force participation rate of women aged 25 to 54 in the United States increased from 34.9% in 1950 to 60% in 1999. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the gender wage gap narrowed from 60% in 1960 to 75% in 2020.

Labor Force Participation of Women in the USA, 1955–2005 Source: Our World in Data

By enabling women to control their fertility and delay childbirth, the pill has reduced maternal and infant mortality in countries with high fertility rates and has empowered women to pursue higher education and increased women’s labor force participation worldwide. Yet, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 214 million women of reproductive age in developing regions have an unmet need for modern contraception, highlighting the persistent barriers to access.

Today, about 10 million women in the U.S. use the pill, and 13 million have undergone sterilization. However, in 2016, 40% of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age who used birth control had been sterilized, while less than 10% surveyed used an oral contraceptive. During the Zika outbreak of that year, a temporary CDC assistance program made many forms of birth control available for free and included a broad education campaign to inform women of the opportunity. During that program, there was a surge in women accessing birth control, suggesting that price and information access are both factors that continue to make birth control less accessible to Puerto Rican women today.

Resources:

Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. University of California Press, 2002.

Eng, Jonathan. The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Garcia, Ana Maria, La Operación documentary, 40 minutes. Latin American Film Project, 1982.

Lankford, Kathryn. More than a Way Station: Ground-Level Experiences in the Field Trials of Oral Contraceptives and IUDs in Puerto Rico, 1956-1966 (Ph.d dissertation, 2021)

Ramirez de Arellano, Annette, and Conrad Seipp. Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception: A History of Birth Control in Puerto Rico. The University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Speroff, Leon. A Good Man, Gregory Goodwin Pincus: The Man, His Story, the Birth Control Pill.  Arnica Publishing Inc., 2009.

Tone, Andrea. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. Hill & Wang, 2001.

World Health Organization, “Contraception”

“Las Borinqueñas is more than a title” A Personal Statement from Nelson Diaz-Marcano

Las Borinqueñas is more than a title.

More than a play. They are the women who help a whole country not only survive but preserve its identity. They’re the people who raised and cared for me and mine everyday, despite everything trying to tell them we were not worth it. Las Borinqueñas are our mothers, sisters, partners, friends, who take care of their community despite themselves. Las Borinqueñas are heroes who are often forgotten.

Nelson Diaz-Marcano (Photo: Jackie Abbott)

My obsession with this story started years ago when I was living with my then girlfriend who had severe menstrual pains. Her doctor suggested the pill might help and she only found one that helped after years of trying different formulas which often left her paralyzed from deep cramps or so uncomfortable she had to forgo eating that day. This led me to study the birth control pill history and to my shock I found that the trials had not only happened illegally in my homeland, but that I knew someone that had been through them. She  had passed away of natural causes by the time I found the story, so I never got to talk to her. This woman who sacrificed her body to help create the miracle of birth control had been buried and barely anybody knew her name. Yet everyone knows the name of Gregory Pincus, Edris Rice-Wray, John Rock and Margaret Sanger.

That unfairness, that these people who gave everything could be lost to time, while these people that took advantage took all the credit, didn’t sit well with me. It doesn’t sit well with me because it’s another part of the erasure of a culture so beautiful that to conquer it,  you have to make them forget who they are.

But Las Borinqueñas won’t let us forget.

My mother Carmen Yaritza Marcano, who woke up every morning, despite rheumatoid arthritis, to make sure we were fed and educated, wouldn’t let me do that.

My abuela Hilda Suarez, who was one of the most respected teachers and one of the first post office workers in Gurabo Puerto Rico, won’t let me do that.

My other abuela Victoria Rodriguez who raised kids since she was a teenager, would never let me do that.

And my sister Yarinel Diaz is a living reminder of the everyday strength that is required to exist as a Borinqueña. Yet she thrives.

All these women were matriarchs of a proud but embattled culture.

As a child, Hilda was paraded in an American flag dress through the town square so she could receive benefits once her father died and her sister couldn’t work.

Victoria was married to my grandfather when she was 12; she had to raise her own kids, but also the kids from my grandfather’s other wives.

All these women were the women the community relied on.

My mother helped heroin addicts recover, fed people in need and never denied help to anybody, even while she acted like she hated helping.

My abuela Victoria is considered a matriarch not only by my grandfather’s children but by the whole community of the Barrio Jaguas.

My abuela Hilda was an unofficial advisor to local politicians from my town. She also taught English to most of the town in the 60s and 70s.

It continues with my sister, who after taking care of my mother for more than 15 years, created a fitness program  to improve the lives of older people in our hometown.

These are the women who raised me. The woman who would never let me forget. So I won’t let you forget them. This play is for them. Because without them I would be nothing. Without them, Puerto Rico would have been a memory. Thank you Borinqueñas.

Las Borinqueñas is the 2023/2024 Mainstage Production of the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in collaboration with the Latinx Playwrights Circle & Boundless Theatre Company. It began previews at the Ensemble Studio Theatre on April 3 and ran through May 5.

Writer/scholar Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez and sociologists Iris López and María E. Pérez y González join playwright Nelson Diaz-Marcano to discuss contraceptives, clinical trials, and LAS BORINQUEÑAS

From left, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, Iris López, María E. Pérez y González, Nelson Diaz-Marcano

On Saturday, May 4, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of LAS BORINQUEÑAS, the powerful new drama by Nelson Diaz-Marcano,  everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback discussion about the cultural, historical, and scientific background of the play.

Set in the 1950s in Puerto Rico, LAS BORINQUEÑAS tells the stories of María, Fernanda, Yolanda, Rosa, and Chavela, all fighting to live full lives in a changing country with crushing societal rules for women. Into their lives comes the American scientist Dr. Gregory Pincus, trying to find test subjects for a clinical trial to test the safety and effectiveness of the first birth control pill, an invention that could give women everywhere freedom. This is a story about medical innovation and the women who risked everything for the chance to live. The audience will have the opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.

The author of LAS BORINQUEÑAS, Nelson Diaz-Marcano, will moderate the discussion with Latino Studies writer/scholar Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, and sociologists Iris López and María E. Pérez y González.

LAS BORINQUEÑAS is the 2024 mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the world of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-fifth year. 

About the Panelists

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at CUNY Hunter and is the Directora of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO). She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translation, Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press). Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez was a Duke University Mellon SITPA Fellow, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow. She is the PI and co-director of the 2022-2024 Andrew W. Mellon funded “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $2M Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies.

Iris López

Iris López is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Program in Latin American and Latin@ Studies at City College of New York, a program she has directed for several terms beginning in 1999. Previously, Dr. López has chaired the Sociology Department (2013-2016), the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Committee (2005-2008), and she was Director of the Women’s Studies Program (1996-1999). She is the author of Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Her book Telling To Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, co-authored with the Latina Feminist Group, won the 2002 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Her research and publications on the Puerto Rican Diaspora in Hawai’i and on sterilization abuse of Puerto Rican women has highlighted crucial connections to globalization, reproductive freedom, and social justice. As an invited speaker and panelist at numerous U.S.-based and international conferences, Dr. López continues to present critical work and speak about her areas of expertise in Latino/ education, gender issues, pre-natal care, and sterilization abuse.

María E. Pérez y González

María E. Pérez y González, Ph.D. (Sociology, Fordham University, National Institute of Mental Health Fellow), is a first-generation Puerto Rican born in Brooklyn, NY, and a first-generation college graduate of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Having taught for over 32 years, she is a Professor in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY, with 17 years as Chairperson. Having recently served as Interim Dean of the School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts, she is the Co-Director of the María E. Sánchez Center for Latinx Studies. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and has completed the Harvard Management Development Program and the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities Leadership Academy: Executive Leadership in Higher Education. Her research includes DiaspoRicans, Latinxs, women in ministry, and Pentecostals; she is the author of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. (Greenwood Press 2000) and co-editor of Puerto Rican Studies in the City University of New York: The First 50 Years (Centro Press 2021).

About the Moderator

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

Nelson Diaz-Marcano is a Puerto Rican NYC-based theater maker, advocate, and community leader whose mission is to create work that challenges and builds community. His play, LAS BORINQUEÑAS, is the 2024 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production in April 2024. He currently serves as the Literary Director for the Latinx Playwright Circle where he has helped develop over 100 plays in the past three years. His plays have been developed by the Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Road Theatre Company, Pipeline Theatre Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Lark, Vision Latino Theater Company, The Orchard Project, The William Inge Theatre Festival, Classical Theatre of Harlem, and The Parsnip Ship, among others. Recent credits include: World Classic (Bishop Theatre Arts Center), Y Tu Abuela, Where is She? Part 1 (CLATA), When the Earth Moves, We Dance (Clubbed Thumb, Teatro Vivo), The Diplomats (Random Acts Chicago), Paper Towels (INTAR), Misfit, America (Hunter Theatre Company), I Saw Jesus in Toa Baja (Conch Shell Productions), and Revolt! (Vision Latino Theatre Company).

 LAS BORINQUEÑAS began previews on April 3 and runs through May 5 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Biochemist Mandë Holford, Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller join Playwrights Nelson Diaz-Marcano, Anna Ziegler and Playwright-Actor Naomi Lorrain for the 2023 EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event on Zoom

From left, Mandë Holford, Daniela Schiller, Nelson Diaz-Marcano, Anna Ziegler, Naomi Lorrain

Where do ideas for plays come from? How do you develop a play? How is an EST/Sloan play different?

Playwrights! Join us on Monday, November 20, 2023, at 7:30 PM for the 2023 EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Virtual Event, the annual far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion among scientists and playwrights about science, storytelling, and what makes plays work. This year’s event will be online and is free for any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology. Registration is required. Once registered, you will receive the event access link in your confirmation email. You can register here.

WHAT MAKES A PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE GREAT?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 24 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theater companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide. Commissions range from $5,000 to $10,000.

Applications for this year’s EST/Sloan commissions are currently open and will be accepted through December 15, 2023. You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage.

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

1) The First Light Festival is a month-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and

2) A full mainstage production of at least one work. Recent mainstage productions have included Smart (2023) by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton about AI technology and trust, what you are now (2022) by Sam Chanse about memory and trauma, Behind the Sheet (2019) by Charly Evon Simpson about how American gynecology began with experiments on slaves (a NY Times Critic’s Pick), BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions, and Photograph 51 (2010) by Anna Ziegler about Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of DNA.

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Dr. Mandë Holford

Dr. Mandë Holford is a Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at The American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine. Her joint appointments reflect her interdisciplinary research, which goes from mollusks to medicine, combining chemistry and biology to discover, characterize, and deliver novel peptides from venomous marine snails for manipulating cellular physiology in pain and cancer. Her laboratory investigates the power of venom to transform organisms and to transform lives when it is adapted to create novel therapeutics for treating human diseases and disorders. She is active in science education, advancing the public understanding of science, and science diplomacy. She co-founded Killer Snails, LLC, an award-winning EdTech learning games company. Her honors include being named: a 2023 NIH Pioneer Awardee, a 2020 Sustainability Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, Breakthrough Women in Science by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and NPR’s Science Friday, a Wings Women of Discovery fellow, an NSF CAREER awardee, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. Her Ph.D. is from The Rockefeller University, USA.

Dr. Daniela Schiller

Dr. Daniela Schiller is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research is focused on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories. Schiller got her PhD in Tel Aviv University where she developed a laboratory model for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. She then continued to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University where she examined methods for emotional memory modification in the human brain. Schiller joined Mount Sinai in 2010 and has been directing the affective neuroscience laboratory since. Her lab has delineated the neural computations of threat learning, how the brain modifies emotional memories using imagination, and the dynamic tracking of affective states and social relationships. Schiller’s work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and has been the recipient of many awards, including the New York Academy of Sciences’ Blavatnik Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences. 

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

Nelson Diaz-Marcano is a Puerto Rican NYC-based theater maker, advocate, and community leader whose mission is to create work that challenges and builds community. His play, LAS BORINQUEÑAS, will be the 2024 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production in April 2024. He currently serves as the Literary Director for the Latinx Playwright Circle where he has helped develop over a 100 plays in the past three years. His plays have been developed by the Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Road Theatre Company, Pipeline Theatre Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Lark, Vision Latino Theater Company, The Orchard Project, The William Inge Theatre Festival, Classical Theatre of Harlem, and The Parsnip Ship, among others. Recent credits include: World Classic (Bishop Theatre Arts Center), Y Tu Abuela, Where is She? Part 1 (CLATA), When the Earth Moves, We Dance (Clubbed Thumb, Teatro Vivo), The Diplomats (Random Acts Chicago), Paper Towels (INTAR), Misfit, America (Hunter Theatre Company), I Saw Jesus in Toa Baja (Conch Shell Productions), and Revolt! (Vision Latino Theatre Company).

Anna Ziegler

Anna Ziegler’s plays include the widely produced Photograph 51 (West End, directed by Michael Grandage and starring Nicole Kidman; named the number one play of 2019 by the Chicago Tribune; winner of London’s WhatsOnStage Award for Best New Play; available on Audible and in Methuen Drama’s Modern Classics series), The Last Match (Roundabout; Old Globe; Writers Theatre), The Wanderers (Old Globe; Roundabout; City Theatre; Gesher Theater (Israel); Ernst Deutsch Theater (Germany); Craig Noel Award for Outstanding New Play), A Delicate Ship (NY Times Critic’s Pick), Actually (Geffen Playhouse; Williamstown; Manhattan Theatre Club; Trafalgar Studios in London and many more; L.A. Ovation Award winner for Playwriting for an Original Play). Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama has published two collections of her work entitled Anna Ziegler: Plays One and Anna Ziegler: Plays Two. She is developing television and movie projects with Paramount, Defiant by Nature and Leviathan Productions.

Moderator

Naomi Lorrain

Naomi Lorrain is a Harlem-based playwright/actor. She is a 2022-2023 member of the Page 73 writers group, Interstate 73. She was a writer for the 2022 Disney Television Discovers: Talent Showcase. She is an AUDELCO Awards nominee and a NY Innovative Theatre Awards nominee for Best Lead Actress for Behind the Sheet and Entangled, respectively. Theater: Daphne (LCT3), La Race (Page 73/WP), Mark it Down, Song for a Future Generation (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Behind the Sheet (Ensemble Studio Theatre), What To Send Up When It Goes Down (The Movement Theatre Company). TV: "Orange is the New Black" (Netflix), "Elementary" (CBS), "The Good Fight" (CBS All Access), "Madam Secretary'' (CBS).

Scientist Shree Bose, Director Billy Carden, Playwright Carla Ching, Microbiologist Karine Gibbs join Biologist Stuart Firestein at the 2022 EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event on December 5

From left, Shree Bose, Billy Carden, Carla Ching, Karine Gibbs, Stuart Firestein

Playwrights! Join us on Monday, December 5, 2022, at 8:00 PM for the 2022 Virtual EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event, the annual far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion among scientists and playwrights about science, story-telling, and what makes plays work. This year’s event will be online and is free for any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology. Registration is required. Once registered, you will receive the event access link in your confirmation email. You can register here.

WHAT MAKES A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 23 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theatre companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide.

Applications for this year’s EST/Sloan commissions are currently open and will be accepted through January 15, 2023. You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage.

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

1) The First Light Festival is a month-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and

2) a full mainstage production of at least one work. Recent mainstage productions have included what you are now (2022) by Sam Chanse about memory and trauma, Behind the Sheet (2019) by Charly Evon Simpson about how American gynecology began with experiments on slaves (a NY Times Critic’s Pick), BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include

Shree Bose

Shree Bose is currently completing her MD at Duke University School of Medicine. At 17 years old, Shree triumphed over 10,000 competitors to become the Grand Prize Winner of the first-ever Google Global Science Fair in 2011. For her winning research, Shree worked to understand how ovarian cancer cells develop resistance to  a chemotherapy drug called cisplatin. She presented this work to President Obama and directors of the National Institutes of Health, as well as students around the world. Through these experiences, Shree also became a passionate advocate for better STEM education, which led her to co-found Piper Learning, Inc., a company creating educational toys for kids for which she currently serves co-CEO. After graduating Harvard University in 2016, she joined the MD/PhD program at Duke University School of Medicine, where she recently completed her PhD on understanding metabolic changes in ovarian cancer metastasis. She will be completing her MD in May 2023. 

William “Billy” Carden (Photo: Marc J. Franklin)

William “Billy” Carden served as Artistic Director of the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) for 15 years (2007-2022). In 2015 EST was given a Special Drama Desk Award for its unwavering commitment to developing new American plays. At EST he directed productions of Against the Hillside by Sylvia Khoury The Good Muslim by Zakiyyah Alexander, Pidgeon, PTSD and Zero by Tommy Smith  and four EST/Sloan productions: Please Continue by Frank Basloe, Headstrong by Patrick Link, Lenin’s Embalmers by Vern Thiessen, and Lucy by Damien Atkins.  He was artistic director of the HB Playwrights Foundation for eleven years where he directed the Off-Broadway productions of Mrs. Klein and Collected Stories starring Uta Hagen.  His many other productions there include Horton Foote’s The Habitation of Dragons, Burnt Piano by Justin Fleming and Voir Dire by Joe Sutton.  He directed The Dew Point at Summer Play Festival, The Young Girl and the Monsoon at Playwrights Horizons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Stratford Festival in Canada. As an actor he played leading roles Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Circle Rep, WPA, and EST and also worked at numerous regional theatres including Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, Huntington, Humana Festival, and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. On Broadway, he created the title role in the original, award-winning production of Short Eyes by Miguel Piñero. He teaches in the acting and playwriting programs at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Carla Ching

Carla Ching wrote Fast Company as an EST/Sloan commission. It received its New York City premiere in 2014 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and its World Premiere in 2013 at South Coast Rep. The play has also been published by Samuel French. Her other plays include Revenge Porn or the Story of a Body, Nomad Motel, Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, and The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up. She is a founding member of The Kilroys, a member of New Dramatists, and former Artistic Director of 2g. She was among the first three recipients of the Los Angeles New Play Project Award in 2021. Carla was also a co-recipient of the 2021 Horton Foote Playwriting Award from the Dramatists Guild. Her television credits include Fear the Walking Dead, I Love Dick, The First, Preacher, Home Before Dark, and the forthcoming Mr. + Mrs. Smith.

Karine Gibbs (Photo: Adam Sings in the Timber)

Karine Gibbs is a Jamaican American microbiologist and immunologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Gibbs’ research merges the fields of sociomicrobiology and bacterial cell biology to explore how the bacterial pathogen Proteus mirabilis, a common gut bacterium which can become pathogenic and cause urinary tract infections, identifies self versus non-self. In 2013, Gibbs and her team were the first to sequence the genome of P. mirabilis BB2000, the model organism for studying self-recognition. In graduate school at Stanford University, Gibbs helped to pioneer the design of a novel tool that allowed for the visualization of the movement of bacterial membrane proteins in real time. In 2020, Gibbs was recognized by Cell Press as one of the top 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America. 

This year’s moderator

Stuart Firestein

Stuart Firestein is the former Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences where his laboratory studies the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. Aside from its molecular detection capabilities, the olfactory system serves as a model for investigating general principles and mechanisms of signaling and perception in the brain. His laboratory seeks to answer that fundamental human question: How do I smell? Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience, Firestein serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science.  He is the author of Failure: Why Science Is So Successful (2015) and Ignorance: How It Drives Science (2012).

Ken Urban on social media, content moderation, worker trauma, and THE MODERATE

Ken Urban

To keep violent and disturbing content off their platforms, social media companies need humans to decide what stays and what goes. But what does what they see do to the watchers? On Monday, April 11 the 2022 EST/Sloan First Light Festival hosts the first public reading of THE MODERATE, the extensively researched and chilling new play by Ken Urban about the daily life of a social media content moderator and  how what he sees and the decisions he makes affects his mental health, his family life, and his friendships. But let’s have the playwright tell us more.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did THE MODERATE come to be?

I had been thinking about internet content moderators as an interesting story for a new play after reading Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts and seeing the documentary The Cleaners. As the story of Frank started to come into focus, I applied for the EST/Sloan Project commission in 2020 and then in the midst of all the devastation, I got the good news that I got the commission, so I could immerse myself in writing something new and stop doomscrolling.

What kind of research did you do in order to write THE MODERATE? Did you interview any content moderators?

Sarah T. Roberts in her interview with Ken

I spent 2020 interviewing scholars of internet culture like Sarah, Andrew Marantz and Mary L. Gray, and from there I was able to get into touch with people working as moderators. All these interviews took place on Zoom or the phone, but I was able to get moderators to open up to me in surprising ways. All of that influenced the writing of my play. But there were things that were so upsetting that I really grappled with what to include. Ultimately, the play is fictional, but draws from those interviews.

Your play concerns the impact moderating content on an unnamed social media platform has on your main character, Frank. Your stage directions have the audience seeing descriptions of what he sees without actually showing what he sees. Will the audience hear what he sees? Did you ever consider actually showing what he sees? 

The audience will hear what Frank hears, but never see what he sees. How that will work in production is something director Steve Cosson and I will explore in our next stage of development. You might read or hear a description of the content, or see a blurred out version of it, but never ever see the actual thing. I don’t think that would be ethical for an audience given some of the material in the play.

What do you think the responsibilities of a company should be for the people who do content moderation for them? Is there a way to do it differently?

This work is not going to go away. There will never be an AI intelligent enough to take the place of moderators. And as one of my interviewees told me, looking at naked pics or consensual porn isn’t necessarily a terrible way to earn a living. But many of these workers see things that would traumatize any of us. What they do is hard work, and they should be compensated fairly. They should have a union like EMS workers. They should have job stability and resources for when this work takes a toll, like access to free therapy, and never be penalized for taking mental health breaks when they are needed.

How active are you on social media? Which platforms?

I wish I could quit it, but I can’t. I don’t use Facebook anymore, but I use Instagram, so it’s not exactly like I’m taking any big stand against the Metaverse.

You went to Bucknell to study chemical engineering but left with a degree in English and a playwriting habit. You are currently Senior Lecturer and Head of Dramatic Writing in the Music and  Theatre Arts Program at MIT. So you seem to have succeeded in bringing together what C. P. Snow called the “Two Cultures” – science and the humanities. Or you at least are engaged in straddling them. How is it going? And what are the most important things each culture needs to know about the other?

Teaching at MIT has been a real joy and I love the intellectual curiosity of my students. Compared to some places I’ve taught, I like how grounded the culture at MIT is. Lately, I keep thinking about how these “two cultures” possess such different ideas about what constitutes data. I tease my students that my feelings are my data. I’m only partially kidding.

You have developed plays at a number of other theaters around the country. How is the EST/Sloan play development process different?

I was fortunate that when I got the EST/Sloan Commission that Steve Cosson, who is the Artistic Director of The Civilians, put me in his company’s R&D Group so I could have deadlines and have help finishing the first draft of the play. This reading is really my first interaction with EST, other than some notes from Linsay Firman and Graeme Gillis. Like every playwright in my position, I am hoping they are intrigued enough by the play that they keep asking me back to work on the play.

In addition to being a playwright, you are a musician, the electronics wizard in Occurrence, a trio with four albums that Atwood Magazine has described as “a formidable electro-space post-punk beast.” So how has your music-making influence your playwriting – and vice versa.

Occurrence. From left, Cat Hollyer, Ken Urban, Johnny Hager.

I really care about how things sound, and that’s true when I am writing songs with my band or when I am writing plays or films. I hear a play before I see it on stage. I make playlists of music to listen to when writing, songs that gets me in the mood. I don’t typically listen to my own music though when I’m writing, because I start making mental notes about the music, listening too intently to pay attention to writing. I haven’t written a musical but we might be making a dance theater piece out of my band’s next album. I also have an insane idea for a vaporwave musical set in an abandoned mall. I’m sure it’s a horrible idea so of course, it is insanely attractive to me.

What’s next for Ken Urban?

At the end of the month, I’m going to Flint Rep to work on a new play about a throuple called Danger and Opportunity. Big news is coming about a narrative podcast that I wrote called Vapor Trail, but I can’t share that yet sadly. I have a commission that I need to finish this summer from Kane Rep; that play is set in the 1990s and follows two college students and how the decision by one of them to have an abortion impacts their friendship. There are discussions about doing workshops of The Moderate and this new neurotechnology play The Conquered coming up next season potentially. I finished a new screenplay and the band just finished a new double album. I always feel like I’m not doing enough, but answering this question made me realize I guess I am working.

The 2022 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from April 7  through May 24 and features in-person readings of five new plays. Most of the readings are open to the public for free but reservations are required. You can learn more about our current Covid policies and protocols here. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-fourth year.

Poet Pichchenda Bao, Neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Artist Daveth Cheth, Designer Davey Chhoeun, and Chef Chinchakriya Un join Dramaturg Soriya Chum to discuss the many sides of what you are now

From left, Pichchenda Bao, Heather Berlin, Daveth Cheth, Davey Chhoeun, Chinchakriya Un, Soriya Chum

On April 2, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of what you are now, the powerful new drama by Sam Chanse, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback about the historical, cultural, and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, including how trauma gets passed from one generation to another, Cambodian American life in the U.S., and what happens in the brain when we form memories and create art. Dramaturg Soriya Chum will moderate the discussion with neuroscientist Heather Berlin, poet Pichchenda Bao, artist and activist Daveth Cheth, designer Davey Chhoeun, and chef Chinchakriya Un.

what you are now asks what if our memories aren’t fixed, but change each time we recall the past? This world premiere by Sam Chanse is a thrillingly insightful new play that asks the audience to move through the shifting dance between the past and present, and to consider how with new understanding we might change “who you were then” to “what you are now.”

what you are now is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the worlds of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-third year, and is being co-presented with The Civilians, a theater group dedicated to investigative theater, projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

About the Panelists

Pichchenda Bao

Pichchenda Bao is a poet born in Cambodia at the end of the Khmer Rouge regime. She came with her parents to the United States as refugees in the 1980s, and now she lives, writes and raises her children in New York City. Her work delves into the urgencies and uncertainties of post-war and post-genocide survival and resilience, generational tension, motherhood, and feminism. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize nomination, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Words, a grant from Queens Council on the Arts, a residency from Bethany Arts Community, and an invitation to the Kundiman writers retreat as a poetry fellow.

Dr. Heather Berlin

Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NY. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the aim of developing novel treatments. She is also interested in the brain basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity.  Berlin is a passionate science communicator and a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She’s hosted series on PBS and the Discovery Channel and makes regular appearances on StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, BBC, History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, and TEDx, and was featured in the documentary film Bill Nye: Science Guy. Dr. Berlin also co-wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed off-Broadway show, Off the Top, about the neuroscience of improvisation, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, Impulse Control.  Berlin received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, and Master of Public Health from Harvard University, and trained in clinical neuropsychology at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of Neurological Surgery. She is a visiting scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and was a Visiting Professor at Vassar College, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology/University of Zurich, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Daveth Cheth

Daveth Cheth is the founder, writer, and visionary behind Khmer Identity, a platform honoring Khmer legacies and contemporary Khmer voices. Born in Cambodia, Daveth immigrated to Lynn, Massachusetts when he was nine. A queer, non-binary Cambodian artist and activist, Daveth explores the  mediums of art, dance, and spoken word by focusing his work around queer visibility and Cambodian heritage and culture. A native Khmer speaker, Daveth teaches online classes in Khmer through Khmer Identity.

Davey Chhoeun

Davey Chhoeun is co-founder of Khmer Identify. The youngest daughter of four, and the only one born in the U.S., Davey was born and raised in Lynn, Massachusetts, where her family immigrated from Cambodia in 1988. Davey aspires to share her creative lens with her community and the world through apparel design and many personal hobbies. She graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA in Fashion Design. Currently, she is a designer at a manufacturing company based in Boston. In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, she collaborated with Daveth Cheth to create an exhibition to share their mutual heritage with the world. This became Khmer Identity.

Chinchakriya Un

Chinchakriya Un is the chef and owner of Kreung Cambodia.  Kreung is a project that highlights her family’s recipes and new inspired dishes that she creates. Kreung is a traveling pop up with roots in Brooklyn, NY. Chinchakriya’s goals are to raise money to buy a tractor for her family in Cambodia, create a residency for artists, connect with the Cambodian diaspora around the world, and to document her family’s stories from the past and present to include in a cookbook. She was born in a refugee camp, moved to Massachusetts and grew up in a neighborhood with other immigrant families, predominately Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cape Verdeans, and attended a predominately white school. Chinchakriya has found  that connecting with her elders and Khmer folks in the diaspora is a way that she continues to grow her understanding about the Khmer culture. She hopes that Kreung can exist as a platform for other young aspiring chefs to showcase their creations.

About the Moderator

Soriya K. Chum

Soriya K. Chum is a Cambodian American writer, dramaturg, and project manager working in the fields of arts and culture and book publishing. He currently produces consumer engagement events and programs for the Random House division of Penguin Random House. Previously, he has held roles at the flagship branch of The New York Public Library, Theatre for a New Audience, and the Asian American Arts Alliance. As a dramaturg, he specializes in providing support to scripted projects that focus on the lives of contemporary immigrants and refugees, particularly intergenerational stories that center the perspectives and experiences of Cambodian Americans.

what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Community Organizers Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, and Thida Virak join Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller and Editor Laura Ly to discuss inherited trauma, Cambodian American life, and what you are now

From left, Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, Thida Virak, Daniela Schiller, and Laura Ly.

On March 26, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of what you are now, the powerful new drama by Sam Chanse, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback about the historical, cultural, and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, including how the brain forms memories, Cambodian American life in the U.S., and the neuroscience of inherited trauma. Journalist-editor Laura Ly will moderate the discussion with neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, and community organizers Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, and Thida Virak.

what you are now asks what if our memories aren’t fixed, but change each time we recall the past? This world premiere by Sam Chanse is a thrillingly insightful new play that asks the audience to move through the shifting dance between the past and present, and to consider how with new understanding we might change “who you were then” to “what you are now.”

what you are now is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the worlds of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-third year, and is being co-presented with The Civilians, a theater group dedicated to investigative theater, projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

About the Panelists

Sothea Chiemruom

Sothea Chiemruom is the Executive Director at CMAA-the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, MA. He has over 25 years of experience in day-to-day program operations, administration, management, reporting, and ongoing work in advocacy, and public relations. CMAA provides services for not only Khmer but vulnerable individuals who need support with everyday challenges. Throughout his career, Sothea has engaged youth, the elderly, and the underrepresented and promoted programs that serve them. A strong proponent for the education of immigrants and refugees, he promotes leadership training, economic development, and civic participation. He actively supports the empowerment and self-sufficiency of community members. He serves as vice-chairperson of the Affordable Housing Trust in the Town of Tyngsborough, MA.  Sothea has participated at NeighborWorks Training Institute, a  leadership program. A refugee from Cambodia, he has lived and worked in Boston and Lowell. He currently lives in Tyngsbo, MA with his wife, Bora, and their children. He enjoys the outdoors and gardening.

Sanary Phen

Poet, writer and storyteller, Sanary Phen was born in a refugee camp in Thailand during the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia. She and her family emigrated to the United States in 1981 and resettled in Lowell, MA, which has been her home for more than 35 years. Sanary has a deep love and appreciation for the community and takes pride in giving back to the city and its people. She has over 15 years of experience in social work in the nonprofit sector and is currently working for Coalition for a Better Acre as their Workforce Development Coordinator. Sanary is also a freelance writer for the Lowell Sun and a dedicated volunteer with the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association.

Dr. Daniela Schiller

Dr. Daniela Schiller is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research is focused on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories. Schiller got her PhD in Tel Aviv University where she developed a laboratory model for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. She then continued to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University where she examined methods for emotional memory modification in the human brain. Schiller joined Mount Sinai in 2010 and has been directing the affective neuroscience laboratory since. Her lab has delineated the neural computations of threat learning, how the brain modifies emotional memories using imagination, and the dynamic tracking of affective states and social relationships. Schiller’s work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and has been the recipient of many awards, including the New York Academy of Sciences’ Blavatnik Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences. 

Thida Virak

Thida Virak is the Director of Social Services & Advocacy at Mekong NYC and was previously Lead Organizer for Mekong NYC for ten years. Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Thida immigrated to the Bronx, where she began her work in the community as a volunteer. Shortly after Mekong NYC was founded in 2011, she joined as a part-time organizer and quickly helped build Mekong NYC’s community base, and was promoted to Director of Social Services & Advocacy in October 2021. Mekong NYC is a social justice organization that brings dignity and value to the lives of Southeast Asians in the Bronx and throughout New York City. As an organizer, advocate, interpreter and translator, freedom fighter, and mother, she exemplifies the spirit of social justice and advocacy. Her work explores identities, culture, collective healing, mutual supports, and community building, and deepens Mekong NYC’s campaigns for health justice, mental health justice, and the end of deportation in the Southeast Asian community. She also serves as a delegate in various coalitions, like the Bronx-Wide People’s Platform. Thida attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Borough of Manhattan Community College, and completed ANHD’s Center for Community Leadership Organizing program.

About the Moderator

Laura Ly

Laura Ly is an Emmy-nominated journalist and editor based in New York City. In her time with CNN, she has also worked in Hong Kong and Atlanta. She currently covers breaking news across the northeast United States. She is the daughter of Khmer refugees from Battambang and Takeo provinces.  Ly is a longtime Board Member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association and also serves on their literary magazine committee. Each year, the organization publishes the “Stilt House” zine, a showcase dedicated to celebrating the work of artists in the Cambodian diaspora. Ly is originally from Connecticut and is a graduate of Columbia University. In her free time, she enjoys travel writing, biking, playing badminton, and attempting to cook Khmer food.

what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Actor Robert Lee Leng, Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, Poet Sokunthary Svay and Actor Sophia Skiles to discuss how we form memories, Cambodian American culture, inherited trauma and what you are now

From left, Robert Lee Leng, Daniela Schiller, Sokunthary Svay, Sophia Skiles

On March 19, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of what you are now, the compelling new drama by Sam Chanse, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback about the historical, cultural, and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, including how the brain forms memories, Cambodian American memory work, and the neuroscience of inherited trauma. Actor-teacher Sophia Skiles will moderate the discussion with Cambodian-Chinese American actor Robert Lee Leng (Darany in the play), neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, and Cambodian American poet-scholar-librettist Sokunthary Svay.

what you are now asks what if our memories aren’t fixed, but change each time we recall the past? This world premiere by Sam Chanse is a thrillingly insightful new play that asks the audience to move through the shifting dance between the past and present, and to consider how with new understanding we might change “who you were then” to “what you are now.”

what you are now is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the worlds of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-third year, and is being co-presented with The Civilians, a theater group dedicated to investigative theater, projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

About the Panelists

Robert Lee Leng

Robert Lee Leng (Darany in the play) I am a first generation Cambodian-Chinese American/Artist. To be an artist during the Khmer Rouge regime meant immediate death; but we survived; we are surviving. We are a very expansive, complex, eclectic, and lit community of people.  I love us. Read Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So; Read Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto by Eric Tang; Stream music by $tupid Young, VBO, VannDa; follow @Khmer.identity on Instagram. Reach out, donate and show support to CMAA Lowell and Mekong NYC.

Dr. Daniela Schiller

Dr. Daniela Schiller is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research is focused on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories. Schiller got her PhD in Tel Aviv University where she developed a laboratory model for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. She then continued to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University where she examined methods for emotional memory modification in the human brain. Schiller joined Mount Sinai in 2010 and has been directing the affective neuroscience laboratory since. Her lab has delineated the neural computations of threat learning, how the brain modifies emotional memories using imagination, and the dynamic tracking of affective states and social relationships. Schiller’s work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and has been the recipient of many awards, including the New York Academy of Sciences’ Blavatnik Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences. 

Sokunthary Svay

Sokunthary Svay was born in a refugee camp in Thailand shortly after her parents fled Cambodia following the fall of the Khmer Rouge. They resettled in the Bronx, where she grew up. She is a founding member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA), and has received fellowships from the American Opera Project, Poets House, Willow Books, and CUNY, as well as commissions from Washington National Opera, White Snake Project, and ISSUE Project Room. Her first book, Apsara in New York, was published in 2017. Her first opera, Woman of Letters, premiered at the Kennedy Center in January 2020. Her second opera,Chhlong Tonle, funded by the OPERA American IDEA grant, premieres in March 2022. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

About the Moderator

Sophia Skiles

Sophia Skiles (she/her) is a theater actor, a teacher of acting, facilitator, and citizen—purposefully blurring, disrupting, and bridging the boundaries of the stage, the classroom, and the public.  She has performed in productions directed by Michael Kahn, May Adrales, Chay Yew, Ralph Peña, Andrei Serban, Mary Zimmerman, Richard Foreman, and David Herskovits, among others - in venues throughout New York City, and across the United States and Europe.  Sophia is Associate Professor of the Practice and Head of Acting of the Brown/Trinity MFA program and a former twice-elected Trustee of the New Paltz Central School District Board of Education.  She was a member of the 2016 artEquity National Facilitator training cohort and the 2021 artEquity BIPOC Leadership Circle. 

what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

A Note on the Neuroscience Behind what you are now

The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the neuroscience behind what you are now by Sam Chanse, the 2022 EST/Sloan mainstage production. what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3. You can purchase tickets here.

The Neuroscience Behind what you are now

By Rich Kelley, Science Press Liaison

“Memory is a marvelous device, a means of transporting ourselves to earlier times. We can go back a moment, or most of a life. But as we all know, it’s not perfect, and is certainly not literal. It’s a reconstruction of facts and experiences on the basis of the way they were stored, not as they actually occurred. And it’s a reconstruction by a  brain that is different from the one that formed the  memory.” —Joseph LeDoux

A quick review of the metaphors we have used for memory reveals how far we have come—and how inadequate we are at describing it: from wax tablet to library to labyrinth to enchanted loom to switchboard to network to leaky bucket to computer program to hologram. From a scientific standpoint, what has changed our thinking about memory has usually come from an experiment. WHAT YOU ARE NOW refers to several significant experiments in the history of neuroscience. We thought you might find this background information on some of them interesting.

Ivan Pavlov (1849‒1936) was a Russian physiologist best known for inventing what has come to be known as “classical conditioning.” To study the physiology of the digestive system, Pavlov invented surgical procedures to create fistulas and gastric pouches on unanesthetized dogs so that he could repeat experiments for months and measure secretions outside the body. During his research Pavlov noticed that the dogs salivated when they saw the person who fed them. This led to his famous experiment: if he played a sound—usually on a metronome, not a bell—just when the food was put in the dog’s mouth, the dog would salivate at the sound, even when the food did not follow. This association turned a previously neutral stimulus—the tone—into a “conditioned” stimulus that generated a “conditioned” response—the salivating. Pavlov called the saliva thus generated “psychic secretions.” The power of the stimuli depended on conditions. If the tone was sounded repeatedly without the dog being fed, the salivating would decrease and eventually stop completely.

One of Pavlov's dogs with a surgically implanted cannula to measure salivation, preserved in the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia.

American behavioral psychologists favored Pavlov’s procedure because it removed any question of will, subjective experience, or consciousness from their experiments. Yet Pavlov himself never denied the inner life of his experimental animals. As Daniel Todes notes in his biography of Pavlov, “[Pavlov} identified them as heroes and cowards, intelligent and obtuse, independent and compliant, sociable and aloof, freedom fighters and narrow pragmatists.”

Eric Kandel (1929‒ ) is an Austrian-born American medical doctor, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and professor of biochemistry who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2000 for his work on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. Kandel is perhaps best known for his insight that learning processes are similar among all life forms and that he could more easily study what changes occur in the synaptic connections between neurons during learning and memory storage by electrophysical analysis of an invertebrate as simple as a sea slug. He published his initial findings in 1963 and over the next twenty years his work in molecular neural science led to several remarkable findings, including that short-term memory involved functional changes in existing synapses but long-term memory involves a change in the number of synaptic connections.

A mouse in a glass container partially filled with water, as part of a forced-swimming test. The use of forced swimming tests is criticized by animal rights groups, notably PETA. (Photo: TaoPan CC3.0)

Learned safety in mice. The play refers to one of Kandel’s experiments with Daniela D. Pollak in which they conditioned mice to feel safe in stressful situations. Kandel called this conditioned inhibition of fear “learned safety.” For fear conditioning they associated an auditory tone with a shock to the mouse’s foot. For safety conditioning, the tone was not followed by a shock. The safety conditioned mice learned to associate the tone with the absence of danger and showed less anxiety, The mice were then given a stress test and put into a pool of water for a swim test. As Kandel explained, “In this seemingly desperate situation—where the mice have no option to escape from the water—they start to show signs of behavioral despair that are ameliorated by antidepressant medications. We found that the mice trained for safety could overcome their sense of hopelessness in the swim test.”

Memory reconsolidation. Memories evolve over time and “consolidation” and “reconsolidation” have come to describe the “two lives” memories have after the initial coding of new information. Consolidation refers to the extended period after learning when new information gets “fixed” at a cellular level and interleaved with existing memories. Much of consolidation is now thought to occur during sleep. Reconsolidation describes the process in which a newly consolidated memory gets modified as it is reactivated. In 2000 neuroscientists Karim Nader, Glenn E. Schafe and Joseph E. LeDoux performed an experiment to test whether it is possible to extinguish a “new memory” so that it never becomes a long-term memory. Current models of learning at the time proposed that new proteins need to be produced for recent experiences to be encoded into long-term memory. In the experiment, rats were conditioned to fear a tone by being given a foot shock. When they heard the tone, they froze into immobility. Twenty-four hours later, the rats were played the tone but given an infusion of anisomycin, a drug that inhibits protein synthesis, into the amygdala. Twenty-four hours later, when the rats which had been given the drug were played the tone, they didn’t freeze. They had lost the memory of the conditioning. This group was tested for up to 14 days and still had no memory of the conditioned response. A test group was given anisomycin without the tone being played. Twenty-four hours later, when they were played the tone, they still froze. In order for the conditioned response to be extinguished, the memory had to be reactivated—the tone had to be played—for the drug to interfere with memory retrieval.

A diagram representing a common understanding of memory systems (Image: Erich Parker)

Extinguishing traumatic memories. Drugs had been used successfully to remove traumatic memories but neuroscientist Daniela Schiller wondered if a non-invasive behavioral technique could be used instead. In 2010 she used classical conditioning to train 65 people to fear a colored square by associating it with a shock. Twenty four hours later, the sight of the square alone induced a fearful reaction in all of them. Schiller then divided them into three groups and presented the squares to one group many more times without a shock. Because this extinction process began within ten minutes of having their memory reactivated, the members of this group completely forgot their fear. A second group, which did not begin the extinction process until six hours after they were shown the squares, did not lose their fear. The experiment demonstrated that memories can be changed behaviorally and that interfering with memory reconsolidation can be effective but is very time sensitive. As Schiller commented in Michael Specter’s profile of her in The New Yorker, her work led her to realize that memory is “what you are now, not what you think you were in the past. When you change the story you created, you change your life.”

A Note on the Historical and Cultural Context of what you are now

The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the historical and cultural context of what you are now by Sam Chanse, the 2022 EST/Sloan mainstage production. what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3. You can purchase tickets here.

Passing on the Uncanny

by Soriya K. Chum, Dramaturg

Pia is a neuroscientist whose academic research is intensely enmeshed with the personal. Her scientific investigations concern “fear memories;” her mother is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. As Pia looks at the long road ahead of possibly breaking into her field with a proposal to rid the brain of traumatic memories, she wrestles with the omnipresence of her own family’s uncanny memories—their capacity to terrorize her mother at night, to induce in their home a stultifying silence, which Pia helps to maintain as a way of coping.

Memory is an intimate process. The experience of a specific memory is palpable not only to loved ones who remember, but also to those who share space intimately with them—so that family, too, can be immersed, by extension, in the pleasure, grief, or violence of a recollection we may not exactly call their own. The reach of memory is powerful, with a magnitude that in some cases is felt across generations, and for a community like Pia’s that once endured a massively traumatic event, their interdependent behaviors of remembrance can either inhibit or change the course of the group’s collective development.

From 1975 to 1979, a communist group known as the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia, enacting radical social, economic, and cultural reforms throughout the country. In the group’s pursuit of an agrarian utopia, they expelled entire urban populations and moved them to remote rural provinces where they worked in labor camps. The Khmer Rouge purported that the citizens of this new, classless system would work the land together and live off of it, equally. In the propagation of their doctrine, they sought to re-educate the public on the party’s values and to root out all dissent by punishing alleged loyalists of the former regime. As their paranoia intensified, the Khmer Rouge grew rampantly murderous, targeting intellectuals, capitalists, foreigners, ethnic minorities, and artists. As a result of their totalitarian reign, an estimated 2.5 million people died of execution, starvation, and disease. Those who survived, like Pia’s mother, fled to refugee camps in Thailand—few with families left intact, some alone, all shaped forever by a deeply formative past.

My mother is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. She evades questions still today about the losses she suffered. When I was a child, she would prepare dishes for our ancestors during the Cambodian New Year as a ritual expression of holding their hunger in the family’s memory. We’d patiently wait for our ancestors to eat first before lifting our forks. I’d crouch on the floor before a festive table presented with ample platters of roasted duck, oily noodles, pickled greens, and sour soup, while clasping sticks of champak incense in silent prayer, sending blessings of peace and comfort to them. My eyes would study the empty chairs, and I imagined I could draw into the seats my ancestors’ silhouettes with the rising, sweet smoke that escaped my hot fingers. I wondered if they could see me too—see us, the living, and how we struggled. I’d blush from the guilt of divining their tired eyes on me.

In what you are now, there is a scene in which Pia’s brother Darany makes a similar ancestral offering. He asserts, “Someone should be feeding us knowhatI’msayin / give us food to ease our suffering.” Embedded within his sentiment is a powerful question of what nourishment is given to people who haven’t passed, but who live on to bear difficult legacies. Darany’s assertion is an interesting counter-proposal to the survivor narrative that tends to centralize the memorialization of atrocious pasts. It is a suggestion that gently shifts our preoccupation with what happened, who we lost, and how we barely survived, to the untidy business of those living today, of nurturing present and future generations after the fact. 

In the eighties, nearly 160,000 Cambodians migrated to the United States as refugees. Planning for their arrival, the federal government assessed cities that could equip the newly arrived with low-wage and low-skill jobs and affordable housing. The majority of Cambodians resettled in communities with pre-existing, high rates of poverty and crime. In the play, Pia’s family migrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, home to the second largest Cambodian community in America. Challenged by the stresses of resettlement—securing a job, learning a language, and adapting to new norms—while burdened with the anguish of having fled genocide, Cambodians found their hard start exacerbated by their placement in distressed areas. From their precarious point of inception in the States, a line can be drawn to many of the contemporary problems faced by Cambodian Americans decades later, including deportation, gang-related violence, underemployment, and mental health conditions. 

In the last twenty years, we’ve seen tremendous advancements in research dedicated to helping us better understand the biological dimensions of trauma. Scientists now know that the posttraumatic stress individuals experience may be owed to changes to gene regions in the brain responsible for processing fearful stimuli. A person living with PTSD then, who shows signs of hypervigilance, reactivity, or avoidance, may be exhibiting these tendencies because of a past traumatic event that distinctly altered their DNA. These genetic changes extend beyond the life of the individual, branching out to the lives of their children and their children’s children, so that patterns of trauma are heritable down the bloodline. 

To stop these effects, Pia is exploring through her research the viability of an intervention that could selectively target and blunt fear memories, so that typical triggers become more like reminders, unimbued of their painful associations. Though a pathway to implementing treatment models and therapies lags behind the research in her field, Pia’s belief in science and its potential to heal is persuasive, and there is, of course, her double-fold experience (as both a scientist and the daughter of a genocide survivor), which is a factor in our bet on her. The dramatic irony of Pia’s mission is how much skin she has in the game. We cheer her on when she perceives connections between her personal life and career with the clarity of an expert witness; and we cringe with compassion when she barrels full-steam ahead in her research with the unchecked zeal of a grief tourist, and forgets herself—her close orientation to the work at hand. 

On a family trip to Cambodia in 2016, I insisted we visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. The building once was a secondary school the Khmer Rouge repurposed as S-21, a prison camp and execution center. Now a museum, it displays the photographs of inmates, their discarded clothes, instruments of torture, and dusty chalkboards that spell of the place’s bygone innocence. In the main artery of the museum, my mother and I came to a large map on a free-standing wall. I took her hand to it. I asked her to trace her journey from Phnom Penh to labor camp to refugee camp for me. Confusion riddled her finger—starting, then stopping, falling, and breaking away from the map. In my abstract way of seeing back with her and urgently correcting the record, hovering over this map, a shade of disappointment rose in me for her failure to remember. My mother then turned and pointed to the open museum door, which looked to a sunlit courtyard lined with swaying palm trees, and she uttered just over the sound of a motorcycle zizzing by that her sister whom she loved lived once two blocks from where we stood. 

 For a scopic regime that deliberately annihilated the social foundation of a society by splitting up sisters, seeding distrust among brothers, rearranging marriages, and orphaning children, the most defiant act for Cambodians today against the perpetrators is keeping our families together. Like Pia’s family, it is a path of trial and error, closing the distance, and putting voice into the gulf of silence.  

Radiolab Host Jad Abumrad, Microbiologist Karine Gibbs, and Biochemist Mandë Holford join Playwrights Sam Chanse and Lucas Hnath at the 2021 EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event on December 2

From left: Jad Abumrad, Sam Chanse, Karine Gibbs, Lucas Hnath, Mandë Holford

WHAT MAKES A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 22 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theatre companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide.

Every year the highlight of the EST/Sloan Project submission season is the Fall Artist Cultivation Event. At this eagerly anticipated event, a panel of scientists, science writers, and playwrights engages in a far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion with an audience of prospective playwrights about “What Makes a Great Play about Science?” 

The 2022 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will be virtual this year and take place on Thursday, December 2 at 8 PM. 

This virtual event will be held on Zoom and is free to attend for any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology. Registration is required. Once registered, you will receive the event access link in your confirmation email. You can register here.

Applications for this year’s EST/Sloan commissions are currently open and will be accepted through January 15, 2022. You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage.

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

1) The First Light Festival is a month-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and

2) a full mainstage production of at least one work. Recent mainstage productions have included Behind the Sheet (2019) by Charly Evon Simpson on the enslaved women who as experimental victims launched the science of gynecology (a NY Times Critic’s Pick), BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Jad Abumrad (Photo: Lizzie Johnston)

Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on nearly 600 stations and downloaded more than 12 million times a month as a podcast. He employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what’s been called “a new aesthetic” in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews, and sounds into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the legal foundation for the war on terror. Jad has won three George Foster Peabody Awards, and in 2011, he was honored as a MacArthur Fellow. He also created and hosted three seasons of More Perfect, a series about untold stories of the Supreme Court, which The New York Times called “. . . possibly the most mesmerizing podcast.” And in 2019, he co-created Dolly Parton’s America, a Peabody Award-winning nine-part series that explores a divided America through the life and music of one of its greatest icons.

Sam Chanse

Sam Chanse’s plays include Monument, or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play); Trigger; Fruiting Bodies; and What You Are Now (EST/Sloan’s 2022 Mainstage Production). Her work has recently been developed with The Civilians, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova,  NAATCO, Magic Theatre, Ma-Yi, and the Lark, and is published by Kaya Press (Lydia’s Funeral Video) and TCG (The Kilroys List). Commissions include NAATCO (Out of Time), Workshop Theatre, and EST/Sloan Project.  She is a past fellow at MacDowell, the Lark Venturous Fund (Trigger), Cherry Lane Mentor Project (The Opportunities of Extinction), and Playwrights Realm (The Other Instinct), and an alum of New York Stage and Film’s inaugural NEXUS project, Ars Nova’s Play Group and the Civilians R&D Group. She has also received residencies from Sundance Theatre Institute, Djerassi, and SPACE at Ryder Farm.  A native New Yorker, she served for some years as artistic director of San Francisco-based Kearny Street Workshop. She is a writer on ABC’s The Good Doctor, and has taught at Columbia University, NYU, University of Rochester, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, Dramatists Guild, and WGAE, and a resident playwright at New Dramatists.

Dr. Karine Gibbs (Photo: Adam Sings in the Timber)

Karine Gibbs is a Jamaican American microbiologist and immunologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Gibbs’ research merges the fields of sociomicrobiology and bacterial cell biology to explore how the bacterial pathogen Proteus mirabilis, a common gut bacterium which can become pathogenic and cause urinary tract infections, identifies self versus non-self. In 2013, Gibbs and her team were the first to sequence the genome of P. mirabilis BB2000, the model organism for studying self-recognition. In graduate school at Stanford University, Gibbs helped to pioneer the design of a novel tool that allowed for visualization of the movement of bacterial membrane proteins in real time. In 2020, Gibbs was recognized by Cell Press as one of the top 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America.

Lucas Hnath (Photo: Rebecca Martinez)

Lucas Hnath is the author of Isaac’s Eye, which EST produced as the 2012 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production and which won the 2012 Whitfield Cook Award. More recently, Lucas Hnath received a 2017 Tony Award nomination for Best Play with A Doll’s House, Part 2, which garnered eight Tony nominations—the most of any play in the 2016-2017 season—and a Best Actress win for Laurie Metcalf as Nora. His other plays include Hillary and Clinton, The Thin Place, Red Speedo, The Christians, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, and Death Tax. He has been produced on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre, Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, and Ensemble Studio Theatre. His plays have also premiered at the Humana Festival of New Plays, Victory Gardens, and South Coast Repertory. He is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, and an alumnus of New Dramatists. Awards: Whiting Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Kesselring Prize, Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New Play, Obie Award for Playwriting, Steinberg Playwright Award, and the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize.

Dr. Mandë Holford (Photo: DFinnin_AMNH)

Mandë Holford is an Associate Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at The American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine. Her research, from mollusks to medicine, combines chemistry and biology to discover, characterize, and deliver novel peptides from venomous marine snails as tools for manipulating cellular physiology in pain and cancer. She is active in science education, advancing the public understanding of science, and science diplomacy. She co-founded Killer Snails, LLC, an award winning EdTech learning games company. Her honors include being named: a 2020 Sustainability Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, Breakthrough Women in Science by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and NPR’s Science Friday, a Wings WorldQuest Women of Discovery fellow, an NSF CAREER awardee, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. Her Ph.D. is from The Rockefeller University, USA.

This year’s moderator:

Rich Kelley

Rich Kelley has served as the Science Press Liaison for The EST/Sloan Project since 2009. He also contributes interviews and blog posts to the EST/Sloan blog and creates panels for post-performance talkbacks. A book publishing veteran, Rich is currently VP/Strategic Partner with Bridget Marmion Book Marketing, where he specializes in content development, email marketing, online advertising, SEO, social media coaching, and website optimization.

Jake Brasch on alcoholism, mountains, Alzheimer’s, and THE RESERVOIR

Jake Brasch

Can brain exercises stave off dementia? On Monday, March 22, at 4:00 PM the EST/Sloan First Light Festival  presents the first public reading (free on Zoom) of THE RESERVOIR, Jake Brasch’s new play about a young writer who, struggling with alcoholism and memory loss, finds unexpected bonds with his quirky grandparents. The playwright has lots more to tell.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did THE RESERVOIR come to be?

This play has been trying to fight its way out of me for years. When I got the commission, there was no turning back. 

I set out to explore Alzheimer’s Disease and alcoholism, diseases that have plagued my family for many moons. Along the way, I discovered I was writing a love letter to my grandparents. 

You describe Josh, your main character, as 22 years old in 2014-2015. “A queer, neurotic, lost soul. Dropout. Alcoholic. Wannabe writer. A white Jew with Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Nebraskan roots.” Dare I ask how much of your play is autobiographical? Or would it be better to ask how much is not?

You got me!

Indeed, this is a very personal piece. Too personal? Maybe! There were definitely “WHY THE HELL AM I DOING THIS?!” moments. But for the most part, I found strength in writing into this painful chapter of my life. I’m a fundamentally different person than I was seven years ago and it felt empowering to remember that. 

That being said, the play is not strictly autobiographical. The constraints of the commission and the needs of the piece steered me away from my experience. I also took some creative license to protect my heart and my family. It feels important to be very clear about this: Josh’s story is not my story. A brilliant friend of mine recently wrote, “Most of us need a degree of artifice to say what we really think.” Paradoxically, I found that untethering Josh’s story from my own gave me permission to tell the truth. 

Much of the science in this play has to do with the concept of Cognitive Reserve and how it might be helpful in preventing or delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s. What kind of research did you do in writing this play? 

Figure illustrates how cognitive reserve develops over a lifespan. Figure courtesy of Frontiers of Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01814/full

I went on a deep dive into medical journal land. The more I read, the more I discovered how little we know about Alzheimer’s, specifically about how we might stave off its symptoms. There are a lot of misconceptions out there. People want to believe that all they have to do is play tennis, solve crossword puzzles, and memorize a list of our nation’s Vice Presidents, and all will be well. Yes, there are certain lifestyle factors that may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s, but there is no formula, no proven regimen, no sure way to protect yourself from the disease.

Bleak? Oh yeah. But also, ultimately, freeing. We simply cannot know what lies ahead. Josh’s revelation in the play mirrors what I discovered in my research: the best way to protect oneself against the onset of Alzheimer’s is to lead a present, full, joyous, active, inquisitive, open, and loving life. 

Have your grandparents had the chance to read your play? How did they react?

Oh, how I wish I could share this with them.

Jake and his grandmother

Both of my maternal grandparents passed away a few years ago after battles with Alzheimer’s. My paternal grandfather died this year of complications from COVID-19. 

My paternal grandmother is in a memory care facility. She’s mostly nonverbal at this point and doesn’t seem to recognize me. I miss her more than I can say. If she were still herself, I’m guessing she would request a paper copy of the play to litter with brilliant, scathing, and hilarious notes in red colored pencil. I’d like to think she’d be both horrified and proud.

What do you want your audience to understand about the nature of alcoholism and the current treatment options for coping with it?

Addiction is brutal. Being inside of the disease of alcoholism was the scariest experience of my life. I wanted so badly to get out from under it, but the harder I tried to escape, the worse it got. At some point, I had to accept defeat and get help. For anyone going through it, don’t try to go it alone. I’m here. We’re here. Recovery is the foundation my life has been built upon and I wouldn’t have it any other way. As impossible as it may seem, there’s a lighter life on the other side.

Jewish music and themes run through many of your plays. What has being a Jew meant to you?

Being a Jew has meant a lot to me. Much to unpack here!

My father, a fervent atheist, insisted I attend way too much religious school, which we can attribute to good old-fashioned Jewish guilt. I have at least an hour and a half of Hebrew chanting memorized, but I can’t say I know what any of it means. I know what we do, but I don’t know why! It’s just what we do! And I’ve come to love it! Plus great food and ancestral trauma! I think I’ll probably do the same thing to my poor children! 

In all seriousness, as I’ve become a spiritual person over the last few years, I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing about my Jewish roots. My faith today feels decidedly Jewish: I’m more concerned with what I do than what I believe.

You set your play in Colorado? Why Colorado?

Rocky Mountains outside Denver (Photo: Jake Brasch)

Because Colorado is awesome, bro! Party! Powder! Snowboarding! Sick!!!

I’m a proud Denverite, born and raised. The year I got sober, the mountains were there for me. Every time I looked west, I felt so delightfully small.  Mother Nature gave me breathing room and I’m forever grateful to her. I hope that’s in the play. 

Have you written any other science-related plays?

This is my first full-length with a science bent. I’ve written two other shorts for the EST/Sloan Project. One was about our national feral pig problem. The other just so happens to be debuting in the next couple of weeks on the brand new Youngblood Podcast (shameless plug)! It’s called Endogamy and it’s about Ashkenazi Judaism and genetics.  

What’s next for Jake Brasch?

Dinner! I’m making a chicken tagine with an olive and rosemary sourdough boule and a shaved fennel salad. After that, bedtime. And after that, here’s hoping for a lifetime of climbing mountains, telling stories, and basking in the sunlight of the spirit. 

The 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

Laura Maria Censabella on animal intelligence, sexism in science, ageism, and BEYOND WORDS

Laura Maria Censabella (Photo: Jeff Colen)

How much do we really know about the intelligence of our fellow creatures? On Thursday, March 18 at 3:00 PM the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first reading (by invitation only) of BEYOND WORDS, the new play by Laura Maria Censabella. The play dramatizes the achievements and travails of Irene Pepperberg, the scientist responsible for breakthrough communications experiments with parrots, especially with Alex, the African Grey parrot she worked with for thirty years and chronicled in her books, Alex & Me and The Alex Studies. The playwright tells us more.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Take us through how BEYOND WORDS came to be.

Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex (Photo: David Carter)

I heard Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s beautiful monologue about her 30-year relationship with her African Grey parrot research subject Alex on The Moth podcast while I was working on my play Paradise.  In the way that always happens when you’re struggling with one play, I thought to myself I would love to write a play about Irene and Alex, that play would be so much easier and more fun.  I mean who hasn’t longed to communicate meaningfully with an animal?  To my great delight the Columbia biologist I was consulting with on Paradise, Dr. Stuart Firestein knew Irene and I asked him for an introduction.  Of course, actually writing the play was not easy!

Your play is unusual in chronicling the life and work of a living scientist. How closely did you work with Dr. Irene Pepperberg in writing the play? Has she seen each draft? Many of the scenes are deeply personal. Did you have any disagreements about what to include?

Irene read one draft of the play to vet the science—that is the extent of her oversight per our contract.  When she hears the newest draft of the play on March 18th, she will once again give notes about the science.  But before Irene gave me legal permission to write the story of her life, I had already written her a detailed letter about why I thought I was the one to write her story.  We then met for lunch in Cambridge to talk about the project.  After she gave me verbal permission to go ahead and I received a Sloan grant, I spent days in her lab observing her work with her birds.  I had already read many of her scientific writings and had detailed questions for her so she saw that I was attentive to the facts.  Additionally, before giving permission, she attended a workshop of my play Paradise which was presented at Underground Railway/Central Square Theater (prior to its world premiere there), and she liked it.  I’m sure she also spoke to Dr. Firestein about me.  In other words, she vetted me.  She learned that I completely believed in her scientific enterprise and that I am an advocate for women’s untold stories.  I told her, however, that I would have to write her faults as well as her strengths. Would she be up to that scrutiny?  Irene loves the theatre and she is no novice when it comes to what makes a true and good play. She agreed but I believe she also knew that I would do everything possible to represent her in her full humanity.

Dr. Stuart Firestein

Irene and I also had other emotional connections. I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens as did Irene.  Mine was a working-class family that did not have educational opportunities and yet I wound up with an Ivy League education as did Irene.  Like Irene, I had a parakeet when I was young that I trained and cared for deeply and that I knew possessed intelligence.  Like Irene, I have a parent who suffered from PTSD brought on by World War II.  And like Irene I work at a university where I have given my heart and soul but where there is no path to tenure and therefore perpetual economic uncertainty.

Why this play? Why now?

If ever there was a time for science plays, it is now. We’re continuing to live through the tragic effects of science denial with our COVID pandemic. Irene’s life’s work is another wake-up story: the animals we live among are feeling, intelligent beings. They possess forms of intelligence that we don’t. We are all a part of this living web of consciousness, a loss of one form of intelligence is a loss for us all.  Every day 150 species of plants and animals go extinct due to human activities. We have damaged and continue to damage entire ecosystems. What will it take for us to wake up? Floods, hurricanes, and ice storms of Biblical proportions beset us and we still choose to ignore the signs. The earth and animals are speaking to us—we just don’t listen.

You have decided to keep this first reading of BEYOND WORDS private. What concerns factored into that decision?

This is a play that calls for physicality from the actor playing the parrot Alex, which will call for highly abstracted bird movements created with the actor and a choreographer. We can’t convey that on Zoom. Additionally, there are a lot of shifts in time and place very quickly and we also wondered how that would translate in a reading. We wanted to protect this next step in the play’s development.  However, we do have an invited audience to test the play with.

Poster for the West Coast premiere of Paradise at Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles in 2019

Another play of yours, PARADISE, has also received an EST/Sloan commission and has had productions in Cambridge, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. How did the development process for that play differ from the development process for BEYOND WORDS?

First Light is the very first reading of BEYOND WORDS outside of the EST Playwrights Unit where I bring in drafts of my work to be heard around the table and to be critiqued. I also run the Unit. It’s a safe environment composed of caring and incisive professional playwrights where we share work in its early stages. At a certain point, the play must leave that room, and I was grateful to get Linsay Firman’s and Graeme Gillis’s (co-artistic directors of EST Sloan) input on the play, and then my director Melissa Crespo’s thoughts. Beyond that, it hasn’t had any formal development. This first reading for EST/Sloan with professional actors is the beginning of that process.

In addition to working with Dr. Pepperberg, what other research did you do in writing the play?

Dr. Diana Reiss with dolphin

I’m grateful to the animal scientists I spoke to such as Diana Reiss, dolphin expert, who was generous with her time, the science, her perceptions of Irene, and her own theatre background.  I then read, read and read—anything connected to animal science or animal behavior, including many scientific experiments in scientific journals. I also interviewed Elizabeth Hess, the author of Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. She helped me think about the entire animal behavior field in provocative new ways. And of course, Irene was always there to ask questions via email.

One of the scientists in the play, Howard Towers, does not get a very flattering portrayal. How do you think he’ll react to his characterization?

Luckily, Howard Towers is not a “real” scientist.  All the scientists in the play are fictions with the exception of Erich Jarvis who is presented briefly and those are not his actual words.  Even Irene is a fiction in that she is my Irene.  However, I strove constantly to tell the scientific and emotional truth of her life.

As for the Howards in the world of science (and there are plenty of them): they have had years of accolades and exponential advantages not accorded to women scientists and scientists of color. If they recognize some negative aspects of themselves in the character of Howard, that would be a good thing although I believe they are psychologically defended from introspection or things would have changed a long time ago!

By the way, I like the character of Howard. Not in the sense that I want to hang out with him but in the way that he makes an excellent stage character. He’s relentless and charismatic in what he will do to get what he wants. He’s also, I hope, complex. He’s at a stage in his life where he is looking back and just barely allowing himself to wonder what he lost and what he damaged to get where he is. Not just by affecting other people’s careers but by affecting and damaging animals.

Dr. Pepperberg’s work involved so many breakthroughs in our understanding of the intelligence of birds and how they communicate. What did you discover as you wrote the play that surprised you the most? Was it about the science or about what’s involved in being a scientist?

Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex and his colored shapes (Photo: Jeff Topping)

I already knew about the challenges a bench scientist faces from my play Paradise so the uncertainties in the life of a scientist—and the parallels with being an artist in terms of a scientist’s creativity—were familiar to me.  However, Irene’s story brought home the point of how contemptuously scientists can treat one another, especially when a colleague’s discoveries contradict their own, and the far-reaching repercussions such enmity can have on the ability to do one’s work.

One of the ongoing arguments in the play is whether Dr. Pepperberg’s close relationship with Alex undercuts her scientific findings. Where do you stand on this?

In this instance, when we’re talking about a helpless captive animal, I come down on the side of love—bearing in mind, of course, that love can cloud our judgment. However, my argument in the play and the argument of Irene’s life’s work is that she had enough outside controls and non-biased observers verifying her work. Also, for many years she treated Alex like a colleague and was completely unsentimental. It was only in the later years of Alex’s life that the emotional bond deepened so that he became the great love of her life. To be clear, her work has continued with other birds, birds that she has not had such an intense bond with, and in many cases, they have exceeded what Alex achieved.  However, there are still some scientists who deny Irene’s groundbreaking accomplishments and that is what made this such a rich play to write.

You mention the organization HONOR ROLL! in your bio.  What is HONOR ROLL!?

HONOR ROLL! is an action and advocacy group for women+ playwrights over 40. I’m sure you’ve heard the dire statistics about how few new plays by women are produced. As of the last count, the portion of produced plays by women is still under 25% and even lower for trans women and women of color. Although things are getting better, and numbers are slowly rising, experienced women playwrights like myself and others are now encountering ageism. Denied a seat at the table when we were younger, we are advocating for a seat at the table now that we have lived and really have something to say—and the craft to say it with.

What’s next for Laura Maria Censabella?

I just finished writing the polish for the film version of Paradise. I am also in the early stages of researching a new play partly based on my aunt who was also my godmother. She was severely disabled and had approximately 90 surgeries in her lifetime. At a certain point, against the wishes of the family, she signed up to have 12 more so that she could walk down the aisle unassisted at her son’s wedding. I want to tell the story of how she was infantilized in a close-knit Italian family, how she was cut off from disability activism and had to go it alone, and how her life changed all of us.

The 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

Bonnie Antosh on aye-aye muses, conjuring with Shakespeare, inheritance, and LEMURIA

Bonnie Antosh

How does the behavior of researchers mirror the animals they are studying? On Wednesday, March 10 at 3:00 PM the EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first public reading (free on Zoom) of LEMURIA, the new play by Bonnie Antosh that asks the question: in the animal kingdom and in our own, how does  a queen pass the crown to the next queen? Imagine, if you will, a queer King Lear in a North Carolina lemur lab. The playwright has more to tell us.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

You describe LEMURIA as “an inheritance drama about dominance, queer Southern scientists, academic lineage, sex, and – yes – lemurs.” Take us back to the play’s first formative days. Which of those themes came first and how did the play come to be?

The first seed was "King Lear plus lemurs,” which stuck with me because it’s (obviously) irreverent and felt risky, in a good way. 

I took a Primatology class as a distribution requirement in college, and I walked away with this abiding curiosity about lemurs and female-dominant species. When a dominant female ring-tail is sick or dying, young females will battle for control over the troop. So I started imagining the Lear archetype with a queen, Regan and Goneril as lemurs – and then as academics who study lemurs – and then also as exes. And that was pretty much that. 

Left: Jade Anouka as Hotspur in the St Ann’s Warehouse production of Shakespeare's Henry IV in 2015.(Photo © Pavel Antonov). Right:  Janet McTeer as Petruchio in Phyllida Lloyd's free Shakespeare in the Park production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Delacorte Theater in 2016.(Photo © Joan Marcus)

As an actress, you seem to have specialized in Shakespearean roles. Has this influenced how you create characters or write dialogue?

Completely. When I first came up with this idea, I was hunting for a science-driven story that might fit the structure of a Shakespearean or Tudor inheritance drama, but with Southern women centered as the old power and the rivals for new power. I’ve enjoyed playing male characters, watched women play many of the Big Classical Roles – Jade Anouka as Hotspur and Janet McTeer as Petruchio were particularly revelatory. At the same time, modern artists should be able to embody that epic ambition, lust, and tactical maneuvering while playing modern women. 

An aye-aye photographed at night in the wild in Madagascar (Photo: Frank Vassen)

Why lemurs?

A question that haunts me day and night! On a superficial level, some lemurs, like aye-ayes, are cute in a way that’s also a bit freaky. A little demonic? Do you know what I mean? Certain lemurs have this energy of the goth kids who got picked last in Nature’s Gym Class, but who’ve become masters of adaptation as a result. So I guess… I did this for love. 

You set the play in eastern North Carolina. Any significance to that setting?

The Eastern Piedmont of North Carolina – especially the university-dense area known at the Research Triangle – is one of many, many centers of Southern intellectualism and activism. I’m excited for audiences to walk away from my plays with a more realistic sense of the cultural multiplicity that exists in both Carolinas, where I’m from. 

Also, Durham is the IRL home of the Duke Lemur Center, the largest center for strepsirrhine primate research outside of Madagascar. I was hoping to take advantage of a treasure in my own backyard. 2020 had other plans!

What research did you do to prepare to write the play? Did you use a consultant?

Even from afar, I’ve been grateful to be able to interview some of the DLC staff, researchers from around the country, primatologists, and anthropologists while constructing this very fictional institution of LemurLab. Dr. Patricia Chapple Wright’s gloriously-titled For the Love of Lemurs provided context on fieldwork in Madagascar, where lemurs are endemic, and on primate research over multiple decades. I’ve also spoken to academics and writers about intellectual lineage and the desire to be “claimed” by mentors or proteges in the arts. I had and have incredible mentors as a playwright, so the experience of idolizing someone so much that you can barely speak actual, intelligible words to them was – embarrassingly easy to tap into while writing this script. 

In your play, the lemurs are very expressive and one even converses with one of the scientists. Was this your original concept or something that evolved? How do you imagine this happening on stage?

I’ve always pictured the lemur character, Cordelia, as a gorgeous, intricate puppet who’s voiced and manipulated by a visible actor. It would have been a tragedy to write this play with no lemurs onstage! Can you imagine? 

Lemur Catta (Photo: Leila Adolphsen)

In retrospect, a lot of scientists I interviewed this summer shared a desire to be able to converse with lemurs for a day, to be able to ask how to make the animals' environments more enriching or their participation in the research process clearer. Thematically, Cordelia needed to be able to discuss aging and power with Anabelle, the director of LemurLab: Cordelia is the Fool to Anabelle’s Lear. But in writing, I discovered that I didn’t want those conversations to be “magical." They needed to come at a cost for Anabelle, who is starting to question the trustworthiness of her own mind. 

Why this play? Why now?

This past year has been full of horrors, but – at least for me – nature is a source of wonder that cannot be exhausted.

Remember as a kid how curious you felt about animals? Just ‘cause. We don’t necessarily allow ourselves to access that same level of curiosity in adulthood. 

This play is obviously about the threat of death or extinction, but it’s also full of stage pleasures: flirtations and battles and puppets. It’s about chosen families. It’s about the choice to devote your life – sometimes insanely – to the survival and evolution of a creature you’ve become obsessed with. Theater people will be able to relate to that devotion that borders on obsession. 

Winifred at one week, an aye-aye born at the Duke Lemur Center in 2020 (Photo: Jenna Browning) https://lemur.duke.edu/winifred/

What’s next for Bonnie Antosh? 

This is hard to admit, but I did not get to chill with one single lemur during the writing of this play. The lemurs don’t even care: they’re such cruel mistresses!

Still, I’ll go on some manner of celebratory pilgrimage, as soon as public safety allows. 

The 2021  EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

AJ Clauss on stolen bodies, erotic medical textbooks, “writing the world we want to see,” and HENRY MAKES A BIBLE

AJ Clauss

On Monday, March 1 at 3:00 PM, the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first public reading (free on Zoom) of HENRY MAKES A BIBLE, the new play by AJ Clauss. The play dramatizes the little-known story of the creation in disease-infested London in 1858 of the world’s most famous medical textbook, Gray’s Anatomy, with text by 31-year-old medical wunderkind Henry Gray and 360 dazzling woodcuts by his artistically gifted medical colleague, 27-year-old Henry Vandyke Carter. To learn more, let’s hear from the playwright.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for HENRY MAKES A BIBLE come from?

I used to go to the Strand bookstore on Sundays and one afternoon I was holding a copy of this medical textbook. This copy was like the 86th edition, very college-vibes, and it cost three dollars. But I couldn’t stop flipping through the pages to get to the next drawing and the next. They really are so stunning. This led me into some research on anatomical illustrations in the 1800s. That’s when I learned the book was made by Henry and Henry and I asked them out on a date. They both said yes.

What kind of research did you do?

I relied heavily on Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection, and the Destitute which is an incredibly wholesome book on the underbelly of Victorian London. I’m also grateful for the research of Bill Hayes, Mike Sappol, and the Wellcome Library (who have Henry Carter’s journals from most of his life).

Henry Gray

My research focused on how the book would have been made and how they got the bodies. That’s really the beating heart of this play, the bodies. London had just passed in 1834 the New Poor Law (like, omg) which was basically a big middle finger from the rich. And this was just after The Anatomy Act (1832), which allowed for bodies from the “poor class” to be sold to doctors, anatomists, schools, etc. Their argument was that the contributions of these bodies would benefit all of mankind, and they did!! However, we don’t even know their names. When you look at Gray’s Anatomy, you are looking at the insides of an actual person who was sold to either provide bread for their family, or simply because they couldn’t afford a funeral (so expensive back then!). So, this book is a burial ground. The global infrastructure of anatomy was supplied by people who were starving and working themselves to death. A tale as old as time, I suppose.

What did you discover about what seems to have been a complicated relationship between Gray and Carter? Your play makes some decisions about the sexual preferences of the lead characters. Are those based on your research into their lives?

A few people have asked me that. First, let’s just acknowledge that history is told through a heterosexual lens where hetero folks are dramatized all the time as lovers and we don’t question the magic or the romance. When we dramatize a queer relationship, it’s like, wait, were they really though? Where’s the proof? I guess my proof is that queer people have always been around and have always been written out, especially in this era, thanks to the primarily cis-white-male-heterosexual gatekeepers of history. Because of this, we’ve had centuries of trying to find ourselves in the cracks of stories because of how secret and hidden our queer ancestors had to be.

Henry Vandyke Carter, self-portrait, 1870

In Carter’s journals, there’s no doubt that Henry Gray is his best friend and his biggest threat. I’m sorry, that’s hot! Carter also admits to burning journals that have stories he’s ashamed of, he keeps a calling card bookmarked in his journal from a guy he met in Paris, and he says all the time his mind wanders from religion. I’m recalling one line in particular, “What manner of Man am I?”

As a queer writer, I love the challenge of justifying why a seemingly non-queer person is actually a little queer, or a lot queer, because we write the world we want to see. And if that’s uncomfortable for a historian, or for anyone, that’s awesome.

The two Henrys are often quite funny. Is there evidence in letters, diaries, whatever, that Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter were this witty?

Thank you for saying that! So (spoiler) everything Henry Gray wrote was actually burned. That was part of my intrigue in writing this: that I would have breadcrumbs of a historical narrative and a lot of dark empty rooms to sit inside and figure out how they got from crumb to crumb. We do, however, have journals from Henry Carter, tons, such a great writer, some of his words are in the play, but he wasn’t funny at all! Which is even funnier. He was the brooding artist we can all identify with, so much to give, so cute, and so worried it’s all going to be for nothing.

I knew when I started this play that it was going to be very out of my comfort zone, as I needed to learn so much about language from a region and time far away from my middle-American roots. I wanted to find a rhythm that moved as fast as Henry Gray did (he was practically running St. George’s Hospital by the age of 28) and so I found a home in using banter as a birthright. It doesn’t matter, rich or poor, the wit became a communal love language.

Poster for Henry Makes a Bible

Much of the enduring appeal of the book Gray’s Anatomy is due to Carter’s painstakingly detailed woodcuts, all based on his own research from doing dissections. Do you plan on using any of his illustrations in your production?

Oh I’d love to! There are three scenes where the play describes the walls covered with his sketches, and that’s open to interpretation, but I’d love to see as much of his work as possible on stage. He portrays people with such grace. Even when their skin is off and their entrails are spilling out, he tilts their heads in a way that just feels nice. Calm. Home.

You include characters in the play from London’s lower classes -- the Little Boy and Grace the factory worker -- people we could say were exploited by Gray and Carter as they used for dissection the bodies of people who died impoverished. Why was it important to include these characters?

I wanted to give a life to the person on the page. The person whose heart changed the way we have understood hearts anatomically for generations, I wanted to give them a name. Her name is Grace.

As you did your research for the play, did you discover anything that surprised you?

I was surprised how erotic anatomical drawings are! Wowee! At the time, there was such a fascination at getting to see the inside of a body. It was brand new. There was so much bondage, and beautiful scenes, and you just can’t deny this incredibly complicated and cosmic feeling they are conjuring. I find myself grabbing onto my shoulders, my hips, my clavicle a lot more often these days and just saying: would you look at that. 

The other surprise was truly how disgusting the treatment of the poor was.  (I am writing this while hundreds of people without homes are freezing to death in Texas right now.) There were proposals to build gas chambers for the poor, and the workhouses were worse than I imagined. This comes up in the play. You watch a character sit with the idea of going to a workhouse—and resisting it: we are not that, we are not those people, this is the age of reason. And yet, somehow we are those people. We still are.

Sally McSweeney, the adventurous, pants-wearing foil for Gray and Carter, keeps things lively with her snappy repartee. Was she based on any real person in their lives?

Sally! So, (spoiler, omg) when Henry Gray dies, all the records say is that a nurse and his fiancée named Sally were in the room. That’s it. I screamed. His fiancée?!  He’s always referred to as never having time to date, so this was such a surprise, and wild to me that she only gave her first name, and is never heard from again. In the play, the idea for the book is actually her idea. She loves dressing like a man even though it’s still illegal, because the colonial idea of “woman” isn’t something she’s inspired by. And she wants to hold a knife like Henry does. I just love her. She’s teaching me so much.

Proofs of the title page for the 1858 edition showing Gray’s changes to Carter’s credit line

What’s next for AJ Clauss?

I’m currently staring at a wall of post-it notes that are the anatomy of this play and I’m just really grateful this is happening. I love this story. I’ll be sad when the wall comes down.

And I’m absolutely gobsmacked to say that next month I’ll be moving to the West Village thanks to the Still Standing artist residency. It’s a free apartment for a year as a chance to focus on writing. So the next twelve months I hope to be on a spiritual high with my ancestors and the universe, and sharing this love with our community.

The more you give away the more it comes back.

The 2021  EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

Amanda Quaid on Eunice Foote, Families, Climate Science, and CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE HEAT OF THE SUN'S RAYS

Amanda Quaid

Kicking off the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival on Thursday, February 25 will be the first public reading (free on Zoom) of CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE HEAT OF THE SUN'S RAYS, a new play by Amanda Quaid. The play takes its title from the path-breaking 1856 paper by amateur scientist, inventor, and women’s rights activist Eunice Newton Foote. In a two-page report on her innovative experiments, Foote became the first to identify carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and as the principal cause of global warming.  A pioneer of climate science, she remains largely unknown . . . until this play. Let’s have the playwright tell us more.

 (Interview by Rich Kelley)

Tell us how you came to write this play. When and how did you first hear about Eunice Foote?

I wanted to apply for a Sloan commission, but I didn’t have a topic. I think I actually googled “undiscovered women in science” or something like that. Climate science is a big interest for me, so when I chanced upon an article about Eunice Foote, I knew that was the story I wanted to tell.

What kind of research did you do? Did you use a consultant?

Samuel McKenzie

In my early research, I reached out to the Brookside Museum in Saratoga Springs, where Eunice had lived. They put me in touch with a researcher named Samuel McKenzie, who specializes in Eunice’s life and work. He generously shared many resources with me—a biographical report he wrote for the museum, photographs, letters, maps, and an analysis of the experiments. In addition to being a great researcher, he had a keen sense of story and an intuition about the kind of material that might be relevant to a playwright. I’m beyond grateful to Sam, and when he finally read the play and liked it (with notes, of course), I breathed a sigh of relief.

Why this play? Why now?

It’s interesting. She’s having something of a cultural renaissance. I just read a wonderful new book about women in the climate movement called All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, and it starts with Eunice’s story, portraying her as a kind of founding mother of climate science. From the beginning, women have been pioneers in this movement, and they’re stepping into leadership roles today at an unprecedented rate. This play is a kind of origin story. But hopefully, it’s more than a history lesson. At its heart, it’s about a family’s ambition—hers, her husband’s, her daughters’—and how that pans out for all of them in unexpected ways. I think most people can relate to that on some level.

There are many ways to write a play about a scientist. You chose to tell it very much through her dynamics with her family. Was that your original concept or one that evolved?

It took a lot of different incarnations, and I struggled at first to find the story. Since I was writing most of this during the first COVID lockdown, and I have a toddler, it was a feat just to get an hour of writing behind a closed door. So I started with a scene about Eunice not being able to get the privacy she needed, and it unfolded from there. I’m fascinated by her marriage because her husband was a feminist and her greatest supporter. Their bond was unusual and complex, and it completely upended expectations I had about marriage in the 1800s. I wanted to make it central to the play.

Researchers contend this may be the only known photograph of Eunice Newton Foote

In her book, Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British women in science, 1800–1900, Mary Creese notes that just sixteen papers in physics were published by American women in the 19th century; only two were published before 1889 and both were written by Eunice Foote.  So how is it possible that her remarkable contribution to climate science could lay unappreciated for more than a hundred years until a petroleum geologist rediscovered it in 2011?

It's a great mystery. And it does certainly make you wonder how many other Eunice Footes are out there.

Eunice was not only a trailblazing woman scientist but also an early woman’s rights activist who signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Settlements (along with her husband) in 1848. How did knowing that affect your characterization of Eunice?

I think it helps her push herself to publish at a time when women didn’t. It gives her confidence and a sense of herself as a role model. But I treaded lightly with this theme. It’s tempting to read her story—the difficulty she had getting recognized, how her work was overshadowed by a male British scientist—as all about gender injustice—and in a sense, to dismiss it on that account as well, just because we’ve seen that story so many times. I felt strongly that the play have a wider scope. She’s not an activist who happens to be a scientist. She’s a scientist first whose understanding of the state of women’s rights colors the way she maneuvers in her field.

Because Eunice Foote was the first scientist to discover the impact increased levels of carbon dioxide could have on the atmosphere, your play includes ways to call attention to the difference in CO2 levels in 1856 and today. What do you want the audience to take away from CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE HEAT OF THE SUN'S RAYS?

The CO₂ levels interest me because people think of the rise of CO₂ as such a modern phenomenon. To learn that the level was also creeping up back then and that she was unaware of that, even as she made this crucial discovery—adds a layer of irony to the story. But there’s not one specific thing I hope people will take away. I just hope they’re entertained and leave with something that has meaning for them—whether that’s a story about parents and children, ambition, women’s history, science, or something else entirely.

Chart courtesy of www.sealevel.info https://www.sealevel.info/co2_and_ch4.html

In CIRCUMSTANCES, the character of the glazier introduces the idea that trees are sentient, the theme of one of my favorite books, The Overstory by Richard Powers. You have also written a wonderful online guide to the Great Trees of Central Park. Might we be seeing a play from you about trees at some point?

How funny you should ask! That’s all I can say at the moment. But there’s a great quote by the poet Robinson Jeffers in his poem “Carmel Point:”

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

I’m trying to do a little bit of that. The Overstory is one of my favorite novels, too.

You are also a “not only” in being both an actor and a playwright. How does your experience as an actor influence your playwriting? And does it also work the other way: does your playwriting inform your acting?

Being an actor probably helps with writing dialogue. I can tell if a scene is working by reading it out loud—though I’m sure other playwrights who aren’t actors also do that. As for playwriting informing acting, it’s always humbling to be in another seat in the room—you see the process from an entirely different angle. It makes me a more informed colleague.

Poster for the Heartbeat Opera workshop production of The Extinctionist

What’s next for Amanda Quaid?

An opera libretto I wrote called The Extinctionist, based on a short play I had in the EST Marathon, is having a public workshop at Heartbeat Opera this May.

The 2021  EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

Radiolab Host Jad Abumrad, Biologist Danielle Lee, Astrophysicist Brian Nord join Playwrights Carla Ching, Charly Evon Simpson, Actor/Playwright Naomi Lorrain at EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event

From left: Jad Abumrad, Danielle N. Lee, Brian Nord, Carla Ching, Charly Evon Simpson, Naomi Lorrain

WHAT MAKES A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 22 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theatre companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide.

Every year the highlight of the EST/Sloan Project submission season is the Fall Artist Cultivation Event. At this eagerly anticipated event, a panel of scientists, science writers and playwrights engages in a far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion with an audience of prospective playwrights about “What Makes a Great Play about Science?” The 2020 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will be virtual this year and take place on Monday, November 30 at 7 PM. 

This virtual event will be held on the Zoom platform and is free to attend for any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology. Registration is required. Once registered, you will receive the event access link in your confirmation email. You can register here.

Applications for this year’s EST/Sloan commissions are currently open. Those who attend the virtual panel will receive an extended deadline of January 1, 2021.

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season: 1) The First Light Festival is a month-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and 2) a full mainstage production of at least one work. Recent mainstage productions have included Behind the Sheet (2019) by Charly Evon Simpson on the enslaved women who as experimental victims launched the science of gynecology (a NY Times Critic’s Pick), BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

 This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Jad Abumrad (Photo: Lizzie Johnston)

Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on nearly 600 stations and downloaded more than 12 million times a month as a podcast. He employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what’s been called “a new aesthetic” in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews, and sounds into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the legal foundation for the war on terror. Jad has won three George Foster Peabody Awards, and in 2011, he was honored as a MacArthur Fellow. He also created and hosted three seasons of More Perfect, a series about untold stories of the Supreme Court, which The New York Times called “. . . possibly the most mesmerizing podcast.” And in 2019, he created Dolly Parton’s America, a Peabody Award-winning nine-part series that explores a divided America through the life and music of one of its greatest icons.

Carla Ching (Photo: Elisabeth Caren)

Carla Ching wrote Fast Company as an EST/Sloan commission which got produced in 2014 at EST as well as at South Coast Rep, and in Seattle and Minneapolis. Her other plays include Nomad Motel, The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up, The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, TBA, Dirty and Big Blind/Little Blind.  Her full-length plays have been produced or workshopped by The O’Neill Playwrights Conference, The Atlantic Theatre Company, South Coast Rep, Center Theater Group, Huntington Theatre Company, the National New Play Network Showcase of New Plays, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Lark Play Development Center, Ma-Yi Theatre Company, Unicorn Theatre Company, The Women’s Project, Partial Comfort, 2g, The Hegira, Ferocious Lotus, Porkfilled Productions and Artists at Play, among others. She’s also written for television on Fear the Walking Dead, I Love Dick, The First, Preacher, and Home Before Dark.

Danielle N. Lee (Photo: Alecia Hoyt Photography)

Danielle N. Lee is an assistant professor of biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and is best known for her science blogging and outreach efforts focused on increasing minority participation in STEM fields. Her research interests focus on the connections between ecology and evolution and their contribution to animal behavior. In 2017, Lee was selected as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer which led her to travel to Tanzania to research the behavior and biology of landmine-sniffing African giant pouched rats. Her 2019 TEDTalk “How hip-hop helps us understand science” has received more than two million views.

Brian Nord (Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)

Brian Nord's interests revolve around exploring the ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific contexts and developing new methods for people to learn and do research. Brian's current research is in applying AI to data taken from big cosmic experiments, like the Dark Energy Survey. Recently, he's started to investigate methods for automating experiments --- think self-driving telescopes. Brian is also working on building better research communities: in 2017, Nord co-founded the the Deep Skies Lab — an inter-institutional collaboration of deep learning experts and astrophysicists. Brian has a long history of public engagement in science, including collaborations with artists and educators. He currently leads the KICP Space Explorers program, working with Chicago high school students. Nord is co-creator of ThisIsBlackLight.com, an online curriculum to teach about Black experiences in America. He helped start the Academic Strike4BlackLives in 2020, and co-authored the Change Now calls to action for a better physics research community. He is a Scientist in Fermilab's AI Project Office and Cosmic Physics Center. He is also a CASE Scientist in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and a Senior Member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago. 

Charly Evon Simpson (Photo: JMA Photography)

Charly Evon Simpson is a playwright, teacher, and TV writer based in Brooklyn. Her plays include Behind the Sheet, Jump, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Lark, The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Fire This Time Festival, and others. She has received the Vineyard Theatre's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Dramatists Guild's Lanford Wilson Award and has commissions from theaters including MTC/Sloan, Cleveland Play House, The New Group, and South Coast Repertory. She’s a core writer at the Playwrights' Center, a member of New Georges Jam, and in the incoming class of resident playwrights at New Dramatists. Charly has worked on TV shows for Showtime and HBO and has taught playwriting at Hunter College, SUNY Purchase, and the National Theatre Institute. BA: Brown University. MSt: University of Oxford, New College. MFA: Hunter College.

This Year’s Moderator

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff)

Naomi Lorrain is a NYC based actor/playwright. She holds both a B.A. in the History of Science, History of Medicine and a B.A. in African American Studies from Yale University as well as an MFA in Acting from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She works part-time as a Scholars-in-Residence Research Assistant at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an AUDELCO Awards nominee and a NY Innovative Theatre Awards nominee for Best Lead Actress for Behind the Sheet and Entangled, respectively. Theater: Behind the Sheet (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Entangled (The Amoralist), What to Send Up When It Goes Down (Movement Theatre Company, Drama Desk Nomination - Unique Theatrical Experience), Song for a Future Generation (Williamstown Theatre Festival). TV: “Orange is the New Black” (Netflix), “Elementary” (CBS), “The Good Fight” (CBS), “Madam Secretary” (CBS). Plays: The Lost Ones (NYU Tisch Grad Acting), A Trojan Woman’s Tale, The Big O (Villa La Pietra), Rigor Mortis (NYU Freeplay Festival), #shelfies (52nd Street Project), The Queen of Macon County (HomeBase Theatre Collective).