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).

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.

Jake Brasch on alcoholism, mountains, Alzheimer’s, and THE RESERVOIR

Jake Brasch

Can brain exercises stave off dementia? On Monday, March 22, at 4:00 PM the EST/Sloan First Light Festival  presents the first public reading (free on Zoom) of THE RESERVOIR, Jake Brasch’s new play about a young writer who, struggling with alcoholism and memory loss, finds unexpected bonds with his quirky grandparents. The playwright has lots more to tell.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did THE RESERVOIR come to be?

This play has been trying to fight its way out of me for years. When I got the commission, there was no turning back. 

I set out to explore Alzheimer’s Disease and alcoholism, diseases that have plagued my family for many moons. Along the way, I discovered I was writing a love letter to my grandparents. 

You describe Josh, your main character, as 22 years old in 2014-2015. “A queer, neurotic, lost soul. Dropout. Alcoholic. Wannabe writer. A white Jew with Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Nebraskan roots.” Dare I ask how much of your play is autobiographical? Or would it be better to ask how much is not?

You got me!

Indeed, this is a very personal piece. Too personal? Maybe! There were definitely “WHY THE HELL AM I DOING THIS?!” moments. But for the most part, I found strength in writing into this painful chapter of my life. I’m a fundamentally different person than I was seven years ago and it felt empowering to remember that. 

That being said, the play is not strictly autobiographical. The constraints of the commission and the needs of the piece steered me away from my experience. I also took some creative license to protect my heart and my family. It feels important to be very clear about this: Josh’s story is not my story. A brilliant friend of mine recently wrote, “Most of us need a degree of artifice to say what we really think.” Paradoxically, I found that untethering Josh’s story from my own gave me permission to tell the truth. 

Much of the science in this play has to do with the concept of Cognitive Reserve and how it might be helpful in preventing or delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s. What kind of research did you do in writing this play? 

Figure illustrates how cognitive reserve develops over a lifespan. Figure courtesy of Frontiers of Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01814/full

I went on a deep dive into medical journal land. The more I read, the more I discovered how little we know about Alzheimer’s, specifically about how we might stave off its symptoms. There are a lot of misconceptions out there. People want to believe that all they have to do is play tennis, solve crossword puzzles, and memorize a list of our nation’s Vice Presidents, and all will be well. Yes, there are certain lifestyle factors that may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s, but there is no formula, no proven regimen, no sure way to protect yourself from the disease.

Bleak? Oh yeah. But also, ultimately, freeing. We simply cannot know what lies ahead. Josh’s revelation in the play mirrors what I discovered in my research: the best way to protect oneself against the onset of Alzheimer’s is to lead a present, full, joyous, active, inquisitive, open, and loving life. 

Have your grandparents had the chance to read your play? How did they react?

Oh, how I wish I could share this with them.

Jake and his grandmother

Both of my maternal grandparents passed away a few years ago after battles with Alzheimer’s. My paternal grandfather died this year of complications from COVID-19. 

My paternal grandmother is in a memory care facility. She’s mostly nonverbal at this point and doesn’t seem to recognize me. I miss her more than I can say. If she were still herself, I’m guessing she would request a paper copy of the play to litter with brilliant, scathing, and hilarious notes in red colored pencil. I’d like to think she’d be both horrified and proud.

What do you want your audience to understand about the nature of alcoholism and the current treatment options for coping with it?

Addiction is brutal. Being inside of the disease of alcoholism was the scariest experience of my life. I wanted so badly to get out from under it, but the harder I tried to escape, the worse it got. At some point, I had to accept defeat and get help. For anyone going through it, don’t try to go it alone. I’m here. We’re here. Recovery is the foundation my life has been built upon and I wouldn’t have it any other way. As impossible as it may seem, there’s a lighter life on the other side.

Jewish music and themes run through many of your plays. What has being a Jew meant to you?

Being a Jew has meant a lot to me. Much to unpack here!

My father, a fervent atheist, insisted I attend way too much religious school, which we can attribute to good old-fashioned Jewish guilt. I have at least an hour and a half of Hebrew chanting memorized, but I can’t say I know what any of it means. I know what we do, but I don’t know why! It’s just what we do! And I’ve come to love it! Plus great food and ancestral trauma! I think I’ll probably do the same thing to my poor children! 

In all seriousness, as I’ve become a spiritual person over the last few years, I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing about my Jewish roots. My faith today feels decidedly Jewish: I’m more concerned with what I do than what I believe.

You set your play in Colorado? Why Colorado?

Rocky Mountains outside Denver (Photo: Jake Brasch)

Because Colorado is awesome, bro! Party! Powder! Snowboarding! Sick!!!

I’m a proud Denverite, born and raised. The year I got sober, the mountains were there for me. Every time I looked west, I felt so delightfully small.  Mother Nature gave me breathing room and I’m forever grateful to her. I hope that’s in the play. 

Have you written any other science-related plays?

This is my first full-length with a science bent. I’ve written two other shorts for the EST/Sloan Project. One was about our national feral pig problem. The other just so happens to be debuting in the next couple of weeks on the brand new Youngblood Podcast (shameless plug)! It’s called Endogamy and it’s about Ashkenazi Judaism and genetics.  

What’s next for Jake Brasch?

Dinner! I’m making a chicken tagine with an olive and rosemary sourdough boule and a shaved fennel salad. After that, bedtime. And after that, here’s hoping for a lifetime of climbing mountains, telling stories, and basking in the sunlight of the spirit. 

The 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

Laura Maria Censabella on animal intelligence, sexism in science, ageism, and BEYOND WORDS

Laura Maria Censabella (Photo: Jeff Colen)

How much do we really know about the intelligence of our fellow creatures? On Thursday, March 18 at 3:00 PM the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first reading (by invitation only) of BEYOND WORDS, the new play by Laura Maria Censabella. The play dramatizes the achievements and travails of Irene Pepperberg, the scientist responsible for breakthrough communications experiments with parrots, especially with Alex, the African Grey parrot she worked with for thirty years and chronicled in her books, Alex & Me and The Alex Studies. The playwright tells us more.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Take us through how BEYOND WORDS came to be.

Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex (Photo: David Carter)

I heard Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s beautiful monologue about her 30-year relationship with her African Grey parrot research subject Alex on The Moth podcast while I was working on my play Paradise.  In the way that always happens when you’re struggling with one play, I thought to myself I would love to write a play about Irene and Alex, that play would be so much easier and more fun.  I mean who hasn’t longed to communicate meaningfully with an animal?  To my great delight the Columbia biologist I was consulting with on Paradise, Dr. Stuart Firestein knew Irene and I asked him for an introduction.  Of course, actually writing the play was not easy!

Your play is unusual in chronicling the life and work of a living scientist. How closely did you work with Dr. Irene Pepperberg in writing the play? Has she seen each draft? Many of the scenes are deeply personal. Did you have any disagreements about what to include?

Irene read one draft of the play to vet the science—that is the extent of her oversight per our contract.  When she hears the newest draft of the play on March 18th, she will once again give notes about the science.  But before Irene gave me legal permission to write the story of her life, I had already written her a detailed letter about why I thought I was the one to write her story.  We then met for lunch in Cambridge to talk about the project.  After she gave me verbal permission to go ahead and I received a Sloan grant, I spent days in her lab observing her work with her birds.  I had already read many of her scientific writings and had detailed questions for her so she saw that I was attentive to the facts.  Additionally, before giving permission, she attended a workshop of my play Paradise which was presented at Underground Railway/Central Square Theater (prior to its world premiere there), and she liked it.  I’m sure she also spoke to Dr. Firestein about me.  In other words, she vetted me.  She learned that I completely believed in her scientific enterprise and that I am an advocate for women’s untold stories.  I told her, however, that I would have to write her faults as well as her strengths. Would she be up to that scrutiny?  Irene loves the theatre and she is no novice when it comes to what makes a true and good play. She agreed but I believe she also knew that I would do everything possible to represent her in her full humanity.

Dr. Stuart Firestein

Irene and I also had other emotional connections. I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens as did Irene.  Mine was a working-class family that did not have educational opportunities and yet I wound up with an Ivy League education as did Irene.  Like Irene, I had a parakeet when I was young that I trained and cared for deeply and that I knew possessed intelligence.  Like Irene, I have a parent who suffered from PTSD brought on by World War II.  And like Irene I work at a university where I have given my heart and soul but where there is no path to tenure and therefore perpetual economic uncertainty.

Why this play? Why now?

If ever there was a time for science plays, it is now. We’re continuing to live through the tragic effects of science denial with our COVID pandemic. Irene’s life’s work is another wake-up story: the animals we live among are feeling, intelligent beings. They possess forms of intelligence that we don’t. We are all a part of this living web of consciousness, a loss of one form of intelligence is a loss for us all.  Every day 150 species of plants and animals go extinct due to human activities. We have damaged and continue to damage entire ecosystems. What will it take for us to wake up? Floods, hurricanes, and ice storms of Biblical proportions beset us and we still choose to ignore the signs. The earth and animals are speaking to us—we just don’t listen.

You have decided to keep this first reading of BEYOND WORDS private. What concerns factored into that decision?

This is a play that calls for physicality from the actor playing the parrot Alex, which will call for highly abstracted bird movements created with the actor and a choreographer. We can’t convey that on Zoom. Additionally, there are a lot of shifts in time and place very quickly and we also wondered how that would translate in a reading. We wanted to protect this next step in the play’s development.  However, we do have an invited audience to test the play with.

Poster for the West Coast premiere of Paradise at Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles in 2019

Another play of yours, PARADISE, has also received an EST/Sloan commission and has had productions in Cambridge, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. How did the development process for that play differ from the development process for BEYOND WORDS?

First Light is the very first reading of BEYOND WORDS outside of the EST Playwrights Unit where I bring in drafts of my work to be heard around the table and to be critiqued. I also run the Unit. It’s a safe environment composed of caring and incisive professional playwrights where we share work in its early stages. At a certain point, the play must leave that room, and I was grateful to get Linsay Firman’s and Graeme Gillis’s (co-artistic directors of EST Sloan) input on the play, and then my director Melissa Crespo’s thoughts. Beyond that, it hasn’t had any formal development. This first reading for EST/Sloan with professional actors is the beginning of that process.

In addition to working with Dr. Pepperberg, what other research did you do in writing the play?

Dr. Diana Reiss with dolphin

I’m grateful to the animal scientists I spoke to such as Diana Reiss, dolphin expert, who was generous with her time, the science, her perceptions of Irene, and her own theatre background.  I then read, read and read—anything connected to animal science or animal behavior, including many scientific experiments in scientific journals. I also interviewed Elizabeth Hess, the author of Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. She helped me think about the entire animal behavior field in provocative new ways. And of course, Irene was always there to ask questions via email.

One of the scientists in the play, Howard Towers, does not get a very flattering portrayal. How do you think he’ll react to his characterization?

Luckily, Howard Towers is not a “real” scientist.  All the scientists in the play are fictions with the exception of Erich Jarvis who is presented briefly and those are not his actual words.  Even Irene is a fiction in that she is my Irene.  However, I strove constantly to tell the scientific and emotional truth of her life.

As for the Howards in the world of science (and there are plenty of them): they have had years of accolades and exponential advantages not accorded to women scientists and scientists of color. If they recognize some negative aspects of themselves in the character of Howard, that would be a good thing although I believe they are psychologically defended from introspection or things would have changed a long time ago!

By the way, I like the character of Howard. Not in the sense that I want to hang out with him but in the way that he makes an excellent stage character. He’s relentless and charismatic in what he will do to get what he wants. He’s also, I hope, complex. He’s at a stage in his life where he is looking back and just barely allowing himself to wonder what he lost and what he damaged to get where he is. Not just by affecting other people’s careers but by affecting and damaging animals.

Dr. Pepperberg’s work involved so many breakthroughs in our understanding of the intelligence of birds and how they communicate. What did you discover as you wrote the play that surprised you the most? Was it about the science or about what’s involved in being a scientist?

Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex and his colored shapes (Photo: Jeff Topping)

I already knew about the challenges a bench scientist faces from my play Paradise so the uncertainties in the life of a scientist—and the parallels with being an artist in terms of a scientist’s creativity—were familiar to me.  However, Irene’s story brought home the point of how contemptuously scientists can treat one another, especially when a colleague’s discoveries contradict their own, and the far-reaching repercussions such enmity can have on the ability to do one’s work.

One of the ongoing arguments in the play is whether Dr. Pepperberg’s close relationship with Alex undercuts her scientific findings. Where do you stand on this?

In this instance, when we’re talking about a helpless captive animal, I come down on the side of love—bearing in mind, of course, that love can cloud our judgment. However, my argument in the play and the argument of Irene’s life’s work is that she had enough outside controls and non-biased observers verifying her work. Also, for many years she treated Alex like a colleague and was completely unsentimental. It was only in the later years of Alex’s life that the emotional bond deepened so that he became the great love of her life. To be clear, her work has continued with other birds, birds that she has not had such an intense bond with, and in many cases, they have exceeded what Alex achieved.  However, there are still some scientists who deny Irene’s groundbreaking accomplishments and that is what made this such a rich play to write.

You mention the organization HONOR ROLL! in your bio.  What is HONOR ROLL!?

HONOR ROLL! is an action and advocacy group for women+ playwrights over 40. I’m sure you’ve heard the dire statistics about how few new plays by women are produced. As of the last count, the portion of produced plays by women is still under 25% and even lower for trans women and women of color. Although things are getting better, and numbers are slowly rising, experienced women playwrights like myself and others are now encountering ageism. Denied a seat at the table when we were younger, we are advocating for a seat at the table now that we have lived and really have something to say—and the craft to say it with.

What’s next for Laura Maria Censabella?

I just finished writing the polish for the film version of Paradise. I am also in the early stages of researching a new play partly based on my aunt who was also my godmother. She was severely disabled and had approximately 90 surgeries in her lifetime. At a certain point, against the wishes of the family, she signed up to have 12 more so that she could walk down the aisle unassisted at her son’s wedding. I want to tell the story of how she was infantilized in a close-knit Italian family, how she was cut off from disability activism and had to go it alone, and how her life changed all of us.

The 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

Bonnie Antosh on aye-aye muses, conjuring with Shakespeare, inheritance, and LEMURIA

Bonnie Antosh

How does the behavior of researchers mirror the animals they are studying? On Wednesday, March 10 at 3:00 PM the EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first public reading (free on Zoom) of LEMURIA, the new play by Bonnie Antosh that asks the question: in the animal kingdom and in our own, how does  a queen pass the crown to the next queen? Imagine, if you will, a queer King Lear in a North Carolina lemur lab. The playwright has more to tell us.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

You describe LEMURIA as “an inheritance drama about dominance, queer Southern scientists, academic lineage, sex, and – yes – lemurs.” Take us back to the play’s first formative days. Which of those themes came first and how did the play come to be?

The first seed was "King Lear plus lemurs,” which stuck with me because it’s (obviously) irreverent and felt risky, in a good way. 

I took a Primatology class as a distribution requirement in college, and I walked away with this abiding curiosity about lemurs and female-dominant species. When a dominant female ring-tail is sick or dying, young females will battle for control over the troop. So I started imagining the Lear archetype with a queen, Regan and Goneril as lemurs – and then as academics who study lemurs – and then also as exes. And that was pretty much that. 

Left: Jade Anouka as Hotspur in the St Ann’s Warehouse production of Shakespeare's Henry IV in 2015.(Photo © Pavel Antonov). Right:  Janet McTeer as Petruchio in Phyllida Lloyd's free Shakespeare in the Park production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Delacorte Theater in 2016.(Photo © Joan Marcus)

As an actress, you seem to have specialized in Shakespearean roles. Has this influenced how you create characters or write dialogue?

Completely. When I first came up with this idea, I was hunting for a science-driven story that might fit the structure of a Shakespearean or Tudor inheritance drama, but with Southern women centered as the old power and the rivals for new power. I’ve enjoyed playing male characters, watched women play many of the Big Classical Roles – Jade Anouka as Hotspur and Janet McTeer as Petruchio were particularly revelatory. At the same time, modern artists should be able to embody that epic ambition, lust, and tactical maneuvering while playing modern women. 

An aye-aye photographed at night in the wild in Madagascar (Photo: Frank Vassen)

Why lemurs?

A question that haunts me day and night! On a superficial level, some lemurs, like aye-ayes, are cute in a way that’s also a bit freaky. A little demonic? Do you know what I mean? Certain lemurs have this energy of the goth kids who got picked last in Nature’s Gym Class, but who’ve become masters of adaptation as a result. So I guess… I did this for love. 

You set the play in eastern North Carolina. Any significance to that setting?

The Eastern Piedmont of North Carolina – especially the university-dense area known at the Research Triangle – is one of many, many centers of Southern intellectualism and activism. I’m excited for audiences to walk away from my plays with a more realistic sense of the cultural multiplicity that exists in both Carolinas, where I’m from. 

Also, Durham is the IRL home of the Duke Lemur Center, the largest center for strepsirrhine primate research outside of Madagascar. I was hoping to take advantage of a treasure in my own backyard. 2020 had other plans!

What research did you do to prepare to write the play? Did you use a consultant?

Even from afar, I’ve been grateful to be able to interview some of the DLC staff, researchers from around the country, primatologists, and anthropologists while constructing this very fictional institution of LemurLab. Dr. Patricia Chapple Wright’s gloriously-titled For the Love of Lemurs provided context on fieldwork in Madagascar, where lemurs are endemic, and on primate research over multiple decades. I’ve also spoken to academics and writers about intellectual lineage and the desire to be “claimed” by mentors or proteges in the arts. I had and have incredible mentors as a playwright, so the experience of idolizing someone so much that you can barely speak actual, intelligible words to them was – embarrassingly easy to tap into while writing this script. 

In your play, the lemurs are very expressive and one even converses with one of the scientists. Was this your original concept or something that evolved? How do you imagine this happening on stage?

I’ve always pictured the lemur character, Cordelia, as a gorgeous, intricate puppet who’s voiced and manipulated by a visible actor. It would have been a tragedy to write this play with no lemurs onstage! Can you imagine? 

Lemur Catta (Photo: Leila Adolphsen)

In retrospect, a lot of scientists I interviewed this summer shared a desire to be able to converse with lemurs for a day, to be able to ask how to make the animals' environments more enriching or their participation in the research process clearer. Thematically, Cordelia needed to be able to discuss aging and power with Anabelle, the director of LemurLab: Cordelia is the Fool to Anabelle’s Lear. But in writing, I discovered that I didn’t want those conversations to be “magical." They needed to come at a cost for Anabelle, who is starting to question the trustworthiness of her own mind. 

Why this play? Why now?

This past year has been full of horrors, but – at least for me – nature is a source of wonder that cannot be exhausted.

Remember as a kid how curious you felt about animals? Just ‘cause. We don’t necessarily allow ourselves to access that same level of curiosity in adulthood. 

This play is obviously about the threat of death or extinction, but it’s also full of stage pleasures: flirtations and battles and puppets. It’s about chosen families. It’s about the choice to devote your life – sometimes insanely – to the survival and evolution of a creature you’ve become obsessed with. Theater people will be able to relate to that devotion that borders on obsession. 

Winifred at one week, an aye-aye born at the Duke Lemur Center in 2020 (Photo: Jenna Browning) https://lemur.duke.edu/winifred/

What’s next for Bonnie Antosh? 

This is hard to admit, but I did not get to chill with one single lemur during the writing of this play. The lemurs don’t even care: they’re such cruel mistresses!

Still, I’ll go on some manner of celebratory pilgrimage, as soon as public safety allows. 

The 2021  EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

AJ Clauss on stolen bodies, erotic medical textbooks, “writing the world we want to see,” and HENRY MAKES A BIBLE

AJ Clauss

On Monday, March 1 at 3:00 PM, the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first public reading (free on Zoom) of HENRY MAKES A BIBLE, the new play by AJ Clauss. The play dramatizes the little-known story of the creation in disease-infested London in 1858 of the world’s most famous medical textbook, Gray’s Anatomy, with text by 31-year-old medical wunderkind Henry Gray and 360 dazzling woodcuts by his artistically gifted medical colleague, 27-year-old Henry Vandyke Carter. To learn more, let’s hear from the playwright.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for HENRY MAKES A BIBLE come from?

I used to go to the Strand bookstore on Sundays and one afternoon I was holding a copy of this medical textbook. This copy was like the 86th edition, very college-vibes, and it cost three dollars. But I couldn’t stop flipping through the pages to get to the next drawing and the next. They really are so stunning. This led me into some research on anatomical illustrations in the 1800s. That’s when I learned the book was made by Henry and Henry and I asked them out on a date. They both said yes.

What kind of research did you do?

I relied heavily on Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection, and the Destitute which is an incredibly wholesome book on the underbelly of Victorian London. I’m also grateful for the research of Bill Hayes, Mike Sappol, and the Wellcome Library (who have Henry Carter’s journals from most of his life).

Henry Gray

My research focused on how the book would have been made and how they got the bodies. That’s really the beating heart of this play, the bodies. London had just passed in 1834 the New Poor Law (like, omg) which was basically a big middle finger from the rich. And this was just after The Anatomy Act (1832), which allowed for bodies from the “poor class” to be sold to doctors, anatomists, schools, etc. Their argument was that the contributions of these bodies would benefit all of mankind, and they did!! However, we don’t even know their names. When you look at Gray’s Anatomy, you are looking at the insides of an actual person who was sold to either provide bread for their family, or simply because they couldn’t afford a funeral (so expensive back then!). So, this book is a burial ground. The global infrastructure of anatomy was supplied by people who were starving and working themselves to death. A tale as old as time, I suppose.

What did you discover about what seems to have been a complicated relationship between Gray and Carter? Your play makes some decisions about the sexual preferences of the lead characters. Are those based on your research into their lives?

A few people have asked me that. First, let’s just acknowledge that history is told through a heterosexual lens where hetero folks are dramatized all the time as lovers and we don’t question the magic or the romance. When we dramatize a queer relationship, it’s like, wait, were they really though? Where’s the proof? I guess my proof is that queer people have always been around and have always been written out, especially in this era, thanks to the primarily cis-white-male-heterosexual gatekeepers of history. Because of this, we’ve had centuries of trying to find ourselves in the cracks of stories because of how secret and hidden our queer ancestors had to be.

Henry Vandyke Carter, self-portrait, 1870

In Carter’s journals, there’s no doubt that Henry Gray is his best friend and his biggest threat. I’m sorry, that’s hot! Carter also admits to burning journals that have stories he’s ashamed of, he keeps a calling card bookmarked in his journal from a guy he met in Paris, and he says all the time his mind wanders from religion. I’m recalling one line in particular, “What manner of Man am I?”

As a queer writer, I love the challenge of justifying why a seemingly non-queer person is actually a little queer, or a lot queer, because we write the world we want to see. And if that’s uncomfortable for a historian, or for anyone, that’s awesome.

The two Henrys are often quite funny. Is there evidence in letters, diaries, whatever, that Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter were this witty?

Thank you for saying that! So (spoiler) everything Henry Gray wrote was actually burned. That was part of my intrigue in writing this: that I would have breadcrumbs of a historical narrative and a lot of dark empty rooms to sit inside and figure out how they got from crumb to crumb. We do, however, have journals from Henry Carter, tons, such a great writer, some of his words are in the play, but he wasn’t funny at all! Which is even funnier. He was the brooding artist we can all identify with, so much to give, so cute, and so worried it’s all going to be for nothing.

I knew when I started this play that it was going to be very out of my comfort zone, as I needed to learn so much about language from a region and time far away from my middle-American roots. I wanted to find a rhythm that moved as fast as Henry Gray did (he was practically running St. George’s Hospital by the age of 28) and so I found a home in using banter as a birthright. It doesn’t matter, rich or poor, the wit became a communal love language.

Poster for Henry Makes a Bible

Much of the enduring appeal of the book Gray’s Anatomy is due to Carter’s painstakingly detailed woodcuts, all based on his own research from doing dissections. Do you plan on using any of his illustrations in your production?

Oh I’d love to! There are three scenes where the play describes the walls covered with his sketches, and that’s open to interpretation, but I’d love to see as much of his work as possible on stage. He portrays people with such grace. Even when their skin is off and their entrails are spilling out, he tilts their heads in a way that just feels nice. Calm. Home.

You include characters in the play from London’s lower classes -- the Little Boy and Grace the factory worker -- people we could say were exploited by Gray and Carter as they used for dissection the bodies of people who died impoverished. Why was it important to include these characters?

I wanted to give a life to the person on the page. The person whose heart changed the way we have understood hearts anatomically for generations, I wanted to give them a name. Her name is Grace.

As you did your research for the play, did you discover anything that surprised you?

I was surprised how erotic anatomical drawings are! Wowee! At the time, there was such a fascination at getting to see the inside of a body. It was brand new. There was so much bondage, and beautiful scenes, and you just can’t deny this incredibly complicated and cosmic feeling they are conjuring. I find myself grabbing onto my shoulders, my hips, my clavicle a lot more often these days and just saying: would you look at that. 

The other surprise was truly how disgusting the treatment of the poor was.  (I am writing this while hundreds of people without homes are freezing to death in Texas right now.) There were proposals to build gas chambers for the poor, and the workhouses were worse than I imagined. This comes up in the play. You watch a character sit with the idea of going to a workhouse—and resisting it: we are not that, we are not those people, this is the age of reason. And yet, somehow we are those people. We still are.

Sally McSweeney, the adventurous, pants-wearing foil for Gray and Carter, keeps things lively with her snappy repartee. Was she based on any real person in their lives?

Sally! So, (spoiler, omg) when Henry Gray dies, all the records say is that a nurse and his fiancée named Sally were in the room. That’s it. I screamed. His fiancée?!  He’s always referred to as never having time to date, so this was such a surprise, and wild to me that she only gave her first name, and is never heard from again. In the play, the idea for the book is actually her idea. She loves dressing like a man even though it’s still illegal, because the colonial idea of “woman” isn’t something she’s inspired by. And she wants to hold a knife like Henry does. I just love her. She’s teaching me so much.

Proofs of the title page for the 1858 edition showing Gray’s changes to Carter’s credit line

What’s next for AJ Clauss?

I’m currently staring at a wall of post-it notes that are the anatomy of this play and I’m just really grateful this is happening. I love this story. I’ll be sad when the wall comes down.

And I’m absolutely gobsmacked to say that next month I’ll be moving to the West Village thanks to the Still Standing artist residency. It’s a free apartment for a year as a chance to focus on writing. So the next twelve months I hope to be on a spiritual high with my ancestors and the universe, and sharing this love with our community.

The more you give away the more it comes back.

The 2021  EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

Amanda Quaid on Eunice Foote, Families, Climate Science, and CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE HEAT OF THE SUN'S RAYS

Amanda Quaid

Kicking off the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival on Thursday, February 25 will be the first public reading (free on Zoom) of CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE HEAT OF THE SUN'S RAYS, a new play by Amanda Quaid. The play takes its title from the path-breaking 1856 paper by amateur scientist, inventor, and women’s rights activist Eunice Newton Foote. In a two-page report on her innovative experiments, Foote became the first to identify carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and as the principal cause of global warming.  A pioneer of climate science, she remains largely unknown . . . until this play. Let’s have the playwright tell us more.

 (Interview by Rich Kelley)

Tell us how you came to write this play. When and how did you first hear about Eunice Foote?

I wanted to apply for a Sloan commission, but I didn’t have a topic. I think I actually googled “undiscovered women in science” or something like that. Climate science is a big interest for me, so when I chanced upon an article about Eunice Foote, I knew that was the story I wanted to tell.

What kind of research did you do? Did you use a consultant?

Samuel McKenzie

In my early research, I reached out to the Brookside Museum in Saratoga Springs, where Eunice had lived. They put me in touch with a researcher named Samuel McKenzie, who specializes in Eunice’s life and work. He generously shared many resources with me—a biographical report he wrote for the museum, photographs, letters, maps, and an analysis of the experiments. In addition to being a great researcher, he had a keen sense of story and an intuition about the kind of material that might be relevant to a playwright. I’m beyond grateful to Sam, and when he finally read the play and liked it (with notes, of course), I breathed a sigh of relief.

Why this play? Why now?

It’s interesting. She’s having something of a cultural renaissance. I just read a wonderful new book about women in the climate movement called All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, and it starts with Eunice’s story, portraying her as a kind of founding mother of climate science. From the beginning, women have been pioneers in this movement, and they’re stepping into leadership roles today at an unprecedented rate. This play is a kind of origin story. But hopefully, it’s more than a history lesson. At its heart, it’s about a family’s ambition—hers, her husband’s, her daughters’—and how that pans out for all of them in unexpected ways. I think most people can relate to that on some level.

There are many ways to write a play about a scientist. You chose to tell it very much through her dynamics with her family. Was that your original concept or one that evolved?

It took a lot of different incarnations, and I struggled at first to find the story. Since I was writing most of this during the first COVID lockdown, and I have a toddler, it was a feat just to get an hour of writing behind a closed door. So I started with a scene about Eunice not being able to get the privacy she needed, and it unfolded from there. I’m fascinated by her marriage because her husband was a feminist and her greatest supporter. Their bond was unusual and complex, and it completely upended expectations I had about marriage in the 1800s. I wanted to make it central to the play.

Researchers contend this may be the only known photograph of Eunice Newton Foote

In her book, Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British women in science, 1800–1900, Mary Creese notes that just sixteen papers in physics were published by American women in the 19th century; only two were published before 1889 and both were written by Eunice Foote.  So how is it possible that her remarkable contribution to climate science could lay unappreciated for more than a hundred years until a petroleum geologist rediscovered it in 2011?

It's a great mystery. And it does certainly make you wonder how many other Eunice Footes are out there.

Eunice was not only a trailblazing woman scientist but also an early woman’s rights activist who signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Settlements (along with her husband) in 1848. How did knowing that affect your characterization of Eunice?

I think it helps her push herself to publish at a time when women didn’t. It gives her confidence and a sense of herself as a role model. But I treaded lightly with this theme. It’s tempting to read her story—the difficulty she had getting recognized, how her work was overshadowed by a male British scientist—as all about gender injustice—and in a sense, to dismiss it on that account as well, just because we’ve seen that story so many times. I felt strongly that the play have a wider scope. She’s not an activist who happens to be a scientist. She’s a scientist first whose understanding of the state of women’s rights colors the way she maneuvers in her field.

Because Eunice Foote was the first scientist to discover the impact increased levels of carbon dioxide could have on the atmosphere, your play includes ways to call attention to the difference in CO2 levels in 1856 and today. What do you want the audience to take away from CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE HEAT OF THE SUN'S RAYS?

The CO₂ levels interest me because people think of the rise of CO₂ as such a modern phenomenon. To learn that the level was also creeping up back then and that she was unaware of that, even as she made this crucial discovery—adds a layer of irony to the story. But there’s not one specific thing I hope people will take away. I just hope they’re entertained and leave with something that has meaning for them—whether that’s a story about parents and children, ambition, women’s history, science, or something else entirely.

Chart courtesy of www.sealevel.info https://www.sealevel.info/co2_and_ch4.html

In CIRCUMSTANCES, the character of the glazier introduces the idea that trees are sentient, the theme of one of my favorite books, The Overstory by Richard Powers. You have also written a wonderful online guide to the Great Trees of Central Park. Might we be seeing a play from you about trees at some point?

How funny you should ask! That’s all I can say at the moment. But there’s a great quote by the poet Robinson Jeffers in his poem “Carmel Point:”

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

I’m trying to do a little bit of that. The Overstory is one of my favorite novels, too.

You are also a “not only” in being both an actor and a playwright. How does your experience as an actor influence your playwriting? And does it also work the other way: does your playwriting inform your acting?

Being an actor probably helps with writing dialogue. I can tell if a scene is working by reading it out loud—though I’m sure other playwrights who aren’t actors also do that. As for playwriting informing acting, it’s always humbling to be in another seat in the room—you see the process from an entirely different angle. It makes me a more informed colleague.

Poster for the Heartbeat Opera workshop production of The Extinctionist

What’s next for Amanda Quaid?

An opera libretto I wrote called The Extinctionist, based on a short play I had in the EST Marathon, is having a public workshop at Heartbeat Opera this May.

The 2021  EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from February 25 through March 29 and features readings of nine new plays. Readings open to the public are free and available on Zoom. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-third year.

Radiolab Host Jad Abumrad, Biologist Danielle Lee, Astrophysicist Brian Nord join Playwrights Carla Ching, Charly Evon Simpson, Actor/Playwright Naomi Lorrain at EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event

From left: Jad Abumrad, Danielle N. Lee, Brian Nord, Carla Ching, Charly Evon Simpson, Naomi Lorrain

WHAT MAKES A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?

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

Every year the highlight of the EST/Sloan Project submission season is the Fall Artist Cultivation Event. At this eagerly anticipated event, a panel of scientists, science writers and playwrights engages in a far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion with an audience of prospective playwrights about “What Makes a Great Play about Science?” The 2020 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will be virtual this year and take place on Monday, November 30 at 7 PM. 

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

Applications for this year’s EST/Sloan commissions are currently open. Those who attend the virtual panel will receive an extended deadline of January 1, 2021.

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season: 1) The First Light Festival is a month-long series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development, and 2) a full mainstage production of at least one work. Recent mainstage productions have included Behind the Sheet (2019) by Charly Evon Simpson on the enslaved women who as experimental victims launched the science of gynecology (a NY Times Critic’s Pick), BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

 This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Jad Abumrad (Photo: Lizzie Johnston)

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

Carla Ching (Photo: Elisabeth Caren)

Carla Ching wrote Fast Company as an EST/Sloan commission which got produced in 2014 at EST as well as at South Coast Rep, and in Seattle and Minneapolis. Her other plays include Nomad Motel, The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up, The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, TBA, Dirty and Big Blind/Little Blind.  Her full-length plays have been produced or workshopped by The O’Neill Playwrights Conference, The Atlantic Theatre Company, South Coast Rep, Center Theater Group, Huntington Theatre Company, the National New Play Network Showcase of New Plays, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Lark Play Development Center, Ma-Yi Theatre Company, Unicorn Theatre Company, The Women’s Project, Partial Comfort, 2g, The Hegira, Ferocious Lotus, Porkfilled Productions and Artists at Play, among others. She’s also written for television on Fear the Walking Dead, I Love Dick, The First, Preacher, and Home Before Dark.

Danielle N. Lee (Photo: Alecia Hoyt Photography)

Danielle N. Lee is an assistant professor of biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and is best known for her science blogging and outreach efforts focused on increasing minority participation in STEM fields. Her research interests focus on the connections between ecology and evolution and their contribution to animal behavior. In 2017, Lee was selected as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer which led her to travel to Tanzania to research the behavior and biology of landmine-sniffing African giant pouched rats. Her 2019 TEDTalk “How hip-hop helps us understand science” has received more than two million views.

Brian Nord (Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)

Brian Nord's interests revolve around exploring the ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific contexts and developing new methods for people to learn and do research. Brian's current research is in applying AI to data taken from big cosmic experiments, like the Dark Energy Survey. Recently, he's started to investigate methods for automating experiments --- think self-driving telescopes. Brian is also working on building better research communities: in 2017, Nord co-founded the the Deep Skies Lab — an inter-institutional collaboration of deep learning experts and astrophysicists. Brian has a long history of public engagement in science, including collaborations with artists and educators. He currently leads the KICP Space Explorers program, working with Chicago high school students. Nord is co-creator of ThisIsBlackLight.com, an online curriculum to teach about Black experiences in America. He helped start the Academic Strike4BlackLives in 2020, and co-authored the Change Now calls to action for a better physics research community. He is a Scientist in Fermilab's AI Project Office and Cosmic Physics Center. He is also a CASE Scientist in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and a Senior Member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago. 

Charly Evon Simpson (Photo: JMA Photography)

Charly Evon Simpson is a playwright, teacher, and TV writer based in Brooklyn. Her plays include Behind the Sheet, Jump, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Lark, The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Fire This Time Festival, and others. She has received the Vineyard Theatre's Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Dramatists Guild's Lanford Wilson Award and has commissions from theaters including MTC/Sloan, Cleveland Play House, The New Group, and South Coast Repertory. She’s a core writer at the Playwrights' Center, a member of New Georges Jam, and in the incoming class of resident playwrights at New Dramatists. Charly has worked on TV shows for Showtime and HBO and has taught playwriting at Hunter College, SUNY Purchase, and the National Theatre Institute. BA: Brown University. MSt: University of Oxford, New College. MFA: Hunter College.

This Year’s Moderator

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff)

Naomi Lorrain is a NYC based actor/playwright. She holds both a B.A. in the History of Science, History of Medicine and a B.A. in African American Studies from Yale University as well as an MFA in Acting from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She works part-time as a Scholars-in-Residence Research Assistant at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an AUDELCO Awards nominee and a NY Innovative Theatre Awards nominee for Best Lead Actress for Behind the Sheet and Entangled, respectively. Theater: Behind the Sheet (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Entangled (The Amoralist), What to Send Up When It Goes Down (Movement Theatre Company, Drama Desk Nomination - Unique Theatrical Experience), Song for a Future Generation (Williamstown Theatre Festival). TV: “Orange is the New Black” (Netflix), “Elementary” (CBS), “The Good Fight” (CBS), “Madam Secretary” (CBS). Plays: The Lost Ones (NYU Tisch Grad Acting), A Trojan Woman’s Tale, The Big O (Villa La Pietra), Rigor Mortis (NYU Freeplay Festival), #shelfies (52nd Street Project), The Queen of Macon County (HomeBase Theatre Collective).

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

Margot Connolly

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for HELLO, WORLD come from?

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

What kind of research did you do? 

Girl Code with authors Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did you first realize playwriting was your thing?

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

What’s next for Margot Connolly?

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

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

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

Kristin Slaney

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

This event is sold out!

(Interview by Rich Kelley)  

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

Alex Grubbs of The Lobbyists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now? Why a musical?

Tommy Crawford of The Lobbyists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Walek

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

 (Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

What prompted you to write this particular play?

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

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

What research did you do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you written other plays about science?

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

When did you first know you were a playwright?

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

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

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



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

Justice Hehir

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for FREEPLAY come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

please, an educated pleasure shop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo from Just Give Back Animal Rescue Facebook page

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

How does being an intersectional feminist inform your playwriting?

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

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

Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

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

What’s next for Justice Hehir?

Night Creatures poster from Jackalope Theater

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

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

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

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

Behind the Sheet confronts the history of a great medical breakthrough by telling the forgotten story of a community of enslaved black women who involuntarily enabled the discovery. In 1840s Alabama, Philomena assists a doctor—her owner—as he performs experimental surgeries on her fellow slave women, trying to find a treatment for the painful post-childbirth complications known as fistulas. Reframing the origin story of modern gynecology, the play dramatizes how these women supported each other, and questions who, and what, history remembers.

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

About the Panelists

Dr. Briana Walton

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

Gabrielle Foreman

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

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff).

About the Moderator

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

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