Playwright Sarah Gancher Desperately Wishes ‘Russian Troll Farm’ Were Irrelevant

When the pandemic hit, Russian Troll Farm playwright Sarah Gancher thought she might lose her window for the play’s cultural relevance. She was wrong.

Renata Friedman and Hadi Tabbal in Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy at Vineyard Theatre. Photo by Carol Rosegg

Sarah Gancher started developing Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy right after the 2016 election. In the lead-up to Donald Trump’s presidential victory over Hillary Clinton, she began to notice online activity that didn’t quite make sense: “Posts with weird grammar or strange spelling, people I didn't know commenting on friends’ feeds, really virulent arguments among strangers on my friends’ pages,” she describes. “Initially I just thought it was an internet trend that I was too old to pick up on — some kind of new slang or something like that.”

But as the election ran its course, Gancher began to realize those inexplicable political memes, tweets, and rants were something much more insidious. They were the work of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a band of professional internet trolls posting extremist propaganda for the purpose of destabilizing American politics.

Gancher was fascinated. “Here's this office building full of people that are making up new personas, writing dialogue for the people that they made up, staging fights and concocting whole controversies, and then faking getting mad about it,” she says. “I became obsessed.”

She found herself contemplating who these people were and what it was like for them to come to work every day. Then she realized she, herself, had fallen prey to the trolls’ work. “I found out that there were pages that I followed in the midst of that election that were Russian troll pages,” she says. “I realized that I had been quite influenced by these trolls.”

So she began to put fictional names and faces to the trolls in her mind, making sense of it all by turning them into everyday desk jockeys just trying to collect a paycheck and get noticed by the boss. Gancher found it quite easy to get into their heads, relating to that human impulse to just do a good job. “I know for a fact that if I had worked in this building, even if I had felt like what we were doing was evil, I would be obsessed with trying to do great at it,” she admits.

Gancher set out to psychoanalyze these characters and, along with them, the entire American people. “What is it about human beings as animals that makes us uniquely susceptible to this type of propaganda?” she asked herself. And with the 2020 election coming up, she had a clear deadline to find her answer — because although she threw herself wholeheartedly into writing Russian Troll Farm, Gancher figured it would have a pretty short shelf life of political relevancy.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020 and all the theaters shut down, she thought her window for the play had slammed shut forever. “I thought, ‘Well, that's the end of that. I've wasted years of my life trying to manifest this thing, and it's over now. It’s going to be too late,’” she said.

That’s when her friend, director and designer Jared Mezzocchi, contacted her about taking it online. He was figuring out how to create Zoom theater, and Gancher had a play that felt like a natural fit — one where the characters were just as dependent on the internet for connection as the entire rest of the world. From a design perspective, it excited Gancher. “The tweets could really look like tweets. The posts could really look like posts,” she said. And audiences watched characters type them as if on the other side of the trolls’ screen. The play hit Zoom in October of 2020, a month before the presidential election.

By the time the world opened back up, Gancher was ready to see the play alongside her audience, as she initially intended. “There's a lot of direct address, there's a lot of talking right to the audience, and of course, it's a comedy, so you want to be with people while they're laughing,” she says. But she’s noticed that laughter isn’t always the audience’s first instinct, given the political reality we’re still living in. “Some nights are really hot for laughter and some nights are actually kind of quiet and kind of scared,” she says. “It's taken me a while to understand that those are both okay and actually good responses.”

She admits the anxiety makes sense and gives audiences credit for showing up and confronting it. Here we are in an election year, staring down the barrel of another Trump-centric presidential race. The real-life Russian troll farm has reportedly been disbanded, but fake posts on social media are still rampant. And eight years after its inception, Gancher’s play is as pertinent as ever. But, truthfully, she really wishes it weren’t. “My dearest hope for this play — what I would love more than any conceivable type of success — would be for it to be irrelevant.” But until then, maybe it’s best to log off social media for a while.

Russian Troll Farm runs through March 3 at Vineyard Theatre.