![]() Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-fourth year. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. You can learn more about our current Covid policies and protocols here. Most of the readings are open to the public for free but reservations are required. The 2022 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from April 7 through May 24 and features in-person readings of five new plays. I always feel like I’m not doing enough, but answering this question made me realize I guess I am working. I finished a new screenplay and the band just finished a new double album. There are discussions about doing workshops of The Moderate and this new neurotechnology play The Conquered coming up next season potentially. I have a commission that I need to finish this summer from Kane Rep that play is set in the 1990s and follows two college students and how the decision by one of them to have an abortion impacts their friendship. Big news is coming about a narrative podcast that I wrote called Vapor Trail, but I can’t share that yet sadly. I don’t use Facebook anymore, but I use Instagram, so it’s not exactly like I’m taking any big stand against the Metaverse.Īt the end of the month, I’m going to Flint Rep to work on a new play about a throuple called Danger and Opportunity. How active are you on social media? Which platforms? They should have job stability and resources for when this work takes a toll, like access to free therapy, and never be penalized for taking mental health breaks when they are needed. They should have a union like EMS workers. What they do is hard work, and they should be compensated fairly. But many of these workers see things that would traumatize any of us. And as one of my interviewees told me, looking at naked pics or consensual porn isn’t necessarily a terrible way to earn a living. There will never be an AI intelligent enough to take the place of moderators. What do you think the responsibilities of a company should be for the people who do content moderation for them? Is there a way to do it differently? I don’t think that would be ethical for an audience given some of the material in the play. You might read or hear a description of the content, or see a blurred out version of it, but never ever see the actual thing. How that will work in production is something director Steve Cosson and I will explore in our next stage of development. The audience will hear what Frank hears, but never see what he sees. Will the audience hear what he sees? Did you ever consider actually showing what he sees? Your stage directions have the audience seeing descriptions of what he sees without actually showing what he sees. Your play concerns the impact moderating content on an unnamed social media platform has on your main character, Frank. Ultimately, the play is fictional, but draws from those interviews. But there were things that were so upsetting that I really grappled with what to include. All of that influenced the writing of my play. All these interviews took place on Zoom or the phone, but I was able to get moderators to open up to me in surprising ways. Gray, and from there I was able to get into touch with people working as moderators. I spent 2020 interviewing scholars of internet culture like Sarah, Andrew Marantz and Mary L. What kind of research did you do in order to write THE MODERATE? Did you interview any content moderators? As the story of Frank started to come into focus, I applied for the EST/Sloan Project commission in 2020 and then in the midst of all the devastation, I got the good news that I got the commission, so I could immerse myself in writing something new and stop doomscrolling. Roberts and seeing the documentary The Cleaners. I had been thinking about internet content moderators as an interesting story for a new play after reading Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. But let’s have the playwright tell us more. But what does what they see do to the watchers? On Monday, April EST/Sloan First Light Festival hosts the first public reading of THE MODERATE, the extensively researched and chilling new play by Ken Urban about the daily life of a social media content moderator and how what he sees and the decisions he makes affects his mental health, his family life, and his friendships. To keep violent and disturbing content off their platforms, social media companies need humans to decide what stays and what goes.
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![]() “Well, excuse me, sorceress!” I replied in the same language. “Before this dome collapses under us, I suggest we get to the ground.”Ĭalypso grumbled in ancient Minoan, “I already said that.” Despite the danger, if I had a chance of seeing Meg McCaffrey again, of prying her away from her villainous stepfather’s grasp, I had to try. Something about the landscape below made me as restless as Festus.Īlas, I was sure this was where we were meant to be. After so many weeks of travel, I was tired and saddle sore. Better not to think of such possibilities. As long as I remained mortal, Meg could order me to do anything, even kill myself….No. She also happened to be my demigod master, thanks to Zeus’s twisted sense of humor. The truly sad thing about this? Meg was one of my better friends. If you cannot bring him to me alive, kill him. Capture Apollo before he can find the next Oracle. I had heard my old enemy Nero give orders to Meg: Go west. Nor could I imagine why Meg McCaffrey would be sent here to capture me. I could think of no reason why an evil triumvirate of ancient Roman emperors would take interest in such a location. And, no, Hera, why would I be talking about you?)Īfter falling to earth in New York City, I found Indianapolis desolate and uninspiring, as if one proper New York neighborhood-Midtown, perhaps-had been stretched out to encompass the entire area of Manhattan, then relieved of two-thirds of its population and vigorously power-washed. (Not the yummy kind of licorice, either the nasty variety that sits for eons in your stepmother’s candy bowl on the coffee table. Around us rose a meager cluster of downtown high-rises-stacks of stone and glass like layered wedges of black and white licorice. Indiana was flat country-highways crisscrossing scrubby brown plains, shadows of winter clouds floating above urban sprawl. “Apollo, just try, will you? Does this look like the city you dreamed about or not?” “Guys, cool it.” Leo patted the dragon’s neck. “That doesn’t mean I can pinpoint her location with my mind! Zeus has revoked my access to GPS!” Just hearing Meg’s name gave me a twinge of pain. “You said your friend Meg would be here.” “You’re the one who’s been having visions,” Calypso reminded me. “Why is it my job to sense things? Just because I used to be a god of prophecy-” Leo glanced back, his face streaked with soot. I had a flashback to the time I installed a life-size statue of the muse Calliope on my sun chariot and the extra weight of the hood ornament made me nosedive into China and create the Gobi Desert. Despite my New York State junior driver’s license, Leo Valdez didn’t trust me to operate his aerial bronze steed!įestus’s claws scrabbled for a hold on the green copper dome, which was much too small for a dragon his size. It wasn’t enough that I had to toil upon the earth doing (ugh) heroic quests until I could find a way back into my father’s good graces, or that I had a case of acne which simply would not respond to over-the-counter zit medicine. Oh, the indignities I had suffered since Zeus stripped me of my divine powers! It wasn’t enough that I was now a sixteen-year-old mortal with the ghastly alias Lester Papadopoulos. I, the most important passenger, the youth who had once been the glorious god Apollo, was forced to sit in the back of the dragon. Cold wind blew her chestnut hair into my face, making me blink and spit. “Could we please get to the ground? Gently this time?”įor a formerly immortal sorceress who once controlled air spirits, Calypso was not a fan of flying. No blowtorching public monuments!”īehind him on the dragon’s spine, Calypso gripped Festus’s scales for balance. “Whoa, buddy!” Leo Valdez pulled the dragon’s reins. He landed on the cupola of the Indiana Statehouse, flapped his metallic wings, and blew a cone of fire that incinerated the state flag right off the flagpole. Yet for some reason, Festus decided he did not like Indiana. Ohio he tolerated, even after our encounter with Potina, the Roman goddess of childhood drinks, who pursued us in the form of a giant red pitcher emblazoned with a smiley face. Pennsylvania he seemed to enjoy, despite our battle with the Cyclopes of Pittsburgh. We’d been traveling west for six weeks, and Festus had never shown such hostility toward a state. WHEN OUR DRAGON declared war on Indiana, I knew it was going to be a bad day. Who taught me that rules change in the Reaches |
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