Rich Kelley

November 10, 2023

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

Rich Kelley

November 10, 2023

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 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 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 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’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 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).

Rich Kelley

March 25, 2022

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

Rich Kelley

March 25, 2022

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Rich Kelley

March 18, 2022

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

Rich Kelley

March 18, 2022

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.”

About the Panelists

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.

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 (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.

Rich Kelley

March 12, 2022

A Note on the Neuroscience Behind what you are now

Rich Kelley

March 12, 2022

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.”

Rich Kelley

April 22, 2017

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

Rich Kelley

April 22, 2017

On Thursday, April 27, this year’s EST/Sloan First Light Festival will feature as its final event a reading of WHAT YOU ARE NOW by Sam Chanse. Cutting-edge neuroscience commingles with ancient culture in this compelling family drama as we watch Pia, a neuroscience postdoc, research how the brain copes with pain even as she tries to come to terms with the traumatic events of her family’s past. Sam kindly took a moment to tell us more...

The Neuroscience Behind what you are now

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