Radiolab Host Latif Nasser, Biochemist Mandë Holford, Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller join Playwrights Sam Chanse & Lloyd Suh & Science Editor Sophie Bushwick for 2024 EST/Sloan Zoom Event

Top row, from left: Latif Nasser, Mandë Holford, Daniela Schiller

Bottom row, from left: Sam Chanse, Lloyd Suh, Sophie Bushwick

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

PLAYWRIGHTS! JOIN US ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2024 AT 8:00 PM ON ZOOM FOR THE 2024 EST/SLOAN ARTIST CULTIVATION VIRTUAL EVENT

The EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event is the annual far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion among scientists, science writers, 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 25 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 November 15, 2024. 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 months-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and is currently in progress through December 12.

2) A full mainstage production of at least one work every season. Recent mainstage productions have included Franklinland by Lloyd Suh about William and Ben Franklin and experiments scientific and otherwise (currently running through November 3), Las Borinqueñas (2024) by Nelson Diaz-Marcano about the birth control pill trials in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, 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, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Sam Chanse

Sam Chanse’s plays include What you are now (Ensemble Studio Theatre & The Civilians), Disturbance Specialist (The Public Theater & National Asian American Theatre Company’s Out of Time), Trigger (Lark Venturous Fellowship), Fruiting Bodies (Ma-Yi Theater), and Monument, or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play) (Magic Theatre). A resident playwright of New Dramatists, her work has also been developed with Ars Nova (P.S.), Cherry Lane (The Opportunities of Extinction), Playwrights’ Realm (The Other Instinct), New York Stage & Film, Boston Court, the Ojai Playwrights’ Conference, and is published by Kaya Press (Lydia’s Funeral Video) and TCG (The Kilroys List). She is a recipient of a 2024 Bret Adams & Paul Reisch Foundation Vivace Award with collaborators MILCK and AG, and is currently developing a new musical, The Family Album, as a commission of La Jolla Playhouse. Other commissions include EST/Sloan Project, NAATCO, Ars Nova, Workshop Theater, the University of Rochester, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. A former fellow of MacDowell, the Lark Venturous Theater Fund, Cherry Lane, Sundance Theatre Institute, and Playwrights Realm, she is a member of Dramatists Guild and WGAW, and wrote on three seasons of ABC’s The Good Doctor. Proud alum: Ars Nova’s Play Group, Civilians R&D Group, and the Ma-Yi Writers Lab.

Dr. Mandë Holford  Photo Credit: DFinnin_AMNH

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. The Holford Laboratory of Chemical and Biological Diversity demonstrates the scientific path from mollusks to medicine - examining how venoms evolved, developed, and function over time, and how we can use this knowledge as a roadmap for discovering and characterizing peptide natural products with therapeutic potential. She is particularly interested in using venoms and venom peptides to study rapidly evolving genes and to develop invertebrate venom gland model systems that can be genetically manipulated to advance discoveries in novel gene regulation, expression, and function. Her work combines scientific research, education and diplomacy to understand the extraordinary marine biodiversity on our planet and transform this knowledge for the benefit of human and planetary health. She is cofounder of Killer Snails, LLC, an award winning EdTech company that uses tabletop, digital, and XR games as a conduit to advance scientific learning in K-12 classrooms. 

Latif Nasser

Latif Nasser is co-host of the award-winning WNYC Studios show Radiolab, where he has reported stories on everything from snowflake photography to medieval robots to a polar bear who liked to have sex with grizzly bears. He also hosted the award-winning miniseries The Other Latif, about his Moroccan namesake who was Detainee 244 at Guantanamo Bay. In addition to his work in audio, Latif is the host and executive producer of the Netflix science documentary series, Connected.  He has also given two TED talks, and written for the Boston Globe Ideas section. He has a PhD from Harvard's History of Science department.

Dr. Daniela Schiller

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. 

Lloyd Suh

Lloyd Suh is the author of The Chinese Lady (Ma-Yi at The Public Theater), Bina's Six Apples (Alliance Theatre and Children's Theatre Company), Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!, Franklinland, and more, including The Heart Sellers, (Milwaukee Rep). His play The Far Country (Atlantic Theatre) was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His work has been produced at theaters across the country, including Ensemble Studio Theatre, Magic Theatre, National Asian American Theatre Company, Denver Center, ArtsEmerson, Long Wharf and others, and internationally at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and with PCPA at the Guerilla Theatre in Seoul, Korea. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award, Horton Foote Prize, and Helen Merrill Award. He was elected in 2016 to the Dramatists Guild Council. Starting in 2015, he has been a member of the Dramatists Guild Council. He joined The Lark as the Director of Artistic Programs in 2011. From 2005 to 2010 he was the Artistic Director of Second Generation and Co-Director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. He is a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre and an alum of Youngblood and the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab.

About the Moderator

Sophie Bushwick

Sophie Bushwick is a science and technology journalist based in New York City and is currently working as senior news editor at New Scientist. She has more than a decade of experience as a writer and editor at outlets including Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover Magazine and Gizmodo, and she continues to make regular appearances on Science Friday. Her work spans digital and print, podcasts and radio, TV news and TikTok.

Thandiwe Mawungwa on contemporary Zimbabwe, culture clashes, playwriting, and HOW POWER FLOWS

Thandiwe Mawungwa

How do you introduce new technology to a village community where nothing can be done unless you consult with and get the approval of the village ancestors? In HOW POWER FLOWS, the compelling new play by Thandiwe Mawungwa, the idealistic civil engineers confront exactly this problem as they try to bring running water to a remote village in Zimbabwe.  

HOW POWER FLOWS will have its first public reading at 3:00 PM on October 24 at the Ensemble Studio Theater as part of the Fall 2024 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free and reservations are encouraged.

Thandiwe kindly found time this week to answer all our questions about her new play.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did HOW POWER FLOWS come to be?

My husband and I travel a lot to remote villages filming documentaries for humanitarian organizations. During our travels, I noticed there was one problem that was consistent among the villages – the clash between development and African traditional religion. When I saw the call for plays for the EST/Sloan Project, I thought that would be the perfect platform to write and develop the play that had been circling in my head for many years. The deadline also added the much-needed discipline to write and finish it!

Tell us about your journey from Zimbabwe to the U.S.

My journey from Zimbabwe to the U.S has been an adventurous one and began in 2019 when my play 33 Cents was chosen to be part of the Ojai Playwrights Festival in California. The following year, I returned to the United States for a film festival, which never happened because of COVID and we ended up being stuck in the U.S. for one and a half years. It was actually during this period that I applied for the EST/Sloan grant. Now, four years later, I am here again – with two films having been screened at the 33 and Me Film Festival in Pennsylvania as well HOW POWER FLOWS seeing its “First Light” at EST.

Have you ever visited or lived in villages in Zimbabwe like the one in the play? How did that inform the play?

Growing up we used to go to the village during school holidays and even as a young child, I could feel the tension between science and African traditional religion. My filming work takes me to many villages. These experiences played a major role in how I created my characters and their reactions.

Parts of the story are based on my own experiences in various villages. For example, when Henrietta is fined by the Chief for wearing trousers, that actually happened to me! However, in my case, I was wearing a skirt on top of the trousers but they saw the trousers around my ankles so I got into trouble! 

Why this play? Why now?

I have seen many talented, enthusiastic and hardworking young people leaving Zimbabwe because they were blocked from achieving their goals. The brain drain is real. I think it is time to address how corruption and our spiritual beliefs have played a major role in that. We need to find a way to respect our cultures and customs but not at the cost of development.

What do you want the audience to take away from HOW POWER FLOWS?

I want the audience to not only get an insight into some of the challenges we face in Zimbabwe, but for them to also understand that there are many nuances and complexities involved in trying to help a community. It’s not just about bringing development but about respecting and understanding the people you want to help.

Is the play set in contemporary Zimbabwe? Is the current political climate there as repressive – with frequent arbitrary arrests – as depicted in the play?

Yes, the play is set in contemporary Zimbabwe. Arrests happen there but are not arbitrary. You only get arrested if the government sees you as a threat – which is sometimes synonymous with trying to improve people’s standard of living. I, however, feel very strongly the need to mention that Zimbabwe is a very safe and peaceful country despite the political challenges we sometimes face. Everyone should definitely come and visit one day!

Are there still spiritual mediums in villages in Zimbabwe today who have as much influence over communal decision making as the medium depicted in the play?

Oh yes, definitely!

When did you know you were a playwright?

This may sound like a cliche but I started writing stories as soon as I could hold a pen. I became a playwright when I watched a terrible play in university and decided to write another play on the same subject but even better. I called that play A Banquet of Sorts and it played to three full houses!

What playwrights have influenced you the most?

Lyn Nottage, August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry. The Zimbabwean playwright who influenced me the most was Aaron Chiundura Moyo. We studied his books in school. Another notable writer who has influenced me is Ngugi Wa Thiong'o.

You may be best known for producing the 2017 Zimbabwe thriller Mind Games, which has won several awards including Best Zimbabwean Film at the Zimbabwe International Film Festival in 2017. That movie has quite a different vibe from HOW POWER FLOWS and your other plays which all seem to have a social justice component. Do you see theater as inherently better at accomplishing some things than movies? Any plans to write more thrillers?

Mind Games also has a social justice component just packaged differently from HOW POWER FLOWS. Theater is definitely better at accomplishing certain things than movies. The creativity in theater is endless while creativity in movies is usually limited by the budget. For example, in theater you can put a chair on stage and say this is now an airplane, but in movies you have to show the plane.

What's next for Thandiwe Mawungwa?

More writing! My husband and I are currently co-writing a feature film called Shanduko. I am also in the process of writing my next full-length play which is about social justice – but now focusing on the hypocrisy I see in the world. Interesting times!

HOW POWER FLOWS is one of three readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in the Fall 2024 First Light Festival, which runs from October 24 through December 12. The festival is made possible through the alliance between the Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.   

Historians Christopher L. Brown, Philip Dray, and Rosalind Remer gather at EST on October 26 to discuss Ben Franklin, eighteenth-century science, the American experiment, and FRANKLINLAND

From left, Christopher L. Brown, Philip Dray, and Rosalind Remer

On Saturday, October 26, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of FRANKLINLAND, the hilarious new comedy by Lloyd Suh, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback discussion with historians Christopher L. Brown, Philip Dray, and Rosalind Remer about the cultural, historical, and scientific background of the play.

FRANKLINLAND is the story of growing up as the only son of Benjamin Franklin: the greatest scientific mind in the world, inventor of the lightning rod and the urinary catheter and the glass harmonica and bifocal glasses and, oh yeah, in his spare time the United States of America.

The audience will have the opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.

FRANKLINLAND, written by Lloyd Suh and directed by Chika Ike, is the Fall 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

Christopher L. Brown

Christopher L. Brown is professor of history at Columbia University. He is a historian of Britain and the British empire, principally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the comparative history of slavery and abolition, and with secondary interests in the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Age of Revolutions.  His current research centers on the history of European experience on the African coast at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, and continues early commitments to the rise and fall of slavery in the British Empire.  His published work has received prizes in four distinct fields of study – American History, British History, Atlantic History, and the history of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance. Completed projects include Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press) and, with Philip D. Morgan, Arming Slaves: Classical Times to the Modern Age (Yale University Press).  He has written as well for The Nation, The New York Times, and the London Review of Books, among other outlets.  

Philip Dray

Philip Dray is the author of several books about the cultural and political history of the United States, including Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America; Capitol Men: The Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen; and At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. He also published There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America and A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Redemption in the Gilded Age. He has received the Southern Critics Book Circle Award for Non-Fiction, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.  He teaches in the Journalism + Design Department at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, and lives in Brooklyn. 

About the Moderator

Rosalind Remer

Rosalind Remer was Executive Director of the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, a federal commission to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Franklin’s birth. She is Senior Vice Provost at Drexel University for Collections and Exhibitions, and the founding Executive Director of the Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships at Drexel.  Remer is Chair of the Board of Managers of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and serves as a member of Board of Advisors for the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, vice chair of the American Antiquarian Society’s Council, and a member of the Independence Historical Trust board of directors.

 FRANKLINLAND began previews on October 9 and runs through November 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Lloyd Suh on fathers and sons, Ben Franklin’s humor, the American experiment, and FRANKLINLAND

Lloyd Suh (Photo: Jackie Abbott https://www.jma-photography.com/)

Imagine what it must have been like to be William Franklin, only son of the greatest scientific mind of his time: to assist in his father’s experiments and try to understand their importance, to travel with him and do experiments aboard ship, to match wits daily with the creator of some of the most famous sayings in American culture. And then to rupture the sacred bond when the time came to choose sides in the great experiment of inventing America.

In his brisk comedy FRANKLINLAND, Pulitzer finalist Lloyd Suh has great fun putting center stage one of the most fractious father-son love-hate relationships in American history – at a time when the country itself was just being born. Lloyd tells more about the genesis of the play below.

The New York premiere of FRANKLINLAND, directed by Chika Ike, is the Fall 2024 EST/Sloan Project Mainstage Production. This year is the 25th anniversary of the partnership between EST and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Previews of FRANKLINLAND start Wednesday, October 9 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the show will run through November 3. Reserve your ticket here.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea of writing a play about Ben and William Franklin come from?

Honestly, it came from EST and the Sloan Foundation. Graeme Gillis had asked me back in 2011 if I had any ideas for a play about science and technology. I had always been fascinated by Benjamin Franklin and had read a couple of biographies about him previously, but I probably wouldn’t have come to the idea of writing a play about him without that prompt from Graeme. But once he asked, I started thinking about an inventor who ultimately invents a nation. It started from that.

When did you know it was going to be a comedy? Was Ben Franklin really as funny as he is in the play?

I knew immediately it wanted to be a comedy, because yes, Benjamin Franklin was very, very funny – albeit in a different way than I’ve depicted him here (what was funny then isn’t necessarily what’s funny now). But humor was a key part of what he valued about life.

What kind of research did you do to prepare to write FRANKLINLAND?

Since the reading I had already done about Benjamin Franklin was casual reading, I went back to various sources, including Ben’s own writing – basically re-reading key sections with more of a researcher’s eye. I gave myself permission pretty early on to deviate in certain ways from the historical record, but I wanted everything to be rooted in the truth – so especially in the few key instances when I’ve invented an idea or encounter, I wanted to make sure there was historical grounding.

Is the term “Franklinland” something you discovered in your research or is it your invention?

That’s one of the things I invented, but it comes from something very real. Ben and William had done a great deal of land speculation in their time together, and in his will Ben left his son almost nothing but for the lands he owned in Nova Scotia. There’s no doubt this conveyed a particular metaphor at the time, as the significance of the land was elusive. But it made me curious about potential complexities – perhaps hidden complexities – in what that land could have represented. Ultimately, the land has a different fate in the play than it did in reality, but trying to load it with as much meaning as possible was a fun and valuable exercise in giving context to that relationship.

There is so much going on in FRANKLINLAND: the tempestuous father-son relationship, the confusion of a young nation in rebellion, Ben’s endless inventiveness.  Which aspect attracted you the most?

Well, it started with the inventions, which led to the notion of America itself as a grand scientific experiment. But the father-son relationship, especially as it related to the war in pursuit of that American experiment, was the most essential element in making it an actual play. The other stuff was the impetus – I guess you could say the bones of the play – but the family conflict was the heart.

In your recent conversation on the “EST Re:Members” podcast, you mentioned that you felt that FRANKLINLAND resonates differently now than it did in 2014, when you first wrote it. What in the play resonates differently now?

Okay, this is very nerdy, but if we apply the scientific method to the American experiment, we can just imagine how differently we might interpret the data coming back during the Obama years vs. the data we’re receiving in this very contentious election season, or even just generally in the aftermath of the Trump administration and the ongoing national conversation around our monuments, and what they mean as we reckon with America's racist history. These are new data points, and I suspect we’ll get even more, every day over the coming weeks as the election ramps up. I’m fascinated to see how the news of the day in the run up to Election Day might make its way into the theater during the run.

You are perhaps best known now for your history plays about Asian immigrants coming to America: The Chinese Lady, The Heart Sellers, and The Far Country, for which you were a Pulitzer finalist. How does FRANKLINLAND relate to those plays?

Each of those plays is so distinct, not just in terms of story but also in terms of form, so I never know how to define them collectively. But there was about a 10-year stretch when pretty much everything I did was part of an involuntary impulse to investigate particular moments in history. Many of these plays were full-length plays centered around Asian American history, like The Heart Sellers and Charles Francis Chan, along with the ones you mentioned, but some were not: I would also count Disney & Fujikawa, a shorter play that was another EST commission, as part of that exploration, as well as Bina’s Six Apples, which is not set in the US but in Korea. So I guess you could classify these in many different ways, and sometimes by necessity or convenience I will, but ultimately I think they are all connected. Franklinland was chronologically the first one – both in terms of setting, but also in terms of when I wrote it.

What’s next for Lloyd Suh?

I think I’ve satisfied enough of whatever that involuntary impulse was – that impulse around history. I’m trying not to overthink this, but I’m following a different impulse now, which is that lately I’ve been writing about the future.

Meghan Brown on sibling rivalry, quantum physics, hard-to-shake stories, and BIGFOOT

Meghan Brown

When do harmless ideas become dangerous? How do members of the same family develop radically different belief systems? How enduring are family bonds? Meghan Brown explores these questions and more in BIGFOOT, her edgy family comedy in which disgraced physicist Holly tries to persuade her Bigfoot conspiracy theorist sister Alyssa to return from the wilds of Oregon for a family Thanksgiving before their mother dies. A darkly funny high-stakes suspense play about sibling rivalry and the power of a good story.

BIGFOOT had its first public reading on June 17 at the Ensemble Studio Theater as part of the 2024 EST/Sloan First Light Festival.

Taking time out from her many new projects, Meghan kindly talked with us about her new play.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What inspired you to write BIGFOOT?

In light of the increasing visibility of anti-science thinking during the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to explore the ways in which seemingly harmless ideas (like believing in Bigfoot) become dangerous. 

I was also really interested in exploring a family dynamic where two sisters had diametrically opposed views on science, and imagining a set of circumstances where they were able to connect with each other in a way that made change possible. 

The two sisters in the play have a lot of issues with each other and have developed dramatically different worldviews: one is a physicist; the other is extremely skeptical of science. Do you think family dynamics can determine a person’s worldview?

I think that human beings are at the mercy of stories, and that many of the most foundational, hard-to-shake stories about identity often crystallize within families. We all see the world through a very particular lens — and that filter is shaped significantly (though not necessarily permanently!) by childhood experiences and dynamics. 

Frame 352 of the 1967 Patterson–Gimlin film, alleged by the filmmakers to depict a female Bigfoot.

Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin / Public Domain

Holly, the physicist in the play, talks about some of the more puzzling theories in physics: quantum superposition, quantum entanglement, and dark matter. Is the play contending that some of the tenets in physics require a belief system similar to what a conspiracy theorist buys into?

Definitely not! There’s a big difference between believing in Bigfoot and believing in quantum physics — but one of my main interests in telling this story was trying to really highlight what that difference actually is. In BIGFOOT, Alyssa points out that Bigfoot is just a “weird animal,” not an “all-knowing bilocating electron or whatever” — I wanted to explore the idea that depending on your background, believing in something like Bigfoot might feel much more comfortable than “believing” in a scientific paradox you haven’t been given the opportunity to truly understand. 

What would you like audiences to take away from seeing BIGFOOT?

That you can change your story. You can change your mind. You can learn new things and gather new evidence and release outdated beliefs and come to new, more evolved conclusions. And you can do this without being “incapacitated by shame.” It’s OK to have been wrong!

Have you had any personal relationship to physics?

I’m married to a quantum physicist, which has resulted in a much more personal relationship to physics than I ever would have predicted. Physics is mysterious and fascinating, and it has been a real privilege to get some small level of insight into how the world works on an atomic level. 

Plays about sisters are always so rich with history and feeling. What are your favorite plays about sisters?

The first two that come to mind are Jiehae Park’s Peerless and Jen Silverman’s The Moors. (Both happen to have productions in July 2024!)

What’s next for Meghan Brown?

I’m currently working on a physics-related spy romcom screenplay called Superposition, and was one of the co-writers on a comedy thriller film for Buzzfeed/Lionsgate called F*** Marry Kill that shot last summer and will be released soon. In terms of theater, I’m currently collaborating on a few new musical projects and continuing work on my astronaut murder mystery play A Seam (developed at the Geffen Playhouse Writers Room) and the Much Ado About Nothing riff/sex tragicomedy What Happened While Hero Was Dead (developed at Moving Arts’ MADlab, the Great Plains Theater Conference, and the Ashland New Plays Festival). I’ve also got a production of my play The Pliant Girls opening in DC this fall! 

BIGFOOT was one of six readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in the 2024 First Light Festival, which ran from April 25 through June 17. The festival is made possible through the alliance between the Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.   

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).

Amanda Keating on medieval nuns who paint, dental anthropology, COVID-19, and WITH FELLOWSHIP

Amanda Keating

Has how we work together changed over time? What can we know now about those who lived 1,000 years ago? WITH FELLOWSHIP, the captivating new play by Amanda Keating, tells two parallel stories: an 11th-century nun grinds beetles to create the precious inks she uses to illuminate manuscripts, and, in our time, a team of researchers studies that nun’s fossilized dental plaque to try to reveal secrets about her life.

WITH FELLOWSHIP will have a live public reading this Thursday, June 22 at 3:00 PM at the Ensemble Studio Theatre as part of the 2023 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free and reservations are encouraged.

Amanda reveals her insights about the play below.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Tell us how WITH FELLOWSHIP originated?

I originally wrote WITH FELLOWSHIP as a short play for a Sloan-themed Youngblood brunch back in 2019, after I read about some very cool research that was published around the same time. Like Charlie in the play, I’ve always been really fascinated by the Middle Ages and manuscript illumination specifically, so this research — which hypothesized that women in monastic communities were more involved with manuscript production than we previously thought — really excited me. I also have spent many years working in a myriad of workplaces and was eager to write about the strange experience of being in a community with others in that context.

Self-portrait of Guda, 12th-century German nun and illuminator. One of the first woman to create a self-portrait in a manuscript. Her inscription: “Guda, a sinner, wrote and painted this book.” (Frankfurt am Main Staatsbibliothek / Public Domain)

What research did you do to write the play? Did you work with a consultant?

My research mostly involved reading a lot of books about monastic life in the Middle Ages, particularly for women, texts on manuscript illumination, and a handful of articles and books about the study of dental anthropology. I didn’t work with any consultants or researchers, just dug into the materials I could get my hands on to see where they led me.

Why this play? Why now?

I finished the first draft of this play in 2020, right before the pandemic, but the play always felt oddly in conversation with COVID-19. There’s a lot of discussion of “plague” in the 11th-century sections of the play. In both worlds, the characters all feel the need for fellowship, community, and purpose in the wake of crisis and loss. For me, this play feels relevant now because we’re all sort of re-learning community and what it means to be good to each other. I think this is a universal human experience and something that the characters in the play grapple with, whether they inhabit the 11th century or today.

This play is also important to me in how it centers women’s voices in fields that have been largely dominated by men — science and manuscript production. There are male characters in the play, but they exist entirely offstage, allowing us to really see these two workplaces and worlds through the perspectives of female-identifying characters.

Dental calculus on the lower jaw of a medieval woman (B78) entrapped lapis lazuli pigment (Photo courtesy of Christina Warinner)

WITH FELLOWSHIP was first included in the First Light Festival in 2020. How has the play changed since then?

The play has continued to evolve since 2020! I have done a couple of other readings — mostly virtual — over the years, as well as some “cut” versions of the play that explored B78’s story in isolation. But the 2020 First Light reading was hugely informative for the growth of this play, and because many of the rewrites have been undertaken during the pandemic, I’ve been especially curious about the ways in which the play is in conversation with our experience of the last few years. The structure of the play has remained largely the same but I’ve worked to deepen that conversation, as well as to consider how the two worlds (medieval and contemporary) overlap and collide throughout the play.

You are a former member of EST’s Youngblood program. How did being a member of Youngblood influence or change your playwriting?

Scene from RETREAT by Amanda Keating, Ensemble Studio Theatre (2016) (Photo: Jody Christopherson)

Being in Youngblood changed everything for me. It connected me to a huge community of artists and allowed me to see a lot of the work I was writing on its feet. I wrote many brunch and Asking for Trouble plays that taught me how audiences responded to my characters and sense of humor, and was able to work with incredible teams of actors and directors on a handful of readings as well as a workshop production of my play RETREAT in 2016. I learned so much about myself as a writer and a person in Youngblood and am so grateful to have spent four years with the group.

What’s next for Amanda Keating?

Great question! I just finished up my MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop, so “what’s next” is mostly moving back to the city, hanging out with my dog, and figuring out how to game alternate side parking. I’m also working on a handful of other plays, including a new piece called MELINDAS about three women named Melinda and a dead body in a freezer.

WITH FELLOWSHIP is one of seven readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 22. 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.       

Margot Connolly on girls who code, apps that change the planet, writing after Dobbs, and HELLO, WORLD

Margot Connolly

Can an app change the world, even a little bit? Can being able to code change your life? How do you code as a team? You could learn the answers this Thursday, June 8 at 3:00 PM at the Ensemble Studio Theatre during a public reading of HELLO, WORLD, the vibrant new play written by Margot Connolly and directed by Alex Keegan. The reading is free and part of the 2023 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. Reservations are encouraged.

HELLO, WORLD takes us inside two teams of teenage girls as they compete to see who can code an app that could change the world for the better.  As we watch them, we have to ask: who decides which app and cause are most worthy of winning? Playwright Connolly kindly answered our questions before the very first reading of the play when it was part of the 2020 First Light Festival.  The times—and the play—have changed quite a bit since so we now have a revised interview with some new replies.  

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for HELLO, WORLD come from?

Alex Keegan, my director and collaborator, and I have been interested for a while in creating a play about girls who code. We were originally inspired by a photo of Margaret Hamilton, one of the women who worked on the guidance software for Apollo. In this picture, she’s standing next to a tower of binders taller than her. It’s all the code for the Apollo mission, written by hand. The image is so compelling—this idea that not only have women been working in these fields for so long, largely unrecognized, but also the sheer amount of work that goes into creating all these basic things. We batted around that image for a while but never had a compelling story to go along with it. Finally, we put together the idea of girls coding. There are these real-life all-girl coding competitions that are meant to encourage girls to get involved in tech. From there we were able to come up with a rough idea for a story. Last year, I turned that outline into the first draft of HELLO, WORLD.

Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton poses with the Apollo guidance software she and her team developed at MIT in 1969. Photos: MIT Museum

Why this play? Why now?

We live in a world in which teenagers are more and more empowered to change the world around them.  Look at Greta Thunberg, at X Gonzalez, and the other gun control activists from Parkland, Florida, etc. A huge part of what they have achieved is due to their access to technology: how fluent they are in social media and how that translates into media savvy, how having access to the internet opens doors and worlds that wouldn’t have existed for them fifty years ago. At the same time, the world around them is in desperate shape. These kids are forced to fight for themselves because they have no faith that adults will fight for them—and the matters they are fighting for are literally about life and death. So, looking at coding as a means of resistance for these girls, as a way for them to be able to engage with and change the world around them, especially as teenage girls who are historically not taken seriously, was most of what we were interested in while working on this play.

In a lot of ways, this play has been harder for me to work on than others because it’s so of the moment. Both the situation in Flint and the situation with abortion legislation in America are constantly changing, so it’s been interesting to figure out how to address that and make sure the information in the play is accurate, but not to the extent that I have to do a full rewrite every time a restrictive abortion bill hits the news. The specifics are less important than the need. Now more than ever, we need to be giving teenagers, particularly young women, a voice and to empower them to feel like they can make these changes to their world, and that’s what HELLO, WORLD is about. 

Girl Code with authors Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser

What kind of research did you do?  

I’m not a science-brained person, so I went to the library and found a bunch of books about coding meant for kids to try and wrap my head around the subject. I played some online games that teach coding to kids too, like CoderDojo. I basically treated myself like a fifth grader to get a hang of the basics. I was also super-inspired by the organization Girls Who Code and used their websites and the book Girl Code (written by Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser, who went through the Girls Who Code summer program and made a really awesome game, Tampon Run, to de-stigmatize menstruation!  I also love documentaries, so watched a lot of those. The most useful was CodeGirl, about the real-life Technovation Challenge for Girls, but I also watched Flint Town and After Tiller, among other docs, to try and get a glimpse of the worlds of these girls.

The team from Moldova whose Pure Water app won the Technovation Challenge in 2014

The apps your two teams develop—one related to abortion, the other to clean water—are actually quite compelling. Where did the idea for them originate? 

Part of our process was looking at the apps developed in the documentary CodeGirl, all of which serve some sort of need in their environment. One of the winning teams from previous years of the competition was a group of girls from Moldova who made an app to track contaminated well water in the community. That led us to think about how this isn’t just an issue for girls from third world countries. This was a kind of app that people in our own country could benefit from, like people in Flint who have spent the last six years dealing with uncertainty about their water supply. That led us to the idea for the team of girls from Flint, whose app is meant to track the nearest locations to collect clean, bottled water.  

Heather Booth, who founded the Jane Collective in 1965 as a 19-year-old University of Chicago student

For the Iowa team, I was particularly interested in the history of the Jane Collective, a group of women in Chicago pre-Roe v. Wade who helped connect women in need to underground abortion providers, and who eventually taught themselves to administer abortions in order to provide all women with affordable and safe abortions. After Roe v. Wade, they disbanded, but when we considered that many states are down to one abortion clinic and when the financial strain and time commitment of getting to and from that clinic makes getting an abortion difficult if not impossible, we started thinking about what the modern-day equivalent to the Jane Collective would be, and that’s where the idea of the app from the Iowa team was born. 

HELLO, WORLD had its first reading as part of the 2020 First Light Festival. What have you changed in the play since then and why?

The first reading of HELLO, WORLD in 2020 was amazingly helpful—it gave me a lot of great information about how to balance the three teams of characters in the play, how to deepen the inner lives of the teenaged protagonists, and how to complicate the world of the competition. However, by the time we got to the reading on March 12, 2020, the world was rapidly shutting down around us. The world that play lived in no longer exists. I said in my initial interview with you that this play was an interesting challenge to me because it was so “of the moment” and the moment that we're in now is a very different moment than pre-pandemic. So, the big project in this draft was shifting the events of the play from 2019 to 2022 and tweaking things to fit that new timeline—whether that's the weirdness of students being at an in-person coding competition for the first time since COVID, the new state of abortion access in America, or the ongoing nature of the crisis in Flint.   

Tell us more about how what has changed in the world has changed the play.

So much has changed in the world since the 2020 reading! The thing that required the most attention was the Dobbs Supreme Court ruling in June 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. When I was writing about the Iowa team's app JaneRide in 2020, I never imagined that we'd take such a drastic step backwards regarding the constitutionally protected right to abortion. When revisiting the play, it felt wrong to keep the work set in 2019 and ignore this seismic shift, especially since it brings a lot of interesting questions to the Iowa teams' project: is their app even more urgent in this new landscape, or is it dangerous or potentially illegal in light of new legislation? By moving the play to 2022, only a few weeks after the Dobbs decision, I was able to work in some of these questions while still keeping a lot of the core details about the app intact, since the students themselves were blindsided by this turn of events. 

Overall, the theme of disappointment, betrayal, or lack of trust in the government feels a lot more prevalent in this draft. It was always there for the Flint team, but with the events of the pandemic and the Supreme Court decision, it feels like something both teams have had to come to terms with much more deeply, and something that's fueling their desire with these apps to build resources that can help mitigate some of these failures. 

Would you say that the context for the play has changed? The stakes, the urgency, the risks for what the coders are working on?

While the immediate context for the play has changed in a few fundamental ways, the stakes, urgency, and risks for the coders are very similar to the previous iteration of this play. One thing that the past couple of years has made clear to me is the way that older generations are really failing Gen Z and leaving them a world in shambles; climate change, gun violence, environmental injustice, attacks on abortion care and LGBTQ+ rights are all issues that are creating increasingly inhospitable environments for this next generation. This was already true in 2020 but not necessarily as immediately apparent. So, while these stakes may feel more heightened or more urgent, the main struggle at the heart of the play is the same—what tools do teenagers have to engage with the world around them? How can they create positive change in a world that doesn't take them seriously?  

What do you want the audience to take away from HELLO, WORLD?

That teenage girls are amazing and can do more than most people give them credit for! Also, it’s worth thinking about what function these competitions serve. Their goal is to encourage young women to get involved in tech, which is great, but they do so by creating a competitive environment as opposed to encouraging these girls to collaborate and support each other. This focus on competition furthers the idea that there can only be one winner—-that there is room in this field (or any field) only for the most exceptional women and that you must, therefore, be in direct competition with other women for your spot. If they succeed, it means you’ve failed. What do we gain by pitting young women against each other like this? Both of these apps are good ideas and both of them could do an enormous amount of good—so why pick only one? Who gets to decide what is most important, whose need is greater? Why is this an all-or-nothing game? We’d like people to be thinking about those questions when they leave the play!

What’s next for Margot Connolly?
I'm currently working on a few new things! During the pandemic, I found myself learning to write for opera, a fascinating new form to discover, and wrote the libretto for a chamber opera called Juvenilia which is being performed as part of the Four Corners Ensemble’s Operation Opera this weekend. I'm currently working with composer Zachary Detrick on expanding that piece, which deals with the complicated relationship between the Brontë siblings and the childhood writings that were the foundation of their later works. I'm also in the very early stages of a play that explores the vibrant online communities that spring up around fanfiction and fan culture, and how ChatGPT may be infringing on those communities by scraping their work to train their language processing system. So, more science research in my future!

HELLO, WORLD is one of seven readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 22. 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.       

Nelson Diaz-Marcano on clinical trials, birth control, women at risk, and LAS BORINQUEÑAS

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

Is there a way to measure the cost in human lives of medical breakthroughs? Does the number of lives saved by a breakthrough offset the lives harmed by the experiments that enabled it? Are we willing to revisit how unethical historical experiments were?

LAS BORINQUEÑAS, the hard-hitting new drama by Nelson Diaz-Marcano, confronts exactly these questions. The play derives its title from Borinquén, the aboriginal Taino name for the island of Puerto Rico, and tells two parallel stories: one about the American scientists who in the 1950s made the world-changing discovery that a pill could prevent conception, and the far less heroic story of how the clinical trial for the pill was conducted with the women of Puerto Rico.

LAS BORINQUEÑAS will have its first public reading at 3:00 PM on Thursday, June 1 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre as part of the 2023 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free but reservations are encouraged.

We interviewed the playwright back in 2021 when the play had an invitation-only reading as part of that year’s First Light Festival. The interview below recaps some of those answers along with Nelson’s thoughts on what has changed — in the play and in the world.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Take us back to the origin of LAS BORINQUEÑAS. How did it start?

Years ago, as I started doing my research on the Puerto Rican revolt of 1951 for another play, I stumbled upon the details of the birth control mass trials that were conducted in Puerto Rico. While there are plenty of stories about medical negligence and abuse in Puerto Rico, this one fascinated me the most because the results of the experiments ultimately benefited the world. But whose world? Who got the most from these trials? Were the women rewarded for their bodies being used? What was the human cost of the birth control pill? Do good results excuse evil practices? Those questions kept percolating in my mind as I unfolded the history we were never told.

LAS BORINQUEÑAS is part of my life-goal project to expose the hidden/forgotten history of Puerto Rico through the celebration of those who lived it.

What kind of research did you do in writing the play?

Dr. Gregory Goodwin Pincus (seated at the table) and Dr. John Rock (pictured on the right). Source: Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research

I read dozens of academic articles about the trials, about John Rock, Gregory Pincus, Margaret Sanger, Katherine McCormick, the birth control movement and, in particular, the books The Birth of the Pill:  How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig and A Good Man, Gregory Goodwin Pincus: The Man, His Story, the Birth Control Pill by Leon Sperrof. I watched Ana María García’s 1982 documentary La Operación and spent hours watching stock footage from Puerto Rico and America from that time. And I talked to my grandmother and others who lived during the 50s and 60s to get a sense of how they felt and acted.

Did anything you discovered in your research surprise you?

I want to say yes, but sadly, very little surprised me due to the years I spent researching the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. The corruption, the lack of care for the native population, the scientific risks which cost lives — these have all been constant fixtures of that relationship. What surprises me — and always does — is the lives of the survivors after the event. How these women who got no rewards or recognition for their contribution continued raising their kids, taking care of their families, and lived full lives. I am continually surprised by the spirit of the survivors and their complete dedication to live as happily as they can. I wanted to show that in this play.

The clinical trial depicted in the play — testing the contraceptive pill Enovid in Puerto Rico in the 1950s — seems very problematic. What did the participants in this trial know about what they were taking and what effects to expect?

They didn’t know much. Some women thought these pills were part of a survey on family size, others were told these pills were an experimental contraceptive, but they got no specifics about any side effects or the real nature of the experiment. The demand for a contraceptive pill was high at the time, so women flocked to the trial thinking they would be safe. Little did they know the scientists were using them to find out what the actual side effects were and what needed to be tweaked in the formula to make it safe for consumption on the mainland. In other words, to create a better product they were providing pills that they knew could be toxic to these women without informing them of the risks.

Five Puerto Rican women are at the heart of your play; four participate in the trial. How did you decide the right number to have and how to differentiate the characters?

To be honest, there was no specific reason for the number of women. I wanted to create characters based on the women I grew up around in the late 80s and early 90s and their dynamic. While the men were “working,” the women were doing the house chores, trying to take care of the kids. Some of them had jobs, yet all of them were expected to do it all. The best part of their day was when they were able to steal moments for each other. Their conversations always went from religion to politics to whatever happened in the neighborhood that day. They knew everything, had an opinion about it all, but only had each other to decompress with as their men came like storms and changed the environment.

Two characters in the play have a secret extramarital gay relationship. How common was this in Catholic Puerto Rico in the 1950s? Why was this important for you to include?

The thing about queer history is that it’s always been common, we were just not as privy to it as we are today. This is especially true in heavily colonized communities where indoctrination through religion is fierce and brutal. You are not only afraid of the masters, but you are also afraid of the oppressed as they seek to please their masters. There’s always been people hiding in marriages, people being chastised for being too femme/boyish, people being condemned due to their sexuality, for not fitting the mold. I included it in this story because I believe love is the most pure emotion we all share, and even that is decided for them by men.

“Who can they love? How can they love? What are their duties to that love?” These are the questions each woman deals with in this play. The homosexual relationship explores a big aspect of that dilemma.

LAS BORINQUEÑAS had an invitation-only reading as part of the First Light Festival in March 2021. What have you changed in the play since then and why?

Mostly, the Gregory Pincus storyline [Biologist Gregory Pincus was co-inventor with gynecologist John Rock of the combined oral contraceptive pill]. One of the things we noticed was that while the women’s story was strong, the Pincus storyline lacked the same emotional power. This version aims to create an emotional anchor that connects the two pieces and shows the stakes everyone was dealing with. It also creates a less black and white narrative.

Dr. Edris Rice-Wray  (Photo: HenryLee Marlo/CC 3.0)

The play no longer includes John Rock or Margaret Sanger. The scientific storyline focuses on Pincus and Dr. Edris Rice-Wray, the medical director of the Puerto Rico Family Planning Association who conducted the clinical trials. How has this narrower focus helped you present the science in the play?

It has allowed me to simplify the scientific issues in a way that bolsters the pacing of the story but creates a path for people to go afterward and educate themselves about what happened. Not only in this instance but how in history Puerto Rico has been a scientific playground for questionable practices by USA scientists.

Why this play? Why now?

These women represent how most of the comforts of this world have been built on the backs of brown and black bodies. This play shows how much of a business the medical industry is and how colonies/poor countries are treated as experimental grounds for the more developed societies. This is very important to know and remember as we go through a pandemic that is killing black and brown people at a higher rate while they demand human rights.

What do you want the audience to take away from LAS BORINQUEÑAS?

Enovid Credit: G.D. Searle &Co./Pharmacia Company Credit

I want them to question where their comfort comes from. I want them to understand a  bit more about what colonization does to the countries that are supposed to benefit. I want them to realize that many of the things people enjoy in their lives were constructed on top of the lives of people of color. I want them to honor those lives. But more importantly, I want the audience to meet these women and take a little bit of their spirit and culture with them.

What discoveries have you made about the play and what you wanted to do in it during your rewriting?

That we have created a society where doing good, where creating miracles, where wanting to improve society, comes with a certain darkness. Even if you have the best intentions at the start, the games you have to play to be able to accomplish anything end up getting those intentions destroyed. Are the accomplishments necessary? Absolutely. Do we need to hurt people in the process? I don’t think so.

Is it your sense that anything has now changed in the world to give the play a different context?

Roe vs Wade has been struck. Books are being banned in America. We have openly bigoted people running for office again, but this time they are empowered. The more things have changed in the past year the more we have returned to the world where the women of LAS BORINQUEÑAS existed. 

Why is LAS BORINQUEÑAS the perfect title for this play?

Because this story is about them, not the trials. It’s about their lives and their dreams. It’s about those women who should be honored every day for their lives. It’s about getting them the recognition they deserve.

What’s next for Nelson Diaz-Marcano?

Keep on uplifting and developing Latine voices as part of the LatinX Playwrights Circle. Besides that, I’m working on a few other projects with the likes of The Road Theatre Company. I have a reading coming on June 15 with the Exquisite Corpse Company and after that — Off-Broadway? We manifest!

LAS BORINQUEÑAS is one of seven readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 22. 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

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.