3 Concept Notes Harvest is a darkly comic and unsettling tale of globalism and organ harvesting in India written by playwright Manjula Padmanabhan.  Harvest poses a potent critique about how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires.  The play is set in the future, at a time when multinational companies have gone to the Third World not for software, minerals or fabric, but to harvest organs for their rich customers in America. It’s about India and the gritty Third World reality. In our production we specific associate the playwright’s fictional multinational company — Interplanta — with Apple Computers. Set in the imminent future, Harvest imagines a grisly pact between the first and third worlds, in which desperate people can sell their body parts to wealthy clients in return for food, water, shelter and riches for themselves and their families. As such, it is a play about how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires. The core of our production concept might be expressed in a single phrase: the dark side of Apple. While Apple Computers are never mentioned in the script, it is a perfect match for the point of the play. The world is in love with everything Apple, yet many people have never questioned where and how all this shiny, hi-tech stuff gets made.  We’re all aware of outsourcing, but many of us are very much unaware of the enormity of the problem.  Third world employees of Apple products are so overworked that that many of them are committing suicide by jumping out of buildings. In a feeble attempt to stop the suicides, large nets are draped around the factories. Why are we using Apple-inspired branding in our production? Apple is American, and the fact that it’s in the image of something one “harvests to eat” make it a perfect match for this play.  Is Apple harvesting human body parts?  No, not yet, but the familiar logo — an Apple with a bite taken out it —  is possibly a reminder of what companies like Apple are actually doing. Apple’s first slogan was “Byte into an Apple.”  We like to “byte” into our Apple products, but Apple as a first world American corporation is cannibalizing bite by bite, third world donors for its bountiful “harvest.”