neuroscience

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.       

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.