New drama tackles sexual harassment in tech world
As discussion of sexual harassment has come more out of the shadows and into the public arena with the #MeToo movement, it has begun to pop up more and more onstage as well. In “Greater Than,” a new play that Bay Area Drama Company is premiering in Sunnyvale, the CEO of a smoothie-making startup gets lured into a too-private meeting with a general partner of a venture capital firm that she’s trying to get to invest in her company. “The play is the second in a series that I call the Inequality Series,” says BAD Company co-founder and co-artistic director Basab Pradhan, who wrote and directs the play. “The first one was staged last year in Decem- ber, which was about class conflict. It was called ‘Not Equal To.’ And when I was writing that, I already knew that the second one was going to be about gender inequality, gender discrimination, sexual harassment — and then of course #MeToo happened. So that’s what I decided I would write about. When I was working full time I was working in the tech industry, so I decided I want to make that the background to the story.” “One of the things that stood out to me about the script was there’s this notion that sexual harassment is black and white,” says fellow founder and co-artistic director Sindu Singh, who plays Roma, another venture capitalist in the firm who has to try to sort the unfolding mess. “But what’s very interesting about this script to me, the characters are very nuanced; they’re very gray. For example, my character, she’s tough as nails, willing to pretty much take on anything and anyone to get where she wants to be. And when she goes into this VC firm she’s really earning her stripes. She’s new. It’s a male-dominated world where only 7 percent of VCs are women and only 2 percent of VC money goes to women founders of startups. She’s really in this space which is completely male dominated in terms of the power dynamics. And why she actually chooses to help the woman that’s harassed is very gray; Basab leaves it for the audience to decide.” The thorny topic isn’t unusual for the relatively new South Bay company, which has produced about a dozen topical dramas in the last four years. “We started in 2014 with the mission to do meaningful theater,” Pradhan says. “Almost everything we’ve done has some kind of social justice theme underlying it.” “The very first play we did was a play called ‘Bhopal,’ which was based on the world’s largest industrial disaster, which happened in India in 1984,” Singh recalls. “Basab did an adaptation of ‘A Doll’s House,’ which set it in contemporary times here in the Bay Area, and he made it about a young tech entrepreneur and his wife. The next play we did, we looked at the expectations on men in society and how they’re expected to be providers. So if they, for example, choose to pursue a career in the arts, there’s a lot of judgment. Then we did a play on the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, and we did a play on social media and the consequences of teens putting material out that ends up having very, very tough repercussions.” All that’s to say that a hard look at sexual harassment isn’t just well in the company’s wheelhouse. It’s exactly the kind of work the founders set out to do. “We basically look to highlight issues that we think are relevant, that people need to be thinking about, that conversations need to be struck about,” Singh says. “We aim to do plays that not just entertain but leave our audiences with something that they’re chewing on. That’s really been our mission from the get-go, to do fantastic theater but theater with purpose.”