Burlingame playwright Geetha Reddy premieres 'The Employee Dharma Handbook' at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

GR: This is a workplace discrimination play which asks: Did the discrimination happen, and if it did, what is the remedy? It follows an HR executive looking into disputes among Indian immigrants and Indian American employees.

DJ: What first inspired you to write “The Employee Dharma Handbook”?

GR: The original inspiration for the play were the recent disputes over caste discrimination in California over the past several years, such as the Cisco caste discrimination case and the vetoing of SB 403 to name two. The intersection between corporations and culture was particularly interesting because in the case of caste and capitalism, you have two systems of hierarchy at work.

DJ: What does that concept “dharma” mean to you, and why is it important to this story?

GR: “Dharma” is a word that is not easily translatable into English and has different meanings in different religious contexts. The broadest definition is that of “duty,” and the play asks what does duty mean, and to whom do we owe our obedience? Our own moral compass, or the larger systems that are trying to organize our lives? 

DJ: What were the particular experiences or observations from life in the Bay Area that influenced your writing of this play? 

GR: I’ve lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area my whole adult life — first in tech and then in theater. Seeing the difference in mindsets of these two groups of people who live and work beside each other has been instructive in writing the play. The differences in the ways in which people use language, assess success, create meaning and navigate complex layers of privilege are all at work in the play. 

DJ: This play is premiering in the heart of Silicon Valley. What aspects of the story do you think will feel especially familiar to Bay Area audiences?

GR: I think interacting with HR will be familiar to anyone who has worked for a mid to large-sized company. Also many of us in the Bay Area are familiar with the habits and charms of family and friends who are highly technical and/or engineers.

DJ: How collaborative has the rehearsal process been between you, the director, and the cast?

GR: With a new play, the collaboration with the director is always the final stage of bringing the work to completion. Snehal Desai 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. 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.

DJ: On opening night, what will you be watching for from the audience?

GR: Laughter, surprise, curiosity.

PLAY PARTICULARS: “The Employee Dharma Handbook.” Written by Geetha Reddy. Directed by Snehal Desai. July 8-Aug. 2, 2026 at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. For information about show schedules, ticket information, special events and accessible performances visit theatreworks.org.