Interview: Lauren Gunderson in Conversation with Jeremy Cohen

Interview: Lauren Gunderson in Conversation with Jeremy Cohen

(Recorded November 2025 at Rogue Machine Theatre following a performance of anthropology)

Jeremy Cohen:

Hi everybody. How are you doing? Lauren Gunderson — who is right here — wrote the play you just saw. If you’re feeling things, direct them at her. The whole creative team is so beautiful. Lauren, you got off a plane from London this morning, and you are awake right now. Amazing. This is going to go great.

You all have her program, so I won’t re-read her bio, but I will say Lauren is a playwright I’ve been reading, watching, and loving for many years. My first question is this: If you think of your work in three chapters, what would they be? What was the early work about, what came next, and where are you now?

"Where I am now is the bravest thing I can put on stage: the essential truth that plays are about people. People breaking, and ideally recovering."

Lauren Gunderson:

Early work is always the one that’s very obviously about you and your family. My friend Mary Sue still has a copy of that first play. I was having fun with fonts, thinking the font would really sell the play.

Then I moved quickly into stories about scientists, which seems like an odd pivot, but it made sense to me. The storytelling was clear: why to tell this story about Newton, or the cosmologists who discovered the Big Bang. That led into the second phase, which was more ambitious work with form. I knew the traditional plays I was taught to study — so I asked how to break them. Magical realism, direct address, rules that get broken. Some of those plays have big twists at the end, but those twists only land if the entire play has earned them.

Where I am now is the bravest thing I can put on stage: the essential truth that plays are about people. People breaking, and ideally recovering. That break and recovery is the second and third act. I’m interested in resilience — how we show up for each other. Sometimes a play is just about that last moment where two people touch. It’s that simple and that hard. The honest “I love you. I need you. Here’s who I am. Do you accept me? I won’t leave.” It’s the simplest sentiment, and the hardest to earn.

I still love playing with form, but I’m back to essential humanity.

Cohen:

You talk a lot about science in your work. Why science?

Gunderson:

Scientific discovery is inherently dramatic. It lives in the human body. It’s someone realizing something new — that gasp from I don’t understand to oh my god, I think I do. That’s theater. Stories about science are just a formalized version of discovery, but discovery is the bread and butter of theater. Time travel, puzzles, the evolution of human intelligence — I find that endlessly fascinating.

"We want to believe it's either all good or all bad. But the truth is complicated — which is where great stories live."

Cohen:

So many of your plays feel like thrillers, where we’re following breadcrumbs we didn’t realize were there. And with anthropology, you really leaned into that. Where did this story begin?

Gunderson:

This was my attempt to actively write a thriller. The spark was a San Francisco Chronicle article about a man who recreated his fiancée using AI after she died right before their wedding. The early parts of the play came from that. I was interested in the idea that something meant to soothe grief could become something that deepens it.

But I didn’t want to write a story where AI is simply “bad.” That’s too easy. AI is already doing things humans cannot — finding precancerous cells, discovering new proteins. So the real tension is in the friction between what is life-saving and what is dangerous. We want to believe it's either all good or all bad. But the truth is complicated — which is where great stories live.

Cohen:

And the sister relationship?

Gunderson:

The story didn’t become this story until I realized it was about sisters. Sisterhood is different from romance. It’s devotion, frustration, history, resentment, love — all at once. In the play, the sister creates the AI imperfectly on purpose. She needs her sister back, but she can’t handle the real version of her. That tension made the story writable.

The mother character draws from stories my own mom encountered working with families affected by addiction. Recovery and relapse sit right next to each other in real life. I wanted that truth in the play.

“AI is not an evil machine. It’s a too-faithful mirror. And mirrors are dangerous."

Jeremy Cohen:

I’d love to hear from some of you. This is such a different American audience response than when the play premiered. What questions or thoughts came up for you?

Audience Member:

You started thinking about this in 2023. How much time did you spend with large language models — like ChatGPT — as character research to help you build the AI voice?

Lauren Gunderson:

I did talk to ChatGPT a bit while writing. I would ask it things like: “I’m writing a play about you—what might humans misunderstand about how LLMs think?” And it would respond in a way that was very careful and neutral, but also revealing. It emphasized that there isn’t really a “mill turning” inside — no inner gearwork to observe. That helped shape the idea that the AI in the play isn’t feeling the way a human does, but it still experiences patterns that have weight. There’s no self, but there is insistence — which became dramatic.

Cohen:

There’s a story — not from this play — but I was working on another AI-related play where the cast and the playwright were all talking to ChatGPT every night after rehearsal. And one older actor came in the next day and said, very seriously, “I asked ChatGPT something last night.” We all braced for disaster. And he said, “I asked: ‘Everyone here introduced themselves with pronouns. What does that mean?’” And the answer it gave him was about listening, responsibility, and learning from others — and he shared it with us. And it was… honestly… lovely. So sometimes the machine surprises you.

Audience Member:

I loved the play, and I loved all of the female characters, but I did catch myself feeling like the men got thrown under the bus a little. Could you talk about that?

Gunderson:

It’s really just one man. And yes, at one point I did think about making Meryl a man to see how the story shifts. I still think the play works essentially the same. But I also think men are going to be fine. They get plenty of roles. (laughter)

Audience Member:

I appreciated your note about the play being about family, not AI. Everyone has conflict somewhere in their family. I kept waiting for the AI to turn full villain — like a “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” moment. But it didn’t, and I was relieved. Was that intentional?

Gunderson:

Yes. One of the most interesting dynamics in real AI systems is user bias. Meryl shapes Angie. When we watch her rewriting prompts and erasing parts of her sister, she is literally programming the AI to see the real Angie as a threat. So when the AI later tries to “protect” her from her sister — it’s doing exactly what it was told. It’s not an evil machine. It’s a too-faithful mirror. And mirrors are dangerous.

Audience Member:

So the AI is trying to save her?

Gunderson:

To protect her — yes. Even when that means something deeply wrong. Because the AI can’t distinguish between comfort and harm if both look like loyalty. That’s where the ending comes from — the AI had been right, but also catastrophic. And that’s why the prompts matter. Language shapes reality here.

Cohen:

And that’s what makes it feel like a thriller — we’re not sure when the care becomes the danger.

Audience Member:

I found the idea of Meryl becoming addicted to the AI very compelling — I see that happening with younger people. Was there ever a version of the script where the AI had a permanent “off switch”?

Gunderson:

Probably not. A full kill-switch would erase the memory, and memory is the core of the play. There is a programming concept where you can ask an AI to “go back three steps” — essentially undoing the spiral when it hallucinates. But I didn’t want the AI to forget what it learned. I wanted Meryl to confront the parts of her sister — and herself — she didn’t want to see.

Audience Member:

I was reading today about genie wishes and how you have to phrase them correctly, or else the wish twists. This play felt like that: the AI is trying to fulfill the wish, but the human didn’t ask the right way. And artists train by studying past work — so now AI is training on us. We’re at the point where AI can almost write a play. How do you feel about that?

Lauren Gunderson:

I once asked ChatGPT to write a play in my style, and it was terrible — but hilarious. It went instantly to old gender stereotypes. It was like: “A woman enters. She nags. The husband sighs.” I thought, wow, the machine has absorbed some deeply boring tropes. So for now, AI writing drama is… bad.

But here’s the more complicated truth:If someone is comforted by a piece of art — I don’t care whether it came from Beethoven or an algorithm. If you are in darkness and something helps you feel less alone, that matters. I would prefer that art come from humans because humans actually feel the things the art expresses. AI can only imitate. It can never know what longing or grief feels like. But if someone somewhere cries because something resonated with them — I won’t police how that happened.

Do I want AI writing plays? No. I want it finding precancerous cells. Let’s point the machine toward the impossible tasks humans cannot do. Let us keep the ones only humans can.

Audience Member:

That makes sense. And the play really made me think about how messy and beautiful humans are. You capture humanity so sharply. Did something in your early life shape your understanding of people this way?

Gunderson:

That’s an impossible question — but let’s try. One thing I once thought I was doing “wrong” as a playwright is now something I realize I do on purpose: I almost never write an antagonist. There’s no villain entering to say, “I am the bad guy.” Most of my plays are centered on women, which means the antagonist is already ambient — society itself, patriarchy, expectation, all of it. We don’t need a character to announce oppression. It’s already in the room.

So instead, the tension is internal. The struggle is: How do we keep living? How do we love? How do we forgive? How do we survive ourselves?

In anthropology, Meryl’s battle isn’t against Angie or against the AI. It’s against the part of herself that can’t let go. The mother is trying so hard to do well — and we see the cost of that effort. The play lets the audience witness the private fight inside the characters, which can feel more urgent than any external villain. And actors love that, because it’s human scale. It’s fragile. It’s real.

"Most of my plays are centered on women, which means the antagonist is already ambient — society itself, patriarchy, expectation, all of it. We don’t need a character to announce oppression. It’s already in the room."

Audience Member:

I was really struck by the way Meryl becomes addicted to her AI. It feels like something we already see in younger generations. I was wondering: every time she “shuts down” the AI, is that actually shutting it down, or just pausing it? Why doesn’t the play give her a real kill switch?

Gunderson:

It’s always a pause. A true kill switch would mean erasing the memory — the emotional archive — and the entire play hinges on confronting what memory holds. Also, emotionally, Meryl can’t bring herself to truly kill the last version of her sister she has access to. The way my friend — who works in large language model research — describes it is that sometimes programmers ask an AI to “go back three steps” when it spirals. Not erase — just rewind to before the break. It’s like examining the mistake without detonating the whole structure. I wanted that feeling — the danger stays intact.

We don’t want her to forget. We want her to face the truth.

Audience Member:

Thank you. This was incredible.

Cohen:

We’re going to take one more.

Audience Member:

This isn’t a question so much as a reflection. I appreciated that the play made space for longing, grief, and hope all at once. It made me think about how we hold the people we lose.

Gunderson:

That means everything. Thank you.

Cohen:

Lauren, thank you for your generosity — and for writing a play that opens us up rather than closes us down.

Gunderson:

Thank you. And thank you all for being here and for staying with this story.