Corporate culture strives to reduce unconscious bias and prevent discrimination based on gender, race, and other identities. But what happens when long-standing historical conflicts and personal relationships surface in today’s carefully managed workplaces?
Bay Area playwright Geetha Reddy explores this question in her new play, The Employee Dharma Handbook, which uncovers the hidden tensions within Silicon Valley. It was commissioned by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, where it will premiere and kick off Season 56. The Employee Dharma Handbook is a recipient of TheatreWorks’ Kurjan/Butler commission.
The play is set at a Silicon Valley aerospace company, where simmering conflicts among Indian immigrant employees threaten to derail a major rocket launch. HR executive Val investigates a potential staffing issue amongst the lead engineers, suspecting sexism. Instead, she encounters simmering tensions of ancient origin amongst the company’s Indian immigrant employees.
Reddy moved to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom to work in the tech industry before becoming a playwright. Her previous works include the acclaimed Safe House and Mahābhārata. Center Theatre Group’s Brindell & Milton Gottlieb Artistic Director Snehal Desai directs this investigation of identity and desire.
In an exclusive interview with India Currents, playwright Geetha Reddy spoke with Anuj Chakrapani about the play, its themes, and the experiences that inspired it. Director Snehal Desai reveals what drew him toward directing this play.
Anuj Chakrapani: What first sparked the idea of The Employee Dharma Handbook for you? Was there a particular question, observation, or tension that felt important enough to build a play around?
Geetha Reddy: The original inspiration for the play was the Cisco caste discrimination case brought by the California Civil Rights Department. At the time, I wasn’t sure whether it was an isolated incident or part of something more widespread in Silicon Valley. Soon after, there was a planned Google Talk by anti-caste activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan that prompted backlash from some South Asian engineers and was ultimately canceled. That moment, particularly the role of HR in the cancellation, made me start thinking about the collision between two systems of hierarchy — corporate and caste — and about how American institutions, whether capitalist or governmental, interpret culture.
Anuj: The play is set at an aerospace company during a high-stakes rocket launch a moment where precision, hierarchy, and pressure all collide. What drew you to this environment as a stage for exploring workplace culture and human behavior?
Geetha: I’ve always been interested in aerospace, so this gave me the chance to research something I found fascinating while writing the play. It also offered a naturally dramatic setting: people working on projects so large they dwarf human scale, with a built-in countdown clock. I was also interested in the fact that aerospace is an industry with relatively few immigrant workers, for international treaty reasons, which helped the play avoid seeming aimed at any one specific company or industry.
Anuj: The story unfolds through Val, an HR executive trying to understand whether bias played a role in a missed promotion. What interested you in using HR, often seen as the neutral or procedural layer of corporate life, as the entry point into the story?
Geetha: Part of that choice came from what happened around the Google Talk cancellation, when HR and DEI executives were involved in shutting it down. More broadly, HR is often an enforcer of corporate culture and has a great deal of leeway when it comes to investigation and sanctions, which made it a compelling entry point dramatically.
Anuj: The play hints at tensions among Indian immigrant employees that run deeper than surface-level corporate identity. What kind of unspoken dynamics were you most interested in exploring within this workplace?
Geetha: The main dynamic I was interested in was caste identity and how it is expressed (or not expressed) among different employees. The play also looks a bit at gender in the workplace, and in particular at the way women are often passed over for promotion in technical environments. Generational divisions are in the mix as well.
Anuj: Val finds herself navigating competing responsibilities — to Leela, to the company, and to herself. How do you think this idea of duty is shaping the story, especially in a modern corporate setting?
Geetha: This is really one of the fundamental questions the play is asking: what does duty mean, and who do we owe our obedience to? Our own moral compass, or the larger systems that are trying to organize our lives? I have a strong opinion about where one should fall on that question.
Anuj: How has your collaboration with Snehal Desai shaped the evolution of the play so far? Have there been moments where the direction and writing influenced each other in unexpected ways during development?
Geetha: With a new play, the collaboration with the director is always the final stage of bringing the work to completion. Snehal is uniquely good at understanding how scenes fit together and how transitions need to work between them. He also has a great sense of comedic timing, and because the play has a lot of humor in it, his ability to find additional moments of humor, or underline what is already there, has been terrific.
Anuj: During the process of developing this work, has any character or situation revealed something to you that wasn’t initially part of your intention?
Geetha: Absolutely. Actors always bring a great deal to the process, and that’s really the point of making a play: to put it in the hands of actors and let them bring it to life. We’re in rehearsal right now, and every day something new emerges. It could be a look, a take, or even a misunderstanding that makes the play more interesting or more nuanced than it was before.
Anuj: What conversations or reflections do you hope audiences take away from The Employee Dharma Handbook, especially those familiar with Silicon Valley from the inside?
Geetha: First and foremost, I hope audiences become more aware of the forces shaping their own lives. I also hope that people who are not South Asian come away with a better understanding that there are tensions within the communities around them that may not be visible on the surface, but that still shape their neighbors’ and coworkers’ lives. In particular, as anti-caste activists work to get legislation passed, I think it’s important for people who may not know this discrimination is happening to have some awareness of it.
Anuj: Looking ahead, are there questions or themes that have emerged during this project that you find yourself thinking about and wanting to explore further?
Geetha: Right now, I’m very interested in the life and work of B.R. Ambedkar and his role in shaping India. I’m not usually a historical writer though, so I don’t know whether that would become a project. One thing I am interested in exploring next is meritocracy, which feels adjacent to caste and capitalism. At the same time, I don’t tend to stay with one subject forever, and I’ll probably move on to something else after this.
Snehal Desai – Director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s The Employee Dharma Handbook, Center Theatre Group’s Brindell & Milton Gottlieb Artistic Director
Anuj Chakrapani: What drew you toward directing this play?
Snehal Desai: As an Indian American artist, I have always been interested in stories that allow us to open up a dialogue around those issues and topics we sometimes find hard to talk about openly in our communities, whether it be class, gender, sexuality, mental health, or disability. There also are not many works out there where there is a differentiation and understanding between Indian and Indian American and what that means in terms of lived experience. This play does that and also delves into, in my experience, one of the most taboo topics in the Indian community, caste, but yet somehow manages to tackle the topic, which can be very fraught, with humor, heart, and empathy.
I laughed out loud when I first read the play and for days after thought deeply about what these characters are grappling with. That’s always a good sign when reading a new work.
Anuj: How has your collaboration with Geetha Reddy shaped the evolution of the play so far? Have there been moments where direction and writing influenced each other in unexpected ways during development?
Snehal: One of the great joys of working on a new play is getting to be in conversation with the playwright as the piece continues to evolve. Geetha is an incredibly thoughtful collaborator who is both fiercely committed to her vision and wonderfully open to discovery. My role has often been to ask where the audience enters the story emotionally. Not everyone watching will know the language of startups, aerospace or corporate culture, but everyone knows what it feels like to want approval, to compete with colleagues, to feel overlooked, or to compromise something they care about.
The play is full of smart, ambitious, flawed people trying to navigate systems that reward ambition while simultaneously punishing certain kinds of vulnerability. It asks: How much of ourselves do we bring to work? What do we sacrifice in terms of our identity in the pursuit of success? And how do we maintain our values inside systems that often reward something else?
As we’ve dug deeper, I’ve become less interested in who’s right and who’s wrong and more interested in what each character believes they’re protecting. I have also really enjoyed watching how the humor in the play and humanity continually sharpen each other.
Anuj: What conversations or reflections do you hope audiences take away from The Employee Dharma Handbook, especially those familiar with Silicon Valley from the inside?
Snehal: I hope people see themselves in it, even if they don’t work in tech or are not South Asian.
Certainly, anyone who’s spent time in Silicon Valley will recognize pieces of this world—the language of disruption, the obsession with IPO’s, the belief that every problem has a solution, particularly if enough money is thrown at the situation.
But I think the play is really asking a broader question: Is there a divide between who we are outside of work and at work? How much of our identity affects and impacts who we are in the workplace? Are western workplaces set up to resolve Eastern cultural conflicts? Or, for that matter, can they ever be properly set up to do that, and is it their place to?
One thing I’ve learned is that institutions are often very good at telling us who we should be. The harder work is figuring out who we actually are.
Anuj: Looking ahead, are there questions or themes that have emerged during this project that you find yourself thinking about or wanting to explore further?
Snehal: I don’t think the play offers easy answers, nor should it be. It’s about the stories that institutions tell about themselves and the stories people tell themselves in order to survive inside those institutions, as well as within larger cultural contexts and our own diaspora. Many of the characters in this play have learned how to fit in exceptionally well. The harder question is whether they’ve found a place where they can be fully themselves. That’s a question I think extends far beyond Silicon Valley and far beyond this play.
The Employee Dharma Handbook features Megan Suri (Netflix’s “Never Have I Ever”), Kapil Talwalkar (Peacock’s “The ‘Burbs,” NBC’s “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” NBC’s “Night Court”), Kunal Dudheker (20th Century Studios’ Ad Astra, Marvel Studios’ Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Kathryn Smith-McGlynn (20th Century Studios’ Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials), and Ranjita Chakravarty (Netflix’s “Never Have I Ever”).
The Employee Dharma Handbook
July 8 – August 2, 2026
Press opening: July 11
Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto
Single tickets $54-$104, pricing inclusive of fees
For more information, visit TheatreWorks.org or call 877-662-8978.
