SEVAN on nuclear science in 1950s U.S., Samira Mussa Aly, fear of what’s foreign, and MISS CURIE OF THE EAST

SEVAN

What did a brilliant, young, foreign, Muslim woman nuclear scientist have to contend with working in the top secret world of nuclear power in the U.S. in the early 1950s? Samira Mussa Aly, Egypt’s first nuclear scientist, died at 35 under mysterious circumstances, less than two years after beginning her research in the U.S. In the chilling new play, MISS CURIE OF THE EAST, SEVAN pulls together the fragments of what’s known to reconstruct the remarkable life of a scientist who could have irrevocably changed the world had it not been for her gender, her religion, and her nationality.

MISS CURIE OF THE EAST will have its first public reading at 3:00 PM on November 14 at the Ensemble Studio Theater as part of the Fall 2024 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free and reservations are encouraged.

We had so many questions; SEVAN answered all of them (answers edited for this interview)..

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What inspired you to write MISS CURIE OF THE EAST?

Samira Mussa Aly (Public Domain)

Growing up, I was aware of the contributions from Arabs and Muslims to many areas during the Golden Age of Islam, but I found my knowledge of contemporary contributions lacking. When I was looking for inspiration, as I was filling out my EST/Sloan application, I came across a short snippet about Samira Mussa Aly, which led me down the rabbit hole of her life and the history of nuclear politics of the time.

I found her and her life absolutely fascinating and remarkable. I was also inspired by the half-life of nuclear particles as a structural jumping off point for the construction of the bones of the play. The story fits in with my mission as a writer of plays that build bridges across cultures, communities, and countries in an effort to expand awareness and understanding beyond stereotypes and archetypes. I want to expose people from all sides of the cultural fences to stories of the unknown or forgotten.

Why this play? Why now?

Given the current politics of and surrounding Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim communities and countries, there is a growing hesitation to and avoidance of supporting MENA artists and narratives. While this play doesn't directly relate to current politics, some might find it too “dangerous” and “risky” because stories that humanize and pluralize The Other are always dangerous and risky. They might lead to, God forbid, empathy and understanding. So, while I believe we NEED stories like this, especially in times like now, I am not so naive to think anyone is going to be brave enough to come near it or to have their personal politics shifted and questioned.

Your play is based on a historical figure, the nuclear scientist Samira Mussa Aly. You note in your script that there is a great deal of mystery and mythology and conflicting facts about her life. How did you decide what to include?

This was fun and frustrating. With the help of Dina Abd El-Aziz (an Egyptian costume designer) I was able to get a hold of her biography which only exists in Egypt. I translated it and found it full of inconsistencies and that it sometimes contradicted itself. Finding her PhD thesis was also helpful.

I went through three rounds of research.  In every round, facts and information changed and new things suddenly appeared online. I thought I was losing my mind. I was sure that at any moment Black Ops were going to burst through my door and seize me. Thankfully, there are some concrete pieces of evidence which helped me connect all the red strings so I could figure out some kind of' “factual” story.

For example, the oft repeated story is that she was heading to a party in California when her car mysteriously drove off a cliff but at the crash site the driver's body was never found. Juicy stuff, right? But there are several news articles about the accident and her death that show it happened nowhere near California. At a certain point, I had to take what I knew to be fact and what I knew of the politics of the time and craft a narrative that best paid homage to her and to the time.

Do you have a theory about what caused her death? She was very active in working for the peaceful use of nuclear power. You show her addressing the first international Atoms for Peace conference she organized in London in 1952. Do you think her work for Atoms for Peace led to her death later that year?

Samira Mussa Aly aka Sameera Moussa (Photo: Beyond Curie)

Oh, I definitely have a theory. She had been a visiting scientist in the U.S. for a little more than a year and was being escorted around the United States by an Air Force civilian employee shortly before she was due to return home. It's possible this was an assassination, and certainly some facts point to it, but it might very well have just been a car accident. A few years after her death there was a rampant spate of mysterious deaths of Arab and Muslim scientists. But I don't think her work with Atoms for Peace caused her death, especially since Eisenhower stole her idea and the conference name to start the “first” atomic peace conference in the United States the following year. Her work was always being stolen and co-opted.

What do you want the audience to take away from seeing MISS CURIE OF THE EAST?

A remarkable story of a remarkable woman and a broadening of their understanding of what it means to be Arab or Muslim outside of the stereotypes and fear mongering that have taken over our lives.

What is the legacy of Samira Mussa Aly today?

Well, she doesn't have one, at least not one that is known outside of Egypt, which is why this play is important. We can thank her for all the current x-ray and radiation technologies we still use all over the world.

In addition to being a playwright, you have had a parallel career as an actor in numerous plays, television shows, and films. How has your work as an actor informed your playwriting?

Becoming a writer was an accident. During my first year in NYC, a fellow actor strong-armed me into writing for the Arab American Comedy Festival and that was it. I started to dabble some more, got into The Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group and thought, "Alright, I suppose I better focus, shouldn't I?" Being an actor helped so much in understanding how to craft interesting dialogue for actors to speak; how to shape scenes and plays for their maximum effect. It wasn't until I moved to London for a few years that I was able to sit down and understand playwriting as craft and technique. That work also helped inform my acting process. 

What playwrights have influenced you the most?

Euripides, Caryl Churchill, José Rivera, Yussef El Guindi, Simon Stephens, Tanika Gupta, Neil Simon, debbie tucker green.

What’s next for SEVAN?

I am a part of the Playwright Center's open season. In February, I'll be presenting a workshop performance of How to Watch an Immigrant Have a Racial Nervous Breakdown which is an audience-immersive solo musical performance that portrays the Neither-Here-Nor-There experience of 7 different MENASA immigrant characters navigating their new lives and identities in the West while asking how and if they can truly belong.

MISS CURIE OF THE EAST 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 Joyce E. Chaplin, Nicole Eustace, and Evelynn Hammonds discuss Benjamin and William Franklin, eighteenth-century science, the American experiment, and FRANKLINLAND on November 2 at EST

From left, Joyce E. Chaplin, Nicole Eustace, Evelynn M. Hammonds

On Saturday, November 2, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of FRANKLINLAND, the raucous new comedy by Lloyd Suh, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback discussion with historians Joyce E. Chaplin, Nicole Eustace, and Evelynn Hammonds 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

Dr. Joyce E. Chaplin

Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, where she is affiliated with the departments of History and History of Science, and with the Graduate School of Design. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has taught at six universities on two continents, an island, and a peninsula, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. A prize-winning author, her work has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Estonian. Her recent works include The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit, and (as editor) Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: A Norton Critical Edition. Her new book, The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution, was supported by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times. A long time ago, she used to be a stage manager.

Dr. Evelynn M. Hammonds

Evelynn M. Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.  Her research focuses on the history of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race, gender and sexuality in the histories of medicine, science and public health in the United States; black feminist and queer theory and the history of disease and race. She is the author of Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930 (1999), and, with Rebecca Herzig, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (2008).

About the Moderator

Dr. Nicole Eustace

Nicole Eustace is Julius Silver Family Professor of History at New York University, where she has leadership roles in both the history of women and gender program and the Atlantic history workshop. A historian of the early modern Atlantic and the early United States, she specializes in the history of emotion. She is the author of Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Her other books include 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (2012), Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (2008), and Warning for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812 (2017), co-edited with Fredrika J. Teute.

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

FRANKLINLAND: The History and Science Behind the Play

This 2024/2025 season marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the EST/Sloan Project, the joint initiative between the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ensemble Studio Theatre “designed 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.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the historical and scientific context of  FRANKLINLAND the Fall 2024 Mainstage Production of the EST/Sloan Project. FRANKLINLAND, written by Lloyd Suh and directed by Chika Ike, begins previews at EST on October 9 and runs through November 3. You can purchase tickets here.

“He Snatched Lightning from the Sky, and the Scepter from Tyrants”

Benjamin Franklin’s Embrace of Science and the Rights of Humankind

By Philip Dray, author of Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America

On one of his journeys to England, the ship on which Benjamin Franklin was sailing became lost in the fog for several hours before managing to land safely.  His relieved fellow passengers sought to take up a collection to build a shrine of thanksgiving but Franklin objected, insisting a lighthouse would be far more appropriate.

Throughout his life (1706-1790), Franklin’s pragmatism was brought to bear in many such situations.  Born in Boston, where he apprenticed for his older brother James’s newspaper, he moved to Philadelphia as a young man and made a name for himself as a printer, publisher and community steward.  He organized a young men’s civic leadership group, and lent his support to libraries, fire departments, philosophical societies, as well as the need for unity among the American colonies. Known for his wise and witty almanacs, he also pursued horticultural and scientific experiments.       

Franklin stove (c.1795)  Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art  Rogers Fund / Creative Commons CC0 1.0

His curiosity was most piqued by natural systems – wind, magnetism, heat, electricity – forces that contained energy but no mass.  When he noticed that the warmth generated by an open fireplace tended to “scorch” those individuals seated close by but left others in the drafty cold, his answer, one of his first inventions, was a stove that stood away from the wall and with its multiple surface areas warmed an entire room, while its closeable doors meant its fire required less fuel. 

Franklin did not invent electricity – its mysteries had been noted since Antiquity -- however his tabletop inquiries enabled him to describe how it worked.  His letters on the subject were published by the Royal Society in London and led to his initial worldwide renown.  Most notable was his 1752 outdoor experiment with kite and key, in which he proved that the atmosphere becomes electrified at the approach of a thunderstorm.  Having established that thunder and lightning are natural phenomena, he proceeded to invent a means of protection, the lightning rod, a metal contraption that, affixed to the roof of a dwelling and grounded in the earth, conducts lightning’s powerful electrical charge away from inhabitants and property. 

The lightning rod which still tops the dome of the Maryland State House in Annapolis was the largest Franklin lightning rod (28 feet) ever built for a public building during Franklin’s lifetime. Photo courtesy of Acroterion / Creative Commons 4.0

Franklin’s simple rooftop device was a cultural turning point, toppling the long-held superstition that thunderbolts were weapons of divine anger and retribution to which humans could only cower in fear.  The image of Franklin, the humble American printer and publisher who “stole God’s thunder” and thus called into question the heavenly powers of earthly kings, would make him a much-admired scientific and political figure of the dawning revolutionary age.  “He Snatched Lightning from the Sky, and the Scepter from Tyrants,” it was said of Franklin’s twin fields of endeavor.                     

Any full account of Franklin’s science must cite the invention of which he was most proud: bifocals.  When on diplomatic assignment in France he often attended dinner parties where he needed to see clearly the lips and faces, and even the hand gestures, of those with whom he conversed, as his mastery of French was adequate at best.  At the same time, a lover of good food, he wanted to see what was on his plate.  Returning in frustration to his quarters after one such affair, where he’d had to continually shift between two different eyeglasses, he disassembled several pair and using adhesive brought the upper and lower lenses together to form a dual lens.  Now, by merely raising and lowering his gaze, he could keep an eye on his meal and at the same time know what his dinner companions, or adversaries, were saying.

Franklin characteristically never sought to patent any of his creations, considering the practical solutions he devised so inevitable they could not possibly “belong” to him or to any person.  Such generosity of spirit reflected his allegiance to what would become known as the Scientific Method, an idea that had emerged from the Newtonian 17th century, that the search for scientific knowledge is open-ended, and functions best as a process in which hypotheses give way to experimentation, leading to better hypotheses, improved theories and conclusions, in an ongoing quest for truth.       

Benjamin Franklin (1785) by Charles Willson Peale.  The only known portrait of Franklin wearing bifocals. In the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts / Public Domain.

His interest in bettering human affairs was thus inspired by his and the late 18th century’s belief in the powers of experimentation and reason.  The Declaration of Independence of 1776, the founding document of arguably the Enlightenment’s most ambitious invention, the United States of America, underscored that “the laws of nature, and of nature’s God” (an echo of Isaac Newton’s “laws of gravity”) provided a moral basis for the safeguarding of humanity’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and held that such rights are inherent to humankind, and not endowed by any monarch or divinity.  Where Thomas Jefferson, the document’s youthful author, referred to the principles of human equality as “sacred and undeniable,” Franklin suggested the words be changed to say that such truths are “self-evident,” the latter a phrase derived from Newtonian science. 

A nation governed by its people, however, was an exceedingly novel concept, and it was far from certain what form it would take or how long it could survive.  When the Constitutional Convention completed its work in September 1787 after four months of arduous deliberation, a Philadelphia acquaintance named Elizabeth Powell accosted Franklin as the delegates departed Independence Hall.  “Doctor,” she demanded, “what do we have, a monarchy or a republic?” 

“A republic,” Franklin famously replied, “if you can keep it.”  For in approving the Constitution he had worried that even the best-intentioned experiment in self-rule might fall prey to corruption; and in the final years of his life, regretful that slavery persisted in North America, aligned himself with a group of Quaker abolitionists vehemently opposed to the institution. 

Franklin was fascinated by what later scholars would call “population studies,” and liked to prognosticate on the future growth of the United States, with, he’d be pleased to know, a surprising degree of accuracy.  Doubtless he’d be gratified to see that the nation he helped found also became and continues to be a place known for research, innovation and the openness to new ideas.

About the Author: 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 teaches in the Journalism + Design Department at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School and will be joining a panel discussion about FRANKLINLAND after the October 26 matinee performance.

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.       

Larissa Lury on vanguard aviators, physical storytelling, mental constructs, and S P A C E

L M Feldman (top; photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey); Larissa Lury (photo: Mike Simses)

Our 60+ years of exploring outer space have been defined by “missions” but what is the mission of our time? Drawing on the experiences of women pilots and astronauts over the past 100 years, S P A C E, the lively and thought-provoking new play written by L M Feldman and directed by Larissa Lury, revisits the challenges, joys, and inequities of what we have achieved so far and asks us to imagine what could be different.

S P A C E will have its first public reading this Thursday, June 15 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.

Taking time out from a hectic last week of rehearsals and rewrites, co-creator Larissa Lury kindly answered our many questions.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did S P A C E come to be?

About a decade ago, my partner showed me an article about thirteen pilots who underwent the medical tests for astronauts in the earliest years of the space program, and it sparked me, because it looked like a rare moment in history when technological advancement and the movement towards a more equitable society aligned—and then that fell apart.  A few years later, when L and I first met and started brainstorming projects we might develop together, this idea and the idea that became L’s play THRIVE, OR WHAT YOU WILL were the two that rose to the top of the list.

The process for developing S P A C E has been extremely collaborative, with L and I sometimes working together outside of the typical “lanes” for a director and a playwright, inventing the process as we go. We’ve also been extremely lucky to work with villages of collaborators, including ensembles of brilliant actors and dramaturgs, who have contributed a lot to making this play what it is.  

Why this play? Why now?

Mae Jemison and her 100 Year Starship Project

We’re inspired by the ideas of Dr. Mae Jemison and 100 Year Starship. Their idea is that by setting a currently impossible mission (in this case to travel outside of our star system in the next 100 years), we begin to define and develop the practices, values, and technology necessary in the moment and place we are in, here and now.  The characters in S P A C E are inspired by folx who spent/are spending their lives redefining what’s possible.  The play looks at the forces at work in our world that we want to tap into, push against, or leave behind, and the capabilities and potential we have to do that. It wrestles with what questions we need to ask ourselves to define and pursue the mission of what world we want to live in and how we want to live in it.

The characters in S P A C E span quite a range of women aviators, from Bessie Coleman in the 1920s to Jackie Cochran in the 1940s to Sally Ride in the 1980s, Mae Jemison in the 1990s, and Christina Diaz Hernandez and Jasmin Moghbeli today. What do they have in common? Do you have a favorite?

Bessie Coleman in 1923 (Wikipedia Commons/Public Domain)

I can’t pick a favorite—too many amazing people in the mix.  I would say what they have in common is that flying, and/or space (whether traveling through human spaceflight or through a rover), connects with a sense of self-actualization for them.  Several of the characters in this play have found stunning ways of creating paths where there weren’t any, or have found their ways around barriers that would stop most people. By seeing through their eyes, we can start to share the imagination and vision that makes the realization of the seemingly impossible possible. Bessie Coleman, for example, was born to a mother who worked as a maid and a father who worked as a sharecropper. Her father, who was Cherokee, left her family to live back in Oklahoma, where he hoped he would experience less prejudice.  When no flight school in the U.S. would accept her because she was a Black woman, she learned French, and flew to Paris, only to arrive a week after the flight schools there had been closed to women.  She traveled to the North of France, got her pilot’s license there, went to Germany to learn from WWI flying aces, and returned to the US, where she performed aerobatics that stunned the public.  She used her popularity to desegregate the spaces she performed in. She described the sky as the one place free from prejudice. 

In addition to being a playwright, one (or both) of you are also circus performers. Do you envision productions of S P A C E to involve elements of the circus? 

One of the things that brought L and I together as collaborators is the fact that we think about storytelling physically in addition to verbally. Earlier ideas for the play involved full-on acrobatics—hoop diving, spring boarding, etc. As the play has evolved, it became important to us to be able to tell this story with an ensemble of actors who are not necessarily acrobats, and some of those physical gestures have been replaced by language that would make those gestures redundant.  However, we are still all about the physicality of this playworld and integrating physical feats that give us the sense of playfulness and awe the play is asking for.

How do you visualize members of the cast “floating” onstage?

We got to play with some of the physicality of the world with an amazing ensemble of actors as a part of a Next Stage residency with The Drama League. There’s a version of this play where actors are suspended in the air, but there’s also an exciting version of the play where the audience is let in on the playfulness of it all, and we get to evoke space the way five-year-olds do, and the liberation of that is a part of the feeling of the scene.  There are also some extraordinary ways of achieving “floating” by supporting each other’s weight or giving individual body parts a quality of weightlessness.

Some action in the play takes place in a parallel universe. Are you hopeful that things would be better in a parallel universe—or are we likely to recreate the same problems?

Maybe we can let the play speak to that ;-).  That’s a conversation I would love to have with folx after they see the play.  I wonder whether they will find hope in it or something else.

What appeals to you about outer space?

When it comes to The Unknown, what our imaginations project onto it, the way we approach it, and what questions it sparks for us all reflect back to us something about who we are, what we value, and what we believe is possible.  The fact that in learning about space, we need to shift entire mental constructs—like our concept of time as a dimension, our understanding of the ways in which forces act on one another, and our ideas about what boundaries exist and are, how energy moves, and the idea of infinity—makes thinking about it extremely compelling to me.  In even thinking about space, and definitely in exploring it, we have to question ourselves and things we fundamentally hold true.

So much of the way we’ve been approaching space exploration as earthlings, but especially as Americans, frightens me.  It parallels many of the mistakes humans have made along the way when approaching what is new to them; we are colonizing, throwing trash “away” without a second thought, because of a sense that what is vast seems unlimited. We are allowing people with the most money to make decisions about who gets to access what, and we are proceeding as if our own notions about what kinds of matter matters are givens. 

And yet, there is so much potential for us to approach this differently, to learn new ways of conceiving of the known world by asking the questions that the currently “Unknown” to us invites in our imaginations.

S P A C E 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.       

Sam Mueller on Wrestling, Being Nonbinary, the Corn Belt, and PIN.

Sam Mueller

“What would happen to a student who wanted to play high school sports who didn’t fit into either category of ‘girl’ or ‘boy’?” This is the dilemma Sam Mueller dramatizes in their wildly entertaining new play PIN. When nonbinary athlete Jo Wagner is kicked off their high school wrestling team, their longtime rival MJ McKinnon comes up with a plan to stage a guerrilla final match in a local barn. Local shock jocks, the principal, and their biology teacher all get in the act and the event grows in scope, joy, imagination, and complications.

PIN. will have its first public reading on Thursday, May 25 at 3:00 PM at the Ensemble Studio Theatre as part of the 2023 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free but reservations are encouraged.

Sam smacked down as many questions as we could ask below.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Please tell us the story of how PIN. came to be.

Laura Jane Grace performing with Against Me! at 9:30 Club in Washington, DC on 10/13/17  (Photo courtesy of wojo4hitz/CC0)

PIN. probably started in the pit of a punk concert in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois in April of 2017 watching Laura Jane Grace, frontwoman of the band Against Me!, growl out songs to a visibly gender-nonconforming crowd. I left the venue that night having inhaled some embers that five years later kicked up into the full flame that became this play. It didn't fan into a fire until Thanksgiving 2021. I had been thinking about the safety of trans kids and looking over some recent legislation surrounding trans kids in high school sports. I wanted to make space for the trans-nonbinary kids who are often left out of these conversations because the understanding of trans identity in mainstream society can be incredibly binary. What would happen to a student who wanted to play sports who didn't fit into either category of "girl" or "boy"? Moreover, what would happen if that student had real advocates for their ability to not only survive but thrive? 

Why this play? Why now?

Because the coolest stories ever are found in a biology textbook and also right outside of your window right now. Because pro wrestling is also drag. Because you can't say gay in Florida schools. Because trans people cannot get their life-saving medical care. Because the changes we have to make in this country are so big it becomes overwhelming to the point of inaction and sometimes people just need to see it to know what's possible. Because being larger than life can feel so thrilling. Because there is nothing like the feeling of knowing and existing in your own expansiveness. 

 Is the story of the play based on an actual incident involving a nonbinary high school wrestler?

Yes and no. I read and listened to a lot of stories about transgender high school athletes in the creation of this play. All of those stories would end before I wanted this one to begin. I wanted to know what happens after the decisions are made and someone can no longer compete. I was interested in the fall out and the comeback. 

Everyone would love to have a biology teacher as charismatic, knowledgeable, and irascible as Mr. Rodgers. Is he based on anyone you read about or know?

My director, Lucky Stiff, actually said to me the other day "You wrote the advocate [trans kids] all wish we had in high school." I certainly didn't have a Tom Rodgers. Ironically, I hated biology in high school (I refused to dissect the frogs) and when it came time to choose a science to study further, I decided I would rather take chemistry instead. What I do have in my life are people who advocate the way that Rodgers does, with a dual foundation in knowledge and charisma. Bits and pieces of those people are found in Rodgers. 

Zuri, the lioness who sprouted a mane when her mate died in 2020, just died on May 3, 2023 at 19 (Photo; Topeka Zoo and Conservation Center)

You have Mr. Rodgers cite so many examples of nonbinary sexual differentiation in nature in his teaching sessions: clownfish, butterflies, lionesses, white-throated sparrows. Do you have a favorite?

I do not. I just tried to choose one. I can't do it. They have all actually taught me so much. I have a Leo moon though, so the lionesses have a slight edge if I had to choose. 

Are you now or have you ever been a wrestler?

Clip from YouTube video by Noah Frick-Alofs of Wrestlepocalypse XI, May 19, 2017. https://youtu.be/SibVWUL3Ci4

Okay. Hear me out. At Northwestern (my alma mater), there used to be a yearly event called Wrestlepocalypse (aka Pocs) and it would happen at the end of every May. I was a part of the student theater group that produced the event and for several years, I was the stage manager. This was less "writing down blocking and calling cues" and more "risk management". It is where my love of wrestling began and also never again in my life do I want to be responsible for more than a dozen twenty-somethings teaching each other how to do professional wrestling moves. Pocs forever, though. You haven't lived until you've been inside of a wrestling ring. 

How much real wrestling will your actors have to do onstage?

A lot! The radio DJs are spared from the deep physicality of wrestling, but the academics and the athletes? There's a whole tag team match! The athletes get to pivot between competition wrestling and professional wrestling, too, so there's that as well. 

People sometimes wonder why nonbinary people continue to live in states that are hostile to them. At one point in the play Jo is quite moving describing why they want to continue living in the “Corn Belt.” Have you spent any time in the Corn Belt? 

A map of the American Corn Belt (Map: Heitordp/CC0)

I have a very, very special place in my heart for the Corn Belt. I've spent a lot of time there. One of my favorite drives is from Illinois to Missouri. Once, I rode shotgun on an overnight drive from Chicago to St. Louis and when the sun was starting to rise, we were driving through thick, pink-tinted fog that seemed to go on forever. It made our skin look like it had a rosy glow to it. We were beautiful aliens. I felt like I was no longer on earth. It is a perfect memory. 

The footnotes you include in the script of the play demonstrate the considerable research you did about the biology of sexual differentiation. How do you imagine the footnotes could be incorporated into a stage production?

It depends, really. I feel like all of my answers would pale in comparison to a creative team's ideas. You can project them, you can attach a sound or light cue to them, you can make the floor beneath an audience vibrate every time they exist, you can pass out the script with footnotes to audience members who want to read along. All of these things tie into making the play more accessible, too. I make a note in the beginning of the play that says "Academia should be a playground. How else do we learn?" I've always thought about this play being in communication with designers and an audience, and with the footnotes, I made a space for other people to play if they want. 

I’ve never known anyone to be so impassioned about footnotes.

A sample of Sam’s references for PIN

The footnotes came from a desire to bring the art of writing a scientific peer-reviewed paper to the art of writing a play. What I love about the footnotes is they also ask "How do we peer-review plays? How do we tie plays together into a lineage of not only other plays but the innovations and understanding of the time the play was written? How does a play serve as an artifact of understanding, meant to be engaged with and built off of and all of those other beautiful things that scientific papers do?" I was a scholarship kid at an esteemed university; I often found that academia did not want me in a number of ways, but I LOVE learning. I love it SO much. This is also my way of reclaiming my own learning. 

When did you know you were a playwright? What playwrights have influenced you?

I knew I was a playwright in college when Laura Schellhardt, the head of the department and one of my earliest mentors, let me into one of her classes. She picked one of my first homework assignments as the example to read out loud in class and I remember thinking, "This is incredible. I kind of want to vomit. I might want to do this forever."

Taylor Mac teaches me a lot about imagination. The Bengsons teach me a lot about vulnerability and honesty and bravery. Nia Robinson teaches me a lot about deep love and concern and also joy. Paula Vogel teaches me a lot about catharsis. Antoinette Nwandu teaches me about the deliberate power of each individual word. I work a lot with undergraduates, and honestly writing better worlds for them, with all of their spark and teeth, is a huge influence on my work. 

You are a member of EST’s Youngblood program. What impact has being in Youngblood had on your playwriting?

Youngblood is a home. I get to listen to beautiful stories every Wednesday before other people get to know them; it's like having a front row seat to people's brilliance. These writers have also cooked for me and reminded me to drink more water and told me stories about their lives and showed me a kind of community-based love that is very hard to find because of how our society's priorities are ordered. RJ and Graeme have been beautiful champions of my work and my creative process. I'm trying not to miss it while I'm still a part of it. 

What’s next for Sam Mueller? 

On the playwriting front — I started a two-hander Western play about brothers on a hunt for a Bighorn sheep when I was in Wyoming on an artist residency at the Ucross Foundation this past February. On the personal front — I turn 30 the day after the First Light reading of PIN. I'm looking forward to ringing in a new chapter while also being loyal to my inner 13-year-old. And then hopefully, a lot of things I couldn't even dream up. 

Nikki Brake-Sillá on Science, Faith, Medical Transplants, and REWOMBED

Nikki Brake-Sillá

REWOMBED asks the provocative question: in a world where nothing is believed until it is replicated, when did science lose its faith? What roles science, risk, and faith play in personal decisions recur over several office visits between an uterine transplant candidate and her OBGYN in this compelling new drama.

The first reading of REWOMBED by Nikki Brake-Sillá will occur as part of the 2023 EST/Sloan First Light Festival on Thursday, May 18 at 3:00 PM. The reading is free but reservations are encouraged.

Learn more about REWOMBED in the following exchanges with Nikki.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did you come to write REWOMBED?

I wrote REWOMBED in 2020 after I read an announcement in PENN Medicine News that talked about the birth of Baby Benjamin, the first birth from the Uterus Transplantation for Uterine Factor Infertility (UNTIL) trial that started in 2017 at the University of Pennsylvania. I was immediately torn. It felt like doctors were playing God in a way that made me uncomfortable. Which got me thinking, WHY was I uncomfortable? I have two beautiful daughters, so it’s easy for me to sit in my seat of privilege and judge and question. What would it mean if the woman deciding to participate in this trial was someone who is deeply religious and believes, “For all those things My hand has made, And all those things exist,” Says the Lord. Isaiah 66:2 NKJV

What kind of research did you do to create the play? Did you speak with couples going through IVF? Did you interview doctors who work in this area?

Penn Medicine announcement of successful transplant (Photo credit: Penn Medicine)

I did extensive research before writing. I read journal and newspaper articles and watched a short film about Baby Benjamin. I have spoken to couples who have gone through the IVF process and am excited to interview doctors familiar with this procedure to answer more of my process-based questions.

Your main character Rachel is intensely religious. In fact, she is a pastor. She preaches and leads her congregation in prayer during the play. Why was it important to incorporate faith in God into the play?

There is so much faith in Science. Every day you put your faith in something. Just because you don’t name it capital ‘G’ God doesn’t mean it’s not divine. I find there is no room for scientists who believe in a higher power. I’m Christian, I’m a scientist and I believe in evolution. It’s not an either-or for me, yet some people have highjacked Christianity and their warped interpretations of it leave no room for grace, love, faith, or science.

Is religion important to you? Do you see a conflict between science and religion?

Artwork for ReWombed

Religion is important to me. I grew up in the church in North Carolina. That church was all hell and brimstone and fear. I read the Bible front to back three times before I graduated from high school. Because I wanted to be able to question and have discussions from a place of knowledge. As I got older, and through the help of my village, I now see God as someone whom I need to help me weather the storms I experience.  That’s why it’s important to me that Rachel is a woman of unwavering faith. A dear friend said, faith is a verb, and it will be tested. That’s my mantra throughout this play.

As we watch Rachel and her husband Isaiah go through the lengthy and stressful transplant and IVF process, we see the toll it can take on a relationship. How did you get such hard-won knowledge of what they experience?  

As a playwright, I am constantly gleaning information from my surroundings and relationships. I have also been married for almost 15 years, so there is a certain familiarity between couples who have that type of history. And I have a vivid imagination and am curious about how characters would handle situations that I find untenable. They are my very own What if?

When I google Nikki Brake-Sillá the first line that keeps coming up to describe you is “Nikki Brake-Sillá is a Black playwright and filmmaker with an invisible disability, who tried to check out of the hospital with her infant, A.M.A.”

You wrote a monologue called A.M.A. Against Medical Advice. Is this monologue about your own experience of medical bias? Did that experience influence the writing of REWOMBED? Care to say anything about your “invisible disability”? Do the characters in REWOMBED have this disability?

AHHHHH, good ol’ google. I did write A.M.A. from my first-hand experience after the birth of my second child. The way I was treated during both of my fourth trimesters has shaped all my subsequent work. The trauma that I faced during that process, me, a highly educated Black woman who is a strong self-advocate is the reason I write plays that deal with inherent medical bias and medical racism. My invisible disability is rheumatoid arthritis and interstitial lung disease. Autoimmune diseases love to buddy up. Because of my lung condition whenever I exert, I must use a portable oxygen concentrator. Without it, I become hypoxic, and can’t stop coughing, which isn’t a great look in these still COVID streets. Rachel’s invisible disability is Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH syndrome) which means she was born without a uterus.

What’s next for Nikki Brake-Sillá?

Artwork for Say It Ain’t So

What’s next? Well, I’m so glad you asked. Say it Ain’t So, the full-length play I’m co-producing with Revolution Shakespeare, will run from July 20 – 23, 2023 at Neighborhood House in Philadelphia. Say it Ain’t So weaves a tale of Sandra, an affluent Black mother, on the lam with her Deaf sister, Renny, after Sandra kills her husband. This familial play asks, “What do you pass on, and what should not be inherited?” Christina D. Eskridge is directing the play with Patrice Creamer as Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL).

A.M.A. – Against Medical Advice was the impetus for The Fourth Trimester, an ARTisPHL/Knight Foundation-funded work that will provide six weeks of free group psychotherapy, devised theater workshop, childcare, and transportation for Black women and birthing parents, a program that will begin in September 2023.

And lots of naps.

Anyone can keep up with everything I do by subscribing to my newsletter.

REWOMBED 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.

Jeanne Dorsey on Miniatures, Marty Goddard, Rape Victims, and THE KIT: MADE BY MARTHA

Jeanne Dorsey (Photo courtesy of Cassis Birgit Staudt)

Why were so few rape cases successfully prosecuted in the United States prior to 1970? How was evidence handled then? What changed to enable rape to be investigated as a real crime? Developed with support from the Sloan Foundation and Bechdel Project’s yearlong Room of One’s Own (ROO) Writer’s Residency, THE KIT: MADE BY MARTHA, written by Jeanne Dorsey and directed by Jackson Gay, explores the life and work of Martha Goddard, inventor of the first standardized rape kit.

THE KID: MADE BY MARTHA is a satellite event in the 2023 EST/Sloan First Light Festival and will have readings at Alchemical Studios on May 7 and 8. The readings are free but reservations are encouraged.

Jeanne Dorsey took time out from preparing for these first readings to answer our questions about her play.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Can you tell us the story of how you came to create THE KIT: MADE BY MARTHA?

I’ve been a member of EST for years and friends encouraged me to apply for the Sloan grant. I was always hesitant since I never considered science and technology to be in my wheelhouse. But when I read Pagan Kennedy’s article about Marty Goddard in the New York Times, I immediately thought that it would make a good Sloan play. Goddard’s work transformed criminal forensics, she was overlooked, her story was theatrical, tragic and needed to be told. Most importantly, there are aspects of her story to which I felt a visceral connection.

What kind of research did you do in writing THE KIT?

Marty Goddard in an interview for the Oral History of the Crime Victim Assistance Field Project in 2003.  U.S. Department of Justice / Public Domain

I tracked down and interviewed Scott Goddard, Marty’s nephew; Cynthia Gehrie who worked with Marty in the early days, Mary Dreiser who was Marty’s assistant at the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance (CCVA); and Margaret Pokorny who was the Assistant Director of the Playboy Foundation. I had numerous lengthy Zoom conversations with them. Through Margaret, I was able to connect with Christie Hefner. I found archival interviews with Marty. I went to the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Chicago Art Institute, I met with Catherine Ott at the Smithsonian and viewed the first standardized rape kit. I spoke with emergency room doctors who have administered rape kits. There’s more to be done.

In your play, the young Marty Goddard seems so focused, so determined, so persuasive, and so effective, why do you think her contribution to the creation of what’s come to be known as the rape kit is so little known?

Because her name wasn’t on it. Back then, it was a given that men often took credit for women’s work. The circumstances were such that the option for her to take ownership simply wasn’t available to her the way it should have been. She was an advocate, a powerful one for sure, but she didn’t have any leverage to push for ownership and she knew that. Her focus was on getting the kit out to the Chicago community and beyond. But because her name wasn’t associated with the kit, she was essentially erased from her own narrative.

Chronologically, you begin Marty’s story with her volunteer work on the phone lines at a crisis center in Chicago helping with teenage runaways. How significant was it that this happened around the time of Roe v. Wade in January 1973?

It was on the heels of the 60s and the height of second wave feminism. Women were organizing, women were speaking out, The Janes were doing their underground abortion work, the traditional 1950s family model was starting to show cracks because women within the model found it stifling and untenable. Women were seeking bodily, emotional and financial autonomy and divorce was happening in record numbers. Amidst all this chaos of change, kids were running away from home. I was one of them. At the same time, Chicago literally had a rape epidemic on its hands, local government was at a loss, women were clamoring for a solution and Marty had one.

Vitrullo Evidence Collection Kit  Smithsonian National Museum of American History / Educational Fair Use

When the rape kit was first introduced in Chicago in 1978 it was called the Vitullo Rape Kit and its invention credited to Sgt. Louis Vitullo of the Chicago Police Department crime lab. When and how did Marty’s critical role in the creation of the kit begin to emerge?

Until Pagan Kennedy’s article appeared in the NY Times in 2020 I don’t believe it was widely known. I’d never heard of her. It was known among a small circle of Chicago advocates at the time of its creation that it was Marty’s brainchild.

There are so many surprising turns in Marty’s story. Did she get any flack from the fact that the Playboy Foundation was the only organization willing to fund the production of the first batch of rape kits?

She did. She talks about it in an archival interview that I found. She was defiant, as well she should have been. The fact is, and I state this in the play, the Playboy Foundation, the giving arm of Playboy Inc., funded many progressive causes, including The Janes, and early LGBTQ organizations.

Marty had a hobby of creating these amazingly skillful miniature dollhouse rooms. How did that contribute to her advocacy work?

They were two separate things but I chose to connect them for the purposes of my play. I saw an opportunity to create the character of Little M, the tiny figure who inhabits her miniature rooms. The dialogues with Little M give voice to Marty’s interior life as well as to survivors of sexual assault who, because of being doubted, are made to feel tiny.

Having accomplished so much in her life, what do you think happened to cause Marty’s life to take such a downward turn in her later years?

I think it was a perfect storm of her being a type A personality, single and self-supporting, with, according to her nephew, an undiagnosed bi-polar disorder for which she self-medicated with alcohol. Like many who are drawn to social activism, (and theatre too) she was deeply wounded in childhood. She was driven and had no real sense of her limits and didn’t know how to take care of herself. She had some grandiosity, perhaps a symptom of her bi-polar disorder that led to extremely poor self-care. She alienated people as well, both personally and professionally. That she was never recognized as the creator of the kit made it so that she constantly had to justify herself in connection with her work. Ultimately, I think this conundrum took a huge toll on her psychic wellbeing. Also she was never financially compensated in a way that was commensurate to her work and her accomplishments. Thus, she had no material guardrails in place to offer a foundation from which to battle her demons.

Why this play? Why now?

While the #MeToo movement has created a space in which conversations about sexual assault can finally happen without shame, women’s safety and well-being continue to be disregarded and threatened. The appointment of Bret Kavanaugh to the highest court and the overturning of Roe are proof writ large. This article in this week’s NY Times about E. Jean Carroll’s suit against Trump says it all about how women have been and continue to be treated in rape trials.

What do you want the audience to take away from watching THE KIT?

• ·        We owe a lot to Martha Goddard.

• ·        Our society has a lot of work to do.

• ·        People who advocate for the good/betterment of society should be well compensated.

• ·        Funding for rape prevention needs to be robust and consistent.

• ·        We need to keep the conversation going.

The development of The Kit was supported by the Bechdel Project and its Room of One’s Own Writer’s Residency. Can you tell us more about the Bechdel Project and its sponsorship of your play?

Strip from Dykes to Watch Out For by Allison Bechdel that inspired the Bechdel Test  Alison Bechdel / Educational Fair Use

The Bechdel Project is directed by Maria Aparo, Jens Rasmussen, and Lucy Flournoy. It’s a feminist arts incubator that develops stories for stage and screen that pass the Bechdel test. Inspired by Alison Bechdel’s comic The Rule, the story must have 1) at least two women; 2) they must talk to each other;  3) about something besides a man.

For the ROO residency they were seeking to support a playwright working on a play about a woman who was forgotten by history. I applied with THE KIT, heard I was a semi-finalist, then a finalist, had an interview and then a week later, I was standing outside the Smithsonian, having literally just finished viewing the first rape kit when Jens called to tell me that I was offered the residency. It’s been a game-changer. They’ve been so supportive at every step, great listeners, cheerleaders, hand holders, producers, and wonderful friends.

THE KIT: MADE BY MARTHA 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.

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.

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

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

What is the cost in human lives of medical breakthroughs? On Thursday, March 25, the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival hosted an invitation-only reading of LAS BORINQUEÑAS, the new play by Nelson Diaz-Marcano. 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. The playwright tells us more.

(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.

Dr. Edris Rice-Wray

Several of the characters in the play are based on actual historical figures: Margaret Sanger, Gregory Pincus, John Rock, Edris Rice-Wray. Not everything about them is appealing. How much of these characters reflect what they were like in real life and how much is your invention?

While I took some liberties with their characterization due to this being a narrative work, I didn’t change much of the ideologies they express or the relationships they had with each other.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

The 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival ran from February 25 through March 29 and featured readings of nine new plays. Most of the readings were open to the public for 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.

Phaedra Michelle Scott on activism, dramaturgy, intersectionality, and GOOD HAIR

Phaedra Michelle Scott

Do issues of race, class, and gender intersect more visibly anywhere than with Black hair? On March 29 at 3:00 PM the EST/Sloan Project will end the 2021 First Light Festival with the first public reading of GOOD HAIR by Phaedra Michelle Scott. GOOD HAIR explores the science of Black hair by following the stories of three trios of women through three different time periods. The playwright has lots more to tell.

(Rich Kelley interview)

Where did the idea for GOOD HAIR come from?

I have always been interested in telling a story that centered around a natural hair journey, and how deeply personal that can be. I was inspired by the news—specifically, the story of Andrew Johnson who in 2018 was forced to cut his locks in order to participate in a wrestling match or he would have to forfeit. I thought—what other teenager is told to alter their appearance to play a game? Why is it that Black hair is policed in a way that does not happen to his white peers? I was also inspired by my own natural hair journey and the stories of Black women around me as we embarked on learning how to understand our hair.

Madame C. J. Walker

What research did you do in writing the play?

I am a huge history fan, so I spent a lot of time reading a bunch of books—Hair Story by Ayana D. Byrd, biographies of Annie Turnbo Malone and Sarah Breedlove (later known as Madame C. J. Walker); my friends who have had natural hair journeys, hairdressers, dramaturg Tatiana Godfrey, and my family. It has been a lot of conversations and independent research.

Why this play? Why now?

Hair discrimination has been a reality for many Black folks, and it wasn’t until 2019 with The Crown Act in California that this injustice has been addressed legally. New York City also has its own anti-discrimination laws based on hair that went into effect in 2019. The fact that this issue is gaining more traction, and that it deeply effects the school life and work life of so many Black people goes to show that we are only in the beginning stages of addressing this; so it makes sense to focus on a play like this now.

The play tells the stories of three trios of women in different times. Why did you choose this way of telling the story of GOOD HAIR, rather than, say, telling the stories of three of the same women at different times?

Two timelines are set in the 20th and 21st centuries, while one is set in a fantasy universe. I wanted to show the range of how hair care for Black women has evolved through science, changing standards of beauty, while also addressing how easy it is to want to change yourself in order to be accepted. It was important to me to have a lot of perspectives, because I genuinely have no answers or solutions. I am interested in pitting different ideologies against each other. I also wanted to write an “athletic” play for Black and Brown actors, one where they have the opportunity to flex those artistic muscles.

Annie Turnbo Malone

GOOD HAIR features one professor who has given a Ted Talk style lecture on Black women’s hair on YouTube and two entrepreneurs who have created and marketed hair products for Black women. Are any of these characters inspired by real women?

Yes! Pretty much every character is a hodgepodge of people I know in real life, of stories I have picked up, and people directly ripped from history—most specifically, Madame C. J. Walker and Annie Malone.

Do you sense any progress in society’s attitude toward how Black women wear their hair? Where are we now and where do we need to be?

Of course, there has been progress, and, of course, there has not been nearly enough. While this play focuses specifically on women of color and hair, there is a whole other conversation about cultural appropriation that this work does not even address. Personally, I am happy that it’s much easier to get natural hair care products at Target or by shopping online, but there is still a long road ahead in terms of becoming a truly anti-racist society, and the conversation about hair is just a part of it.

On your website, you write that your work “lies at the intersection between history, Afrofuturism, and activism.” Is there an activist component to GOOD HAIR? What do you want the audience to take away and do after watching your play?

Poster for the Crown Act — Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair —https://www.thecrownact.com/

I hope that the play inspires people to do their own research and learn more about the complicated history of Black hair. I hope that by presenting so many perspectives of women of color that it further affirms that Black women are not a monolith, and that the truth of the matter is that intersectionality is complicated, and it is our duty to learn and understand the nuances of identity.

You are a playwright and a dramaturg. Do you have to turn off the dramaturg when you are writing?

Absolutely!! I’ve had to train myself to not edit as I write, and to simply let the story come out and then put my dramaturgical brain on it. Thankfully, I have developed a way of working that helps me. I tend to underwrite, and then as I do more research and think about the overall story, I add and inject more specificity. Overall, I think they work well together, because I have the tools to understand dramatic structure, and I can inject my dramaturgical creativity into my writing. I also love dramaturgs, so it’s especially fun to work with one as a playwright. 

When did you know you were a playwright?

To tell the truth, I became a playwright right after my sister passed away. I was a dramaturg for a while, and after she passed I needed to find a way to express myself, so I turned to the medium I was most familiar with: playwriting.

Have you written any other science-related plays?

I love science fiction and fantasy, and I tend to write plays that involve time somehow, which is why there are three intersecting timelines. This is my first science-related play, and I had a lot of fun finding my way into it that makes the science accessible to me (and hopefully everyone else, haha).

What’s next for Phaedra Michelle Scott?

More writing! I have been fortunate to have the support of EST’s Youngblood, Pipeline Theater Company, as well as a few other writing projects. I am a writer for an upcoming roleplaying game by a Swedish game company, Helmgast, where I am writing the mechanics for creating intersectional characters, which has been a fun way to stretch my creative muscles.

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.

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).

Margot Connolly on girls who code, apps that can change the planet, and HELLO, WORLD

Margot Connolly

At 3 PM on Thursday, March 12, as the final event in this year’s First Light Festival, the EST/Sloan Project is presenting the first public reading of HELLO, WORLD, a new play written by Margot Connolly and directed by Alex Keegan. The play takes us inside two teams of teenage girls as they compete to see who can code an app that could change the world for the better.  As we watch them, we have to ask: who decides which app and cause are most worthy of winning? We had even more questions for playwright Connolly.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for HELLO, WORLD come from?

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

What kind of research did you do? 

Girl Code with authors Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did you first realize playwriting was your thing?

I went to a very small middle and high school that did three shows a year: a straight play in the fall, the musical in the winter, and in the spring, the student-written and -directed one-act plays. I started acting in those plays in seventh grade and by the time I hit high school I was desperate to take the playwriting class, which was a group of maybe six students sitting on couches in the teacher’s office (which also doubled as the green room.)  I ended up taking it seven times and wrote seven plays by the time I graduated— two of them were produced in the spring one-acts—and from there I never looked back. I’ve been writing plays now for more than half my life, and I feel super fortunate that I was able to find my passion at fourteen years old. Maybe that’s part of the reason that I also feel so drawn to these girls in HELLO, WORLD. I know what it’s like to be a teenager: to know what you want to do and to just have to figure out how to do it!

What’s next for Margot Connolly?

I’m currently in my last term at Juilliard, so I’m working on my last play there (based on a real-life disappearance from my college town in the 1940s) before I graduate in May! In the past five years, I’ll have gotten an MFA, an artist’s diploma from Juilliard, and written twelve plays, so next for me is to be out of school at last!

The 2020 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from January 16 through March 12 and features readings and workshop productions of ten new plays. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-second year.

Kristin Slaney and The Lobbyists on Nantucket women, astronomy, collaborating, music, and MISS MITCHELL

Kristin Slaney

On Monday, February 24, this year’s EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first public reading/performance of Act One of MISS MITCHELL, a new musical by Kristin Slaney and members of The Lobbyists. The show celebrates the life and achievements of Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), the first female professional astronomer in America and a pioneer in the education of women. To learn more, we snagged playwright Slaney and two of her actor-musician-composer collaborators, Alex Grubbs and Tommy Crawford, and peppered them with questions:

This event is sold out!

(Interview by Rich Kelley)  

How and when did you first learn about Maria Mitchell? When did you know you wanted to write about her?

Alex Grubbs of The Lobbyists

Alex: In 2015, we performed a musical, SeaWife*, at the South Street Seaport. It was an epic tale about whaling in mid-nineteenth-century, set on the island of Nantucket. In 2017, the White Heron Theatre on Nantucket invited us to perform it there and we were pretty jazzed about that. While we were there, we noticed how prominently the name and figure of Maria Mitchell appears on the island. The Maria Mitchell Association, an organization dedicated to preserving Maria's legacy, operates out of the house she was born in. The Nantucket Atheneum, the library where she worked for many years, still has a bust of her. Her observatory is right across the street from where she's now buried. There's a knowledge of her and what she accomplished that's kind of woven into the history of Nantucket as an island. She embodies the Nantucket “can-do” attitude.

We had known Kristin around the Youngblood and EST world, and have been a fan of her writing. When we were thinking about what would work for this story, her style came to mind. 

Kristin: Yes, it was through the EST/Youngblood Playwriting Program that I got to meet Alex, Tommy, and the other Lobbyists. Tommy was in a brunch play of mine, Alex was in one of my Bloodworks shows, and so they had an idea of my sensibilities as a writer when they approached me about the Maria Mitchell project.

Maria Mitchell, US astronomer and pioneer of women's rights, from a portrait by H. Dassell, 1851, 4 years after she had discovered Miss Mitchell’s Comet at age 29.

I became interested in Maria pretty quickly. Most famously, she discovered a comet in 1847; she was the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she was hired as a computer for the Nautical Almanac, tracking the tables for Venus; and when Vassar College opened, she was the first woman professor to be hired, as an astronomy professor (despite the fact that she never went to college herself). She was also notoriously private. She burnt her journals in 1846. She didn't want all the attention associated with discovering the comet, and her sister Phebe (who ends up playing a huge role in our piece) redacted her journals after her death.

What kind of research did you do to develop the book?

Kristin: We've done a lot of research. There are a few different Maria Mitchell books (especially her compiled journals and letters) that have been important to the research process, but there are so many gaps in what we understand about her life, because of how many of her documents were redacted or destroyed. What we do have showcases this intense sense of drive to do the work she was meant to do, which I really connected with. Nantucket was a place very different from much of America at the time, especially for women. Whaling sent many men off to sea, leaving women to run things—there was a street of women-owned businesses called Petticoat Row. The island was largely Quaker (a religion Maria and her family members were born into but later left), and Quakerism held that women should also be allowed to be ministers. Quaker parents gave the same education to their daughters as to their sons, which was uncommon at that time. Maria's father William ran a school and was also an astronomer. While growing up, Maria often assisted him. Moreover, Nantucket is an island, so there's this sense of isolationism that fostered certain attitudes while keeping out more Puritanical ones. All this was context for how Maria was able to become an astronomer, and it's inextricably tied to the island as a place.

Why this play? Why now? Why a musical?

Tommy Crawford of The Lobbyists

Tommy: We are drawn to Maria's independence of thought, her humility, her creative spirit, and the rigor with which she pursued her studies. Her story as an educator and thinker should be known and carries a lot of resonance to our world today, and I think can be inspiring to many people in different walks of life. We are drawn to the way she explored big questions of life through her daily work. 

Alex: One of the things we are interested in exploring in this workshop is how music will relate to the world we are building—what will it sound like? Interestingly enough, Maria grew up Quaker, and they didn’t allow music at all! However, there were definitely ways that the music of the world and perhaps the celestial “music of the spheres” gave a soundtrack to her world. 

What has been your working process for developing the songs for this show? Which comes first: words or music?

Kristin: Our working process has been guided in a few different ways. There are certain songs and tunes Tommy and Alex came up with early in the process that definitely informed the overall piece before there was any script at all. There are certain song moments that Tommy and Alex pulled from the initial outline I made. Now that I’ve finished Act One of the book, we've been locating different moments that want to be musical. There's one tune Tommy and Alex came up with last spring, before we had any idea what the show would be, that's been stuck in my head throughout the process and I think has informed it, tonally. So the songs are informed by the story, but there's also been a back-and-forth in the process.

The Lobbyists. From left, Tommy Crawford. Eloise Eonnet, Alex Grubbs, Tony Aidan Vo,, Will Turner, Douglas Waterbury-Tieman

How does being actor/musicians factor in the collaborative process?

Alex: It factors heavily in our case. Our collective, The Lobbyists, is really concerned with a new form of musical—this hybrid of concert and play that a lot of theater people are exploring. In that way, we are really drawn to the idea of seeing that theatrical genesis on stage, having actors play the music both heightens the style and also allows the audience to relate in a new way.

How close is your Maria Mitchell to the historical figure? How is she different? Did you take any liberties in creating her?

Kristin: A lot of what we're working with in the show comes very much from Maria Mitchell and who she was, sometimes coming directly from her own writing, but it's also really necessary to diverge from that in making a play. A question that kept coming up before we started was: how can we make a musical about someone who was so private that she burned her documents and seemed embarrassed by any of the attention she got for her discoveries? The answer, so far, has been to deal with this question by making the musical about that. A framing device we're working with right now is Maria's sister Phebe (the one who redacted the documents after Maria's death), going through her sister's papers and trying to decide what to keep and what to lose, trying to guess what this person who was so close to her would want.

Maria Mitchell (second from left) and her students measure the Sun’s rotation from the movement of sunspots. Credit: ID 08.09.05, Archives & Special Coll., Vassar College Library

Have you been to Nantucket? How did visiting there inform the writing of the play or its music?

Kristin: The Lobbyists were there for their production in 2017 but I had never been. Last spring we spent a few days on the island, learning a ton of Maria history and Nantucket history in general. Having the time to spend on Nantucket and to learn about her life there has made all the difference. The town and how it functions is very tied to what's going on in the play, right now.

Alex: It’s an island. People ride bikes everywhere, the beaches are lovely—it’s an easy place to fall in love with. One particular place on the island we were taken with was Madaket beach— on the western end of the island. The road just turns into sand. It feels more remote than other parts of the island. We would ride out with a grill, our instruments and grill oysters on the beach and watch the sunset. It’s both highly developed in parts but also wild and that wildness is protected fiercely. There’s also some kind of salt and magic in the air that preserves things so well. It has one of the largest concentrations of 18th- and 19th-century homes in America. It really feels like stepping back in time. That immersive quality allows the mind to wander freely and consider the history of the fascinating people who lived there. It was a remarkably progressive place, pushing boundaries in education and liberty way before the rest of the country. Women ran many of the businesses while their husbands were away at sea. To this day, more women own businesses than men on the island. 

Have you written or collaborated on other plays about science or technology?

Kristin: I was in Youngblood's Sloan Science Brunch two years in a row, which was a really great experience. It kind of gave me the context for how Sloan plays can work—that they are about science, absolutely, but that science is distilled through the story and conflict in the piece.

Kristin, you are an alum of Youngblood. How has being a member of that playwriting group influenced your writing?

Kristin: I am a Youngblood alum, and honestly, that playwriting group has meant so much to me, as a writer. It's a group filled with the most incredible minds, who give the best notes. It was so inspiring to be able to show up once a week and experience the work of my peers, who kept me going as a writer during years when things felt pretty bleak, writing-wise

What’s next for Kristin Slaney? For The Lobbyists?

Kristin: What's next for me? Writing Act Two of MISS MITCHELL, I'm working on a few film projects, and there will be a production of my play Hockey Messiah this fall in Canada.

Tommy: We are working on a few different projects, including a musical called The Golden Spike, and a new music-theater piece called The Westside Cowboys of Death Avenue. We'll be workshopping both later in 2020, and just came off of a workshop of The Golden Spike at BRIClab, as well as a production of Twelfth Night at Two River Theater in New Jersey, for which we wrote the score and in which a number of us performed. We also have a short-form podcast series in the works!

The 2020  EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from January 16 through March 12 and features readings and workshop productions of ten new plays. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-second year.

*Editor’s note: SeaWife was nominated for the 2016 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Musical