 Hi everyone, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the American Society for Theater Research's Arts in Conversations. Conversations? Oh, with Christina Anderson, Martina Mayok, and Lauren Yee. Round of applause again, please. And this session is being a live stream by Hallround. So there's a camera in the back right there. So for those who are tuning in via Hallround, we're happy to have you in this space. Like, hello, hello. My name is Harvey Young and I have the pleasure of serving as the moderator for this conversation. And I wanna actually take a moment to acknowledge Northwest University, specifically the interdisciplinary PhD program in theater and drama and performance studies for being a sponsor for this conversation. And so the structure for this is we have about an hour for a conversation. I'm thinking that what we'll do is we'll talk up here for about 35, 40 minutes and just open it up for a conversation with people who are here. So that's what we're gonna do. So if you have questions, start thinking about them. What I will also do is to reserve time for that conversation. I will offer quite brief bios of our distinguished guests here. And I want you to be aware of the fact that these three amazing artists, playwrights, authors, they have been nominated for or won every single major award you can get in the American theater. Right? So, so this is my way of saying the bios will be quite brief and I had to edit it down because we could be here for an hour or just talking about each of them. So, but to my left, and please hold your applause until I've introduced everyone. To my left we're seeing the Anderson is a 2022 Tony Award nominee for Outstanding Book for the Musical Paradise Square. She's a playwright, a TV writer, a screenwriter, an educator and a creative. Her plays, there's many of them such as How to Catch Creation, Black Top Sky and the Ripple, The Wave, That Carried Me Home, have been produced by many theaters such as the Goodman Theater, Berkeley Rep, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Kansas City Rep, Yale Rep, among many, many others. Her recent awards, just the recent awards in honors includes the 2022 Horton Foot Prize, the 2022 Arthur Miller Legacy Award, the 2021 Prince Prize, as well as in the arsenal of awards you have, the Lily Awards, the Lily Awards Harper Lee Prize. Christine, I'm so glad you're here. Martina, very next here. Martina was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, The Cost of Living, which was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play as well. Her other plays include Sanctuary City, Queens and Ironbound, which have been produced widely and across the country internationally. Her other awards, in a long list of awards include the Arthur Miller Legacy Award, the Obi Award for Playwriting, the Whole Warner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding New Play, there's so many more. Gatsby, which is a new musical for which Martina wrote The Libretto will premiere this spring at American Repertory Theater. I called them up for tickets and they're like, wait. They're not in sale yet. She has developed TV projects for HBO and is writing feature films for Plan B, among other studios. And Lauren is a playwright, a screenwriter and a TV writer just in 2019, 2020, which was the before times of COVID, right? She was, according to American Theater, the second most produced playwright in this country. And if you look and you follow beyond the reopening, she has been on that list of most produced playwrights consistently since then. Her play, Cambodian Rock Band, premiered at South Coast Rep with productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Victory Garden, signature theater. Her play, The Great Leap, I'm only giving the two of many plays. It has been performed at the Denver Center, Seattle Rep, Lanix Theater, Guthrie Theater, American Conservatory Theater, Steppenwolf, Pasadena Playhouse, East West Players and more. She's the winner of the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Seinberg Playwright Award, the Horton Foot Prize, among many, many other awards. And her plays were the number one and number two plays on the 2017 Kill Royce List. So please join me to have massive round of applause. We had dinner just recently. And one question I asked was like, where do you keep all of your awards? I mean, it's like, it is truly staggering. But my first question I have is, so in 2020, we witnessed the rise of We See You, White American Theater, and the demands to confront the racism and prejudice that exists within American theater. And now three years later, right, you're seeing sort of a backlash of bands, a rollback of those 2020 commitments across different theaters. So, not only talking about We See You, but just more generally, so what is your perspective and your vantage point on the state of professional theater today in the United States? That's a softball question. Yeah. Yeah. We had a lot of conversations at dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was amazing. We did. What are your thoughts about theater? Thank you. Thank you. What do you see in the landscape in terms of what's happening right now? How do you feel about where we're going? I'm just really that the theater's still open. I don't mean to be such a like a thing, but we're talking about how so many people will be like, theater's dead, it's dead, it's no more. And we're like, no, it's still alive. It's still going. We're still thriving to some degree. I'm not a producer, so I'm not the gatekeeper. All I can keep doing is making the things that I believe in and hoping that people will find value in them. And my job is to make them as generous and inviting, inclusive and interesting as I possibly can. But ultimately it's not up to, I don't have the keys. So I think it's, we can create the things and then also be, speak to why they matter and why people should cast them and produce them in the ways that they do. But yeah, I don't have any producerial advice because I don't have that many. So we are looking at the landscape of regional theaters across the country, right? How do things feel today, relative to how they felt in 2019, for example? Like what do you see that has changed, has shifted, what remains the same? I mean, just to kick it off, I'm sure there's more. But I think there's a, I have a greater awareness of a lot of things down to the little minutia of what contract your actors are on or kind of like how much are people making in these roles? And I think there's just like, at least I have a greater awareness of, I think the privilege we have like as playwrights to be able to kind of push for change. And I think also being able to like, that it's in a way not our job, but also part of our job to take care of the people that are part of our projects and like our community. And I would say that was something that would not even have occurred to me kind of pre-COVID. What do you see? Yeah, you know, I would say probably pre, we see you, I experienced a great deal of hostility because of the things that I was writing. You know, I was centering black stories, I was centering black women and you know, I'd get a lot of hostility about like no one's gonna understand this or you know, our audience or subscribers aren't gonna get this, you should change this, what does this word mean? You know, and oddly enough, or I don't even know if it's oddly, we see you happen, COVID happened and all of a sudden everybody, not everybody, but a lot more people understood what I was trying to say for the past 15 years. All of a sudden it was like, oh, like let's produce this. It was never a discussion or a question or a debate in the lit office. All of a sudden my agents were getting calls that they wanna program this. You know, I got a lot of pushback about things that weren't true anymore in a lot of my plays, but after we see you and after COVID and after George Floyd, a lot of things that they considered invisible or old were all of a sudden relevant. So that was probably like my personal biggest experience that I experienced. And then also I was trusted more as a dramatist, which I guess, and I only bring these up because I wasn't entirely sure that that was happening pre these things because it was, I would get talked out of a lot of things or talked down from a lot of things. And so, but I always felt like it was happening, but I couldn't pinpoint it. And so after COVID and we see you and it was a collective vocal noise about the mistreatment or looking the other way. Now all of a sudden everybody can see my work. And I don't mean, I don't say that to discount, like the countless people who have been very supportive of me for many, many years. They buoyed me in a lot of ways and I'm still great for them. And I often talk about them, but for me personally in my work and the things that I'm trying to do on the American stage, like that was probably the biggest thing that I noticed. And all of you write for television and I've written for television and film and development of writing projects. And of course, the writer's guild strike, just settled and looks like the SAG contract was approved by the board by 86% of the board. Sort of what is, so Lauren, we were talking about this earlier today, but if you could offer some insights in terms of the work you're doing right now, what is it like, how do you build a writer's room, can you share a bit of information and sort of storytelling here about your work related to television? Yeah, I mean, I will say to me the biggest difference between what I do in theater and what I do in TV, I mean, one, it's the ownership, right? Like in theater, it is your thing, you get to do hopefully whatever you want to do with it and if nobody wants to make it, that's totally fine. And in TV, you may be the creator, you may be developing it, but in general, someone else owns it and you have become an employee on your own story and so just the expectations and the process becomes much different. You get on this kind of like timeline that they've decided is the process. And I think it's interesting because there was a point where I realized the notes process as I understood it in theater where you work with a drama trigger. Sometimes you even work with the artistic director and they'll have like notes for you. It's very different than the notes process between you as a TV and film person, you know, you and your executives. Like there was a point where you realized you're like, oh, these notes aren't thoughts, they're instructions. I was like, they're instructions and it's your job to figure out how you're gonna implement their instructions or try to get around their instructions. So it's just like an interesting different contrast but I think one of the things that I've gotten to in, like I was kind of afraid of but have also enjoyed working in TV is that in TV, and Harvey and I were discussing this, like in a way it's you're becoming, you're a writer but you're also expected to be a manager where you're getting into rules of leadership and you have to think about things like the budget or the hiring process or a lot of things that I didn't have to take responsibility for as much in theater. And so, you know, it's just like an interesting thing to be like the leader of kind of a corporation or a community and having more responsibility in deciding like what is your work culture? Who are you hiring? You know, like just like as I've gone on in my career as a playwright, I've realized just how much more privilege I have to kind of change things. And that responsibly I think just continues into the TV work where, you know, you basically are just becoming an employer and a supervisor for many, many people. And also, you know, all of you have worked in musicals and created musicals, right? You know, so Paradise Square, you're doing a wrinkle in time right now when you're working on Gatsby. Can you talk about your process in terms of, you know, how you approach sort of developing a book or a musical differently than when you're drama? It sounds like a mix somewhere in between television and playwriting musicals where there's like, you are also getting no instructions, but they're a little, because they can't legally change a word of what you write in the theater, you're like, oh, this is a suggestion now, whereas like they will own your soul in television and film and it can change whole things without your permission, which is what you sign up for, for delicious, delicious health insurance. But I have two things on the music. I started working on Gatsby during the pandemic and I found it really difficult to create original work during that time because I was still very much in it. And so for the past few years, I've been doing adaptations and that has been a lovely way for me to talk about now without having to pull from things that might be more autobiographical. I feel like I have a co-writer in The Ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald with me to sort of respond to and that's helped me be more creative within very specific limitations and I've actually really loved that. It's also wonderfully less lonely. I hate writing so much, I hate it. It's, I don't like sitting for too long, like being in a room by myself and minding my own demons to orchestrate them into an arc for other people. That's legible and generous. It feels like agony. But I do it to be in the rehearsal room and to collaborate with other people and so making a musical, there'll be somebody else in the agony with me and they're the composer and the lyricist and so it's nice to have somebody in that creative muck and beauty earlier on. Whether it's The Ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Florence Welch, that there's somebody collaborating with you just feels less lonely and I really enjoyed that process. Yeah, musicals are fun and people actually want to see them, which is nice. And Christina, what about you? What is your thought in terms of the reach and the impact of the musical as a form? Yeah, well, I think I had a bit of a unique experience because I was brought on to work on a book of a musical and then the pandemic hit and then it was lifted and all of a sudden they were like, we have a rehearsal room in Chicago, we're going into rehearsal. And this was at a time where I wasn't even sure the theater was gonna come back because we had just experienced the pandemic and the world shut down and there was still a lot of fear and Paradise Square was a huge musical. We had a lot of people in it and I cannot describe you the feeling of sitting in that first rehearsal with the dance number and the actors and the performers all in masks and the rehearsal room wasn't that big and there was something, I don't even have the adjectives for it, but to be in a space where you didn't know if we were gonna come back and what coming back was going to look and feel like and then to see, to sit in a room with all these super talented people, I felt like it was fame. Like everybody knew how to dance, everybody knew how to sing and they were in front of me like practicing this choreography and then I was like, oh, this is like a unique experience. No one else, or I imagine at least no one else who's alive right now has experienced the pandemic and then experienced theater coming back in a certain capacity. And so that probably was the most like awakening moment about how important and necessary live performance is and how much skill and talent and right now, I believe even more so bravery it takes to get up there every night into people who are running the house and dealing with people who have been in lockdown and it's just a lot of bravery and compassion that's unprecedented in us coming back and I think that was the biggest surprise for me in working on the musical. And Lauren, what approach are you taking? Say that again? What approach are you taking with a wrinkle in time? I think there's something so great and impossible about like the book wrinkle in time that I think was like a fun challenge. Like I think to me, in a way the musical that I wouldn't know how to write is like the movie where everything's kind of plotted out already for you. Cause I would be like, why are we doing it? Or like, why does there need to be a musical when there's already a movie that like does it so well? And I think, you know, like wrinkle in time did have a movie version recently and there were just like some things about it that I was like, oh, I see how you could put that on stage and possibly just like tell that metaphor in a way that might hit differently. And so I think it was like a really cool fun challenge. And I think just doing it with our composer, Heather Christian, has been like such a gift because there's something in her music that already makes you feel like you're traveling through like it's hurtling through space and time. And so all I have to do is help us get to those places and set up those songs. There's something just like incredibly satisfying in like how economical it is. And I mean this in a very genuinely positive way that it almost feels like a math problem. Sometimes when you're like the book writer that you're not supposed to be the fireworks and there's something kind of nice in allowing a collaborator to like be and the music to be the fireworks and just being like, okay, my job is to figure out which themes we're covering in our story, how we get from point A to point B, how to do it fast, how to get us in in like two and a half hours and it just feels like different muscles at the gym. I don't either of you are musicians, I am not. And so like it is the coolest fucking thing to make music and it's the most proximal to coolness I can ever get. Like when these people come in and they are levitating these dancers off of the fucking floor and singing while they do it, with full face of makeup, I'm just like, this is amazing. Like look at what the human body can do. And it's so thrilling. It feels like being a child of like, oh my God, wow. This is so great. And you're like, right, this is like the pure joy of being in a room with people who are like gifting you the fullness of their humanity for a generous story to like take part in in the evening. It's like so pure. Yeah, and then also when you're watching orchestration and then you go from someone just playing a piano to having the whole orchestra come in and then what's the word for when they just play this? Yes, I had no idea what was happening. And so I go down in the room and it's like a rock concert and like the actor's like, you better go girl. And then I'm screwed because I love cellos. I studied it for years. Like I'm a, yeah, I love cellos and there was a black girl who was playing a cello and I was like, go girl, go. You know, and like it's just like, because yeah, because you know, after working on play so long and it's a lot of like, you know, doing this word and feeling this moment and doing this blocking and all of a sudden you just got a bass player who's in front of you like playing a shit out of a line. And you're just like, oh wow. I mean it is really unbelievable. That's awesome. Yeah. That was pretty good. So this room, the American Society for Theater Research, like everyone who's sitting here, they're forces. You know, it's educators, it's scholars, it's critics, it's theorists, it's people who are historians who write about theater, who write about performance in everyday life. They're educators who teach the next generation of artists as critics and also as theater makers as well. So this is a force in this room. This is a force in this room. And what I want to ask you is when you're thinking about not the world of journalism and critics, right? Like that's a, I have many friends who are critics. I adore them too. You know, but you know, my question is when you think about your body of work and the way that people engage your work in terms of writing and teaching and sharing, are there sort of plays of yours that you wish maybe the spotlight could shift toward? You know, as a way of offering a different perspective on your work, you know, are there misconceptions? You've noticed that people might have about your work that you might want to clarify? First of all, thank you. Yeah, if you wish to be like my person. I feel like I've been asked a lot about casting, specifically how to cast disabled actors and I'm like, you just cast them. I don't know. But I wish I was asked more about like structure, nerdy things that I really like, like time, how to organize time and space, particularly for immigrants, for somebody who maybe had a before and an after, had a BC, you know, BCAD or whatever. I just like nerding out about structure and craft and things like that. But I think I tend to get off to be asked about, yeah, the producerial things that like end up being larger topics of discussion in the American theater, which are important to have, it seems, because as advanced as we feel like we are, we are not, so we could do better. We all like the nerdy stuff. Talk about time. I mean, I was like, if we're talking about nerdy stuff, I was like, I love hearing about process, just like in terms of like how writers write and like how, like what my process is and like literally kind of like, do I use a paper and pen or do I use it on a laptop and like I'm intensely interested in kind of like the conditions under which like my best work has come out because I feel like the more that I've gotten to learn about myself as a writer, the more I'm able to like articulate with collaborators and theaters, like this is actually what I need to do my best work and I know that because just like I've observed it over time, yeah, kind of like best practices, because some of it like is not necessarily expensive or like costs anything, it's just like the ways in which you kind of put together the collaboration. I think I wish I could talk or I wish like I had to do fewer things on the producing side of like the marketing or kind of like making sure that the play was being represented in the best way and I wish I could talk more about, I don't know, like kind of community, I don't know, it kind of doesn't quite fit into your question, but I feel like it's relevant because I think when I write a play, I always ask who it's for and I mean that maybe in the broad sense, I feel like everyone should come to all the plays, but frequently when I write a play, I will think one person and that may be a real person or it may be just kind of like a fictitious person I make up in my mind and that is something that helps guide me towards what is like the right experience of what this play is and so I think like the community aspect of it is important to me, like my earliest plays were kind of like me and my friends in high school and us trying to like create these, original plays for our friends and family and so like from my earliest days, I've always thought about like, well, who is it actually for? Yeah, well, I've had the pleasure of being here since Thursday and talking with many of you and you all are very smart and I also appreciate, because I often travel with a very heavy book bag because I have books and my laptop and stuff and I've seen so many heavy book bags and heavy totes and I feel like my people. And also, you know, I do a ton of research for my plays and you know, like I love J-Store, it's like, and I feel like part of the only reason I teach is just so I can have access to the libraries and you know, to help the youth and stuff but you know, I love librarians, you know, like one of my early trainings as a playwright was by a professor who encouraged us to look at scholarly articles and figure out how to dramatize those pieces. So I've been trained in that since I was like 1920 and so I guess I would say that, because like sometimes I feel like with black plays, it's an assumption that it happened to that playwright or it happened to somebody that that playwright knows and while I feel like a lot of my, the body of my work is an emotional biography, there's very little that actually happened to me or anyone that I know because I'm very interested in history and time in systems, American systems and how black folks navigate those systems regardless of who constructed them or not. And so I would, I guess I would just say to just like not make an assumption that it's autobiographical and to look at the piece as a piece of dramatic work. And because I'm very interested in placing my plays in historical context, but you know, if I've done my job correctly, you don't feel like you're watching a history piece. You're watching human beings go through life. I'm a big believer that history is created by human beings, whether we were successful at it or not. And so I try to put that on the American stage. I think it's really important to, because you know what's so funny when you sent us that question about the critics, I thought you meant like journalists and I don't read my reviews, my partner reads all of them. And so I asked her, well like, what should I say? And so she gave me a list of all these awesome things to say, but now they don't want to block because you're talking about scholars. What would you say? Well, okay, so here's what I was saying. The reason that I stopped reading reviews is because I wasn't really sure what I was doing, but I knew that I was really committed to putting something on the American stage and particularly black women on the American stage in a way that I had seen glimpses of and that I was inspired to create. And I knew that if I kept reading my reviews, it would derail me from the work I was trying to do because of her feelings. And so I stopped reading good or bad reviews very early on. And so my partner, who's very loving and supportive, she reads all of them. And then sometimes if there's a particular review by a black woman, she'll be like, you should really read this, you know? But she said one of the things is that with my body of work, if you feel uncomfortable or uncertain, like question that, not necessarily my ability as a dramatist, be in conversation with what the play is asking you more than my skill as a dramatist. So that's what I would say. And we're gonna transition soon to questions. So this is your prompt, too. So think about the questions you're gonna have. I wanna ask about a meaningful mentoring moment that you've had personally. Like in terms of a moment in your lives where someone sort of came along and impacted you in some way that sort of positively helped you on your journey as an artist. And if you'd share that. I remember one of my mentors in grad school, UC San Diego, Adele Schenck. I remember like the piece of advice that she gave other than being like totally badass and always being like, those people don't know anything, you're fine. Is that she was like, always keep champagne in your refrigerator. Because she was like, it's a hard road when good things happen, you should always celebrate it. You should always celebrate it because you never know when you're gonna get that again. And so for a long time, I kept a bottle of champagne in the fridge. And I think I kept being too precious about like, what was worth getting out of the fridge. So like by the time I got it, I think it was like no longer good. But basically, I think I should have taken her advice and like just celebrated more. That's what I got. I love it so much. This is, I feel like the public school teachers who did not get paid enough to give the gift of their attention as generously as they did. Where I grew up with a lot of domestic violence and when I first started, the way my tactic to deal with it is I would lock myself in my room for hours and just kind of stay out of the way and do homework and like quiet things. And so I'd get assignments in school to like write two pages and I'd commit with like 25. And these poor teachers were like, this is great, but they don't pay us enough. And so there was one teacher who was like, well, what do we do with this energy and this desire to communicate and create? And so she found a playwriting competition in elementary school. And I didn't know what a play was. I thought it was a movie you couldn't afford to make. Not untrue. So I like wrote a play. And she stayed after school every day for hours. This teacher to, I like acted it for her. I acted it after school. And it was her, like she chose to give her time in this way so generously and so she not only, I mean, she was literally giving me a safe space also. Like there was a place that I could be for a few hours after school that wasn't my home. And just like the gift of her attention made me feel so worthy. And I think that that, like these ways that teachers will go out of the, especially public school teachers, who will go out of their way and can see, I don't know if this teacher knew what was going on at home or not, but like either way she, I think she kept, she in some ways really kept me alive. And I think I held onto that, that maybe if there was one person that was willing to listen, maybe more would. So I think she and other teachers so this sort of sees in that way and I'll be forever grateful for them. So public school teachers, you guys. Yeah, I don't know. The only thing I can think of is when I was first learning playwriting, I had a teacher in high school who was like, you know, if you put in the stage directions, they're drinking water. Somebody has to say this water is good or else there won't be water. And it's so funny because I still think of that teacher because sometimes I'll be writing dialogue and I'm like, oh, this prop is important. And then I always put in that dummy line of like, that broom is nice. You know? So, yeah, any kind of, somebody complimented any kind of prop on stage is like my dummy line to remember that that prop is important. That was great. All right, let's open it up. There's mics being run around so I'll let, I trust, I have to call, do I? Like Amy, I trust you. Thank you so much. A huge admirer of all your work. So this is just a joy. Since we're talking about mentorship in conversations of kind of theatricality, I'm really curious, who do you imagine your work in conversation with? It's something we talk to our students a lot about is the legacies of playwriting and how things move across time. And I'm just really kind of fascinated by who are playwrights who you imagine yourself in conversation with, who you are perhaps challenging in ways, who you are perhaps responding to in ways contemporary or past. But I'm just really intrigued by that idea of kind of longer legacies of mentorship perhaps. When you first asked that question, I was like, I wasn't thinking about playwrights at all. I was thinking about the little like working class kids, like little first-gen kids who like might get these plays and be like, me too? Maybe I can like find out, when you're talking about process, like wanting to know how playwrights make, I was like, that would be such a great gift to compile and demystify the making of this because most of us don't know what the fuck we're doing. Or we're trying to figure out as we go, and so I like, that was the first thing I thought it was like the playwrights that will be coming that will hopefully be able to tell their, the stories of their moms and the stories of like, being a weird first-gen kid or not having enough food or money to live with and so, yeah, I don't know. That's what I, that's what I, if I can cheat on your question. I think I'll cheat too. And I'll also say Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought. I read that when I was 19 and it flipped my world upside down and it defined the early half of my body of work. Sonya Sanchez, Niki Giovanni, Wala Shan, a lot of his solo work, his world building has taught me a lot. Sam Shepard's early plays, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage. In Tezaki Shange, I took a class freshman year of college where we helped her adapt Lillian into a stage play and I learned, you know, because I was trained under Aristotle in a well-made play when I was in high school and I'll never forget this, the first day of class, like, we sitting, I was the only freshman in that class and Shange was like, this is how this class gonna work. And, you know, we're gonna read a chapter out loud every class and then we'll talk about how to adapt it. And I was like, excuse me, Professor Shange. Like, first of all, we need an exciting incident. Second of all, we need a protagonist who has an obstacle. And she looked at me, cigarette in hand and she was like, that's not how I make theater. And I was like, okay. And we spent that semester and she totally just flipped my world upside down. So Shange is a theater maker. And as a live action performance maker has also taught me a great deal. So that's what I would say. Oh, I mean, I think for me there, I mean, there's obviously like, I feel like contemporary playwrights like who I know and who I admire. I was like the Lynn Nottages. I was like Rajeev Joseph, Julia Cho. And then I also feel like there's all these kind of like childhood influences that I grew up with that, you know, that like I'm a kid of the 90s and like the pop culture. I watched a lot of television. And so I think about like the ways in which like, you know, there's kind of like all the contemporary playwrights, but it's also like my work is in conversation with Sesame Street and my work is in conversation with like, you know, like all the commercials of the 90s. And I don't know. It's just like, it's, I don't know. It's like, it's kind of like wide and varied. Yeah. Hi, thank you so much for being here. I teach at the University of Washington in Seattle. And so I've been trying to teach in dialogue with plays that are happening in the city. So Lauren, I was really excited. I brought my students to Cambodian Rock Band and next quarter I'm gonna bring students to Sanctuary City at Seattle Rep. And so it's an honor to teach your plays. And so I'm curious for all three of you, what do you want us to know as professors who teach your plays? Like what's helpful for us to tell our students when we teach your plays and when we bring students to your plays? I mean, just like thinking about the play that you took your students to see. I always like the idea of like an action step after a play and that can be kind of as like concrete or intangible as that may be. Yeah, like I feel like if my plays are in dialogue with people in that it moves them to do X thing, then I've succeeded. I think for Cambodian Rock Band, it's like if I can make you a fan of the music or you can feel like you're more immersed in the world and you wanna know more about it than I feel like I've succeeded. I feel like in terms of like how I want them to experience that, I don't know, I was like anybody else have? I'm like as I think about it. I feel like it's, where do you find yourself in it? We, I think we're just so much more alike than we are dissimilar. And for some of, I remember talking about Sanctuary City as like, oh, it's about dreamers, oh, it's about undocumented. I'm like, yeah, but it's about friendships and people with a prom and about your person that knows you better than your own mother and that core relationship that you have that's not romantic love, but it's deep love and how, where are they finding themselves in stories that might not on the surface feel like they represent their own or on the opposite. It's like, look, this is a story that represents your experience. And so if they're playwriting students, then I would, I would ask them what's the, what's the thing that if they didn't write it down, they would regret and they died tomorrow. What would they regret not having said? What is the thing that matters so much to them? What is that core experience of living in the world that they feel like only they know that they have to share with the world and just imagine that your next play may always be your last play and I think that that's an approach I've taken to every other, every play I've written next is like, well, I'm gonna, since I'm gonna die tomorrow, what's the thing that I need to, that I wanna share so that I feel less lonely? And I feel like there's an act of reaching and so what in them makes them want to reach and where they, what do they wanna share? So I don't, it's more of a playwriting question, but yes, I think that's that. Thank you for taking me to the plays. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. I guess I would just say, how can it only be a play? Like, how can it only be a piece of theater? You know, like I really, like with my work, I really strive to have it wholly exist as a piece of live performance that's extremely ephemeral and to also really celebrate live performance and being in an audience with a group of people and experience a moment that will never happen again and just really having conversations about theatricality and spectacle and celebrating live performance because, you know, I really do believe we almost lost it. And so just constantly having that conversation with the students and also encouraging them to make noise, not like in a disrespectful way, but laugh if they wanna laugh, if they know what song is playing, sing it. You know, if they have like a visceral reaction to it, vocalize it. I think that's also important too and to also encourage those young folks that to bring their family. Because, you know, I've had a lot of young people see my shows on school trips and then they take their parents or, you know, they'll take their, like friends who couldn't go. And so also reminding them that they have access to those faces outside of school, I think is important too. Thank you so much. My question is, I'm witnessing a lot of loss and grief and scarcity in the nonprofit theater world and also what does it mean for us to develop new work. So I'm interested in how you navigate this kind of increasing mode of scarcity in the nonprofit theater world and how do you continue to, you know, dream and practice abundance in the midst of that kind of scarcity? Thank you. Practice abundance, that's a beautiful way of phrasing that. A lot of our new play development places like the Lark have been decimated by the pandemic. These places where so often you're the only playwright in the rehearsal room and of course you're doing a television room, but it's a lot of the spaces in which we would meet to share our strangeness and then be able to move past that to just create as well as like, here's my strange and co-eight pages and sharing them with somebody else and being celebrated and being able to move onto the next day have been, have are gone now. I realized how much, how important community was because of the absence of it. And so I think a lot of us have been putting together our own rooms. Like I replicated a Lark program where we would just like meet for two, I gathered like six playwrights and we met for two weeks. We, Natasha Sinha gave us like space for free at the Playwrights Horizons when they weren't rehearsing a show. We all brought some Costco snacks. Like we brought in 10 pages of new plays and we'd meet for three hours a day for two weeks and the first like 45 minutes of every session we were just weeping because we'd missed it so much. And I think that in terms of things that are scarce, it feels like safe spaces to create outside of a producerial eye, outside of that audition process when you do a reading are rare and I have been a part of and I've seen a lot of people just making their own versions of these things that have been taken away that we've lost. I mean, not to mention the loss of life and all of these things that we're holding in our bodies and in our memories but specifically administratively and as an art form and all of it. But we're having to get really grassroots about stuff. I mean, I would say kind of like my journey through the pandemic has also been coupled with like my journey into like parenthood. And so like I've come out of it just like a very different person with very, I was like with a very different schedule. And so I think like one of the things I've done to kind of combat the pandemic related losses that we've had of like our theater development spaces and also kind of like my new life is like, oh, I don't do late nights anymore is that like I've kind of organized for instance like AAPI artist picnics where I think it's just kind of compensating for the fact that I was like, I don't see people kind of as much as I used to. Some of those places are gone. Some of those places just don't exist anymore. And so just trying to replicate what I feel like I'm missing and making it a space that is as flexible with some of those spaces used to be where there doesn't need to be so much of an agenda. You can show up. You don't have to know anybody. You get to meet people. I feel like that's the way that I've kind of coped with it. The music. So and then also just being truthful that it's scary and that it hurts. And I have a lot of colleagues who I came up with who are now running theaters and it's really hard to watch a lot of people who I think are very brilliant to get this opportunity to run these institutions and either they're ended or they're having really hard times because I think, yeah, that they're just brilliant people and it really hurts my heart to see them have to deal with some real tough moments when I think they have a lot of really important things to say to audiences as ADs and directors. So I've been a little, I don't know how to answer the abundance question because it's not where I'm at right now. But it does bring me solace that there's so many brilliant people like many of you in this room who are showing up every day and doing the work and asking the hard questions and also hopefully all taking care of yourselves as well and drinking the tea and getting the sleep and all those human things as well. I'm here, stage three. Thank you Icons for your words and wisdom. My question is what advice might you have for all your career playwrights, aspiring screenwriters who are trying to find homes for their work and also want their work to be protected in a way? I guess my question is what do you know now in your career that you wish you had known early in your career about, oh, this is who I want to produce my work with, this is who I want to go to and this is how I want my story to be told. I would say, because I'm working with some of the playwrights at YSD and the thing that I tell them is to not necessarily be interested in an institution but be interested in your process as a writer because that's really the only thing you can or in my opinion at least, that's the only thing you can really control is what you're trying to say with the work and what kind of conversations you're trying to have. And that's not to say that you have to have these heavy conversations that make these big statements, it's just like what kind of theater do you want to make? And because it's been my experience, I've worked in lit offices as an intern and all these things and a lot of times, I love you ADs, but a lot of times it's just like they don't know what they're looking at until they see it or sometimes they're super influenced by the coast and they'll produce things based off of that but I would just say as an early career playwright just figure out what it is like a conversation you want to have with your work. And then a lot of times the people who are meant to be in conversation with you will gravitate towards you and you will also gravitate towards certain people because you're clear about what you're trying to do. I would cost that on that, like find your people, know how to talk about your work because if you don't then somebody else will talk about it for you. And that's annoying because just like part of the process of writing is that you don't know what you, it's essentially writing about what you don't know about what you know, you're going through the process to come and understand something but then at the end of it you have to then speak for it and I think that falls away after a certain time but from jump it was like know that your part time job is being social, go to the readings, go to the openings, get a friend who's like going all the openings and go with them because the ADs would be there because the lead managers would be there, go up to them, be like hi, I'm, you know, here's my name and like this is a genuine thing that I feel about your theater, what you do, if it's, you know, like don't lie. Find out what's out there, even if, you know, there's things to see for free, get educated about the places that are doing the work that you respond to and make relationships there. Go like find playwrights bios and look at all the awards and fellowships they want and apply to them. See like what, because I didn't know what the hell was out there so I just would like go on bios and be like oh is this, can I apply, am I eligible and then just like make that, make that excel sheet of like when this is due, when that is due, like it is the, what I didn't know about being a playwright starting out was how much of a business it was or that you had to run. Like you had to guard your, that part of your soul and your brain that creates and then there was an aspect of like the doer, the mover, and the shaker because a lot of it is relationships that are genuine, that you bond with somebody who makes some things that speaks to you and they make some that vice versa, remember Rao? And you're just trying to find each other and lift each other up and so yeah, there's an aspect of like networking at the half word but like it's just, you're trying to find your friends whether they're gonna be in the rehearsal room with you or getting you to the rehearsal room. Like so much of this is relationships and knowing how to talk about what your intention is to them, I think, and then you have lots of friends. It'd be great. I mean, I was like all of this and also I think just like do a lot of stuff. I feel like the first time like I wrote a play that I thought was good, I was like, like I have this one play and then you would send it in the theater to be like well send us, this is not right but send us to like your next plan, I'd be like but I don't have another play. And just learning to like create and be like okay, maybe something will come up with this one but like let's keep going or like submit to contest and then just forget about it and then like do more. So I think just like always kind of be moving through it and don't get stuck on like this is my only thing or this is my one opportunity if it doesn't work because there's just gonna be a lot of stuff that you're gonna be making. So we have about three minutes left so let's try to get in a couple more questions and then maybe one person can respond so we can get more questions in. Hi, I'm Quanda Johnson. I'm from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm a dissertator there. A lot of dramatists start out as poets and I'm just really curious if any of you started out writing that way through exploring poetry. I did a lot of spoken word. That was my entry way in. I did forensics. I don't know if people are familiar with it. Oh, nice. Okay. Okay. Cause usually people are like criminology. So I did solo humorous monologue. And I also did a lot of spoken word, Jessica Caramor, like Saul Williams. So that was my entry way in. I remember in seventh grade we all got a copy of For Color Girls and we were all like, you know, there was no way out. You know. So yeah, that's how I got started with performing life was through spoken word and monologues. Yes. Thank you so much for this wonderful event. You're on? Okay, excellent. So Christina, I saw Good Goods in 2012, the night that Whitney Houston passed and it was so beautiful to see it that night. But Martina, I wanted to ask you back to the question about influences. Cause I see a lot of kinship between your work and Linnautage's work because you both tell these stories of like working class people. And I was wondering if you felt connected to her as a playwright. So we share the same agent. And when my agent, who I love very much is his love language, when he wants to piss me off, he'll cut me off mid-sentence and go, I'm sorry, my two-time Pulitzer president is calling me. Ah. It's referring to Linnautage. Yeah, she was our teacher at ISD and I think that she's one of the most brilliant fucking minds. And is also similar to her, Dominique Mariso. They're these makers that are also deeply invested in actually changing the world in ways that by going out into communities and going out and doing, organizing advocacy that I respect so much with, even if that advocacy is just on social media, that they are so committed and are inspiring to me. And I think that, my God, if I can get, put into a sentence with Linnautage, I'm very moved. I think, she's, I read her forward to the Arthur Miller collection a few years ago and she wrote about his commitment to the common man as king. And I think that maybe if there's a parallel, it's that, I mean, all of us on the stage right now make work that are the people that we grew up with, people that we are that haven't traditionally been on, been on stages as prevalently as others and then having them be center stage and seeing their lives as royalty. And at that level of dignity and integrity that I think I was, I saw in Lin's work and she's a master architect. She knows how to build a cathedral of drama that I like, that I look up to so much. Thank you. So to wind this down, I just wanna say a couple of things. The first is, you three are truly amazing. Absolutely, extraordinary. I mean, the work that you do, not only sort of transforms like theaters all across the US, all around the world, you also inspire people to explore and engage, not only sort of as a humanity through your work but also to enter the arts themselves. And it's, the words you use to describe Linnautage, as a person who has built this structure that has inspired people and welcomed people in that's the work that you are doing. And just to give you a sense of their generosity as people, it's like when I send emails to say, would you come? They responded immediately without hesitation, like literally within a few minutes. And you walk the walk, you inspire me in particular, you inspire all these people in this room. And all these people in this room represent a lot of more people because we all represent different schools and departments and stuff like that. So each person here is probably like another like, like a hundred, right? And that is your impact. So I just wanna round of applause for that. And for the folks who happen to be watching this be a hull round, the American Society for Theater Research is a fantastic organization that you should be a member of. So looking up online, their conference will be next year in Seattle. It's great conversations like this that happen at ASTR every single day. So we're gonna break right now. There is a wonderful reception in honor of our Distinguished Scholar Award winners and the larger community of those who have invested their time and energy and support of this organization. It's a festive celebration of people who are committed to scholarship and community. So let's all go to that venue, you know? And then thank you again. So we'll next round of applause. Thank you guys. Thank you, thank you. Can we thank you for your camp?