Cambridge theater companies Central Square Theater and Moonbox Productions were recognized by the Boston Theater Critics Association (BTCA) at the 43rd Elliot Norton Awards June 1. Moonbox received the award for Outstanding Music Direction for “Crowns,” a musical celebrating the women of the traditional Black church, and Central Square Theater’s “The Moderate” received awards for Outstanding Scenic Design, Midsize or Small (Sibyl Wickersheimer and Jared Mezzocchi), Outstanding Sound Design, Midsize or Small (MIT instructor Christian Frederickson), and Outstanding New Script by playwright Ken Urban.

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Cambridge Day spoke with Urban about writing a play mired in the internet’s darkest recesses. “The Moderate” tells the story of Frank Bonner, a content moderator whose job requires him to look at sexually explicit, racist and violent posts so he can keep them off social media.

During the play, three walls of giant screens display images that Bonner either accepts or blocks. Some audience members found these images so disturbing that they walked out during the play.

Urban, a senior lecturer in theater and director of dramatic writing at MIT, understands why some people walked out of the show. In the early stages of development, he said, “We talked about blurring out a lot of the footage.” But he and the other members of the creative team ultimately decided against it. Showing people in the audience the graphic images puts them in Frank’s shoes, “walking with him on that journey.”

Urban first learned about content moderators in 2019. “I became really fascinated,” he told Cambridge Day, saying he found it “heartbreaking and fascinating and disturbing” that people would subject themselves to such images, “particularly people who worked in the child porn and terrorism divisions of content moderation.”

For research, Urban talked to content moderators for Facebook and Microsoft, including some who broke their non-disclosure agreements to help Urban understand their work. During the pandemic, he realized that the play should reflect the experience of working from home.

Urban worked with Mezzocchi, the play’s director and multimedia designer, and Wickersheimer, scenic designer, to develop the idea of isolating the actors from each other, rather than bringing them together on stage. Bonner, played by Nael Nacer, is physically alone on stage for most of the play. The other characters appear only on large screens, giving the audience the same experience Bonner is having.

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Urban is drawn to the hard stuff. His play “A Guide for the Homesick” is about international aid workers. One critic who saw the Huntington Theatre’s production in 2017 wrote that it “burns with outrage for the way real-life American religious meddling incited homophobic violence … in African nations like Uganda.”

Another of Urban’s plays, “Sense of an Ending,” grapples with questions of guilt and complicity in its portrayal of an American journalist interviewing Hutu nuns accused of war crimes during the Rwandan genocide. (Cantabrigians can see a staged reading of “Sense of an Ending,” co-presented by MIT Theater Arts and Front Porch Arts Collective, on Sept. 16.) 

What draws Urban to these difficult subjects? Writing a play, Urban said, is his way of making sense of the world. “I need to understand how someone could do this to their neighbor.” His definition of “neighbor” is broad. “What does it mean that there’s a genocide happening just a plane ride away? We act as if that’s another world, but it’s not.”

In the same way that actors immerse themselves in their roles, Urban conducts interviews and watches videos that let him disappear inside his characters. Such immersion comes at a cost. While he wrote “Sense of an Ending,” Urban had nightmares in which his apartment was broken into, and he was murdered with a machete.

Like Bonner in “The Moderate,” Urban exposes himself to material most of us would be unable to stomach. The willingness to take on hard topics can yield profound results. During the run of “The Moderate” at Central Square Theater, he said, “we got this amazing letter that someone left at the box office, unsigned, just saying that as a victim of abuse as a child by her father, watching that play really helped her heal and feel a sense of closure.”

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“That,” Urban said, “is why I make art.”