Neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Biochemist Mandë Holford, Genomicist Christopher Mason, Playwrights Sam Chanse & Patrick Link join Science Editor Steve Mirsky at EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event

From left: Heather Berlin, Mandë Holford, Christopher Mason, Sam Chanse, Patrick Link, Steve Mirsky

WHAT MAKES A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 21 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theatre companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide. (You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage and submission guidelines here).

Every year the highlight of the EST/Sloan Project submission season is the Fall Artist Cultivation Event. At this eagerly anticipated event, a panel of scientists, science writers and playwrights engages in a far-ranging and free-wheeling discussion with an audience of prospective playwrights about “What Makes a Great Play about Science?” The 2019 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will take place at EST on Thursday, December 12 at 8 PM. The event is free and any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology is welcome to attend.   

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

This year's Artist Cultivation Event panelists include:

Dr. Heather Berlin

Dr. Heather Berlin is a cognitive neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She trained in clinical neuropsychology at Weill Cornell Medicine in the Department of Neurological Surgery and is a visiting scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the aim of developing novel treatments. She is also interested in the brain basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity. Passionate about science communication and promoting women in STEM, Dr. Berlin is a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Committee on Science and Technology Engagement with the Public, and The New York Times series TimesTalks. She co-hosts Startalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has hosted series on PBS and Discovery Channel. Dr. Berlin co-wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed off-Broadway show, Off the Top, about the neuroscience of improvisation, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, Impulse Control. She has made numerous media appearances including on the BBC, History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, Big Think, and TEDx, and was featured in the documentary film Bill Nye: Science Guy.

Dr. Mandë Holford

Dr. Mandë Holford is an Associate Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at The American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine. Her joint appointments reflect her interdisciplinary research, which goes from mollusks to medicine, combining chemistry and biology to discover, characterize, and deliver novel peptides from venomous marine snails for manipulating cellular physiology. Her laboratory investigates the power of venom to transform organisms and to transform lives when it is adapted to create novel therapeutics for treating human diseases and disorders. Dr. Holford has conducted several global fieldwork expeditions to collect venomous snails and to present her research findings. She is actively involved in science education, advancing the public understanding of science, and science diplomacy. To provide tools for the classroom, Dr. Holford co-founded Killer Snails, an award-winning EdTech XR learning games company. The mission of Killer Snails is to rethink education by creating science games and immersive experiences tailored to local environments and cultures to advance STEM learning and teaching worldwide. She is a life member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Board member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Global Science Diplomacy Roundtable and Planning Committee. Dr. Holford is also an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow. She has received several awards including being named a New Champion Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum, the prestigious Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an NSF CAREER Award, named a Breakthrough Women in Science by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and NPR’s Science Friday, and was recently named a Wings WorldQuest Women of Discovery Fellow. Dr. Holford received her Ph.D. in Synthetic Protein Chemistry from The Rockefeller University.

Dr. Christopher Mason

Dr. Christopher Mason is an Associate Professor of Genomics at Weill Cornell Medicine, as well as the Director of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, with appointments at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and Rockefeller University. The Mason laboratory develops and deploys new biochemical and computational methods in functional genomics to elucidate the genetic basis of human disease and human physiology. Dr. Mason has won the NIH’s Transformative R01 Award, the NASA Group Achievement Award, the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Alliance Young Investigator award, the Hirschl-Weill-Caulier Career Scientist Award, the Vallee Scholar Award, the CDC Honor Award for Standardization of Clinical Testing, and the WorldQuant Foundation Scholar Award.  He was named as one of the “Brilliant Ten” Scientists by Popular Science, featured as a TEDMED speaker, and called “The Genius of Genetics” by 92Y.  He has authored of co-authored more than 175 peer-reviewed papers that have been featured on the covers of Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Microbiology, and Neuron, as well as cited by the U.S. District Court and U.S. Supreme Court.  Coverage of his work has also appeared on the covers of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TIME, The LA Times, and across many media (ABC, NBC, CBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, PBS, NASA, NatGeo). He has co-founded five biotechnology start-up companies (Genome Liberty, Biotia, Onegevity Health, P-Omics, and Shanghai GeneTech) and serves as an advisor to 15 others. He lives with his daughter and wife in Brooklyn, NY.

Sam Chanse

Playwright Sam Chanse is the author of Trigger, Monument, or Four Sisters (A Sloth Play), The Opportunities of Extinction, Fruiting Bodies, The Other Instinct, What You Are Now, Lydia’s Funeral Video, about that whole dying thing, and Asian American Jesus. Her play What You Are Now about memory and trauma was featured in the EST/Sloan 2017 First Light Festival and received a 2019/2020 grant from EST/Sloan for a developmental production with The Civilians in 2020. Her work has been developed and/or produced with the Lark, Ma-Yi Theater, Cherry Lane, Leviathan Lab, Ars Nova, Broken Nose, Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan Project, and the Ojai Playwrights’ Conference, and is published by Kaya Press (Lydia’s Funeral Video) and TCG (The Kilroys List). She is a Lark Venturous Fellow, a resident playwright of New Dramatists, a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and a Rita Goldberg Playwrights' Fellow at the Lark. A former fellow at MacDowell, Cherry Lane Mentor Project, Sundance/Ucross Theatre Program, and the Playwrights Realm, she has also received residencies from Djerassi, Tofte Lake Center, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, and SPACE at Ryder Farm. Commissions include Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan, Ma-Yi/the Flea, Second Generation, Leviathan, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is an alumna of Ars Nova’s Play Group, the Civilians R&D Group, and the Lark’s New York Stage & Film Vassar Retreat.

Patrick Link

Playwright Patrick Link is the author of Headstrong, a gripping family drama about concussions and sports that was the EST/Sloan Mainstage Production in 2012, directed by William Carden, and later recorded by LA Theatre Works. His other works include The Majestic Players Storm Kansas City, Sweet Forgotten Flavor, and his Galileo Prize-winning Kinemacolor (EST/Sloan). He has also written the book for several musicals with Eric March that include Christmas in Queens, Red Hook Hotel, The Bone Wars (commissioned by EST/Sloan), and The Triple Threat. He is an alum of Youngblood and a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre.

The moderator

Steve Mirsky

Steve Mirsky is a senior editor at Scientific American. He has written the “Anti Gravity” column since 1995. Mirsky launched Scientific American’s long-form Science Talk podcast in 2006 and has been hosting it ever since. He also created the daily 60-Second Science podcast later that year and its 3000th episode will run in early 2020.  He has contributed to numerous publications and broadcast outlets, including Audubon; Wildlife Conservation; National Wildlife; Earth; Longevity; The Humanist; Men’s Fitness; American Health; Technology Review; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bulletin; Astronomy; New York Newsday; Sea Frontiers; the children’s magazines Current Science, Science World and Muse; National Public Radio; and the Medical News Network. Mirsky is also a 1978 graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

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

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

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

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

About the Panelists

Dr. Briana Walton

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

Gabrielle Foreman

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

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff).

About the Moderator

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

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

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.  

Historian Deborah Gray White, Urogynecologist Ambereen Sleemi, Playwright Charly E. Simpson join Communications Pro Ayofemi Kirby to discuss the historical & scientific context of BEHIND THE SHEET

On February 23, following the 2:00 pm matinee performance of BEHIND THE SHEET, the powerful new drama by Charly Evon Simpson, everyone is encouraged to stay for our fourth talkback about the historical and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses. Joining Charly will be Deborah Gray White, Distinguished Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, and Ambereen Sleemi, Executive Director and Surgical Director of International Medical Response, for a conversation moderated by Ayofemi Kirby, who manages all communications and publicity initiatives at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture.

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

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

About the Panelists

Professor Deborah Gray White

Deborah Gray White is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is author of the seminal book Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994; several K-12 textbooks on United States History, and Let My People Go, African Americans 1804-1860 (1999).  In 2008, she published an edited work entitled Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower, a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of black women into the historical profession and the development of the field of black women’s history. Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, a co-authored college text, is now in its second edition. As a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, White conducted research on her newest book, Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March.  She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history, and was also awarded a Doctorate in Humane Letters from her undergraduate alma mater, Binghamton University. She currently heads the “Scarlet and Black Project” which investigates Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University. With Professor Marisa Fuentes she is editor of the 2016 volume: Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History.

Dr. Ambereen Sleemi

Ambereen Sleemi is a female pelvic medicine reconstructive surgeon (urogynecologist) and trained obstetric fistula surgeon. She is Co-founder, Executive Director and Surgical Director of International Medical Response and leads a medical relief project in Puerto Rico, and fistula training programs in Malawi, Liberia and Haiti. Dr. Sleemi has served as an obstetric fistula surgeon for the Eritrean Women’s Project in Mendefera, Eritrea since 2007, and as a surgical team co-leader for Medicine in Action’s spring trip to Kingston, Jamaica as well as on the medical board. She spent six years on the executive committee of the International Society for Obstetric Fistula Surgeons (ISOFS) and is still an active member. In January, 2013, she developed the Haitian Women’s Heath Collaborative in partnership with the Department of Ob/Gyn at the National Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Charly Evon Simpson

Charly Evon Simpson is the author of BEHIND THE SHEET, this year’s EST/Sloan mainstage production. Her other plays include Jump, Scratching the Surface, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, Stained, Hottentotted, Trick of the Light, While We Wait, who we let in, or what she will, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Flea, P73’s Summer Residency, National New Play Network through its NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights Workshop and National Showcase of New Plays, and others. Jump will receive an NNPN Rolling World Premiere, with productions at Playmaker’s Rep (Chapel Hill, NC), Actor’s Express (Atlanta, GA), Milagro Theatre (Portland, OR), and Shrewd Productions (Austin, TX) in 2019-20.  She’s currently a member of WP Theater’s 2018-2020 Lab, The New Georges Jam, The Amoralists 18/19 ‘Wright Club and she’s The Pack’s current playwright-in-residence. Charly is a former member of SPACE on Ryder Farm’s The Working Farm, Clubbed Thumb’s 17/18 Early Career Writers’ Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, and Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Purchase and an engager at The Engaging Educator. 

About the Moderator

Ayofemi Kirby

Ayofemi Kirby is a communications and public engagement professional who builds mission-driven brands, engaged audiences and active communities, on and offline. She is passionate about helping individuals, multicultural communities and organizations across sectors tell powerful stories, start provocative conversations and build the relationships necessary to achieve meaningful results and measurable impact.

With more than 10 years of experience at the intersection of communications, civic engagement and culture, Ayofemi has managed online and corporate communications in the financial sector, developed award-winning programs that empowered Snake People across the country to be leaders in their communities and more active in our democracy, and led communications for the Congressional Black Caucus on Capitol Hill. She has also shaped and shifted community and media conversations about political, civic engagement, entertainment and cultural initiatives as an independent consultant.

Ayofemi currently manages all communications and publicity initiatives at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture and continues to runs her own consultancy, CODE PR GLOBAL where she has worked with SONY Pictures, the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation, the NYC Office of the Mayor, A+E Networks and others. Her work has shaped media coverage in and secured partnerships with the New York Times, USA Today, ARTNews, Teen Vogue, CBS News, Essence, Ebony, OkayAfrica, The Huffington Post, NBC, among many others.

BEHIND THE SHEET began previews on January 9 and runs through March 10 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

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. 

Anchuli Felicia King on doing research, then throwing it out, moral ambiguity, semiotic misfires, and GOLDEN SHIELD

Anchuli Felicia King

This weekend, on February 15 and 16, the EST/Sloan First Light Festival will feature two workshop performances of GOLDEN SHIELD, Anchuli Felicia King’s head-spinning, globe-spanning drama about the ethics of working for repressive regimes, the entanglements of language, the risks of legal showdowns, and the brittleness of family ties. Beginning in 2006, the play dramatizes the efforts of two Chinese-American sisters to sue an American technology giant for helping China build its Internet firewall – part of its Golden Shield Project – in a way that enables the government to identify and crack down on dissidents. But let’s have the playwright tell us more.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What inspired you to write GOLDEN SHIELD?

As a playwright, I have an ongoing obsession with the intersection of globalism and technology, and I'm always looking for potent metaphors for that intersection. Most of my plays start with me reading something in the news or hearing about an event that piques my interest, which is how GOLDEN SHIELD started. I can't really remember the first piece of journalism I read about the Yahoo or Cisco cases but I discovered them in early 2016 and instantly started researching them, without fully knowing what form that research was going to take. 

Your play is chockablock with technical terms from software and network development to legal precedents and procedures. What kind of research did you do??

Shi Tao, Chinese journalist sentenced to ten years in jail for “illegally divulging state secrets.” When charged with supplying information to Chinese authorities used to convict him, Yahoo settled out of court.

My first port of call is always to just research a ton on my own. I read public documentation on the litigation the play's based on, I read additional transcripts from civil trials, I read theses on the structure of the firewall in China, I did lots of research on different kinds of digital filtering. Basically once I feel I've done my due diligence (which is usually a couple months of research), I throw it all out and try to write a compelling piece of drama. But I'm also very lucky that my friends and family are international lawyers and software engineers for massive companies, so I can float drafts by them as I'm writing to keep checking back in about whether things sound accurate. 

Your play calls for several actors to speak Mandarin with the Translator simultaneously translating what they say into English. Why is this important to you? How did you become fluent in Chinese?

I'm absolutely not fluent in Mandarin! I studied Mandarin for around a decade but quickly lost proficiency at it when I went to college, so now I'd say it's conversational Mandarin at best. This means that the Mandarin in this draft has been a real process of collaborating with different translators and native Mandarin speaking actors. Actually, it's been fascinating because every time we've workshopped this play, we keep discovering little regionalisms that affect our Mandarin text – the difference between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese idioms, for example. 

The play concerns litigation in Texas by an American human rights lawyer suing an American software developer on behalf of mainland Chinese dissidents because the company helped the Chinese government build its Internet firewall in a way that allowed them to identify domestic subversives.  The story reminds me of two cases that the World Organization for Human Rights brought in the  United States, one against Yahoo, the other against Cisco, both accusing the companies of helping the Chinese government identify subversive Chinese. How much of your play mirrors actual cases and how much is your own invention?

Slide from a leaked internal 2002 Cisco presentation. Read more in Wired article.

The play mirrors some of the details of the actual cases brought against Cisco and Yahoo and the claims of their plaintiffs, particularly their legal grounds and precedent. But I wanted to heavily fictionalize it – for the simple reason that I wanted to create more moral ambiguity. The biggest departure from reality is what OSCIS actually does for the CCP, and the fact that Marshall single-handedly invents the multi-tiered firewall in China, which is actually a process of refinement that the Chinese government has been engaged in for decades.  

Much of the drama – and humor – in the play concerns the friction between the two Asian-American sisters, one a lawyer, the other a translator.  I understand you have an identical twin sister who happens to be a human rights lawyer. How well do you get along? How did your relationship with her inform the writing of GOLDEN SHIELD?

I have to clarify that my sister is not a human rights lawyer! Tash is an international trade lawyer. She works at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. But she's deeply invested in humanitarian issues (she worked with Muslim Advocates and Lawyers without Borders) and how you can arbitrate them through international commercial mechanisms. The relationship of the sisters in this play is actually the polar opposite of our relationship! With Julie and Eva, I wanted to find a useful mechanism to talk about inherited cultural trauma, through two characters who are grappling with their liminal status as Chinese-Americans. 

You have created a character, The Translator, who is very much the fulcrum of the play. A rich theme in the play is the difficulty of translating between languages, in this case, between Chinese and English, especially when comparable expressions don’t exist. You show this not only in the exchanges between the lawyer and the dissident but also between the American software executive and the Chinese government official. Do the problems the play confronts originate in different cultures not being able to understand and communicate with each other?

For me, the play is really about our failures to communicate effectively on all fronts – not only between different languages and cultures, but between technologies, judicial systems, family members, lovers. This is why the Translator not only translates literal text but also subtext and context, to reveal the total sum of semiotic misfires that can happen when two parties try to bridge a communicative chasm. I really hope that what people take away from the play is that the attempt to translate, as fraught as it is, is what really counts – that as multivalent and impossible as communication is, we have to keep trying because it's the best mechanism we have. 

Subsequent to this first public reading of GOLDEN SHIELD this week, there will be a full production of the play at the Melbourne Theatre Company this summer. How do you envision the EST public reading affecting the production later this year?

Hugely! The draft that comes out of the EST reading is the draft I'm about to take to Australia to workshop for the production. The EST workshop is an invaluable part of getting this play primed for production – getting to dive into the characters in more detail, refine the translation and the mechanics of the play. 

Have you written other plays on a scientific or technological subject? What tips do you have for playwrights attempting to write such a play?

Basically, all my plays are on technological subjects! My advice would be to acknowledge the complexity of the issue but don't feel beholden to it. I find my first drafts are always stuffed with research but that I end up throwing that out and searching for more useful figurative devices. The best way to unpack the complexity of a given technology is to map it onto the complexity of human beings. 

What’s next for Anchuli Felicia King?

White Pearl opens at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 10 and runs through June 15

Golden Shield will get its world premiere at the Melbourne Theatre Company on August 12 and run through September 14.

Slaughterhouse will be produced as part of the 25A Downstairs Series at the Belvoir Theatre Company in Sydney from October 16 to November 2

White Pearl will receive a production in Sydney as a co-production of the Sydney Theatre Company and Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta from October 24 to November 9.

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. 

Julie McKee on New Zealand during WWII, Maori culture, women scientists, and THE SECRET LIFE OF SEAWEED

Julie McKee

This year the EST/Sloan First Light Festival is featuring THE SECRET LIFE OF SEAWEED by Julie McKee as a satellite event at HB Playwrights Theatre, a co-production of Collider Theater and HB Studio. Performances of the production directed by Jean Randich began February 2 and run through February 16. Tickets are free and can be reserved here. Set in New Zealand in 1941, the play follows the quest of botanist Louise MacGregor and her sixteen-year-old assistant to find Pterocladia Lucida, a species of seaweed critical to the war effort. The playwright explains . . .
(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What inspired you to write THE SECRET LIFE OF SEAWEED?

I have a book called The Book of New Zealand Women: Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa and in it there is a photo taken in 1935 of Lucy B. Moore, a prominent scientist and botanist wearing boys’ shorts. Among her many achievements, she was tasked during the Second World War, to travel around parts of the NZ coast in search of Pterocladia Lucida, a seaweed needed for biomedical research. In order to succeed, she needed support from the children of the native schools of the East Coast. I thought, what an adventure that must have been.

What kind of research did you do to write your play?

Lucy B. Moore (center) with fellow botanists Harry Howard Barton Allan (left) and G. F. Papenfuss (right) in Auckland, 1949.

A ton. I found all my research about seaweed on the Internet. The history of New Zealand during WW2 was from film, documentary, books and the Internet. I grew up in New Zealand, so the Pakeha culture is second nature. Since my dad served in the Pacific, I've always been fascinated with that era. Growing up in New Zealand when I did, most of us Pakeha were horribly ignorant of the Māori experience and culture. I did a lot of homework. As Dr. Ella Henry, one of our Māori advisers put it, "I thought the dialogue accurately reflected the casual racism about Māori issues and people for the era." She and Rangimoana Taylor, actor/director and storyteller, also pointed me in the right direction regarding Māori specific matters and pronunciation. They were very helpful and I am grateful for their enthusiastic support. While on holiday in New Zealand, I followed in Lucy's footsteps from Te Kaha to Gisborne.  Of course, I was in a car, stayed in motels along the way, and conducted interviews about the history of the area when I could. She did it on foot, or in a horse-drawn cream cart and the occasional service car.  It's a remote area even today but a gorgeous trek. The coastline is stunning. 

The route from Te Kaha to Gisborne.

Why did you decide to fictionalize Moore as your character Louise MacGregor?

I fictionalized her private life as there was little I could find on her personal life.  The adventures along the way are also fictionalized; however, the purpose of the mission is actual.

Moore frequently worked with the botanical illustrator, Nancy Adams, who began working for New Zealand’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D.S.I.R.) in 1942 at the age of 16, much like Louise’s assistant, May Smith. How much of Smith is based on Adams?

Botanical artist Nancy Adams at work

Nancy Adams did indeed accompany Lucy on this wartime journey at 16, as does May. She was a talented botanical artist and worked for the D.S.I.R. as does May. But I was not able to find much about Nancy's personal life or her relationship to Lucy except that they remained lifelong friends and frequently worked together after this mission. Fact and fiction intertwine. 

The play is quite steeped in Māori culture. Was this also part of Lucy Moore’s story?

The majority of the play takes place in a predominantly Māori area. The success of the mission depended upon the participation of the local population. I couldn't tell the story without their presence.

How did THE SECRET LIFE OF SEAWEED became a satellite event of the EST/Sloan First Light Festival with numerous performances at HB Studio?

The play began as an EST/Sloan Project Commission.  Then as the play developed through the EST Playwright Unit and the HB Rehearsal Lab Project, ten performances were offered via Edith Meeks and the HB Performance Lab, directed by Jean Randich, and funded in part by Collider Theater and the EST/Sloan Project. It’s been such an opportunity. We took three short weeks to test it on its feet with a wonderful and dedicated group of artists led by the gifted Jean Randich and assisted by stage manager extraordinaire Colton Robertson. So "hold on to your hats" cries Archie as he hurtles downhill with no brakes.  

Playwrights who work on science-themed plays often find that their research turns up things both surprising and delightful that they are pleased to include in their plays. Did that happen for you in researching THE SECRET LIFE OF SEAWEED?

Pterocladia Lucida , the red seaweed used for making agar.

I was surprised to find that seaweed is the food source of the future, easily farmed, easily sustained, as long as the oceans remain healthy.  It was the first species to have sex. The etymology of the Butterfly Pea. Many things!

What do you want the audience to take away from THE SECRET LIFE OF SEAWEED?

What connected me to writing this story were the enormous adjustments and sacrifices that ordinary women make during the extraordinary times of war.  How shame and repression of grief brought on by society can warp a person's character and the choices they make. 

Other plays you’ve written have been part of the EST/Sloan First Light Festival. What was Fringe Benefits about?

Fringe Benefits is about a Reno showgirl who is approaching a certain age, the effects of gravity, and her efforts to understand the science behind it.

You also teach playwriting. What do playwrights need to know about how to write a good science-themed play? 

Develop your characters and their personal journey too, but then again, it depends on the kind of play you're writing.

School girls from Raukōkore Native School, Bay of Plenty, hanging out agar seaweed to dry in 1941.

What’s next for Julie McKee?

Will Sacrifice. New York 1996.  A mature couple's search for home, and each other during the real estate boom in the lower Catskill Mountains.  A comedy.

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. 

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

Michael Walek

On Tuesday, February 5, as part of the 2019 First Light Festival, the EST/Sloan Project is presenting the first public reading of HAVE YOU MET JANE GOODALL & HER MOTHER by Michael Walek. 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 hear from the playwright: 

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What prompted you to write HAVE YOU MET JANE GOODALL & HER MOTHER?

When I was 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. 

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

What research did you do to write your play?

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. 

Jane Goodall grooming David Greybeard, the first chimp to lose his fear of her.

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. 

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. 

Young Jane Goodall with Jubilee

Much has been made of how Jubilee, a plush toy chimpanzee Jane was given as a child, may have determined her career. Were you ever given something as a child that shaped your life?

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

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. 

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. 

Marc Acito on Wernher von Braun, Alabama in the sixties, Wagner, surrealism, the ethics and dreams of America’s Apollo program, and THE SPACE RACE

Marc Acito

On Thursday, January 31, as part of this year’s First Light Festival, the EST/Sloan Project will host a public reading of THE SPACE RACE: An American Dream by Marc Acito.  THE SPACE RACE had its first reading during last year’s First Light Festival when it had the title MAN IN THE MOON. The play opens in 1967 when 55-year-old German émigré rocket scientist Wernher von Braun is on the verge of realizing his lifelong dream of putting a man on the moon. For the past seventeen years he has been leading the development of American rocket technology in Huntsville, Alabama, first with the Army, then, in 1960, as NASA’s first director of the new Marshall Space Flight Center there . . . but this makes it sound like a straightforward story and THE SPACE RACE is anything but that. So let’s hear the playwright’s take.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

What inspired you to write THE SPACE RACE?

In order to “win” the arms race, the U.S. military recruited Nazi war criminals and enabled them to escape justice. Our rockets to the moon were fueled with the blood of thousands. Those victims deserve justice. And the corruption of American exceptionalism demands examination.

Why this play? Why now?

With the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing this year, I expect to see a lot of misinformation from parties with competing agendas. Polls show that 7% of Americans don’t believe we landed on the moon, along with 40% of Russians and 52% of Britons. The future of democracy depends on bringing the truth to light, particularly when the veracity of verifiable information suffers daily assaults.

THE SPACE RACE had its first public reading last February as part of the 2018 First Light Festival when its title was Man in the Moon. Why the title change? What’s changed in the play? What were you aiming to do in the new version?

I chose the title Man in the Moon as a reference to Wernher von Braun, with the idea that the play was about this man who got us to the moon. But when I heard the play for the first time last year, I realized it was about much more than Von Braun. The title change reflects the widening lens.

The other big takeaway from last year’s reading was how the surreal aspects didn’t have the impact of the real. Getting those elements to register has been the bulk of my work.

Many historians claim that America could never have put a man on the moon without the vision, knowledge, and inventiveness of Wernher von Braun. Yet many also question how truthful he was in describing his involvement with the Nazi war effort during World War II, especially the use of prisoner slave labor to build the German rockets. How do you want the audience to feel about him?

Wernher von Braun with President John F. Kennedy at Cape Canaveral, 1963. NASA's deputy administrator, Robert Seamans is behind von Braun

Von Braun’s complicity with evil led to one of humankind’s most sublime achievements. I want the audience to discuss and decide among itself: What should the U.S. government have done? Are some minds too essential to execute? What happens when the advancement of knowledge collides with human ethics? These questions don’t yield easy answers, but hopefully they’ll inspire some enlightening post-show discussions.

The play shows sides of Wernher von Braun that audiences may be unfamiliar with: that besides being the world’s foremost rocket scientist, that he was quite the ladies’ man, a skilled musician and music lover, and that in America he had a religious conversion to Evangelical Christianity. Did anything you discovered as part of your research about him surprise you?

Von Braun was only 35 when he converted, a fact crucial to understanding his actions in America. He also married then. While he was sexually charismatic, I believe the moon was his only mistress.

Rocket engineer Wernher von Braun (back row, second from right) and members of his Peenemunde rocket team are congratulated by Gen. Erich Fellgiebel (left), head of the German Army Information Service during WWII, for a successful V-2 rocket test in October 1942.

What surprised me most was the dramatic unity and irony of von Braun’s experiences; I don’t want to give away any plot twists, but suffice it to say if I wrote them as fiction, you’d say they were implausible. Von Braun’s life suits dramatization because there’s just enough historical record to see the man’s dimensions but not too much to impede speculation. His story has the scope of a Greek tragedy, operatic and Shakespearean in its proportions.

One of the more chilling characters in MAN IN THE MOON is Dolf Baumgarten, a survivor of the Mittelwerk prison camp where the German V-2 rockets were built. Is he based on a historic person?

Dolf is a fictional composite based on the accounts of survivors. The harrowing events he relates are all true.

MAN IN THE MOON interweaves the story of Wernher von Braun with the lives of Glory and Fix Watson. Fix is a black engineer native to Huntsville; Glory, his journalist wife, is a native of Chicago.  Were these characters based on anyone who actually worked with Von Braun? If you invented them, why?

Morgan Watson

Like Dolf, Fix is a fictional composite of the black pioneers at NASA, including Morgan Watson, who graciously allowed me to interview him. Given von Braun’s documented support of integration, I felt comfortable inventing his relationship with Fix in the absence of any account. Glory is completely fictional, though her offstage activities are with real people—the activists Dr. John Cashin and Clyde Foster.

We have so many new characters in THE SPACE RACE compared with MAN IN THE MOON: Glory now has two friends, Joan and Myrna; Maria, von Braun’s wife, is now a character; an engineering whistleblower, Thomas Baron, only briefly mentioned before, now takes the stage; and two characters, the mysterious Professor Mannfeldt and Friede, seem to have stepped out of the screen of the 1923 Fritz Lang film Woman in the Moon. And we finally have a true Wagnerian character in Erda, goddess of the Earth. What prompted you to add so many characters? Can you still work with just five actors?

We’re up to six actors now. The addition of all those roles reflects my effort to root the surreal aspects in the psychological reality of the characters. I credit Tony Kushner, who read my rewrite and encouraged me to locate the surreal landscape in the dream world of the characters.

For me this version tackles the same sobering issues as the last: von Braun’s complicity in using slave labor to build the first V-2 rockets under the Nazis; his charming, complex character; the dilemma of the black couple in considering exposing him; but the treatment, the presentation here struck me as more boldly theatrical with more music, more characters, more effects, more flights of fancy, and could there even be more Wagnerian elements in it? Was this as much fun to rework as it reads?

Scene from a film depicting prison laborers working on the V2 rockets at Mittelwerk

Welcome to my world. I reject naturalism as an artist because it doesn’t fully express my experience of life. Countless images and sounds course through our consciousness in every moment, so to see a play that only portrays people from the outside feels incomplete to me. So, yes, it is more Wagnerian—not only in its use of his operatic material, but in its conception as a gesantkuntswerk.

You incorporate some serious science into the play with discussion of the “sympathetic vibration” of the rocket and fuel tube and von Braun’s description of the “genesis of the moon.” How did you decide how much science to include in the play?

What excites me most about a narrative that requires science are the metaphors. Science allows us to understand the physical world, but its institutional language puts up a barrier best breached by poetry. In our Disinformation Age, dramatists have a moral obligation to provide and facilitate an accessible forum for ideas. Luckily, theatergoers seem to welcome an intellectual meal if it’s well-prepared.

A lot has been going in with you in the past year. Your play The Secrets of the Universe (and Other Songs) about the relationship between Albert Einstein and Marian Anderson had a full production at the Hub Theatre in Fairfax, Virginia last July. Did that live up to your expectations? Did anything about that production inform your revisions to THE SPACE RACE?

That production emboldened me as a surrealist. What was so enlightening was how audiences embraced the weird and esoteric from the very moment the play hopped out of naturalism and into the psyches of the characters. The first tier critics didn’t understand it, so they were hostile, which made me realize I need to do a better job communicating my mission as an artist. What was most gratifying was the response of black audiences. As a gay, white man I’m highly sensitive to the perils of writing about the intersectionality of oppressed minorities. So I was thrilled when, during a talkback, a black man in the audience said he was surprised to discover I was white.

How great is it that there is a German song about Alabama? At what point in the writing of MAN IN THE MOON did you realize how you were going to use the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song “Moon over Alabama” (aka “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)”)?  

The idea came very late in the process, which I find astonishing considering I did my college thesis on Weill. I wrote the play while listening to Wagner, occasionally switching to Haydn’s Creation. When I got the idea to begin the play with “Fly Me to the Moon” in Russian, I instantly thought of using “Moon Over Alabama” and “Stars Fell on Alabama.”

You’ve developed plays and musicals with many different theatrical organizations. How is the EST/Sloan Project play development process different?

As someone who coaches writers, I’m shocked at how rude and insensitive some theater professionals can be when giving notes. Linsay Firman and Graeme Gillis do it right. They organize their thoughts into a digestible size; they ask legitimate questions rather than question-shaped opinions; they focus on what resonates for them as much as what eludes; and they truly seem to hold writers in high esteem.

What’s next for Marc Acito?

A complete departure. I’m back to comedy roots directing a staged concert at the York Theater of the little-known Lerner and Loewe musical The Day Before Spring, which I adapted. It’s like a Doris Day/Rock Hudson romcom—February 9 through 17—the perfect date night for Valentine’s Day.

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. 

Portions of this interview appeared on this blog previously when MAN IN THE MOON had a reading during the 2018 First Light Festival.

Historian Marisa Fuentes, Urogynecologist Ambereen Sleemi, Public Health Specialist Erin Anastasi & Playwright Charly E. Simpson join Actor Naomi Lorrain to discuss the context of BEHIND THE SHEET

From left: Marisa Fuentes, Ambereen Sleemi, Erin Anastasi, Charly Evon Simpson, Naomi Lorrain

On February 2, following the 2:00 pm matinee performance of BEHIND THE SHEET, the powerful new drama by Charly Evon Simpson, everyone is encouraged to stay for the third and final talkback about the historical and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, especially the history of gynecological surgical techniques, the rights of enslaved women to be used for experiments, what urgent gynecological concerns exist today in the developing world, and much more. Joining Charly will be Marisa J. Fuentes, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at Rutgers University, Ambereen Sleemi, Executive Director and Surgical Director of International Medical Response, and Erin Anastasi, Coordinator of the Campaign to End Fistula at the United Nations Population Fund, for a conversation moderated by actor and research scholar Naomi Lorrain (Philomena in the play).

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

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

About the Panelists

Professor Marisa J. Fuentes

Marisa J. Fuentes is the Presidential Term Chair in African American History and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at Rutgers University—New Brunswick. Her scholarship brings together cultural studies, critical historiography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World. Professor Fuentes is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) which won the Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize, the Berkshires Conference of Women’s Historians First Book Prize, and the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She is also the co-editor of Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I (Rutgers University Press, 2016), and the “Slavery and the Archive” special issue in History of the Present (November 2016).  

Dr. Ambereen Sleemi

Ambereen Sleemi is a female pelvic medicine reconstructive surgeon (urogynecologist) and trained obstetric fistula surgeon. She is Co-founder, Executive Director and Surgical Director of International Medical Response and leads a medical relief project in Puerto Rico, and fistula training programs in Malawi, Liberia and Haiti. Dr. Sleemi serves as an obstetric fistula surgeon for the Eritrean Women’s Project in Mendefera, Eritrea since 2007, and as a surgical team co-leader for Medicine in Action’s spring trip to Kingston, Jamaica as well as on the medical board. She spent six years on the executive committee of the International Society for Obstetric Fistula Surgeons (ISOFS) and is still an active member. In January, 2013, she developed the Haitian Women’s Heath Collaborative in partnership with the Department of Ob/Gyn at the National Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Erin Anastasi with children in northern Uganda (Gulu district) where she worked on a project with MSF/Doctors Without Borders.

Erin Anastasi is Coordinator of the Campaign to End Fistula and Technical Specialist for Sexual & Reproductive Health (SRH)/Obstetric Fistula in the Technical Division at the United Nations Population Fund. In 2017, the United Nations Federal Credit Union Foundation awarded Erin its Women’s Empowerment Award for her leadership of the Campaign.  She received her doctorate in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at the University of London and her Master of Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Launched in 2003, the Campaign to End Fistula now consists of over 100 global partners working in more than 55 countries across Africa, Asia and the Arab region. In each country it focuses on prevention by increasing access to quality maternal health care services; treatment, from training doctors in fistula surgery to equipping and upgrading fistula centers; and rehabilitation/reintegration, including emotional, economic, and social support.   

Charly Evon Simpson

Charly Evon Simpson is the author of BEHIND THE SHEET, this year’s EST/Sloan mainstage production. Her other plays include Jump, Scratching the Surface, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, Stained, Hottentotted, Trick of the Light, While We Wait, who we let in, or what she will, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Flea, P73’s Summer Residency, National New Play Network through its NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights Workshop and National Showcase of New Plays, and others. Jump will receive an NNPN Rolling World Premiere, with productions at Playmaker’s Rep (Chapel Hill, NC), Actor’s Express (Atlanta, GA), Milagro Theatre (Portland, OR), and Shrewd Productions (Austin, TX) in 2019-20.  She’s currently a member of WP Theater’s 2018-2020 Lab, The New Georges Jam, The Amoralists 18/19 ‘Wright Club and she’s The Pack’s current playwright-in-residence. Charly is a former member of SPACE on Ryder Farm’s The Working Farm, Clubbed Thumb’s 17/18 Early Career Writers’ Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, and Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Purchase and an engager at The Engaging Educator. 

About the Moderator

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff).

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

BEHIND THE SHEET began previews on January 9 and runs through February 10 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder on what photographs miss, Rochester in 1963, finding a voice, and WHAT LOOKS LIKE PRETTY

Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder

On Monday, January 28, as part of the 2019 First Light Festival, the EST/Sloan Project is presenting the first public reading of WHAT LOOKS LIKE PRETTY, Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s new play about the intersection of race, the science of capturing images, and business ethics. When an African-American girl goes missing in 1963, colleagues Gloria and Charlie struggle to get a photograph the police can use, and begin to question who gets seen and who is invisible. 

As she traveled east from Tennessee, where she is the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South, Elyzabeth stopped a few moments to answers our questions.    

 What inspired you to write WHAT LOOKS LIKE PRETTY? 

A Kodak “Shirley” card from the 1960s

Several years ago, I read an article about the Kodak Shirley cards which had been used for color correction in the labs. The photograph was always of a fair-skinned white woman and across the bottom of the photograph they would stamp "NORMAL". It made me think about how visual representations of beauty and "normalcy" shape our perceptions and control the narrative that is created about those who might not fit within that norm.

 What research did you do to prepare to write the play? Did you work with a technical consultant to get the scientific details right?

 In the fall of 2017 I received a research grant to travel to Rochester to view the Kodak archives. It turned out to be a terrifying experience, because the more I read, the more I realized just how complicated the issue actually was. You have the racial bias that influenced what was created in the lab, but you also have to consider how light functions and how our eyes process color and light. I left feeling overwhelmed. 

 OK, that covers research on the science. How about research on the characters?

 I was really struggling to find Gloria's voice in this play; then I was asked to participate in the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's State of the South tour. We put four playwrights, the artistic director, and a filmmaker in a van and spent 10 days touring the Southeast, cities and tiny towns, across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia, hosting town hall discussions about the changing face of Southern identity. American Theatre did an article on our trip. I heard so many people talk about feeling invisible in their community and the efforts being made to be seen.  Those conversations really got to the heart of Gloria's struggle. You can watch many of these interviews in the video we created afterward: “The State of the South.”

 You set your play in 1963? Why that year?

The Kodak Instamatic 100 from 1963

I really struggled with deciding on the time period. The Shirley cards have been used for years.  However, the Kodak Instamatics were first released in the early 60s and that’s when color photography started to become the norm. The technology was becoming increasingly common and accessible. It was also such a volatile time in our country in terms of race relations. I thought that made for a powerful backdrop. The African-American community was fighting not just for equality, but for visibility, and here you had this new technology that was working against that.  It was also a pivotal time for race relations in Rochester. The African-American population was growing and the city was increasingly divided. The following year all of that tension erupted in the biggest race riot in the city's history.   

You seem to have tapped a rich thematic vein in writing a play about how photography has shaped how we see – and don’t see – each other. And how we remember. Has writing this play changed how you look at photographs? At cameras? 

The way we consume photography has changed dramatically since color photography became mainstream.  It is instant, it is abundant, and it can be manipulated more than ever. Now that everyone has a camera on their phone, we are seeing stories unfold from multiple angles. It's a reminder that a photo can capture an image, but it doesn't necessarily tell the whole story.

Have you written any other plays on scientific subjects?

New startup Hyperlive claims it has an algorithm that can predict hits. See Hyperlive.fm

My play, A Requiem for August Moon, was my first experience writing a play based on a scientific theory. By focusing on a Ph.D. student who develops an algorithm for predicting a hit song, it explores the relationship between art and science.

 Do you have any special advice to give to someone writing a science-themed play?

 The biggest challenge I always face is finding a way to blend the science with the personal. An audience isn't going to be able to invest emotionally in the science, but they will invest in a character who is wrestling with its consequences.  

 When did you know you were a playwright?

 I spent a lot of time as a kid writing monologues and short plays. I started doing local theatre in the fourth grade and fell in love with it. I always knew I wanted to work in the theatre, but I think I was always aware that I wasn't really an actor. I saw Madeleine George's "The Most Massive Woman Wins" at the Young Playwrights Festival at the Public when I was 17 and that's when I realized that maybe I could write plays, too. Wendy Wasserstein was there that day. I worked up the nerve to talk to her and after I poured my heart out, she told me to go home and write a play. So I did.

 What’s next for Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder?

 I'm working on another play, The Light of the World, which explores our relationship with Confederate iconography.  I'm also researching a new play about service workers at the Atlanta airport and the exploitation of minimum wage employees.

 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 February 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. 

Charly Evon Simpson on medical experiments on slaves, the birth of gynecology, lost voices, and the creation of BEHIND THE SHEET

Charly Evon Simpson

On January 9, 2019, the world premiere of BEHIND THE SHEET, the powerful new drama by Charly Evon Simpson, began previews at the Ensemble Studio Theatre for a run initially scheduled to end on February 3, but extended to February 10 due the entire initial run being sold out a week after its January 17 opening. It has since been extended twice more, to February 17 and then to March 10. Rave reviews greeted its opening, most notably by Ben Brantley in The New York Times who described the play as “a deeply affecting new historical drama” and a “meticulously assembled story of a dark chapter in medical experimentation.” BEHIND THE SHEET is the 2019 Mainstage Production of the EST/Sloan Project, which funded the development of the play and featured it as part of its 2018 First Light Festival.

 In this exclusive interview for the EST blog, Charly shares the story of how the play came to be.

 (Interview by Rich Kelley) 

 How did BEHIND THE SHEET come to be? How has it changed through different drafts?

Statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims on Fifth Avenue prior to its removal

 A few years ago, I read an article about a group of women protesting at a statue of J. Marion Sims. As someone interested in how black women’s bodies have been seen and treated throughout history, I found myself trying to learn more about Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy (the three enslaved women we know Sims experimented on) and how slavery intersected with the rise of gynecology. When it came time to apply for an EST/Sloan commission, my brain immediately went back to this history.

The play has changed since the proposal. For example, my first proposal included a more contemporary piece—a black woman gynecologist having to reconcile this history of her field. I soon decided to just focus on the history. Characters have come and gone, scenes have been cut and added, and history has made its way in and out of the story. My first draft was very true to what we know happened. The draft for last year’s First Light Festival allowed a little more room for my voice and imagination, while staying true to the basic facts.

Yes, it was just last April in the 2018 First Light Festival that BEHIND THE SHEET had its first public reading. How has the play changed since?

cover of program for BEHIND THE SHEET

I've lived with the characters for another eight months so I've gotten to know them better. I've gotten to know the play more. I've been pushed further by those helping me strengthen the piece. J. Marion Sims' statue was removed from Central Park. There's been more media attention about black maternal mortality rates that has also brought more attention to the story of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. So, in many ways, it feels like a lot has changed on and off the page. That said, there are scenes that have only changed in the slightest of ways and there are scenes that are completely unrecognizable. As we stepped into rehearsals and now into tech and as we began to see the characters and world truly lived in, new themes and complications appeared and continue to appear. I think (I hope) the play has become a little stronger and a little clearer.  

As you say, the play tells a story strongly inspired by the work of J. Marion Sims, a physician often referred to as the "father of gynecology" who practiced medicine in Alabama in the 1840s. He is credited with inventing the speculum and, most notoriously, trying out new gynecological surgical procedures on slaves without using anesthesia. But you don't use his name for your main character, who you call George, and you give the female characters names different from the ones we know from history. Why the name changes? How is the story in the play different from Sims’?

I’ve gone back and forth on the name changes. And, you never know, perhaps the name changes won’t exist in a future draft, but for right now, it allows me some distance from the real story. It allows me to play as a writer in a way that I wasn’t able to when I was using their real names and really focused on getting every historical detail right. With the name changes, I am acknowledging that some of this is fiction. It is historical fiction. I am very aware that we don’t know what Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy were thinking or saying. I have J. Marion Sims’ book, for example, and what he says about them, but I don’t have their words. And I didn’t want to put words in their mouths. I want to shed light on this history and I want to give voice to the experience from the women’s perspective. For me, it is easier to explore the possibility of their perspectives without using their real names. That said, we make a point at the end of the play to bring it back to Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and J. Marion Sims. I don’t want to lose them or ignore them. I want the audience to know their names.

“J. Marion Sims: Gynecologic Surgeon,” painting by Robert Thom, from the Great Moments in Medicine series, shows Sims with Anarcha, as Betsey and Lucy look on.

Why this play? Why now?

In December 2017, ProPublica published an article entitled “Nothing Protects Black Women from Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth.” The article is heartbreaking and shows how much more at risk black women are when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. Education, income…when it comes to black women successfully carrying a child to term and surviving the childbirth and weeks after, it seems nothing is protecting us. In February 2018, Serena Williams shared her own struggles and complications after giving birth. There is a long history of our physical pain being ignored. There is a long history of black women being used for medical innovation while at the same time being ignored by medicine. This history, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, has influenced our current medical systems. And it is important to know the history so that we can make strides away from it. 

Women of all races are fighting for their reproductive rights and their healthcare right now, and I think it is important to acknowledge that some women have to fight particular fights that their counterparts do not. This is one of the fights. 

Dr. J. Marion Sims

What kind of research did you do to write BEHIND THE SHEET?

At first, I didn’t have a consultant. I read J. Marion Sims’ book, The Story of My Life. I read numerous articles, listened to talks (like "Remembering Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey: The Mothers of Modern Gynecology" on NPR) and parts of books like, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A Washington. I read Patient. by Bettina Judd which is a book of poetry intertwining her experience as a patient with the experiences of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy (as well as other black women who found themselves in the role of patient under racist conditions). I went to talks. Then I had to stop researching and just write the play. I wanted to respect and honor the history, but I also knew I was creating a piece of fiction and so I had to find a balance. 

Over the past year, you have been working with a consultant, Evelynn Hammonds, a historian of science at Harvard. What has that process been and how has it informed and changed the play?

Professor Evelynn Hammonds, who participated in a talkback about the play on January 19, 2019.

Speaking with Evelynn Hammonds was incredibly helpful. Dr. Hammonds highlighted some details about the world/reality of the play that I hadn't gleaned from the books and articles I had read. She turned me on to Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens, a deeply researched, devastating book I highly recommend. Dr. Hammonds really made clear how different our understanding of surgery is now as compared to then. Doctors weren't in white coats. Keeping tools sterilized wasn't a primary concern. There weren't operating rooms as we think of them. Medicine had a long way to go to resemble what we think of it as. Dr. Hammonds took me through the history of slavery, of using black bodies for medical progress, and the inherent quandary that existed within those. On the one hand, using black people for experimentation was useful because they were human beings and therefore had bodies like those of white people, but on the other hand, the experimentation on black people was considered okay by many due to the fact that black people weren't given humanity in the same way white people were. Dr. Hammonds reminded me that first and foremost Dr. J. Marion Sims, and other doctors of that time period, had a question that needed answering. The play grew in leaps and bounds after my talk with her.

BEHIND THE SHEET features five black slave women and one black slave man. How did you come to decide how many different black slave voices you wanted to dramatize? Did the number or the kind of voices change over time?

To be honest, I’m not sure. It just happened. I started with only three black women, but also wanted to somehow honor the other women Sims experimented on whose names we don’t know. So I felt free to move away from the three women and add the voices that came to me. 

There is an article in The Journal of Medical Ethics that states that "Although enslaved African American women certainly represented a ‘vulnerable population’ in the 19th century American South, the evidence suggests that Sims's original patients were willing participants in his
surgical attempts to cure their affliction." What do you make of this statement?

My first instinct is that, sure, if you are in pain and someone offers you a possible way out of that pain, chances are you might be willing to agree to experiments aimed at curing you. That said, “willing” is a…complicated word to use in reference to enslaved people. The power dynamic alone complicates any ideas around the word “willing”. What does willing even mean when your rights have been stripped away and your body is often being used in service of other people? When one does not own your own body, and when your worth is attached to said body, how does consent work? If any of them said “no,” how do we think their owners may have reacted? Also, if there was any notion of willingness and if it was respected at first, was there any room for that “willingness” to end? When Sims took on the financial burden of taking care of these women who were “unfit” to do much of what was expected to them, are we sure he would have been willing to stop? Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and the other women—along with J. Marion Sims—didn’t know it would take numerous surgeries to find a cure for fistulas. If Anarcha wanted to stop at surgery 15, would she have been able to? What may have been done to “convince" her to keep going? 

A scene from the EST production of BEHIND THE SHEET. PIctured: Nia Calloway, Joel Ripka, Naomi Lorrain, Stephen James Anthony, Cristina Pitter (Photo::Jeremy Daniel Photography)

We have a tendency to want to make our history seem way more light, bright, and friendly than it actually is. History is complicated. I’d rather we live in the complications than ignore them. 

What do you want the audience to take away from BEHIND THE SHEET?

When director Colette Robert first read the play, she said she had to put it down because it made her stomach hurt. I don’t want to cause people pain, but I do hope the audience feels the discomfort, feels the complicatedness, feels the pain that is intertwined in our history. You can be grateful there is a cure for fistulas. You can also be disappointed that it was found at the expense of black women’s bodies. Holding those two feelings inside is possible and it is messy and it is uncomfortable and I want us to do it anyway. I hope the audience walks away feeling that messiness, thinking about that discomfort, and wondering what systems we may have in place that continue this history.

Can you describe the experience of seeing actors embody your characters onstage? They’ve been in your head for years and now, suddenly, they are onstage. What is that like for you?

A scene from the EST production of BEHIND THE SHEET. Pictured: Amber Reauchean Williams, Jehan O. Young. (Photo::Jeremy Daniel Photography)

I can't really describe it. It is like seeing a dream in front of you. I feel so many emotions that I get overloaded and feel nothing...everything and nothing. But then it hits me that this play, my play, is not just mine anymore. It is the cast's, the crew's, the design team's play too. I created the foundation, but they are making it a living, breathing thing. And that's beautiful and I'm so grateful.

You have been a member of EST's Youngblood program.  What impact did being a member have on your writing?

I have to say that I think the biggest impact for me was not on my writing, but on my understanding and participation in the theater community. I became a member of Youngblood only two months after moving back to NYC. While I knew a few people from college and high school doing theater in the city, being in Youngblood allowed me to meet a wide variety of actors, directors, writers, stage managers, etc. Many of my first theater opportunities came from people I met at EST. They helped me find my footing and place and continue to even after nearly two years out of the group. 

April Mae Davis and Adam Poole in Playmakers Repertory production of Jump (Photo: Huth Photo)

2019 is opening big for you. Beside BEHIND THE SHEET, your play Jump just opened at Playmakers in North Carolina and, also this month, your high school, Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, honored you with a production of Hottentotted. And I believe that as part of its National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere Jump is having three other productions this year: at Milagro in Portland in March, with Shrewd Productions in Austin in May, and at Actor’s Express in Atlanta in June. Big congrats! Is there a story that explains why all this is happening?

Haha. Thank you! Short answer: I have no idea. Longer answer is that I've received a lot of support from old friends, mentors, and teachers and from organizations like the National New Play Network and all that support is coming together this January and the first half of 2019. My family and close friends would remind me that I've worked hard for this and that work is paying off. I'm trying to listen to them. It still hasn't hit me really and I don't know how to process it. This year is going to be like no other and I'm just trying to stay calm and not succumb to my anxiety.

Do you find that your plays inform each other?

Oh yes. I notice that I become obsessed with certain themes and images. And often my plays will show different sides of the themes and images. For example, I'm clearly interested in gynecology right now. BEHIND THE SHEET shows the history of it and my play form of a girl unknown, which I started writing a few months after I started BEHIND THE SHEET, focuses on a 12-year-old black girl around the time she gets her first period. A new play I'm working on came to be after reading articles about how the intersection of racism and sexism is affecting black people. I also have a trio of plays that all have elements of Westerns and the West. Who knows why...but clearly it takes a while for me to work through themes and ideas.

BEHIND THE SHEET started previews on January 9 and runs through March 10. Purchase tickets here.

Portions of this interview appeared previously on this blog when BEHIND THE SHEET had its first reading at the 2018 First Light Festival.

You can hear more from Charly in her interview with Christie Taylor on the January 22 Science Friday podcast.  

The schedule for the 2019 First Light Festival has just been published. Reserve your ticket here.

Historian Deirdre Cooper Owens, Gynecologist Nerys Benfield and Director Colette Robert join Actor/Scholar Naomi Lorrain to discuss slavery, the birth of gynecology in America, and BEHIND THE SHEET

From left: Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens, Dr. Nerys Benfield, Colette Robert, Naomi Lorrain

On January 26, following the 2:00 pm matinee performance of BEHIND THE SHEET, the powerful new drama by Charly Evon Simpson, everyone is encouraged to stay for what promises to be a provocative discussion of the many issues the play addresses, especially the history of gynecological surgical techniques, the rights of enslaved women to be used for experiments, race and gender relations in nineteenth-century America, and much more. Joining the play’s director Colette Robert will be Deirdre Cooper Owens, Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY, and author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, and Nerys Benfield, Associate Professor and the Director of Family Planning in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women’s Health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine for a conversation moderated by actor and research scholar Naomi Lorrain (Philomena in the play).

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

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

About the Panelists

Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens

Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens is Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY in Queens, New York and an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer.  She has served as an American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology Fellow in Washington, D.C. and is a board member for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (UGA Press, 2017) won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the OAH as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history. Professor Cooper Owens is also the Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the country’s oldest cultural institution​. In the fall of 2019, she will join the University of Nebraska, Lincoln’s Department of History as the inaugural Linda & Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and the Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program. Copies of Medical Bondage will be available for sale—and signing by the author—following the talkback.

Dr. Nerys Benfield

Dr. Nerys C. Benfield is an Associate Professor and the Director of Family Planning, the Fellowship in Family Planning, and the Global Women's Health Program at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. She is a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist in Bronx, New York and is affiliated with Montefiore Medical Center. Her research interests include the integration of contraceptive counseling, access, and distribution into medical care for high-risk women both domestically and internationally, uro-genital fistula, and clinical training and health technologies in low-resource settings. Dr. Benfield has worked in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo since 2008 where she has developed an academic collaborative research and clinical training program with research interests that include the integration of contraceptive counseling, access, and distribution into medical care for high-risk women, uro-genital fistula, and methods to optimize evidence-based clinical training and the use of health technologies such as information and communication technologies (ICT) and ultrasound in low-resource settings.

Colette Robert

Colette Robert is the director of the world premiere production of BEHIND THE SHEET by Charly Evon Simpson (New York Times Critic’s Pick) at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Her recent directing credits include: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (NYU Grad Acting), Mary’s Wedding (Chester Theatre Company), Big Love (Sarah Lawrence College), How My Grandparents Fell in Love (EST, New York Times Critic's Pick), What Every Girl Should Know (NYU/Stella Adler Studio), Hottentotted (The Tank, Ars Nova/ANT Fest), The Mountaintop (Chester Theatre Company), Icons/Idols (The New Ohio/Ice Factory Festival), Flops, Failures, and Fiascos (The Civilians), and When Last We Flew (Diversionary Theatre and FringeNYC, GLAAD Media Award). As a playwright, her play The Harriet Holland Social Club Presents the 84th Annual Star-Burst Cotillion in the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel has been developed with Fuller Road Artist Residency, New Georges, Mabou Mines, and The Drama League. Colette is a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, a co-facilitator of the New Georges Jam, and an adjunct lecturer in the Humanities department at Hunter College. 

About the Moderator

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff)

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

BEHIND THE SHEET began previews on January 9 and runs through February 10 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Historian Evelynn Hammonds and Urogynecologist Lauri Romanzi join Playwright Charly Evon Simpson and Historian Jennifer L. Morgan to discuss medical experiments, lost voices, and BEHIND THE SHEET

From left: Professor Evelynn Hammonds, Dr. Lauri Romanzi, Charly Evon Simpson, Professor Jennifer L. Morgan

On January 19, following the 2:00 pm matinee performance of BEHIND THE SHEET, the powerful new drama by Charly Evon Simpson, audiences are encouraged to stay for what promises to be a lively discussion of many of the issues the play addresses, especially the history of gynecological surgical techniques, the rights of enslaved women to be used for experiments, race and gender relations in nineteenth-century America, and much more. Joining playwright Charly Evon Simpson will be Evelynn Hammonds, Chair, the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, and urogynecologist and fistula surgeon Lauri Romanzi for a conversation moderated by Jennifer L. Morgan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis & History at New York University.

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

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

About the Panelists

Professor Evelynn Hammonds

Professor Evelynn Hammonds is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She is currently Chair of the Department of the History of Science and Director of the Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard.  Prof. Hammonds was the first Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University (2005-2008).  From 2008-2103 she served as Dean of Harvard College. Professor Hammonds’ areas of research include the histories of science, medicine and public health in the United States; race and gender in science studies; feminist theory and African American history. She is the author of Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 2002), and, most recently, with Rebecca Herzig, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (MIT Press, 2008.) Professor Hammonds’ current work focuses on the intersection of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race in the United States.

Dr. Lauri Romanzi

Dr. Lauri Romanzi is an international fistula surgeon, urogynecologist and an advisor to the Office of Global Women’s Health of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Her international work includes academic appointment through Yale University to Rwanda’s Human Resources for Health, as well as long-term relationships with Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and with Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Somaliland.  She has worked in West Africa onboard Mercy Ship, throughout sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia as an academic collaborator to national and international healthcare organizations, and as technical consultant to the United Nations Population Fund for development of  “End Fistula” strategic plans for Nepal, Afghanistan and Eritrea.  Within the United States, she collaborates with global health organizations to advocate on Capitol Hill for effective fistula legislation. In addition to  academic publications, she has authored works to inform the public, including Plumbing and Renovations, The Good In Bed Guide to Pelvic Organ Prolapse, and the chapter “Sexual Violence: Genital Fistula and Conflict” for the book Operation Crisis: Surgical Care in the Developing World during Conflict and Disaster.

Charly Evon Simpson

Charly Evon Simpson is the author of BEHIND THE SHEET, this year’s EST/Sloan mainstage production. Her other plays include Jump, Scratching the Surface, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, Stained, Hottentotted, Trick of the Light, While We Wait, who we let in, or what she will, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Flea, P73’s Summer Residency, National New Play Network through its NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights Workshop and National Showcase of New Plays, and others. Jump will receive an NNPN Rolling World Premiere, with productions at Playmaker’s Rep (Chapel Hill, NC), Actor’s Express (Atlanta, GA), Milagro Theatre (Portland, OR), and Shrewd Productions (Austin, TX) in 2019-20.  She’s currently a member of WP Theater’s 2018-2020 Lab, The New Georges Jam, The Amoralists 18/19 ‘Wright Club and she’s The Pack’s current playwright-in-residence. Charly is a former member of SPACE on Ryder Farm’s The Working Farm, Clubbed Thumb’s 17/18 Early Career Writers’ Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, and Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Purchase and an engager at The Engaging Educator.

About the Moderator

Professor Jennifer L. Morgan

Professor Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair.  She is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in America (University of Illinois Press, 2016).  Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in in the Black Atlantic world.  Her most recent journal articles include “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Trans-Atlantic Passages” in History of the Present and “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism” in Social Text.  In addition to her archival work as an historian, Professor Morgan has published a range of essays on race, gender, and the process of “doing history,” most notably “Experiencing Black Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007). She is currently at work on a project that considers colonial numeracy, racism and the rise of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic world tentatively entitled “Accounting for the Women in Slavery.”  Morgan teaches courses on the history of slavery, on race and reproduction, and on comparative feminist theory and praxis. 

BEHIND THE SHEET began previews on January 9 and runs through February 10 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

A Note on the Scientific & Historical Context of BEHIND THE SHEET

In the spirit of the EST/Sloan Project’s commitment to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact in our lives,” we offer this essay on some of the scientific and historical background to BEHIND THE SHEET by Charly Evon Simpson, the 2019 EST/Sloan mainstage production. BEHIND THE SHEET begins previews on January 9 and runs through March 10. You can purchase tickets here.

Background essay by Rich Kelley

The first Women’s Hospital in America is thought to be the four-story, 20-bed institution that used to stand at Madison Avenue and 29th Street in New York City, founded by Dr. J. Marion Sims in 1855 where he operated on ailing white women. That claim, however, ignores the two-story, eight-bed “sick house” Sims had set up on a small slave farm in Mount Meigs, Alabama, where from 1844 through 1849 he performed surgical experiments on between 10 and 17 enslaved women, most of them suffering from what we now call obstetric fistulas. 

Left, First Woman’s Hospital in New York City, 1857; Right, Dr. Sims’ first women’s hospital, Montgomery, Alabama (photographed in 1895 by Edward Souchon. Courtesy of the Reynolds Historical Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham)

Dr. Sims had come to Alabama in 1840, at the age of 27, to open a new medical practice. He had closed his first practice in South Carolina after his first two patients, infants, had died, probably from cholera. Sims quickly developed a reputation as a skilled surgeon. In those days bleeding to death was a constant danger during surgery and Sims describes in his memoirs how he relied on speed in the surgical area to save his patients.

Sims’ speculum

While widely known as the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” Dr. J. Marion Sims was quite frank in his memoirs about his initial distaste for the field: “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” Little was known of female anatomy at the time and, frustrated by what he couldn’t see in 1845 during his first case of an obstetric fistula, Sims turned a pewter spoon into a kind of duck-billed retractor. Describing the first use of the “Sims speculum,” he wrote, “I saw everything as no man had ever seen before. The fistula was as plain as the nose on a man’s face.” 

What he saw led Sims to believe he could find a way to repair a devastating condition that had plagued women for centuries. “I said at once, ‘Why cannot these things be cured?’” The case at hand involved the pregnancy of Anarcha, a seventeen-year-old slave girl who had been in labor for three days when Sims was called. He was not able to save the baby, and, days later, he observed that she had developed both kinds of obstetric fistulas: a vesico-vaginal fistula and a rectal-vaginal fistula. These can occur during long, obstructed labors when the infant’s head is too large to pass through the pelvic canal. The infant’s head traps the soft tissues of the pelvis up against the pelvic bone, cutting off the blood supply. When labor continues for several days, the tissues die. In a vesico-vaginal fistula, the wall between the bladder and the vagina breaks down and creates a hole, leading to uncontrollable urine leakage. In a rectal-vaginal fistula, the wall between the rectum and the vagina breaks, causing fecal leakage. The ensuing incontinence often produces infections, strong odors, and, over time, the painful inflammation and scarring of the inner legs. Fistula patients quite often become ostracized from family and friends, depressed recluses, unable to live in their homes.

“J. Marion Sims: Gynecologic Surgeon,” painting by Robert Thom, from the Great Moments in Medicine series, shows Sims with Anarcha, as Betsey and Lucy look on.

To test his idea, Sims needed more patients with the same condition. We know from his records the names of two others, Betsey and Lucy. As Sims writes, “I made this proposition to the owners of the negroes: If you will give me Anarcha and Betsey for experiment, I agree to perform no experiment or operation on either of them to endanger their lives, and will not charge a cent for keeping them, but you must pay their taxes and clothe them.”

He kept them for five years. Each had a fistula and was experimented on several times, Anarcha perhaps as many as thirty times. When two years passed without a breakthrough, the white colleagues who had assisted Sims drifted away and he had to train his slaves to assist him in the experiments, including restraining patients during surgery, which was performed without anesthetic. Many became addicted to the opium he gave them to ease their pain.

Illustration from a contemporary medical textbook shows patient in “Sims position”

By continually operating on these women, Sims perfected many of his techniques. To improve his ability to visualize the fistula, he invented the “Sims position,” when the patient lies on her left side with her left leg straight but flexing her right knee and hip, pulling the right leg up.

Sims eventually realized he needed something stronger to hold the repair. On June 21, 1849, he used fine silver wire on Anarcha for the first time. On day seven after the operation he re-examined her and found that the fistula had healed perfectly. Sims was ebullient: “I realized that in fact at last my efforts had been blessed with success and that I had made perhaps one of the most important discoveries of the age for the relief of suffering humanity.”

Sims would go on to a storied career as a surgeon in New York and Europe, but questions continue to rage about his contention that his patients consented to his experiments. Sims defenders make the case that these women had much to gain from these operations given the crippling effects of fistula and that no other treatment existed.

In Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, historian Deirdre Cooper Owens presses the case that we understand Sims in his historical context:

“Gynecological surgeons during the early and mid-nineteenth century were neither exceptionally cruel nor sadistic physicians who enjoyed butchering black women’s bodies, as some scholars have argued. They were elite white men who lived in an era when scientific racism flourished. Ideas about black inferiority were established and widely believed, as was the underlying assumption about black people’s intelligence. Black women, particularly those who were enslaved, were a vulnerable population that doctors used because of easy accessibility to their bodies. Further, the value of black women’s reproductive labor demanded that it be “fixed” when it was seen as “broken” by those who depended on their labor.”

Many question why Sims did not use any anesthetic in his operations on slave women but later did so in New York when his clientele were mostly white women. Some contend that Sims believed that African American women had a higher tolerance for pain. Additionally, when he began his experiments in the 1840s, Sims may not have had full knowledge of what anesthetics were available. The first public lectures about nitrous oxide and diethyl ether did not take place until 1845 in Boston and their use did not become common in surgical practice until the 1850s. But even in the 1850s, Sims remained skeptical about the use of anesthesia. In a lecture to The New York Academy of Medicine in 1857, Sims remarked that the Sims position “permits the use of anesthetics if desired, but I never resort to them in these operations, because they are not painful enough to justify the trouble. “

Owens’ book presents an even-handed account, but importantly, much of the book turns our attention and appreciation to the unheralded experiences and contributions of the women Sims and others experimented on:

“Beginning with those nearly ten black bondwomen who labored under Sims as leased chattel, patients, and nurses, they serve as the counter to Sims’s designation as ’father’. They are the rightful ‘mothers’ of this branch of medicine.  . . . Their bodies enabled the research that yielded the data for white doctors to write medical articles about gynecological illnesses, pharmacology, treatment, and cures.”

The statue

The Sims statue when it stood on Fifth Avenue outside Central Park

Sims was the first medical professional to have a statue in his honor in New York City in 1894. It was first in Bryant Park and then moved to Central Park where it stood outside the New York Academy of Medicine on Fifth Avenue. In response to protests about the statue during the summer of 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio charged the Public Design Commission with determining what should be done. In its January 2018 report, the commission was quite scathing in its recommendation that the statue be moved.

“In short, especially in its current location, the Sims monument has come to represent a legacy of oppressive and abusive practice on bodies that were seen as subjugated, subordinate, and exploitable in service to his fame. To confront this legacy in accordance with the principle of Historical Understanding, the Commission feels that the City must take significant action to reframe the narrative presented in the monument.” The status has been relocated to Greenwood Cemetery, where Sims is buried, and there are plans to add in both locations a plaque adding the names of Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey along with a description of the roles they played in Sims’s life.

The state of obstetric fistulas today

The United Nations has observed the International Day to End Obstetric Fistula on May 23 every year since 2013.

In the developed world, ready access to obstetrical care, and especially caesarean section, have virtually eliminated the problem. However, fistulas remain an urgent problem in the developing world. The World Health Organization reports that more than two million young women live with obstetric fistulas in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and 50,000 to 100,000 new cases occur each year.  When those afflicted are able to get timely access to quality obstetrical care, 80% to 95% of them can be repaired surgically.

BEHIND THE SHEET by Charly Evon Simpson, the 2019 EST/Sloan mainstage production, begins previews on January 9 and runs through March 10. Tickets are available here.

Recommended Reading

 Books

 Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington (Doubleday, 2007)

 Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens (University of Georgia Press, 2017) Note: the opening to this essay was inspired by the opening of the introduction to Medical Bondage

 The Story of My Life by J. Marion Sims (D. Appleton & Co., 1884) 

 Journal Articles

 “The medical ethics of Dr J Marion Sims: A fresh look at the historical record” by Lewis Wall in Journal of Medical Ethics, June 2006.

 “J. Marion Sims, the Father of Gynecology: Hero or Villain?” by Jeffrey S. Sartin, MD in Southern Medical Journal, May 2004.

 “A History of Obstetric Vesicovaginal Fistula” by Robert F. Zacharin in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery, June 2008.

 “On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula” by J. Marion Sims in The American Journal of Medical Sciences, 1852. Reprinted in International Urogynecology Journal, 1998.

 “The medical ethics of the ‘father of gynaecology’, Dr J Marion Sims” by Durrenda Ojanuga in Journal of Medical Ethics, March 1993.

 Radio shows/Podcasts

 “Remembering Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey: The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” on an episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain, February 7, 2017

 “The Controversial Figure of J. Marion Sims” Episode 51 of Legends of Surgery

 Websites

 J. Marion Sims in the online Encyclopedia of Alabama

 J. Marion Sims in Wikipedia

A Dr. J. Marion Sims Dossier at the University of Illinois – poets on J. Marion Sims

“WHAT MAKES A GREAT PLAY ABOUT SCIENCE?” Four playwrights and three scientists join Doron Weber on November 19 for a special 20th anniversary EST/Sloan Artist Cultivation Event

Clockwise, from top left: Lucas Hnath, Cassandra Medley, Charly Evon Simpson, Anna Ziegler, Darcy Kelley, Stuart Firestein, Gabriel Cwilich, Doron Weber.

To celebrate its landmark twentieth anniversary, the EST/Sloan Project is bringing together on November 19 many of the people who have been critical to the program’s success. Joining Sloan Program Director Doron Weber to discuss “what makes a great play about science?” will be playwrights Cassandra Medley, Lucas Hnath, Charly Evon Simpson, and Anna Ziegler, all of whom have had (or will soon have) EST/Sloan mainstage productions. Also participating will be EST/Sloan’s three veteran scientist/consultants: Gabriel Cwilich, Stuart Firestein and Darcy Kelley.

The 2018 Fall Artist Cultivation Event will take place at EST on Monday, November 19 at 8 PM (with a reception beginning at 7:30 PM). The event is free and any playwright interested in developing a play about science or technology is encouraged to attend. Expect a free-wheeling and far-ranging discussion about science, storytelling, and what makes plays work.  Reservations recommended. Reserve your ticket here.

“To stimulate artists to create credible and compelling work exploring the worlds of science and technology and to challenge the existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination.”—this has been the mission of The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project (EST/Sloan Project, for short) for the past 20 years. Over that time the EST/Sloan Project has awarded more than $3 million in grants to some 300 playwrights and theatre companies. More than 150 productions of EST/Sloan-developed plays have been mounted nationwide. (You can view previous commission recipients on the EST/Sloan webpage and submission guidelines here).

Two related events culminate each EST/Sloan season: 1) The First Light Festival is a series of readings and workshops that showcase plays in development—this season’s festival will take place in January-February, 2019—and 2) a full mainstage production of at least one work. This season’s mainstage production will be BEHIND THE SHEET by Charly Evon Simpson, which will begin previews on January 9 and run through February 3. Previous mainstage productions have included BUMP by Chiara Atik (2018) on pregnancy and childbirth, SPILL (2017) by Leigh Fondakowski on the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Boy (2016) by Anna Ziegler on sexual identity, Please Continue (2016) by Frank Basloe on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, Informed Consent (2015) by Deborah Zoe Laufer on scientific research and Alzheimer’s, Fast Company (2014) by Carla Ching on game theory and confidence games, Isaac’s Eye (2013) by Lucas Hnath on scientific method and rivalry, and Headstrong (2012) by Patrick Link on sports and concussions.

The 2018 20th Anniversary Artist Cultivation Event panel features:

Doron Weber

Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, helps the President oversee and improve all aspects of the foundation’s programs and plays a leadership role in Sloan’s broader philanthropic efforts with the foundation community. For the past 20 years, Doron has run the program for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology & Economics at Sloan, which uses diverse media—books, radio, television, film, theater, opera and new media—to bridge the “two cultures” of science and the humanities and to educate and engage the public. He helped start Radiolab, Tribeca Film Institute, and World Science Festival; supports Emmy-winning television on American Experience, NOVA, and National Geographic, award-winning plays at not just the Ensemble Studio Theatre, but also the Manhattan Theatre Club, and London’s National Theatre, and Oscar-winning films via film schools and film festivals at Sundance, Tribeca, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. He started the EST/Sloan Project with a grant for Arthur Giron’s Flight in 1996. Doron’s published works include the acclaimed Immortal Bird: A Family Memoir (2012) and three works of nonfiction. On November 14, the National Book Foundation presented Doron with the 2018 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, which is given to an individual for a lifetime of achievement in expanding the audience for books and reading. Under Doron’s leadership, Sloan has helped ensure the publication of numerous groundbreaking and acclaimed books such as Hedy’s Folly by National Book Award Winner Richard Rhodes, Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter, Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Stuart Firestein’s Ignorance, and Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory.

The Playwrights

Lucas Hnath

Playwright Lucas Hnath* is the author of Isaac’s Eye, which EST produced as the 2012 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production and which won the 2012 Whitfield Cook Award. More recently, Lucas wrote A Doll’s House, Part 2, which had its world premiere on Broadway in 2017 and closed after 30 previews and 173 regular performances at the Golden Theatre. With the original cast featuring Laurie Metcalf, Chris Cooper, Jayne Houdyshell and Condola Rashad, the play garnered eight TONY nominations—the most of any play in the 2016-2017 season—and a Best Actress win for Metcalf as Nora. Lucas’s new play, From the Words and Writings of Dana H., will receive its world premiere at the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles in May, 2019. His other plays include A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, The Christians (which won the 2016 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off Broadway Play and a 2016 Playwriting Obie), and Red Speedo, which also won a 2016 Playwriting Obie. Lucas has been a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011 and is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Cassandra Medley

 Cassandra Medley*’s play Relativity, about the conflict of two generations of black scientists and melanin research, was the 2006 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production. Coming Up for Air, her play about fracking and climate change, was part of the 2016 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. Recently produced plays include: American Slavery Project (NYC), Cell (Molelo Theater, CA, and Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon 2011, NYC), Daughter (Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon 2009, NYC), and Noon Day Sun (Diverse City Theatre Company, NYC). Cassandra has the received the 2004 “Going to the River Writers” Life Achievement Award, the 2002 Ensemble Studio Theatre 25th Anniversary Award for Theatre Excellence, the 2001 Theatrefest Regional Playwriting Award for Best Play, the 1995 New Professional Theatre Award, and the 1995 Marilyn Simpson Award. She teaches playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College, has taught at New York University, and has also served as guest artist at Columbia University, the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop and Seattle University.

Charly Evon Simpson (Photo: JMA Photography)

Charly Evon Simpson’s play BEHIND THE SHEET, about the untold stories behind the rise of modern gynecology, will be this year’s EST/Sloan mainstage production and will begin previews at EST on January 9, 2019. Her other plays include Jump, Behind the Sheet, Scratching the Surface, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Flea, P73’s Summer Residency, National New Play Network through its NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights Workshop and National Showcase of New Plays, and others. Jump will receive an NNPN Rolling World Premiere, with productions at Playmaker’s Rep (Chapel Hill, NC), Actor’s Express (Atlanta) and Milagro Theatre (Portland, OR) in 2019-20.  She’s currently a member of WP Theater’s 2018-2020 Lab, The New Georges Jam, The Amoralists 18/19 ‘Wright Club and she’s The Pack’s current playwright-in-residence. Charly is a former member of SPACE on Ryder Farm’s The Working Farm, Clubbed Thumb’s 17/18 Early Career Writers’ Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, and Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Purchase and an engager at The Engaging Educator.

Anna Ziegler

Anna Ziegler*'s widely produced play about Rosalind Franklin, Photograph 51, was the 2010 EST/Sloan mainstage production. It has been or will be produced in Germany, Latvia, Sweden, Italy, India, Japan, and Australia, among many other countries. When it was produced on London’s West End in 2016 (starring Nicole Kidman, winner of the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress), Photograph 51 won the WhatsOnStage award for Best New Play. Her play Boy was an EST/Sloan mainstage production in 2016 (co-produced with Keen Company) and was nominated for the 2016 John Gassner Award by the Outer Critics Circle. In 2017, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Manhattan Theatre Club and The Geffen Playhouse premiered her play Actually (winner of the Ovation Award in Los Angeles for Playwriting of an Original Play), and The Roundabout Theatre Company produced The Last Match. Her work has also been produced at The Old Globe, Seattle Rep, The Magic Theatre, Playwrights Realm, City Theatre, and many more, and developed at the Sundance Theatre Lab, The O’Neill Playwrights Conference, NY Stage & Film, Soho Rep and the Cape Cod Theatre Project, among others. Anna is developing a television series with Michael Showalter for HBO based on Actually and a screenplay for Scott Free Productions. Oberon Books has published a collection of her work entitled Anna Ziegler: Plays One.

The Scientist/Consultants

Gabriel Cwilich

Gabriel Cwilich is a condensed-matter-theory/statistical physicist in the Physics Department of Yeshiva University. He works on the physics of disordered media, including at the nanoscale, and has a strong interest in the physics of complexity and computer simulations. He has also explored the connections between the origins of classical physics and the cultural world of the renaissance, and periodically brings American students to Italy to teach them about that. He has been lecturing in the US and in Latin America on the connection between science and theater and has been collaborating and advising several theater groups and foundations in NYC (among them the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Epic Theater Ensemble) in projects that bring the world and ideas of science to the stage. He is also the Division Coordinator of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program at Yeshiva University.

Stuart Firestein

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

Darcy Kelley

Darcy Kelley is the Harold Weintraub and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. Her research interest is the neurobiology of voice—the subtle acoustic cues in vocal signals essential for social communication.  She and her colleagues study this question in Xenopus, a group of frogs that returned to the water from land about 180 million years ago, and invented a new way of creating and shaping the vocal signals that rule their social system. Her laboratory has defined the neural circuits that produce these underwater songs and determined how voice is decoded by auditory neurons. She is a longtime scientific advisor to the EST/Sloan Project and, for her pains, served as the model for the amphibian biologist played by Gina Gershon in Claudia Myers’ movie, Kettle of Fish (2006).

*Denotes EST Member Artist

Jorge Odón, Mario Merialdi, David Milestone, Claudia Weill, Chiara Atik, and Sonia Epstein on car mechanics, birthing technology, the Odón device, and BUMP

From left: Sonia Shechet Epstein, Chiara Atik, Claudia Weill, Jorge Odón, Mario Merialdi, translator Rosa Rivera, and David Milestone

An amazing thing happened during the last weekend run of BUMP, the new comedy by Chiara Atik that was this year’s EST/Sloan Mainstage Production. The idea for the play began when Chiara discovered the story of Jorge Odón, an Argentine garage mechanic who saw a YouTube video about a cork getting removed from a wine bottle – and that video inspired him to invent a revolutionary new device to help in the late stages of childbirth delivery. A fictionalized version of Odón’s story became, in Chiara’s hands, one of three storylines in BUMP. Odón still lives in Argentina but on Thursday, May 31, three days before the play was due to close, the EST office got a call that Jorge Odón himself was flying in to attend the Saturday matinee performance . . . and yes, he would be happy to participate in a talkback after the performance. Odón arrived with his wife and with Mario Merialdi, the former World Health Organization executive who was critical in helping Odón turn his idea into a product that has gone on to be clinically tested in Iowa, South Africa, and Argentina and may start going into use in 2020.

Joining Odón and Merialdi for this remarkable talkback on June 2 were the playwright Chiara Atik, the director Claudia Weill, translator Rosa Rivera, and David Milestone, the Acting Director of the USAID’s Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact, an organization that also played a key role in funding the development of the Odón device. Sonia Shechet Epstein, Executive Editor of Sloan Science and Film at the Museum of the Moving Image, moderated the discussion.

A lively comedy about childbirth, BUMP explores women’s evolving understanding of and control over the birthing process through three stories: a young first-time mother giving birth in colonial New England with the help of an experienced and peppery midwife; five women sharing quips, gripes and observations on an online message board; and a grandfather-to-be getting inspired to invent a device that could revolutionize how infants in difficulty get delivered (this is the storyline inspired by the experiences of Jorge Odón).

Some of the highlights of the June 2 discussion follow: (Recap by Rich Kelley)

Sonia Shechet Epstein: Chiara, in BUMP there are characters who give birth in a range of ways. Why was it important for you to present that range?

Chiara Atik: The play is not trying to say that there is a correct or incorrect way to give birth. My hope was that by offering an assortment of examples of what giving birth is like, that the audience could take what it wants from the different experiences. The play ends with the colonial girl looking at her future. That’s where I wanted the focus to be.

What Jorge Odón thought after seeing BUMP

Sonia: Jorge, what is your reaction to seeing your invention dramatized? 

Jorge (translated by Mario Merialdi): The play is great and he is still surprised about his invention and how it has been interpreted. . . . This invention actually took him around the world to meet many important people. He met Princess Caroline in Monaco. He met Pope Francis. The device got on the front page of The New York Times. Seeing this play was really a surprise for him.

When he was seeing the play he could see and feel very much of what had happened in reality. He was spending hours on this device. His wife Marcella, who is here with him today. She actually did sew parts of it . . . He congratulates Chiara the playwright and all the actors who interpreted his story.

Sonia: And what do you have there?

Jorge (translated by Mario): [shows prototype for Odón device] This is a simulator of the uterus that he uses for demonstrations of the Odón device. The first prototype of the device is what he is showing here. He’s a car mechanic. He’s not a doctor. He needed to learn how the baby exists inside the uterus. This part was used the first time to insert the device. It was difficult for the doctor to use it and to position the device correctly. This is the inserter. The gauge indicates when the device has been inserted properly.

From left: Chiara Atik, Claudia Weill, Jorge Odón, Mario Merialdi

It’s been fourteen years since he had the original idea. This is the bag we use now. Now he is going to fill it with air. This is not hard to do. The device immediately deflates once the baby is removed. You have now seen in just a few minutes the evolution of the device over fourteen years. Imagine what happened in between. Jorge was actually very afraid of seeing blood. Because of his passion, he was able to attend 48 deliveries. In these 48 deliveries he was able to deploy the device. Without the help of his family, his friends, and everyone who believed in him, he would not have been able to develop the device. Without them it would not have been possible for a big company like Becton Dickinson to pick up his idea and take it to the next level. It first was his family that supported him, then it was CEMIC, the Center for Medical Education and Clinical Research in Buenos Aires; then it was me [Mario Merialdi] who was shown this device and fifteen weeks later Jorge and I were together in a hospital in Des Moines, Iowa, a very specialized advanced center testing the device. . . . I didn’t mention that I’m actually his friend.

How the Odón device went from an idea to a product

From left: Sonia Shechet Epstein, Chiara Atik, Claudia Weill, Jorge Odón, Mario Merialdi

Sonia: Mario, you’ve been instrumental in the development of Jorge’s device. I’m curious about two things: first, what about the Odón device stood out for you when you first saw it and second, how aware were you of the need for innovation in obstetrics before the device?

Mario: Someone mentioned in the play that there had been no innovation in the instruments used for childbirth deliveries for centuries. There was definitely a gap there. I remember I was working at the time at the World Health Organization. I was leaving to go from Geneva to Buenos Aires for a meeting. I got a call in the evening from a colleague in Argentina telling me about a crazy doctor at a hospital working with an even crazier mechanic who had a new device for assisted vaginal delivery. I was very skeptical but at the same time I was intrigued because of the unmet need for new devices both in developed and developing countries. So I said I will be at this meeting and will be able to give him ten minutes. I met with Jorge who showed me the device. The moment I saw that this was something new in the field I was intrigued. The reason why it’s so appealing is that forceps and suction are all lifesaving procedures but they require professionals and they are not available everywhere in the world, especially in the area where most of the world lives. Seeing this device that is potentially easier to use and potentially safer was very, very promising and pushed me to invest and to develop a research plan.

How USAID innovates new medical solutions — and helped develop the Odón device

Sonia: Dave, I know that you and USAID also helped develop the device. What are some of the criteria you were using to decide which innovations to support?

From left: Jorge Odón, Mario Merialdi, Rosa Rivera, David Milestone

David Milestone: I’m with the Global Health Bureau of the US Agency for International Development, the part of the State department that works on economic development and humanitarian assistance primarily in places with low resources. Think Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia. We’ve made a lot of progress in global health. For example, we cut child mortality in half in the last few decades. We still have a long way to go to reach what we call sustainable development goals that the United Nations targets around maternal newborn mortality. One of the things we recognize is that we need to start working and thinking in different ways if we’re going to have any chance of reaching those targets. Part of that is casting a wider net to different nontraditional problem solvers.

Over the last several years we’ve run programs called “Grand Challenges,” which are open innovation competitions around maternal and newborn health, like Saving Lives at Birth, and around the Ebola and Zika grand challenges to help us be better prepared for the next outbreak. [Note: The Odón device received funding in Round 5 of the Saving Lives at Birth challenge in 2015]. What we’ve found is that great ideas can come from anywhere, from Buenos Aires to just up the street at Columbia University where a group of students developed a type of colorized bleach to be used in decontamination settings during the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. It’s now being used in the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What’s exciting about that is that was a group of students at Columbia. They now have a business, they’re making money and it’s sustainable. That was only three or four years ago, in 2014.

Traditionally, in global health it can take 30 to 40 years for a product to go from an idea in the garage to scale. This can really accelerate the progress. There’s a saying that vision without execution is hallucination. It takes a village to execute. Jorge delivered the vision. It took us as a government agency to take the risk and invest in this device and it took the World Health Organization to be supportive of it and to get it to scale. We look for products that are potentially game changers, that can leapfrog existing technology and address the leading killers of newborns and mothers.

Sonia: Were there any other innovations that you awarded that also address these needs?

David: Yes, over the course of the eight years that we have run the Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge we have awarded some 120 different awards to innovators. Some awards were as low as $250,000. Some as high as two million dollars in order to be catalytic. Yes, we’ve seen a whole host of ideas. About 15% of these will transition through development and get to scale. That doesn’t sound like a lot but when you’re looking for new approaches to reach what we call the last mile in real rural settings, it’s proven to be a pretty successful model. We’re going to be seeing more of it.

Claudia Weill on directing BUMP

From left: Sonia Shechet Epstein, Chiara Atik, Claudia Weill

Sonia: Claudia, one of my favorite storylines in the play is during colonial times when you see and feel the terror of giving birth without the aid of technology or community. What was it like directing that scene?

Claudia Weill: We were very lucky. We found an amazing group of actors who really brought the play to life. The two actors in that scene (Lucy DeVito and Jenny O’Hara) were fantastic in making it come to life. When Chiara writes “1690” she writes it almost as a contemporary scene. It’s not like “Ye ole . . .” It’s very hip and edgy. That made it very easy to direct and easy to connect it with the other material.

Sonia: Claudia, can you tell us about the creation of the set and the development of the prototype for the device?  

Claudia: I wasn’t so much involved in developing the prototype. We had wonderful prop people who were.  In terms of the set, we worked with this wonderful woman Kristen Robinson. Early on, we realized we had to create the world of the Internet and to bring it onstage in some alternate space. She came up with this wonderful idea of this window. Everything that happens in the window is somehow connected with the Internet, whether it’s a YouTube video or a chat room or whatever. I thought that was a marvelous visual concept, a visual metaphor for what Chiara is doing in the play. One of the things Chiara is writing about is that we are more intimate with our devices and with what’s happening on the Internet than we are with the person next to us in bed. It’s as if that person in the device is in the room. It’s not a remote thing. The set brings that home.

Why outsiders may be key to medical innovation

From left: Sonia Shechet Epstein, Chiara Atik, Claudia Weill, Jorge Odón, Mario Merialdi

Sonia: Jorge, another question. How do you think your experience as a car mechanic helped you to think about the problem that your device solved?

Jorge (through Mario): He has several patents related to automotive mechanics. When he was having issues with mechanics in his garage, he used to go to bed with the problem and woke up with the solution. This time when he had the idea his wife was not pregnant. He thanks God for giving him this idea. He wants to congratulate the actor who portrayed him on stage. He has only one complaint. In the program he is not described as an Argentine mechanic but simply as a grandfather inventing the device.

Sonia: I have a question for any of the panelists. Forceps were invented in the seventeenth century. I’m surprised there haven’t been more innovations in this area. Do any of you have ideas on why that is?

Mario: There have been many attempts to improve the forceps and the vacuum extractor. There are at least one thousand different kinds of forceps. Obstetricians have typically tried to improve on what’s already existing. Being a car mechanic, Jorge looked at the problem from a different perspective. Speaking as an obstetrician, I know we often refer to labor and delivery as a biological process, but mostly it’s a mechanical process. The baby has to go down the birth canal and navigate different diameters, taking different positions as it is being pushed by the mother. It has always struck me that Jorge has a better understanding of the dynamics of delivery than a physician. He always says he’s a car mechanic. He’s not a doctor, so he doesn’t have any kind of biological background. This always brings to mind for me the saying that sometimes imagination is more important than knowledge. What you need sometimes is someone who takes a totally different view who has a lot of creative imagination. It’s great that there are now platforms available for innovation. Innovation can come from totally different backgrounds. This is my view. This is why there has not been so much innovation. We had to wait for Jorge.

David: I’d add that it’s very expensive to develop new medical technologies. For a good reason. We want to make sure that they’re safe. So they often require these randomized controlled trials which are very expensive. If you’re a medical device company like Becton Dickinson, you want to make sure that the devices you’re developing and testing will allow you to make more of those and make a profit. Often In these low resource settings . . . in northern Nigeria, for example, women often will give birth by themselves by tradition. These are completely different markets with different user needs than are available in more developed places. There is not necessarily an incentive for innovation in these low resource stings. Fortunately, Becton Dickinson is very progressive in moving into these emerging markets – the fastest growing markets in the world – Africa and Southeast Asia – so we’ll likely see more of this innovation coming sooner than later.

How the testing process for a new medical device works

Question from audience: The play makes a point of the difficulty of moving from testing a device on dummies to clinical trials on people. How does that process work? How are the first human testers chosen?

Jorge (through Mario): There is a process you have to go through in order to get a device approved. There is an ethics committee that has to approve it. In this case, there actually was a first woman to test the device that had never been used before in the world. Jorge was involved in approaching the women. Jorge is really grateful to the first woman. We have to remember that the women in Argentina were going to have a normal delivery. They would not actually need the device. They needed to start with women who were going to deliver anyway. So the first women who agreed to participate were doing it for science. When you do research of this kind there is a very detailed form the women have to read and discuss with their family. Reading the two or three pages describing all the possible risks could have been very scary. Despite that, the women decided to participate. Another requirement of the ethics committee was that the first test had to be conducted with women who had advanced education, a university degree.  They wanted a population of women who could not be interpreted as being disadvantaged or who might consent without properly understanding what they were consenting to.

What inspired  BUMP

From left: Sonia Shechet Epstein and Chiara Atik

Question from the audience: Chiara, what was it about Jorge’s story that made you want to write a play about him?

Chiara: I read this article and I just loved the idea of a man, a mechanic, someone not in the medical field, someone just completely out of it in this very female experience and I thought this was a funny juxtaposition. The idea of someone with a plastic uterus in his garage just seemed lovely.

The 2018 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production, BUMP by Chiara Atik began previews at the Ensemble Studio Theatre on May 9 and completed its run on June 3, 2018.

Read more about BUMP

Interview with Chiara Atik about BUMP: Chiara Atik on new mom message boards, ALT lines, science stories, and BUMP

Background on the science behind BUMP: Childbirth’s “Grinding Pirouette,” a Colonial Midwife, the Odón Device: Some Background to BUMP

May 26 talkback panel on BUMP: Rebecca Tannenbaum, Debra Pascali-Bonaro, Chiara Atik and Robin Marantz Henig on Midwives, Doulas, Colonial Home Births, Birthing Positions, Medical Devices, and BUMP

Rebecca Tannenbaum, Debra Pascali-Bonaro, Chiara Atik and Robin Marantz Henig on Midwives, Doulas, Colonial Home Births, Birthing Positions, Medical Devices, and BUMP

From left: Robin Marantz Henig, Debra Pascali-Bonaro, Rebecca Tannenbaum, Chiara Atik

Following the May 26 matinee performance of BUMP, Chiara Atik's lively new comedy, EST/Sloan assembled a panel to discuss several of the compelling issues about childbirth the play addresses. Joining playwright Chiara Atik for this discussion were Rebecca Tannenbaum, Senior Lecturer in History from Yale University, and doula trainer Debra Pascali-Bonaro. Journalist Robin Marantz Henig moderated the talkback.

BUMP explores women’s evolving understanding of and control over the birthing process through three stories: a young first-time mother giving birth in colonial New England with the help of an experienced and peppery midwife; five women sharing quips, gripes and observations on an online message board; and a grandfather-to-be getting inspired to invent a device that could revolutionize how infants in difficulty get delivered (a storyline inspired by the experiences of Jorge Odón).

What follows are some of the highlights from the discussion. (Recap by Rich Kelley)

On the inspiration for the play

Robin Marantz Henig: What I love about this play is that you chose this emotional topic. It was very moving and very beautifully done.  What made you want to write about this?

Chiara Atik: Pregnancy and childbirth are things that a lot of my friends are going through right now. I'm at the age where people are starting to have kids or certainly starting to think about having kids, so it's a topic that comes up a lot. I was inspired by the article in The New York Times in 2013 about Jorge Odón, the real-life inspiration for Luis in the play. Odón invented this fabulous machine to assist mothers in deliveries. I thought that would make a great Sloan play — Sloan supports plays about science — then I incorporated the other stories.

Robin: What about the colonial story? Did you put that in there to give us a longer view of the history of childbirth?

Chiara Atik

Chiara: For me, it was an exercise in imagining what it would be like to be pregnant without Google, without a message board, without constant information at your fingertips, or even, in the case of our story, family support, which I think was rare even for the time ... In those days, most people likely had a lot of family, had big support systems; Mary doesn't. I wanted to show the opposite extreme. The Internet really influences the other two storylines and, thematically, just how much information you have: whether you have too much, whether you have too little, how it influences the experience.

Robin: So, Chiara, the message board: How did that come to you? Did you want all good feelings, or sort of a combination of old wives' tales and natural information?

Chiara: Yeah, definitely a combination. The message board, it's less about the specific kernels of information, which sometimes can be helpful and sometimes can be the least helpful thing in the world, and more about the feeling of community and feeling like you're not in this alone. You're a team: They're going through this experience at the exact same rate at the exact same time and I think that even pre-Internet groups like that were very helpful. I wanted a sort of a Greek chorus of the whole experience, or aspects of the experience. So, again, it's less about "Well, I got this information," and more about other people.

Robin: Sharing

Chiara: Sharing, yeah.

On the historical accuracy of the colonial storyline

Robin: Rebecca, is that how the birth would have gone in colonial times? The character had so little information: she thought she was going to have a pain and then have a baby. And she had no interaction with her midwife before she arrived that night... It was interesting that she was sitting in a chair when she was actually giving birth.

Rebecca Tannenbaum: Yeah, I thought that was actually quite accurate. We have this image of the woman today — many of us who have given birth did it this way ourselves — you lie on a table on your back, but that's not how women have given birth for a long time.  Certainly, in the colonial period, many midwives had birthing stools: special chairs with a hollowed-out seat and a lower seat for the midwife to sit on and catch the baby. Giving birth upright would've been the standard practice for that time and right up until the nineteenth century when physicians started performing a lot of births.

Rebecca Tannenbaum and Chiara Atik

Another thing that struck me as very accurate was the walking because the walking was definitely something that midwives would encourage women to do: to keep moving; to not lie still because movement helps encourage the contractions as well. But one of the things about birthing in the colonial period, which came out in the play as well, was this idea that it was meant to be painful; that women were meant to suffer in birth. The biblical references that the midwife gave to Mary were very much the way birth was understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: that this is part of woman's lot for being a daughter of Eve and that the fear and pain was just something you had to accept as punishment for Original Sin.

Robin: Was it typical to bring a midwife in? Because the way she said, "We're paying you a lot for this; why are you going away?" almost seemed like it was a mark of being different from her neighbors.

Rebecca: Women certainly counted on having a midwife there: someone who was experienced; someone who could help them. So, it wouldn't have been unusual at all. What would've been unusual would've been having a male physician attend the birth. And as time passed, and as you got into the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, having a male physician actually became a status symbol. You start to see it first in urban areas among wealthy clientele. Part of it was just, like, "I have this doctor who was trained in Europe," and that's better news, but part of it also was that it was true that, beginning around the 1780s, 1790s, physicians could offer technology, like the forceps, that midwives could not. The fear the mother in the play showed was also pretty accurate for the colonial period, so having the reassurance that you had a practitioner who could offer this new technology that could pull a baby out without danger to the baby or the mother was something that people who could afford it really wanted.

Robin: Did this midwife pull out forceps?

Rebecca: Yes, I know noticed that she had forceps.

Chiara:  Yes.

Robin:   Why did she ... Was she really going to use it on the baby?

Chiara:  Yeah, they were there as a measure. And that was more of a dramatic choice than . . .

Robin:   But perhaps not historically accurate?

Rebecca: Yeah, not historically accurate. It would have been a formally-trained physician who used forceps.

Chiara:  Right.

Rebecca: It became kind of controversial, whether you would allow a man in the birthing room, seeing a woman in this intimate way, and one of the titles of one of the pamphlets that was actually advocating for midwife birth was "Hands of Flesh vs Hands of Iron."  "What do you want touching you: hands of flesh or hands of iron?"

Chiara:  Wow.

From left: Robin Marantz Henig, Debra Pascali-Bonaro, Rebecca Tannenbaum, Chiara Atik

On the evolution of how babies are delivered

Adriana Sananes (who plays Maria in the play and who joined the audience for the talkback): Did I hear correctly that when physicians started doing the births, that's when women started lying down?

Rebecca: Yes, because it's easier for them to see what's happening ... easier for them to use their forceps ...

Adriana:  And that's more or less what time?

Rebecca: The late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, so between 1780 and 1820.

Debra Pascali-Bonaro:   Isn't that phenomenal to know? Whose comfort? The doctor’s? Not the person giving birth. How crazy is that? And that we have all the data to say it's actually harmful to lay down and push your baby out, and yet we're still doing it against the best science.

Adriana: That’s the reason for my question. I went through 27 hours of intense contractions in labor. And a lot of the time, I was laying down with all these things and the doctor kept telling me, "The baby's fine. The baby's fine." And it's like, "But I'm the one ..."  [laughter] So I was wondering when that whole aspect of the physician telling me ...

Rebecca: Well, the reason you had to be lying down is because you had all the monitors attached.

Adriana:  Exactly, exactly. I wasn't dilating, but still, it was incredible to just ... Your instinct is to walk. Breathe and walk and breathe and walk.

On home births, birth centers, and hospitals

Audience member: In the play the colonial mother has a home birth and Claudia wants to have a home birth. What is your feeling about having home births today?

Debra: I attend many home births in the New York/New Jersey area, and we have wonderful qualified licensed midwives for home birth. I think home birth is growing, and there is misinformation out there, but home birth for low-risk women is quite safe, and that's the midwife's role: to keep that safe and transfer, when needed, to a hospital. So as long as you're here in New York you're always thirty minutes from a hospital, but as long as you can transfer in time if you need extra care, home birth is very safe.

Robin:   And how about birthing centers? Is that a big midway thing?

Debra:  They are wonderful. The sad thing here in New York is we don't have many of them. Due to different regulations and licensing. But other states do have more birth centers, and birth centers are growing around the U.S. In the U.K. they have many birth centers. Good home birth rate, birth centers ... ultimately, that's what we need so people have the choice of where you feel safe, whether that's home, birth center, or hospital.

Audience member: What do you recommend women do in a hospital scenario?

Debra Pascali-Bonaro

Debra:  First, have a doula because a doula is really trained to navigate that, and doulas facilitate communication between the person giving birth and the team. We don't speak for anyone, but we amplify their voice. So we don't let anyone do anything that isn't really engaging them and ultimately, we need to bring home birth into the hospital. I teach at medical schools and midwifery schools, and I'm teaching bringing back the wisdom of our great grandmothers that knew how to do all these comfort measures. We've got to overhaul the system so that this is available. But in the short term where our system is still dysfunctional, bring a doula with you and get educated! A lot of people, like the message board, are passing some good information, but also some misinformation. And a lot of people that think they know a lot about birth that are pregnant actually don't always know what they think they know. I’m an advocate that, especially first-time mothers, get into a really good childbirth class ... not in most hospitals though, because hospital classes ... Sorry, I'm biased, but I think a lot of them are for patient compliance: They really teach you what they want you to do to be a good patient, and they don't really teach you your options. Then again, you're being led onto the assembly line of industrialized childbirth, and it's not about you. It's about getting you through the system.

On the difference between a doula and a midwife

Robin: Debra, you’re a doula, not a midwife. Can you explain what the difference is?

Debra:  Chiara, you mentioned "doula" in the play. I loved that. I lit up. So looking "herstorically," women had other women that were around them.  A doula really is reconnecting that circle of support of females. Sadly, we don't attend each other's births anymore. We would've known how to do that back then, but now we have to go to a workshop and relearn those skills. So a "doula" isn't really new; it's really rediscovering the role of women supporting women. Just like women's menstrual cycles come together when they live or work together, we're starting to learn that women have a physiology among each other. And the studies show that even the most wonderful, loving male, sorry to say, but he doesn't make labor any easier or less of an intervention.

When you bring another woman, who's trained in the natural comfort ways, labor actually is shorter and with less interventions. A doula is just offering that emotional, physical support. If there's religious or spiritual practices, they're integrating them, but doulas don't do any medical skills. And the midwife is really the keeper of that, making sure mother and baby are healthy and well. A doula is really like a sister, your best friend, being at the birth with you.

On the potential usefulness of the Odón Device  

Robin: Debra, can you talk a little bit about this device that sort of yanks the baby out?

Robin Marantz Henig and Debra Pascali-Bonaro

Debra: I have this double-edged kind of look at it: On one side, I think that we've gone so far that we just keep making mothers lie down today to give birth. We have a fascination with getting the baby out in positions that don't work, so we are doing too much assisted birth. I'd hate to see us, now, create another technology that just again indulges our fascination with how we can get a baby out without physiology. But I am kind of interested in it because it sounds like it's gentler than the alternative, if we use it appropriately.

Audience member: Debra, I hear your reservations about the Odón device. But you've had so much experience in attending so many childbirths around the world ... Do you think something that's as low-tech as the Odón device could make a difference in low-resource environments?

Debra:  Oh, I do. And that's why I said it's double-edged: I think when you truly have a baby that's having trouble getting out you need to change positions a lot ...  A baby being born is — it may be a bad analogy but it may help explain — it’s like a lock and key. If you put the key in upside-down, it doesn't matter how long you push: you won't open the door. You'll eventually cut the door down. So all around the world, we always say "four to five pushes in a position" and if we're not making movement, we change again. In some places in the world, we're moving and moving and moving, because you move the mother, and it moves the baby. And we get all the babies out! So when we put people in a hospital and put them on their back, and then we're going to randomize a trial, you are going to have babies that are going to get stuck because we're not using gravity and we're not moving the mother, then I think we are just using more technology without really needing to. But if really just use it in the rare cases, then I think it's valuable.

Audience member: And you could envision a doula or a midwife doing this?

Debra:  Not a doula. Let’s remain historic. Doulas don't do any medical care.

Audience member: Not even that. Okay.

Debra: That’s the question. Around the world where if you're in really low-resource areas where we don't have access to doctors, will they then train the midwives in that? Although the midwives who use lots of positions will have a very, very, very low rate of babies that get stuck.

The panel taking questions from the audience (including members of the cast).

The 2018 EST/Sloan Mainstage Production, BUMP by Chiara Atik began previews at the Ensemble Studio Theatre on May 9 and completed its run on June 3, 2018.

Inventor Jorge Odón, Global Health Experts Mario Merialdi and David Milestone, and Director Claudia Weill join Playwright Chiara Atik and Editor Sonia Epstein to discuss Birthing Technology and BUMP

Clockwise from top left: Jorge Odón. Mario Merialdi, David Milestone, Sonia Shechet Epstein, Chiara Atik, Claudia Weill

On June 2, following the 2:00 pm matinee performance of BUMP, the lively new comedy by Chiara Atik, audience members are encouraged to stay for an extensive discussion of many of the issues the play addresses, especially current birthing technology, devices for instrumental vaginal delivery  (IVD), the Odón device, and how medical devices get approved for clinical use. Joining playwright Chiara Atik  and director Claudia Weill will be Jorge Odón, the inventor of the Odón device, Mario Merialdi, Senior Director of Global Health at Becton Dickinson, and David Milestone, Acting Director for the Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact, USAID, for a conversation moderated by Sonia Shechet Epstein, Executive Editor of Sloan Science & Film at the Museum of the Moving Image.

BUMP is the exuberant exploration of the evolution of women's understanding about and control over the childbirth process through the  stories of three separate quests for knowledge: a young expectant mother in colonial New England getting coached through her first pregnancy by a peppery midwife (inspired by the diary of Martha Ballard); a contemporary message board where new pregnant moms swap gripes, quips, and observations; and a grandfather/mechanic's invention of a device that could revolutionize how babies in distress could be safely delivered (the last inspired by the story of Argentine mechanic and inventor Jorge Odón). 

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

About the Panelists

Jorge Odón

Jorge Odón is the inventor of the Odón device. For more than thirty years, he operated the El Rayel S.A. automobile alignment and wheel balancing service center in Lanús, Argentina. During that time he patented several products relating to car parts. In 2005, he had an idea for facilitating childbirths after seeing a YouTube video about how to pull a cork from an empty wine bottle. After developing several device prototypes, Odón’s big breakthrough came in 2008 when he presented his device to Dr. Mario Merialdi, then director of Reproductive Health at the World Health Organization. That meeting led to both traveling that December to the birth simulation center at Des Moines University in Iowa for a successful series of tests. The WHO then agreed to conduct a series of hospital-based tests of the device in three phases in Argentina and South Africa. In 2013, Becton Dickinson and Company (BD) licensed the development rights of the Odón device and developed a new prototype based on their pre-clinical studies. In March 2018, BD and WHO announced the results of the latest round of tests. The report concludes: “Delivery using the Odón device is therefore considered to be feasible.” BD will next pursue a randomized pivotal clinical trial before potential introduction in clinical practice.

Odón has won recognition for his invention that includes finalist in the First WHO Forum on Medical Devices in Thailand (October 2009); winner of one of the 19 awards in the international contest Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development, in Washington (July 2011); recognition at world congresses and athenaeums in gynecology and obstetrics; first prize from INNOVAR 2011, and the gold medal from IMPI as best inventor of 2012.

Dr. Mario Merialdi

Mario Merialdi, MPH, MD, is Senior Director of Global Health at Becton Dickinson (BD), with a special interest in Maternal and Newborn Health. Prior to joining BD, Dr. Merialdi served as the coordinator of Human Reproduction and as a Medical Officer in the Maternal and Perinatal Health Research Unit at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He worked in the design, implementation and coordination of large multinational epidemiological studies involving research institutions in developed and developing countries. Dr. Merialdi’s research interests have been focused on issues related to the reduction of maternal and newborn mortality worldwide. He is a strong supporter of the need to foster international research collaborations between researchers from developing and developed countries.

David Milestone

David Milestone is Acting Director of USAID Bureau for Global Health's Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact (CII). CII applies business-minded approaches to the development, introduction and scale-up of health innovations. Since 2011, USAID, CII, and its partners have cultivated a pipeline of over 150 innovations and supported them on their path to deliver health impact—from improved maternal and newborn health to enhanced outbreak response for diseases like Ebola and Zika to strengthened health supply chains. David has also held various strategic marketing roles at Stryker, an $11B medical device company, where he led innovation and strategy initiatives in India.

Claudia Weill

Claudia Weill is a film, television, and theatre director. After graduating Harvard in 1969, she made 30 short films for Sesame Street (still on the air) and directed documentaries, notably This is the Home of Mrs. Levant Graham (Kennedy Journalism Award) and The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, with Shirley MacLaine, released theatrically in 1975 (Academy Award Nomination). She produced and directed her first feature, Girlfriends, in 1979, which she sold to Warner Brothers after winning multiple awards at Cannes, Filmex, and Sundance. Next she directed It’s My Turn for Columbia Pictures, winning the Donatello (European Oscar) for Best New Director.

She directed mostly new plays at Williamstown, The O’Neill, Sundance, ACT, Empty Space and in New York at MTC, the Public and Circle Rep among others. In 1984, she was nominated for the Drama Desk Best Director Award for the premiere of Donald Margulies’ Found a Peanut, produced by Joe Papp at the Public Theatre. Moving to Los Angeles in 1985, she began working in television, directing episodic, cable movies and pilots. She is most well-known for multiple episodes of Thirtysomething (Humanitas and Emmy Awards), My So-Called Life, Chicago Hope (Reynolds Award), Once and Again, and TV movies, including Johnny Bull and Face of a Stranger (Gena Rowlands, Emmy Best Actress). Returning to theatre in the last few years, she directed the West Coast Premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner, Doubt, at the Pasadena Playhouse; Tape, Memory House, and End Days at the Vineyard Playhouse, Archy and Mehitabel at the Yard; Huck and Holden at the Black Dahlia; La Bella Famiglia at ACT; Twelfth Night, Act a Lady and Sweet Mercy at Antaeus; Melancholy Play and The Shore at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Chiara Atik

Chiara Atik is a graduate of the Obie Award-winning EST/Youngblood program, and a portion of BUMP had its origins as a short play written for Youngblood's monthly Sunday Brunch series, specifically its annual crossover with the EST/Sloan Project, the Youngblood Science Brunch. Her plays include I Gained Five Pounds, Women (a mashup of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and HBO’s Girls) and Five Times in One Night, which was first produced at EST. She is the author of numerous articles for Cosmopolitan Magazine, Glamour Magazine, Refinery29, and New York, as well as the book, Modern Dating: A Field Guide. Her screenplay, Fairy Godmother, was on the 2016 Blacklist. Helen Estabrook (Whiplash) and Cassidy Lange will produce for MGM, which won the rights in a bidding war. Television: NBC’s Superstore.

About the Moderator

Sonia Shechet Epstein

Sonia Shechet Epstein works at the intersection of science and culture. As Executive Editor of the Museum of the Moving Image’s website Sloan Science & Film, she produces all of its content. At the Museum, she also curates the ongoing series “Science on Screen” which pairs rarely screened films with discussions between scientists and filmmakers. Since 2014, she has been a mentor at NEW INC—the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s incubator for practitioners in art and technology.

BUMP began previews at the Ensemble Studio Theatre on May 9 and runs through June 3. You can purchase tickets here.