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

Michael Walek on research surprises, mythologizing, rewriting, and HAVE YOU MET JANE GOODALL & HER MOTHER?

Michael Walek

On Thursday, February 13, as part of the 2020 First Light Festival, the EST/Sloan Project is presenting two public readings—at 3 pm and 7 pm— of HAVE YOU MET JANE GOODALL & HER MOTHER? by Michael Walek. The first public reading of the play occurred as part of the 2019 First Light Festival. The play dramatizes the first months of twenty-six-year-old Jane Goodall’s first expedition to study chimpanzees in Africa. But why did she bring her mother? To learn why let’s ask the playwright:

 (Interview by Rich Kelley)

It was almost exactly a year ago that HAVE YOU MET JANE GOODALL & HER MOTHER? had its first public reading as part of the 2019 First Light Festival. How has the play changed since then?

This is an entirely new play. After a great note session with Linsay and Graeme*, I decided to take the play in a completely different direction. It is a screwball comedy instead of a bio-play. More Noel Coward than Merchant-Ivory.

What prompted you to write this particular play?

Jane Goodall and her mother Margaret “Vanne” Myfanwe Joseph in camp (Photo: Hugo Van Lawick, National Geographic Society)

Growing up, my mom loved Jane Goodall. We had her books in the house, and I thought I knew her story. A few years ago, I learned that when the Tanzanian government allowed Jane Goodall to study chimpanzees, they required she bring a chaperone, so she brought her mother. The idea of a scientist bringing her mother on her first expedition sounded like a play I wanted to write. 

What research did you do?

Tons of research. I read everything I could get my hands on from her journals to her family’s letters. 

Your play creates vignettes that dramatize the first months Jane Goodall spends with her mother leading her first expedition to study chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1960. How did you figure out what they sounded like? Did you work with her field notes?

Luckily, many of Jane and Vanne’s letters from that time were published, so it was easy to get a sense of their writing style, words they liked, nicknames they used. I found them to be utterly charming. 

Is the relationship you dramatize between Jane and her mother your invention or based on something Jane wrote?  They are often quite funny. Is that from your imagination or based on your research?

Before I did my research, I assumed that any child living in a tent with her parent for five months would find it a stressful situation, only to discover that Jane and Vanne adored each other and never really fought. Suddenly, I had to write a play about two funny, kind people who encouraged and supported each other. 

It’s always seemed a bit preposterous that the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey would choose a secretary with no academic background or field experience to lead an expedition into the thick mountainous terrain the chimpanzees inhabited. And be able to get funding for her. Why do you think he chose Jane?

Well, she wasn’t his first choice. Jane only found this out years later, but Leakey tried to get another scientist to go into the field, but she declined. I think a lot has been made out that she was “just a secretary.” She went on a human fossil dig with Leakey and worked with him at his museum in Kenya. She was a bit more qualified, but it makes a better story if she’s this random typist. 

Jane Goodall grooming David Greybeard, the first chimp to lose his fear of her. (Photo: National Geographic Creative/Hugo Van Lawick)

Your play focuses on the first months Jane spent in Tanganyika in 1960 and what she discovered as the first person to study chimpanzees in the wild—but also her frustration at not being able to make the major discovery she had hoped for that would justify Louis Leakey’s faith in her. When did her breakthrough observation about how chimps make tools to collect termites actually occur?

In the play, all the facts about science are true. Jane really did make her discovery in the final weeks of her first stay in Tanganyika after her mother went home.

Much has been made of how a plush toy chimpanzee Jane was given as a child may have determined her career. What do you make of that?

Young Jane Goodall with Jubilee (Photo: Courtesy of Jane Goodall Institute)

Again, I think this is some hindsight mythologizing. Jane would’ve studied birds if it was the assignment. It just happened to be chimpanzees. 

Rewriting is probably among the most under-appreciated, or under-discussed, aspects of playwriting.  When you begin a rewrite, do you have a particular goal in mind: give the characters more personality, make it funnier, add more science, make the transitions sharper?

This is an incredibly collaborative process, so the director and the actors and I spend a lot of time talking about the play. They all have incredible observations, so each night I have plenty of things to work on and rewrite.

Have you ever gone camping for an extended time? Spent any time observing nature? Done field research?

I absolutely hate camping, and the outdoors, which I realize makes it hysterical I wrote this play. 

You’ve been a member of EST’s Youngblood collective. How has that influenced your playwriting?

One of the best things about Youngblood is how radically different everyone’s writing is. I think Youngblood pushed me to write more like myself. I am very lucky to have been part of the collective. 

Have you written other plays about science?

 Yes. I wrote numerous plays for the Youngblood Science brunch and they were always rejected. 

When did you first know you were a playwright?

My high school had a play contest my senior year. I wrote a play, and it won. I wasn’t invited to rehearsals, so I just showed up one night and saw my play. There was a twist ending, and the audience gasped. I was completely hooked. 

*Linsay Firman is Associate Director and Graeme Gillis is Program Director of The EST Sloan Project

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.



Justice Hehir on engineers, mentors, female friendships, dildos, and FREEPLAY

Justice Hehir

On Thursday, January 30, this year’s EST/Sloan First Light Festival will feature the first public reading of FREEPLAY by Justice Hehir, member of Colt Coeur and the 2020 Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers’ Group. FreePlay is the name of a Brooklyn-based, feminist, sex toy startup,  popular for its “’deconstructed take” on the dildo. The company’s owner/managers—engineer Amy and sculptor Sara—have been best friends since college and share office space with their devoted intern and an environmental artist/ulcerative colitis activist. What ensues is a story about art, engineering, the painful intimacy of female friendships, dildos, and the people who make them. Playwright Justice Hehir tells us more:

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for FREEPLAY come from?

This is literally one of two times in my life where I have a legitimate answer to this question. What luck! I went to the last Kenyon Playwrights Conference before it shut down, and during a writing exercise in one of the workshops I wrote five pages that would eventually be in this play. Those lines, about choosing the colors for a new dildo, are straight from Gambier and the raging waters of the mighty Kokosing. I don’t remember what the exercise was, but it definitely wasn’t supposed to be about sex toys. That just happened because I have deep psychological problems.

What research did you do as part of writing the play?

Picnicking along the Kokosing River, Gambier, Ohio (Photo: Justice Hehir)

I feel like most of my research looked like those memes of Golden Retrievers wearing glasses and bow ties sitting in front of a computer with text saying something like, “What do?” I was coming to this with absolutely zero understanding of math, manufacturing, business, any of it. I read a bunch of articles about sex toy companies, watched a bunch of videos of their manufacturing processes, and accidentally subscribed to Quora trying to learn about sex toy testers. So, the research happened in fits and starts. I’m not a playwright that can do too much heavy research at once because I just get stuck. This is, first and foremost, a character-driven play. I wrote characters I loved so much that I owed it to them to learn about this process. It’s the only way I can do it. If it weren’t for Amy, and me loving Amy so much, this would be a way less well-researched play. All my plays are just love letters to my characters. 

Two of the characters in the play are engineers. Did you use any consultants to help you understand the minds of engineers, or the manufacturing or use of dildos?

Yerp! My husband. Thanks, babe. To be fair, my wonderful husband does not work making dildos (sadly). But he is a mechanical engineer. Unfortunately, you can’t catch Engineering Knowledge through close contact or saliva—so whenever I was reading articles about dildo manufacturing and not getting stuff, I called Elias over and asked him to translate. He helped decipher and explain what I couldn’t get on my own, which was a lot. I also owe a great deal to my dramaturg, Emilie, who not only fact-checked my fanciful butt but provided a LOT of dramaturgical characters things and organized a field trip that ended up being very important to the play.

please, an educated pleasure shop

We went to a sex shop called Please in Brooklyn, where we spent an hour asking the poor unfortunate soul who happened to be working that shift questions about what most people are looking for when shopping for a dildo. (We did ask permission to ask a bunch of questions first, don’t worry! As a fellow hourly worker I would not spring that shit on someone without asking.) We learned so much that night—about which dildos men in heterosexual pairings were most likely to find “threatening”, what dildos cis-women often gravitated toward, and the plethora of dildo options for trans/genderqueer/GNC people offered by the store. Being in the kind of consent-driven, feminist sex shop where I imagine FreePlay’s products being sold, getting to walk around and imagine where their dildos might fit in that ecosystem, was really fascinating.

One of the dynamics in FREEPLAY is its nuanced depiction of the mentor/intern relationship between Amy and Emma. Have you experienced either side of that relationship yourself?

Yes! I’ve been the weird intern, not the unwilling mentor, as I should never be mentoring anyone ever. But we’re in a funny place right now when it comes to #GirlBoss culture, which I would argue is not feminism, it’s just post-feminist white women on Instagram while at work. Just because an office is woman-led does not make it healthy or feminist, unfortunately. That takes effort and intention. At the same time, I feel like we see/read/watch a lot of media where women-owned companies fail because women can’t work together because of sexual competition/jealousy/babies/husband babies/etc. I wanted to take a different look at a women-led workplace, one that was functional and flawed. You know, the way we accept depictions of male-led workplaces to be ALL THE TIME. 

FREEPLAY is set in the office of a small company that makes dildos yet the office dynamics are so relatable they could occur in almost any company (absent the sex jokes). Was one of your goals to normalize the sex toy industry?

It wasn’t when I started writing the play. I didn’t really have an agenda. (Which is funny, because a play about dildos practically screams “I HAVE AN AGENDA.”) But I am not that smart or organized. The realization that that is part of what the play is doing came later. Like when you asked me this question.

In addition to being a playwright, you manage a cat rescue and you are a postpartum doula. Do any of your experiences from these worlds find their way into your plays?

Photo from Just Give Back Animal Rescue Facebook page

Well, like my apartment, there’s always a cat somewhere in a play of mine. It’s not intentional. It just happens. (Again, same as my apartment but my apartment has five and a dog with anger issues.) In this play, my experience as a postpartum doula was closer to the front of my mind. I often joke that being a postpartum doula is being a professional best friend. I form really close, attentive, and intimate bonds with my clients. Trust is paramount. Being a doula makes you super aware of the exact chemistry of trust and amicability. My experience as a doula has certainly served as a meaningful shadow to Amy and Sara’s relationship.

How does being an intersectional feminist inform your playwriting?

It’s just about taking a personal inventory, really paying attention to what I do and don’t know. In either case, I own it. I just try to be really accountable, do my research, ask good questions, and shut up and listen a lot. 

You recently earned an MFA in Playwriting from Hunter College where you studied with Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. What impact has that had on your playwriting?

Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

They changed my whole life. They gave me a shot. I would not have written this play, I would not be in this position, if they hadn’t gone against their better judgement and admitted me into their program. I also have Brighde Mullins to thank, who was a huge part of my education at Hunter, as well as Anne Washburn. In my family, on very important or scary days, my grandpa lights a candle for you on his altar in the garage. (Did I mention I’m Italian?) He lights a saint candle and puts your picture in front of it and prays. There’s a Virgin Mary statue with a rosary wrapped around her at the center of the altar, and pictures of other family members, too. On the day of my Hunter interview, my grandpa lit a St. Jude candle for me. (Saint Jude is the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. It's unclear how intentional this was.) I’m just really glad he lit that candle. I thought about it during my interview, actually. That there was a flame burning right now in my grandpa’s garage just for me. It was a really lovely thing to hold on to. 

What’s next for Justice Hehir?

Night Creatures poster from Jackalope Theater

I have a production of my play, Night Creatures (which takes place in an animal shelter) going up at Jackalope Theater in Chicago in May! It’s my first production. St. Jude is really working overtime.

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.

Sam Chanse on unstable memories, applying an Asian American perspective, and WHAT YOU ARE NOW

Sam Chanse

As a special satellite event of this year’s First Light Festival, The EST/Sloan Project is supporting a new public reading of WHAT YOU ARE NOW by Sam Chanse, a play she has been developing with The Civilians. The reading is free and will take place this Friday, January 17 at 3:00 PM at New Dramatists. The last public reading of WHAT YOU ARE NOW occurred as part of the 2017 First Light Festival at EST.

Cutting-edge neuroscience commingles with ancient culture in this compelling family drama as we watch Pia, a neuroscience postdoc, research how the brain copes with pain even as she tries to come to terms with the traumatic events of her family’s past. Sam delved into the background and writing of the play in our 2017 interview.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What sparked the idea for WHAT YOU ARE NOW?

Dr. Daniela Schiller (Photo: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images North America)

A few years ago I read a piece in The New Yorker, “Partial Recall” by Michael Specter, about memory and trauma, and latched onto the idea that a memory, in the act of being retrieved or remembered, is unstable and vulnerable to change. The article also profiled a neuroscientist, Dr. Daniela Schiller, who studies how emotional memories are formed in the brain, and who describes her work as driven in part by a desire to understand her dad, a Holocaust survivor. Her story resonated with another one that had been on my mind for a while, the experience of Cambodian refugees in the U.S. who face deportation – and consequently another major trauma.

We see the main character, Pia, early in her career as an enthusiastic young neuroscience student and then, ten years later, as a beleaguered postdoc. Both feel very real. The play also references specific research by Nader and LeDoux, Eric Kandel, and work on zeta inhibitor peptides (ZIP), among other things. What research did you do to write your play?

Linsay and Graeme were kind enough to connect me with Dr. Schiller, so I was able to meet her in person and talk with her a bit (she’s a pretty phenomenal human and scientist, not to mention musician and songwriter). And then I did a lot of reading and some watching – books on the science of memory, and essays and articles on memory and trauma, as well as some videos.

WHAT ARE YOU NOW is wonderfully steeped in Cambodian culture: Cambodian creation myths, Apsara dancing, the music of Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea all play important roles. Is this your first play that conjures with Cambodian culture? Has it played a part in your life?

I’m Asian American myself, and mixed (Chinese and Pennsylvania Dutch – basically Swiss-German), and it’s always been a key aspect of where I’m coming from as a writer. A lot of my plays have centered around Asian American or Asian characters and implicitly involved an (or multiple) Asian American perspective(s), but this is the first play I’ve written with Cambodian American characters, and that involves elements of Cambodian culture. I’ve been grateful for the chance to explore these characters and their history and where they’re coming from through working on this play. In particular, I did a brief residency at Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I was able (thanks to MRT folks Megan Sandberg-Zakian and Elizabeth Kegley) to connect with members and leaders of the Cambodian community there – including Sovanna Pouv of the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association, and Linda Sopheap Sou, Dahvy Tran, and Tim Thou, of the Angkor Dance Troupe.

The Angkor Dance Troupe performs “Apsara Dancing Stones” (Sun Photos/Julia Malakie)

The play dramatizes powerfully what a world apart the refugee’s experience of America was in the second half of the twentieth century – and thereafter. And how scars can pass from one generation to another. Are there other writers you look to who have also captured this phenomenon?

From left: Qui Nguyen, Mona Mansour, Michael Golamco

Yeah, absolutely – I know a lot of writers have written plays about the experience of being a refugee (or the children of refugees), in the US and elsewhere – and given the current political and global climate, it’s unfortunately a subject that feels especially immediate. Some writers and plays that come immediately to mind: Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone, Mona Mansour’s Urge for Going, and Michael Golamco’s Year Zero.

What do you want the audience to take away from WHAT YOU ARE NOW?

I’m interested in what the audience will take away from it, but I’m not sure I want to predefine what that is. For myself, there are a few things I take away from it. One of those things: we can have these concretized ways of thinking about our own history, which can sometimes be damaging. I’m interested in the possibility of changing the stories we tell about ourselves – not in a way where we’re making shit up or being dishonest or erasing history, but in a way where we’re revisiting and maybe changing a potentially destructive relationship to painful experiences.

Have you written other plays about science?

There are other plays I’ve written or am working on that explicitly involve or reference scientific ideas and concepts. A collaborator, Bob Kelly and I, have been developing a musical (gilgamesh & the mosquito) whose main characters include a genetically modified mosquito and a biotech scientist, so there’s some science-y stuff in that (I mean it’s an anthropomorphized genetically modified mosquito, so not necessarily a strictly-scientific approach). And a couple other plays, Fruiting Bodies and The Opportunities of Extinction, include a fair amount of material from a more environmental and ecological perspective.

I don’t think of this play as being about science so much as being about people struggling with their relationship with one another and with their own history and past. The science is part of how the main character, Pia, is wrestling with these things – it’s a way for her (and us) to try and understand what’s going on.

What do you like about science? What scares you about science?

For me (and from my very layperson perspective), scientific ideas and theories and methods are another way of interpreting and understanding (or trying to understand) the world we’re in – I love how science offers us these other lenses through which to view and consider different aspects of living and doing this human thing we’re all doing.

I guess what scares me about science and technology is the accelerated pace, and issues of access. We’re developing new technology and scientific processes at an unprecedented rate, which of course can be incredible and promising and potentially life- and planet-saving. But the development of this science and technology – and our enthusiasm for it – seems to be outstripping our ability to thoroughly consider and explore the intended and unintended consequences. The other fear is about access – the gap between people who can make use of all the amazing new technology and scientific advances and people who are shut out of it – and maybe an overreliance on science & tech alone to save us from some pretty serious problems.

You turned your one-woman play, Lydia’s Funeral Video, into a book but added a “counterpoint narrative” through drawings and marginal comments. What effect were you going for there?

Lydia’s Funeral Video is a solo play I wrote back when I was making work as a writer and performer. Kaya Press published it in 2015 (several years after I wrote it). The counterpoint narrative and illustrations were elements developed with Kaya Press specifically for the publication as a way to adapt some of the dimensionality of the live performance into printed matter.

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.

Mona Pirnot on risk, research, rewriting, and OFFSHORE CLINICAL TRIALS

Mona Pirnot

On Thursday, January 16, this year’s EST/Sloan First Light Festival will feature as its first event a reading of OFFSHORE CLINICAL TRIALS by Mona Pirnot, member of EST/Youngblood. Set in a beach house on Saint Kitts in the Caribbean, the play brings together four strangers so debilitated by herpes outbreaks that they agree to participate in a risky clinical trial of a new vaccine. Hear more from playwright Mona Pirnot:

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What prompted you to write OFFSHORE CLINICAL TRIALS?

William Halford, the dying microbiologist who conducted the herpes vaccine trials in the Caribbean in 2016. Photo: Jason Johnson, SIU.

A year and a half ago, I read a Wired article about a dying microbiologist who flew participants to the Caribbean to run clinical trials for a herpes vaccine. The particulars of the story are completely bizarre. I was immediately obsessed. I read everything I could find about this scientist and these trials and the FDA and vaccines. All of the research exploded into a play. I wrote the first draft in a week, which is very unusual for me. I have since rewritten it thirty times, which is not unusual for me.

What research did you do as part of writing the play? Did you use a medical consultant? How did using a consultant change the play?

Tracey Van Kempen Photo: John Abbott

I’m a compulsive researcher. Always. For this play, I read articles and peer reviews and medical consent forms and blog posts. I bought a small press libertarian manifesto about the right to choose drug treatments. I read that in a day. There’s a lot you can find on the Internet. But nothing matches talking to a person. Over the summer, a friend introduced me to a medical director named Tracey Van Kempen, PhD. I was floored with how generous she was with her time. We talked on the phone. We met in person. She answered all of my questions and sent me articles. We nerded out together. It was helpful to have a human cut through the conjecture. Before I met her, I would read an article and have a question and try to answer the question by reading another article. After I met Tracey, I’d read an article and ask her a question and she’d be like, “Okay, let me tell you why that article is crazy.” It was great.

Your play focuses on the participants in the clinical trial rather than on the researcher conducting the trial or the science behind what is being tested. What went into making that decision about the play?

In past drafts, I was preoccupied with the science and the experts. Then I remembered I wasn’t an expert on science. I turned my focus to the trial’s participants and the good stuff started surfacing. I’ve become more interested in questions about the patients. What compelled them to participate in something so risky? What’s at stake for them? Where does their understanding of the science end? How do I relate to that? After I started engaging more with the questions I shared with the patients, I felt myself getting closer to the play I wanted to write all along.

Has the play changed much as you have developed it? How so? How is working with the EST/Sloan Project different from other companies in developing this play?

YES. BIG YES. I’m an aggressive rewriter. I’ve turned this play inside out ten times. Graeme Gillis (Program Director of The EST/Sloan Project) can confirm. I don’t shy away from slash and burn rewrites. Of course, the scary thing about being that sort of rewriter is, you run the risk of losing something crucial along the way. But I’m not too worried about that because I have Linsay (Firman, Associate Director of The EST/Sloan Project) and Graeme. We share a collective vision of what this play wants to be. I don’t imagine they would ever let me stray too far from center. Not only have those two helped me write a better play, they’ve helped me write the play I want to write. That’s a big deal.

Have you written other plays about scientific or medical topics?

Poster for reading of Private at Premiere Play Festival at Kean University in 2018.

I have a play called Private that’s set in a world where people pay premiums for privacy like we do for health insurance. That’s sort of a pop science idea. The play is hardly speculative fiction though. It focuses more on the drama of privacy in interpersonal relationships. That’s something I’m interested in. I like starting plays with big novel ideas and then making each draft more intimate, more about the specifics of human relationships.  

What impact has being a member of EST/Youngblood had on your playwriting?

Youngblood is one of the seven wonders of my life. I’m so grateful. Since joining the group, I’ve felt myself multiply. Like a virus! I’ve grown so much. I’ve become more formally uninhibited, more prolific, more daring, less precious. And I am in constant awe of the work of my friends. Some of my favorite playwrights are my friends. What a special thing.   

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.

Neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Biochemist Mandë Holford, Genomicist Christopher Mason, Playwrights Sam Chanse & Patrick Link join Science Editor Steve Mirsky at EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event

From left: Heather Berlin, Mandë Holford, Christopher Mason, Sam Chanse, Patrick Link, Steve Mirsky

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 21 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. (You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage and submission guidelines here).

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 2019 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will take place at EST on Thursday, December 12 at 8 PM. The event is free and any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology is welcome to attend.   

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:

Dr. Heather Berlin

Dr. Heather Berlin is a cognitive neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She trained in clinical neuropsychology at Weill Cornell Medicine in the Department of Neurological Surgery and is a visiting scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the aim of developing novel treatments. She is also interested in the brain basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity. Passionate about science communication and promoting women in STEM, Dr. Berlin is a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Committee on Science and Technology Engagement with the Public, and The New York Times series TimesTalks. She co-hosts Startalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has hosted series on PBS and Discovery Channel. Dr. Berlin co-wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed off-Broadway show, Off the Top, about the neuroscience of improvisation, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, Impulse Control. She has made numerous media appearances including on the BBC, History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, Big Think, and TEDx, and was featured in the documentary film Bill Nye: Science Guy.

Dr. Mandë Holford

Dr. 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 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. 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. Dr. Holford has conducted several global fieldwork expeditions to collect venomous snails and to present her research findings. She is actively involved in science education, advancing the public understanding of science, and science diplomacy. To provide tools for the classroom, Dr. Holford co-founded Killer Snails, an award-winning EdTech XR learning games company. The mission of Killer Snails is to rethink education by creating science games and immersive experiences tailored to local environments and cultures to advance STEM learning and teaching worldwide. She is a life member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Board member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Global Science Diplomacy Roundtable and Planning Committee. Dr. Holford is also an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow. She has received several awards including being named a New Champion Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum, the prestigious Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an NSF CAREER Award, named a Breakthrough Women in Science by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and NPR’s Science Friday, and was recently named a Wings WorldQuest Women of Discovery Fellow. Dr. Holford received her Ph.D. in Synthetic Protein Chemistry from The Rockefeller University.

Dr. Christopher Mason

Dr. Christopher Mason is an Associate Professor of Genomics at Weill Cornell Medicine, as well as the Director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, with appointments at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and Rockefeller University. The Mason laboratory develops and deploys new biochemical and computational methods in functional genomics to elucidate the genetic basis of human disease and human physiology. Dr. Mason has won the NIH’s Transformative R01 Award, the NASA Group Achievement Award, the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Alliance Young Investigator award, the Hirschl-Weill-Caulier Career Scientist Award, the Vallee Scholar Award, the CDC Honor Award for Standardization of Clinical Testing, and the WorldQuant Foundation Scholar Award.  He was named as one of the “Brilliant Ten” Scientists by Popular Science, featured as a TEDMED speaker, and called “The Genius of Genetics” by 92Y.  He has authored of co-authored more than 175 peer-reviewed papers that have been featured on the covers of Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Microbiology, and Neuron, as well as cited by the U.S. District Court and U.S. Supreme Court.  Coverage of his work has also appeared on the covers of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TIME, The LA Times, and across many media (ABC, NBC, CBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, PBS, NASA, NatGeo). He has co-founded five biotechnology start-up companies (Genome Liberty, Biotia, Onegevity Health, P-Omics, and Shanghai GeneTech) and serves as an advisor to 15 others. He lives with his daughter and wife in Brooklyn, NY.

Sam Chanse

Playwright Sam Chanse is the author of Trigger, Monument, or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play), The Opportunities of Extinction, Fruiting Bodies, The Other Instinct, What You Are Now, Lydia’s Funeral Video, about that whole dying thing, and Asian American Jesus. Her play What You Are Now about memory and trauma was featured in the EST/Sloan 2017 First Light Festival and received a 2019/2020 grant from EST/Sloan for a developmental production with The Civilians in 2020. Her work has been developed and/or produced with the Lark, Ma-Yi Theater, Cherry Lane, Leviathan Lab, Ars Nova, Broken Nose, Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan Project, and the Ojai Playwrights’ Conference, and is published by Kaya Press (Lydia’s Funeral Video) and TCG (The Kilroys List). She is a Lark Venturous Fellow, a resident playwright of New Dramatists, a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and a Rita Goldberg Playwrights' Fellow at the Lark. A former fellow at MacDowell, Cherry Lane Mentor Project, Sundance/Ucross Theatre Program, and the Playwrights Realm, she has also received residencies from Djerassi, Tofte Lake Center, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, and SPACE at Ryder Farm. Commissions include Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan, Ma-Yi/the Flea, Second Generation, Leviathan, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is an alumna of Ars Nova’s Play Group, the Civilians R&D Group, and the Lark’s New York Stage & Film Vassar Retreat.

Patrick Link

Playwright Patrick Link is the author of Headstrong, a gripping family drama about concussions and sports that was the EST/Sloan Mainstage Production in 2012, directed by William Carden, and later recorded by LA Theatre Works. His other works include The Majestic Players Storm Kansas City, Sweet Forgotten Flavor, and his Galileo Prize-winning Kinemacolor (EST/Sloan). He has also written the book for several musicals with Eric March that include Christmas in Queens, Red Hook Hotel, The Bone Wars (commissioned by EST/Sloan), and The Triple Threat. He is an alum of Youngblood and a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre.

The moderator

Steve Mirsky

Steve Mirsky is a senior editor at Scientific American. He has written the “Anti Gravity” column since 1995. Mirsky launched Scientific American’s long-form Science Talk podcast in 2006 and has been hosting it ever since. He also created the daily 60-Second Science podcast later that year and its 3000th episode will run in early 2020.  He has contributed to numerous publications and broadcast outlets, including Audubon; Wildlife Conservation; National Wildlife; Earth; Longevity; The Humanist; Men’s Fitness; American Health; Technology Review; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bulletin; Astronomy; New York Newsday; Sea Frontiers; the children’s magazines Current Science, Science World and Muse; National Public Radio; and the Medical News Network. Mirsky is also a 1978 graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

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Urogynecologist Briana Walton and Literary Historian Gabrielle Foreman join Actor and Scholar Naomi Lorrain to discuss the historical & scientific context of BEHIND THE SHEET

On March 2, following the 2:00 pm matinee performance of Behind the Sheet, the powerful new drama by Charly Evon Simpson, everyone is encouraged to stay for our fifth talkback about the historical and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses. On the panel this week, we have Dr. Briana Walton, director of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery at the AAMC Women’s Center for Pelvic Health, and literary historian Gabrielle Foreman, the Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Professor of History and Black American Studies at the University of Delaware, for a conversation moderated by research scholar and Behind the Sheet actor, Naomi Lorrain.

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. In 1840s Alabama, Philomena assists a doctor—her owner—as he performs experimental surgeries on her fellow slave women, trying to find a treatment for the painful post-childbirth complications known as fistulas. Reframing the origin story of modern gynecology, the play dramatizes how these women supported each other, and questions who, and what, history remembers.

The World Premiere of Behind the Sheet is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST's partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays "exploring the worlds of science and technology," an initiative now in its twentieth year.

About the Panelists

Dr. Briana Walton

Dr. Briana Walton has served as the Director of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery at Anne Arundel Medical Center (AAMC) since its inception in 2008. She is recognized as an expert in robotic/minimally invasive surgery and treatment of fibroids, urinary incontinence, and pelvic organ prolapse. In the field of robotics, she has personally performed 500 plus pelvic reconstructive surgeries while developing programmatic growth around quality, cost containment, and safety. Before starting the Women’s Center for Pelvic Health at Anne Arundel Medical Center, Dr. Walton was the Director of Benign Gynecology at Washington Hospital Center. She has also served as adjunct assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and an assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Urology at Georgetown University School of Medicine. Internationally, she uses her clinical skills and strengths in the treatment of health care disparities. She has worked in Ghana, Niger and most recently Rwanda where the program focuses on obstetrical fistula repairs, but the group has developed other clinical programs to treat the victims of trauma and genocide. She has served as board member and team leader for the International Organization for Women and Development.

Gabrielle Foreman

P. Gabrielle Foreman is a teacher and scholar of African American studies and nineteenth-century literary history who has published extensively on issues of racial reform and slavery with a focus on the past’s continuing hold on the world we inhabit today. In her current manuscript The Art of DisMemory: Historicizing Slavery in Poetry, Performance and Material Culture, she traces the story of an enslaved Connecticut man named Fortune who was dissected and skeletonized by his enslaver, Dr. Preserved Porter. As the state abolished slavery, the Porter family turned their chattel property into intellectual property, passing down Fortune’s bones through generations of family doctors before donating his bones to a regional museum where he was the most popular exhibit until the 1970s. Our generation knows his story because the museum commissioned poet Marilyn Nelson to write about him. She and Ysaye Barnwell also created a manumission requiem with Nelson’s poetry serving as lyrics. Gabrielle teaches at the University of Delaware where she is the Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Professor of History and Africana Studies. She is also the founding director of the Colored Conventions Project, which brings decades of nineteenth-century Black activism to digital life.

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff).

About the Moderator

Naomi Lorrain plays Philomena in the world premiere production of Behind the Sheet by Charly Evon Simpson at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Naomi is a New York City-based actor, playwright and scholar. She received her B.A. in the History of Science, History of Medicine and African American Studies from Yale University and her M.F.A. 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. Her plays include A Trojan Woman’s Tale (Villa La Pietra), The Queen of Macon County (The National Black Theatre), Shelfies (The 52nd Street Project), The Big O (Villa La Pietra), and Rigor Mortis (NYU Tisch). Recent theater credits include What to Send Up When It Goes Down (Movement Theatre Company), Stained (The Amoralist), Song for a Future Generation (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Restoration Comedy (The Flea), and Daughter of Lot (Edinburgh Fringe Festival). TV: “Orange Is the New Black” (Netflix), “Elementary” (CBS), “The Good Fight” (CBS), “Madam Secretary” (CBS). As a Scholars-in-Residence Research Assistant, she has worked on several books, including Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes. At Yale, her senior essay “Plan B: The Collision of the Birth Control Movement and the Uplift Movement Viewed Through Works of Angelina Weld Grimké” received both the Lily Rosen Prize in Women's Health for best essay that contributes to knowledge about women’s health and the William Pickens Prize for outstanding senior essay in the field of African and African American Studies.

Behind the Sheet began previews on January 9 and runs through March 10 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Susan Bernfield on Poppy Northcutt, Apollo 8, soundscapes, the swinging sixties, and SIZZLE SIZZLE FLY

Susan Bernfield

This weekend, on Friday March 1 and Saturday March 2, the 2019 EST/Sloan First Light Festival will feature two workshop performances of Susan Bernfield ’s sparkling new play SIZZLE SIZZLE FLY, a drama about Frances “Poppy” Northcutt, the first female engineer to work in NASA’s Mission Control. SIZZLE SIZZLE FLY had its first public reading in January 2017 as part of that year’s First Light Festival. A child of the sixties herself, Susan has lots to say about Poppy.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

SIZZLE SIZZLE FLY is your new play about Frances “Poppy” Northcutt, the first woman engineer who worked in Mission Control at NASA and who played a critical role in configuring flight trajectories for Apollo 8 and other Apollo missions. What prompted you to write this play?

Flipping through channels one night (so old fashioned!) I landed on an episode of the MAKERS documentary series that was about women in space.  Poppy Northcutt was in it, along with these awesome pictures of her during her time at NASA.  She helped Apollo 13 get down, but she sure wasn’t in the movie!   I’ve always been obsessed with the space program; I think most people who were little kids in the late ‘60s are.  My standing image, of course, was row after row of uniform-looking guys: the glasses, the white shirts, the pocket protectors.  Poppy – not just a woman but a young and super-fashionable woman – utterly disrupted that image for me.  Even consciously inhabiting a feminine stereotype, she still could break all the stereotypes at once.  I had this near-Robert-Wilson-style vision, a long line of identical guys with Poppy in her headset suddenly entering their line. The play has grown around that image. 

Poppy Northcutt at NASA (from MAKERS: Women in Space)

What kind of research did you do to prepare to write the play? There’s some serious math involved in calculating orbital trajectories. How deep a dive did you take into Northcutt’s work product?

Apollo 8 Lunar Orbital Plan

Thanks for liking my math! It’s probably pretty surface-y, though I did read many (simple) articles about orbital mechanics, Fortran, early computers.  I didn’t understand much but I loved using the vocabulary, I find it delicious and oddly lyrical. Mainly, I dove into the organizational systems and work culture at Mission Control, which is central to the play and, as I discovered, a secret of NASA’s success. The NASA website has an incredible trove of oral histories with engineers, supervisors, employees, and I read dozens of them. Actually, first I watched on YouTube some really stylish films made to promote the Apollo program. Their look and sound has influenced the play a lot, but more importantly there was one that described what I took to be Poppy’s division, so I looked up the division chief featured in the film and read his oral history.  When he mentioned other people – I’d go read their oral histories, too, and so on, following a trail of names through these documents, occasionally hitting on a fact or anecdote that helped me piece things together. I also watched documentaries and read many sources on Apollo 8. There was so much I didn’t know about it, certainly how fast it was planned and prepped, and it has so much poetic value – the “saving” of 1968 on the cusp of a changing world, earthrise.  And the first thing I read was an oral history Poppy did for the Houston Public Library, it’s the source of the core ideas in the piece but had limited details, sending me on the goose chase described above.

Northcutt got a lot of press attention in 1968 and thereafter as the “lithesome blonde” who sported miniskirts even while she held her own among the nerdy NASA engineers. In later years, after earning a law degree, she actively worked with the National Organization for Women to defend women’s rights. Is it your sense that she was a feminist from day one or did her consciousness evolve on women’s issues?

Frances "Poppy" Northcutt at her terminal.

She’s said that her time at NASA was her consciousness raising and the play tracks that evolution.  She didn’t want any woman to ever have to be the only woman again, so she got involved.  She was very honest about using what we’d now probably call her privilege. She figured she had a good income, she was prominent, she wasn’t going to be fired, so she could safely put herself out there for women for whom activism was risky, but who needed the progress the women’s movement promised.  I love that. 

In your script you include many specific references to artifacts of the time – chairs, computer screens, lamps. How important are these elements to establishing the context for the world Northcutt inhabited?

A visual excerpt from the script for SIZZLE SIZZLE FLY

It’s a very visual play.  As I said, it started with an image, it repeats that image and builds in more.  I see just a few iconic items on stage, and I’ve tried to activate them: the swivel chairs, for example, produce a kind of dance.  In addition to establishing the world, for me these items are a clue to the theatricality, it’s a memory play and a non-naturalistic play, and picking a few iconic items and images lets me pull ideas into focus.  At some point I started inserting pictures of objects into the text on the page:  “it looks like this.” Having them right there inspired me, once I could see the chair or the lamp I could inhabit what was happening around it.  Then I decided I wanted EVERY reader to see them. It put me right in it, wouldn’t it be the same for others?  I had such a great time writing this play, I felt freer than I ever had before, so I just figured, why not, and I loved how it made my page come alive.  

Sound and music, especially jazz, play a significant role in the play. Will the workshop be doing anything special with sound?

Space and the ‘60s are both so sonically cool. The sounds, specifically integrated with the text, also assist the spare and iconic theatricality I’m looking for. It was amazing, and frankly just the right move, for the EST folks to invite me to include sound design in this workshop.  Sound designer Kate Marvin and I got together in September to play around with some of the bigger sound moments in the play (well, more than we expected to, once we got going we just wanted to have at more of ‘em!). We had such a great time. There’s a big dream of sound in this text, I just heard soundscape throughout when I was writing it, sometimes it’s something literal and existing, and sometimes in stage directions I tried to articulate the FEELING or the acceleration or emotional underpinning the sound should convey. What Kate came up with, the sounds we explored together and then she constructed into sequences, concurred with and often improved on what I’d been dreaming. There’s one spot where I’d tried to describe the feeling of a piece of music in words, and she showed up with the exact piece I’d been thinking about! Plus mainly we giggled. Including when we came in to play Linsay and Graeme what we’d been up to. And now, being in this workshop week with Kate’s work to play with and for the actors to respond to… it really is an essential element, it’s illuminating and is punctuating the play just as intended, and it’s just really exciting. 

Katherine Johnson (left), the "computer" portrayed by Taraji P. Henson in the movie Hidden Figures.

In 2016 we had a cascade of books – and one noteworthy film – about women who worked on the ground in the space program: The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly (in 2017 a popular and critically acclaimed film), and Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt. What do you think accounts for this sudden interest in these women behind the space program? If you’ve read any of these books, how do the stories told in them compare with Poppy Northcutt’s? If you saw it, what did you think of the movie Hidden Figures?

Wow, I didn’t know about those other books, both were published after I handed my play in last year!  I’m not surprised these stories have become popular, with so much interest in technology now I’m sure there’s curiosity from all possible angles.  I did see the movie, Hidden Figures, it’s so good, and I’m thrilled that it became, what, the number one movie in America several weeks running? 

Because she invented the math, as the movie says, Katherine Johnson came up a lot in my research. It was amazing to discover her. Poppy did many remarkable things, but hundreds of men at NASA had similar functions, and the play is about the experience of being alone in that crowd. Obviously, being African-American in Virginia adds an immeasurable layer of difficulty.  Poppy was a native Texan in Houston, she presented very assertively, and from what I could tell pretty much spoke her mind. Once she proved she could do the job there weren’t many outward obstacles; like in the movie, they needed all the smart people they could get. But she was always, in her words, a curiosity. I did all this fascinating research, but pulling a story out of it, trying to find the drama in some pretty subtle slights and pressures, was challenging, I was stumped for a while. Can she penetrate the men’s camaraderie? Seems like a small question, but in a work environment in which teamwork is the established mode of productivity, and the results are life and death, the stakes are pretty high.  Or I hope so!

Poppy Northcutt in a 1969 ad in Time Magazine for her contractor, TRW.

Northcutt played a critical role in another Apollo mission, when an explosion aboard Apollo 13 forced the astronauts to abort the lunar landing and put their return in jeopardy. Can you explain what NASA called upon her to do?

She calculated new return-to-earth trajectories – among other things, the explosion put Apollo off course, so hundreds of thousands of new trajectories had to be run in order to get the astronauts home. 

In addition to EST/Sloan, you have developed and produced plays at New Harmony Project, People's Light & Theatre, Huntington Theatre Company, Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Lark, and many other venues. How does the play development process at EST/Sloan compare with or differ from these other organizations?

I’ve gotten so much out of every opportunity, but they were always for existing plays.  I usually make time for and incentivize writing myself, and it’s usually the last thing I get to with so much else going on. So this commission has meant a lot to me. A deadline! I took it very seriously, and I couldn’t believe how different that felt or how productive that made me. I worked more consistently than I ever have on a play, I planned my time out, I created task lists, I did all this research, I forced myself to keep going when it felt overwhelming or dead end. I sent it in at 3 pm on the deadline day we’d set and I was ridiculously pumped, so excited. It’s great to know Linsay and Graeme will read it, to have their feedback. They invited me to SPACE on Ryder Farm in the summer of 2016 to turn the first draft into a second one, so productive. After shepherding so many science plays, their advice is unique and specific. When I was stumped, Graeme said, your characters are working. Just let them do their work. And I did. And that’s how I figured it out.

Portions of this interview appeared previously on this blog as part of the 2017 First Light Festival.

The 2019 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from January 28 through March 2 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.  

Andrea Lepcio on fixing the ozone hole, dangerous chemicals, climate change and WORLD AVOIDED

On Tuesday, February 26, this year’s EST/Sloan First Light Festival will feature a reading of Andrea Lepcio’s new play, WORLD AVOIDED, followed by a special panel discussion and reception. The title captures in two words the future environmentalists hope their efforts can deliver: a future different from the one we are destined to arrive at if we don’t change our behavior.

WORLD AVOIDED dramatizes what many consider the most successful global effort to change our future, the 1987 Montreal Protocol, in which, eventually, every country in the world agreed to a treaty that would protect the ozone layer by phasing out numerous substances responsible for ozone depletion. And the participants in the Montreal Protocol did not stop there: they kept trying to refine and improve their proposal over the next thirty years, climaxing with what John Kerry called the “monumental agreement” by 197 nations in Kigali, Rwanda in October, 2016 to cut back on the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and possibly “reduce the warming of the planet by half a degree centigrade.”

Joining Andrea for the post-reading discussion on Tuesday will be many of the individuals who contributed to the success of the Montreal Protocol, including Dr. Stephen O. Andersen, Dr. Suely Carvalho, Dr. David Fahey, and Durwood Zaelke.

 In advance, let’s hear more from Andrea about the background of the play.

 (Interview by Rich Kelley)

 On your website you note that WORLD AVOIDED is “based on [your] experiences attending Montreal Protocol international diplomatic meetings.” How many meetings did you attend and when did you decide that you had to write this play? 

Stephen Andersen (left) and Madhava Sarma at Montreal Protocol meeting 2002 where they launched their book, Protecting the Ozone Layer.

Steve Andersen, Director of Research for the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development and the former EPA official responsible for the Montreal Protocol, was my college professor and we have remained friends. He suggested that the Montreal Protocol would be a good topic for a play, emphasizing that it is the most successful climate change agreement. I began research and quickly concurred, though, at first, I was worried: where would I “find the conflict” since the history was about the world coming together and agreeing. Steve then invited me to come to the Meeting of the Parties. My first time was in July 2014. It was good that he didn’t warn me before I got there. Everyone was screaming at each other. They were in the middle of a huge fight and I got excited – there’s my conflict. I attended five meetings over two years. Most of that time the conflict got worse and I used to say, this is very bad for the climate but very good for the play. Even better for the play –and the climate – we reached a happy ending in Kigali in October 2016. I had finished the draft on that happy note – and then Trump got elected President – so I went back and added the election and his winning since he is now the greatest threat to climate in the world.

WORLD AVOIDED had its first public reading in February 2017, as part of that year’s First Light Festival. How has the play changed since?

The play has become shorter. After the 2017 reading, it was very clear that some material had to go. It was a little too much to ask an audience to absorb in one sitting. This was the most difficult part of the re-write for me. From conversations with Linsay Firman and Graeme Gillis at EST and other observers, I started to see what could go. They do instruct us to kill our darlings. As it turned out, I needed to trim the part of the story I had personally witnessed and trust that the more interesting material was the deeper history. Pages fell away and the story focused.

Besides attending the meetings, what other research did you do to write WORLD AVOIDED? How many of the characters you portray did you get a chance to meet and interview?

I read many books on the Montreal Protocol. Steve Andersen has a good one that he wrote with Madhava Sarma, Protecting the Ozone Layer: The United Nations History (2002). And Richard E. Benedick, the U.S. negotiator for MP (and also a character in the play), wrote his own account, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet (1998). There are also famous articles like the 1974 Nature journal paper by Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland – perhaps the most important article on climate change ever published – in which they describe how ultraviolet radiation breaks down chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the stratosphere and how the chlorine that gets released breaks down ozone (they won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work).

Participants at the Montreal Protocol meeting, Kigali, Rwanda, 2016. Playwright Andrea Lepcio is second from right.

At the meetings, I got to meet, essentially, all of the living people. I am very disappointed I never got to meet Mostafa Tolba, who passed away in March 2016 at a very old age, nor Madhava Sarma, both of whom Steve adored and was mentored by. My now friends include Helen Walter-Terrinoni, Marco Gonzalez, Durwood Zaelke, Guus Velders, David Fahey, Paul Newman, Mack McFarland, and many more. There is always a very congenial atmosphere at the meetings. The first one I went to, Steve was greeted like a long lost relative. The next meeting I went to, I was greeted like a long lost relative. 

In 2005, Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the United Nations, hailed the Montreal Protocol as "perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.” What made this agreement so remarkable? 

Mostafa Tolba

This is true. I believe there are a few reasons. The first would be the magic of Mostafa Tolba. He led the original effort in a strategic, diplomatic, manipulative and brilliant manner that made the first agreement come together and increased the ambition for what could happen in 1990. Second, under United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) rules, all decisions are by consensus. I believe once consensus was reached in ‘87 and again in ‘90, the World learned this was possible and continued to reach for it in this setting. The Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change also relies on consensus, but the delegates there have only agreed on relatively small steps. Third, success brings success. The Montreal Protocol took care of the ozone problem so fast. They went from “the sky is falling” to “we saved the earth” so quickly; that created pride that continued to feed achievements. It was even held over people’s heads when they resisted changes in 2016. There are people who believe the ozone problem was more viscerally palpable than the climate problem. With less ozone we were going to get skin cancer, cataracts. For me climate is just as visceral, but there are those who argue that the idea of getting warmer isn’t as immediate. I think storms like Sandy made it immediate, but then, not to people like Trump. 

Why do you think the Montreal Protocol succeeded where so many other international conferences failed? How important was it that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a “chemist by training”?

Graph showing impact of Montreal Protocol agreement on chlorine in the stratosphere

I have never attended a United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP). They meet annually. Durwood goes and members of his team. Steve doesn’t go. I’m not really sure what went wrong with those. Was there no one like Mostafa? Were there too many competing interests? With the Montreal Protocol (MP), there is always the balance of developed and developing countries. Again, it helped that Mostafa was Egyptian. Sometimes it is referred to as North versus South. I can only guess that tensions are higher and less resolved at COP. At MP I witnessed, specifically, the Gulf States trying to beat us up to get what they want. I think they are likely to be even more strident at COP and without the legacy of success which always distinguishes MP. With MP, success begot success. Maybe, with COP, failure begets failure. Paris 2015 was a step forward. Durwood says Marrakesh 2016 was a step back. I think Thatcher was amazing in 1990. Yes, because she understood the problem as a chemist and because she could call Bush and bully him.

Some 197 parties ratified the Montreal Protocol and WORLD AVOIDED dramatizes in a brisk, entertaining and lively fashion the negotiations that led to that 1987 agreement and the several attempts in the thirty years since to revise and improve it. This clearly involved a lot of judicious editing. How did you decide what to include and focus on? 

Graph showing decline of production of fluorocarbons through 2007

This is about the fifth draft of the play. I tried, for three drafts, to center the action on the current crisis and flash back in time to show the earlier successes. I was convinced that was how to write the play. Finally, brilliant Linsay Firman [Director of Play Development at EST] said, I think we might understand it better chronologically. I instantly knew she was right – even though it had never occurred to me!  I had been worried in the beginning that there would be a lack of drama, but of course, there was drama at every turn. In chronological order the audience understands the build and evolution better. At least I hope they do. There was a huge amount of editing. There are so many chemicals and stories about how they were phased out. I have so many deleted scenes. I could have written a play entirely about 1987-1990. There was a specific chemical, for example, methyl bromide, which is ozone depleting and important in agriculture that was very difficult to phase out. A friend of Steve’s took a machete to the head over this one. It kind of needs its own play. There were people I couldn’t really serve in the space I had.  Madhava Sarma, head of the Montreal Protocol Secretariat, for example.

The play has some clear heroes – scientists Frank Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina for their discoveries, researcher and environmental protection advocate Stephen O. Andersen and Durwood Zaelke for their persistence – am I missing anyone? They drive the action that spans almost fifty years. How do you envision their characters and motivations changing over that time?

Frank Rowland and Mario Molina in their lab, 1975

In a play, characters are supposed to change. In many ways, I knew that Steve and Durwood only got older as opposed to really changed, but I found Steve getting more desperate and exasperated as the final win seemed in danger. I hope that is satisfying for the audience. Durwood is kind of a Zenlike figure who keeps his emotions very close to his vest. Once I came out of a particularly contentious meeting looking very grumpy. Durwood said “Fix your face.” And I understood in that moment, that was how he did it. He is always externally calm. I learned a big lesson from him that day. What’s important to me is that the play captures the tension of feeling – like they and the world are running out of time. There are many other heroes who get much less stage time. Researcher Guus Velders was named one of Nature’s “Ten People Who Mattered in 2016” for his work on HFCs.

Some of the antagonists in the play – perhaps we shouldn’t name names – seem rather comically hapless. Is what you have them say actually from conference transcripts?   

Yes, we could say there is a villain in the play and I pushed his text for fun. A scientist who just seemed to always be working against the HFC amendment. But he was still given a platform to share his views. Some of the text is exact transcript – for instance, much of what we hear from the Saudis, but not all. In some cases I did expand the text to make a point. Spoke what was subtext, that kind of thing. It was so wonderful to hear, after the Kigali amendment passed, the Saudi delegate saying, after years being on the other side, how grateful and happy he was that we had reached this agreement. 

To understand the stakes in the play the audience will have to understand something about chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and hydrofluoroelefins (HFOs). Do you have any special approach to doing this? 

When the play was going back and forth in time, I think it was nearly impossible to understand, to be honest. And it took me a long time to see that. I kept trying to make it clearer in that structure. Now that the story is told in chronological order, it will be easier, because we learn about each gas or chemical as it is in use and at issue and then resolved. The 1987 protocol, for instance, focused on replacing CFCs, which depleted the ozone layer, with HCFCs, which did not but still increased global warming.  Then in 2007, the goal was to replace HCFCs with HFCs but in 2009 scientists discovered a problem with HFCs . . . but we shall see once we have an audience.  

The play often has text projected in “square brackets” for discussion. Can you explain how the Montreal Protocol meetings used “square brackets” to address areas of disagreement?

Once text is proposed it is typed up and projected so everyone can see the proposed text. Bear in mind there are translators, but text is always typed in English. When someone has an amendment, that is typed in square brackets so square brackets phrases are added and subtracted during the debate until everything is agreed and the square brackets are eliminated.  There is an environmental group at the College where I teach called Earth in Brackets.

Graph of urban vs rural population 1950-2030

We now know that since 2009, for the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas. How has that changed the concerns of environmental scientists?

It put the pressure on. In urban settings, people have more income and demand air conditioning, mobile air conditioning, use more electricity, etc. It’s the air conditioners that use the fluorocarbons – CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs.

UNEP Executive Director Mostafa Tolba frequently tells Andersen “talk less, listen more” which echoes Aaron Burr’s advice to Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton. Did Mostafa get this from Burr or did Lin-Manuel Miranda get this from Mostafa? Have you considered a rap version of WORLD AVOIDED?

I am totally doing a Lin-Manuel reference on purpose for fun. So let’s credit Lin-Manuel. But Steve says he learned everything about diplomacy from Mostafa.

Is there anything you discovered by attending the Montreal Protocol meetings that you were too discreet to include in the play?

Ha! I don’t think so. I mostly wish I could put 400 people on stage. The experience of being there with everyone is so profound. To go out to get some air and spend time with a man from Jordan who is saying how nice the weather is in Rwanda. Each of these moments are so precious to me. 

Have you written other plays related to science?

I wrote a screenplay about a kid whose mother gets breast cancer who becomes obsessed with cell biology. That won a Sloan award at grad school at Carnegie Mellon. And I’ve written a ton about breast cancer. I am now working on a site-specific piece for Acadia National Park where I am a writer in residence. And I am working on a play about how Exxon went from leading climate change research to denying it was happening, all in the interest of profits. 

Having lived with the concerns of this play for so long, I suspect you are especially sensitive to changes in the environment. Do you have any observations you’d like to share?

Living in Maine, I am more and more conscious of how visible the changes to climate are right in front of my eyes. There are fewer songbirds. Our summers are near drought, and our winters have extreme precipitation. For the first time this year, pools of water collected on my lawn; this never happened a couple of years ago. In the piece I am working on for Acadia, I want to emphasize to people that they must look, assess, remember changes, and act. We are running out of time. 

Portions of this interview appeared previously on this blog as part of the 2017 First Light Festival.

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.  

Historian Deborah Gray White, Urogynecologist Ambereen Sleemi, Playwright Charly E. Simpson join Communications Pro Ayofemi Kirby to discuss the historical & scientific context of BEHIND THE SHEET

On February 23, following the 2:00 pm matinee performance of BEHIND THE SHEET, the powerful new drama by Charly Evon Simpson, everyone is encouraged to stay for our fourth talkback about the historical and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses. Joining Charly will be Deborah Gray White, Distinguished Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, and Ambereen Sleemi, Executive Director and Surgical Director of International Medical Response, for a conversation moderated by Ayofemi Kirby, who manages all communications and publicity initiatives at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture.

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. In 1840s Alabama, Philomena assists a doctor—her owner—as he performs experimental surgeries on her fellow slave women, trying to find a treatment for the painful post-childbirth complications known as fistulas. Reframing the origin story of modern gynecology, the play dramatizes how these women supported each other, and questions who, and what, history remembers.

The World Premiere of BEHIND THE SHEET is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST's partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays "exploring the worlds of science and technology," an initiative now in its twentieth year.

About the Panelists

Professor Deborah Gray White

Deborah Gray White is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is author of the seminal book Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994; several K-12 textbooks on United States History, and Let My People Go, African Americans 1804-1860 (1999).  In 2008, she published an edited work entitled Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower, a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of black women into the historical profession and the development of the field of black women’s history. Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, a co-authored college text, is now in its second edition. As a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, White conducted research on her newest book, Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March.  She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history, and was also awarded a Doctorate in Humane Letters from her undergraduate alma mater, Binghamton University. She currently heads the “Scarlet and Black Project” which investigates Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University. With Professor Marisa Fuentes she is editor of the 2016 volume: Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History.

Dr. Ambereen Sleemi

Ambereen Sleemi is a female pelvic medicine reconstructive surgeon (urogynecologist) and trained obstetric fistula surgeon. She is Co-founder, Executive Director and Surgical Director of International Medical Response and leads a medical relief project in Puerto Rico, and fistula training programs in Malawi, Liberia and Haiti. Dr. Sleemi has served as an obstetric fistula surgeon for the Eritrean Women’s Project in Mendefera, Eritrea since 2007, and as a surgical team co-leader for Medicine in Action’s spring trip to Kingston, Jamaica as well as on the medical board. She spent six years on the executive committee of the International Society for Obstetric Fistula Surgeons (ISOFS) and is still an active member. In January, 2013, she developed the Haitian Women’s Heath Collaborative in partnership with the Department of Ob/Gyn at the National Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Charly Evon Simpson

Charly Evon Simpson is the author of BEHIND THE SHEET, this year’s EST/Sloan mainstage production. Her other plays include Jump, Scratching the Surface, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, Stained, Hottentotted, Trick of the Light, While We Wait, who we let in, or what she will, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Flea, P73’s Summer Residency, National New Play Network through its NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights Workshop and National Showcase of New Plays, and others. Jump will receive an NNPN Rolling World Premiere, with productions at Playmaker’s Rep (Chapel Hill, NC), Actor’s Express (Atlanta, GA), Milagro Theatre (Portland, OR), and Shrewd Productions (Austin, TX) in 2019-20.  She’s currently a member of WP Theater’s 2018-2020 Lab, The New Georges Jam, The Amoralists 18/19 ‘Wright Club and she’s The Pack’s current playwright-in-residence. Charly is a former member of SPACE on Ryder Farm’s The Working Farm, Clubbed Thumb’s 17/18 Early Career Writers’ Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, and Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Purchase and an engager at The Engaging Educator. 

About the Moderator

Ayofemi Kirby

Ayofemi Kirby is a communications and public engagement professional who builds mission-driven brands, engaged audiences and active communities, on and offline. She is passionate about helping individuals, multicultural communities and organizations across sectors tell powerful stories, start provocative conversations and build the relationships necessary to achieve meaningful results and measurable impact.

With more than 10 years of experience at the intersection of communications, civic engagement and culture, Ayofemi has managed online and corporate communications in the financial sector, developed award-winning programs that empowered Snake People across the country to be leaders in their communities and more active in our democracy, and led communications for the Congressional Black Caucus on Capitol Hill. She has also shaped and shifted community and media conversations about political, civic engagement, entertainment and cultural initiatives as an independent consultant.

Ayofemi currently manages all communications and publicity initiatives at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture and continues to runs her own consultancy, CODE PR GLOBAL where she has worked with SONY Pictures, the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation, the NYC Office of the Mayor, A+E Networks and others. Her work has shaped media coverage in and secured partnerships with the New York Times, USA Today, ARTNews, Teen Vogue, CBS News, Essence, Ebony, OkayAfrica, The Huffington Post, NBC, among many others.

BEHIND THE SHEET began previews on January 9 and runs through March 10 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Dominic Taylor on African American scientists in the 1920s, gender and power dynamics, class, experimental risks, and THE BIOLOGY OF THE SURFACE

Dominic Taylor

On Tuesday, February 19, as part of the 2019 First Light Festival, the EST/Sloan Project is presenting the first public reading of THE BIOLOGY OF THE SURFACE by Dominic Taylor. The play dramatizes the working relationship -- and romance – over some ten years in the 1920s and 1930s between the pioneering African American biologist Ernest Everett Just and one of his students, Roger Arliner Young, who went on to become the first African American women to earn a doctorate in zoology. The playwright uses this relationship to mine rich themes about eugenics and racism in the sciences during that time, power dynamics in academia and scientific publishing, the design of experiments, and the costly unknowns of some technology. But let’s hear more from the creator.  

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What moved you to write THE BIOLOGY OF THE SURFACE?

I knew something about Ernest Everett Just but not a lot. I knew that he was the first African American graduate of Dartmouth College. I knew that he was a major thinker in biology at the beginning of the twentieth century. As I researched him, I learned that he worked for a long time with a graduate assistant Roger Arliner Young. When I discovered that Roger Young was a woman, I become more intrigued, especially in that she is not mentioned in his seminal text The Biology of the Cell Surface.

Why this play? Why now?

Ernest Everett Just in his lab at Howard University

There are a few reasons. The first has to do with class. Class in the African American community is never examined. People often assume that there is no way that a black woman could earn a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s. Young did. The nature of the African American poor or working-class woman and man is replete in many works. This play allowed me to address many questions: class, gender, mentor-mentee relationships, and academic life. These areas are seldom examined in any African American context.

What research did you do to write your play?

Primarily, I read texts. Black Apollo of Science, by Kenneth Manning, is the primary biography of Just. One of the things I noticed was that it did not examine the collaborative nature of scientific study. This is where I met Roger Young. How could this young woman be a research assistant for seven years prior to the publishing of The Biology of the Cell Surface but not be mentioned in the book at all? I have a background in the sciences. My undergraduate degree is in engineering, not biology, but I think it helped my understanding of the play. I adopted a different type of three-act structure: a hypothesis, an experiment and then data analysis.  

The action of the play takes place at Howard University in D.C. and at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts in the twenties and thirties. What should the audience know about the environment in which Just and Young were doing research at that time?

Roger Arliner Young (c. 1927-1929)

There are so many things, but perhaps the most significant might be how different African American life was in the 1920s and 1930s. The 1920s was a period when with the end of WWI and the Great Migration, black life changed. It was the time of the Harlem Renaissance and the birth of the work of Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes. It was also a time when Ida B. Wells was writing every day about the lynching of African Americans. Lynching was legal into the 1940s. Additionally, the 1930s was a time when after the Great Depression, the limited economic gains of African Americans had been pushed back.

In the play one matter of contention between Just and Young is how much she contributed to his most famous work, The Biology of the Cell Surface (1939). Is there evidence he failed to acknowledge her contribution?

This is a fact. There is no mention of this woman in anything referencing this book. Not in a foreword or an acknowledgement page. There is no indication of her contribution anywhere. Additionally, she was removed from Howard University’s faculty just before the book was published. The reasoning offered in Black Apollo of Science was that Just wanted to stand alone alongside other singular scientists. Percy Julian and Charles Drew on Howard’s faculty are also notable in this regard, but this was true of all scientists at the time. Who was Thomas Alva Edison’s assistant or Alexander Graham Bell’s? Scientists at the time believed they must stand alone as singular titans of brilliance.

Your play has three sections that take place in 1926, 1929 and 1936. Quite a lot has changed between the two characters between 1929 and 1936. Young has failed her dissertation defense with Just’s mentor, Frank R. Lillie, at the University of Chicago. Her eyesight has become damaged from her work with ultraviolet radiation in Just’s experiments. Just is about to get married for the second time, to a white German woman, and there is evidence that at this point both have been actively engaged in sabotaging the other’s career. Is it likely such a scene ever happened? How did everything go so wrong?

One of the fun things about research is putting puzzle pieces together. Reading about Young, (a good text to start was Black Women Scientists in the United States by Wini Warren) I learned that her vision did deteriorate over time. The ultraviolet lamps she used for Just’s experiments were unsafe. The knowledge of light therapy and early X-ray technology was limited and no one knew the complete damage. Black Apollo of Science also tells us that Just wanted to get his new would-be-wife a job at Howard. Howard’s president, Mordecai Johnson, was appalled at what he heard about the behavior of both Just and another scientist Percy Julian while they were in Europe. Both men were married but engaged in inappropriate behavior abroad. Johnson needed to rein in this behavior.

Stephen Jay Gould has written about his obsession with the photo of Just at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, where Just worked for some twenty summers. Gould describes the photo: “The man it depicted was singularly handsome, with a pervasive look of sadness that touched me across half a century.” He goes on to characterize Just as “fascinating, complex, and ambiguous,” “If he had fit the mold of an acceptable black scientist, he might have survived in the hypocritical world of white liberalism in his time. A man like George Washington Carver, who upheld Booker T. Washington’s doctrine of slow and humble self-help for blacks, who dressed in his agricultural work clothes, and who spent his life in the practical task of helping black farmers find more uses for peanuts, was paraded as a paragon of proper black science. But Just preferred fancy suits, good wines, classical music, and women of all colors.” What’s your take on Just?

Gould is accurate in how I saw Just as well. Just did not want to be constrained by teaching only at Howard. He applied for positions at Brown and Dartmouth and was rejected by both. He wrote about wanting to teach at a major research institution. At the time this was a euphemism for a white institution. Gould’s description of him not willing to sublimate himself is apt. In my reading of him, he was a very complex modern man, and I hope I show that complexity in the play.

What do you want the audience to take away from THE BIOLOGY OF THE SURFACE?

Percy Julian in his chemistry lab at Howard University

First, I want them to meet these two titans of science. Second, I want them to consider how they should have interacted. On the surface, a brilliant black man and a brilliant black woman should have helped each other achieve degrees of success. The fact that each had success in his and her own right is good to know, but the success could have been exponential. How did race or pressure around race, science and the academy hinder this understanding? I also want the audience to consider the mentor/mentee relationship. How it operated on and beneath the surface.

Just was ahead of his time in viewing the organisms he studied as part of an ecosystem and that the cell surface represented an organizational complexity that could not be reduced to the sum of its parts. Do you see a connection between Just’s “holistic” ideas and the way he behaves in his relationship with Young?

I think he could not see the relationship completely. He had a blind spot. A bad analogy might be Louis CK championing women comedians, yet engaging in behavior that was inappropriate. If he could have seen her contribution as part of his ecosystem, he could have helped her in a series of career ways that he chose not to do. The personal relationship presented in the play is speculative, but we know he did not buoy her career and he could have. He was looking at a tree and not the complete ecosystem.

Young’s work with Just impaired her vision for the rest of her life. When she failed her defense of her PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago, Frank Lillie (who had been Just’s mentor) would no longer work with her and Just effectively abandoned her and eventually got her fired from Howard. Young never married. After she left Howard, Young struggled to find work and later checked herself into a mental institution and died impoverished. In this #MeToo era, can’t the case be made that Just was a monster who used and destroyed his mentee Young?

Not necessarily. After being fired from Howard, Young went on to get her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (1940). She taught at North Carolina College for Negroes in the 1940s. In 1944 she helped the NAACP register voters. Her activism got her blacklisted from teaching in North Carolina. She had to go to Jackson State in Mississippi to teach after that. She committed herself in 1962, more than 20 years after Just died. After leaving the mental institution, she went on to teach at Shaw University in Louisiana.

The fact that she died in poverty was an outgrowth of her bad health and a series of additional events in her life that I do not dramatize.

I guess that the case could be made that Just was a monster, but I am hoping that the audience leaves with a more complex view. We knew so little about the effects of UV light in the 1930s.

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. 

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.