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

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

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

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

WHAT MAKES A PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE GREAT?

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

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

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

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

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

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Dr. Mandë Holford

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

Dr. Daniela Schiller

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

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

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

Anna Ziegler

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

Moderator

Naomi Lorrain

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

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

Margot Connolly

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for HELLO, WORLD come from?

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

Girl Code with authors Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser

What kind of research did you do?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HELLO, WORLD is one of seven readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 22. All readings are free, but reservations are encouraged. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.       

A Note on the Science and Technology Behind SMART

The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the science and technology behind SMART by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, the 2023 EST/Sloan mainstage production. SMART began previews on March 30 and runs through April 23. You can purchase tickets here.

Voice-Activated AI: Mixing Convenience with Risk

By Rich Kelley, Science Press Liaison

“A lot of cutting-edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI, because once something becomes useful enough and common enough, it’s not labeled AI anymore.”—Nick Bostrom

“If something is free, you’re the product.” —Richard Serra, 1973

Mechanical devices that talk to us have a long and storied history. In 1589, Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay depicted the “Brazen Head” reportedly invented by the 13th-century Franciscan friar and philosopher Roger Bacon.

A woodblock engraving of Miles (the assistant to the friars) playing the tambour while friars Bacon and Bungay sleep and the Brazen Head finally speaks. From the 1630 edition of Robert Greene's The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay.

In the play, Bacon and his fellow friar build a large brass head that they hope will speak and reveal to them the secrets of the universe. It takes them seven years. Then, having watched the head night and day for two months waiting for it to speak, Bacon falls asleep and never hears the head’s mysterious oration: “Time is. Time was. Time is past.” After which the head explodes.

So even in our earliest imaginings smart devices failed to live up to expectations.

Today we are most familiar with chatbots in their incarnation in the voice-driven digital assistants we find in Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s Bixby. While they are all voice-activated, their features vary. As primarily virtual assistants for phones, Siri and Bixby are more integrated into their phone’s ecosystem: sending messages, making phone calls, setting reminders. Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant are more focused on smart home control and home devices like lights, locks, and thermostats.

These devices have enabled the corporations behind them to use the data they have been collecting on customers’ transactions, web searches, and browser data to make conversational chitchat about the weather, sports scores, and what the listener should buy next. According to Business Insider as of 11/22, Alexa is third in the voice-assistant wars with Google Assistant at 81.5 million users, Apple’s Siri at 77.6 million, and Alexa at 71.6 million.

Is Anyone Listening?

In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon uses thousands of contractors and full-time Amazon employees in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India, and Romania to listen to voice recordings captured in Alexa owners’ homes and offices. The teams then transcribe, annotate and feed back those recordings into the software to help improve Alexa’s understanding of human speech and to help it respond to user requests.  These listeners work nine hours a day and can parse as many as 1,000 audio clips a day.

Amazon Echo unpacked (2105) (Photo: Brewbooks/ CC 2..0)

Alexa software is designed to record snatches of audio continuously, listening for a “wake” word, “Alexa” by default for Alexa. “Hey, Google” for Google Home. “Siri” for Apple’s Siri. When Alexa detects the wake word, the light ring at the top of the Echo turns blue indicating that the device has started recording and is sending a command to Amazon’s servers.

But sometimes Alexa begins recording without any prompt at all. One interviewee said the auditors can transcribe as many as 100 recordings a day when Alexa receives no wake command or an accident triggers the recording:

“Occasionally, the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, or a child screaming for help.”

Two workers interviewed in Romania said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. After requesting guidance, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere.

Recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don’t include a user’s full name and address but do include an account number, the user’s first name, and the device’s serial number. Apple’s Siri also uses human auditors. According to an Apple white paper, the recordings lack personally identifiable information and are stored for six months tied to a random identifier. Google also employs reviewers of audio snippets from its Google Assistant, but the company says, they are not associated with any personal identifiable information and the audio is distorted.

Enter ChatGPT

ChatGPT, released by the AI research company OpenAi in November 2022, uses the large language model — millions of human-created texts available online — to produce answers based on which word it considers most likely to come next in a human response. As prominent computer scientist Stephen Wolfram explains in “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?”

“ . . . at each step it gets a list of words with probabilities. But which one should it actually pick to add to the essay (or whatever) that it’s writing? One might think it should be the ‘highest-ranked’ word (i.e. the one to which the highest ‘probability’ was assigned). But this is where a bit of voodoo begins to creep in. Because for some reason if we always pick the highest-ranked word, we’ll typically get a very ‘flat’ essay, that never seems to ‘show any creativity.’ But if sometimes (at random) we pick lower-ranked words, we get a ‘more interesting’ essay. The fact that there’s randomness here means that if we use the same prompt multiple times, we’re likely to get different essays each time.” 

In early March, OpenAI released ChatGPT-4, representing a quantum improvement over ChatGPT-3.5. Where ChatGPT-3.5 scored in the tenth percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam law students must pass to practice legally, ChatGPT-4 scored 298 out of 400, the 90th percentile.

The Risks of Home Devices

Connectivity has its costs. Not only is there the risk, recounted above, of smart devices recording conversations without having heard the “wake” word, there is also risk because the cloud is hackable. Cloud-based gadgets can be vulnerable to hacking since not all data transmitted over the web is encrypted. Most people secure their networks with weak passwords, making them vulnerable to hacking.

Since your home network is likely to have all your personal and banking information, that information is also vulnerable. Smart home devices are connected to a Global Positioning System (GPS) that automatically identifies the location of your home. If someone steals this information, your identity is at risk.

As AI and natural language processing technology continue to advance, smart devices will become even more sophisticated and capable of handling complex tasks. Smart consumers need to decide what tradeoffs of personal risk they want to make for the additional convenience.

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton on trusting tech, making connections, and SMART

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton (Photo: JMA Photography)

How are smart devices changing how we live . . . and love? Are we aware of all that can happen when AI becomes an intimate part of our home life? Playwright Mary Elizabeth Hamilton has dramatized these questions in SMART, the witty and topical new family drama about why we let technology into our homes, and the unexpected changes tech can bring. SMART is the 2023 EST/Sloan Project Mainstage Production. Learn more about what other questions concern Mary below.

Previews of SMART start March 30 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the show will run through April 30. Reserve your ticket here.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did SMART come to be? 

EST/Sloan gave me a commission to develop SMART five years ago. At the time, we had just gotten an Alexa for my partner’s mom, who was dealing with memory loss after a stroke. I became interested in the ways in which the device — and tech in general — can be used for communication with people dealing with memory or language loss. 

As I understand it, the play began as a one-page proposal when you first submitted it to EST/Sloan. How has the play changed over the past five years? 

We had a workshop in which the play changed quite a bit, in all the ways a play changes in an early workshop. We had a second workshop. And then the world shut down. Suddenly, the idea of a character working remotely (which we worked so hard to explain in that first draft) was painfully familiar, and the characters’ experiences of loneliness, feeling cut off, trying to communicate with family from afar, made sense in a new light.

I also developed the play as a TV pilot, and parts of the story changed pretty drastically, but the relationships of the three women in the play, and the questions about privacy, communication, boundaries and technology, have remained central in every iteration. Returning to the play, I wanted to update some of the tech to be more in conversation with what’s happening in the world now. Everything has changed so much. And I’m sure will be wholly different in a week.  

Why this play? Why now? 

When I started, I would have answered that questions about technology and privacy, and the ways tech impacts our personal lives and relationships, feel pretty central to our world. That’s still true, but as the play evolved, and as AI was more in the news, I became interested in the ways tech relates to memory and language, and how it impacts how we try to create a shared experience of reality. 

Do you own any smart devices? What do you use them for? How would you characterize your relationship with your device’s persona?

My daughter was given a Siri at the start of the pandemic. I was deep into research for the show at the time, watching and reading everything about how tech companies are using these devices to monitor and collect our data without our consent. So I was super creeped out by it and unplugged it every chance I got. But I eventually came around to the idea that it’s probably not much worse than my phone, and it does make listening to music easier . . . I go back and forth between intense paranoia and resignation. I do try to be polite to the robot’s persona, just in case. 

Both of your main characters, Elaine and Gabby, have close relationships with a parent. SMART is quite powerful in capturing the stress and conflicting emotions of caring for an elderly parent in decline. Does your sensitivity on this front come from your own personal experience?

My grandfather had aphasia, and was a big part of my life growing up. My mom cared for him during that time, and seeing him transform from a person with incredible speaking ability to someone who struggled with the most basic utterances made a huge impression on me. And as I mentioned, my ex’s mom had dementia from a stroke when I started working on the play, so she was very present in my mind as well. 

You wrote all eight episodes of the wonderful podcast Power Trip with Tatiana Maslany. How does writing a podcast differ from writing a play?

The biggest learning curve was realizing just how much we rely on visuals in theater. Telling a story that is only auditory became a lot more reliant on dialogue. Another note I ran into is that audiences listening to podcasts space out, so you need to find organic ways to keep circling back and reminding them what’s going on. 

You have been a member of EST’s Youngblood program. How has that affected your playwriting? 

I had no idea as a clueless 28 year old what a lasting part of my life that program would become. At the time, I was nannying, raising a toddler, and not writing very much. The handful of Brunch sketches I managed to crank out made me feel like I was still a playwright, and that community was really central to keeping me sane during a pretty intense period of my life. Many of my closest friendships and collaborators remain people I met in Youngblood.  

How does the development process at EST differ from the process at other theaters?

So, yesterday I walked into Graeme's office [Graeme Gillis is Co-Artistic Director of EST], during a particularly intense moment in an overall intense rehearsal process. I unloaded all of the many things I was concerned about, some more ridiculous than others, and Graeme took the time to talk through each one, then asked calmly if I had slept (not in a while) and if I had been eating (some stale chips I found backstage?). An hour later, he showed up in rehearsal with a banana and a granola bar, and later that day came to a run with a bag full of fruits and vegetables for the cast and crew. I don't know of another theater where the newly appointed artistic director takes time out of his doubtless busy day to not only listen to your problems, but to personally walk to the deli and make sure the artists are nourished.  So that’s one way the development process at EST is different.

What do you want the audience to take away from seeing SMART?

As much as the play explores themes of boundaries in technology, it’s also a play about communication, and the ways in which we attempt to connect using whatever means we have at our disposal. I think tech has become part of the fabric of how we try and fail and continue to take stabs at making meaningful connections.

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.

Anchuli Felicia King on doing research, then throwing it out, moral ambiguity, semiotic misfires, and GOLDEN SHIELD

Anchuli Felicia King

This weekend, on February 15 and 16, the EST/Sloan First Light Festival will feature two workshop performances of GOLDEN SHIELD, Anchuli Felicia King’s head-spinning, globe-spanning drama about the ethics of working for repressive regimes, the entanglements of language, the risks of legal showdowns, and the brittleness of family ties. Beginning in 2006, the play dramatizes the efforts of two Chinese-American sisters to sue an American technology giant for helping China build its Internet firewall – part of its Golden Shield Project – in a way that enables the government to identify and crack down on dissidents. But let’s have the playwright tell us more.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What inspired you to write GOLDEN SHIELD?

As a playwright, I have an ongoing obsession with the intersection of globalism and technology, and I'm always looking for potent metaphors for that intersection. Most of my plays start with me reading something in the news or hearing about an event that piques my interest, which is how GOLDEN SHIELD started. I can't really remember the first piece of journalism I read about the Yahoo or Cisco cases but I discovered them in early 2016 and instantly started researching them, without fully knowing what form that research was going to take. 

Your play is chockablock with technical terms from software and network development to legal precedents and procedures. What kind of research did you do??

Shi Tao, Chinese journalist sentenced to ten years in jail for “illegally divulging state secrets.” When charged with supplying information to Chinese authorities used to convict him, Yahoo settled out of court.

My first port of call is always to just research a ton on my own. I read public documentation on the litigation the play's based on, I read additional transcripts from civil trials, I read theses on the structure of the firewall in China, I did lots of research on different kinds of digital filtering. Basically once I feel I've done my due diligence (which is usually a couple months of research), I throw it all out and try to write a compelling piece of drama. But I'm also very lucky that my friends and family are international lawyers and software engineers for massive companies, so I can float drafts by them as I'm writing to keep checking back in about whether things sound accurate. 

Your play calls for several actors to speak Mandarin with the Translator simultaneously translating what they say into English. Why is this important to you? How did you become fluent in Chinese?

I'm absolutely not fluent in Mandarin! I studied Mandarin for around a decade but quickly lost proficiency at it when I went to college, so now I'd say it's conversational Mandarin at best. This means that the Mandarin in this draft has been a real process of collaborating with different translators and native Mandarin speaking actors. Actually, it's been fascinating because every time we've workshopped this play, we keep discovering little regionalisms that affect our Mandarin text – the difference between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese idioms, for example. 

The play concerns litigation in Texas by an American human rights lawyer suing an American software developer on behalf of mainland Chinese dissidents because the company helped the Chinese government build its Internet firewall in a way that allowed them to identify domestic subversives.  The story reminds me of two cases that the World Organization for Human Rights brought in the  United States, one against Yahoo, the other against Cisco, both accusing the companies of helping the Chinese government identify subversive Chinese. How much of your play mirrors actual cases and how much is your own invention?

Slide from a leaked internal 2002 Cisco presentation. Read more in Wired article.

The play mirrors some of the details of the actual cases brought against Cisco and Yahoo and the claims of their plaintiffs, particularly their legal grounds and precedent. But I wanted to heavily fictionalize it – for the simple reason that I wanted to create more moral ambiguity. The biggest departure from reality is what OSCIS actually does for the CCP, and the fact that Marshall single-handedly invents the multi-tiered firewall in China, which is actually a process of refinement that the Chinese government has been engaged in for decades.  

Much of the drama – and humor – in the play concerns the friction between the two Asian-American sisters, one a lawyer, the other a translator.  I understand you have an identical twin sister who happens to be a human rights lawyer. How well do you get along? How did your relationship with her inform the writing of GOLDEN SHIELD?

I have to clarify that my sister is not a human rights lawyer! Tash is an international trade lawyer. She works at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. But she's deeply invested in humanitarian issues (she worked with Muslim Advocates and Lawyers without Borders) and how you can arbitrate them through international commercial mechanisms. The relationship of the sisters in this play is actually the polar opposite of our relationship! With Julie and Eva, I wanted to find a useful mechanism to talk about inherited cultural trauma, through two characters who are grappling with their liminal status as Chinese-Americans. 

You have created a character, The Translator, who is very much the fulcrum of the play. A rich theme in the play is the difficulty of translating between languages, in this case, between Chinese and English, especially when comparable expressions don’t exist. You show this not only in the exchanges between the lawyer and the dissident but also between the American software executive and the Chinese government official. Do the problems the play confronts originate in different cultures not being able to understand and communicate with each other?

For me, the play is really about our failures to communicate effectively on all fronts – not only between different languages and cultures, but between technologies, judicial systems, family members, lovers. This is why the Translator not only translates literal text but also subtext and context, to reveal the total sum of semiotic misfires that can happen when two parties try to bridge a communicative chasm. I really hope that what people take away from the play is that the attempt to translate, as fraught as it is, is what really counts – that as multivalent and impossible as communication is, we have to keep trying because it's the best mechanism we have. 

Subsequent to this first public reading of GOLDEN SHIELD this week, there will be a full production of the play at the Melbourne Theatre Company this summer. How do you envision the EST public reading affecting the production later this year?

Hugely! The draft that comes out of the EST reading is the draft I'm about to take to Australia to workshop for the production. The EST workshop is an invaluable part of getting this play primed for production – getting to dive into the characters in more detail, refine the translation and the mechanics of the play. 

Have you written other plays on a scientific or technological subject? What tips do you have for playwrights attempting to write such a play?

Basically, all my plays are on technological subjects! My advice would be to acknowledge the complexity of the issue but don't feel beholden to it. I find my first drafts are always stuffed with research but that I end up throwing that out and searching for more useful figurative devices. The best way to unpack the complexity of a given technology is to map it onto the complexity of human beings. 

What’s next for Anchuli Felicia King?

White Pearl opens at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 10 and runs through June 15

Golden Shield will get its world premiere at the Melbourne Theatre Company on August 12 and run through September 14.

Slaughterhouse will be produced as part of the 25A Downstairs Series at the Belvoir Theatre Company in Sydney from October 16 to November 2

White Pearl will receive a production in Sydney as a co-production of the Sydney Theatre Company and Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta from October 24 to November 9.

The 2019 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from January 28 through March 1 and features readings and workshop productions of ten new plays. The climax of every EST/Sloan season is the annual Mainstage Production, which this year was the world premiere of  BEHIND THE SHEET by Charly Evon Simpson. Directed by Colette Robert, BEHIND THE SHEET confronts the history of a great medical breakthrough by telling the forgotten story of a community of enslaved black women who involuntarily enabled the discovery. Previews began January 9 and the show runs through March 10. Tickets can be purchased here. The First Light Festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twentieth year.