Elizabeth A. Harris

He also slid into his best creepy smirk and sexually harassed an underling in a corporate training video.

“Not only are you a solid candidate,” his character said to a woman up for a promotion, “but I’ve been watching you move around out here, and you’re solid everywhere.”

“What?” he responded. “Being hot’s a good thing!”

This project may not win Dillinger any trophies, but office workers around the country are seeing a lot of him — or other actors playing odious characters just like his. New or expanded laws mandating sexual harassment training in states like New York and California, as well as a nationwide awakening to a very real problem, have fostered a market for workplace training videos and for actors who can bring #MeToo to life, usually in roles lasting just a minute or two.

They play harassers and their victims, supervisors who comfort, colleagues who intervene, and co-workers who look into the camera and say it’s not their problem. On Backstage.com, the job listings site for actors, casting calls are going out for parts such as, “A client of a big manufacturing company; a little sleazy; makes an unwanted advance on a salesperson,” and “an account manager at a large manufacturing company; strong and articulate; she stands up for herself” when a client makes an unwanted advance.

These videos do not, naturally, have a reputation as great cinema, which is not surprising considering that, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, they can have a lot of legal ground to cover. In New York, for example, training programs have to define sexual harassment, give information on state and federal sexual harassment laws and lay out avenues for handling complaints. There must also be interaction, so there are often little quizzes along the way to keep viewers paying attention, or least keep them from wandering off completely.

They are made by law firms, human resource outfits and companies that specialize in compliance training, which may also be making videos on topics such as respectful communication and bribery. Some keep the whole operation in-house, with a small team of people wearing multiple filmmaking hats (director today, producer tomorrow), while others contract with outside film companies to hire actors and put the videos together.

The productions are nothing if not efficient.

“When I get a new crew they look at the call sheets and go, ‘Are you out of your mind? You’re giving us 45 minutes to shoot two pages!’” said Lori Richardson, the producer and director of video content at Emtrain, a compliance training company. In a typical film, it might take at least half a day to shoot that amount, she said. “But I’m pretty quick on set and I keep it moving along.”

Laura Faye Smith, the actress who was harassed by Dillinger’s character, said it took about half a day to shoot her scenes.

She didn’t have to use too much imagination to get into character.

She said she once had a real-life job as a human resources manager, which including giving sexual harassment training. Then, one day, it happened to her: one of her superiors, who was also the boss’s father, put his arm around her, got right in her face, and said her high heels made her the perfect height for him to kiss her.

“No matter how much you know about this,” she said, “when it happens to you, it’s hard not to go into this thing of ‘did I bring this on somehow?’”

In an effort to make the scripts more relatable to these real-life experiences, film companies say they are trying to make videos more engaging, with better acting and higher production values. They also change up where scenes are set to make them more relevant to the companies who may be buying the films. Dillinger’s character harassed Smith’s twice — once in a printing plant and once in a retail setting.

Emtrain said it has created scenes that riff off current events, like the memo written by a Google engineer that said “personality differences” between men and women helped explain why there were fewer women engineers and high ranking executives at the company.

Some companies have started to use virtual reality. Mursion, a San Francisco startup, allows managers — as well as prospective teachers, Air Force captains, executives from finance and tech — to practice difficult conversations with an avatar. In one training, you are a commanding officer in the armed forces and a woman comes to you because she hooked up with a subordinate who is now defying her authority.

There is a range in quality and approach in these programs, though they tend to charge in roughly the same way. Traliant, which produced the videos with Dillinger and Smith, said it starts at about $25 per user, but that price can drop to less than $5 for companies with more than 10,000 people. Emtrain generally charges $47 per person for the year, dropping to about $20 for an organization of 3,000, and it includes additional services like a way for people to ask anonymous questions on tricky issues like bias, ethics and harassment, and feedback for companies on potential problem areas based on what employees say.

The actors themselves generally make a few hundred dollars per video, not a large sum, but also not bad for what often amounts to a few hours of work.

While many executives and lawmakers have embraced these training videos, there are questions about how effective they can be. For years, companies have used such videos to try to defend themselves from any lawsuits saying they didn’t do enough to ensure safe working environments. Whether workers took the training to heart was not necessarily the top concern.

“My worry is that there will be some category or organization who believes they have checked the box by conducting training, whether or not there is any commitment from leadership to actually change the culture,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center. “I don’t want to suggest that training itself is harmful, but I also think that training alone is not likely enough to actually change organizations.”

Frank Dobbin, a social science professor at Harvard, said that while research in this area is thin, there is some evidence that training for managers can be helpful, as can bystander intervention training. But he said there are also studies that suggest typical harassment training might make some men more hostile than they were to begin with, perhaps because they feel a threat to their way of thinking.

“It’s possible that training for whole populations of employees, which is what the states are now moving toward, is going to backfire,” Dobbin said. “I don’t think there’s any evidence that it reduces harassment and there’s some evidence that it’s likely to increase harassment.”

Michael Del Polito, a media producer and director at LRN, an ethics and compliance company, said that the company realized that in most cases, employees are mandated to watch the videos. “It’s not necessarily something they’re electing to do,” he said.

Still, he said, the company tries to make them watchable. Last year, one of LRN’s sexual harassment videos won a Telly award, which honors video and television production. In it, a woman tells a colleague she was groped by a superior in Las Vegas after a conference; the flashbacks to what happened in Vegas were illustrated by animated people made of neon lights.

Del Polito said: “We try to approach it as, we respect our audience and try to put something out that — within reason, of course, given time and budgetary constraints — try to put out the best product possible because we think our audience is sophisticated.”

This article originally appeared in

The Most Watched Show at the Office? Sexual Harassment Training Videos

Troy Dillinger was having a good month. A working actor in Los Angeles, he played in June a lawyer in a Lifetime movie, a coach in a public service announcement about opioids, and a judge in Cardi B’s video “Press.”

Set way back from the road, this maze of open-air passageways and courtyards is about the size of two football fields, an unusual vision of limestone bumping up against the Utah Rockies. It has played host to Mary and Joseph, John the Baptist and Jesus — as well as Lehi, Amulek and Alma the Younger.

This is the Motion Picture Studio South Campus, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Jerusalem set, near Goshen, Utah, is part of the church’s substantial film and media production arm, which includes full-time producers, editors and animators, and a fully equipped studio in Provo, complete with sound stages, editing bays and a clutch of 19th-century Americana houses constructed on a backlot.

The church is an important piece of a film and TV ecosystem in northern Utah, which includes a small world of independent films that cater to the Latter-day Saints market, BYUtv (part of Brigham Young University, which is affiliated with the church), as well as mainstream commercials, television and movie productions that film in the state, drawn by a generous rebate program and its proximity to Los Angeles.

Taken together, it’s like its own little Hollywood in the mountains. For the country’s 7 million Latter-day Saints — 6,709,072 according to the church — it is also an answer to a culture that often does not speak its language, and a way to reinforce the conservative values it finds lacking in much of popular entertainment.

Here, the faithful can see their own stories — films about prominent church figures or a series reenacting Bible scenes — without the mockery (sometimes gentle, sometimes not) they’re often subject to, like in Broadway’s “The Book of Mormon” musical. And there is not an R rating in sight.

A Bounty of Work

Ben Hoopes, a carpenter with a slow, rolling voice, builds sets in Utah. Last December, he made one for a church Christmas concert. Then he put together a talk show set for BYUtv, before moving on to “High School Musical,” a Disney show filming in the area. After that, he worked on the church’s most recent big project: a video series that visualizes (not dramatizes!) scenes from the Book of Mormon; it began releasing episodes on Sept. 20.

On a sunny September morning, Hoopes was out at the church set near Goshen patching up the “limestone” walls after a stretch of shooting for the “Book of Mormon Videos.” This Jerusalem (or Bethlehem or Mesoamerica or wherever the church needs it to be) has a concrete foundation and wooden frame, but the facade is made of Styrofoam coated in a stucco and then painted a nice sandy color. Birds like to nibble at the stucco.

There is a whole community of crew members, directors and producers who, like Hoopes, carve out a living working freelance in Utah. “I’ve always had an abundance of work here,” said Chantelle Squires, a director and producer based in Utah who has worked with the church, BYUtv and in local independent films. “I’ve always felt like, why would I leave?”

This year, BYU Broadcasting, which owns BYUtv, is in production on 25 shows including TV movies, scripted dramas, reality shows, religious content and a cooking show. It is staffed by 158 full-time employees, more than 200 students who work part time, and a small army of freelancers who operate in just about every job, from directors and producers to grips and production assistants.

The network says its audience is growing, and its sketch comedy show Studio C, which is like a G-rated “Saturday Night Live,” has nearly 2 billion views on YouTube. But it still sometimes brushes up against a barrier that holds it apart.

Take “Dwight in Shining Armor,” a comedy that premiered this year about a 21st century teenage boy in the suburbs and a warrior princess who awakens there after being asleep for 1,000 years. Michael Dunn, the managing director of BYU Broadcasting, said the show was tested with focus groups in Dallas (“heavily evangelical,” Dunn noted) and San Diego (“very heavily agnostic”). He said that the audiences, made up of parents with children, loved the show. But there were a few who said that because it was made by BYU, they wouldn’t watch it.

“People have bias,” he said. “You can’t get around that.”

Still, there is enough demand for this kind of content to beget a streaming service called Living Scriptures that is geared specifically to Latter-day Saints (the church and its followers no longer refer to themselves as Mormons). Its 2,500 titles are arranged into Netflix-style categories with a distinct tilt, like Church History, Animated Book of Mormon, Must See LDS Films, and Miracles Collection.

And then there are the actors. Most Americans probably wouldn’t recognize Kirby Heyborne’s blond waves — but many Latter-day Saints do. Along with a number of national commercials, including a Snickers spot with Mr. T, Heyborne has played Elder Calhoun in “The Best Two Years,” a movie about four missionaries in the Netherlands, and Jared in “The R.M.” (“Returned Missionary.”)

“Just today, I was at Walmart picking up some chocolate milk and the bagger was really friendly to me,” Heyborne said one day last month. “At the very end — and you can kind of tell, people get a little twinkle in their eye — he very kindly said to me, ‘Do you like it when people recognize you?’”

But Heyborne has also caught some criticism from the faithful. In 2008, he was in a commercial for Miller Lite, a decision for which he still sometimes gets a scolding. (Latter-day Saints are supposed to abstain from alcohol, coffee, tea and tobacco.) Heyborne is hosting a new show on BYUtv called “Making Good,” and under a promo video posted on YouTube, one commenter wrote, “He drank beer. I hate him.”

Heyborne, who is a member of the church, said he did not actually drink the beer.

While actors in Utah can become something of a face, they generally cannot convert that into a proper living. Jasen Wade, who has crisp blue eyes and the kind of chin you could use to shave ice, said that when he works as a leading man in these independent movies — most of which are low-budget affairs shot in just a couple of weeks — he makes $200 to, occasionally, $450 a day.

“In my entire career, I’ve probably made money on three films,” said Wade, who works at a power plant and just got his real estate license. “Other than that, I either break even or I’m in the hole because I have to take off work to be there.”

By the Book

On the set, one camera was trained on a group of women dancing in flowy, midcalf skirts, swishing scarves around their heads in a demure nod to seduction. Another focused on the wicked King Noah who drank wine and flirted with concubines from beneath an elaborate hat.

Nearby a producer named Aaron Merrell, who works full time for the church, draped a well-worn copy of the Book of Mormon across his lap, “Season Three” printed neatly in permanent marker along the outer pages. This was a shoot for the church’s “Book of Mormon Videos,” and Merrell was keeping an eye on their scripture to make sure the action stuck to its source material.

The church teaches that in the early 19th century, its founder Joseph Smith discovered inscribed golden plates buried on a hill near his home in Palmyra, New York, which he then translated into English, creating the Book of Mormon. Among other proclamations, the book holds that Jesus Christ appeared in the Americas after his resurrection. That book sets the Latter-day Saints apart from other Christian denominations, who even today often view the relative newcomer faith as suspect — or even apostate.

The “Book of Mormon Videos” are being put on YouTube (viewable in internet-friendly snippets of a couple minutes each) so anyone who wants to watch them can: Missionaries who will use them as proselytizing tools or members who might show them to their kids. And, the church hopes, perhaps even nonbelievers who are curious about the faith will watch.

The church also makes self-help and inspirational videos that live on YouTube, on topics like addiction, bullying and how to recover after discovering that a spouse watches pornography. There are videos for use in its temples, as well as instructional videos on topics including how its clergy should protect children from abuse, directions for missionaries on diet, hygiene and exercise, and even advice on how to maintain a church parking lot.

“The goal of all of our productions is to create messages that invite all of God’s children to follow Jesus Christ,” said Scott Smiley, director of film and video for the church. “That goes from parking lot maintenance videos all the way to the Bible and Book of Mormon videos.

“Really,” he added, “that means to act as he acted.”

Randy Astle, author of “Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952,” said that the first church-sponsored movie was a silent film called “One Hundred Years of Mormonism” made in 1913, and that the effort has continued steadily since 1953. Now, with movies and videos as a regular part of religious classes, church and cultural activities, “it just permeates all aspect of Mormon culture,” he said.

“The church also kind of positions itself as providing an alternative to Hollywood,” he said. By offering up its own content and steering members away from what it sees as problematic, it’s telling followers, “You need to look for this good moral content,” he added.

But its productions, he said, are not likely to make film critics particularly effusive.

“Films we see as classics challenge us,” Astle said. “They probe dark subject matter, they challenge our beliefs. When they’re made by the church, the people who pay for them don’t want that. They want them to affirm belief. To answer questions, not to ask them.”

The technical production, however, is impressive, he said, so they can look like Hollywood movies.

But on set, it is quickly made clear this is not Hollywood. To kick off every day of shooting, the cast and crew gather around the monitors or the cameras, and they pray.

And they are all praying the same way, because just about every person on a church production — actors, directors, carpenters, script supervisors — is a Latter-day Saint themselves. Merrell, the church producer, said that exceptions can be made if a particular specialty needs to be filled, but it is “generally preferred” that crew members be church members. Those in good standing are given what is called a temple recommend, a little wallet-size card that attests to their status. (A church spokeswoman said there are exemptions for religious organizations that make such hiring preferences legal.)

Becky Swasey, head of the hair and makeup department on the “Book of Mormon Videos” project, has worked on movies made by AMC and Francis Ford Coppola. She said there is a vibe on set that comes from a shared sense of mission and purpose. But the shoots feel unusual in other ways, too.

“People don’t swear — I’ve got to watch my mouth!” she said. “There’s no coffee or tea. And people tend to be a little less divalike.”

A First Family Screening

John Hajicek arrived at the Megaplex Theaters at Jordan Commons in Sandy, Utah, dressed in a sharp blue suit, clutching a locked briefcase in each hand. Inside, he carried what he said was precious Latter-day Saints memorabilia. He had copies of the Book of Mormon that appear to have been printed in the 19th century. An early pencil sketch of Joseph Smith. A suede map Smith supposedly carried around in his pocket.

Hajicek had been invited to a film screening that night for “Out of Liberty,” a movie about a jailbreak, in which one of the people doing the breaking is Joseph Smith.

The director, Garrett Batty, also invited some very special guests: members of the Smith family.

“To all the descendants of Joseph and Lucy,” Michael Kennedy, one of those descendants, said from the front of the theater, “would you please stand up.”

Several dozen people put their popcorn aside and rose from their seats. The room took it in (“Wow!” a woman breathed), and then burst into a firm and gracious applause.

And with that, the movie could start.

Lights. Camera. Prayer. A Mini-Hollywood Grows in Utah.

PROVO, Utah — In the heavy quiet of the Utah desert, past fields of alfalfa and fruit trees, past the Goshen trailer park and a big, sprawling dairy farm, the domes of Jerusalem rise up from the patchy grass.

Mysterious and layered, it follows a middle-aged creative writing professor at Yale who becomes close to a student shortly after receiving a terrible cancer diagnosis. The two-person play, starring Mary-Louise Parker and Will Hochman, premiered to acclaim last year at the Williamstown Theater Festival and will open on Broadway next month, directed by David Cromer.

Rapp has had a remarkably prolific and varied career, having written some 30 plays, two novels, two graphic novels and nine books for young adults. His television credits include “The Looming Tower” and, coming up, an adaptation of the Philipp Meyer novel “American Rust.” Still, this is his Broadway debut.

Best known for Showtime’s “Weeds,” Parker is a stage regular, and a Tony Award winner for “Proof” in 2001. This spring, she’ll star in Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “How I Learned to Drive” on Broadway, in the role she originated off-Broadway in 1997.

A few days into previews for “The Sound Inside,” Rapp and Parker gathered in her dressing room at Studio 54 to talk about writing, acting and fame. (There was also a mention of their dogs. He has a puggle named Cesar; she has a cocker spaniel, she thinks, named Mrs. Roosevelt.) Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

This play is so much about writing, so why don’t you tell me about your process. Did you have the play pretty well mapped out when you started?

ADAM RAPP: I didn’t know how it was going to take shape. I never know. I just kind of have an idea and have a few moments that I need to get to, and sometimes I know what the end is, weirdly enough. I wrote it pretty quickly. I was really in the free-fall — that’s a word we used to have in the play that we cut — in the free-fall of the writing.

How do you do manage to produce so much? Do you approach writing a play like a day job?

RAPP: I wish. It’s hard to describe. It feels like when you’re falling in love. I’m totally out of control. Everything goes away. I don’t do my life well and I have to finish it or I feel like I’m going to drown. That’s why it’s hard for me to start something now because I have a job. I work on a television show, and I have to show up every day in the writer’s room. I have a new play that I’m so excited to write, that I want to talk to [Mary-Louise] about, that I want to talk to Cromer about. But the problem is, once I start talking about it, then I have to write it, and then I won’t go to work. It’s always been that way.

Ms. Parker, you’re a writer as well. Did the process of writing or publishing your book, “Dear Mr. You,” change you at all?

MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I think it did. I was able to own my writing. I’d written for Esquire for 15 years or something, and written for other things, but I didn’t really talk about it. There was this one moment where a fairly close friend of mine — who won’t remember saying this, so I can go ahead — read something that I’d written and asked me who helped me with it. I didn’t really understand what effect that had on me until I was doing my book and I was able to go and talk about my writing. Which I don’t mind, actually — especially in the way I mind talking about acting.

People just approached me completely differently. They communicated with me in a completely different way. I felt legitimate in a way I never do as an actor — rarely do.

You’re happy talking about writing in a way you’re not comfortable talking about your acting. Why is that?

PARKER: There’s a thing, and I can say, “I made that.” I can understand what about it is overwritten or when it’s convoluted, but I also can say, “That’s really good.” And I can’t do that with my acting, ever.

Why not?

PARKER: It’s too amorphous. And it’s my voice, it’s my body, it’s all these things I can’t separate from myself, that are tied into my ego and myself as a woman and my insecurities.

You’ve been in the public eye for a long time. Does it get easier?

PARKER: No. Some aspects of it do, but no. I don’t go to things unless I’m paid or I’m supporting somebody I care about. I don’t have social media. I guess that’s kind of revealing about how I feel about it.

RAPP: The level of recognition I have is so small it’s like someone will see me at a coffee shop or out in front of the theater and they’ll say “I like your work” — or they think I’m Michael Shannon. I’m not kidding, that’s happened like 900 times. And I have to be like, “No he’s my friend. He has a bigger head.” [Smiling] And then I feel bad because I think he looks like a monster.

PARKER: A sexy monster!

RAPP: Sexy monster, right.

PARKER: And a handsome monster!

RAPP: I like being more invisible.

PARKER: I feel pretty invisible also.

In New York City?

PARKER: Most of the time, yeah. There’s a guy in my neighborhood, he sees me all the time and I keep telling him I’m not Parker Posey. But every day that he sees me he thinks I’m Parker Posey. It’s just hilarious. The way he is so excited about the fact that I’m Parker makes me happy.

Let’s talk about “The Sound Inside.” Adam, Mary Lee Baird was your mother’s maiden name. Why did you choose to name your main character Bella Lee Baird?

RAPP: It’s not autobiographical at all. I think the thing that feels most common with my mother is she was just rigorously autonomous. She had a kind of lonely life. She didn’t ask much of the world in terms of being social or being loved or being sexual; she was kind of profoundly fine with her solitude. She was the oldest of 13 kids from a huge Catholic family, so part of it was she was just tired of being around a bunch of screaming Catholics.

Did you decide to name her Baird when you started writing or later on?

RAPP: I named her Baird immediately, and I don’t really know why. But it’s not an elegy to her. I’ve never really written about her directly. There are weird things that, actually, Mary-Louise does: You stand like my mom. It’s really weird. That’s just accidental, but I see a spectral version of her sometimes onstage.

Mary-Louise,you do a lot of speaking directly to the audience in this play, and I understand direct address is not your favorite thing.

PARKER: I feel differently about it now than I did even at Williamstown. I felt like it was something I could never achieve properly. But I’ve gotten closer. I’ve gotten a lot closer.

What was scary about it?

PARKER: Everything. I like the comfort and the elasticity of two people because things have to be somewhat self-generated when it’s just you. It becomes very technical. Because I want them to hear his beautiful writing — and in the best way, it’s not easy writing, in the absolute best way. Because it’s so rich. I want them to hear that richness, but I don’t want it to be about that. I want them to also get his story.

Can you tell me more about working with that kind of writing?

PARKER: I’ve done a lot of new plays. Sometimes the writer comes in and they’re like, “This is it.” And maybe there’s an “an” or an “and” changed — and that’s fine, too. And then there are times when it’s all over the place, and they bring in 20 pages every day, but no one else is a part of that. But I felt that [Adam] was part of it in a way that he’s like a character.

RAPP: It makes it easy when the actor is so dramaturgically inclined. She has a strange — I don’t want to use the word “witchy” because that’s stupid —

PARKER: Oh, I like it!

RAPP: She has a way of saying, “I need something here.” Or “I’m being too articulate here, I want to be inarticulate here.” Or “I don’t want to go into Bella’s bag of tricks where she can embroider, I want something that’s balder or harder.” Not a lot of actors I’ve worked with can actually come up with the thing they want in a way that is benefiting the dramaturgy of the play and not just benefiting their own performance or their own vanity.

PARKER: Can I ask a question?

Please!

PARKER: When you’re writing a novel, do you ever then see it dramatized? Or are you just like, this is a book, this is a this, this is a that?

RAPP: Yeah, I always know. I’ve never turned one into the other.

Is the feeling as you write the same?

RAPP: Not the same. For a book, it’s more meditative and controlled, and I feel like I can return to it. I feel like an adult. When I’m writing a play, I just feel like an adolescent.

Mary-Louise Parker and Adam Rapp Conjure a Haunting

NEW YORK — Adam Rapp wants his new play, “The Sound Inside,” to feel “like a haunting.”

In the first act, the principal presides over a “Community Activated Conversation” with parents (also known as a Facebook Live chat) to talk about an outbreak of mumps.

The conversation does not go well.

“We’re all threatened by your ANTI-SCIENCE DEATH CULT,” one parent offers.

“Do what you want,” comes the reply, “just keep your POISON off my kids.”

Jonathan Spector, 40, who wrote “Eureka Day,” said that he started thinking about vaccines as a subject after moving with his girlfriend, now his wife, to the Bay Area. When their friends started having children, whispers began to circulate at farmers markets and house parties that this person or that person was refusing the shots.

“I had this experience of talking to people who were very smart, very well educated, and sort of agreed with me about everything,” Spector said. “And then you would realize that in this one area, they seem to live on a different planet than you do.”

“Eureka Day,” which is in previews and opens in New York on Thursday at Walkerspace in a Colt Coeur production, follows four parents and the principal as the school faces down the mumps — and as the perceived good of the individual crashes into the good of the group.

It arrives in New York as public health officials struggle to contain an outbreak of measles, and it pulls at a larger thread many feel unraveling around us: What do you do when you cannot agree on basic facts?

The divisions do not track along typical political battle lines, Spector added, making it richer material for a playwright.

“Abortion or gun control or climate change — any one of those things is predictive of all the others, but not vaccines,” he said. “There are vaccine skeptics on the far left and on the far right,” and, he added, it is more difficult to wave them off as unthinking nincompoops if they otherwise agree with you.

Indeed, “Eureka Day,” which is already scheduled for productions in Philadelphia, Washington and Sonoma County, California, gives the anti-vaccine parents their humanity, though it does not buy their arguments. Spector said it makes him uncomfortable even discussing the play in terms of the “vaccination debate.”

“I don’t feel like it’s a debate,” he said. “From my point of view, the science is settled.”

Nonetheless, Josh Costello, the artistic director of Aurora Theater Company in Berkeley, which commissioned the play and staged its world premiere last year, said that anti-vaccine audience members who saw it seemed comfortable with their portrayal.

“We spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted the play to accurately represent people’s points of view without validating a point of view with which we disagree,” Costello said. “That’s a really fine line to walk.”

Another pleasant surprise, Costello said, were the wails of laughter that came from the audience during the group chat scene.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, the audience was roaring with laughter for like seven straight minutes,” he said. “We had to redo some of the cues to make it less funny so the audience could hear the dialogue and the key lines.”

Spector said that, after discovering at the New College of Florida that he was a terrible actor, he set out to become a director. While he had always written, he said, “I didn’t realize that writing plays was still a thing people really did in the world.” But as he moved from project to project, “what was appealing to me,” he added, “was being able to be intimate with this writing I was really excited about.”

He read hundreds of scripts a year as the literary manager of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and went on to get an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University.

Spector lives in Oakland with his wife, Molly Aaronson-Gelb, and their 3-year-old daughter Maisie, who he said tries to rope other children into acting out plays at school. The couple are co-artistic directors of a small company, Just Theater, which they founded in 2006.

Aaronson-Gelb is a director as well as a high school drama teacher, and some of her experiences, both as a private school student in the Bay Area and in previous teaching jobs, inspired the “Eureka Day” setting. (It was the school she attended that cheered for opposing teams.)

“Eureka Day” is Spector’s first production in New York. It will be directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, who was nursing her 2-month-old daughter Esme in the rehearsal room this month while giving the actors notes.

Her husband, Brian Wiles, plays Eli, a parent awash in self-satisfaction and tech money; every now and then he gave Esme googly eyes from his seat.

One directorial challenge: managing the laugh lines in that chat scene, where Facebook comments will be projected behind the actors for the audience to read.

“The build at the end felt the most right it’s felt,” Thomas Jay Ryan, who portrays the principal, said after one run-through.

“You keep saying, ‘Oh they’re going to be screaming laughing — in Berkeley they were screaming laughing.’ Well, OK,” he added. “That’s the kiss of death!”

But for Campbell-Holt, balancing the laughs and the flare-ups in “Eureka Day” is no longer just a theatrical exercise.

“As a new mom,” she said later, “my awareness of this public health crisis has really shifted to being much more immediate. It’s personal.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/theater/eureka-day-play-vaccinations.html" id="d39cdbbd-a57c-3d6c-a28f-d509cb1084e8">The New York Times</a>.

Can a Play About Vaccines Be a Laughing Matter?

“Eureka Day” is a play about a school in Berkeley, California, where the soccer team cheers when the other side scores a goal, and where parents were so concerned that an 8th grade production of “Peter Pan” would have “colonialist issues” that it was set in outer space. It is also a school where many — many — families refuse to vaccinate their children.

“The museum’s investigation into allegations concerning Neil deGrasse Tyson is complete,” a museum spokeswoman said in a brief statement. “Based on the results of the investigation, Dr. Tyson remains an employee and director of the Hayden Planetarium. Because this is a confidential personnel matter, there will be no further statements by the museum.”

Tyson was accused of behaving inappropriately with two women in an article published in November on the website Patheos.

In one instance, Katelyn N. Allers, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, said she met Tyson in 2009 at a party after a gathering of the American Astronomical Society. He was examining her tattoo of the solar system, which stretches along her arm to her collarbone, and she said he followed the tattoo with his hand, putting it into her dress. He said he was looking for Pluto, she said.

Ashley Watson, who had been his assistant on the television series “Cosmos,” made another accusation. She said that during a visit to his apartment, which she thought was for work purposes, he held her hand and stared into her eyes, in what he called a Native American handshake, for about 10 seconds until she pulled away. Watson said that as she was leaving, he told her, “I want you to know that I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do, I’ll just want more.” She subsequently quit her job.

The article also included already public allegations by Tchiya Amet el Maat, who said Tyson raped her in 1984 when they were in graduate school at the University of Texas, Austin.

Tyson responded to the allegations in a long Facebook post, in which he denied the rape and described the first two incidents as benign.

“While I don’t explicitly remember searching for Pluto at the top of her shoulder, it is surely something I would have done in that situation,” Tyson wrote of Allers’ account. “As we all know, I have professional history with the demotion of Pluto, which had occurred officially just three years earlier. So whether people include it or not in their tattoos is of great interest to me.”

Allers said she was interviewed in person for several hours by an investigator from T&amp;M; Protection Resources, a company the museum hired. She said the investigator followed up with witnesses she provided and looked into a speech Tyson gave at a conference in 2014, which she said included jokes about gay people and criticisms of conservatives.

Tyson was also investigated by Fox Broadcasting and National Geographic, which broadcast his television series “StarTalk” and “Cosmos.” Those companies announced in March that their investigations were complete and that his shows would return to the air. Allers said that investigation seemed less thorough to her, just a half-hour phone call with investigators from the two networks.

Allers said she did not find the results of the museum’s investigation surprising — “This is kind of the way the world works,” she said — but added that there was no good possible outcome either way.

“Any time this comes up in the news — I’m sure it will, even with this outcome — I get bombarded with emails and phone calls that are pretty hateful and kind of scary,” Allers said. She said she hoped the museum was “taking steps to make sure behavior like this doesn’t continue to occur.”

Amet was outraged by the museum’s decision.

“If Neil deGrasse Tyson had raped a white woman, he would not be on TV anymore, and this woman would have received a settlement,” Amet, who is black, said in a statement.

Watson said she had declined to speak with the museum’s investigators, as she was worn out from telling her story to other investigators and to news outlets. She said she just wanted to move on.

“In hindsight, I should’ve talk to them,” she said in a text message. “Although I personally don’t think the outcome would’ve been different.”

Tyson, who has led the planetarium since 1996, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/design/neil-degrasse-tyson-keeps-job.html" id="781cab90-f38f-3ea9-a9a2-f50d7fc21e04">The New York Times</a>.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who leads the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, will keep his job, the institution said Thursday. The museum has closed an investigation into sexual misconduct accusations against him.

After Investigation, Neil deGrasse Tyson Will Keep His Job

“The museum’s investigation into allegations concerning Neil deGrasse Tyson is complete,” a museum spokeswoman said. “Based on the results of the investigation, Dr. Tyson remains an employee and director of the Hayden Planetarium. Because this is a confidential personnel matter, there will be no further statements by the museum.”

Ashley Watson, who had been his assistant on the television series “Cosmos,” made another accusation. She said that during a visit to his apartment, which she thought was for work purposes, he held her hand and stared into her eyes, in what he called a Native American handshake, for about 10 seconds until she pulled away. Watson said as she was leaving, he told her, “I want you to know that I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do, I’ll just want more.” She subsequently quit her job.

The Louvre became the first major institution to scrub the family’s name, which is all the more striking because opioid abuse is viewed as far more of a crisis in the United States than it is in France.

But the name retains its honored position at a number of American institutions: the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum, the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other places. Outside the United States, there is the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London and more.

The three Sackler brothers, who built what became Purdue Pharma, and their heirs have been prolific donors to the arts and sciences for decades. Several museums, including the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art, have said they would no longer accept donations from the family, but neither they nor any other large institution, other than the Louvre, have stripped the name from any wings, galleries or buildings.

That is because removing a name, even one that has become culturally toxic, is an enormously complicated decision, mined with legal, financial and moral concerns. Here are some of those issues:

Big donations come with strings — and contracts

When a museum puts a name on the wall, almost always in exchange for a substantial donation, there is often a legal contract that outlines how long that name has to stay.

In 1973, Avery Fisher, founder of Fisher electronics company, donated $10.5 million to renovate Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. The agreement included the stipulation that the name Avery Fisher Hall “will appear on tickets, brochures, program announcements and advertisements and the like, and I consent in perpetuity to such use.”

In order to rename the hall, Lincoln Center had to buy out the Fisher family in 2014 for $15 million and promises to feature tributes to Fisher in the new lobby. David Geffen, the entertainment mogul, then stepped in with a $100 million gift to pay for a renovation — and the naming rights to what is now David Geffen Hall.

Geffen also required that his name be used in perpetuity.

In some circumstances, museums have said their contractual obligations mean they have no choice but to keep the name.

In June, Sen. Jeffrey A. Merkley, D-Ore., demanded that the Smithsonian change the name of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, saying the family name “has no place in taxpayer-funded public institutions.” In a letter to Merkley, Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian, said the donation was made in 1982, and as was its custom at the time, the Smithsonian granted the naming rights in perpetuity.

Bunch said the gift policy was revised in 2011 and now limits naming rights to a term of 20 years or until the next significant renovation of the space. (The Louvre said it was able to act because its policy limits naming rights to 20 years; the wing was named in 1997.)

Michael Ward Stout, a lawyer who has negotiated such deals, said the terms depend “on how much the institution wants the money — and how big are the egos of the donors.”

Some Sackler family members have no ties to OxyContin

Bunch’s letter also pointed out that the gift — which included a collection of more than 1,000 works of Asian art and $4 million — was made more than a decade before OxyContin came on the market. In fact, the man behind the donation, Arthur Sackler, had been dead for nine years when the drug was introduced.

Arthur and his brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler bought a small company called Purdue Frederick in 1952 and grew it into a pharmaceutical giant. Arthur’s family sold his stake in the company after his death in 1987. Purdue Pharma was founded in 1991 and released OxyContin five years later.

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City announced in May that it would stop accepting Sackler money, it made a careful distinction, saying it did not want gifts from family members tied to Purdue Pharma, leaving the door open to family members who are not.

It also declined to rename its Sackler Wing, home of the popular attraction the Temple of Dendur, saying it was not in a position to make such a permanent change while litigation against the family was ongoing. The attorney general of Massachusetts has accused members of the Sackler family of directing the company’s efforts to mislead the public about how dangerous the drug really was.

The company has said it “neither created nor caused the opioid epidemic,” and denied the allegations.

Museums don’t want to spook other big donors

Nonprofit cultural institutions live or die by their fundraising, especially in an era of declining government support for the arts. So one concern for museums is how taking down the name of one donor will make all the others feel.

“The ‘damnation of memory’ — as the Romans used to call it — of a generous party of the past could have a chilling effect on donors that might be concerned the history of their family, or an individual associated with them, might illicit a rebuke, said Maxwell L. Anderson, a longtime museum leader.

If someone is in an “adventurous part of the economy,” Anderson continued, like genetic engineering or bio farming, it’s difficult to know how that work is going to look in the future. Take Facebook, for example, which was a national darling just a few years ago, and is now being admonished on Capitol Hill.

They want to stay above the fray

Perhaps the trickiest and most fundamental question is where institutions should draw the line. What counts as so morally abhorrent that an association should be erased — and who gets to decide?

The unveiling of the David H. Koch Plaza at the Met was greeted by protesters because, while Koch (and his brother Charles) have been generous to the arts, their influential political giving to conservative candidates and causes has made them reviled on the left.

The decisions by several museums, including the Met and the Guggenheim, to swear off future Sackler donations came after demonstrations led by Nan Goldin, a photographer who overcame an OxyContin addiction. She has also called on museums to ditch the Sackler name, and she protested at the Louvre just a few days before it did so.

Daniel H. Weiss, president of the Met, was careful to say during the Sackler announcement that it was an extreme circumstance, and that political protests would not be treated the same way. Given that many donors to the arts are wealthy conservatives, Weiss was both drawing a line for the museum to abide by and reassuring patrons that their checks would not be turned away on account of party affiliation.

“We are not a partisan organization, we are not a political organization, so we don’t have a litmus test for whom we take gifts from based on policies or politics,” Weiss said. “If there are people who want to support us, for the most part we are delighted.”

This week the Louvre Museum in Paris said it had removed the Sackler name from its Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities, following an outcry over the role of some Sackler family members in the production and promotion of the opioid painkiller OxyContin.

Elizabeth A. Harris

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