Geetha Reddy’s new play began with a problematic cancellation. If that sounds like a familiar cultural script—well, not quite.

To clarify: Reddy, a playwright and screenwriter who has also worked for a variety of Silicon Valley tech companies, had heard the story of two Cisco engineers, both, like her, of South Asian descent, who’d been accused of caste-based discrimination against another South Asian employee. Then she happened to notice that a planned Google talk on the subject by an anti-caste activist was suddenly scrubbed when “all the upper-caste engineers at Google got into a hissy fit on their internal network, like, ‘This is going to make us look bad.’”

Any dramatist with a nose for conflict might sniff some promise in this, but what really intrigued Reddy—whose sharp new comedy The Employee Dharma Handbook is now onstage at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California, through Aug. 2—was how the cancellation was announced.

“The person they put out to cancel the Google talk was their DEI executive, a Black woman, who said, ‘These talks are meant to bring people together, not to divide them,’” Reddy said. “I had my own little hissy fit. I was like, ‘Well, she wouldn’t have said that if it was a Black Civil Rights activist.’ But then I thought: I bet she would have, because the power of her corporate fealty, her stock options—the gravitational pull in our culture is always toward that.”

Thus the complicated hall of mirrors that is The Employee Dharma Handbook, in which four South Asian employees at the fictional company Sequoia Dynamics work on a high-stakes rocket launch while tangling over the lingering effects of deeply entrenched caste distinctions most of them assumed they and their families left behind in India. Leela, a promising young female engineer, is Dalit, a.k.a. “untouchable,” and when Baasu, her male colleague, a high-caste Brahmin with talent but uneven work product, gets promoted over her, she suspects bias on the part of her superiors, Krish and C.K., who are also higher-caste. When Leela brings her concerns to Val, the company’s Black diversity officer, Val tries to mediate this complicated internecine struggle in terms that make sense to her, i.e., with reference to the racial politics of the U.S., or at least the wary, anodyne version that has filtered up to corporate diversity programs.

Val’s first obstacle: sussing out which person is which caste in the first place. “Is that something that is okay to ask?” Val inquires of Baasu, who responds, “No, not really—it is really quite rude.” (Here Reddy’s script encourages a fourth-wall-breaking take à la The Office, noting in parentheses: “Okay to eyeball the audience here.”)

Taking my cue from that warning, I avoided asking the same of either Reddy or the play’s director, Snehal Desai. Instead I inquired about their relationship to the caste system, as second-generation immigrants whose parents were raised in India.

“It’s not something that I talk about or my family talks about,” said Desai, whose day job is artistic director of L.A.’s Center Theatre Group. “But it is interesting that among my Indian American friends, I do know who are Brahmin—that’s the only caste I know that my friends are a part of where it’s named or associated.”

Similarly, Reddy said her parents came from “a very secular India, and my experience had never seemed to be mediated by caste at all in this country.” That has changed in part due to a number of intersecting factors, she said. The increase in Indian immigrants on H1B visas has included a variety of folks, some of whom are more closely connected via WhatsApp and other technology to Indian culture, which has in turn seen a resurgence of Hindu nationalism.

“All these things that my parents felt like were totally left behind, that they had their consciousness raised about and had moved past, have now bubbled back up again,” Reddy said. “My cousin’s kid, who was at CMU, was so angry when he went to move into his dorm and one of the Indian kids there asked him what his caste was.” She mentioned another story she’d heard of someone leaving a job “because he couldn’t tolerate working for somebody who was lower-caste than him.”

Though Reddy didn’t explicitly set out to refute Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which made the case for caste hierarchy as underlying mechanism for all forms of group-based oppression, including anti-Black racism, it’s fair to say that The Employee Dharma Handbook complicates that analogy. But there’s one tendency that does map onto the way racism often works in America: Like white folks who insist they “don’t see color,” it is the folks with caste privilege who are most likely to claim, as Baasu does, “I am caste-less…I am just me.” Appropriately enough, it is Val, a Black woman, who clocks it: “The people I hear telling me there is ‘no caste discrimination here in these United States’ end up, I find, being Brahmin.”

Running parallel to this HR drama is the rocket launch and a subsequent IPO—resemblances to SpaceX are indirect but also not totally off-point—for which, director Desai explained, Wilson Chin’s set will have a suitable “verticality.” Not only will this conjure a place where the characters are “thinking of the stars and of things so much bigger than anything our mind can grapple with,” it also conveys “a sense of dharma, a way of living or purpose or duty. I don’t think there is a direct, one-to-one metaphor, but I do love that she’s placed this in a world where cosmology and the cosmic is there as a backdrop. It makes us feel our smallness in a very big universe.”

Similarly, the identity politics at the heart of The Employee Dharma Handbook, though often thorny and painful, begin to seem small, or at least contingent, when Reddy’s characters begin to imagine a life outside their unexamined prejudices, even—and here’s what makes it a comedy—laugh about them. Added Reddy, “It’s such a dark topic that unless there’s some level of levity, it’s going to be so dreary. I feel like we’ve had our fill of dreary identity plays.

“I really want the play to have a kind of funhouse feel,” she continued, “where Val is walking through it and getting turned from one perspective to another to another, and each time it’s a destabilizing, vertiginous shift.”

One of these shifts takes place when Val finally blurts out her frustration with her co-workers’ squabbles, and it’s triggered when one of them asks her rhetorically, “Who does politeness serve, anyway?” I asked Reddy the same question.

“It’s an interesting question for theatre people, right?” she said. “We ask so much of our audiences in terms of being polite, but having read Shakespeare in a Divided America, that hasn’t always been the case. I think politeness serves the people who want to preserve power. I think it can protect other people too—but what are they being protected from? I had a friend who grew up in the South, and I was asking him what that was like, and he was like, ‘Well, I learned that politeness is really important.’ He was a white Southerner, and he just felt that without politeness, there would just be riots everywhere, constant racial warfare. Well, who is it serving not to have that, you know? It’s a genuine question.”