 Oh, friends, here we are. Hi, everybody, thanks for watching. We're gonna be talking about writing science or the stage with three of my absolute favorite writers. I'd like to welcome Anna Siegler and Charlie Von Simpson and Geetha Reddy. Hi, y'all. Hello, hello. I'm Lauren Gunderson, pronouns she, her, hers. I'm in San Francisco right now, which is slightly on fire at the moment, but a little smoky here today. It is Lonely Land. So I'd love to have everybody introduce yourselves, I'll kind of popcorn it around. And what I'd love, I kind of like to start these things for all of you out there watching there. Y'all are all writers out there. So we're all really interested in kind of the practical, how tos, like what is real advice writer to writer about not just writing science, but how you have a career and et cetera. So I'd love to start. Charlie, why don't you start us off and tell us kind of how do you come to be you? How do you find this theater? How are you here today? Yes. So I'm Charlie, my pronouns are she, her, hers. I am in Brooklyn, New York. How did I come to theater? That's funny. It's not a funny question at all, it's really simple. I was a kid who spent a lot of time by myself, basically with my mom, just me and her. And I read a lot of books and I watched a lot of movies. And there was this miraculous time when I sort of realized that theater was kind of like a movie on stage. And so I could do these things called plays and sort of live out my best. I was really obsessed with Julia Roberts. So I could live out my best Julia Roberts dreams on a stage. And so that's sort of how I came to the theater. And it was only really in college when I feel like friends of mine were like, hey, like you do theater and you love to write. There are these things called playwrights and they write plays. Maybe you should try that. And it was in college when I started taking some classes and had some really lovely teachers who were grad students at the time who were sort of like, you have a knack for it. You understand how sort of this works. And then I promptly graduated and did not do theater for a few years until a good friend of mine called. I was in a master's of social work program. I was halfway through working at a camp with kids on the autism spectrum and with emotional support needs. And she called, she's like, that's great, but we're supposed to be writers. Why aren't you writing? And that was, I think at this point, maybe nine years ago. And I've been just trying to write ever since. Awesome. That's amazing that you were doing master's of social work. That's incredible. Yeah, I missed it a little bit. I still like kind of have the dream of going to finish it. But I think it informs a lot of what I think about. Yeah, that helps me see your work in a whole new light. Geetha, tell us about you. How do you come to be you? Hi, I'm Geetha Reddy. I'm also on a lonely land just a little south of Lauren where we're totally getting smoked out. So my apologies if I'm a little hoarse. So I came quite late to theater, I think comparatively. I was involved with the arts in college, but I really was a science person and studied astronomy and physics and then worked in Silicon Valley for 10 years, had my kids. And then I kind of like had an early midlife crisis and was like, what am I doing? And really started thinking about like my earlier ambitions before I kind of was like, oh, I have to do something serious, you know, something appropriate and that would get me a job. And I entered, I took a class at an extension class and the people from that class started entering a 10 minute play competition in the Bay Area called Playground, which is a great organization. And they announced a prompt and you have to quickly play in five days and then they do a live stage reading and they would sometimes get and they continue to get some of the best directors and actors in the Bay Area to come and do it. So I started entering, I won several times, they commissioned a full length play for me, they commissioned another one and slowly this thing that had started as a hobby became a career. And I think it was those early experiences of, you know, I think it's really the audience that changed me from being a Dilletante into a professional, you know, that thing of like seeing your work in front of an audience the first time, hearing them laugh and then also realizing the power you have over the audience and that you can like slowly shift them and then take them this way. It was a thing I became kind of addicted to and can feel a little addicted to. Love it. Amazing, thank you. Hi Anna, tell us about you. Hi, I'm Anna, she, her, hers. I am currently in the Berkshires, but I live in Brooklyn and I guess that's sort of where my playwriting story starts because I went to a school called St. Anne's which is a very arty school, much more common to come out of St. Anne's, a poet than an eye banker. But I didn't write play there until I was in high school. I was a very serious poet and through, I think through high school, I think up until 12th grade it was very focused solely on that but there was a playwriting class and I think my mother takes credit for this. She said, she suggested I do it because I had a lot of dialogue in my poems and they seemed a little play like. So I took that class and I would like to say like I fell in love with it and that was that but it was certainly fun and I think I, even then like, you had your little play performed at the end of the year in front of an audience and I remember the terror of sitting there watching my play performed and that is still what I experienced to this day. So it was a preview that was very accurate. But so I went to college and still was writing poetry very seriously. I thought I would come out of college and maybe work in publishing and write poetry on the side but I ended up taking another playwriting course at the end of my time there and Arthur Coppett taught that course and I didn't have a play. I think you were supposed to apply with a play and I didn't have one. So I applied with a poem and he let me in and then kind of changed the course of my life because I went after that after I graduated from college I went and did and wrote poetry for a year in England on a fellowship but then he kind of suggested that I applied at NYU where he was teaching in the graduate program at the time and kind of like a dope. I didn't really think that going to playwriting graduate school would necessarily lead here. I think I thought like that sounds like a kind of fun thing to do and I don't know what I'm doing and I didn't get a publishing job but right out, you know, right away. And so I went to graduate school and an graduate school at NYU, right? At NYU, yeah. Yeah, I think you were just like a couple of years. Yeah, a couple of years behind you. Yeah, yeah, with Tasha Gordon-Sallman. Indeed. Tasha, oh, you love Tasha. Tasha was the assistant director on my first produced class. She's such a good player. She's a great playwright as well but she's brilliant at all times. Where's them all well? Where's Tasha? We got a texture right there. Yeah, and so then I kept writing plays after that because I discovered how hard it was to write a good play and just kept wanting to write a better one. Oh, that's such a great way to describe a career in the theater. You just keep trying to do it better. Just torture yourself over and over again. Knowing you will never achieve what you want to achieve. No, that's basically it. Yes, it's great. Oh, God, I'm gonna go to sleep now. Okay, thank you. That's awesome. So I mean, what we're here to talk about, all of you have written really incredible, really different plays that deal with science and I get this question asked all the time. Some of my earliest plays were ones at science so I kind of like have that label for me for all of my career and I am fascinated with it. I love science on stage. I love history on stage. Often those are the same thing. And when you talk about history and when you talk about science, you inherently talk about politics and you talk about feminism and racism and all the isms that we're exposing and what do these activities do? So I'm wondering, before we talk about how you do it, I'm gonna throw out a couple of plays so that those out there who may have heard them or read them or seen them can kind of know what we're talking about. Gita has a wonderful play called On a Wonderverse. We also wrote a play about Henrietta Lacks called Hila together and his amazing play, Photograph 51 and Charlie's Extraordinary Play Behind the Sheet. And they all are talking about different kinds of science, chemistry and medicine and physics and biology and a lot of astronomy on mine. So I'm really interested in kind of how you found these subjects and was it a quest to write science? Was it just a discovered this story, reading a cool book or kind of how you found your way in? Of course, Gita like actually is like a legit like science tech person. So maybe we'll start with Gita, the actual science nerd in our bunch. I think I have a different approach than actually you do Lauren. And I think that was part of the fun of our collaboration is that I'm much more interested in not so much the history of the science but what the science is and where it's pointing forward and like the epistemological questions of like how the science was done. And that actually brings up a lot of interesting political issues too around it and seeing how the science is being done and who's doing it and the questions they're asking. And then of course the questions they're not asking. So I kind of, you know, it's one thing I really bemoan about the American theaters that it seems like people don't really want science fiction but I really like that kind of futurism in plays and the way I've kind of snuck it in is bringing in like a lot of Hinduism has to do with a lot of the ideas and science too is like bringing it in with my cultural interests too. So that's been my approach to science. It's kind of a what if approach, you know, like what if this was true and taking it forward often to like absurd examples. I mean, one of my favorite of your plays that was in the Playwrights Foundations, they are playwrights as well as on a, it was on a Wonderverse, right? Where there's like a little or it was a universe in a jar basically, like who writes that? It's so great. And you kind of were sitting there the whole time going, there's universe on stage. She just put it on stage. It's so brave and theatrical and kind of fabulous. We should be on sci-fi. Yeah, I agree. Let's do that. So Charlie, how did you find your subject matter? How did that come to you? And kind of how did you approach telling that story? I think I fall into the, oh, I read this story in what kind of category? You know, for behind the sheet, it was literally, I think it was Gawker back when Gawker existed that sort of highlighted that there had been a protest at a statue of the man of Dr. J. Marion Sims. And I had never heard of him before and I clicked the article and read about this history of gynecology of slavery and then of doing this work on enslaved black women's bodies. And I was astounded that someone who worked to create the speculum, a tool that perhaps TMI, I went to the doctor this morning, a tool that was put inside me that I didn't know the history of this tool. And usually when I'm sort of like flabbergasted by something, I end up writing about it mostly to try to understand it and to try to make sense of it for myself. And that's sort of how that happened. There was a commission opportunities to make a proposal and I submitted it and sort of the rest was history, but it really just came from a sense of like, oh, wow, it's crazy to me that I did not know that. And it's crazy to me that there are other folks that don't know that, oh, wow, I now have to sort of write about it. I had no idea. I mean, I think I probably read that same article and it, but then it didn't, yeah, the idea that something like that that's such an intimate procedure and intimate tool and intimate device and it has such a dark horrifying history. And you did so beautifully by kind of switching the focus from the doctor to the women. It's breathtaking play. I mean, it's, yeah, I had to like take some breaks to kind of breathe while listening to it. And all of you actually can listen to it. LA TheatreWorks has an amazing recorded version where you can experience the show as well. So Anna, I mean, one of your most famous plays, the beautiful production in New York and in London with Nicole Kidman, photograph 51. How did you find that story and how did you decide to tell it the way you did? Well, I mean, I'll just say that, you know, if you had told my young self that one day I would be on a panel of playwrights talking about writing science plays, I would have been shocked. I was the kind of kid who like, was scared of math and science. I think I routinely cried in math class up until I was older than I should admit. So this was not a subject that I sought out. I was a young playwright. I was living in Washington, DC and a small theater approached me with a commission. I had an agent at the time. It was a $500 commission to write a play about three female scientists, none of whom I knew very much about and whose lives really had nothing to do with each other. And one was Rosalind Franklin. And I decided I was going to take this commission in part because it terrified me. The idea of writing about science was really scary. And when I began to write this play, Rosalind Franklin's story really stuck out to me. I mean, I felt like she was kind of a, I don't know, kindred spirit might be too strong a word, but I connected to her and it became clear to me pretty quickly in reading about her that you could tell a science story without really having to know the science. That you were really talking about people and this was about illuminating people and personalities and dynamics in relationships. And this happens to be a story about collaboration and failed collaboration and what those lead to. And in a way it felt like, sometimes actors who've worked on it have said, it's like we're talking about theater. It's all just human stuff. So I think I sort of figured out how much of the science I needed to understand to write the thing. And I promise you, I know no more than that. And I figured if I could get it, then an audience would be able to understand it. Yeah, that's how I came to write that. That's such a smart level that you have to reach. You have to have enough science. To me, it's making sure that the characters sound like they know what they're talking about. Absolutely. Even if the audience doesn't need to know every turn a phrase, it sounds like what astrophysicists sound like. And then you slow down and explain in some way, however you can manage that exposition organically, the actual bits of science. And to me, the stuff that I've found telling it, and I'd be interested in your responses too, is you need to know enough so that the audience can be with you for those eureka moments, for the like, oh, she figured it out. Oh, that's a true, oh, that's false or whatever. Whatever moment that you're trying to put on stage of discovery or revelation or a conflict at a head, that's really all the audience needs to know. And then you do lovely talk backs with smart people at the end and they can explain in detail all the stuff you didn't have time to put into play. So how do you deal with science? I mean, this question I always get asked, how do you do the research? How do you put the science on stage so that it sounds human and rich enough for an audience to understand? Anybody want to take a crack at that one? I really like how scientists talk to each other. And I think each discipline has like its own like secret coded language that they use and like oceanographers talk very differently than high energy physicists and even within disciplines, like the various climate people talk differently about climate issues. And I love, I mean, just very practically, I love like watching conferences on YouTube also because you know, nerd, but you just get to hear that you get to immerse yourself in the language, the way they're thinking about each other. And like, you know, in terms of like the exposition part of like explaining the science, it's like scientists are so great because they are always devils advocating against each other. And that's just part of their culture. Nobody really minds it and everybody kind of becomes a, you know, almost a genial benign asshole to each other, you know? Like there's like, there can be very argumentative. And I think like that's a great way of explaining science obviously is through those arguments. I think because my play was so much about a historical moment, a lot of it was just looking into the history of the conversations, you know, how were doctors looking into and treating women and treating gynecological issues? That's my crazy dog. If you heard that barking, you know, and then sort of, you know, for behind the sheet, Jamie Ray and Sims has an autobiography. So, you know, honestly reading and seeing how he wrote and trying to then sort of ascertain maybe how he spoke versus, you know, in the play, you kind of go between, you know, for lack of better phrasing, the white world and the black world and how then somebody's going to describe the conditions can be very, very different, you know? And being able to sort of describe, you know, the plays about fistulas, describe what a fistula is in, you know, in a character who is experiencing that versus someone who was looking at it from outside. And I think that was sort of an interesting and difficult, you know, parallel to sort of to balance, you know, but thinking about, I'm writing another play more contemporary and now I'm like, oh, right, how do scientists, how's scientists speak now? So I need to, basically I need to watch those conferences on YouTube and take lots and lots of notes. Indeed. I guess I would say two things that helped me. One was that, as I mentioned, I had initially had a commission to write about three scientists and I changed my mind, you know, midway through the process. And so I didn't have very much time to write the play. And so I wrote a first draft very quickly, which meant I couldn't read very much. I think I read one book maybe when I wrote the first draft of that play. And I actually think that was sort of a blessing because you can, I mean, when you were writing about things, especially things you don't understand, you can really go deep down the rabbit hole of research. And it sort of stopped me from doing that. I mean, I've since read, you know, other books that have been informed, you know, like later drafts of the play. But I actually thought it was useful not to sort of over research. And when I do research, I also, I mean, I take notes, but then I often don't look back at my notes very much. I just, then the things that sort of stick in my mind are the things that end up seeming important, or at least were memorable enough for me that, you know, it makes it seem like they should make their way into the play. And then the other thing I was gonna say. I think I was gonna say all notes. Yeah, right. All notes will look like right up and down and never look at that list ever again. It's like outlines, you write your outline, then ignore it. And then the other thing I was gonna say is that another thing that helped me into that play in particular was sort of finding a metaphor at the heart of it. And I realized, you know, that as I said before, this is a play about collaboration and DNA itself is about, you know, strands that collaborate with each other. And that's what creates the building blocks of life. And so once I kind of landed on that metaphor, it helped me kind of understand the play in a bigger way. I was just gonna ask about that. I think metaphors are huge in science plays. And it's trying to find the way to use the metaphor, the way to elaborate on it, the way that it isn't a metaphor for the characters, but it's a metaphor for the audience and the teller. And have you, Gita and Charlie, have you kind of run across that in your science plays as well? Yeah, I have. And I think like obviously, you know, science is so, it's such a tantalizing thing to almost anthropomorphize it or make it metaphorical. But I didn't think I really liked to do is to take the scientific concepts and see if like, you can make them resonate throughout the play, either like structurally or as Anna was saying, you know, like it's about, you know, the strands are about collaboration and just having that feeling come out through the play. And a more poetic form. So even if people aren't directly saying, you know, metaphorical things like, you know, I feel like a strange particle or something, you know, that there is something maybe strange about the world or the way the play fields. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if I've actively thought of metaphor. I think there are things that sort of came out in the play kind of like that then my director would be like, oh, like that kind of makes me think of this. And I was like, oh, I don't know if I actually like was contemplating that. I think I was like maybe to, I won't say to detriment, but I was so focused on trying to get the story as close to quote unquote, right as I could, you know, and to, you know, to balance both sort of perspectives that needed to sort of be in the piece that I think some of the metaphor really came later and really came actually in the production process, you know. And some of that stuff was more, you know, discovered and having lots of conversations with the team of people and sort of them discovering things that I hadn't really actively sat down and thought about in the same way. I think brought a lot of that sort of that side of the conversation to light versus in some other place that like there's a whole plan working on that is a whole big metaphor that it's not even doesn't really talk about the science just directly at all, but like they're physicalizing what is being described in this one medical condition. And so I feel like that I'm like, oh yeah, that's all metaphor, but for behind the sheet I was sort of, I couldn't let that in quite. Yeah, it's interesting because I think we don't have a ton of medical plays, medical science plays and you know, the Sloan Foundation has done a ton for illuminating science plays, but they specifically exclude stories of medicine, which I was always like, but why? That's like the science of us. That's a really, anyway, so I a part of why I loved your story so much, Charlie, was because it felt all the things I love about science plays science and history and feminism and all of that, but it also had this kind of bravely medical thing. I mean, you're talking about something it's not glamorous talking about fistulas and talking about, you know, and it's certainly for women our particular parts have been so vilified and made to be, you know, just something we don't talk about. So it felt really like what better use of theater than to humanize and really dive into that world. Are there scenes from your science plays once that you've written that you particularly love or you're particularly proud of and maybe tell us how you approached writing it or discoveries you had during a production or a rehearsal or something that maybe, yeah can help the folks out there who are writers kind of figure out how to tackle a thing, how to really make it work. Anybody? I can start with one. I have one play about early 20th century astronomy and this was right before stellar photography was the same as other photography on kind of glass plates. And so these women's jobs is in silent sky. Their job is to look at the plates that are pictures of the night sky that are sent to them and they analyze and figure out the, you know the location and the luminosity of various stars. And there's one moment in the second act we discovered where she drops the glass plate and they've talked about how delicate they are the whole time and, you know and the sound of that crunch, you know some productions literally have go all over the stage and some are like very clean and tidy and just have it kind of go, so they don't have to clean it up which I understand. But there's something about the sound of that and it's a play called silent sky. So the silence being shattered by this thing. It just, and it's such a metaphor for her heartbreak for her disappointment for the temporality of things and the delicacy of, you know various things related to science. So that was one of those scenes where I was like, oh yeah, that has to be timed exactly when she's at that low point, when she has that heartbreak when she has a revelation of like, oh this is not going how I want it to go. And combining that with the tool of science that we've been talking about the whole play. So that was one of those things where it was a total accident but it happened once in rehearsal and I was like, oh, that's the thing. Thank you for messing up so beautifully. Are there any other scenes in your plays that feel that, yeah, that you kind of really love? I think I can go. Oh, great. Peter, do you want to go first? I'll go ahead, Anna. I'll keep thinking. Okay, the one that came to mind first is in a play of mine called Boy, which is another Sloan commission. This one is about nature and nurture as embodied by this one child who at birth had a botched circumcision and then was raised as a girl, unbeknownst to him. So, and it's about his sort of journey of understanding and starting to figure out who he is and accept this thing that happened to him. And I guess the thing that came to mind was there's a sort of payoff that I find quite satisfying. So it's really about, I set up at some point early in the play, this boy who is now back to being a boy and is a man really, is a young man and is trying to live his life and is pursuing a woman and they have a very tricky relationship. And I think at one point he's telling her about like eating chocolate under the covers when he was a kid. And she doesn't know, I should say she doesn't know that he had this 15 year long experience of being a girl. And so by the end of the play, he's terrified to reveal that to her and also because he does not have a working penis. I mean, their relationship is quite stunted and difficult for many reasons, but finally at the end, he's brave enough to tell her and he has this whole long monologue where he explains when his father told him that he was actually born a boy and he says that they were at the ice cream parlor and his ice cream was melting on his hands when they went to eat it in the car and then there's sort of this long silence and she asks, what flavor was the ice cream? Was it chocolate or something like that where you sort of know that she is going to accept him without her having to say that? It's just sort of a callback from earlier in the play. And so I've always kind of liked that little payoff. That's beautiful, yeah. That's great. Thank you for sharing that. Geeta, do you want to go? You got one? Yeah, I have some examples too. One is, and they both have to relate to tying science into Hinduism. I have a play called Blue God Countdown where Hindu gods arrive periodically and visit the characters. And there are several points where, I think it's Shiva who arrives and starts speaking to one of the characters and almost using Vedic chanting and rhythms, but it's saying science, it's saying like, let me explain to you how big the universe is. Let me tell you about the pressure under the ocean. Let me tell you about the height of these trees, but all in scientific language. And similarly, I just did an adaptation of a one-person adaptation of Mahabharata, and it was all very fast-paced and talking about telling the various tales. But when we got to the war, I kind of stopped everything and started just using numbers to explain how large that actual war and the war in Kurukshetra was. And at one point, the actor even goes offstage, comes back with like a giant calculator, starts doing the math just to give the audience a sense of the magnitude and connecting the numbers to what was the immense destruction that was about to happen to these characters that they'd gotten to know. That's great. Yeah, combining a rhythm, like a, yeah, a mystic rhythm with the sounds of science. That's great. I love that. Charlie, what's that? Yeah, I was thinking about this. There's a scene in Behind the Sheet that actually really isn't that science heavy. You know, you have the character of Silamina. And she's sort of, there's a character of Lewis who really loves her and wants to be with her. And she kind of keeps him at an arm's distance and she sort of describes her, you know, how she is feeling, how long it has been and sort of just like, why do you wanna be with me? And the entire time there's another character sort of sitting and listening. And it's a moment where she's just like, oh, he wants to give her flowers. Lewis wants to give Silamina flowers but she's not taking them as other characters. Like just take the fricking flowers. And the actress who played the character in the first production is a good friend of mine. And so I just always have her voice sort of just saying, take the flowers, cause she kind of yells at me that way too. And then it becomes about these characters sort of connecting and you sort of see how their relationships have changed over the years. And I always really love that scene cause that really felt like the heart of the play in some way, that it was for that kind of scene that I was writing the play, if that makes sense. That's great. I love that. I wanna go back to something I talked about a tiny bit before and put it in your hands to discuss more about the kind of politics, feminism and racism and all sorts of biases that come out when you write any history, but certainly histories of science and medicine. And I wonder how much or when that became part of your storytelling or was it the first thing? Cause I know that so many of my stories are about women and women anytime in the past have bullshit to do with. And so so much of the stories are tied into a woman proving herself, proving her worth, proving her ability, et cetera, et cetera. And I see that in all of your work as well and kind of how you manage that, think about it. Is it forefront? Is it back? Is it constant? Yeah, how does that hit you? Uh, it's constant. I think, you know, I think, you know, I'm usually, I say I kind of became a playwright in part because I was an actress first and I was told I looked really young and I was always playing moms. And so I wasn't gonna get the roles that I wanted, right? And so in some way there's always, I think I'm always sure of writing a play that like in theory, if someone got sick, I could jump in to do it, you know? If I'm 100% honest. I'm super smart. I like that. It hasn't happened. And I actually don't really want it to happen now, like that's opening with dread, but you know, but that sort of was the beginning of it. And I think, you know, by doing that, by placing someone like myself at the center, all of those things are gonna come in necessarily. And I think, you know, the sort of unfortunate thing about some of the history and science is that, you know, it doesn't have such a great track record with people of color, with black people. And, you know, that was going to come up. And so for behind the sheet, that was always a question. And it was always a debate, you know, how I was depicting things, you know, whether or not I was vilifying certain characters or not, you know, the questions and the discussions and the emails that I still have in my email box, just kind of go to show how even sort of stepping my foot into this history and perhaps not just saying, oh, it's so great that this person figured a way to figure out a way to fix fistulas, you know, by also sort of pointing out the inherent racism that was a part of that, you know, it's been an interesting experience. But I also, I'm like, that's, those are the questions, those are the things that kind of, you know, I'm fascinated by it and I'm scared by it. I'm scared by that. And that's why I have to write about it. Yeah. How about, Ida Geetze are in about this, politics and science on stage. I mean, I think similar to Charlie, I think it infuses all of the work and I mean, you know, so much of it is about the agency of the people on stage and like science and how people, particularly people of color able to do science at all and whether the things that they say are respected in effect on a Wonderverse is very much based on Rosen and Franklin and just that idea of not getting the Nobel Prize when you so clearly, if you'd be, if she'd been a man, she would have. And, but I think the thing I really learned when we were doing Hila, and I think it had a lot to do with a lot of the black women we brought in through the rehearsal project was, you know, imagining what the characters on stage would think if they came to the play, like would they see themselves, would they feel themselves respected? Are we telling the story that they would want to elevate or not? And, yeah, I think that that was like, that was a way of unlocking something for me to read that play and understanding something about actually the very issues that Charlie was talking about with her play. Yeah, that was an incredible process and really grateful to so much of the community that came in and helped us understand what we didn't understand and work to tell what I thought was, ended up being a really powerful and beautiful story. I'm grateful to those books. Shout out to Margot Hall. She's one of our local Bay Area amazing actors who worked with us on that and are incredible actors for the show too. Yeah. Yeah, Anna, what's that like for you telling this? I guess I would weigh in and say, at least in terms of writing photographic piece one, I think I was really naive. I mean, for one thing, I didn't think anyone would see this play. So I was not really considering the politics of it. I certainly wasn't thinking of Rosalind Franklin as any kind of feminist icon or thinking of the play as a particularly feminist play. I mean, in part because Rosalind Franklin did not want to think of herself as a woman in science, she wanted to be a person in science and do her work. So it's been a really fascinating eye-opening kind of experience for me to learn that many will see this play as they want to see it and see it as a feminist play, which is fine by me. But I think what I didn't consider was that some of the politics and sort of grievances depicted in that play because it's about real people and that's always a tricky thing to do. Some of those are still very much alive. I mean, I'm sure you guys all have had like spirited talk backs after your play where like scientists are still kind of debating the issues. There are people who are still alive who were around in the fifties and some who thought Rosalind Franklin was unfairly treated and others who think that's bullshit. And I mean, you know, so it's and there's a James Watson kind of issue too which grows and changes over time. But I mean, I think, you know, what Gita said about the people in the play, if they came to see the play, how would they feel? Well, so that happened with this play. And it's that's terrifying. And I guess, I mean, obviously Rosalind Franklin could not come see the play which is the point of the whole play that she died too young. But, you know, I'm not sure you should have in your mind what those people would think seeing the play because otherwise you would be, I think so hamstrung. I think it would be really hard to write if you, but I think if they're imagined, you know, if you know they really won't come, then you can imagine what they would think if they came. They're very dead. But if you're, yeah, if you're writing real people who might actually come to see your play, I think you can't really think about what they would think or you'd be stymied. This is why I don't want to write about people that are alive. Living people, no, it is really tricky. It is. It was interesting too about science characters that they don't see themselves as being very political and scientists tend to have like a very like cling to this idea that they have very objective goals. And I know a lot of women scientists and I was among them who issued the idea that any of the identity issues that were so clearly shaping my experience in science were gonna actually affecting me, you know? And I think that's actually fascinating. I think that's a fascinating characteristic of scientists and something for them to put, for the characters to push against in the play, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it's getting a lot of love on the comments. When I look over here, I'm looking at my other screen. I'm not looking away from your checking my, you know, Instagram. Yeah, it's such, it's... So maybe just backing up because the conversation about writing plays about anything specific science plays or feminist plays or whatever always goes back to writing a great play. Like it doesn't actually matter if the science is really good, if the play isn't. And so how do you... This is kind of a big question, but how do you define a good play? Like when you set out to write something good and meaningful for you, what are the things you think about and or the first batch of things you think about? What's important to you? And I mean, it's kind of a broader question of, yeah, what advice would you have to the writers watching? Hello, writers watching. Anybody? I mean, I think for me, I think creating it, I believe in theater as an important act within democracy. And so kind of creating a transformative experience. And personally, I'm just like, I'm trying not to preach so much to the choir as trying to find ways to move the conversation forward. So I guess if I had to come up with a rubric for what a good play was, it would kind of be somewhere between transformation and elevation and conversation. Awesome. This is not a really hard question. Sorry, yeah. No, it is. Anna, go, go, Anna, go. I don't have a great answer. But I was going to say, I mean, I think as I said before, I think writing about things that scare you, that's often valuable because it means that there will be something kind of controversial in the play. There's something that you're terrified to tackle. But I guess the way I kind of start plays is if I can kind of like see my way into them and understand what about that story moves me, then I know I can write the play. I mean, I've started many, many plays that I haven't finished that I think I just, there was like a premise that I found interesting. And so I would write a few scenes or even half a play and then realize that I didn't know where it was going and it wasn't going anywhere. And so I think the good plays are the ones where you, I mean, it's so obvious, but where you see the end, you have a sense in your heart of kind of where it needs to go. And ideally, you know that going in, but I don't think you always do, which is how you sometimes end up with those half written plays that you throw away. Yeah, I think it's feels so a cheat to say, but it feels like a feeling, like the plays of mine that I sort of like, I think that is a good play are the ones that like, at some point, usually it's an image or it's a phrase and I latched onto it and I sort of just let it come out on the paper. And I actually, I didn't fucks with it too much until it was clear what the story was and what I was trying to show and that image sort of understanding what that image that sort of came to me, it was about. And the plays that I struggle with are when I can't figure out what the image is or I've been sort of forced an image or something like that. And those are the plays that even I sort of like and look at, I can read, I can be like, yeah, I don't know if I think that's one of a good play of mine. Like maybe it hits other things, but I actually, I don't know if that's a good play and sort of in my mind if I'm being truthful to myself. But yeah, and I'm trying to think about other folks' plays and it's honestly, it's like, there are plays I've gone to, I've been like, I have no idea what is happening here, but like I'm experiencing this and I love it. And I'm like, to me that is a good play, even though I'm like, I also don't know what's happening. You know, as much as sometimes, you know, you're reading a play and it just hits all the things, you know, but again, it's a feeling that I'm left with that I wish I could put into better words. I think for me, it's emotional, right? There's this, especially when you talk about something like science on stage, where we expect it to be so intellectually driven and so heady, you have to remember that to Anna's point or all of our points, it's people. It's a story about people and people get their hearts broken and are betrayed and are overly passionate and declare love and, you know, all of that. And if the play doesn't have room for that kind of human emotion, instead of just, we did it, it's correct, you know? Then it's gonna feel like a kind of a walk through science or a walk through history, but not a walk in somebody else's shoes, you know? So I think that's one of the things in answering my own question that I just randomly came up with and wasn't expected to ask. That to me, I think is one of the most important things is, and it's a combination of it. Like, Charlie, what you're saying about that feeling, for me, that feeling, combined with Anna's point about knowing the end, combined with Geeta's point is like, it sinks and you can kind of get that like, oh yeah, oh, I can write this. Okay, oh yeah, oh man, she's gonna get so mad here, have a great monologue and a door slam. Oh, fabulous, can't wait to write that scene. But trying to figure that out. And I mean, to me with science, that's combining the research that you do and just narrowing it down, what is the discovery? What is the thing you need to know already to understand the discovery? And where do we start? Like, what time period are we in? What hasn't been discovered yet that we need to kind of reference like, there's no cell phones or, you know, like whatever. Like laying that groundwork so the audience can really enjoy the ride of the discovery and the emotion without having to be handheld the whole time and being like, let's pause for a lecture on basic anatomy. So is there any like last minute advice? We only have a couple of minutes left that our flu by. And I know, let's see, actually, there's a few questions. Fabulous pun about how much chemistry we have. Yes, love the science. Chemistry, that's great. I wanted to highlight something Anna said right at the beginning of the, when she was talking about how she was applying for a class and she didn't have a place, so she submitted a poem. I was like, oh, I wish I had been like that when I was younger, like I just never understood that even though these doors seemed closed to me, they were actually just openable, right? Like, and that you find a way around them. And I think like not waiting for permission to show your work or do your work is really important. So, you know, take inspiration from Anna. Submit your poem if you have to. Submit your poem. And like, don't, I always joke, my dad was like a history major and he used to give history lectures just like over dinner and I would be like, I'm never, I hate history, it's not happening. You know, and then clearly have sort of stepped into a place where I'm like, ooh, looking at history is interesting and complicated. And obviously I wanted to live there. And don't let like your own sort of prejudices in that sense, you know, like I was like, I don't like history. So why would I write a play about this moment? You know, and I'm really glad that like, I didn't at the time writing the commission did not think of it as history. It was only later when I like started opening history books. So I was like, oh, I've sort of done this thing that I don't think I'm very good at, you know, and I'm sort of glad that I didn't have that thought. So if you feel like, again, if you feel like you know, history or not a science person, you're not any of these things like, you know, there is a perspective and there is probably a point of view that would be great to have on stage through your eyes. Yeah, great point. I remember, well, I remember when at my sort of grad school orientation, one of the professors stood up and said that playwrights need to be like athletes. And I actually think she meant literally, like we needed to sort of stay in shape. And we all kind of made fun of that idea. But I actually think there is a kind of relevant connection to athletes in that I think playwrights or what I'm still sort of learning to, or trying to do is to recover quickly, you know, sort of put things behind you, let them go and keep going because there are a lot of obstacles and rejections and terrible things happen along the way. And play is you write that you write half of and then decide they probably have no future. And I mean, and I can get sort of stuck in the frustration of those things. And I think that, you know, the world is not reflecting on your, you know, moments of pain. So really, you know, it's just about writing the next play. That's such a good thing to just, I mean, it's like reviews or rejections of applications you've submitted or yeah, any version of failure is like, it doesn't have to be if you don't think of it as failure. And that's inevitable, that's part of a journey. Everyone gets lots of rejections along the way. I think we can all, that's how I go. And I think actually it's really interesting with science plays because most of the people who work in theater are artists and come from the arts. They actually have a lot of emotion, like actually if there's a lot of math in a play, they sometimes get like a little, like they have issues around it. And like sometimes you feel like that's reflecting on you as a playwright and it might just be your job to work through them with it and not, and just be resilient about it to Anna's point. Yeah, that's so great. So in the last couple of minutes, thank you, thank you, thank you for this really exciting inspiring talk. How can we find more of your things to listen to? I mentioned, Charlie's behind the sheets at LA Theater Works, which you can link up. I'll put the link to that in the chat, so you can find it easily. What's, how is the best way to access your work? How do they find your plays to read or listen to or whatever, anybody have some fun stuff to drop? I just did a zoomlet with SF Playhouse, which was a live rehearsal of a play of mine called The Mommy Assumption, which is based on some social science research from the late 1990s. Then you can find that on YouTube, I think now. Awesome. And, you know, just reach out to me, I'm on Twitter. And your website's gorgeous, lots of pictures. Oh yeah, I keep creating a website. I want you to help me, you can look at my website. Thanks for that, thank you. Yeah, I was gonna say my website's very, well, I don't know if it's up to date during the pandemic, I'm not sure I've done that, but usually up to date. And my two science plays are also L.A. Theater Works recordings and those are cool. Oh, that's great. And photograph 51, we just finished recording it for Audible. So it will, following in the footsteps of your play, Lauren. There was a lot of reference to various things that worked well when you were recording your play. So that will be out who knows when, but probably sometime this year. And then, yeah, my website has. Great. Any other stuff for you, Charlie? Interesting, my website, you know, I think I still have some plays on a new play exchange. I had a moment where I was like, everything, all my plays are terrible and I took all them off, but I think I put some of them back on. Oh my gosh. And then behind the shade is on L.A. Theater Works. Awesome. Thank you so much, you fabulous artists. This was such a joy. Yeah, thanks everybody. I'll go through and read some of the comments and respond. And yeah, reach out, see these incredible plays and write your own and tell us about them because I can't wait to see what y'all are writing. Thank you, Lauren. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us, Lauren. And thanks for hosting HowlRound. Thanks.