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

Amanda Keating

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

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

Amanda reveals her insights about the play below.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Tell us how WITH FELLOWSHIP originated?

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

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for Amanda Keating?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did S P A C E come to be?

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

Mae Jemison and her 100 Year Starship Project

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

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

Bessie Coleman in 1923 (Wikipedia Commons/Public Domain)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What appeals to you about outer space?

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

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

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

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

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

Margot Connolly

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Where did the idea for HELLO, WORLD come from?

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

Girl Code with authors Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser

What kind of research did you do?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

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

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

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did anything you discovered in your research surprise you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is LAS BORINQUEÑAS the perfect title for this play?

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

What’s next for Nelson Diaz-Marcano?

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

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

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

Sam Mueller

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

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

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you now or have you ever been a wrestler?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sample of Sam’s references for PIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for Sam Mueller? 

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

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

Nikki Brake-Sillá

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

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

Learn more about REWOMBED in the following exchanges with Nikki.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did you come to write REWOMBED?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artwork for ReWombed

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for Nikki Brake-Sillá?

Artwork for Say It Ain’t So

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

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

And lots of naps.

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

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

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

Nelson Diaz-Marcano

What is the cost in human lives of medical breakthroughs? On Thursday, March 25, the 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival hosted an invitation-only reading of LAS BORINQUEÑAS, the new play by Nelson Diaz-Marcano. The play derives its title from Borinquén, the aboriginal Taino name for the island of Puerto Rico, and tells two parallel stories: one about the American scientists who in the 1950s made the world-changing discovery that a pill could prevent conception, and the far less heroic story of how the clinical trial for the pill was conducted with the women of Puerto Rico. The playwright tells us more.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did anything you discovered in your research surprise you?

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

Dr. Edris Rice-Wray

Several of the characters in the play are based on actual historical figures: Margaret Sanger, Gregory Pincus, John Rock, Edris Rice-Wray. Not everything about them is appealing. How much of these characters reflect what they were like in real life and how much is your invention?

While I took some liberties with their characterization due to this being a narrative work, I didn’t change much of the ideologies they express or the relationships they had with each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

Why is LAS BORINQUEÑAS the perfect title for this play?

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

The 2021 EST/Sloan First Light Festival ran from February 25 through March 29 and featured readings of nine new plays. Most of the readings were open to the public for 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.

Phaedra Michelle Scott on activism, dramaturgy, intersectionality, and GOOD HAIR

Phaedra Michelle Scott

Do issues of race, class, and gender intersect more visibly anywhere than with Black hair? On March 29 at 3:00 PM the EST/Sloan Project will end the 2021 First Light Festival with the first public reading of GOOD HAIR by Phaedra Michelle Scott. GOOD HAIR explores the science of Black hair by following the stories of three trios of women through three different time periods. The playwright has lots more to tell.

(Rich Kelley interview)

Where did the idea for GOOD HAIR come from?

I have always been interested in telling a story that centered around a natural hair journey, and how deeply personal that can be. I was inspired by the news—specifically, the story of Andrew Johnson who in 2018 was forced to cut his locks in order to participate in a wrestling match or he would have to forfeit. I thought—what other teenager is told to alter their appearance to play a game? Why is it that Black hair is policed in a way that does not happen to his white peers? I was also inspired by my own natural hair journey and the stories of Black women around me as we embarked on learning how to understand our hair.

Madame C. J. Walker

What research did you do in writing the play?

I am a huge history fan, so I spent a lot of time reading a bunch of books—Hair Story by Ayana D. Byrd, biographies of Annie Turnbo Malone and Sarah Breedlove (later known as Madame C. J. Walker); my friends who have had natural hair journeys, hairdressers, dramaturg Tatiana Godfrey, and my family. It has been a lot of conversations and independent research.

Why this play? Why now?

Hair discrimination has been a reality for many Black folks, and it wasn’t until 2019 with The Crown Act in California that this injustice has been addressed legally. New York City also has its own anti-discrimination laws based on hair that went into effect in 2019. The fact that this issue is gaining more traction, and that it deeply effects the school life and work life of so many Black people goes to show that we are only in the beginning stages of addressing this; so it makes sense to focus on a play like this now.

The play tells the stories of three trios of women in different times. Why did you choose this way of telling the story of GOOD HAIR, rather than, say, telling the stories of three of the same women at different times?

Two timelines are set in the 20th and 21st centuries, while one is set in a fantasy universe. I wanted to show the range of how hair care for Black women has evolved through science, changing standards of beauty, while also addressing how easy it is to want to change yourself in order to be accepted. It was important to me to have a lot of perspectives, because I genuinely have no answers or solutions. I am interested in pitting different ideologies against each other. I also wanted to write an “athletic” play for Black and Brown actors, one where they have the opportunity to flex those artistic muscles.

Annie Turnbo Malone

GOOD HAIR features one professor who has given a Ted Talk style lecture on Black women’s hair on YouTube and two entrepreneurs who have created and marketed hair products for Black women. Are any of these characters inspired by real women?

Yes! Pretty much every character is a hodgepodge of people I know in real life, of stories I have picked up, and people directly ripped from history—most specifically, Madame C. J. Walker and Annie Malone.

Do you sense any progress in society’s attitude toward how Black women wear their hair? Where are we now and where do we need to be?

Of course, there has been progress, and, of course, there has not been nearly enough. While this play focuses specifically on women of color and hair, there is a whole other conversation about cultural appropriation that this work does not even address. Personally, I am happy that it’s much easier to get natural hair care products at Target or by shopping online, but there is still a long road ahead in terms of becoming a truly anti-racist society, and the conversation about hair is just a part of it.

On your website, you write that your work “lies at the intersection between history, Afrofuturism, and activism.” Is there an activist component to GOOD HAIR? What do you want the audience to take away and do after watching your play?

Poster for the Crown Act — Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair —https://www.thecrownact.com/

I hope that the play inspires people to do their own research and learn more about the complicated history of Black hair. I hope that by presenting so many perspectives of women of color that it further affirms that Black women are not a monolith, and that the truth of the matter is that intersectionality is complicated, and it is our duty to learn and understand the nuances of identity.

You are a playwright and a dramaturg. Do you have to turn off the dramaturg when you are writing?

Absolutely!! I’ve had to train myself to not edit as I write, and to simply let the story come out and then put my dramaturgical brain on it. Thankfully, I have developed a way of working that helps me. I tend to underwrite, and then as I do more research and think about the overall story, I add and inject more specificity. Overall, I think they work well together, because I have the tools to understand dramatic structure, and I can inject my dramaturgical creativity into my writing. I also love dramaturgs, so it’s especially fun to work with one as a playwright. 

When did you know you were a playwright?

To tell the truth, I became a playwright right after my sister passed away. I was a dramaturg for a while, and after she passed I needed to find a way to express myself, so I turned to the medium I was most familiar with: playwriting.

Have you written any other science-related plays?

I love science fiction and fantasy, and I tend to write plays that involve time somehow, which is why there are three intersecting timelines. This is my first science-related play, and I had a lot of fun finding my way into it that makes the science accessible to me (and hopefully everyone else, haha).

What’s next for Phaedra Michelle Scott?

More writing! I have been fortunate to have the support of EST’s Youngblood, Pipeline Theater Company, as well as a few other writing projects. I am a writer for an upcoming roleplaying game by a Swedish game company, Helmgast, where I am writing the mechanics for creating intersectional characters, which has been a fun way to stretch my creative muscles.

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

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

Jake Brasch

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did THE RESERVOIR come to be?

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

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

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

You got me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jake and his grandmother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You set your play in Colorado? Why Colorado?

Rocky Mountains outside Denver (Photo: Jake Brasch)

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

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

Have you written any other science-related plays?

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

What’s next for Jake Brasch?

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

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

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

Laura Maria Censabella (Photo: Jeff Colen)

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

Take us through how BEYOND WORDS came to be.

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

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

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

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

Dr. Stuart Firestein

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Diana Reiss with dolphin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for Laura Maria Censabella?

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

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

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

Bonnie Antosh

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why lemurs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lemur Catta (Photo: Leila Adolphsen)

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

What’s next for Bonnie Antosh? 

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

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

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

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

AJ Clauss

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

What kind of research did you do?

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

Henry Gray

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

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

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

Henry Vandyke Carter, self-portrait, 1870

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

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

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

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

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

Poster for Henry Makes a Bible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for AJ Clauss?

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

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

The more you give away the more it comes back.

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

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

Amanda Quaid

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

 (Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

Samuel McKenzie

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

Why this play? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poster for the Heartbeat Opera workshop production of The Extinctionist

What’s next for Amanda Quaid?

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

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

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.

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

Susan Bernfield

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

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

Apollo 8 Lunar Orbital Plan

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

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

Frances "Poppy" Northcutt at her terminal.

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

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

A visual excerpt from the script for SIZZLE SIZZLE FLY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2019 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from January 28 through March 2 and features readings and workshop productions of ten new plays. The climax of every EST/Sloan season is the annual Mainstage Production, which this year was the world premiere of BEHIND THE SHEET by Charly Evon Simpson. Directed by Colette Robert, BEHIND THE SHEET confronts the history of a great medical breakthrough by telling the forgotten story of a community of enslaved black women who involuntarily enabled the discovery. Previews began January 9 and the show runs through March 10. Tickets can be purchased here. The First Light Festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twentieth year.  

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

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

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

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

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

 (Interview by Rich Kelley)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mostafa Tolba

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

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

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

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

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

Graph showing decline of production of fluorocarbons through 2007

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

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

Frank Rowland and Mario Molina in their lab, 1975

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graph of urban vs rural population 1950-2030

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you written other plays related to science?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominic Taylor

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

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What moved you to write THE BIOLOGY OF THE SURFACE?

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

Why this play? Why now?

Ernest Everett Just in his lab at Howard University

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

What research did you do to write your play?

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

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

Roger Arliner Young (c. 1927-1929)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Percy Julian in his chemistry lab at Howard University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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