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

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

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

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

WHAT MAKES A PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE GREAT?

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

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

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

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

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

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Dr. Mandë Holford

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

Dr. Daniela Schiller

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

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

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

Anna Ziegler

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

Moderator

Naomi Lorrain

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

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

Amanda Keating

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

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

Amanda reveals her insights about the play below.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Tell us how WITH FELLOWSHIP originated?

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

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for Amanda Keating?

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

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

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

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

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

S P A C E will have its first public reading this Thursday, June 15 at 3:00 PM at the Ensemble Studio Theatre as part of the 2023 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free and reservations are encouraged.

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did S P A C E come to be?

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

Mae Jemison and her 100 Year Starship Project

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

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

Bessie Coleman in 1923 (Wikipedia Commons/Public Domain)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What appeals to you about outer space?

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

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

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

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

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

Margot Connolly

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for HELLO, WORLD come from?

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

Girl Code with authors Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser

What kind of research did you do?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

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

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

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did anything you discovered in your research surprise you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is LAS BORINQUEÑAS the perfect title for this play?

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

What’s next for Nelson Diaz-Marcano?

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

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

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

Sam Mueller

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

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you now or have you ever been a wrestler?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sample of Sam’s references for PIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for Sam Mueller? 

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

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

Nikki Brake-Sillá

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

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

Learn more about REWOMBED in the following exchanges with Nikki.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did you come to write REWOMBED?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artwork for ReWombed

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for Nikki Brake-Sillá?

Artwork for Say It Ain’t So

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

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

And lots of naps.

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

REWOMBED is one of seven readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 22. All readings are free, but reservations are encouraged.

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

Jeanne Dorsey (Photo courtesy of Cassis Birgit Staudt)

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

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

• ·        We owe a lot to Martha Goddard.

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

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

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

• ·        We need to keep the conversation going.

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

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

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

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

THE KIT: MADE BY MARTHA is one of seven readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 22. All readings are free, but reservations are encouraged.

AI & Generative Media Expert Claire Leibowicz, AI Ethics Leader Bhuva Shakti, and Google Engineer Lucy Vasserman join Playwright Naomi Lorrain to Discuss AI in the Home, Privacy, Ethics, and SMART

From left, Claire Leibowicz, Bhuva Shakti, Lucy Vasserman, Naomi Lorrain

This Saturday, April 29, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of SMART, the brilliant new family drama by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback discussion about the issues the play addresses. SMART dramatizes questions about how and why we let technology into our homes, and the unexpected changes tech can bring. The talkback will explore the risks and rewards of using smart devices in the home, the privacy issues we should be concerned about, how AI is changing how we live, the gap between how we think technology works and how it actually works, and the future of voice-activated AI. The audience will  have the opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.

Playwright/actor Naomi Lorrain will moderate the discussion with the Head of AI and Media Integrity at the Partnership on AI Claire Leibowicz, Chief Ethics & Culture Officer at Women in AI Bhuva Shakti, and Google/Jigsaw Engineering and Product Manager Lucy Vasserman.

SMART is the 2023 mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the world of science and technology.”

About the Panelists

Claire Leibowicz

Claire Leibowicz is the Head of the AI and Media Integrity Program at the Partnership on AI, where she has worked since the organization’s inception. Under Claire’s leadership, the AI and Media Integrity team creates best practices for the development and deployment of AI technologies that impact digital media and online information, in collaboration with over 100 partners from across civil society, academia, industry, and media. Aside from generative AI, the program focuses on responsible recommender systems, misinformation interventions, and the sustainability of local news. Claire's insights have appeared in publications such as Axios, the Associated Press, MIT Tech Review, WIRED, and The Hill, and she has advised companies, governments, and nonprofit organizations on AI governance, generative AI, and digital media

Bhuva Shakti

Bhuva Shakti (She/Her) is the Chief Ethics & Culture Officer and global management board member at Women in AI, a non-profit community of leaders in artificial intelligence and data science. With an MBA from Columbia University in New York and as a Senior Director at Capgemini, she has managed diverse multinational teams and launched several technology products in the investment banking, capital markets risk and regulatory compliance industry. As the financial inclusion advisor at Wallet Max, Bhuva is committed to positive planet impact, sustainable business transformation and green revenue strategies. Bhuva is an early-stage investor in social innovation startups with a vision to accelerate economic freedom and reduce inequalities.

Lucy Vasserman

Lucy Vasserman leads Engineering and Product at Jigsaw, a unit within Google focused on technology to make people safer. Jigsaw's focus areas include misinformation & hate, violent extremism, and censorship & cybersecurity. In these areas, Jigsaw’s technology offerings include Perspective API, machine learning to recognize toxicity in online comments, Outline, VPN technology to enable anyone to access the free and open internet, and a range of experimental tools and research. Prior to joining Jigsaw, Lucy worked on machine learning research and engineering for other Google products including Speech Recognition and Google Shopping.

About the Moderator

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff)

Naomi Lorrain is a Harlem-based playwright/actor. She is a 2022-2023 member of the Page 73 writers group, Interstate 73. She was a writer for the 2022 Disney Television Discovers: Talent Showcase. Her one-act comedy, THERESA, was selected for the 2022 Black Motherhood & Parenting Festival. 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: La Race (Page 73/WP), Mark it Down, Song for a Future Generation (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Behind the Sheet (Ensemble Studio Theatre), What To Send Up When It Goes Down (The Movement Theatre Company). TV: "Orange is the New Black" (Netflix), "Elementary" (CBS), "The Good Fight" (CBS All Access), "Madam Secretary'' (CBS).

SMART began previews on March 30 and runs through April 30 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Data Journalist Meredith Broussard, Tech Editor Sophie Bushwick, and Technologist Ben Moskowitz join Playwrights Mary Elizabeth Hamilton and Naomi Lorrain to Discuss AI Devices, Privacy, and SMART

From left: Meredith Broussard, Sophie Bushwick, Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, Ben Moskowitz, and Naomi Lorrain.

On Saturday, April 22, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of SMART, the moving new family drama by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback discussion about the issues the play addresses. SMART dramatizes questions about how and why we let technology into our homes, and the unexpected changes tech can bring. The talkback will explore the risks and rewards of using smart devices in the home, the privacy issues we should be concerned about, how AI is changing how we live, the gap between how we think technology works and how it actually works, and the future of voice-activated AI. The audience will  have the opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.

Playwright/actor Naomi Lorrain will moderate the discussion with professor of data journalism Meredith Broussard, tech editor Sophie Bushwick, pubic interest technologist Ben Moskowitz, and playwright Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, author of SMART.

SMART is the 2023 mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the world of science and technology.”

About the Panelists

Meredith Broussard (Photo: Matthias Lundblad)

Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and the research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2023), as well as the award-winning 2018 book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, with particular interests in AI ethics and using data analysis for social good. She appears in the Emmy-nominated documentary “Coded Bias,” now streaming on Netflix. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and other outlets.

Sophie Bushwick

Sophie Bushwick is the technology editor at Scientific American, where she runs daily tech news coverage on topics from generative AI to jumping robots. She has more than a decade of experience as a science journalist and editor based in New York City, where she works online and in print, produces podcasts and videos, and makes radio and TV appearances on shows such as Science Friday. Previously, she was a senior editor at Popular Science, and her freelance work has also appeared in other outlets including Discover Magazine and Gizmodo.  

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton (Photo: JMA Photography)

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton is a Brooklyn-based playwright, TV writer and mom. She holds her MFA from The University of Iowa and an Artistic Diploma from Juilliard. Mary was a Jerome Fellow at The Lark and has participated in Youngblood, The O’Neill, Ars Nova, I-73, New Georges' Jam, and Play Penn. Her play 16 Winters won ASC's New Contemporaries Award. She is developing her play SMART with EST, and writing a pilot based on this play for AMC. She was a Story Editor on “Why Women Kill”, wrote the podcast "Power Trip" starring Tatiana Maslany, and is a resident playwright with New Dramatists.

Ben Moskowitz

Ben Moskowitz is a public interest technologist focused on strengthening user agency, privacy, and security. He leads R&D at Consumer Reports, helping consumers better navigate the digital marketplace. CR’s Innovation Lab collaborates with hackers, builders and entrepreneurs on disruptive technologies that advance the public interest. Consumer Reports has developed a number of free products to help consumers improve their privacy and security, including Security Planner and Permission Slip. Ben previously served in senior roles at the International Rescue Committee and the Mozilla Foundation, and is an adjunct professor at the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

About the Moderator

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff)

Naomi Lorrain is a Harlem-based playwright/actor. She is a 2022-2023 member of the Page 73 writers group, Interstate 73. She was a writer for the 2022 Disney Television Discovers: Talent Showcase. Her one-act comedy, THERESA, was selected for the 2022 Black Motherhood & Parenting Festival. 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: La Race (Page 73/WP), Mark it Down, Song for a Future Generation (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Behind the Sheet (Ensemble Studio Theatre), What To Send Up When It Goes Down (The Movement Theatre Company). TV: "Orange is the New Black" (Netflix), "Elementary" (CBS), "The Good Fight" (CBS All Access), "Madam Secretary'' (CBS).

SMART began previews on March 30 and runs through April 30 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

A Note on the Science and Technology Behind SMART

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

Voice-Activated AI: Mixing Convenience with Risk

By Rich Kelley, Science Press Liaison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Anyone Listening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter ChatGPT

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

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

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

The Risks of Home Devices

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

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

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

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

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton (Photo: JMA Photography)

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did SMART come to be? 

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

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientist Shree Bose, Director Billy Carden, Playwright Carla Ching, Microbiologist Karine Gibbs join Biologist Stuart Firestein at the 2022 EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event on December 5

From left, Shree Bose, Billy Carden, Carla Ching, Karine Gibbs, Stuart Firestein

Playwrights! Join us on Monday, December 5, 2022, at 8:00 PM for the 2022 Virtual EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event, the annual far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion among scientists and playwrights about science, story-telling, and what makes plays work. This year’s event will be online and is free for any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology. Registration is required. Once registered, you will receive the event access link in your confirmation email. You can register here.

WHAT MAKES A 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 23 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.

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

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

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

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

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include

Shree Bose

Shree Bose is currently completing her MD at Duke University School of Medicine. At 17 years old, Shree triumphed over 10,000 competitors to become the Grand Prize Winner of the first-ever Google Global Science Fair in 2011. For her winning research, Shree worked to understand how ovarian cancer cells develop resistance to  a chemotherapy drug called cisplatin. She presented this work to President Obama and directors of the National Institutes of Health, as well as students around the world. Through these experiences, Shree also became a passionate advocate for better STEM education, which led her to co-found Piper Learning, Inc., a company creating educational toys for kids for which she currently serves co-CEO. After graduating Harvard University in 2016, she joined the MD/PhD program at Duke University School of Medicine, where she recently completed her PhD on understanding metabolic changes in ovarian cancer metastasis. She will be completing her MD in May 2023. 

William “Billy” Carden (Photo: Marc J. Franklin)

William “Billy” Carden served as Artistic Director of the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) for 15 years (2007-2022). In 2015 EST was given a Special Drama Desk Award for its unwavering commitment to developing new American plays. At EST he directed productions of Against the Hillside by Sylvia Khoury The Good Muslim by Zakiyyah Alexander, Pidgeon, PTSD and Zero by Tommy Smith  and four EST/Sloan productions: Please Continue by Frank Basloe, Headstrong by Patrick Link, Lenin’s Embalmers by Vern Thiessen, and Lucy by Damien Atkins.  He was artistic director of the HB Playwrights Foundation for eleven years where he directed the Off-Broadway productions of Mrs. Klein and Collected Stories starring Uta Hagen.  His many other productions there include Horton Foote’s The Habitation of Dragons, Burnt Piano by Justin Fleming and Voir Dire by Joe Sutton.  He directed The Dew Point at Summer Play Festival, The Young Girl and the Monsoon at Playwrights Horizons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Stratford Festival in Canada. As an actor he played leading roles Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Circle Rep, WPA, and EST and also worked at numerous regional theatres including Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, Huntington, Humana Festival, and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. On Broadway, he created the title role in the original, award-winning production of Short Eyes by Miguel Piñero. He teaches in the acting and playwriting programs at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Carla Ching

Carla Ching wrote Fast Company as an EST/Sloan commission. It received its New York City premiere in 2014 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and its World Premiere in 2013 at South Coast Rep. The play has also been published by Samuel French. Her other plays include Revenge Porn or the Story of a Body, Nomad Motel, Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, and The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up. She is a founding member of The Kilroys, a member of New Dramatists, and former Artistic Director of 2g. She was among the first three recipients of the Los Angeles New Play Project Award in 2021. Carla was also a co-recipient of the 2021 Horton Foote Playwriting Award from the Dramatists Guild. Her television credits include Fear the Walking Dead, I Love Dick, The First, Preacher, Home Before Dark, and the forthcoming Mr. + Mrs. Smith.

Karine Gibbs (Photo: Adam Sings in the Timber)

Karine Gibbs is a Jamaican American microbiologist and immunologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Gibbs’ research merges the fields of sociomicrobiology and bacterial cell biology to explore how the bacterial pathogen Proteus mirabilis, a common gut bacterium which can become pathogenic and cause urinary tract infections, identifies self versus non-self. In 2013, Gibbs and her team were the first to sequence the genome of P. mirabilis BB2000, the model organism for studying self-recognition. In graduate school at Stanford University, Gibbs helped to pioneer the design of a novel tool that allowed for the visualization of the movement of bacterial membrane proteins in real time. In 2020, Gibbs was recognized by Cell Press as one of the top 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America. 

This year’s moderator

Stuart Firestein

Stuart Firestein is the former Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences where his laboratory studies the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. Aside from its molecular detection capabilities, the olfactory system serves as a model for investigating general principles and mechanisms of signaling and perception in the brain. His laboratory seeks to answer that fundamental human question: How do I smell? Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience, Firestein serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science.  He is the author of Failure: Why Science Is So Successful (2015) and Ignorance: How It Drives Science (2012).

Ken Urban on social media, content moderation, worker trauma, and THE MODERATE

Ken Urban

To keep violent and disturbing content off their platforms, social media companies need humans to decide what stays and what goes. But what does what they see do to the watchers? On Monday, April 11 the 2022 EST/Sloan First Light Festival hosts the first public reading of THE MODERATE, the extensively researched and chilling new play by Ken Urban about the daily life of a social media content moderator and  how what he sees and the decisions he makes affects his mental health, his family life, and his friendships. But let’s have the playwright tell us more.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did THE MODERATE come to be?

I had been thinking about internet content moderators as an interesting story for a new play after reading Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts and seeing the documentary The Cleaners. As the story of Frank started to come into focus, I applied for the EST/Sloan Project commission in 2020 and then in the midst of all the devastation, I got the good news that I got the commission, so I could immerse myself in writing something new and stop doomscrolling.

What kind of research did you do in order to write THE MODERATE? Did you interview any content moderators?

Sarah T. Roberts in her interview with Ken

I spent 2020 interviewing scholars of internet culture like Sarah, Andrew Marantz and Mary L. Gray, and from there I was able to get into touch with people working as moderators. All these interviews took place on Zoom or the phone, but I was able to get moderators to open up to me in surprising ways. All of that influenced the writing of my play. But there were things that were so upsetting that I really grappled with what to include. Ultimately, the play is fictional, but draws from those interviews.

Your play concerns the impact moderating content on an unnamed social media platform has on your main character, Frank. Your stage directions have the audience seeing descriptions of what he sees without actually showing what he sees. Will the audience hear what he sees? Did you ever consider actually showing what he sees? 

The audience will hear what Frank hears, but never see what he sees. How that will work in production is something director Steve Cosson and I will explore in our next stage of development. You might read or hear a description of the content, or see a blurred out version of it, but never ever see the actual thing. I don’t think that would be ethical for an audience given some of the material in the play.

What do you think the responsibilities of a company should be for the people who do content moderation for them? Is there a way to do it differently?

This work is not going to go away. There will never be an AI intelligent enough to take the place of moderators. And as one of my interviewees told me, looking at naked pics or consensual porn isn’t necessarily a terrible way to earn a living. But many of these workers see things that would traumatize any of us. What they do is hard work, and they should be compensated fairly. They should have a union like EMS workers. They should have job stability and resources for when this work takes a toll, like access to free therapy, and never be penalized for taking mental health breaks when they are needed.

How active are you on social media? Which platforms?

I wish I could quit it, but I can’t. I don’t use Facebook anymore, but I use Instagram, so it’s not exactly like I’m taking any big stand against the Metaverse.

You went to Bucknell to study chemical engineering but left with a degree in English and a playwriting habit. You are currently Senior Lecturer and Head of Dramatic Writing in the Music and  Theatre Arts Program at MIT. So you seem to have succeeded in bringing together what C. P. Snow called the “Two Cultures” – science and the humanities. Or you at least are engaged in straddling them. How is it going? And what are the most important things each culture needs to know about the other?

Teaching at MIT has been a real joy and I love the intellectual curiosity of my students. Compared to some places I’ve taught, I like how grounded the culture at MIT is. Lately, I keep thinking about how these “two cultures” possess such different ideas about what constitutes data. I tease my students that my feelings are my data. I’m only partially kidding.

You have developed plays at a number of other theaters around the country. How is the EST/Sloan play development process different?

I was fortunate that when I got the EST/Sloan Commission that Steve Cosson, who is the Artistic Director of The Civilians, put me in his company’s R&D Group so I could have deadlines and have help finishing the first draft of the play. This reading is really my first interaction with EST, other than some notes from Linsay Firman and Graeme Gillis. Like every playwright in my position, I am hoping they are intrigued enough by the play that they keep asking me back to work on the play.

In addition to being a playwright, you are a musician, the electronics wizard in Occurrence, a trio with four albums that Atwood Magazine has described as “a formidable electro-space post-punk beast.” So how has your music-making influence your playwriting – and vice versa.

Occurrence. From left, Cat Hollyer, Ken Urban, Johnny Hager.

I really care about how things sound, and that’s true when I am writing songs with my band or when I am writing plays or films. I hear a play before I see it on stage. I make playlists of music to listen to when writing, songs that gets me in the mood. I don’t typically listen to my own music though when I’m writing, because I start making mental notes about the music, listening too intently to pay attention to writing. I haven’t written a musical but we might be making a dance theater piece out of my band’s next album. I also have an insane idea for a vaporwave musical set in an abandoned mall. I’m sure it’s a horrible idea so of course, it is insanely attractive to me.

What’s next for Ken Urban?

At the end of the month, I’m going to Flint Rep to work on a new play about a throuple called Danger and Opportunity. Big news is coming about a narrative podcast that I wrote called Vapor Trail, but I can’t share that yet sadly. I have a commission that I need to finish this summer from Kane Rep; that play is set in the 1990s and follows two college students and how the decision by one of them to have an abortion impacts their friendship. There are discussions about doing workshops of The Moderate and this new neurotechnology play The Conquered coming up next season potentially. I finished a new screenplay and the band just finished a new double album. I always feel like I’m not doing enough, but answering this question made me realize I guess I am working.

The 2022 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from April 7  through May 24 and features in-person readings of five new plays. Most of the readings are open to the public for free but reservations are required. You can learn more about our current Covid policies and protocols here. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-fourth year.

Poet Pichchenda Bao, Neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Artist Daveth Cheth, Designer Davey Chhoeun, and Chef Chinchakriya Un join Dramaturg Soriya Chum to discuss the many sides of what you are now

From left, Pichchenda Bao, Heather Berlin, Daveth Cheth, Davey Chhoeun, Chinchakriya Un, Soriya Chum

On April 2, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of what you are now, the powerful new drama by Sam Chanse, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback about the historical, cultural, and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, including how trauma gets passed from one generation to another, Cambodian American life in the U.S., and what happens in the brain when we form memories and create art. Dramaturg Soriya Chum will moderate the discussion with neuroscientist Heather Berlin, poet Pichchenda Bao, artist and activist Daveth Cheth, designer Davey Chhoeun, and chef Chinchakriya Un.

what you are now asks what if our memories aren’t fixed, but change each time we recall the past? This world premiere by Sam Chanse is a thrillingly insightful new play that asks the audience to move through the shifting dance between the past and present, and to consider how with new understanding we might change “who you were then” to “what you are now.”

what you are now is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the worlds of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-third year, and is being co-presented with The Civilians, a theater group dedicated to investigative theater, projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

About the Panelists

Pichchenda Bao

Pichchenda Bao is a poet born in Cambodia at the end of the Khmer Rouge regime. She came with her parents to the United States as refugees in the 1980s, and now she lives, writes and raises her children in New York City. Her work delves into the urgencies and uncertainties of post-war and post-genocide survival and resilience, generational tension, motherhood, and feminism. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize nomination, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Words, a grant from Queens Council on the Arts, a residency from Bethany Arts Community, and an invitation to the Kundiman writers retreat as a poetry fellow.

Dr. Heather Berlin

Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NY. 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.  Berlin is a passionate science communicator and a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She’s hosted series on PBS and the Discovery Channel and makes regular appearances on StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, BBC, History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, and TEDx, and was featured in the documentary film Bill Nye: Science Guy. Dr. Berlin also 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.  Berlin received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, and Master of Public Health from Harvard University, and trained in clinical neuropsychology at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of Neurological Surgery. She is a visiting scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and was a Visiting Professor at Vassar College, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology/University of Zurich, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Daveth Cheth

Daveth Cheth is the founder, writer, and visionary behind Khmer Identity, a platform honoring Khmer legacies and contemporary Khmer voices. Born in Cambodia, Daveth immigrated to Lynn, Massachusetts when he was nine. A queer, non-binary Cambodian artist and activist, Daveth explores the  mediums of art, dance, and spoken word by focusing his work around queer visibility and Cambodian heritage and culture. A native Khmer speaker, Daveth teaches online classes in Khmer through Khmer Identity.

Davey Chhoeun

Davey Chhoeun is co-founder of Khmer Identify. The youngest daughter of four, and the only one born in the U.S., Davey was born and raised in Lynn, Massachusetts, where her family immigrated from Cambodia in 1988. Davey aspires to share her creative lens with her community and the world through apparel design and many personal hobbies. She graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA in Fashion Design. Currently, she is a designer at a manufacturing company based in Boston. In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, she collaborated with Daveth Cheth to create an exhibition to share their mutual heritage with the world. This became Khmer Identity.

Chinchakriya Un

Chinchakriya Un is the chef and owner of Kreung Cambodia.  Kreung is a project that highlights her family’s recipes and new inspired dishes that she creates. Kreung is a traveling pop up with roots in Brooklyn, NY. Chinchakriya’s goals are to raise money to buy a tractor for her family in Cambodia, create a residency for artists, connect with the Cambodian diaspora around the world, and to document her family’s stories from the past and present to include in a cookbook. She was born in a refugee camp, moved to Massachusetts and grew up in a neighborhood with other immigrant families, predominately Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cape Verdeans, and attended a predominately white school. Chinchakriya has found  that connecting with her elders and Khmer folks in the diaspora is a way that she continues to grow her understanding about the Khmer culture. She hopes that Kreung can exist as a platform for other young aspiring chefs to showcase their creations.

About the Moderator

Soriya K. Chum

Soriya K. Chum is a Cambodian American writer, dramaturg, and project manager working in the fields of arts and culture and book publishing. He currently produces consumer engagement events and programs for the Random House division of Penguin Random House. Previously, he has held roles at the flagship branch of The New York Public Library, Theatre for a New Audience, and the Asian American Arts Alliance. As a dramaturg, he specializes in providing support to scripted projects that focus on the lives of contemporary immigrants and refugees, particularly intergenerational stories that center the perspectives and experiences of Cambodian Americans.

what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Community Organizers Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, and Thida Virak join Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller and Editor Laura Ly to discuss inherited trauma, Cambodian American life, and what you are now

From left, Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, Thida Virak, Daniela Schiller, and Laura Ly.

On March 26, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of what you are now, the powerful new drama by Sam Chanse, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback about the historical, cultural, and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, including how the brain forms memories, Cambodian American life in the U.S., and the neuroscience of inherited trauma. Journalist-editor Laura Ly will moderate the discussion with neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, and community organizers Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, and Thida Virak.

what you are now asks what if our memories aren’t fixed, but change each time we recall the past? This world premiere by Sam Chanse is a thrillingly insightful new play that asks the audience to move through the shifting dance between the past and present, and to consider how with new understanding we might change “who you were then” to “what you are now.”

what you are now is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the worlds of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-third year, and is being co-presented with The Civilians, a theater group dedicated to investigative theater, projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

About the Panelists

Sothea Chiemruom

Sothea Chiemruom is the Executive Director at CMAA-the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, MA. He has over 25 years of experience in day-to-day program operations, administration, management, reporting, and ongoing work in advocacy, and public relations. CMAA provides services for not only Khmer but vulnerable individuals who need support with everyday challenges. Throughout his career, Sothea has engaged youth, the elderly, and the underrepresented and promoted programs that serve them. A strong proponent for the education of immigrants and refugees, he promotes leadership training, economic development, and civic participation. He actively supports the empowerment and self-sufficiency of community members. He serves as vice-chairperson of the Affordable Housing Trust in the Town of Tyngsborough, MA.  Sothea has participated at NeighborWorks Training Institute, a  leadership program. A refugee from Cambodia, he has lived and worked in Boston and Lowell. He currently lives in Tyngsbo, MA with his wife, Bora, and their children. He enjoys the outdoors and gardening.

Sanary Phen

Poet, writer and storyteller, Sanary Phen was born in a refugee camp in Thailand during the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia. She and her family emigrated to the United States in 1981 and resettled in Lowell, MA, which has been her home for more than 35 years. Sanary has a deep love and appreciation for the community and takes pride in giving back to the city and its people. She has over 15 years of experience in social work in the nonprofit sector and is currently working for Coalition for a Better Acre as their Workforce Development Coordinator. Sanary is also a freelance writer for the Lowell Sun and a dedicated volunteer with the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association.

Dr. Daniela Schiller

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

Thida Virak

Thida Virak is the Director of Social Services & Advocacy at Mekong NYC and was previously Lead Organizer for Mekong NYC for ten years. Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Thida immigrated to the Bronx, where she began her work in the community as a volunteer. Shortly after Mekong NYC was founded in 2011, she joined as a part-time organizer and quickly helped build Mekong NYC’s community base, and was promoted to Director of Social Services & Advocacy in October 2021. Mekong NYC is a social justice organization that brings dignity and value to the lives of Southeast Asians in the Bronx and throughout New York City. As an organizer, advocate, interpreter and translator, freedom fighter, and mother, she exemplifies the spirit of social justice and advocacy. Her work explores identities, culture, collective healing, mutual supports, and community building, and deepens Mekong NYC’s campaigns for health justice, mental health justice, and the end of deportation in the Southeast Asian community. She also serves as a delegate in various coalitions, like the Bronx-Wide People’s Platform. Thida attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Borough of Manhattan Community College, and completed ANHD’s Center for Community Leadership Organizing program.

About the Moderator

Laura Ly

Laura Ly is an Emmy-nominated journalist and editor based in New York City. In her time with CNN, she has also worked in Hong Kong and Atlanta. She currently covers breaking news across the northeast United States. She is the daughter of Khmer refugees from Battambang and Takeo provinces.  Ly is a longtime Board Member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association and also serves on their literary magazine committee. Each year, the organization publishes the “Stilt House” zine, a showcase dedicated to celebrating the work of artists in the Cambodian diaspora. Ly is originally from Connecticut and is a graduate of Columbia University. In her free time, she enjoys travel writing, biking, playing badminton, and attempting to cook Khmer food.

what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Actor Robert Lee Leng, Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, Poet Sokunthary Svay and Actor Sophia Skiles to discuss how we form memories, Cambodian American culture, inherited trauma and what you are now

From left, Robert Lee Leng, Daniela Schiller, Sokunthary Svay, Sophia Skiles

On March 19, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of what you are now, the compelling new drama by Sam Chanse, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback about the historical, cultural, and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, including how the brain forms memories, Cambodian American memory work, and the neuroscience of inherited trauma. Actor-teacher Sophia Skiles will moderate the discussion with Cambodian-Chinese American actor Robert Lee Leng (Darany in the play), neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, and Cambodian American poet-scholar-librettist Sokunthary Svay.

what you are now asks what if our memories aren’t fixed, but change each time we recall the past? This world premiere by Sam Chanse is a thrillingly insightful new play that asks the audience to move through the shifting dance between the past and present, and to consider how with new understanding we might change “who you were then” to “what you are now.”

what you are now is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the worlds of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-third year, and is being co-presented with The Civilians, a theater group dedicated to investigative theater, projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

About the Panelists

Robert Lee Leng

Robert Lee Leng (Darany in the play) I am a first generation Cambodian-Chinese American/Artist. To be an artist during the Khmer Rouge regime meant immediate death; but we survived; we are surviving. We are a very expansive, complex, eclectic, and lit community of people.  I love us. Read Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So; Read Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto by Eric Tang; Stream music by $tupid Young, VBO, VannDa; follow @Khmer.identity on Instagram. Reach out, donate and show support to CMAA Lowell and Mekong NYC.

Dr. Daniela Schiller

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

Sokunthary Svay

Sokunthary Svay was born in a refugee camp in Thailand shortly after her parents fled Cambodia following the fall of the Khmer Rouge. They resettled in the Bronx, where she grew up. She is a founding member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA), and has received fellowships from the American Opera Project, Poets House, Willow Books, and CUNY, as well as commissions from Washington National Opera, White Snake Project, and ISSUE Project Room. Her first book, Apsara in New York, was published in 2017. Her first opera, Woman of Letters, premiered at the Kennedy Center in January 2020. Her second opera,Chhlong Tonle, funded by the OPERA American IDEA grant, premieres in March 2022. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

About the Moderator

Sophia Skiles

Sophia Skiles (she/her) is a theater actor, a teacher of acting, facilitator, and citizen—purposefully blurring, disrupting, and bridging the boundaries of the stage, the classroom, and the public.  She has performed in productions directed by Michael Kahn, May Adrales, Chay Yew, Ralph Peña, Andrei Serban, Mary Zimmerman, Richard Foreman, and David Herskovits, among others - in venues throughout New York City, and across the United States and Europe.  Sophia is Associate Professor of the Practice and Head of Acting of the Brown/Trinity MFA program and a former twice-elected Trustee of the New Paltz Central School District Board of Education.  She was a member of the 2016 artEquity National Facilitator training cohort and the 2021 artEquity BIPOC Leadership Circle. 

what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

A Note on the Neuroscience Behind what you are now

The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the neuroscience behind what you are now by Sam Chanse, the 2022 EST/Sloan mainstage production. what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3. You can purchase tickets here.

The Neuroscience Behind what you are now

By Rich Kelley, Science Press Liaison

“Memory is a marvelous device, a means of transporting ourselves to earlier times. We can go back a moment, or most of a life. But as we all know, it’s not perfect, and is certainly not literal. It’s a reconstruction of facts and experiences on the basis of the way they were stored, not as they actually occurred. And it’s a reconstruction by a  brain that is different from the one that formed the  memory.” —Joseph LeDoux

A quick review of the metaphors we have used for memory reveals how far we have come—and how inadequate we are at describing it: from wax tablet to library to labyrinth to enchanted loom to switchboard to network to leaky bucket to computer program to hologram. From a scientific standpoint, what has changed our thinking about memory has usually come from an experiment. WHAT YOU ARE NOW refers to several significant experiments in the history of neuroscience. We thought you might find this background information on some of them interesting.

Ivan Pavlov (1849‒1936) was a Russian physiologist best known for inventing what has come to be known as “classical conditioning.” To study the physiology of the digestive system, Pavlov invented surgical procedures to create fistulas and gastric pouches on unanesthetized dogs so that he could repeat experiments for months and measure secretions outside the body. During his research Pavlov noticed that the dogs salivated when they saw the person who fed them. This led to his famous experiment: if he played a sound—usually on a metronome, not a bell—just when the food was put in the dog’s mouth, the dog would salivate at the sound, even when the food did not follow. This association turned a previously neutral stimulus—the tone—into a “conditioned” stimulus that generated a “conditioned” response—the salivating. Pavlov called the saliva thus generated “psychic secretions.” The power of the stimuli depended on conditions. If the tone was sounded repeatedly without the dog being fed, the salivating would decrease and eventually stop completely.

One of Pavlov's dogs with a surgically implanted cannula to measure salivation, preserved in the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia.

American behavioral psychologists favored Pavlov’s procedure because it removed any question of will, subjective experience, or consciousness from their experiments. Yet Pavlov himself never denied the inner life of his experimental animals. As Daniel Todes notes in his biography of Pavlov, “[Pavlov} identified them as heroes and cowards, intelligent and obtuse, independent and compliant, sociable and aloof, freedom fighters and narrow pragmatists.”

Eric Kandel (1929‒ ) is an Austrian-born American medical doctor, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and professor of biochemistry who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2000 for his work on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. Kandel is perhaps best known for his insight that learning processes are similar among all life forms and that he could more easily study what changes occur in the synaptic connections between neurons during learning and memory storage by electrophysical analysis of an invertebrate as simple as a sea slug. He published his initial findings in 1963 and over the next twenty years his work in molecular neural science led to several remarkable findings, including that short-term memory involved functional changes in existing synapses but long-term memory involves a change in the number of synaptic connections.

A mouse in a glass container partially filled with water, as part of a forced-swimming test. The use of forced swimming tests is criticized by animal rights groups, notably PETA. (Photo: TaoPan CC3.0)

Learned safety in mice. The play refers to one of Kandel’s experiments with Daniela D. Pollak in which they conditioned mice to feel safe in stressful situations. Kandel called this conditioned inhibition of fear “learned safety.” For fear conditioning they associated an auditory tone with a shock to the mouse’s foot. For safety conditioning, the tone was not followed by a shock. The safety conditioned mice learned to associate the tone with the absence of danger and showed less anxiety, The mice were then given a stress test and put into a pool of water for a swim test. As Kandel explained, “In this seemingly desperate situation—where the mice have no option to escape from the water—they start to show signs of behavioral despair that are ameliorated by antidepressant medications. We found that the mice trained for safety could overcome their sense of hopelessness in the swim test.”

Memory reconsolidation. Memories evolve over time and “consolidation” and “reconsolidation” have come to describe the “two lives” memories have after the initial coding of new information. Consolidation refers to the extended period after learning when new information gets “fixed” at a cellular level and interleaved with existing memories. Much of consolidation is now thought to occur during sleep. Reconsolidation describes the process in which a newly consolidated memory gets modified as it is reactivated. In 2000 neuroscientists Karim Nader, Glenn E. Schafe and Joseph E. LeDoux performed an experiment to test whether it is possible to extinguish a “new memory” so that it never becomes a long-term memory. Current models of learning at the time proposed that new proteins need to be produced for recent experiences to be encoded into long-term memory. In the experiment, rats were conditioned to fear a tone by being given a foot shock. When they heard the tone, they froze into immobility. Twenty-four hours later, the rats were played the tone but given an infusion of anisomycin, a drug that inhibits protein synthesis, into the amygdala. Twenty-four hours later, when the rats which had been given the drug were played the tone, they didn’t freeze. They had lost the memory of the conditioning. This group was tested for up to 14 days and still had no memory of the conditioned response. A test group was given anisomycin without the tone being played. Twenty-four hours later, when they were played the tone, they still froze. In order for the conditioned response to be extinguished, the memory had to be reactivated—the tone had to be played—for the drug to interfere with memory retrieval.

A diagram representing a common understanding of memory systems (Image: Erich Parker)

Extinguishing traumatic memories. Drugs had been used successfully to remove traumatic memories but neuroscientist Daniela Schiller wondered if a non-invasive behavioral technique could be used instead. In 2010 she used classical conditioning to train 65 people to fear a colored square by associating it with a shock. Twenty four hours later, the sight of the square alone induced a fearful reaction in all of them. Schiller then divided them into three groups and presented the squares to one group many more times without a shock. Because this extinction process began within ten minutes of having their memory reactivated, the members of this group completely forgot their fear. A second group, which did not begin the extinction process until six hours after they were shown the squares, did not lose their fear. The experiment demonstrated that memories can be changed behaviorally and that interfering with memory reconsolidation can be effective but is very time sensitive. As Schiller commented in Michael Specter’s profile of her in The New Yorker, her work led her to realize that memory is “what you are now, not what you think you were in the past. When you change the story you created, you change your life.”

A Note on the Historical and Cultural Context of what you are now

The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the historical and cultural context of what you are now by Sam Chanse, the 2022 EST/Sloan mainstage production. what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3. You can purchase tickets here.

Passing on the Uncanny

by Soriya K. Chum, Dramaturg

Pia is a neuroscientist whose academic research is intensely enmeshed with the personal. Her scientific investigations concern “fear memories;” her mother is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. As Pia looks at the long road ahead of possibly breaking into her field with a proposal to rid the brain of traumatic memories, she wrestles with the omnipresence of her own family’s uncanny memories—their capacity to terrorize her mother at night, to induce in their home a stultifying silence, which Pia helps to maintain as a way of coping.

Memory is an intimate process. The experience of a specific memory is palpable not only to loved ones who remember, but also to those who share space intimately with them—so that family, too, can be immersed, by extension, in the pleasure, grief, or violence of a recollection we may not exactly call their own. The reach of memory is powerful, with a magnitude that in some cases is felt across generations, and for a community like Pia’s that once endured a massively traumatic event, their interdependent behaviors of remembrance can either inhibit or change the course of the group’s collective development.

From 1975 to 1979, a communist group known as the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia, enacting radical social, economic, and cultural reforms throughout the country. In the group’s pursuit of an agrarian utopia, they expelled entire urban populations and moved them to remote rural provinces where they worked in labor camps. The Khmer Rouge purported that the citizens of this new, classless system would work the land together and live off of it, equally. In the propagation of their doctrine, they sought to re-educate the public on the party’s values and to root out all dissent by punishing alleged loyalists of the former regime. As their paranoia intensified, the Khmer Rouge grew rampantly murderous, targeting intellectuals, capitalists, foreigners, ethnic minorities, and artists. As a result of their totalitarian reign, an estimated 2.5 million people died of execution, starvation, and disease. Those who survived, like Pia’s mother, fled to refugee camps in Thailand—few with families left intact, some alone, all shaped forever by a deeply formative past.

My mother is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. She evades questions still today about the losses she suffered. When I was a child, she would prepare dishes for our ancestors during the Cambodian New Year as a ritual expression of holding their hunger in the family’s memory. We’d patiently wait for our ancestors to eat first before lifting our forks. I’d crouch on the floor before a festive table presented with ample platters of roasted duck, oily noodles, pickled greens, and sour soup, while clasping sticks of champak incense in silent prayer, sending blessings of peace and comfort to them. My eyes would study the empty chairs, and I imagined I could draw into the seats my ancestors’ silhouettes with the rising, sweet smoke that escaped my hot fingers. I wondered if they could see me too—see us, the living, and how we struggled. I’d blush from the guilt of divining their tired eyes on me.

In what you are now, there is a scene in which Pia’s brother Darany makes a similar ancestral offering. He asserts, “Someone should be feeding us knowhatI’msayin / give us food to ease our suffering.” Embedded within his sentiment is a powerful question of what nourishment is given to people who haven’t passed, but who live on to bear difficult legacies. Darany’s assertion is an interesting counter-proposal to the survivor narrative that tends to centralize the memorialization of atrocious pasts. It is a suggestion that gently shifts our preoccupation with what happened, who we lost, and how we barely survived, to the untidy business of those living today, of nurturing present and future generations after the fact. 

In the eighties, nearly 160,000 Cambodians migrated to the United States as refugees. Planning for their arrival, the federal government assessed cities that could equip the newly arrived with low-wage and low-skill jobs and affordable housing. The majority of Cambodians resettled in communities with pre-existing, high rates of poverty and crime. In the play, Pia’s family migrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, home to the second largest Cambodian community in America. Challenged by the stresses of resettlement—securing a job, learning a language, and adapting to new norms—while burdened with the anguish of having fled genocide, Cambodians found their hard start exacerbated by their placement in distressed areas. From their precarious point of inception in the States, a line can be drawn to many of the contemporary problems faced by Cambodian Americans decades later, including deportation, gang-related violence, underemployment, and mental health conditions. 

In the last twenty years, we’ve seen tremendous advancements in research dedicated to helping us better understand the biological dimensions of trauma. Scientists now know that the posttraumatic stress individuals experience may be owed to changes to gene regions in the brain responsible for processing fearful stimuli. A person living with PTSD then, who shows signs of hypervigilance, reactivity, or avoidance, may be exhibiting these tendencies because of a past traumatic event that distinctly altered their DNA. These genetic changes extend beyond the life of the individual, branching out to the lives of their children and their children’s children, so that patterns of trauma are heritable down the bloodline. 

To stop these effects, Pia is exploring through her research the viability of an intervention that could selectively target and blunt fear memories, so that typical triggers become more like reminders, unimbued of their painful associations. Though a pathway to implementing treatment models and therapies lags behind the research in her field, Pia’s belief in science and its potential to heal is persuasive, and there is, of course, her double-fold experience (as both a scientist and the daughter of a genocide survivor), which is a factor in our bet on her. The dramatic irony of Pia’s mission is how much skin she has in the game. We cheer her on when she perceives connections between her personal life and career with the clarity of an expert witness; and we cringe with compassion when she barrels full-steam ahead in her research with the unchecked zeal of a grief tourist, and forgets herself—her close orientation to the work at hand. 

On a family trip to Cambodia in 2016, I insisted we visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. The building once was a secondary school the Khmer Rouge repurposed as S-21, a prison camp and execution center. Now a museum, it displays the photographs of inmates, their discarded clothes, instruments of torture, and dusty chalkboards that spell of the place’s bygone innocence. In the main artery of the museum, my mother and I came to a large map on a free-standing wall. I took her hand to it. I asked her to trace her journey from Phnom Penh to labor camp to refugee camp for me. Confusion riddled her finger—starting, then stopping, falling, and breaking away from the map. In my abstract way of seeing back with her and urgently correcting the record, hovering over this map, a shade of disappointment rose in me for her failure to remember. My mother then turned and pointed to the open museum door, which looked to a sunlit courtyard lined with swaying palm trees, and she uttered just over the sound of a motorcycle zizzing by that her sister whom she loved lived once two blocks from where we stood. 

 For a scopic regime that deliberately annihilated the social foundation of a society by splitting up sisters, seeding distrust among brothers, rearranging marriages, and orphaning children, the most defiant act for Cambodians today against the perpetrators is keeping our families together. Like Pia’s family, it is a path of trial and error, closing the distance, and putting voice into the gulf of silence.  

Radiolab Host Jad Abumrad, Microbiologist Karine Gibbs, and Biochemist Mandë Holford join Playwrights Sam Chanse and Lucas Hnath at the 2021 EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event on December 2

From left: Jad Abumrad, Sam Chanse, Karine Gibbs, Lucas Hnath, Mandë Holford

WHAT MAKES A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 22 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theatre companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide.

Every year the highlight of the EST/Sloan Project submission season is the Fall Artist Cultivation Event. At this eagerly anticipated event, a panel of scientists, science writers, and playwrights engages in a far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion with an audience of prospective playwrights about “What Makes a Great Play about Science?” 

The 2022 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will be virtual this year and take place on Thursday, December 2 at 8 PM. 

This virtual event will be held on Zoom and is free to attend for any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology. Registration is required. Once registered, you will receive the event access link in your confirmation email. You can register here.

Applications for this year’s EST/Sloan commissions are currently open and will be accepted through January 15, 2022. You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage.

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season:

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

2) a full mainstage production of at least one work. Recent mainstage productions have included Behind the Sheet (2019) by Charly Evon Simpson on the enslaved women who as experimental victims launched the science of gynecology (a NY Times Critic’s Pick), BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Jad Abumrad (Photo: Lizzie Johnston)

Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on nearly 600 stations and downloaded more than 12 million times a month as a podcast. He employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what’s been called “a new aesthetic” in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews, and sounds into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the legal foundation for the war on terror. Jad has won three George Foster Peabody Awards, and in 2011, he was honored as a MacArthur Fellow. He also created and hosted three seasons of More Perfect, a series about untold stories of the Supreme Court, which The New York Times called “. . . possibly the most mesmerizing podcast.” And in 2019, he co-created Dolly Parton’s America, a Peabody Award-winning nine-part series that explores a divided America through the life and music of one of its greatest icons.

Sam Chanse

Sam Chanse’s plays include Monument, or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play); Trigger; Fruiting Bodies; and What You Are Now (EST/Sloan’s 2022 Mainstage Production). Her work has recently been developed with The Civilians, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova,  NAATCO, Magic Theatre, Ma-Yi, and the Lark, and is published by Kaya Press (Lydia’s Funeral Video) and TCG (The Kilroys List). Commissions include NAATCO (Out of Time), Workshop Theatre, and EST/Sloan Project.  She is a past fellow at MacDowell, the Lark Venturous Fund (Trigger), Cherry Lane Mentor Project (The Opportunities of Extinction), and Playwrights Realm (The Other Instinct), and an alum of New York Stage and Film’s inaugural NEXUS project, Ars Nova’s Play Group and the Civilians R&D Group. She has also received residencies from Sundance Theatre Institute, Djerassi, and SPACE at Ryder Farm.  A native New Yorker, she served for some years as artistic director of San Francisco-based Kearny Street Workshop. She is a writer on ABC’s The Good Doctor, and has taught at Columbia University, NYU, University of Rochester, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, Dramatists Guild, and WGAE, and a resident playwright at New Dramatists.

Dr. Karine Gibbs (Photo: Adam Sings in the Timber)

Karine Gibbs is a Jamaican American microbiologist and immunologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Gibbs’ research merges the fields of sociomicrobiology and bacterial cell biology to explore how the bacterial pathogen Proteus mirabilis, a common gut bacterium which can become pathogenic and cause urinary tract infections, identifies self versus non-self. In 2013, Gibbs and her team were the first to sequence the genome of P. mirabilis BB2000, the model organism for studying self-recognition. In graduate school at Stanford University, Gibbs helped to pioneer the design of a novel tool that allowed for visualization of the movement of bacterial membrane proteins in real time. In 2020, Gibbs was recognized by Cell Press as one of the top 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America.

Lucas Hnath (Photo: Rebecca Martinez)

Lucas Hnath is the author of Isaac’s Eye, which EST produced as the 2012 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production and which won the 2012 Whitfield Cook Award. More recently, Lucas Hnath received a 2017 Tony Award nomination for Best Play with A Doll’s House, Part 2, which garnered eight Tony nominations—the most of any play in the 2016-2017 season—and a Best Actress win for Laurie Metcalf as Nora. His other plays include Hillary and Clinton, The Thin Place, Red Speedo, The Christians, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, and Death Tax. He has been produced on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre, Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, and Ensemble Studio Theatre. His plays have also premiered at the Humana Festival of New Plays, Victory Gardens, and South Coast Repertory. He is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, and an alumnus of New Dramatists. Awards: Whiting Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Kesselring Prize, Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New Play, Obie Award for Playwriting, Steinberg Playwright Award, and the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize.

Dr. Mandë Holford (Photo: DFinnin_AMNH)

Mandë Holford is an Associate Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at The American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine. Her research, from mollusks to medicine, combines chemistry and biology to discover, characterize, and deliver novel peptides from venomous marine snails as tools for manipulating cellular physiology in pain and cancer. She is active in science education, advancing the public understanding of science, and science diplomacy. She co-founded Killer Snails, LLC, an award winning EdTech learning games company. Her honors include being named: a 2020 Sustainability Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, Breakthrough Women in Science by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and NPR’s Science Friday, a Wings WorldQuest Women of Discovery fellow, an NSF CAREER awardee, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. Her Ph.D. is from The Rockefeller University, USA.

This year’s moderator:

Rich Kelley

Rich Kelley has served as the Science Press Liaison for The EST/Sloan Project since 2009. He also contributes interviews and blog posts to the EST/Sloan blog and creates panels for post-performance talkbacks. A book publishing veteran, Rich is currently VP/Strategic Partner with Bridget Marmion Book Marketing, where he specializes in content development, email marketing, online advertising, SEO, social media coaching, and website optimization.