 I was interested sitting in the audience when people felt like, oh, they just, something to move them, literally. And particularly, I was found this experience in Shakespeare versions, and by the second act, they were starting to have moments where they sat forward, and often at the same lines. So I want to understand that. I was also working with playwrights and directors who seemed to know things intuitively about how to make a joke work, or how certain staging had to be in order to continue to keep the audience as attention. So I became fascinated with trying to understand exactly what we knew about the brain to try to make some, see if we learned more about what was. And I chose for the cover of, it seems to me fascinating that this iconograph icon, iconic image from Emma, remains as this idea of trying to look into the brain to understand the self, which of course, I think we can pretty much get at this point is a sort of a fool's errand, possibly, you know, I figured that out too. But I do believe actually that theater is teaching us to understand who we are and how kind of the brain was. So that's kind of the global thesis statement for me today and always. But I'm gonna focus on three different questions, three different acts, if you will. The first is, how does complicated voice work, language work on stage? And of course it works the same on stage as in life, but there are other elements to it and we have a nice way of studying it. Second is, how do we build character and what is it that makes a good casting example or bad casting example? And finally, what is this theory of cognition that I'm seeing manifested in contemporary performance? What do I see contemporary theater performers and artists staging as a way of thinking about what they think cognition means? Okay, not easy to see neuroscience in a production of Hamlet. So I started looking specifically at cognitive linguistics and what makes cognitive linguistics a great way of matching is that how we think is how we speak and how we speak is how we think. It's not like there's some separate part of the brain that makes our sentences work and then it translates out. There, research in cognitive linguistics suggests that we speak and think metaphorically and creatively. So therefore, what I found as evidence of creative language or creative ideas on stage or in poetry was pretty much the same, was evidence of the same mental processes as the cognitive linguists were looking at. I wanted to see if I could take a piece of language from Shakespeare play and take apart what kind of thinking was going into it. Particularly language that we think of as relatively easy or literal, but that would be more complicated. So during Hamlet's off-sided advice to the players, he compares then theater to a mirror. And he says the purpose of playing whose end of the first anatomy up to nature to show virtue of her feature, score her own image in the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure. And if we take Hamlet literally for a minute, this mirror called up to nature would not find virtue's feature and reflect it to her. A mirror called up to nature would reflect air tone or you know, nature. I wasn't sure, but it wasn't gonna do this complicated work that Hamlet suggested it was going to do. So I knew because I didn't know the play or I didn't know how to make sense of complicated language that what Hamlet means is he wants the performance of the murder of Gonzaga to extract Claudius' guilt and his guilt for murdering Kate Hamlet. But this, and things are found again at the Fourth Theater. I know that he wants this performance to sort of extract particular salient parts of the nature that's in front of it. But cognitive linguistics allows people to look at how he's able to manage that meaning. So let's take a step back and try to explain what I'm talking about. So the idea that metaphor exists in thought and language is that we think metaphorically and we project our experiences, the inner pre-experiences on the more abstract ideas. So we're able to say Juliet is a son because we are pulling information from the son and we use it to think about Juliet. Of course we don't think that Juliet is a flaming ball of gas. We understand what it means. We're not confused. We understand how to selectively pull information from the son idea to make sense of the Juliet idea. And we do this in other ways too. So the idea of trying to figure out what it means to know something is pretty complicated, it's very abstract. But I do know what it means to see something and I see it and it goes into my eyes and then I see that thing. And so when we talk about I see your point or her argument was getting hazy and we understand this idea of knowledge by thinking about the visual system. This is just sort of the way George Lankoff, who was one of the earlier thinkers on the conceptual metaphor theory, talks about how we make sense of language. It's in body and it's creative. And then explore our thinking to be able to create networks of association. So it's not just the metaphor, it's actually the network of associations that get compressed and blended to create new meaning. Certain networks of association, certain ideas are salient, certain ideas come up and other things are masked. Stop this mirror that Emma's talking about. It's definitely not the mirror that I see in the morning. That's not actually me, but that's the mirror I found. It's not the mirror that I use when I'm driving or I'm hard. I'm in this Arnold Peeley wedding portrait, which would be the kind of mirror that Emma had access to at the time, which is a convex mirror that depth external things into the picture. But it's not just that because that's not specifically just extracting other things. It's also, he doesn't need it to kind of not editorialize. J.T.R. would have had access to as well as sort of political tracks and thought about the mirror at the time, was I realized that this mirror that he sets up at the center of the play is a complicated network of ideas. It is simultaneously a sort of flat, perfect mirror. It's also this convex mirror that's able to kind of pull in information from outside the frame. And it involves the holder of the frame because obviously, although the grammar or the sentence hides the holder, it's the holder that's angling the mirror. So what we have here is a mirror that reflects without distortion and also distorts. And there's an intention to it. This is a mirror that's held in order to extract guilt from audience or to show virtue of the future. And then the purpose of play is to blend or an integration network. The goal of theater is both unmediated. It simply reflects what it sees on the virtual space and intentional on its angle. Since it has a goal, a purpose, it can either be accidental or random. The reflection shows virtue of the score and the details of their outward appearance while conveying the exemplarity of one and the vice of the other. The fact that Shakespeare sets up this network of ideas at the center of his play is not just a demonstration of a contemporary idea theory of linguistics. For it to be useful for me, it needs to help me think about the play decline. So I want to believe that this poetry sort of scaffolds meaning of the play. In other words, once we have this idea set up of this mirror that can do all of these complicated things, we can use that idea to think about other ideas in the play. And indeed, that is true. I think that there are a number of different places in play where we see Hamlet questioning the way of know something by looking at it is clearly not quite working. There are a number of places where there are doubles. Obviously, laertes is sort of a double of Hamlet. There's an even and there are places even where gracious talks of the ghost is as I knew that by these hands are not alive. So the language does continue to evoke or play with this idea of a sort of a mirror that both is and is not a perfect reflecting tool. So I did find ways in which you could think about the play as a kind of research into what does it mean to know what's stable information and what is not and how do we go about assessing what the truth is. So then what I wanted to do was say, well, could this be helpful for directors or am I seeing it on stage? And I did find, I saw a number of productions in Hamlet and I saw many, many, many that used the mirror either as a prop or as a set decoration. It started to think, well, this doesn't really work. I don't, the mirror, and you know what I mean, the verdict in the staging mirror is very challenging because the pan control where it's reflecting and the lights going everywhere, it's reflecting the audience. It doesn't reflect what you want it to. And then I saw production of Ingmar Bergman's at BAM. It struck me that he was maybe getting close to what I was interested in. And what I saw was that he creates the idea of a mirror on stage through the use of symmetry in the staging. So the coronation scene, for example, and the wide-on fencing match are made on stage symmetrically. So we can see this constantly duplicated number as the chord that was sort of knees on a beam and right above the bend. And we have the image of laertes and Hamlet. And in the dual example, we have the mirror at almost state of scale so that it's held in balance as the two go back and forth. And through this double angle of images, Bergman locates the mirror on stage in an absence. He doesn't stage the mirror when he starts to almost evoke it in our minds through the staging. And this place is equidistant before, between doubles and when they're reflecting the curves. And I think in this way, he was able to successfully stage the idea of the mirror as this lacuna. And as in his staging, I thought was successful because it didn't stage a mirror, but it reminded us of all of the things that we think of when we think of the mirror. And there is another example, his uterus retracted stage night. So there are ways in which he's creating the audience to, he's helping Shakespeare's language by highlighting some of the mental spaces or the idea, the association of ideas that we think of when we think of the mirror and then generating it in the staging without doing it. Back to building characters. So I became interested in how we make sense of characters and in the way in which certain casting was talked about as right and other casting was thought I was wrong. It's roughly as interesting that we didn't have enough of a good language to talk about casting when it went awry and what it meant to say something was believable or relatable. I think the character creates quality. While casting characters do this professionally, all of us do this when we make sense of people around us. All the way you should think of character building as a process whereby a person comes to have our poor character because the difficult experiences are being a little wacky. The process of building character with our own and those around us, fictional and professional is a process whereby we cast information from one domain to the other, building on layers of meaning and a network to assemble to the body of the series biases, actions and words. And of course, casting is historically specific, right? When we say something that's sort of about traditional casting or non-traditional casting it doesn't really make any sense because obviously the way Shakespeare did casting or Shakespeare's company did casting or Molière did casting it was very different from the way we do casting now. And the studio system of course had a different way of casting, it was almost a trainer-secretariat where you had a type, you had the doctor type, you had the villain type or the victim type and you basically, you know, it was who was available. When the studio system started to dissolve and TV began there was a room for a casting director and the elevation of this person was slow, probably because it was considered sort of a sectarian role. Mary Anjority was one of the earliest successful famous casting directors, she did the casting for the graduate. And when she, and the book of course calls for a blonde man shortly after college and of course the person that she, everyone wanted was Robert Redford. And she manages to convince them that that was not necessarily the best casting despite the fact that he clearly fit the description in the book better. And when Dustin Hoffman was first cast everyone thought that he was clearly miscast and that it was going to be a huge mistake. But actually the idea of Benjamin Braddock, the character of Benjamin Braddock was a concept made manifest in the casting. That's a character that doesn't really exist without a confidence of body. So the way I started thinking about it was was that there was a tremendous amount of information we were about to unveil and to see that went into how we thought of an actor being right through the part. And that obviously there was a text or the line said about him, he is a player, said to him or said about him, things he does in the plot, all of this point he's going to be asleep with his girlfriend father, he's like a killer's uncle. But then for some parts I think there's extra textual information obviously whether you've read the book before or if it's a historical character like Catherine Graham, you have other information other than the text and the screenplay that you're working with. And then you have the actor on stage, the age, race and body type. And I don't believe that ever disappears. I don't believe that you can successfully act past your age, race or body type or gender, sex, characteristics. And then the actor's background whether that actor is known at all or it's completely famous whether you've seen him in a big million roles I think that that goes in the process of why we construct these characters. So let me look at an example of casting and advertising and then just sort of explain to you how I'm making sense of this complicated idea of why we create characters. So this is an advertisement for three kids in surgical gear, Merlinda, Mike, Scalpel and the body of the man says Joey, Katie and Todd will be performing in your White House. This threatening scenario probably persuades the viewer to read the text in the body of the ad and what horrible situation am I in where Joey, Katie and Todd will be performing in the White House. And the text explains that our education system is not training students in the kinds of ways that they're gonna knowledge them that they're gonna need. And that if we, with this reduction of the standards of Americans education system is going to eventually affect me. And now our question I supported education is the work that the ad is trying to do. I don't actually think that in the future we're gonna allow seven-year-olds to perform surgery but I understand that what they're conveying is that they're compressing the intellect and the skill of seven-year-olds with the role of a doctor. So I'm able to build this character that the hypothetical doesn't exist in the world but in this ad and this hypothetical situation these seven-year-olds are performing my surgery. By casting these kids in these roles we see this critical task as being performed by unimpaired students. They were poorly educated in the past and I didn't seem to care enough to support education and now they're about to cut me out. I'm certainly not afraid of seven-year-old kids but in this situation I suddenly got my emotions involved and now I'm very afraid of these seven-year-olds kids performing my surgery. So then I think let's support education. But again, this comes to you despite a logical weakness that the ad is working with because of course supporting education it does not necessarily mean that my future doctors are gonna be good at my bypass and it doesn't necessarily mean that these three kids are going to be educated. But in this world that's been created by this casting choice I understand that supporting education will generalize to more likelihood that I will be better served by my surgeon. And so we have the parts which are the surgeons and the strict Joey indicated top and then this casting is just a depiction of these seven-year-old bodies. We had strategically miscast these characters in order to make a point. So of course the famous example of brilliant miscasting comes from Hamilton. Passing Latino is Alexander Hamilton in African-American as Aaron Burr is not confused our historical recollection of the character. Nor does it ask that we look past the race of the actors. The casting creates new characters in the network of history, future and America. Casting the mental Miranda is not about America and the way it is. It's not because he looked like Alexander Hamilton. It's not about destroying opportunities on talent and performers. It's about how the racial and ethnic makeup of the performer speaks with and through the story of the birth of democracy. Without the proper sensing on stage the young, scrappy and hungry people who might develop democracy now Hamilton isn't Hamilton. If the body-climbing part is not matched the presumed race or gender of the character that David's learned protocols of reception that question the sensual importance of the normality and visibility of white male bodies. Passing that strategically miscast actors and roles presumed to be raised white or gendered male can help us change what we think and how we think. It helps us to start expanding categories of who belongs and what role. Of who we expect to see in the position of a leader. Of who we expect to see in the position of a founding father or a judge. There isn't one answer though. I think, take for example, Ocean's Eight, the recent Hollywood movie. Lovely ladies playing roles that were traditionally written more lovely men. But the New York Times wrote about these many reboots that happened in the last six months. These reboots require women to relive their stories instead of bashing their own. And they're subtly expected to fix these old millers. To neutralize their sexism and abuse them with feminism. To rebuild them into good movies with good politics too. They have to do everything they can to accept backward and what's ideal. That we should suddenly cast everybody as a woman or a person of color. But I am saying that these strategic mis-passings offer us opportunities to rethink our categories. And I would definitely say that we're seeing a tremendous amount of this kind of casting. So in the last year, I saw Lear, I saw Sean McCann as Lear and this is Jim Maison as Gloucester and the ground inspiration in Toronto. Michelle Terry was hamlet on Shakespeare's low stage in March of this coming year. Linda Jackson will be returning as Lear, Broadway. So do these just offer more parts for women or are they doing something truly creative? It does call attention to our protocols of reception. But the idea that these are gender-blind is patently ridiculous. Gender is more visible, not less. And that's true with smart casting of different races or bodies. Counter-passing advice is the question of these protocols, and also our interpretation. It asks us to start rethinking about what counts as a word, what counts as a man, what counts as a citizen. But just because these are women in commitment or it's not changing the history and reality of the bodies under the postures. As August Wilson said about color-blind casting over 20 years ago, the cast that's in the role of mimics is to deny our own context. It's not, counter-passing isn't gender-blind or race-blind, it's gender and race-attemptive and it changes our protocols and invites us to shift and expand our power of words. So another great example, recently obviously, was Melissa McCarthy as John Spicer. And I think one of the reasons that made this such an evocative example was that her, I have to argue, that her female body underneath there was part of what made it particularly insensitive to the Trump administration. Well, we're seeing a lot of this. We're seeing a lot of performances where we have gender and casting being used as a creative force in contemporary performance. So Target Martin, in their production of Pain of Attention to the Girl, they use different races and genders to do a lot of their parts. But what I was struck by actually was this moment at the very beginning of the play where one of the actresses, Caitlin, I believe, starts the play by saying, hi, I'm David Christowitz, the director, and I'd like you to turn on your phones and invite you. And it's not a comment upon, but what it does is it makes you realize that it reminds you of a visit's play and she's taking on this part and I'm pretty sure she's gonna take on another part and then uses this momentary confusion around, well, I know she's not David or sort of the director, but it forces you to look at those assumptions and then make you realize that in a theater, you get to decide to be whoever you want. Another example of this company is actually here is Sisters of Xers in the Fall. And in this production, they actually cast a chicken as a famous director and the chicken is live on stage and they're talking to it, the chicken is going around. And obviously there are tremendous number of things about the production that I thought was really exciting, but, and this obviously had a lot of people on stage who were hilarious, but it wasn't that about that, it wasn't about the creative force of deciding that in this particular moment, the chicken is then played as a director. And then recently, force entertainment productions that completely work tell the story of all Shakespeare's plays and they ask, they use household objects. So I believe, I'm not exactly remembering exactly what this is, but so the catch up will be Rosalind and the Lindsay's Oil is Orlando and they tell us where and they move them around. But again, it's amazing how powerful these stories are and we're very able to go with it. But I'm thinking of a staging commission. These ways in which through being in an audience, theater is helping us to look at our own assumptions about what it means to take what thinking is that it looks like and our own assumptions about how emotion works, how the body works and how, and how, how publishing works. What is a theater that I've been sitting in a dark room and watching after it's a tend to be characters acting up a story as if the audience isn't there. And I realize, I'm not talking to a very audience because anyone here right now is not at all so I think that kind of theater productions are far more, I'm sure, sophisticated, but you do probably know what I'm talking about. The idea of theater, generally in America, still is that I'm gonna pretend there's a behind, I'm gonna pretend that the actors are really a narrow ball and they're gonna pretend that I'm not there. And I'm gonna pretend that when the woman walks on stage hearing the groceries that she just came in with groceries and not for backstage. And then when they start arguing, I'm not gonna get up and try to stop the fight. We have this idea of willingly suspending and pretending that it's all happening and then there's gonna be a secret and there's gonna be a motion stored inside and then there are gonna come out on some of the big explosion and we're all gonna feel like something different happened. You know that the logo makes the light look like a tree on the floor and not that it's actually a tree. But we expect to stay quiet and read the story being acted out and to find the meaning, to figure out what is the symptom of these characters. Naturalism and realism responded to the first shattering ideas of Darwin, Mark, Freud and Kant, figures that detached the human from God, put them in a relationship to family, environment, money and sexual desire and insisted it could be studied. So the theater that came out of this incredible intellectual movement in the 19th century was about staging these ideas in the last struggle of inherited traits of repressed sexual desires and of a society that has influence on each other and influence from the company environment. This defined theater for more than a hundred years because it's our main desire or the cherry or the long days turning into night characters with internal psychologies controlled by their genes, their drives and their socioeconomic status. We watched them and yes, I too have an insight, deep feelings and memories of a puppy until I turned them dramatically and I'm quite sure it's all my parents' fault. Our theater stages this Freudian self and this Cartesian mind where I think with my brain and there are deep feelings going on and down there that I don't want to deal with but that's what we thought was going on with the human when this was the dominant scientific carry on. And the spectators were engaged in the environment of theatrical experience, not asked to make meaning, in fact, generally frustrated in an attempt to make meaning, but given opportunities to enact an experience. They were engaging with this strange experience, this moment in the theater were charged to find new ways of picking up of exploring the ideas involved. This is the kind of theater I'm seeing now. Theater that stages an embodied, embedded and extended cognition. Okay, what the heck does that mean? So there's a sort of relatively new set of theories in cognitive science and philosophy that's called four e-cognitions. And I'm sure that if we, you know, we talk to somebody in the United States and there's a fit pee that I hate when people start talking about that. But what this basically means is that, and there's a spectrum. The body cognition means that we think with and through the body that we have that cognition isn't separable from the body. And this can be anything from, well, obviously what I'm thinking about has to do with how much food I've had that day or how much blood sleep I've had to recognizing that there are certain things that I think only because of the body that I'm in. Embedded cognition depends heavily on offloading cognitive work from taking advantage of ordinances or potentials in the environment. So this might be, for example, how the way you think in your office space is different than a certain amount of tasks that you need to do. You sort of set it into the environment. Embedded cognition argues that actually we think that the thinking extends beyond this fall, beyond, I think you could say this, in a moment, into the environment. That it extends past the boundaries of the individual organism encompassing aspects of the social, interpersonal environment. So we think with and through the environment we're in. Embedded cognition means that it's inseparable from action. The thinking is actually what happens when we walk across the stage without falling or without getting lost when we sit down with it to look by adequately, figuring out where we need to, when, how to lower our body. And that thinking is not something that is represented, it is a process that we take in the body. This is a picture of a prop table, which I love, this is an obvious, clear example of thinking with and through our environment, that by setting up the process way, you can more quickly get back on stage, you don't really think about what you need, you know where you go to the table. Now there's a, this prop table can be seen as an example of epistemic action, which by us, an action that we take to actually literally change the way our thinking works. What I'm talking about in terms of theater is that I believe that theater is providing an experience for the naval spectators to shift their conception of thinking. There's a philosopher named Almanoe and he has this idea of caliber, which I really love. And he says, don't think of a concept as a label, you can slap on a thing, think of it as a pair of calibers with which you pick what they thought. That there's a difference between seeing something and thinking about it is because of differences in our calibers. So this to me suggests a tremendous value to thinking about our calibers, because if you don't have the right calibers in certain situations, you will be able to pick up. And this is true of categories as well, just some of the blended, I mean some of the characters. So I want to talk about the theatrical experience that would fall into this idea of a new kind of theatrical experience. And there are many I could talk about, but there's one that I experienced environment responsive or site responsive performance in London and I went to London in 2012, I was jet lagged, three big speaks production of the rest of silence is a sort of adaptation of Henry. And when you arrive, you're told that you won't be able to leave the room, so you need to go to the bathroom and then go to the bathroom. And then you're shoved into essentially this sort of warehouse space. Maybe about the size of this room and the walls, it's all dark and empty and the walls have two large black windows on them that are darkened. The audience, the room fills as the audience comes in and everyone is sort of walking around. When the lights go down, I notice people start to get a little nervous and I'm nervous too. I've never been in a large room like that in the pitch black with a whole lot of strangers and it occurs to me that usually I'm safe in my seat and so I know that the usual contract whereby I'm not gonna do anything weird and no one else is gonna do anything weird but if they do, at least not on my little seat and I'm safe, it's suddenly broken and I know that I will free to walk around as everyone else. But then the lights change and these spaces open up and they happen in all four sides and various scenes from when Amelie happened all around us. The first scene, Claudia breaks up out of bed and he goes into a little room next to him is better and he's practicing his speech, the coronation speech and he can't get too much too far through it before he gets incarcerated and starts again. Throughout the play, this is what we're seeing. We're seeing characters are first. We're seeing characters set up for scenes that they're about to take to do. And then when he washes his face in the sink, we actually see the perspective we see through the water through a screen on the ceiling. So our perspective shifts over and over again as we're walking on his room making a choice as to which characters to follow, which things to pull apart. It requires us to know the play and it requires us to some degree and it requires us to shift our perspective over and over again because we're physically moving through the space. But by being made aware of our watching of the choices we're making to consume this production, I think we're being staged in relation to the action. We're invited to move and we're taught to see. Fulfill your practices, which is going to say to him about those remembrances with kids or Rosenpenzen-Gilson's practice that sounds unbelievably casual to Hammond in order to make sense of this. We have to call our knowledge of the narrative and we, and well as our understanding of a personal pretense. Throughout the play, the audiences give us perspectives that highlight our perspective and call attention to the perspectives that work in the play. Our bodies stage this as well as we must move to change our perspectives. The audience moves and flows from wall to wall, conducting its own way through the play, moving it through each other, spreading out and closing in, ebbing and flowing like a murmur of Star Wars. We're not going to have to get out of the way of that tall guy. I'm involved and engaged in the perspective from which I watch this performance. This kind of theater does not ask spectators to diagnose internal, emotional, thoracic psychological problems. At most, as most 20th century theater artists, it's not teaching us something like a moral or attempting to evoke emotions like a medieval morality play or a murmur of it. It gives us something to do and frustrates our desire to find meaning. We are rewarded for engaging and trust and pretend, sorry, we're patiently awaited in the opening up of presence. We know the narrative from how English is a speak camera and that her narrative must be relied on to make sense of the fragments of this camera that does not have to be on a scrap scene and I'm struck by how the repeated reversal, the obvious informativity and the centrality of our shifting perspective means that the whole thing feels like its own manuscript. Catching our conscience as we add and flow around the room. So I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thing. Robert, I'm sorry, Richard Maxwell's work often has a completely different idea of how emotion works and the characters and their presumed emotions are separated, distended. So we're constantly being asked if we're feeling what the characters are feeling or are we feeling something totally different. Another production of Kamlet actually invited the audience to be part of the casting of Kamlet. The first part of the play involved three potential Kamlet sort of auditioning for it and then the audience had to go on stage and choose their Kamlet. So this idea of unstability, the instability of the character or the instability of knowledge was made part of the performance. Thank you. It's hard to know what makes sense or what any of you have experienced about in terms of the actual productions or where you are at all. I've talked to a lot, I've often talked to groups of either theater people or cognitive scientists and I kind of know where they are and I generally know how I'm going to fail. And in this audience, I have no idea how I failed. So I'm curious to hear if you have questions or thoughts. Yeah. I thought you started off with a conversation which tells a lot of the formal reason because that would be sort of saying you don't need to go over it because you're moving on by the way you move. So I thought you were going to go over it. Oh, yes, I have a secret. Well, first of all, can you repeat the question? Yes, yes, she was saying that I sort of promised to explain what moves people in the audience. And what I'll say is that partially I'm being coyed around the idea that we're being moved physically and we're being moved to read things out of our minds. In terms of what I think move people, I do actually believe that we find it incredibly satisfying to be challenged to think new thoughts, to make new sense of things, to be frustrated, to be asked to challenge our assumptions about our data. I no longer feel moved about stories of men tragically unable to fulfill their life dreams or being mad at their mothers or, I mean, I don't really care about individuals anymore. I want places that are interested in how we operate as a network of beings. But I do, when I watch these things that move me, where it's clearly not about the individual but about the social system coming together in all the ways. Not everyone, a lot of people are still moved by individual stories. But my interest is in the way in which particularly awkward theater is finding new ways. And it's not gonna be, you know, you're still gonna go to the Broadway or our films or the tragic divorce story of a baby that's been buried in the backyard for generations or whatever and that's gonna be moving. But I do think that theater artists are more and more dispersing what they're looking at as a central character to care about. It's dispersing where emotion lies, what a host emotion. So something like Richard Maxwell play, no one's feeling the right emotion to what they're talking about. But, and so you can't possibly feel emotions for a particular character. They're sort of prostrating a certain amount of empathy which you can feel, you end up feeling tremendous amount for the situation for the story they're telling. But again, I think I'm not saying anything like that. I think we've saved strategic power from casting the base we think. The theater's reflecting in large part what's happening in the outside world today because everything that was sort of set in form, this does, he does this, she does that. Now it's all blurred, you can see this from recent two weeks. So the strategic in this casting, you maybe look at the new theater, some of which I've seen and which I have to grasp, understand. Maybe a better context for it. So, thank you. Yeah, I think that, I do think that there are plenty of examples of casting where it's not necessarily strategic as casting. So for example, and I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but there, and the Berman or Hamlet that's around on, obviously a play about an odd casting choice, not Burr, not the first but not the last of the time that a woman played Hamlet. But one of the women in the play is her Achillea as a black woman. And that's not about the comments at all. I don't think there's anything there about it. But what's beautiful is it's this kind of undertone of another sort of counter-casting that's happening. It's not asking us to interpret differently or to think differently about that character. It's just simply quietly having this presence of an expanded sense of who belongs. Even though it's not, we don't, that character isn't being commented on or challenged. But I do think that, and the reason why I find it that the idea of casting is because I do think that it's important because of what's going on. I do think it actually does matter that if we think about casting as something that we're actively doing and these categories we're making are alive and changeable, then we can look at them and we can say, well, why is it that we decided this person is presidential and this person isn't? What makes it that, you know, I assume that a man wants to throw a little bit of white coat, I've already decided he's my doctor. And there are a lot of ways where I see people who are playing with counter-casting, playing with performing a role that I'll belong in, in order to start my system. I do think there's a potential there. Please forgive me because I didn't comment at the beginning, I was said another event. So if you already dealt with this, then never mind. But if I hear you correctly, I'm listening to what you're saying and the only way I can agree with you is to change the words that you're using. And I think when you're talking about looking at counter-casting, I personally, cutting reports of business, look at it as counter-casting, I look at it as not labeling with assumptions. I'm gonna cast somebody, for me, it's what does this character represent? What is he dealing with? What is his emotional, what's on the edge of him visually? That's not about making assumptions that go skin color, hair color, gender, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not the same as counter-casting, which I hear and say I made those assumptions and then I'm going against them. To me, that's just as incorrect as the first way. I think what is the character about? What is his psychological dealing? What emotions are at the core? It's the opposite of thinking. It's all about feeling. And how does the feeling express itself in action? Now, how does the action decide that the audience is thinking about what's surrounding it? For me, the emotional truth is what's the most important. So I apologize if I'm completely misunderstood what you're saying, but I'm listening here and listening to, I guess, the last 20 or 30 minutes and thinking I don't see it that way, but maybe I'm misunderstood you, so how do you respond to that? No, that's great. But first of all, are you a casting director? Hi. Do you do casting? I've worked at the film business for a very long time. I did some theater. I'm essentially, well, my time I was two years old and I would choose multiple techniques. I'm a dancer, so I go, even though I was a, the intervention was a lot of writers in direction and directed action, blah, blah, blah. I'm a good writer too. What am I feeling? What are you giving off in that space where actors do what the writer can and the writer should move in and out because it's not the actor who's directing the audience. Still got it. Got it. Okay, well, so first of all, I think you're right about that sort of challenge of the idea of counter because I'm not looking at it from the perspective of making the choice. I'm looking at it from the perspective of looking at a choice that, looking at a choice that's already been made and saying that it is strategically miscasting. I mean, I sort of mean those in quotes. So for example, Lin-Manuel Brandeis is an example from Hamilton, because it's not that he, it's not that he fits or doesn't fit. It's not that he's countered to our expectation. It's that through this casting choice, other things that will win over us. So it's not about, it's not about fine, it's not about, you know, it's not about being countered to gender, countered to race. It's about countering the narrative about identity through casting, basically. So by casting something in a different way and by calling our attention to that way in which it fits and doesn't fit simultaneously, we're able to imagine new possibilities about who we are. And it's not generally race and gender is the most visible, celebrity is the most visible, but it's not just that, because it's also about how we operate in our everyday lives. The other thing I would just say is that I don't think there's any difference between thinking and feeling. I think that I don't think it's possible to think without feeling. I think that that's an idea that sort of comes from Descartes, but it's also dangerously sort of gendered. And obviously in the theater, we all talk about sort of getting out of our heads and using our feelings. I just don't, I don't think that that separation is possible. So if I agree with you, it's just a question of strategizing. Thank you so much.