 the agent to focus on that thing and so many other things they do often with new work. So that's one reason it's going to be published. I guess the other thing is though that the reading copies exist so that on amazon.com you could look up a play of mine or play by Sony Austin, you could get the Samuel French version which is cheaper than if you are letting up to a full published regular paperback. You can get the acting edition to read it and I know with my royalties I will sometimes see oh this is just for reading. This is what people pay to buy the Samuel French version. And then copyright is a confusing thing. I remember when I started out I always thought that you had to register your cop play with a copyright and then I was later told no once you've written it it's considered copyrighted automatically and that when the play is published anyway the publisher will do the copyright for you in your name. Since you brought Neil Simon, this collection is his second play. I think it's titled The Playwright is Schizophrenic where he talks about the characters in this play that actually make a whole person. In comedy the best comedy characters make parts of individuals. Was that the title of the grouping of his plays or did he write an essay? The introduction. Oh I see. Well you know in truth I don't think I feel that way but I wonder if he feels that he put different sections of his own personality and his characters maybe which it might be because I'm sort of aware that for instance in my early days I wrote an awful lot of absurdist plays and I thought they were just coming from my brain because you know Edith Fromage said she invented cheese and crazy things like that. But as I grew older and also started to write slightly more realistically I realized that I was writing about my family origin even though the characters were crazy because Edith Fromage for instance is very dominating and she's telling Jane that what Jane sees isn't true which is making Jane go crazy. And that kind of thing happened in my most family in my opinion. But it was all unconscious so I feel like and then another thing that I often have and I wonder if I should at least conscious of changes once or twice but oftentimes the voice of reason in some of my plays is a woman and like a prudence in Beyond Therapy or Felicity and why torture is wrong and other people who love them. And my mother had a number of sides to her. She had great wonderful sense of humor. She was sometimes terribly stubborn but in her family she was the truth teller and they didn't like her for being a truth teller and she would say did you just have a vodka which they didn't want to be asked and so she wasn't very diplomatic but she actually gave me once I got it Wendy was wonderful getting jobs and I needed a summer job and one of them she got me was to index a book on schizophrenia and I learned the word reality testing which I hadn't known but it means that growing up you want to know what's real and what's true and my mother really gave me a good reality testing with her family because the fighting was upsetting on the other hand I knew that people weren't in agreement and sometimes you had to sort of think well you know who's right so anyway that's sort of an eccentric answer to your question I'm sorry, you're not excited? You know I tried to be more diplomatic because I had to live there and so when my mother would argue with my father when he was drinking my father is nice especially as I grew older I saw his nice but they did fight and he didn't drink but she would fight with him when he was drunk and I would just say to her over and over and start recording with Dan or you know don't wait until the morning don't yell at him when he's drunk and she would agree and then disobey but you know in my head I took sides because I basically said that my mother was a truth teller so I did at some point go you know she's right about these things she said A question, a lot of your shorter plays have very kid-friendly vocabulary and it's easy and it can be read in the classroom then other plays obviously you can't even open it it's a totally censored one talking hearty boys and you know that one and so forth how do you, what's your inspiration for that like how do you decide okay today I'm in a right play that has no backwards whatsoever this one's going to have everything but you know you know I didn't make a decision I think that some of my earlier plays were shocking the one I got into Yale with was called The Nature and Purpose of the Universe and it was very dark and violent but I think funny and then my play Titanic which I wrote the time I was at Yale is really my craziest play and it's very risqué and crazy and however then other times like when Actors Nightmare was written which is done in high schools a lot and actually I love it when high school teachers tell me that they teach it because there are parodies of Noel Coward and Shakespeare and Beckett and I think well what a fun way to get into teaching other and I love all those writers but when Sister Mary was done as a one act and it ran for three weeks and got great reviews and so on then we had some people trying to raise money for our Broadway but they just couldn't manage to they were yelling and starting out and so then my agent was good friends with Andre Bishop who was running Playwrights Horizons and she said to Andre would you ever do Sister Mary again and he said yes but I feel it needs a curtain raiser Sister Mary is about an hour and ten minutes and he felt that was too short the place is about the shorter in recent years but in any case I actually tried three different plays and Actors Nightmare was the third the first one I tried Entity Crisis which already existed but to have Sister the Actors playing Sister do eat a fromage that was too strong women and it was redundant somehow and then the next one was the first act of baby with the bathwater which was originally a one act and it ends with them shaking a toy a poison toy at the baby they're not aware it's poison but everything about this baby's upper knee is terrible and my friend Walter Boddy who was an actor at the time was now a very good director said to me that's not a curtain raiser that's a curtain downer so I was on vacation once and I just a strange thing I had a nightmare it wasn't even an Actors Nightmare but I thought to myself oh wow I was just thinking about all this time I've dreamt that I'm in a play and I haven't been rehearsal and I don't know why and you're on stage and you have to make it up or something and I've had that dream many times so I decided that might be a good idea to write a play and I wrote it on vacation and it meant that the private lives and the becket stuff were all in my head because actually much of the lines were correctly in my head and not the becket so much as it may the Shakespeare I had a leap of blank till I got home but so it wasn't really a decision it was just that because of the plays that they were in there wasn't any out there sexual stuff or something I've been a little surprised at some of the plays of mine that high schools do I can't think of what the examples are offhand but they use some of the more certainly the heart boys it's often done and by the way it's sort of slightly naughty but not super naughty anyway so it's not a choice it's just sometimes and you know I'm probably a little more aware right now that I'm older than I was when I was in my 20s too about being careful when to oh I know the one that's surprising they must do an high school Naomi Naomi in the living room she has the most out there she's always talking in inappropriately bad words As someone who obviously has had a long career and is still going on I'm curious as to what you you know how you've seen I guess theater evolve in your career and I guess where you see theater now as far as how it fought this is crazy general and I don't mean it to be but I don't know how to make it specific but like you know how you see it I guess how you see its purpose and do you feel it's a positive theater is in a positive place because everybody's always saying what's dying it's dying I've been saying that for years and as someone who's really been involved for so many years where do you see it functioning you know in our culture in our society and if it's positive you think still The short answer is I think it's still positive I think financially it's very difficult right now but for everybody and for the people running theaters I feel like I feel two things about the question is that I feel like even when I was in high school there would be articles in the New York Times is theater dead so they just ask it so many times and it doesn't seem to be gone and then again I want to refer back to your you know when you were just saying if you've been moved by something in a special way that actually does have to do with the exchange between the woman actors and the words of the play and you being there and it really does vary sometimes I mean as an actor I know it sometimes varies for performance there's some performances that are oddly magical and then others you can't force it but I saw Sherry Orchard is one of the few check off plays I've not seen much I've seen many of the others repeated times and so there was a recent production at CSC that Diane Weist was I looked at it too anyway I went to see I had rented two two BBC versions from Netflix there were stage things and Judy Tench was in both she was the lead in when she was over and she was the young daughter in Peggy Ashcroft was the lead and they were good but I don't know they were a little musty the only one who wasn't musty was John dealwood is the brother he was fabulous but the other people I don't know but so I went really never having seen a live production well you know how tricky it is to make check off funny and in the two BBC versions when they come in and Madame Ria Skye is not paying paying her bills is not paying attention it wasn't funny in the BBC ones and when Diane Weist came in she just looked at the bill and she threw it on the ground in this way that was funny but at the same time I don't know and the brother was not facing things in ways that were funny and I just felt very I felt very entranced by this particular production or then to jump back to the following you and maybe somebody else about when I saw Cloud 9 in off-Broadway in the 80s and it had a play production by Tommy Tune and I really enjoyed it and Act 2 the ending was so unexpectedly moving I just was so taken by that I saw it five times not close together half or something in the first three times Catherine Kerr who I want to know before had the final speech that was so moving and then later I befriended her and she was in my play laughing while so I feel that like 25 years ago I decided that theatre wasn't going to die it might get small but I just think there's something about the live experience that actually is good now you can go live experience and be bored and so that's not good you know, like making a meal that's not so that you can't always control it I think it'll go on Thank you very much you've been generously shared with us all day Thank you Thank you Bo Holly Carl and Christopher Durant so much and all of the presenters who moderated and presented