Shining a Spotlight on Humanity in a Digital Era

When Carol Dunne and her colleagues first read Matthew Libby's play Sisters, they knew they had experienced something remarkable.

"We were all blown away by it," says Dunne, a senior lecturer of theater and the producing artistic director at Northern Stage in White River Junction, Vermont. "It is a beautiful play."

The play follows two sisters, Matilda and Greta, from age 6 to 96. Over their nine decades together, the sisters experience all of the usual joys and challenges of siblinghood. There's just one catch: Greta is a computer program.

Sisters will receive its first production from Oct. 2-20 at Northern Stage. Dunne chose to program the work for both its outstanding artistic merit and prescient themes.

"I always lean towards plays that will really matter to our audiences," Dunne says. "The idea of how our human relationships are being subsumed into technology frightens me. This play deals with these relationships in such a human, beautiful, loving way. It reveals parts of our future that I think are inevitable. But it also lifts up the humanity that will survive and thrive."

The production is a testament to the success of the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting, which has been presented annually by Dartmouth's Neukom Institute for Computational Science in partnership with the Department of Theater and Northern Stage since 2018.

Sisters, the 2022 Neukom Award winner, is the second Neukom Award-winning play to be produced at Northern Stage.

"The Neukom Award brings us new writers who have previously been unknown to us," Dunne says. "It expands the group of writers with whom we work, and it broadens our mission to include really cutting-edge work that deals with the sciences. It lifts the breadth of what we do."

Exploring the Influence of Our Computerized World

The Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting was conceived by Professor of Math and Computer Science and Neukom Institute Director Dan Rockmore as a way to explore the impacts of digital technology on society. 

"The Neukom Playwriting Award was part of a broader idea intending to recognize that the arts sometimes are a better medium for imagining the possibilities and possible implications of science," Rockmore says.

Rockmore reached out to Dunne about the possibility of creating an award program for theater works that examine these themes.

"We had a fabulous coffee meeting where we came up with what it would look like to have a competition and accept submissions," Dunne says. "Dan came up with the prompt for the competition: 'What does it mean to be a human in a computerized world?'"

In 2018, its first year, the competition received around 45 submissions; by its second, more than 120 works were submitted.

"I doubt that playwrights see the prompt and say, 'I'm going to write a play,'" Rockmore says. "The number of submissions we receive each year speaks to the fact that there are hundreds of people writing plays that sort into this topic—so it has clearly struck a nerve. This award has surfaced all kinds of interesting creative works that are responsive to that idea."

The award includes a $5,000 prize and an opportunity to workshop the play with the Dartmouth Department of Theater and Northern Stage. In recent years, theater students helped bring the winning play to life at both venues, presenting the work to two different audiences.

Brandy Zhang, marketing and engagement associate at Northern Stage and producer of the Neukom Award, says the award's workshop component and simple submission process make the competition accessible to playwrights who are less established or are still refining their play.

"An open submission process like this really gives young, up-and-coming playwrights a platform to submit," Zhang says. "We like to keep it as fair as possible so that any playwright—or any person who has a great idea—can submit. The end point of the award process is a workshop: We are not limiting the award to a very beautifully polished play. We're giving opportunities for people to keep working on their piece even after the season."

Bringing 'Sisters' to Northern Stage

Sisters was workshopped at Northern Stage in January 2023, with Dartmouth students serving as assistant director, dramaturg, understudy, and reader.

Northern Stage Managing Director Jason Smoller—who attended a workshop session on his first day with the theater company—was immediately impressed by the work.

"What was in front of me was a full, realized, beautiful play that just needed a full production behind it," Smoller says. "As we were planning the 2024-25 season, we thought, 'We have this gem, and we have the opportunity to be the first theater to do this play.'"

jihan_haddad_in_sisters_1._photo_by_alia_gonzalez.jpg

A rehearsal of 'Sisters' at Northern Stage with Jihan Haddad (Photo by Alia Gonzalez)

Northern Stage's production of Sisters will be its first professional production. Smoller says Libby was "living in the future" when he penned the play.

"Sisters is of-the-moment—even before the moment was here," Smoller says. "It is a play about what it is to live with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and other AI that was written before those things were in the zeitgeist. We have the opportunity to tell this story at the right moment."

Although the play is centered around AI, Smoller says audiences will be surprised how much the work emphasizes humanity.

"It's a play about human relationships," he says. "It addresses issues of morality and ethics, what happens to a digital legacy, what lives on in the world, and what sorts of imprints we leave on machines."

"It's also whimsical and funny—it's got a little bit of everything," Zhang adds. "Something this play also deals with is the finiteness of humanity. We will perish at some point. Machines or AI, in comparison, can exist and keep existing. So that's what's center stage, especially in this type of close relationship."

Beyond the stage, Northern Stage is collaborating with Dartmouth students and faculty to contextualize the play's themes. Rockmore and two colleagues from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Jeremy Manning and Emily Finn, will lead a "Spot On talkback" titled "Humans and Machines: Boundaries and Relationships" after the 5 p.m. show on Sunday, Oct. 13.

"Spot On is something we try to do for a lot of our main stage productions," Zhang says. "It's a series that brings in experts—whether they're academics, writers, or community partners—to bring real-life and sometimes applicable information to our audiences."

The panelists will explore the multifaceted processes that underlie the human tendency to build attachments to digital entities.

"To trick yourself into animating, in a very emotional way, these inanimate objects, there's a computational part, an emotional part, and a neuroscientific part," Rockmore says. "There's also an ethical part to it: If you're the person who created the thing, and you created it so that people would be attached to it, that then generates an ethical dimension to the situation."

Eager to bring the technology featured in the play to life, Dunne and Zhang reached out to computer science research professor Lorie Loeb, the faculty director of Dartmouth's DALI Lab and a longtime patron of Northern Stage. Under Loeb's guidance, a team of five students and two DALI Lab staff members will create an interactive installation to accompany the play.

"We talked about a lot of different possibilities, such as putting technology in the lobby, and what that might look like," Loeb says. "We settled on something that built off the play more. Everybody has interacted with AI through Siri, Alexa, Google, or chatbots. But we thought, 'What would it be like for audiences to work with a real, state-of-the-art chatbot?' We're going to use a large language model that's built on AI, and we'll feed the character of the AI sister, Greta, into the AI system. When people come into the audience, they'll be able to interact with Greta."

Loeb is thrilled by the opportunity to bring together two institutions about which she cares deeply.

"I think it's just amazing," she says. "It's great to have Dartmouth interact with Northern Stage. I'm a big supporter of both, so the notion of working on these kinds of projects—bringing technology into the theater—is really exciting for us."

Smoller says the collaborations with Dartmouth will help create a one-of-a-kind theater experience for audiences in White River Junction.

"Because we are not a big theater in New York City that has space and time constraints, we are able to give this production room to breathe and put together a really smart group of people who have time to work on it," he says. "We also have this amazing opportunity to work with a world-class university that has the resources to develop and understand the technology that this play is about."

Celebrating the Award's Success 

Northern Stage's production of Sisters exemplifies the artistic and collaborative triumphs of the Neukom Award.

"It's been a success by any metric—from the number of people who are interested, to the work we receive, to the degree of collaborative activity between the institute, the theater department, and the local community," Rockmore says. "Being produced by a professional theater company is a next stage that we would hope for all of the plays that win the award—it gives some sense of validation to the process. One always hopes that plays go further, and that we're not the only ones to recognize how good they are."

Dunne says the award—and the plays it recognizes—provides a platform for sparking prescient conversations about our present and future society.

"This is the most powerful way, I think, that we can address this moment: to bring people together to talk about what's actually happening and how to stay close, collaborative, and human as we enter whatever the next era is going to be," she says.