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.
