Exploring THE NETHER – Talking Tech w/ Shana Cooper & Kirsten Bowen
Host Brian Wesolowski sits down inside D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theater with Director Shana Cooper and Dramaturg Kirsten Bowen to discuss their production of THE NETHER. <br><br>Described as "a haunting and highly original modern crime drama that hacks into urgent questions about desire, technology, and morality," Brian & Emma Llansó –– CDT's Director of our Free Expression Project –– delve into all aspects of the show (and it's creation), exploring the overlapping areas of tech law, policy and norms.<br><br>FOR DISCOUNTED TICKETS: <br>Reach out to press@cdt.org or message us on Twitter at @CenDemTech and we'd be happy to share a special discount code for tickets.<br><br>MORE INFO: http://www.woollymammoth.net/nether/<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT.
Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk where we dish on tech and Internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski, and it's time to talk tech. If you live in the DC area or even if you've just visited, undoubtedly, you've noticed that DC has a vibrant theater scene. One of the best local theaters is Woolly Mammoth. And this month, the theater company is staging a production of The Nether, a play by Jennifer Haley. The tape the play takes place in a bleak gray future, and The Nether is a logical evolution of today's Internet. A completely immersive digital world where you can experience just about anything you want, as anyone you want to be. And not just see the world, but join a realm of sights, sounds, touch, taste, and emotions. The play touches on almost every issue CDT deals within our policy work, especially issues of free expression, anonymity, and privacy rights. Of course, these issues are taken a step further in the Nether. Today, we're lucky enough to have director Shauna Cooper and dramaturg, Kirsten Bowen, from the Woolly Mammoth Theater joining us to talk about their production of The Nether. Later in this episode, our director of free expression, Emma Alonso, will explore issues of law, policy, and norms in the increasingly digital and virtual world with them as well. Thanks so much for joining Tech Talk, Shauna and Kirsten. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here. So I had a chance to see The Nether. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was incredible. And it's one of those plays that you feel a lot of emotions, and a lot of times you're even uncomfortable
another was I've been at Woolly Mammoth as our literary director, this is Kirsten, for almost remember this was one of the first plays that was handed to me when I joined the staff as a play that I was instructed to read and then proceed to get. And, it took us a little bit longer because it's had a couple of wonderful productions in other cities. But Woolly Mammoth, we do first of all, we do new plays. We do world premieres and Washington, DC premieres. And the plays that tend to draw us are not only plays that really push boundaries stylistically and formally that are theatrical, that tell a story in a unusual way, but also plays that cause us to question and that provoke, that are very thoughtful and hard hitting, uncomfortable. And this play just had all of that in spades. It's definitely a wooly mammoth play in that. It does attack its subject from a rather, in a rather left handed way. And just in terms of the the, the structure of it, it's it's structured like a procedural, but it unfolds in a rather in a way that makes you have to lean forward. And And the the subject matter of it is makes one uncomfortable, makes one question what your preconceived notions, I think, before of what you thought about a subject before and then you come out on the other side, maybe thinking a little bit I don't know if you think about it differently, but in a in a new way and, in a more kind of open and thoughtful way, that's something that we definitely go for as well in the place that we choose.
Great. So, I mean, you touched on this a bit. It touches on the play touches on morality, respect, legality, and, you know, love in a virtual world. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of addressing these sort of these tough issues in, a setting that is both, you know, meant to be virtual and real world?
Absolutely. Yeah. I'll take this. This is Shauna. I think one of the biggest challenges actually was that the content is so subversive and brings up a lot of, tricky moral questions that Jennifer is asking us to wrestle with. But at its heart, I really believe the play is a love story. And we talked about this a lot. So I think I think one of the biggest challenges for me was how to create a world where audiences would be so compelled by it and invested in the relationships that happened in that virtual non real space that they would, in spite of themselves, if not support, sort of accept the relationships that were happening there to the extent or be sympathetic or empathetic to the relationships that were happening there that were things that that normally, morally, they would absolutely be opposed to. But because those existed in a realm where they were in fact not real and thus not threatening in terms of real world consequence necessarily, depending on how you think about it, that they would be, compelled by it and thus complicit in the action of the play and have to wrestle more deeply. Doing that though and also, like, how having people be truly, empathetic to the love stories that are at the heart of this play, I think was the biggest challenge because of
the subversive subversiveness of the material. But it's a challenge that I love. I mean, right, that's why that's why we go to the theater. Could you go into the the staging of this a little bit more? I thought that it was a you had an interesting challenge of having to create the physical world and then the virtual world. And in this case, as you've said, the the physical world is only this awful bleak place, and I hope that technology does not take us to a place where that's the case. But then, of course, the virtual world is, you know, maybe what we remember or we think of like present day or, like, think of the past when we were kids. A beautiful place with trees and fantasy and all that sort of stuff. How did you go about staging that and create it so that it was clear to the audience where the transitions were worked in the play? I thought you did a spectacular job.
Thank you. Yeah. That the the big challenge of the play is how do you move at lightning speed really in between these two locations. One being an interrogation room, which does feel like, based on everything you learn in the text wants to be, bleak, a a sense of isolation and, kind of, despair that seems to just sort of exist in the future world as it now exists in the nether. People spend 80% of their time in the virtual world is what we learn in this in this future. And so it seemed important that well, it's an interrogation room to begin with. So those are not cheery places of themselves but that in the future, they really become just a void of anything human. And then in contrast, the hideaway and probably many different realms in, this future Internet is everything we no longer have, everything we're nostalgic for in the way that you just described. I love that idea that it's like the things from our childhood, the things from the past, things like beautiful nature and, birds. Yeah. The tree. And, we thought about that a lot in terms of sounds, like sounds of music boxes and, you know, in what are the things in a little girl's bedroom that would turn it into a little girl's dream, which is how it's described in the play. And so I think there really is an aspect of nostalgia that exists in the hideaway that that everyone we want everyone to be able to just tap into. So,
I would be interested in knowing how working on this play has changed both of your your perspectives, you know, as creative leads for it. How did it move you?
That's a very interesting question. I think that working on this play, I don't know if I had any necessarily preconceived notions about, what did it the consequences of going of online going online and and the actions that we take there. And but it definitely it's as as the production dramaturg, a lot of my job is providing contextual information and and research for the creative team and just kind of really diving deeply into these worlds through Internet, book research, film, video. And this was a particularly interesting journey and just making me think about all the new ways I think that we're affected by by technology and virtual reality. And I guess one thing I there's a lot more and more we talk about how the virtual spaces are make are they making us less human? Are they making us less connected to to who we are, you know, to our, you know, our friends, our family, our, our loved ones? And I never I think that one of the really great strengths of the play is that it doesn't take a side in either of those directions. And it also it offers up, if anything, an alternative view that these spaces can be just as real as as the ones that we, you know, occupy in, like, the flesh and blood and that they can they can be sanctuaries. They can be places where we can actually be free to be the person who we can't necessarily be in, you know, our our real life. Yeah. As Kirsten was talking about the
play, I think really at the heart of it is exploring this question of how, technology is impacting our humanity. And I think when we began this process, I was coming more from a place of feeling like technology, certainly, at least in my own life, was limiting my relationships with other people and the depth of those relationships and, the amount intimacy, that that would happen that in a way technology was a distraction from the true intimacy of face to face exchanges. But through rehearsing this play, I think I really came out on the other side, through a lot of the things that that Kirsten mentioned the play gets at because I think the play makes a beautiful argument for the way in which certain virtual spaces can create opportunities for relationships that could never exist in the real world. And that there is a kind of opportunity to connect beyond form, beyond the human form, transcend that in an almost spiritual way, I think the play is suggesting at times. And I bought in. I think I, I I guess I would say I still have not had that experience, but the play helped me to see and to really believe that could be possible.
Great. Well, we're gonna take a little break here. Thank you so much, Shauna and Kirsten. I'm gonna turn it over to Emma Alonso. Emma actually took part in a post performance, discussion this week titled, The New Frontier, Governance, Expression, and Policy in an Increasingly Virtual World. So we've touched on some of those issues, but Emma and our wooly mammoth friends are gonna go deeper now.
Well, thank you so much for, taking the time to talk with us about some of the deeper issues in the play. I've had the the real luxury of actually getting to see the play a couple of times, and I've been so impressed by the sheer wealth of tech policy issues that the playwright managed to pack into the play, but in a way that really felt dynamic. Like it wasn't, it didn't feel exposition heavy. There were, you know, great scenes that sort of lay out the the legal framework of the play, but it doesn't feel like you're sitting down to read a treatise. So I was wondering, what what do you think about when putting on a play like this, how to keep that kind of big information download, dynamic and and something that the audience can really kind of start sinking into the plot while they're also really getting that context for the world?
The main word is stakes. That's the thing we talk about all the time in relate in in rehearsal, which is what's at stake, basically. And in the theater, we're always talking about how do you make the stakes as high as possible because obviously, we're not interested really in watching a couple of characters talking about something that they have low stakes about. That's a low stakes life choice. Right? So, and this play is, wonderful in that kind of, we say Shavian way sometimes. Like, Shaw would write these plays with just extraordinary arguments at the center of them. And and and Jen Haley is really, getting at that, I think, in the Nether. And so you have characters who are really fighting for their world view and at the same time, the ex their way of existence. That if they cannot win this argument, if they cannot convert the other person to their way of thinking about the world, in a way, the world is no longer worth living in. And so I think, absolutely, the way that these arguments get laid out that are ultim ultimately, I think, in the way that you're talking about, you know, sort of policy arguments, there are life and death questions to these characters. And so we just talked a lot about that in rehearsal. What are the stakes and what are the the points that you're arguing as you might argue in a court of law to defend your point and defend your life, to be more exact.
Yeah. Well and I think because the stakes are so high in the play, the the power dynamics really kind of come to the fore. And one of my questions, you know, the first scene starts out as we've talked about, it's an interrogation. You've got one character, detective Morris, who's got another character, you know, in an interrogation room, but it's not really clear on whose authority any of this is happening. So and I mean, I'm sitting there thinking it's like, you know, the the characters being interrogated is asking for his lawyer. And I'm like, that's right. He's got a right to have counsel in a room with him when he's being questioned. But what so how did you how did you think about that? Where this this happens, this place seems to happen in the future, but also in just context that are pretty different from the procedurals that we all see on TV?
They are. I mean, detective Morris does end up laying out who she is and and and upon whose authority she's there. I think it's a few scenes in. But, really, the people who have given her the authority to be there are essentially their, online community. You know, they've passed this referendum. I mean, if we are to believe her, that's the other question. Right? Is that she could be making all of that up. And I think that's one of the ways in which the play is so fascinating is that Sims, who is the character that in a way we should side with the least impulses. He is actually the one who has a stronger leg to stand on legally at the beginning. And then all the way through, it it kind of it's like a game of cat and mouse in terms of who has the stronger argument. And I think it's one of the ways that Jen gets us really in the middle of this play is that just when you're starting to side with Morris and she's laying out a strong argument, Sims comes in, and he just turns the table, and you can't help but admit the truth of it. So it is it does seem to be a future where legality is maybe a a little, more vague in terms of what determines that, but there are still rules and laws in this future. I mean, I think Jen is purposely creating a future that, you know, could be twenty four hours from now that is imminent, in terms of how all these questions affect our lives.
And, Kirsten, we've talked a little bit about kind of your research process already, but I'd I'd love to hear some more about that of there's so many different issues in this play and so many different it's just really impressive the way Jen Haley is able to kind of in a couple of pages hit what takes like 15 staff members at CDT to cover all of those issues. So how did you approach kind of diving into the wealth of Internet policy questions that she's raising? And then kind of a follow-up, was there anything about the way our legal system currently works that surprised you?
Sure. I I have to admit, I we probably didn't do quite as deep a dive into Internet policy as Jen Haley did or as, you know, or definitely as you know, Emma. A lot of our research, it because there it the play, as you said, does bring up so many different issues. I mean, the things we were covering were not only, about Internet policy and and virtual reality and virtual spaces, what they look like, how they can be used, but also the psychology of being a pedophile with someone with these tendencies and where that how how that exists online, how that exists in real life. It's funny. A lot of the we have we we keep a lot of our research on this this blog and, that, and we were finding a lot of our sections were just were being you know, were overlapping with each other. So a lot of the work that we do tends to be, well, what will feed this this actor's process. And so we try not to be too nitty gritty and, and take and just and overwhelm them with too much information that's not gonna be helpful. But we were I think we were surprised by a lot of the how old some of the laws were and how there was a a lot of the lack of oversight there seems to be and that we haven't it seems in the world of play that we've wherever we are, whether it's next week, whether it's a hundred years from now, it seems that the world's kind of caught up a little bit more with technology and the pace of these questions that are being asked. So I think it was surprising just we had one day where we were trying to track all the laws in terms of of obscenity and pornography and, like, what is obscene and what what is and pornography, what is illegal, but also just how many of these laws had been put forward but then also been repealed because they found they were going a little bit too far. We were also driving into questions of of policing as well. And just we're interested to find too that a lot of these, sites seem to be not policed much by the government, but by the actual the onus was on the actual, you know, the commercial, like, the owners themselves. And I think we found in in a an article, I believe it was in Wired, that was a major source of research for us, that a lot of the reasons that that they also do this, why they have, for instance, I'm now I'm I'm blanking on on the actual term of the person does this, but people, like, who are, the policing content on YouTube and on, you know, Facebook and Google, just that a lot of this is done not for necessarily, like, a moral reason or, you know, to protect people, but so that like, for commercial reasons so that people, you know, will not will continue to use that site and not be, you know, find material that they find, like, upsetting and offensive. And also to how a lot of these, content watchdogs are people who are employed overseas as well. And, you know, the same, like, way that we, you know, have, you know, sweatshop labor, we also have people, like, you know, in The Philippines as well who are having to kind of just trawl through all of the just kind of awful, like, horrifying detritus that we just that create we create and put on the Internet. Yeah. There's a a fantastic article on The Verge,
actually published just this week that was exactly about this what sort of what happens to the content moderator who sees the horrifying video or the horrifying post, and you kind of have to remember that it is humans behind almost all of the really kind of qualitative analysis that goes into content moderation online, because it is it is this case that you're you're talking about where it's, the the the companies creating their terms of service and enforcing them that can go much further than what the government could restrict. And so that's that kind of dynamic, that power dynamic again. Right? Are are we talking about somebody who's empowered by the law to silence the speech or to try to restrict this expression versus what companies are free to do? And, yeah, these questions of how do you actually implement that at scale, can be kind of eye opening when you start realizing, like, oh, but it's a lot of it's people behind this, which actually kind of ties into another, question that I had for you all. So the theme of identity is huge throughout this play. There's a deals with people in the offline world, avatars that they have in the Nether, and and there's a lot of just kind of question about depictions, representations, what's happening in imagination versus reality and the lines all start getting very blurred. How did you approach kind of presenting that in what at the end of the day is kind of a live action theater in that's very physically kind of physically constrained, but is trying to represent these kinds of these big fuzzy questions about reality versus unreality when we're all sort of sitting there in a theater watching using our imaginations?
That's such a big question. So we had a couple of conversations in rehearsal just to help the actors track this question of who am I when there is someone else in this play who is my other half, you know, who is my avatar. And one thing that we found useful was the realization that there were times in the play that they were thinking as as themselves and speaking as themselves, and then there were times in the play that they were thinking and speaking more as their their other half, whether that be the real person or the avatar. And that was just an interesting dichotomy, and it's not like you would necessarily see completely the physical manifestation of that on stage. However, there are times when a certain character I'm I think I'll stick away from names so we don't give things away. But but a certain character will shift in their rhythm, in their physicality, in their attack of language because it really feels like their real world person is speaking through the avatar at that moment. You know? And there's a shift in language and the made and the way they make that arguments, all of these things that it became very clear that, someone other than the the sort of superficial form of the person was speaking in that moment. So that was one way we explored it. And then there's this moment towards the end of the play when one of the avatars disappears, sort of disintegrates. I can't remember what the description is in the script of what happens to her. But as we were the sense that this avatar, this character in the virtual site sort of starts to malfunction in some way. And so an interesting question was, how do we create that image with a real person and yet sort of transition from the real to the unreal in front of our eyes. And that was a place where projections were really helpful, and we started playing with a lot of ideas of projecting on people and how do you then take that projection and start to pixelize it? And, and then the big thing that I felt like was important in that question of tracking an image of a person from the real to the unreal is the way in which there is a loss in that, there is a death in that, and how to create a kind of emotional relationship to that event versus it simply being a, technical or visual journey.
And did you find yourself drawing on any of your own experiences or in working with the cast with kind of their experiences of technology and of kind of the Internet as it affects their relationships? How much did that sort of because the Nether is so far advanced from what we have today. You know, even the kind of the cutting edge of VR is not what we have in, what we hear the Nether described to be of being this, you know, it's more real than real kind of feeling. So how how relevant was kind of everyone's sort of day to day or preexisting experience with technology in trying to create that future world?
Well, one simple example was the child, who's playing Iris in the play, in this moment I was just mentioning where Iris malfunctions. We were trying to figure out what should happen with her physical form in the space, and she started to do this thing where she would just sort of go away in her eyes, you know, that was quite eerie. And when we were having a conversation about it, she talked about her siblings and friends who play a lot of video games, and and she does not happen to be someone who does. But she talked about the experience of watching them and sort of watching what happens to them and watching her mom try to, you know, get through to them when they're in the zone of the game. And so I think that experience certainly impacted the choice that she made that I think is quite an effective choice. And it really, really, it's a simple thing, but it it really registers on stage. And I think she's absolutely drawing from her life in that moment.
Yeah. And so after studying this play and kind of living with it and its themes and all of the complicated questions that it raises, how do you feel about the future of the Internet? Are there any kind of big issues that this play raised for you that you thought, wow, this could this could either go really in the wrong direction or maybe there's a lot of promise? What would what would you recommend to a group like CDT that we really keep our keep our eyes on?
I think well, for me, the Internet is not going anywhere. Definitely. I and I think if anything, what this play has definitely cements for me is that it's it it does it just now the way that we use technology, we're we're starting to change. I also I think as Shauna was alluding to before, our viewpoints of of how, how far apart, how close it keeps us, relationships can now be conducted, I think, completely by via text between two people and they, you know, that can still be a very valid and intimate and close conversation. I think that for me, what what always troubled me the most about what the world that Jen was presenting in this play was it always the lines that Amber always stick up for me is that she your wife wears, you know, actual cotton, and this is Sim's wife. And and, they drink wine from grapes and how these actual, organic, you know, real world things are no longer in existence. So, I I think that the idea that as we kind of go further and further and more deeply into this these virtual worlds and online, what are are we still keeping in mind the actual stakes of living in the real world? And how do we how do we kind of keep those, keep the the world that we're living in now just as as as viable and healthy and and, you know, a live place to live as this this world of our imaginations.
Yeah. I love that. Just to tag on onto that for a second. I mean, I think when we were building this show and creating all of the worlds that exist in the hideaway, the most challenging one to create is the scene that takes place outdoors in a grove of trees. And that was mainly because we there's just no way to compete with the real thing. You know? There's a kind of, healing and joy and, tangible health that you soak up from being around real nature. And no matter how pretty the image was, it could never completely convey that. You know, I was struck by that as we were working on the play, and it's one of the very particular things from the real world that the characters talk about missing. I think they say that several times. I miss the trees. And that line is always so heartbreaking to me because we can see the potential for that all around us. And so I think absolutely the warning of this play is protect the trees, invest in the trees. You know, Colin, our lighting designer, he what he did the morning after the Nether opened was he went and planted trees in DC. We did part of our, design our first design conference. We created one of those, parking parking lots. There's this this day called parking day that's all across the country where you turn parking spots into parks. And so we did that out in front of Woolley just to to invest in a kind of green space in the middle of our city. So I think that that is a real challenge that the play leaves us with. And then on the positive, in terms of technology, I think the play is reminding us that if we invest in our relationships wherever those may be online or off, that is where our hearts are. And, there actually does not need to be a cost as long as your priority is the health of the relationship. So I think benefits and costs to the future of technology as as as we know.
Great. Well, thank you both so much for, talking with us some more about the amazing and really thought provoking, concepts and ideas that have come up in this this wonderful play.
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
