Welcome to Season 2 of the Alliance Theatre Podcast: An exploration of theater and the people who make it happen.
Join Dr. Margarita Kompelmakher in conversation with community organizers Deborah Scott (CEO of Georgia STAND UP) and Eric Richardson (President of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists,) plus, Alexis Woodard (Assistant Director of WORKING: A MUSICAL,) as they explore the innovative ways Atlanta stories and voices gave shape to this production of WORKING.
MARGARITA KOMPELMAKHER, PhD, is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and Community Engagement Manager at the Alliance Theatre, where she runs programs that connect theatre to issues that matter most to communities across Atlanta. She is a regular contributor to the Alliance Theatre blog and her writing also appears in Modern Drama and various scholarly anthologies. She believes theatre is a “rehearsal” for realizing the society we want to live in!
DEBORAH SCOTT, CEO of Georgia STAND-UP, a “think and act tank” for working families, and a 2012 “White House Champion of Change,” is an accomplished advocate of economic inclusion, community empowerment, and progressive civic engagement. A master organizer, strategist, and highly skilled trainer, she has been on the front lines of progressive social transformation for more than 25 years. Deborah has shaped and molded a generation of social activists. https://www.georgiastandup.org/about-us
ERIC RICHARDSON is the President of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, a fiercely independent voice of black workers within the trade union movement, challenging organized labor to be more relevant to the needs and aspirations of Black and poor workers. https://cbtu.nationbuilder.com/
ALEXIS WOODARD is an Atlanta-based Director, proud Spelman College Alumna and current Spelman Leadership Fellow at the Alliance Theatre. Her Directing Credits include: Romeo + Juliet, Eurydice (Spelman College), Finished What We Started (Morehouse College), Hamlet (The Tiny Theatre Company), as well as assistant directing for the Suzi Award winning play, Hands of Color (Synchronicity Theatre), A Kids Play About Racism (Bay Area Children’s Theatre), and Associate Director for A Christmas Carol: The Live Radio Play (Alliance Theatre). Upcoming Credits include: Co-Director for Hands Up (Alliance Theatre), and Co-Director for Othello (The Tiny Theatre Company). She has also worked backstage on several productions such as Holler If You Hear Me (True Colors Theatre) and Hospice + Pointing At The Moon (Alliance Theatre). Film Credits include: Hands Up Teasers (Co-Director) and When Morning Comes (Writer). She also wrote and shot her first short film, When Morning Comes, which discusses sexual assault on college campuses.
Learn more about WORKING: A Musical.
For more information about the Alliance Theatre Podcast please click here.
The New York Times just called DATA “90 minutes of ticktock action, forwarded in snappy dialogue [with] the feel of a well-paced television procedural… the payoff is exciting, in an Aaron Sorkin meets Michael Lewis way.”
“That moment when people realize how precariously they claim space in the world is a turning point in “Data,” produced by the Alliance Theatre and this year’s winner of the Alliance/Kendeda competition for playwrights in graduate school. In this case, the playwright, Matthew Libby, had the requisite background not only in drama but also in high-tech, which is both the subject of the play and the way it got rescued when the pandemic foreclosed on a live, staged production.
The tech also provides a neat visual counterpoint to the story of Maneesh (Cheech Manohar), a programmer at a data-mining company called Athena. When he is asked to transfer to a unit developing a secret algorithm for predicting terrorist acts against the United States government, Maneesh is forced to weigh the benefits to himself against the potential harm to others. The others are immigrants — including Maneesh’s own parents.
If that’s too neat of a setup, it’s hardly science fiction; real-world cases involving data-mining behemoths like Palantir and Cambridge Analytica have raised similar concerns. In any case, the payoff is exciting, in an Aaron Sorkin meets Michael Lewis way. As directed by Susan V. Booth, the Alliance’s artistic director, the production leaps headlong past its problems. Certainly its 90 minutes of ticktock action, forwarded in snappy dialogue between Maneesh and two colleagues — one principled (Clare Latham) and one not (Jake Berne) — has the feel of a well-paced television procedural.
Better than television, though, is the disorienting effect of the green screen technology, which allows the actors, who were actually 10 to 20 feet apart while filming, to appear together, even in endless games of table tennis. As you wonder how the effect was achieved you are brought up short by the contrast with the content: What does it mean when ethics becomes a kind of trick and a game?”
— “Three Dramas Explore the Margins of the Digital Form,” Jesse Green for The New York Times
Read the full feature here.
Due to popular demand, DATA has been extended through June 6. Stream the show on-demand here.
“Popular local theater resumes shows with your safety top of mind.”
The Alliance Theatre closed its doors on March 13, 2020. Despite being closed for more than a year, the Alliance continues to serve the community.
“The artists of our costume shop made 7,000 masks for Grady and Emory Healthcare. They made 1,300 surgical gowns. They made masks to donate to YMCAs, to We Love You Buford Highway, the Latin American Association,” says Susan V. Booth, Jennings Hertz Artistic Director. She adds- “Our educational programming, which so many families and parents and educators rely on, immediately turned to digital delivery.”
Haylee Scott, COVID Coordinator, states “we are in an outdoor tent space with sides up so that we are getting open air flow. We have 2-person and 4-person seating pods for our audiences with 6-feet of distance between all of those. We have mobile and e-ticketing only. And masks are required for all front-of-house staff and patrons.”
Susan Booth says “nothing in the world makes me happier than the thought of saying ‘Welcome Home’ to Atlanta as they walk into their theater.”
Watch the full feature on WSB-TV Channel 2 – Atlanta.
An Interview with Data Ethicists Paul Wolpe and Nassim Parvin
Dr. Paul Wolpe is the Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, and Dr. Nassim Parvin is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We talked to them about their impressions of DATA by Matthew Libby, the danger of predictive algorithms taking away human agency, and the need for storytelling to illuminate more human-technology relationships.
ALLIANCE: What resonated for you most in the play DATA?
Paul Wolpe Maneesh, the title character, is trying to be responsible about the ethics of his position as an entry-level employee at a large tech company. He has this algorithm he’s written as a student that can be used by the company for much more complex and, in his view, unethical purposes. He’s got a moral dilemma. It’s the equivalent of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s five stages of grief. Maneesh goes through the five stages of making an ethical decision: he tries to abdicate responsibility, he resists, he capitulates, he tries to walk away and let them do what they want. It’s a set of emotional dynamics that real workers go through when they confront something that their company does which they find to be problematic.
Nassim Parvin My background is in electrical engineering, and early in my career, I found myself connecting to cryptography. One of the main applications of cryptography is at the time of war, when you want to send secret messages. I had my own moral dilemma when it became clear that war cryptography was not what I wanted to do. At the time, I also had a chance to transition from my studies back home in Iran to my studies in the United States, and it led to a PhD in design and ethics. In the play, I relate most to the character of Riley and her position as an outsider. She has to work with “techbros” and pretend that the toxic culture that she has to endure is OK. Her insights and concerns are easily dismissed and disposed of because she is a woman.
ALLIANCE: Many of us have little or no idea how predictive algorithms are assisting in important decision-making from determining who should receive a visa to who is more likely to commit a crime. Even some of Maneesh’s co-workers in DATA find the algorithms produced by the company beyond their comprehension. Why is there such an aura of complexity around algorithms? Should we be concerned about this?
Paul Wolpe Algorithms can be many, many, many thousands of lines long. There’s a lot of internal decisions that are made that often make it very difficult to know why a particular output has been created by that algorithm. What characterizes artificial intelligence and machine learning is that it learns and modifies itself and to understand how it reaches a certain conclusion, in many cases, is very difficult. This is called the problem of transparency or explainability. And the other side of the question is that algorithms can be proprietary. People create algorithms for their business, and they don’t want to explain exactly how they work because it is proprietary information. Both of these make the situation complicated.
Nassim Parvin Another point is that we are throwing all of this money into designing predictive algorithms that condemn people to their past. Whereas what it is to be human is that we can change. We want to find, and fund, situations where somebody actually gets out of jail, gets back on their feet, and remakes their life. Instead, we are basically saying: If I purchased the pink dress yesterday, I will probably want another pink dress tomorrow. And if I committed a crime yesterday, I will probably do the same. It’s a very grim view of what it is to be human.
We are throwing all of this money into designing predictive algorithms that condemn people to their past. It’s a very grim view of what it is to be human.
Paul Wolpe Agreed. The thing that concerns me the most about algorithms is the removal of human agency although we are not there yet.
ALLIANCE: What do you see as most promising about algorithms?
Nassim Parvin The biggest promise is in the interaction of human agency and machine abilities. For example, in pathology we now have machines that can process images of lungs that can detect traces of cancer. That’s something the human eye can’t see. We can use these instruments to help us do things that we couldn’t do. We need to ask: What are the things that machines can do? And where are the places where we can intervene to make sure that we are making the best decisions in partnership with machines?
ALLIANCE: You work with some of the nation’s most talented students at Georgia Tech. What do you see as the biggest challenge your students face in the transition from work in academia to work as employees in tech companies?
Nassim Parvin Our students want to make a positive change, but they are often ill equipped to deal with ethical issues because they see ethics as their personal moral responsibility. They think that as long as they are committed to doing the right thing they will be able to do it. And that doing the right thing is obvious. Whereas when they go out in the world, they can’t always make all the decisions. And even when they can, it’s not always clear what problem that they are trying to address and how they might address it. I often go back to the failure of our educational institutions when we teach subject matter expertise to students but fail to accompany it with ways of thinking about ethical issues.
ALLIANCE: What role, if any, can DATA and other representational practices play in service of data ethics?
Nassim Parvin Storytelling is one of the main ways that we learn about ethics. Stories are grounded in the concrete nature of situations that call for our ethical decision making and allow us to put ourselves in the place of these characters. That’s really important. And then we can separate ourselves from the situation and think about what we might do as a response. It’s the dialectic of ethical theory and ethical practice present in storytelling that is the key to great theater and great ethics.
Paul Wolpe I read a lot of science fiction as a kid. And the questions in DATA are questions that in one way or another have come up over and over again in the history of people and their relation to technology. We continue to refine them to find out where our anticipations were wrong and where they were right. And we are rarely right when it comes to predicting what technology will be like in the future. Art has to constantly reinvent itself and raise these questions in light of the current reality. What I love about this particular play is how spot on it is with what’s happening right now, and tomorrow, with these kinds of technologies.
Additional talkbacks will be held on May 13th and 20th. For tickets and info, visit alliancetheatre.org/data.
Nassim Parvin is an Associate Professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Dr. Parvin’s interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in design, computing, and STS venues; and her designs have received multiple awards and been exhibited in venues such as the Smithsonian Museum. She is on the editorial board of Design Issues and serves as a Lead Editorial Team member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. is the Raymond F. Schinazi Distinguished Research Chair of Jewish Bioethics, Professor of Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Sociology, and the Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience. For 15 years he served as the Senior Bioethicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Dr. Wolpe is the winner of the 2011 World Technology Network Award in Ethics and was named one of Trust Across America’s Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior.