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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:35]
B
Every play, every musical begins with some writer putting words on a page. Hello, and welcome to Stagecraft, the Broadway radio podcast that talks to playwrights and musical book writers about the shows they've created. My name is Jan Simpson. My guest this week is Matthew Libby, the author of a timely thriller set in the high tech world of Silicon Valley. It is currently scheduled to run at the Lucia Lortel Theater through March 29th. Hello, Matthew Libby, welcome to Stagecraft.
- [01:16]
A
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:18]
B
I'm going to start off a little differently than I usually do because I'm going to ask you, what is the right way to pronounce the name of your play?
- [01:30]
A
You know, I say Data. We decided in the room that we could go either way, but we just needed to all say the same thing. We couldn't have some people saying data and some people saying data. And so we decided on data because that was what was in my brain when I was writing it. But yes, Yeah, I go with data.
- [01:48]
B
Okay. Would you briefly summarize what data is about for listeners who haven't yet had the chance to see it?
- [01:58]
A
Absolutely, yeah. So Data is a thriller that's set in a Silicon Valley tech company called Athena Technologies. And we follow the young employees of the company, specifically this brilliant young entry level engineer named Manish, who is living a sort of content existence in a less central team at the company. And he gets an offer to transfer to the incredibly central team of the company that's working on a super secret project that I will not spoil what it is, but the play is an ethical drama about what this young man does once he learns about what the project at the core of the company is. And then, you know, twists and turns from there.
- [02:40]
B
What's the genesis of this play? Where'd you get the idea for it?
- [02:44]
A
I started writing this play in the fall of 2018, which might surprise some people because it has a lot of resonance right now, but I started writing this in the fall of 2018. I had just graduated from my undergrad at Stanford, where I had been really immersed in Silicon Valley. And specifically as a young person in Silicon Valley, you know, like the way I wrote, like to say it is I came with age in Silicon Valley in this ecosystem where computer science is not just the best thing, but it's the only thing. I went to all the career fairs and the info sessions where these companies would come and recruit young people to try to become entry level employees there. My background is in cognitive science. And so I had been following AI and data practices for a long time before they became kind of part of the public discourse in the past couple of years. And specifically I interviewed, and I believe it would have been late 2015, early 2016, I interviewed for a technical writer internship at this company called Palantir, which is, yes, this was before a lot of the things that we now know about Palantir have been reported. I. But I interviewed in again late 2015 for this internship there and I did not get it. And a couple of years later after I graduated, I was living back home in my childhood bedroom in la. I was going through what I think most people would commonly think of as a quarter life crisis of, you know, I've left the structure of school and what am I going to do with the next 50 years of my life? And this was around the spring of 2018, and this was when the Cambridge Analytica scandal was happening, which feels like a trillion scandals ago, but that was a data mining scandal. This was around a lot of the first Trump administration's very horrific policies around immigration and around human rights. And I was reading reporting that Palantir, this company that I had almost worked at, was deeply involved in a lot of this stuff. And I had the question of what would I have been like if I had gotten that job at Palantir, right? Like, how would I be different if I had gotten a job at Palantir? And then that made me think about my friends. I knew people who worked at Facebook, I knew people who worked at Palantir. You know, I wondered if they were feeling the same quarter life crisis stuff that I was feeling and if so, how working at a company like that, that demanded so much of their time and energy and loyalty and, you know, identity affected that. And so that that idea of young people being faced with these incredibly complex ethical questions of our time was, was where the play started.
- [05:24]
B
Now you mentioned that you majored in cognitive science. I'm not sure that I know what that. So I'm going to ask you a double barreled question here. One, could you briefly Define what cognitive science is. And then could you say, how did you end up as a playwright?
- [05:48]
A
Yeah, well, so, yeah, cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of study. The kind of most straightforward way of thinking about it is that it is a. I took classes in computer science. I took classes in psychology, and I took classes in philosophy. Those. Those are the three major fields of study that kind of add up to cognitive science. The way I like to think about it is the study of the relationship between minds and machines. It's the study of the relationship of how the human brain is like a computer, how you put a human brain into a computer, how you create interfaces that can help human brains interact with computers. And more broadly, though, part of the thing that really excites me as a dramatist is just the idea of what does it mean to be innately human? Right. Like, what are the things about being human that can be put into the algorithm? But more importantly, what are the things about being human that can't? What is innately human in a technological world? That was very intellectually interesting to me. But also, as I have started my playwriting career, I also find those questions very dramatic. And I think definitely, data is, as a play is very much concerned with that question of, are we our data? Like, is there something deeper within all of us that can't be quantified? And I think the play really tries to grapple with that. And so, to answer the second part of your question, I've always wanted to do what I'm doing right now. I've always wanted to be a writer. I've always wanted to write plays and movies and anything. And the advice that I got as a high schooler about to go into college was the only thing more important than knowing how to write is having stuff to write about, like following your passions, learning about a ton of stuff, and then using whatever skills you have as a writer to explore those things that are exciting to you. And so I went to Stanford expecting to be sort of psychology, maybe creative writing, you know, maybe theater. Pretty kind of open to. To what was interesting to me. I ended up taking more computer science than I thought I was going to. And, you know, basically by the time I ended my sophomore year when you had to declare your major, I looked at the classes that I had been taking, and I realized that just kind of following my instincts of what was interesting to me, I had ended up with, like, half of a cognitive science major. And so I. That's what I just committed. And definitely part of what the play is about is about how the world of Silicon Valley makes computer science very attractive to young people. But I was writing the whole time.
- [08:04]
B
It doesn't sound as though you needed to, but did you do any additional research for data, talking to friends who are in the industry, or additional reading?
- [08:19]
A
Absolutely. I mean, you know, as I, as I said, I started writing this play eight years ago and obviously the tech industry moves a lot faster than the theater industry. And so, you know, people who come see the show might be surprised to know that the core of the play is the exact same thing that it was in 2018. But a lot of the details around it have had to be updated over the years. By which I mean, you know, when I started writing this play, ChatGPT did not exist. Right. And the thing that we're talking about in the play is different than ChatGPT. But I also know that when people come in to see a show about quote, unquote, AI, they have a very specific thing that they're thinking about. Right. And so a lot of the work I've had to do over the years is try to just be very, very specific about the way that I'm describing the technology in the play and acknowledging that people are coming in with a different mindset than they might have come into the play with if the show had premiered in 2018. And as I said, this stuff fascinates me. And so I just recreationally follow AI news. I'm pretty consistent with keeping up with AI research. And specifically, you know, companies like Palantir that are a little bit less public facing than some of the big tech giants. I keep very up to date with their technological advances and their business practices. And then, yes, obviously having a lot of friends who work in the tech industry is really helpful. I've never worked at a tech company, so there are the little details, right, of like, I need the characters to, you know, to have a certain workplace problem that they're dealing with. And I have a bunch of people I can reach out to to be like, I need there to be something happening at the company that accomplishes X, Y and Z. Can you give me examples of what might be that at a tech company? And, and yes, having a broad network of people who work in tech definitely helps get those little details right. And I think that's been part of the reason why I've been able to hopefully write something that feels pretty current.
- [10:19]
B
Well, let me say to listeners, as my question about what is cognitive science suggests, I am not tech fluent. And yet it was very easy for me to follow what was going on. Was that a challenge for you to translate it for someone like me who has so little knowledge? Was that one of the challenges for you?
- [10:47]
A
Definitely. There are two kind of competing strands when you're writing a show like this, which is one, you want the play to be authentic. Right. Like I. I really was very excited by the idea of putting real corporate doublespeak and real tech jargon. And just like these characters talking the way that they would actually talk in, you know, there's this presentation meeting scene in the center of the play that I wanted to feel as truly like you were watching a corporate meeting as possible. But as you say, the other strand is trying to make sure that the audience can follow along with what the characters are saying or just being cognizant of what's important to know. And Raffaelli, the director and I worked really hard to try to make sure that you both get the thrill of kind of just going behind the curtain of a world that is kind of a black box, but also that anything that is important for the audience to track, you get.
- [11:45]
B
Now, although the play deals with the ethics of technology, it also takes on other issues. Class, race, sexism, immigration. Why did you decide to expand that palette of issues?
- [12:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, to be honest, it was trying to write something truthful to the experience of Silicon Valley. One of the things that I'm very interested in as an observer of Silicon Valley is the way that the world of it kind of presents itself as one thing, but then the experience of being inside it is. Is different. There is a sort of presentational aspect to. To life as an engineer in Silicon Valley. There's the kind of, we really value you as a human being. We're going to give you a ping pong table and nap pods and all of these perks so that you can really bring yourself to it. But, you know, the sort of wild west of Silicon Valley of these places being like anti bureaucratic, like anti capitalistic libertarian utopias, that's just kind of not the case anymore. And at the end of the day, a lot of these companies do function. The bureaucracies that maybe they claimed that they were rebelling against. And I say all that to say that it makes being an individual in a company like that very tricky. And I think it's something that a lot of the characters are grappling with over the course of the story is what does it mean to be an individual within a company with that kind of tension? You know, the female character in the show, Riley, is. Is consistently dealing with the same sort of latent sexism that was not expected from this kind of utopian industry, but is very much the kind of thing that exists for female engineers. And so that's all to say that I was very interested in how to show the characters trying to be both members of the team, the collective, the company, and also just really trying to zero in on the things that are making it impossible for them to be their full selves in the company. The other thing I'll say is in the world of Silicon Valley, there is a bit of separation from the effects of your work. When you're at a company like Palantir, let's say there is a lot of discussion about how you're doing work with quote, unquote, impact, but very rarely do you really, I think, face the reality and the consequences of that impact. And so a lot of what the story is about is like these individuals with their own sort of tensions within the workplace, confronting the real, true, actual impact of their work. Not the sort of amorphous, you know, buzzwordy version of impact, but the real, true impact of what it means to be a. A person working at a company like this.
- [14:49]
B
One of the storytelling devices, and you referenced it just a minute ago, is the use of ping pong.
- [14:59]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [15:00]
B
Was that always a part of the. The show? It opens with two guys playing ping pong, and at certain intervals they play again. Was that always there? And why?
- [15:17]
A
Yeah, when I write a play, it typically starts with an image or some sort of theatrical conceit that is exciting to me, and it's what the rest of the play comes out of. I for data, the first image I had of the play was two young people playing ping pong having a incredibly complex moral discussion which happens later in the show. So, yes, the ping pong was a part of it from the very, very beginning. It's always very exciting for me when you. You can have something actually happening on stage, like, we're not faking the ping pong, they're actually playing ping pong. And so at first there was just a part of it which is like, oh, this is cool. But as I started developing the play, and specifically, a lot of the stuff I was saying before of, you know, the way that these companies present themselves is very kind of bright and sunny and fun in games, often obscuring a more dangerous, darker core, there felt to me to be something really interesting that as a symbol, the ping pong table could kind of take on that metaphor over the course of the show. And so at the Very beginning of the show, as you say. The first image of the play is two characters playing ping pong and having this very vibrant, buoyant conversation about life in Silicon Valley and about how cool it is to be working at this company and the cool projects that they're working on and, and Taco Tuesdays and like all this fun stuff. And then again, without spoiling it, by the end of the show, Symbol of fun and games has become much more dangerous and much more personal. So, yeah, it was one of these things that you write and then you're in a rehearsal room and you have two actors who have to memorize pages of very fast dialogue and then you're also acting them. Play ping pong and not mess up. You know, like, so far we have not had a ball go into the audience that, you know, if they mess up, they just calmly pick the ball back up and get back to it. It's not Marty Supreme. It's not like competitive ping pong, you know, but hopefully it does take on this sort of weight over the course of the show.
- [17:14]
B
I've read one of your other plays in Athena Technologies. The company in your play appears there too. And I'm wondering, are you going to be revisiting Athena Technologies in future work?
- [17:31]
A
What you're referring to is I wrote a play called the Machine, which is about a poet who is faced with a poetry writing computer. Play actually was set in the present day until ChatGPT came out and made the play kind of obsolete. And so I went back and set it in the 90s. But yeah, I've written three plays about AI the machine, data, and then another play that I wrote called Sisters. Sisters doesn't explicitly name Athena, but it's pretty clear that it's the same company. But you know, the Machine is set in the past and is about generative AI. Data is set in the present and is about predictive or analytical AI. And Sisters is set in the future, and it's about sentient AI. I wrote all of those plays before ChatGPT came out and before AI was kind of part of the, the conversation. And so there's a part of me that's like, I have this neat little trilogy of plays that's my kind of AI Athena trilogy. And maybe that's a good place to leave it and I can go write about other stuff.
- [18:33]
B
Well, in the meantime though, I hope people get to see Data at the Lucille Lortel. And I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us about it.
- [18:46]
A
Thank you so much. This was great.
- [18:50]
B
And thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time. And if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please send them to me@janbrudleyradio.com.