 So welcome to our responders. Thank you so much for taking your time to hang out and be with us today. Hello on my audience. I know you're out there because you told me you're going to be there. You better be there. Are you there? Dominic? Okay, I want to see some tweets from you. Okay, so we're going to be tweeting some of the stuff that's being said, but we're also going to take questions from our online audience. So if you have questions, please use hashtag VAPF on your tweet and then we'll get it. So welcome. It's called Making Theater in a Messy World and a Messed Up World. I don't mind the mess, but I don't like the messed up part. Okay, so yes, and this title came from an article that Alina Brown wrote who will be moderating this afternoon's conversation that she wrote for the TBA. Okay, so we thank TBA and Alina for letting us feel her title. I've been, as I was telling, come on in and find a seat. As I've been telling the responders today, I've been thinking about these questions we're asking for quite some time. It's come out of watching a lot of new work, reading a lot of new work, and meeting some amazing artists who have grown up in our community and are now making their own work. And I guess Javier is one of the prime examples, because I've known Javier since he was a teenager. And Nicole, since she maybe was also a teenager. Teenage. So, and thinking about, you know, my generation of artists from the late, who are you? Amy Mueller on the Artistic Director of Playwrights Foundation. We're producing the Barry and Clarets Festival, so this conversation is part of that. So, I've had a lot of questions about how new work is being made and why it's being made, and also the way in which I perceive that so-called political theater, socially relevant theater, has absolutely transformed in its form. And that speaks to a generation that, you know, of my own children, essentially. And I'm really interested in having a dialogue, I was very interested in having a dialogue between generational artists. And so we've called together a group of amazing people who are giving us their time. And I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves, to start off with, and where, what company, if there's a company you're with, or if there's some attribution you want to make to yourself. And then just talk a few minutes about the work that you do. That would be great. We can start with you, Richard. My name is Bermuthi Montoya. My name you in Room 40, and I'm doing well. Thank you. Richard Montoya worked with a collective performance group called Culture Clash, and then as a solo playwright in the last couple of years, I feel like I've really dedicated myself to this idea of maybe a flame holder and a flamethrower. And then business is brisk. I mean, we'll get into it hopefully, but political theater from not just my private writer's table, but to the public forum is on fire more than ever behind I feel. And so hope to deconstruct some of that. As we go, Culture Clash has been in Los Angeles for the last 20 years, but we were born in Galería de la Raza on 20th Century Bryant in 1984. So despite my youthful appearance, we've seen a lot of movements come and go. And in 84 was really the tail end of many movements. And another movement started, started out. It's been a wondrous journey and really a pleasure to be here today with you all. I am Quinal Bades. I'm a lifelong member of the Teatro Campesino, which translates to the Farm Workers Theater. It's a theater company that was founded in 1965 during the middle of a labor strike. I grew up like a child of the circus, and so today my official capacity at the theater is the producing artistic director. But the way I see that is as the keeper of a set of community traditions. And those traditions, and I use that term lightly, but stem from certain decolonization efforts of the 1970s that resulted in a series of philosophical practices that stem from ancient America. And those terms root to practice of the Teatro Campesino, all its manifestations today. My name is Sean San Jose. I work for a company called Campo Santo, and with Intersection for the Arts, where the company has been in residence since its beginning. We create on-counter work. I love the title of this building. I think that probably speaks for a lot of us and probably why we do the work that we do, because it is a messed up world. I think it's a good way to respond to the world, to give voice to people whose voices don't get heard, you know, for a lot. That's why the group, Campo Santo, is formed to tell some of these stories, and I think the work that we've been able to do, especially with Intersection, that I was trying to tell, stories that I think are reflective and representative in some ways of the neighborhoods we are in. We used to be in remission before it died, and then we moved downtown, and so now we're trying to figure out that neighborhood down there. My name is Ryan Nicole Theaters. I am an actress, an activist, an athlete, and an artist. I guess we can call that theater today for the sake of the discussion. And in the activist capacity, I've worked as an executive director for an arts organization that ran it for a few years, and facilitated opportunities for younger people to find their voice and express it in various settings. As an actress, I've worked with Campo Santo, Intersection for the Arts, California Shakespeare Theater, Colored Age, very, very beginning, Playwright's Festival, in many different capacities as a writer and an actress, as an athlete, a little less pertinent to this conversation, except that you have to look good, I think, on stage. As an artist, I'm an emcee, and I use hip-hop as I think my most impactful medium to communicate my message of activism to a community who I think really, really hears it and really, really needs it. Yeah, I feel like since we're using the word theater today, and since that's the conversation that I'm in, I think theater is something that I can buy necessity. There's less of a choice. I didn't elect to become a lawyer or a doctor or an actress for that matter. This has been a necessity. I grow up in the context that we discuss in the theater that I'm in involved in. So it's a necessity. Hi, my name is Margo Hall. I am a local actress and director, and I think I can say a playwright at this point. I'm also co-founder with Sean Samseh at Composanto, and being a part of that company has given me so much to give to the Bay Area community as an actress and as a director. Working with Composanto kind of gave me this sense that I could do anything, and so I decided that I could do anything. And so I go out to any theater, and I work at all theaters, and I refuse to allow any discussion about I'm an African-American actress, I'm an actress, and I continue to push my voice loudly for diversity in the theater community, and not just on stage, but throughout the theater community, throughout the administration, throughout this world. And I'm not talking about colorblind casting. I'm talking about the fact that all our stories are so important, and I find myself going more towards stories of family to really figure out how is it that where I came from, Detroit, Detroit is in the house? Anyway, but the idea of family and how foundation and structure, it comes in many different colors, it comes in many different shapes, and all of that needs to be expressed in the theater. And just excited to be an artist right now, just excited to be an artist in the Bay. I've chosen to be in the Bay, and I'm very excited about that. I'm always excited about the work that Camposanto continues to do, and I look forward to continuing to be loud and proud. So my name is Javier Reyes, and I'm a baby OG. What I mean by that is I've got kids that are graduating college. I don't know if it's Asians, and I don't know everything I'm that old. But I have a theater company I've had since 1999 called Colody, a hip-hop theater company. They started out at Robert Theater, had a great ten-year run there. Saw the most incredible young talented artists, and taught by the most incredible teachers for free, for free 99, that no college could offer, I believe, because they never separated theater and social justice. They were always married, and so I still carry that to this day. I also have another company called Urban Home and Tour, which is a faith-based company, so it's really dealing about, you know, we live in a messed-up world, but we can have a great spirit if we choose, and that needs to be reflected on stage. There's a lot of spiritual, talented kids in this world. I truly believe the best playwrights are in jail right now. I say that because that's where I work at. I work at a theater inside of units where people are face-to-murder, great prostitution, and the stories that come out of there blow out anything that's on Broadway. I really feel like we need to create our own strip called Harway, and that's why I really actually started with theater, because I wanted to tell my story and other stories that were related to mine at the time of theater rolling on for that. There was no afternoon, there was no real door to express what I experienced as a young man in this world, and so it's been my lifelong commitment to pave that way and get these kids on the bulldozers themselves and create more lanes and highways and vehicles to everybody's story to be told, not just the popular one or the one that gets you done every five years. It needs some fresh meat up on the grill, and so on. That's what I'm here for. My name is Kimberly. I'm lucky enough to be one of the playwrights of the Playwrights Festival this year. I'm currently based in Brooklyn, but I spent most of my formative years in Seattle, and I was like many playwrights these days. I was a professional actress in Seattle, and I found my way to playwriting because the acting jobs that I was being offered were allowing me to use about that much of what I was taking along, and I felt restlessness, and I was writing sort of all along, but I didn't show it to anybody because I didn't think of it as writing, and then a friend of mine encouraged me to, you know, have some people know what that works, and that's what I did, and that's kind of how I found my way. I'm really honored to be in this group of people that you're all amazing and doing amazing work, and I confess I'm a little starved to find myself sitting here, so thank you for having me. Hi, I'm Leigh Ann Brown. I'm an actor, an occasional director, a collective member of San Francisco MindTrue, but I also work lots of other companies, too, and I am a writer for the Theatre Area Magazine, a monthly column, and features, too, and I'm also a singer-songwriter, so I do a lot of different things, but my artistic home for the past 20 years has been San Francisco MindTrue. It has also helped me, similar to what you were describing Margo, being part of a company does help you explore, you know, what your range is, and what you're capable of doing, just sometimes out of just necessity. Like, if this is going to happen, everybody's got to grab a piece and get it done, and then you realize that you actually can do it. So, I think I'll say a little bit more about how this came about for the theatre, so... Hi, I'm Michael Jean Sullivan. I'm an actor, director, and playwright based in the Bay Area. I've also been with the San Francisco MindTrue for 25 years now, and for 12 of them, I was resident playwright. MindTrue, for those of you who don't know, is a collectively run company that has done tour nationally and internationally doing a lot of these free shows, free shows or indoor shows. The theatre is really based on economic and social justice, with a heavy emphasis on the economic justice. You know, part of the philosophy really is that racial inequality, sexual inequality, much of the injustice that we see in the world is very much based on economics. Who has the power? Who has the money? Frequently, who has the power? How much does that outweigh any democratic or, you know, desire on the part of the people? As we, the workers in another country that have made the country, have made the world, why is it that we don't have the power? And so our job is to activate the audience, not to necessarily give them answers, but to piss them off about the questions. I'm also, you know, I work with different theatre companies, like Eduardo said, and I also have recently had a published play, an adaptation of 1984, which has been playing around the country, and tomorrow night I head off to Barcelona to do the Catalan translation of the play, and make the Spanish translation also. And so, yes, so I'm kind of, you know, focusing very much more on how much we can do with plays, not just with new shows, with old shows, to see everything through more of a political lens, and to make sure to always challenge the audience, pissing off the audience to a certain extent, making them mad at themselves for not doing more things. You know, you gotta work harder. Anyway, that's it. Oh, and I'm married to her. I'm Chloe Johnson with Symmetry Theatre Company. I'm really inspired to hear so many stories here that I can relate to. I'm looking forward to talking to you all at the party of tours. But I actually started out as an actor as well, and Symmetry started with myself and two other equity actors. We realized that one as women, once we got our equity card, the work totally vanished. So for us, you know, it made us upset that, you know, in the Bay Area has a lot of hybrid situations where there's theaters, where they hire equity and non-equity, and if there's a limited number of contracts, often they go to the men, because of the play selection and a lot of other reasons. And, you know, it's based on limited resources and all of that. But for us, it's an equal pay-per-work issue, and we felt like it shouldn't just be a hobby for us and a career-grade health insurance intention for male equity actors. So we started Symmetry Theatre Company. Our other goal was we were noticing the lack of strong and multifaceted female characters on the stage, and we thought we really do need some new need on the grill. So our mission is twofold. We want to make sure there's a balance of equity contracts with the two genders, and also a balance of roles in terms of male and female characters, and that both gender roles are interesting and dynamic and show the complete picture. And we think it's not just important for actors who want to be working, but also for our community. It's essential that our community sees the whole picture, sees themself, but most audience members are women, see themselves on stage, represented well, and see, you know, good role models and good images of women. So that's what we do. I regret that we have such a political mission. My biggest wish, I suppose, is that one day the gap will be closed and we'll be just another theater company, and that would be the best thing ever, really. But until then, we're, you know, doing our thing. We're small. We only do one show, one to two shows a year. So primarily at this stage, we were relatively new. We started in 2010. We're there to create an awareness and to keep the discussion out there and visible. I'm Lauren Schelhardt. I'm a playwright who's based in Chicago. I'm also lucky enough to have my play at this festival this year. I'm also an educator. I teach theater at Northwestern University to undergrads. It's alongside writing my other people's passion. My work has, in the past couple years also, I've sort of experienced a shift in process. My last few plays have been involved going out into whatever community, the play subject warrants and doing interviews with the people there. My last play was about the death penalty and involved talking to people in the prison system, talking to lawyers, talking to women, going into women's prisons. The play that is up here is about women leadership. So it involved talking to a lot of female entrepreneurs, women in small businesses, women in the academic world. And it's interesting you talk about your impetus, Chloe, because I think my impetus for starting to write was actually to find, to write more roles for women, more diverse roles for women and roles for women of all ages. So that's, for the past few years, my sitting in the right section. Hi, my name is Christine Young. I'm a director and an educator. I used to work at Clarence Foundation over the years with Amy, so I'm a huge fan of very Clarence Festival. So I started as a director and just sort of an artist, and I met Apple Fugart when I was 18 and did know that theater could do the kinds of things that his plays do. And so that was sort of my conversion experience. And then I directed a lot of plays about the cleansing and the Japanese internment and sort of like some tricks like those. And it was really exciting and meaningful to me, but at a certain point as I got older I sort of didn't feel sufficient to just direct plays, to just sort of have an artistic engagement with these really big issues. And then I wanted to have a different kind of impact. And so I now teach as a performing arts and social justice program at the University of San Francisco. So I'm really primarily an educator. And I spend my days teaching students about Tepo Campesino and Life Troop and trying to kind of rewrite or sort of author an alternative theatrical history for a group of students who are training to be theater artists and trying to expand their ideas about what theater is and can be and can do in the world. We do a lot of community-based work. In the San Bruno County Men's Jail we work with seniors. We do a lot of arts education work. So this idea of artist activist is very important to us. And one of the things I've noticed things I get older is I think I always had a lot of separation in my mind between these different roles, you know, slashes. And now they're starting to really blend together with me. And I'm no longer sort of thinking, well that's professional art. That's community-based art. That's it. Now I'm starting to realize that actually what we're all engaged in is an effort to transform the culture and to create a more just and equitable and peaceful world for everyone. I like what my seatmate just said when she said conversion experience because I feel like the thing that I'm interested in getting into a little bit in this conversation is where our different intentions and goals lie in relation to our interests in converting or engaging or partnering with or collaborating with. I think that's a really nice term that we could pick apart and maybe get in some juicy conversations and even arguments about this afternoon. My name's Michael Rode and I'm going to watch this day murmur over there when I say, I'm really honored to be sitting in this semi-circle with this group of people because there's a lot of people here that I've known a long time and have admired their work and the work of their companies and their individual work and there's a lot of people here I'm really excited to meet. And I was trying to think about my own conversion experience. I run something called Sojourn Theater which is a 15-year-old ensemble-based theater company. We started in Virginia in the late 90s. We spent almost 10 years in Portland, Oregon. There are 15 of us. We now live in eight cities around the United States and are working constantly. We have eight projects going on right now led by different company members in different places. We're always together in different combinations working on projects. And I feel like rather than talk about what we do, I could give like four super quick examples. So one of our projects is we're working in Milwaukee with homebound seniors who are homebound due to health reasons and also economic reasons are isolated. We're working with their caregivers, Goodwill who delivers food to them, Public Transit and the Department of Public Health. And we're doing creative work in the homes with the folks who are homebound and working and using the work that comes out of that to catalyze public conversation about policy related to social isolation and economics. And that's going to result both in lots of small projects and large performances that happened in downtown Milwaukee two years from now. We're working with Catholic Charities of the USA around the United States where artists and residents for two and a half years. And we're working at poverty reduction sites around the country where we're doing interviews, creating performance, giving workshops on collaboration and we are using performance tactics to post public dialogue in communities about poverty. We're working with planning commissions around the country. We developed something called Built which is a participatory civic planning game based in story sharing and facilitation. And we've been working in rural and urban communities with planning commissions to use these tactics to host conversations about resource allocation and its government agencies bringing the public together to have more creative and dynamic conversations so more voices are in those conversations around decisions. And we have a project called How to End Poverty in 90 Minutes which is a performance model that we've done in Chicago that's going to go to some other places soon where we work with local community partners, local artists and students on creating events where audiences of a couple hundred have to decide over the course of 90 minutes how to take part of the box office and use it to fight poverty in their community and the actual money sits on stage in a big glass bubble and by the end of the show the money gets spent and it's spent in relation to community camels that happen through the structure. So I'm really interested in different dramaturgies around participation both in the partnering process as well as in the production of new work. And I think the only other thing I'd say is I spent the 90s living out of a suitcase I found an organization called Hope is Vital in Washington D.C. working with men and women who were living on the street with HIV and or AIDS and I started that project in D.C. in 1991 and then I spent eight years living out of a suitcase working with communities around the country on starting ensembles of men and women living in that context partnering with schools or arts organizations and then I started Sojourn with a group of people and I feel like I'm constantly trying to find my way as a theater artist in our field back into context where the kind of listening that I felt like I got to do doing that super-aggressive community-based work can exist in a lot of the distribution networks and systems that theater gets formally built and shared Sojourn My name is Joan Holden Earlier this week there was an event where the playwrights in the festival were asked to tell their life story in five words I was late and I didn't have to do mine but I would say that my story would be Vietnam War Contra War Gulf War Invasion of Iraq Global War and then I thought no, that's not really true probably the last word would be gentrification and then I thought more generally all those wars and class Also I spent a long time in the San Francisco Mandra from 1967 to 2000 which meant opening a new satire every year on the Fourth of July always always a satire always a comedy because because that's what lets people confront or at least for us there's two reasons you write comedy one is a kind of bent personality that's just how you are and the other is that people laugh or let people look at things that normally they want to look away from so for a subject like you know for example my favorite example is Israel and Palestine we did a mistaken identity course Michael played both he was bravely and skinny in 1988 the year before and the painful subject that no one could deal with the subject that nobody wanted to see and enormously people wanted to be able to laugh about it wanted to be able to relax so that's the so I spent 30 years writing satire and people and people serious people would often ask well are you ever going to write a real play it's fine but are you ever going to write a serious play and my answer is that that serious and comic are not opposites the opposite of comic is straight the opposite of serious is trivial it has nothing to do with comedy can absolutely be completely total serious so I write serious comedy which have involved a lot of interviewing a lot of you know research into different kind of scenes appearing different kind of people's stories but then always turning them into something nothing not thought to drama something crazy and I know this in myself now that around 70 the satiric impulse started to rain and now I'm more right place that celebrate things for example I wrote a play that celebrated diner waitresses and now one and I I got to do this maybe I got into that work by doing I got the commission of a lifetime to do the stage adaptation of nickel and dined Barbara Aaron writes book so that was getting into a lot of lives of low-aged workers and maybe and probably that was transformational for me so now I'm working in a more natural for me very naturalistic but still for most people very broad style and that that I don't have that slash and burn impulse to write satire so I hope younger people do because it needs to be written but I'm writing understand I'm Lindsay Crumbine and I have a one-year-old theater company called pretty city repertoire youth theater it's ensemble based theater in Oakland and we work with 14 to 20-year-old youth pretty much all from Oakland public schools or recent graduates of Oakland public schools virtually all of whom come with no experience in theater most of whom haven't seen a play and so that's really exciting I actually was a teacher for the last 12 years at Mission Rachel in San Francisco and most recently at Oakland Tech and my conversion happened when I was 6 and I saw the comedy of errors at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and just people peering around pillars all while I was just totally enraptured and wanted to be a part of that but never did theater growing up was an athlete and then sort of became an educator against my will my whole family is home educators I was never going to be an educator it just happened anyway but in teaching in very heterogeneous classrooms with kids anywhere from pretty much non-readers to college reading level all in the same high school classroom I found that Shakespeare was the great equalizer cause nobody others but we shoved the tables and put on hats and if everyone loved it it was always everyone's favorite thing cause I Shakespeare definitely I loved it and we always do it instead of reading it I started various after school theater production groups at all the schools where I taught and then they closed for one reason or another tend a lot just all the things where schools aren't stable in their funding and so finally I was like it's always successful it works with the kids I'm just gonna do it I'm just gonna do it myself so I'm doing that now it's very new I'm just quit my day job so we're doing it yeah so and actually I also have a brand new baby so I have two babies four month old in my company it's all pretty exciting but me I was at a workshop with Michael years and years ago when I when I first sort of started doing theater with youth and learned tons and has since integrated a lot of his practices into the work and I think I come from a place where it's less important what play we're doing and more important sort of all the amazing things that come out of the rigor and community of doing theater as ensemble work and then you know every I'd say probably 95% of the youth that I've worked with end up saying after three or four months we're a family it's a family it's our community everyone has each other's backs and so we have youth from all over Oakland all different schools working together six hours a week rehearsing getting there on the bus there's no like credit or anything just doing it for the love of it and I think for me the social justice aspect is about access it's about I don't know Oakland's having a tough time you know but at the same time there's this renaissance there's all this excitement but really if you look at the staffs on you know public school kids they're not improving and the graduation rates and it's incarcerated and all of that and these are the kids that are doing Shakespeare along with other things and so modern work and I think that doing that deep work with kids were really small and sometimes people are like oh yeah we can't do a grant because you're only serving 13 and I'm like yeah but I have to take out my arms around all of them at the same time we can't do that with 150 people so it's exciting and I also was really sort of stunned when I was invited to do this and looked at the list of people and everything so I'm really excited to be here and honored really excited to hear what you all have to say Hi I'm Dale Orlando Smith I'm out of New York and I'm best known for a play called Yellow Man I was here last year doing a play called Black and Blue Boys Broken Men which was a co-pro between Berkeley and Goodman and I have a new piece that's coming up called Forever which is going to be done at the table I began to write I'm 53 so I go back to the 80s and stuff like that 70s to the 80s and I began to write because of the lack of roles for women of color how many ways can you say hope there's not too many ways you can say them and you know back in the 80s there was a whole thing about you know like there was the musical and all of that so again I began to write for my type not fitting in like being this like small little girl I never was and also again for other people's expectation of what it means to be black and female I'm like you it's a given that I'm black and female but in the course of the day maybe I'm listening to Jay-Z maybe I'm listening to Monteverdi or Dr. Tours maybe I'm listening to the Velvet Underground so when people try to compartmentalize this is what my beef is and again having in terms of the political I don't know whether I am in the ways that all of you are I'm hoping that my individualism does add to a collective because I'm hoping because we have to look at how you know again the good thing about groups is that you're not alone the bad things about groups is that sometimes your individualism has to be looked at too because I've also dealt with that when I wrote this play Yellow Man that deals with internal racism the majority of people have been very very very receptive and very you know they are people that glad that I wrote it there was races there was a certain amount of racism you know certain white people said I didn't know you guys you people did this and meanwhile I'm going to talk about the universalism every group of people do it you know I've heard and I grew up in a body so although racially I'm black New Yorkan is my you know my culture so like you'll hear people you know you're so political like in terms of like motherfucking Cuban motherfucking over there it's like you know what are you doing man you know I'm also a West Indian descent so you've got like the American side that was not going to Caribbean side and also you know again I'm interested in what is in fact universal so also the way black and blue boys you can be any gender you can do it it could be single character multi character so if there is a political within that I suppose that's it because if we're going to talk about the unification of fear these are the boundaries that have to be broken down our perceptions of who we think the other one is so thank you Rida and one more responder here please introduce yourself hi I'm Tora I'm Jekia Zaryan I'm the founding artistic director of Productions so we were a company focused on the Middle East and we began talking about a Middle Eastern American voice when there was no Middle Eastern American voice to be promoted I guess and 15 years later we are proud to have built a community of playwrights actors designers writers and all sorts of and allies and allies and personally for me theater has been like so many of all of us a way to survive really and a way to reject sort of a tendency to reduce us to identity or ethnicity or gender theater has been a way to talk about the complexity of the individual and the complexity of the human being and activism for me is kind of a way to fall in love really it's less of a rejection and less of being angry and more a way to bring people together around the table and have a meal and find joy in the fact that we are alive so theater serves all of those needs and creates opportunities for getting together and enjoying life and addressing the things that don't work in life so here we are hey good very quickly I'd just like to go around the room and just say your name two or three words literally putting yourself into social space just so we know who's here with us you can start way back there yeah nice mouth please yeah I think three words Asian religions and culture theater UC Berkeley 60 to 70 I mean not 65 Center for Study Long Society job and writing plays that have to do with the books not getting too many words writing plays two plays that have been written and produced and your name is Meg okay moving on thank you hi my name's Kaitlin dramaturg fellow and emerging advertising I didn't do the intro but hey I'm Erin Merrant director director producer et cetera I'm Nicole newbie intern from Nation I'm Sonia I'm an intern at Playwrights Foundation a spine playwright singer actress love television film theater music dance art I'm Chanel also an intern future playwright lawyer performer mover shaker I'm Katie thank you I'm with the kind of Raymond Foundation I'm a program associate for the arts I'm an arts administrator and we find dance in theater I'm Jerry Rosenblum past filmmaker present virtual world my name's Johnny Mercer I'm a company member with Shotgun players in Berkeley just thrilled to see all you guys be in this space today and be part of this conversation Shotgun certainly involves itself with the stories within its own community we're developing another piece right now called Berkeley Stories Berkeley Play our friend Danny Wolf is writing right now so I just wanted to come here and represent and be part of this conversation today thank you my name's Eric I'm from San Jose a year or two ago at a similar symposium it's just just one or two works oh okay a website anyway I have a website and WordPress through one of these symposiums I think that was a great idea thank you hi I'm Bernard Vosh I teach I'm a clown I'm an actor I teach voice work to actors and moving artists and dancers do fight choreography hi I'm Nicole I'm a writer and filmmaker and I'm really interested in using film as a way to adjust like political themes so I'm very excited to be part of this conversation Regina's need at a theater go to a subscriber here former past board member people's theater coalition and a life of water and everybody was rough back then hi I'm Wayne Starr I'm a visual artist and a theater educator I'm Andrea I'm a playwright and director and educator I'm Daniela Mayock I'm a student I'm a potential play writer potential screenwriter and also a student of Dales right now Chaz Belov pre-emerged playwright volunteer for the playwright center of San Francisco hi Gawanna I used to act with Javier and Margo I was a student I'm a writer I'm Smiley I'm a poet emerging playwright emerging theologian at some point I recently got my B.A. in performing arts and social justice from USF I'm the Christine and focusing on theater and social justice and social justice I'm Carol Lashoff and I've been an interventional emerging playwright for 35 years and I'm also a parent and an educator I'm Erica but I'm Israeli I'm Colleen Egan I'm an actor and I'm an associate artist and board member of the Gritty City Revealtory Youth Theater I'm Erin Kantea I'm a playwright and a mirror and a mother of twins I was with Benedict I'm a writer and an actor and was produced by Golden Fred recently Hi my name is Michael Volgar I'm a recent Del Arte graduate working with Bond Street Theater and Found About Borders and Del Arte I'm Jamie Talley I used to do program management for Youth Radio I performed for five years with the Cocoa List Game I taught for a few years I spent my master's in arts education and working with Jean I'm sorry I'm an organization with applied theater I'm used to it Jean Johnstone mom applied theater action openings I'm Regan I'm a high school special education teacher and I'm working with Jean on the applied theater and kind of just schools I'm Anne Helen Anne a hundred years ago I worked with the mind troop then a dozen years ago I went back to acting my first kid who's in the teatric Compasino and since then I've worked with anybody who'll lie on me Hi I'm Ginny Reid and I'm a director drum target educator and generally an appreciator Charmin Hillfinger I'm a playwright and producer and founder of Boots Rep Theater Foundation Tatiana Chatterjee fight choreographer and martial artist improviser playback theater artist educator with youth around military anti-military equipment also a lot of Bengali theater physical abstract forms Rich I'm a retired teacher playwright poet and some of you may remember years ago Red Balloon Theater Company which I was born in and four of us are members of the Fleshting group are from Tahila synagogue in Oakland playwright triple threat I'm adding directing to that although I have directed I want to get serious about it and here's our project manager I'm Norma Smith we're working on an intergenerational and cross-community collection of family immigration stories which we're going to turn into performance pieces multi-genre working out of Oakland it's an East Bay project we're working with a lot of different organizations that do immigration justice and storytelling my name is Rachelle Towers all of that and still looking to make revolution through stories my name is Barry McElroy I was a bilingual and ESL teacher in East Sites and Hedze I am into transformative arts and integration curriculum design I am a poet and a playwright and a writer for change Michael Austin audience member has been to Ryan Nicole David Oler I'm an intern at the Playwrights Foundation doing the Twitter stuff treat that everybody both are Garcia videographer filmmaker and go-see Food Bell Station in theaters nationwide today yes okay, yeah everybody alright that was really moving I think the panel is over I'm going to introduce the leader Brown to start us off do you want me to get people at the table and explain how we're going to do this well, what I wanted to do is talk a little bit about how this why don't you come up here and explain why okay, alright so I wanted to share a little bit about how theater in a messed up world came about as a good spot so as I mentioned I write this column for the theater Bay Area magazine and I also teach a goal setting workshop for TBA's Atlus program and this latest one that I taught the Atlus program provides training and then offers an opportunity to apply for grants for actors and now they've added directors into Playwrights but starting off with this amazing thing for actors to kind of get themselves their act together so to speak and so I'm teaching this goal setting workshop I've been teaching for some time now for four years for them and I take them through this process and this young artist who I guess she was you know, 20 something and she started to have you know, a reaction to doing the process the goal setting process and she just said I'm stuck because there's so many things wrong in the world and I'm not really sure that the past I'm on as an artist as an actor makes any sense at all right now the ice caps are melting Australia's on fire you know like what am I does this even make sense for me to be sitting here making a plan of how to proceed as an actor is that really the best thing that I could be doing with my time and energy as a human being at this point in human history okay which is what she's asking me and I I feel happy enough with my answer in the moment but I kept thinking about that and I decided you know, a lot of people are probably having this question right now and so I ended up writing to her and asking her to say a little bit more and to respond to her in the magazine in my column and so just the process of thinking about this you know, because there are a lot of things going on that are that are messed up and really so I just in a nutshell my response to her and you know anybody about this is that I think it doesn't really matter that much whether you're an actor or a firefighter in Australia or whatever I think it's important to be doing what you're passionate about if you can be happier and more fulfilled doing something else the stock answer to anybody considering acting if you can be happy doing anything else do that because this is really hard but if this is the thing that you really want to be doing that you're passionate about doing then give it all you've got but to focus on well what is the work I'm doing as an artist because certainly you can be doing work that feels pointless you know and hurtless and overly fluffy if you're tuned into the polar ice caps right or you can decide to utilize your talents to talk about that and to help help address those those issues I don't think that there is a more powerful way that you can address these things and there's all kinds of examples of that you know and so sitting right here exactly so so I I don't think the student who asked me that question is here today but this I sort of see this as an opportunity for sort of a 3D answer to that question you know what is the what is the point or value of doing theater in a messed up world and so this is pretty amazing collection of people who have many of whom have dedicated their whole lives their life's work to doing just to doing just that and then people who are embarking on that and so you know the point is not to convince someone to be or do anything in particular but to just decide to get clear within themselves who they are what their mission is and the vehicle that they want to you know execute that that mission so to start off we have these two parts we had this idea of talking with Amy and Aaron about this event and generating names of people that would be really cool to talk to about and you guys showed up and so so let's start with the first round table or yeah so I'm going to be calling people to sit at the table and Delina's going to ask you a question and each of them will respond to the question you can use the microphone since you're going to have not be facing people and you just pass it around but you don't have to but it's there if you need it or want it and but the point is to talk to each other and for us to listen attentively and actively and then you can ask questions of one of the people at the table in between we're not going to take too many questions so that we can move on and then whoever's at the table will sit down and another group will come up and Delina will probably ask another question to move the conversation along in this for this section yeah okay so I'm going to have Richard Montoya Drange Margo Kinan Lindsay Joan Javier Kimberg is that it? ready? yeah they're going to be listening they're going to be listening they're going to be listening they're going to be listening trying to jump the slide don't worry about it this is the way I would like it to be let's see how this goes you can use the mic and if you're so uncomfortable just move around the side ok move around the side okay alright bring your jacket so the first chunk of this about you as individuals, and some of you have already expressed some of this, but maybe you can go a little bit further into it. How you as an individual came to be an artist that we have identified as political artists. You know, so you could talk about whether or not you agree with that identification. But you're here because we see that. So how did you come about that as a person? Was it something that you knew as a young person that this was what you were going to do? Were you going to do political work or social justice kind of in the inflected work? Or is it something that over time you just discovered that that's what you were going to do or leaving for or whatever? Like maybe a little bit about that. And maybe you could also talk about what you consider political. So I'm going to just say this one thing. I believe that all theater is political. I believe that all art is political. Whether the person who's creating is necessarily intending that or not. The effect is because either you're questioning or challenging the status quo or you are upholding the status quo in some way with your work. That's my view. So therefore whether you think you're a political artist or not, I think you are. But upholding or challenging the status quo is the thing. So anyway, so who would like to start? How did you find yourself being the person, the artist that you are right now? I think we should pass that over. And I should pass that over. So we can really hear it. You guys can talk to each other. So talk to each other. We're just a little chat. We're just a little chat. Okay, loud. Can you hear me? I grew up thinking, I mean I always assumed that I had to do something to make the world better. From a small time. But I also liked to write. And it never occurred to me that those two things could go together. So I thought to be a writer, you had to have really interesting, fascinating experiences. And I tried to have them. But I never finished anything. I just start poems and I never finished them. And I started stories and I never finished them. Then one day in the, and I thought, okay, I guess I'm not going to be a writer. I'll get my masters in social work. And then I got a chance to adapt the script to be a satire on the war in Vietnam. That was in 1967. And then I found out that I could put my whole self, everything, that I felt. And knew into writing plays, into speaking to people that way. And just yelling it. Really. And expressing rage in a very indirect way. That was it. I go next. I grew up in Detroit. And I grew up in a musical family. My stepfather was an arranger and producer for the Supreme. So I grew up in a low-town world. So I was always a performer. But I also was very, I don't want to, I guess, stubborn and upset about things not going the way I thought they should go. And I became very fond of Angela Davis at a very young age. And growing up in Detroit, you know, I grew up in the black mecca. I mean, again, where my family was, where I grew up. But I found that whenever I went outside of that world, there was all this racial injustice. And I went to a gymnastic camp once in Adrian, Michigan. And I always grew up with the sense that I could be whatever I wanted to be. As my mother told me. So that was the truth. And so I just thought I could go anywhere, do anything. And I would be accepted because I was a good person. And I was good at whatever I was trying to do. And I went to this camp. And these people started treating me very poorly. And I was like, I don't understand. What's the problem? I was talking about my hair. Why couldn't I take the... And I was very young. I think I was like eight or nine. Why couldn't I swim in the pool when I was winning camp? And then the actual counselors were abusing me. Like, they wouldn't make fun. You know, when you're doing gymnastics, you got to run. And someone has to help you, spot you. And they would let me fall. And they would laugh. And I was like, what the hell why is this? Then there was another counselor. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I was the only black girl there out of 500. So finally the counselor took me under her wing. And I could no longer be with anyone else. And she taught me everything. And eventually I realized, okay, I see what's going on here. And I decided to say, well, you know what? If you can't accept me for who I am, I'm going to really be who I am. So I braided my hair. I just became the black movie queen. And everyone started following me. How did you do that to your hair? What is your life about it? And so I was like, well, I actually don't feel like telling you about it. It's a very wonderful, beautiful thing. So right away I realized the power that I had as an African American. And I just embraced that for the rest of my life. And again, I was always performing because I was singing with the Supreme. I was writing. I had a talk show in my bedroom. So I was always doing both. And so the more I got into theater, I started finding that vehicle to express that Angela Davis. Finding that vehicle to express the beauty of being this wonderful, talented, beautiful African American woman. And trying to find opportunities to continue to show that. And a lot of that I did and continue to do on stage. And it may not even be a part that's geared to an African American. But whatever I am, I'm that 100% economy. And that's what I bring to the table. And so I'm constantly trying to find ways to let other people know that that's a good thing. And that everyone should be able to bring 100% of themselves to the table at all times. So I'll jump in. Again, I alluded to, I grew up as a child of the theater. My first memories are actually traveling with the Delta Campesino troop. And the reason why I know this is because I had an accident when I was three years old. I fell on a touring bus with my head open. This was in a little hamlet outside of Paris at an international communist school. There was no hospitals nearby. And so I was carried into this little emergency tent. And they had no anesthesia. And the doctors stitched three stitches into my head. And my parents cute after this incident. For me, it was the blessing because that's my first memory of being on the road with this traveling troop. Being held and embraced. And everybody rushing to take care of me in that morning. So I saw the beauty of humanity as my first memory. It was not just about my parents, but it was also about all the people who were working in that morning to take care of me. I grew up in a theater company that has been blessed, blessed experiences. I got to see Richard and Montoya culture class perform as a young boy. I've got to see all the San Francisco mind troop players over the years. I am a blessed individual when it comes to practicing political theater. And so it's my responsibility as an individual to feed that community from here on out. I see myself as a keeper of community traditions. Well, in this case, this is my community. Right here, right now. Part of the principles that the theater camp has seen known still in my generation, the first generation that was able to grow up with it, was one of my concepts called inlaquech. Inlaquech means you are my other. It is the principle, the fact that we all have to cultivate the sense of being pure reflections of each other to recognize that we all have that same sacred humanity in each of us. But part of that is the idea of instilling the practice of solidarity in everything you do. This term inlaquech appeared as part of the work of the sapatistas in the 1990s. It is now part of the popular discourse because it was one of the teaching practices in Tucson. The Mexican-American studies curriculum that has been banned with other people's work. So it is a notion that we all must cultivate. And so I just want to say that I appreciate being here in this particular space. This is very beautiful. So one of the things that really resonated with me that you said, Melina, was that you have to do what you're most passionate about. And I feel like I really do theater with youth for totally selfish reasons. And I think that's actually really good. It's just the most fun, wonderful, joyous part of work that I've ever had. I taught at three different schools and then ended up actually with my first son, who's four years old now, was planning to go half-time and still do after-school theater production. And sort of at the eleventh hour, this charter school wouldn't give me a prep time job. And I actually found the school and it was really crushing. And so it was like combat full-time with a five-week-old baby or no job. And so then I took a year off and sort of figured out where do I want to go from here and tried to do a lot of brainstorming about what I loved best. And it was really the ensemble, is the after-school ensemble work that just gave me this pure joy and where I felt like it was the best work that I did and that the kids I was working with got so much out of it and so did I. And I think that one of the reasons that it's really successful is that the youth that I work with see that I'm having such a great time and working so hard and that it's not this like, I'm in charge, well, I am. But there isn't that division. We're all, I'm down on the floor just as much as anyone is. We're all bruised and sweaty and in it together. And I think one of the things that's really important to me is sort of wrangling kids that don't look good on paper but have all kinds of fire and intellectual curiosity. And for whatever reason, nothing has hooked them. I tend to be one of those teachers that hooks those kids because I'm like, oh, I see you and you're not getting away with this, like, failing thing. It's not happening. But unfortunately, you know, if like at Oakland Tech, where I've been working, you look at the honors and the AP classes and it's like horrifyingly segregated. And I was always one of those teachers that would have, instantly in the first week of school, pull all these kids up into honors. I'm like, oh, no, no, no, you're a reader. This is, well, I failed English last year. I don't care, you're not going to fail this year because I can tell you have it. And so a lot of the kids I end up working with are the kids who haven't been successful academically. But they should be, you know, but they're not. But then they're just rocking Shakespeare. And you're like, okay, so I feel like it's really important. I try and find ways to support them academically so they can get grades, so they can pass classes and graduate because that's all important too. But I think that giving people intellectual pursuits and stimulating their intellectual curiosity with real rigorous, challenging, relevant, exciting work is what I love so much. And then we also just have so much fun doing combat and physical theater and all that kind of thing. And like I said, I grew up being lucky enough going to Oregon Shakespeare Festival every summer, since I was like in utero. My family would go with a group of people and we'd stay in the dorms there and just go see all the plays. And it's been really incredible. I'm actually going, like, three days for my, what, 37th year. And so... So how did you know that you were going to... How did you get into... I was... Shakespeare worked in my classroom and Mission High School had no drama because there was no money. And so I was like, okay, well, let's start an after-school drama program and then I had a good friend who did theater and sort of was a good mentor for me, Gina Gromby, who did a little teamwork here in the city of New York now. We did the tempest with nine people and it was awesome. And people were blown away. I think, I don't know, I think... I just loved it. So I was like, okay, let's do more of this. And then when grading papers for five English classes and doing theater production was too much, I tried to move more into the drama world and pass into it. Just straight up teaching. But I don't know, I just think that it's so stimulating. It's just what I'd rather do than anything else. So I'll put it below what everybody said. And I mean, it's interesting in the U.S. how we separate politics, as if it's this sort of entity that is this separate thing. I've never had that luxury. I was born in Iran. I was sort of pushed into the U.S. when I was 14 as a result of a political act of the people of the country. And my family was displaced and we had to start from zero. And this idea of somebody saying, I'm not political or politics doesn't affect me just makes no sense to me. So I've never had that luxury of separating those things. Separating politics from my life. It's always been a part of our family life. And as I've grown older and sort of interacted with more people, what has been beautiful about theater is how it gives you a space to celebrate, like Joan said, all of who you are. In my case, even in Iran, I was kind of an outsider because I come from a mixed background family of Muslim and Christian. And coming here, that was just too complicated to explain to people. And then growing up in the U.S., trying to sort of work as a professional theater artist, going to auditions or wanting to pursue graduate school, I was actually told that I would never be cast in a leading role in professional American theater because of my accent, because of my looks and probably also because of my preference of the pieces that I was drawing. So that sort of really limited the options I had in terms of theater. I was, in a way, forced to write my own material in a way forced to direct and produce material that I like. And sort of by default, I created a space for other artists like me who hadn't, to that point, found a space where they could be all of who they are. And they could express stories of their lives and their perspectives in a space where audiences were interested and able to sort of bring those stories to life. So that's sort of how my work came about. I can't wait anymore. You know, a political act, for me, can be potentially an act of love, you know. And I see, without being too grandiose, I see the more political that my work is. It's an act of love of which there's a price to pay. There's been a, even though we've been fortunate to have my plays produced, there's still an institutional isolation that comes on that battles me. And there was an East L.A. playwright at Surround Table the other day on the weekend, and I was like, how many times can this group meet and not invite culture clash to this table? What is going on, you know? That's another matter, and I'm not here to settle that score whatsoever, but I just know that in this messed up, increasingly ADD world, that I've kept my hand on a tiller and where it's steering and where I might even differ and separate from the culture clash boys is that I would be methodical about the work. And that's so when Kenan's dad had us stopped by the Fresno store from 67, and the vets at Emma's were paid as back there carving Che Guevara wooden medallions, and six Montoya kids sit down with my mom and my dad, and my mom from Fowler, California that when that that woman sat down to do my dad's poem at Louis, it was nothing but it's not an act of love, you know? The most brilliant version of my dad's poem, undoubtedly etched in my, you know, I think at that moment we're the same age. But it's important, you know, that at that age, that young seeing the the beauty of diatom, of live music, celebrating the most vilified member, members of our community, my dad grew up watching, my dad grew up kind of shoe-shining the pachupos, you know, and talk about the vilification of that set. Like Joan said earlier about, perhaps, I don't think my satirical things have mellowed, but I'm after new things in my work. It is proudly and apologetically political, but I'm also restless to find a grace and a violent moral to find ritual and ceremony in the work. I did that with the river at Campos Sante. It came up again in American Night called Shades, which started at Oregon Shades, went to Yale, blah, blah, blah. When August Wilson came to see Chavez-Rain for the second time, he was writing and dying. He was writing Jim of the Ocean at the Tateburg, and when he came the second night, that was transformation and I gave myself permission at that set to write in cycles. The immigration story couldn't be told in a series. The Chicano like Mr. Wilson's Pittsburgh, it just cannot be told. In one fucking night of theater it's gotta be a cycle of nine plays and what wonderful permission he gave himself to do that. And so sometimes when I come and someone asks me what brings you to San Francisco today? I was like, this Amy, you know these folks were saying you just got shot. I'm exposing my heart. Make her watch the video. She's in the other room watching your rhythm. That isolation that I speak of is why I was willing gratefully to come here today to share this communion because as I see my work grow and anxious to get back with the culture clash boys we talk about hanging up our red noses for a little while and Herbert's on a path and Ricky's on a path and we'll come back together for that 30 year mark because we just promised each other there's pieces that we have to hit before we sunset before we let it go we've made a promise to look at talk about the early years of Chicano art very much like in a Mark Rothko kind of way a progressive Jewish artist we're doing very much very similar to the arguments and the philosophical differences in the Chicano world. When water and power became a film based on the play which I was lucky enough to direct and it's finally ready I realized that what was happening in my film was yes a specific East L.A. Chicano story endeavoring to reach for universal things and I realized then that in my specificity was my university and so every freaking film Latino film conference I go to don't be Chicano tell you don't be specific don't box yourself you should be so lucky to get boxed at least for one time you'll have a gig being boxed and I realized that my composer Ginger Shankar the granddaughter of Ravi Shankar the first cousin of Nora Jones I'm not just name dropping but Ravi passed away during our final sound mix and Ginger was devastated and we met at the Sundance Labs and so the best tabla players in the world came to send Ravi off she gathered all the tabla players in our studio and recorded them for water and power and I realized that those tabla drums mixed with the Aztec drum that was already in the movie with rage against the machine with young Chicano and Chicano bands that those drums were haunting the colonial ghosts of the urban continent and that somehow the work felt elevated a little bit so that it was political yes I was making a political statement about Hispanic corruption in a place like Los Angeles the deeper the deeper elixir the deeper stuff that shakes me every time I see that movie is just that the colonial ghosts that are alive and well in the prisons youth detention institutions the Dow Jones line that's the prison industry complex privatization of prisons the money that's made schools education so my work will always be rooted in the political and like Joan I believe that the satirical allows that window because for example the border is so polarized taking back the town hall that threw a satirical piece like American Night even though Sean San Jose found new depths for the sexual protagonist that character defended which is exactly what I wanted and was able to find out like Mr. Moscone and a whole host of designers and folks that train is going the satirical train I don't want to get fucked with any more television but there's new executives now they're like okay we're not going to mess with you what do you want to do we have a highly satirical news magazine set right on the border and I want to go ski shooting with Dick Cheney and I want to sit down with our pilot and I want to get chased out of town hall meetings I want to sit down with a cartel I want to do all these things and find the executives and the people that allow us to do that because while Culture Clash is one of the book of plays that is banned currently on the list I think Attorney General of Arizona I find that in the television medium of Latvia we're the only ones not commenting on the border John Stewart is Steve Corellis Colbert and Bill Maher are doing fantastic jobs and perhaps because we don't have the access but I find that and even playwrights I talk to and it's funny to be fanciful and you know you want to write in a classical structure that's great but you know people are dying in the Sonoran desert on the American side this year the undocumented queer kids to be undocumented and queer these things are paramount and we'll have to work and write in cycles to get at the bottom and I'm re-energized every time today and I'm sad not to see Robessa Jones but maybe she'll pop up to be with my peers and my teachers and the youngsters coming up is invigorating for a old war or something alright so I don't want to give myself too much credit I didn't choose to be political I was chose to be political the year I was born Sugar Hill game came out Star Welfare Regonomics Fruity Rick so cocaine was being piped in LA to the Bay Area and I grew up in this place in San Francisco called the Steady New Island Project which when I think of a project I think of an experiment so I realized at a young age I was being experimented on and I didn't want to be a lab rat and someone was telling me that this is a trap from very early age I knew this was not cool what this landscape is I didn't know how to say you know you said Detroit Marvin Gaye was very prevalent in my psyche makes me want to holler I didn't know how loud I'd be hollering but at a certain point I'd get a lot more bass in my tone about these issues growing up you know before I I mean I kind of acted in the fourth grade I was literally a gravitational pull coordinate toward acting nothing in my own doing so I gave myself no credit on that 15 I became the first student ever on the San Francisco Board of Education and I was going to be some little stupid kid on there just oh yeah cool you can cut all the funding first that's great and I was going to say anything cause hell straight up like no I ain't going to be a little working boy ever and then I figured at 18 wow if I ever write a book it would not be either or and both because they both came together like the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich the world could ever offer I didn't realize that I had to isolate my passions about what was going on my neighborhood and other people's neighborhood versus direct action and so also with being chosen to be quote-unquote political there's a certain point where I'm at now it's like I want to heal people from political wounds because I feel you can be political all you want to say but at the end of the day there needs to be some neosporin of a new spirit someone got help to either take top off or cut off a little part so you can squirt but at some point there needs to be some healing from this and so that's where I'm at now and at 18 I met at Bravo which again has some of the best just assassins come over here and teach me one of them was Ellen, Sebastian Chang she said straight up huh she said are you willing to die for what you have to say I said whoa I'm gonna die in the pathway I might as well right I'm gonna take a stance for what is being spewed out so I said fine yeah yeah yeah that's alright and so my theater company came right before Bush's election so there's already a good like strike right I had all my great material for 10 years coming to me straight up and so I remember it's 2003 at Union Square and so they asked me and my crew to come up and perform I'm like yeah we're gonna rock this $20,000 I get up on stage and at the Macy's but I'm looking up I see three snipers with a guns point at me and I was like the first time I had a gun point at me but from that range is that high power I was like these guys even got a sneeze and it was at that point when I looked at them and I said bring it at that point I realized not only am I going to die for what I have to say but I'm going to die for the people I need to say it to straight up so and theater was just a platform you know they said a stage is to entertain and a platform is to infuse I mean to influence I felt like alright well let's raise the stage up then let's make it both you know what I mean like let's use it to influence people and actually that was okay you know performing with the snipers I mean I remember Ellie used to send us to go perform at dope spots when people were selling drugs get their attention they got guns too and there would be a lot less you know timid about you interfering in their process but I remember when we go there on third we just spit just on our heart convincingly and I remember transactions would just start going slower pretty soon they started going like this pretty soon the by language was like this and pretty soon after that it's like we performing that next and right there I realized that's a gusto wow 21st century let's go you know what I mean like for me Jesus is demographic though the downtrodden the pimps the prostitutes that's for me I thought I was called to go after you said play with love absolutely love no one was coming to them bringing theater to a by the way the same people I was trying to operate stew 40 years ago couldn't go see it the actual their great grandparents said no you can't come in because of your tone and so I said you know what man I'm not waiting to bring the message to people I'm bringing it to them and then they'll come back I want to be fishers of men and women and get them out of where they are and bring them to the stage they're the young gang bangers everybody you know what I mean like it was a totally hijacked my whole intent of just thinking okay I'm just going to perform I'm going to express why I feel and I'm going to go home no that doesn't happen people start bringing you the gum clips after the show and say you made me go legal tonight okay but I need to rethink this passion and the compaction which is compassion mixed with action equals political movement and from that developing relationships that has caused movement it's just one little scene cause political stirs people seeing a bunch of young kids in front of city hall, in front of police stations in front of places mortuaries even just performing people like I want to do that where do you get this fearlessness from show me, show me because no one is coming what I'm saying and promoting a sense of fearlessness against the suppressor system so hey I'm very thankful and blessed to even be considered amongst the men in Corbin Hall to do this I stand on the shoulders of Brittany straight up, last post too make sure you tweet compaction compaction equals action that's right y'all are some amazing people and so everything that everybody has said about the work that you guys are doing is so inspiring to me I have a lot of questions I have a lot of questions I feel like in my life and in my life as whatever theater artist I might be I have more questions than answers the question that started this whole discussion about shouldn't I just go get a nursing degree and go with doctor without orders and go do some work some real work for whatever that is I still struggle with that I still struggle with the use of what I do and I have a lot of questions that I think I mean just little things jumping out what you were saying about the love and what you were saying about being able to see those kids that are often the ones that need the most there is something about that the love surrounding everything and this desperate desperate need that people have to see and be seen and the power of that the power of visibility that idea was kind of at the heart of what drove the writing of the play that I have here at the festival which again I don't really know if I can call myself a political writer because I don't think I started from a place of consciously trying to agitate change of what I do it comes more for me from a personal place of not being able to sleep on this you know that it is something that I and I have in my life because of where I grew up as a child I grew up in Idaho and was very, most of the time, the only Asian so your experience was very familiar to me and the sense of being somewhat invisible and there being large parts of my identity that were invisible for everybody and for me for a good portion of my life and the sense of me to reclaim that and make it visible in some way has to do with what motivates my work and for now that's kind of enough to keep me going I'm not sure exactly what's going to happen with that, it's going to progress but it is especially with this play that I have here it was about something happening that I could see because I was Googling and researching and trying to find news of it and it was nowhere and I thought this isn't invisible right now this family's loss or grief everything they're going through is invisible and it's going to just disappear and I it was one of those things that just stuck in my gut and I couldn't turn away so thank you a lot I think that you bring up the next group we're going to be here switch and I've heard things that really that I heard repeatedly with you on the first group was this idea of being able to find the space to make a space where you can be fully yourselves or bring all of yourself to the table and that is a hugely political thing to do because of the fact that we consider how the same five stories being told over and over again right and with the same people that sort of thing and what that does is it makes the viewer feel like whatever is going on for me that doesn't fit the picture that keeps being told over and over again I guess that makes me a freak or a weirdo or the fringe or not important or something but when you see someone coming and just bringing themselves fully all of it into the picture all of a sudden it's like oh that's right that is true for me or it gives somebody permission to do that and all of a sudden the status quo is upset right because that's so powerful there isn't anything more powerful than someone who is completely willing to die for what they have to say and to just stand on this is me this is who I am this is my experience and I'm not afraid of you being okay I'm not afraid of you being afraid right so that's huge powerful to do that the act of doing that so for you guys one of the things that we were wondering about is because Kendra you were talking about the impulse because that's always really fascinating what is the spark where is the impulse to act to create even when it's really hard to do even when there isn't funding to do it even when you have twins somebody say you know and you just do it anyway because what so what is the impact that you are after when you're creating the work or doing the work and I'm also wondering about who are you picturing today the person the reader or the audience member are there people that you're picturing that you're speaking to I'm just curious about that too can you talk a little bit about the impact that you're after when you're hitting your creative spark thank god I'm the first I'm sitting on the edge of my seat the whole time first I want to say I wish I got the first question I probably will inadvertently just sitting on the edge of my seat enjoying what I was hearing feeling extremely humbled by being in the room and barraged with a series of questions and I feel inept actually to answer the question around what I intend for my impact to be because frankly I still vassally between wanting to make an impact and knowing where that impact will land the theater is probably one of the most safe places to be yourself and stand on who you are and who you think you are in a moment and for the people that I want to impact they're not in the room it's not, that's not the audience that 80% of the time I'm in front of in front of a bunch of people I don't recognize a bunch of people who don't necessarily identify with me or more importantly who I don't identify with and so the space where I really know the people that I envision speaking to the space where they're what they're watching what they're listening to is extremely commercial it's not $30 tickets it's accessible because it's convenient on TV on radio and I say that with total assurance because I work with that population because I am that population maybe aging out a little bit but still a part of the population of young African American people finding their identity very much broadcast to them through Viacom and Comcast and Clear Channel and then saying this is who I am and having a really hard time a really hard time well into adulthood challenging that view of themselves and so while I find absolute freedom to stand on who I am in the moment and I say in the moment because I'm one of those people who still I think vacillates between an identity of who I think I am and what is pushed out to me on a regular basis through those mediums this space is a free space to experiment and be who I think I want to be and also not a space where I see folks who look like me who can benefit from that expression on a regular basis on as frequent a basis as when they hop in the car on the internal radio et cetera et cetera Papamali go to a party or when they go home and look on the television and whether it's BET or ABC seeing representations that are so dichotomous so polarized there's a Olivia Pope you know and then there's the video and there's nobody in between and the frequency of that messaging it makes it difficult I think for some of us who might feel a little bit different to find ourselves in the middle and so the impact question I think when I think of my audience and I think part of the reason why I'm doing hip-hop one of the larger reasons why I'm doing hip-hop is because my audience listens to hip-hop my audience is attuned to the radio is watching television my audience unfortunately is not in the theater where the freedom to be and experiment with who you be is so the audience that I envision they're glued to to could you give a question just having heard that you started by saying that you think maybe 80% of the time you're maybe not in front of the audience but you really want to in theater and I always clear like I asked this with deep respect and curiosity what keeps you doing that 80% of the time instead of putting that energy into being with the audience you want to be with because I get to find me here and then I get to cultivate me here and then I get to go back out and give it to the world the audience that I'd like to be in front of and I come back it's totally self experience theater I'm not really concerned with the audience because I know the audience isn't necessarily for me most of the time and when it is for me oh my god what a day what an opportunity to act and be but most of the time it's an entirely selfish experience to identify those parts of me hone them, cultivate them and reserve them for the moment when I get to get out on a stage where I know they'll be maybe like kids or you know, like you know kids or girls you know yeah that's why I think it's all up to them are you sure? everybody's so excited I was so excited to hear everything everyone's saying and I wish I'd gotten the last question too because it was so nice to hear so many things I can relate to so I think the impact I think we're all hoping for if I could be civil to say in different ways is to put a face to and a voice to you know human quality to people that are outside of the status quo and not in a separatist way but so that people who are in the status quo can see that and say I can relate to that maybe we're not so different after all and I think that's the impact I'm really hoping for and I wonder a lot are we preaching to the choir doing theater what is it really going to do in the bigger picture and honestly I feel there's nothing like live theater in the live interaction and all that I don't know what else I can do very well I believe in the Teddy Roosevelt quote do what you can with what you have where you are and I feel like if this is what I can do well or as well as I can I thought you know with the budget I have even if it's small with the people I have at least I'm doing something and I feel like I can't you know as long as things are so unequal I can't just sit by and do nothing so it's either do nothing or do what I can do in the way that I can do it I feel like is it right if I address the political question just briefly because I've been thinking about that a lot too and I think that I've always been a little confused negative connotation of being political and perhaps it's my background my dad was a California State Assemblyman for 12 years and I really admired him and grew up with his closest friends and colleagues at the time the most amazing people I know of Barbara Lee, Jackie Spear Cruz Guzdemonte was his chief of staff so growing up I was thinking what's wrong with the most awesome people I know are political and I want to be so much like them and so I sort of feel like if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem and you're either political or you're apathetic and or indifferent and so I feel like I kind of want to take back political maybe in the same way I want to take back the word feminism and say that they're not bad words they're empowering and I just want to say to everybody here how inspired I am and I think what I'm hearing from everybody that I can relate to is this feeling of being told as a child that you can do anything and then growing up and realizing that's not true and maybe somehow I was born into the wrong body and I think what we're all fighting for on some level is being able to have give everybody the freedom or even the basic human rights to bring 100% of ourselves to the table as we are and have that be valued and have that and have it not be the wrong body and I think I ask myself why do this it's so hard and I feel like I can't I'm getting more but I can't live my life and not at least try to change and it won't happen in my generation but at least I can say I try so that maybe generations after me it will be different and I think that's what we're all trying to do on some level and I just really respect and admire everybody else in this room for for doing that that's all I can say I guess what I was about to say was because again I guess I might be the odd person out in a rhetorical way you're odd? because I'm not I did say and I still say that I am not directly political but I'm hoping that individualism adds to a collective because my individual experience has been a lot of the time not always a lot of the time adhering to a group at the expense of who I am no matter what that group was for instance in terms of writing they play yellow men there were a lot of people who were supportive there were a lot of people who were not supportive I had certain black people say why are you airing our dirty laundry having said that also like I said before I had certain white people say we didn't know you guys, you people did that so when one thing that's really important in all of this lack of integration means retrogression, retrogression means extinction when Richard was talking about having Ravi Shankar's child and also dealing with August August came up with the whole idea of mechanic via Eugene O'Neill I was a little black girl between Central Harlem and El Badi sitting watching Long Day's journey tonight going here is this turn of the century Irish would talk about drug addiction and alcoholism and it's right in my house and outside which was then my Mars part which is now Marcus Gardner's part August wrote that cycle because he was influenced by Eugene O'Neill Eugene O'Neill could write something saying that all guys' children got wings and the Emperor of Jones because he studied jazz and he also studied African history when Eugene O'Neill did the Harriet, the use of masks the literal translation of mask means persona he studied Japanese theater and in that theater mask persona the actor when it feels the character come that's when they reach for the mask and they put it on their faces the mask has to speak to them that also extends itself into the theater of the aspect it also extends itself to theater of the actor so my whole my experience is theatrically in certain ways very similar but in other ways as black and female you have to write a certain way you have to write for the group and I'm saying I need to speak to people not for people who is in that room watching Eugene O'Neill totally understood because he spoke to me he didn't try to speak to me when you see a play say like Ozaki was doing with for color girls many people responded to that all this is worth many people respond because they have storytellers beginning middle end story conflict resolution and having the language the language and a further imagination and using the fact that it's diverse and the lack of diversity will cause extinction is the thing that's at hand so again like I said earlier I might be listening to the masks I might be reading you know one of my boys because I'm going to be reading poets as well and he and I have talked about this and he said you know everybody wants Borico Borico and he says you know one of my favorite books there is Paris Spleen I said people need to see that a Latin writer can also it's not mutually exclusive for you to love Baudelaire for you to love Paris so the expectation for me is to write a certain way I wrote a play about an Irish family and people were looking me like I'm out of my mind I said but white people are good about people's color so you know what's up with that and also you know so again it's like it has to be diverse in New York I mean I still live in New York you know and around the country what's happening is this is people said how many black plays have we had how many Asian plays have we had opposed to how many good plays have we had and with that becomes the institutionalized bias to write a certain way and unfortunately we're having certain rules again not everyone is that people take on the very bias that's been done on to them and they perpetuate and that's the legacy of what happens with race and bias oh you're not black if you like this or you're not Latin if you like this you're not Asian if you like this you have to write this you have to rep us when I did black and blue boys last year because if like I said it's about all men that have been abused and someone said why didn't you write that I said well first of all I mean again maybe I am well I don't know I said but people don't look at men as being abused they look at them as abusers and I said we don't have a place for men to talk about their feelings and what's happened with them and like I said I wrote it where it can be done with men woman anybody of any age race gender whatever it is because it happens to all people one of the molesters in fact is a woman because we're just beginning to really look at women as being molesters because there's something hypocritical that happens you know when you have an older man say in a young girl we call that molestation if you have an older woman in a young boy that gets called initiation it becomes a life of passage so one woman said she said Dale are you a feminist excuse my leg is for those of you that don't give eye and ear I said don't fuck with me I said I'm a humanist and that includes feminism I said what you're talking about is convenient feminism I said because they're all bad female people right so again and it was another guy who said to me he says Dale here a white a white upper middle class audience this is in Berkeley and I said again do not fuck with me because I see where this is going you're saying that only people of color or poor people or what have you do this I said this is universal I said you know I'm playing men of all of every spectrum from every socioeconomic group so again this is what my problem or not problem but some of the stuff that I dealt with in terms of group and again not every group does that but I kind of like have to be the individual in a weird sort of way if that makes any sense and I'm sorry if I sound peachy you may have to reach no man you're talking about our skill set not being outpaced by our political ambitions we have to do right totally totally inspired um irish drop you know oh my god that's the black family yeah yeah sure yeah well just what I came I was thinking of a phrase that you know Ray finds mother whatever was a wonderful writer called jennifer lash and she was talking about the arts right but she came up with this thing that I wish I wrote she said artists like the saints are the receivers their job is to summon every emotion every skill to remain skinlessly alert in order to as speak gospel says continuously find okay um attention and I'll speak from the point of view as a director so when I was younger I was really troubled by the fact that all the examples of directing that I had around me involved vision of the big leagues directors would have this vision this incredible artistic vision that would sort of pose and there were people and they would manifest their vision and that never worked for me and so I I love plays and I love artists and I love being with people and collaborating but I never had vision so I figured well I'm going to kick me out but I persisted even though I had no vision I persisted in my study but then I realized and it took me a long time to figure it out that actually the intention is much more powerful and so I can think of three projects in particular in my life where I've had this very particular intention and the project unfolded exactly the way that I imagined it which is really strange because that never happens in arts but especially in theater because there's so many factors and I won't tell you a lot about all of them but one was something called the 9-1-1 project which we produced in San Francisco December 2001 and it came out of a group that was meeting to talk about art and we had a meeting the Friday after September 11th and we were going to talk about auditioning or something and we didn't and then sort of spontaneously we didn't say we need to do something we need to make something we're so upset when we do we got together and we created this sort of cabaret that we performed at the exit and we collected money for the global I don't know, I can't remember now the global exchange and we just set out this call who wants to make art, who needs to do this and we got about 15 people who were involved and so there was a dance piece and there were some people who wrote plays and a bunch of people directed and coordinated and we appealed to the exit theater and we packed into the stage left dressing room 150 degrees in there and it was largely for the artists people came and we made some money and we gave it away but it was mostly for the artists because people needed to do something we needed the space to come together so that was the first experience I had where having this clear intention of we need to create a space where we can process what's happened and we can tell the stories that we know all the pieces of stories that nobody had stories and then the second project happened at USF in my first year I was working with seniors who were getting ready to graduate from a classical company where they were supposed to make a full length a full length work about a social justice issue after community residency and they were supposed to do all the work themselves and it's a great idea but it was a disaster and they were incredibly angry and this was my first semester as a teacher and they were just like setting the building on fire they were so pissed off and I was like trying to shut them along and trying to make the best of it and then as I talked to them I thought that one of the reasons they were so pissed off was because they were on stage in the four years they were in the program and for different students it was for different reasons there was a lot of gender complaints like we did both parts of being in America there was only one thing I'll roll over and some of them have been on stage because of the way they look that was their perception of their body type or their ethnicity and kept them on stage and so I'm sort of listening to how upset these students are and how unprepared they feel to take on this big task and I thought well this has to change we have to get these students on stage and play where I can put all the students I have in and I have to make one so I went and devised a piece and it actually was my latest it was called Dust a play about the Ethanol that's the kind of ensemble of 12 it was about who sort of took Eve, the figure of Eve through this journey it was crazy, it was wild and tore the set down in the middle of the show and it was amazing so all these student artists Spanish, actually a transfer student, she got to speak in Spanish because she didn't know if there was an English skill so we had this really amazing mix of students on stage there was an amazing piece and the audience came up and wow that was awesome like wow, it was like okay it turned out exactly the way I thought it would even though it was a devised piece so it was two and the third one was two years ago directed and produced by the local playwright Elizabeth Yellen's production of Connors Point which is a play about homeless living on the streets in San Francisco and she wrote this play and we shopped it around and nobody picked it up I thought it was an amazing play we did a reading in front of a group of folks for the National Association of Mental Health and they were beating the doors down like that yes this is our experience but nobody wanted to do so so we said okay we'll do it ourselves but if we're going to do it ourselves and we're going to do all of that work we may as well find the audience who really needs to hear this play and so we started looking for community space for a really long journey if I had known what I was getting into I might have given up but we wound up performing the play in an actual theater in the basement of San Juan of this church in the Tenderly neighborhood and we performed it as a benefit for the Gubio project which is a nonprofit that operates the church as a home to children and we did professional quality production with professional design, professional actors and we spent three months going around the neighborhood and making connections and building community contacts and we know from our amazing audience responses that 75% of the people in the room reported an experience with mental illness and 48% reported an experience with homelessness so part of the vision of that project was to bring and we also have traditional theater doors part of the vision was to bring this mixed audience together to experience the play and particularly to bring people who said the receiving side of social services and the people who deliver them bring them together to have an experience in the play despite just working in a ridiculous thing to try to do so those are my three experiences of intention and the power of intention as an artist and how you'll do it or where you're going to get the resources that if you hold the intention of what you're trying to do of a group of people you're trying to bring together the experience you're trying to create that that can get you amazing like this A lot of thoughts that are bouncing off are inspired by what has gone on so far I'm going to try and say them in some order they may come out in order but hopefully they will in some way speak to intention and art when Amy invited me to be on this panel I was like and I looked at the rest of the people on the panel I was like why would you ask me to be on this panel and I think that I'm realizing listening to everybody that the reason is because I am in the process of shifting how I work and so I actually needed to be on this panel listening to everybody's stories and I would say that I come from what we call traditional theater background and I know everyone has a different version of that but my version of that is you write something in your solitude and your poverty and then you send it out and people you don't know read it and if they like it or if it's got few enough actors to produce they will bring you in for either a workshop or a reading or a production and in that system and I don't want to denigrate that system because I think it has a place but within that system it doesn't feel like the process starts until you get in the rehearsal room and that is sort of where it feels like the process starts and yet there's all this time spent researching and that is also so I will tell you what has happened for me recently with Intention I know that the recent shift has been that I now want my place to feel like an invitation and not a presentation and that I want the process of getting there where ever there is to be as impactful and as important to me and the people I'm talking to as the performance or whatever the opening night or closing night are sometimes the same though I found those two things to be equally important and if one has to be more important I want the process of creating it to be more important and by important I mean to reach more people or to teach me more about the world and I think the reason that happened and it's a personal reason that this thing that you just said and I'm mentioning this quote that I'm going to show on my wall now of my mother told me I could be anything I wanted to be and so therefore that was true that and I really don't like separating my writing from teaching because I think that I actually for a long time would have said my political work is my teaching but what started to happen to me in teaching is that I started realizing that by there I was working with students who didn't have that parents and the goal was to figure out how you can get them to be seen and how you can learn from them which in turn enriched my writing but also helped them find a way to a voice or you were working for people who did have that parent but something in the world told them something else between the time the parent got to them and the time they got to me and the second thing that happened was that I started writing my own so all of the things that I originally was interested in and I'm not denigrating my old work but I was definitely one of the fanciful writers I was like I've got a ghost story bring it on Gothic I love a vampire I'll do that all of those were done I was writing those a lot for the whimsical nature of it and when I started considering having kids in this world the stories that I was drawn to I mean the world started to tear apart and the news suddenly became obvious and the questions started to pile on and so what I had recently started doing is trying to figure out how anything I attach myself to will in the process of creating it instill some kind of a conversation that we all get riled up about the same thing and also comforts me so that I don't feel like I'm alone in being terrified about the world I would bring children to and the other thing I would say about the audience is that I was lucky enough to study with Oliver who is one of the greatest women I know and the greatest educators and she always used to say you need to write peace for one person you love very very much you need to start from a place of very specific love so I still buy into that but I think my new view is of what I'm trying to do now is to find more and more people to love so that I am writing for one very specific person but I'm also writing for a group of individuals that I know well enough that I feel like I can love specifically so that is how our audience is changing and is on the screen but I would just love to thank everyone for everything you said thus far and thanks to Amy for forcing me to down the panel because it is certainly influencing your on that right now I'll go hopefully this won't be too long we did so so the question of trying to have an impact on the audience also has to do as it has with a lot of people with why you started I can come from a political family I was taken to every anti-war protest you know I was born outside of Detroit but I grew up outside of Watts and so I remember the tanks coming down the streets I remember at one point my mother and us being at a big anti-war protest where my parents are dragging us through this parking lot running as fast as we can two sisters and our pet rabbit and we were dragged through we had the rabbit to prove that we were peaceful and the thing is turning to this monstrous riot and at one point my mother pointed at this white line and she pointed this white line in the distance in the night to see those those are police helmets chasing us so that was my childhood this is what you do you try to change the world because whatever you're doing and while being reasonably histrionic I wasn't thinking of myself as a theater person until I went to see Pair the original musical Pair by that time I moved to San Francisco and there's a point in Pair if you've never seen it I don't know if they do it in modern production was this going to be about community? no I know because but under all this there's a point at the end of Act 1 and this is after having been taken to all these protests and knowing cops shields down and run the point at the end of Act 1 where they're in the middle of making these incredibly political statements about dodging the draft and the war and suddenly in the Orpheum Theater the doors at the back of the both houses are kicked in and all of these cops come screaming down the aisles in full riot gear screaming and they get up on stage and they're clubbing the cast and the audience and pose end of Act 1 and it was so perfect because it was terrifying but it was the world that I knew and I was like that's what theater can do the outside world can stream in to the theater and mesh so perfectly and you can see the whole audience just was like are we committing a crime by being here you know that feeling of being wrong so you know so I got exposed to that I had a chance to see how much it could affect an audience so what I try to do when I'm writing stuff and when I teach I do teach and I always set the goal for the audience for my students they're teaching his teacher mission as a guest teacher the purpose of every play is to change the whole world anything short of that is masturbation masturbation if everybody in the world sees your play and understands it everything changes oh yeah and they would write beautiful and amazing stuff really like you were saying you know though they're writing stuff and the teachers were like I had no idea about the pressure that they're under and their vision of how the world can be and how the world should change and their sense of horror that they have of the world that we have created and the pressure upon them to change it to save it from us was brilliant and amazing and so I try to bring that sorry I'll calm down I don't drink coffee by the way that passion is what I try to bring to the stuff that I write to impact the audience to challenge them and it depends on the audience and that's a big thing depends on not just the audience but the show the stuff I've written for the Mime Troop is to try to people say you know the audience you're preaching to the convert first of all your challenge this audience all audiences for theater are self selecting it's not to you who shows up but what you can do is try to challenge the people who did show up they shouldn't be made to feel comfortable you know they've got all of their oh this is the way the world is this is the way the cast is going to be what about being part of the solution fuck no as far as I'm concerned did you thrive here you're part of the problem just that simple you're making the world the worst place there's no argument against that so you have to accept your responsibility as an audience member even in a show that you went to see because it's going to speak to you in some positive way you're still at some level are you part of the problem or not and my job for MindTrip shows is to give the audience ammunition for the arguments for social justice for economic justice you know for feminism for anti-racism for anti-colonialism and to challenge them at the same time and also another thing with political theater and again all theater is political you're either holding the status quo or challenging it another thing that's really important even if somebody is always telling you eh you're just being converted the ideas that were presented are so radical not just the MindTrip but all of us are so radical and different that it is important for the audience as a community to not feel alone to not feel isolated they sit home and they're watching television and they're going oh this is the way that all women are this is the way that Blacks are this is the way that Latinos are and that's the message that's coming at them for themselves but when they're sitting in a theater or even in a movie if they're sitting there and they're seeing something that's completely different they are validated in their revolutionary thought by the community of the audience and that is something that we cannot devalue by constantly telling each other or ourselves we've got to reach a new audience it is important to reach a new audience but at the same time we should not devalue the people who showed up to be part of a movement also so the stuff I did not for the MindTrip as you were mentioning that to not segregate ourselves as creators so when I did the stage adaptation for 1984 one of the best things every time was walking into that room when they go and here's the writer Michael Jean Sullivan and I come in and they are not expecting a Black guy they're just fucking not you know and so it's so nice to be able to come in and shake that you know and then we start talking about corporate station and all this stuff and they're just like I thought please but to have that this is a work that speaks to anyone when the play was pre-published recently and I put in there changed the cussing changed this stuff because I want the show to be done around the world but I always want it to be local you know if it takes place in this it doesn't, it's not set in London like the book it's set wherever it's taking place because it is your play it is your nation, your culture your race, whatever, your groups comment about totalitarianism and so like you said the fact that as a Black writer that was that play that I wrote because it speaks to me and my experience blowing up in a police state as I do and to try to you know help other people see that right after that, that particular show that particular show has five guys and one woman the next show I wrote is Five Women which actually is going to open next October and so because you know I didn't want to feel I felt like for one thing you know the idea of what's the spark why do you write something because I felt bad about writing a play with so many men so I wrote a play for older women it's one woman in her 40s and the rest of them are in their 50s to 80s and it's a group of leftists leftist women and it's a farce and the other thing is a lot of times we see plays about the old revolutionaries and the whole play is about them questioning their politics did we make a mistake in the 60s fuck that, no so this show is about validating them, they never question their politics now Doama is about something else the dramatic story is about something else you know and their argument is about it's fun, there's a joke in it that actually uses both Stalin and Trotsky in the punchline you know that one and so to say again this is you know we can own that experience it's not a when most people live tickets for plays are women most subscribed, subscriptions are bought by women most of the roles are for men most of the directors are men most of the playwrights who are accepted are men I mean I feel a little weird writing the old woman play and he keeps saying you should submit it to these old women theaters I'm like I can't those slots are for women playwrights you know and it doesn't matter if my play's the best play in the world I don't get to do that you know and I'm fine you know so then the next play that I'm writing now has to do with the runaway sleigh back and it takes place and it's about a an actual uprising that happened in Pennsylvania and it's about treason there's an uprising against the act with all these sleigh and they were trying to treason because they were seen as breaking taking up arms against this law is taking up arms against the constitution which is taking up arms against the country so the play is about what we as blacks have had to go through and how difficult it is even when we're standing up for our freedom for that not to be criminalized in my mind it's also about occupying it's also about any time you stand up for democracy and freedom and you're labeled a traitor and people say oh we have a system we have a way of working through this stuff you can elect your officials you can petition the government really? how that label is used now however we as citizens try to address the grievances that we have that it can be labeled as treason so I'm trying to blend these ideas into one play that hopefully the goal is always the whole change the world thing but also I'm almost done the other thing is you really want to change the audience so that after the show they stream out of the doors and overthrow corporate capitalism you want to make them into activists and that's one of the great things about this panel is how much people are talking about life and their families and their neighborhoods it's really inspiring especially in the sort of box of the make-believe theater world it's the same lame conversations there aren't about the real grievances that everyone is dealing with so we really need to pose the question it's great, it's like a great reminder to who's knowing what's really daunting about the questions too I don't know if there's like definition and language and identity that dictates a lot of these things like political perspective that you're saying because my experience in watching them is a bit political obviously that they feel it but you know coming from your writing perspective I don't think that's different and I just, I think it's it's hard to own those three words you know what are the definitions that the world gives us who tells you what your identity is how you self-identify and then language is kind of the only thing that we have even we all know that the overseer knows that while that language thing is really powerful and so that's a good reminder and it's good to hear all the different languages around this in this room here and just in terms of politics it's really hard for my writing I think to go from the I think the main thing that I like about it is that we're just trying to do so I agree, it's like just a really human face I think everyone has said that to a certain degree I mean the thing about the world is so crazy that it swirls around us and it really is really fucked up and then you hear people hear your pieces especially when you spit your solo pieces with the world that's around you and you want to sing one return especially when he does poems in the culture class pieces or if you've seen Jessica and how you're doing your thing or Roger Gambier Smith you get this sense that you're in the world even though you're in the brain because you feel the world spinning around you that's what I feel like a lot of times and I think in terms of impact it's really hard to say that I can make an impact because the things that are really really if you know you make me write it in a grant usually when you have to do it like what's your shit about you know the two reasons outside of that that you would do it you know like we're living through two epidemics in this world in Haiti and I guess I think about it every day of my life and I don't know what impact that would make other than I have to respond to that or you have to see it like I think that we're in some ways in this communion world that we do in performance and language like this we're just trying to witness it all in some ways we're recording the thing you know in history you're going to look back especially like in the 1980s and they're going to be like this is fucked man they fucked all these people and then like how do you how do you make an impact against that and then like how do you make a how do you make a peace that does that you can't well let's go backwards you can't clean blood but you can I guess live in a room and you think about it and like who said I think you said you know like in three or four generations maybe we'll know maybe we'll have an impact maybe I'll have an impact what we think about it now or we don't have a stupid president that is scared to say the words or we have a new way defining what rehabilitation means and so can we do that yeah I think we can do that we can change the world you're right man we can change the world it's like this you know because you have these crazy egos like for me it's just like trying to surround myself and clean onto people and these bigger ideas excuse my ego and check a little bit but then it did you know at the start of the day you thought that that big ego would be like yeah I'm gonna make the change I'm gonna change for me a lot of times it's just it's just in response how many times can you I don't know what do you got to do with death you know what I mean it's a really hard time but I'm alive my grandmother did a lot to bring our family here so shouldn't I honor that so it's a hard thing to impact things but the need part of it is really great and I think again the power of language is such an amazing thing you know and how that helps us identify ourselves also it's just like these definitions these definitions are so jazz it's so bogus and you know what I mean theater actor writer playwright drama performance center they're all outlets for identifying the world and our neighbors that's why I want to do graffiti you know what I mean I'm here but my block is here and I think we do that in other ways with language and with performance so I suppose the impact is you get everybody in the world I'm fine my best friends come to a show what's a show a play huh and so it doesn't mean like what I'm not doing is valued or they're not interested it doesn't mean that at all I think we have this really messed up not messed up we just have a long way to go to make some of these systems work better and I like to be part of the the machine that makes the membrane and the space between these definitions get closer and closer together I look at it like the block that I grew up on the neighborhood I grew up on was really really tight you know what I mean it was it's mashed up like that and that's the most beautiful thing you know like your block and I would like to make the impact I would like to make just that it reflects back and forth ways I think that's to be questioned I don't think you know I don't think this is the maybe always the best way to speak in a minute to other ways that we can do that isn't like a block have really cool way to take down you know isn't like around a dinner table cool way to do it or on the lawn or something it's something about taking back our humanity in the world I think we feel that humanity a lot more on like when you're standing on the corner you have to eventually it's going to push and it's going to make a change eventually if it don't make a change let's not get too big on ourselves is it going to make a change like when people have died to make bigger change in the kind of change that I think we're going to go along with people so can we do it? I don't know keep trying to do it because man you know I live in I'm a San Francisco native and more than now I'm just a person of the bay who took the cities from us who decided that they could have our neighborhoods who said that everywhere that you know that your mom worked and lived is suddenly a new spot and it's called something who decided all of that and why aren't we part of that and I think by talking about it and you know acting up and acting out about it we take part in that argument again too that's what I mean it is a messed up world you know stand up put microphones on put cameras on and let us all hear it and speak it it's cool to be able to know how many of us are interested in that part of it because it can be disheartening thinking that you're shouting a little bit you know that you wrote the first joint to be like I'm going to shout and thank you that's part of the reason why you do it right? if you feel you have too much courage or whatever to be the person like are you not going to look at me and listen to what I have to say because it's that important because no one has heard you before because that person's memory deserves to be served because that person's name needs to be shouted out because that city because our city things like that you know I love that story Michael's like the story of your that's the thing the story of your child that's the fear that's the thrill I would like to be part of more things that happen like that Robert Bill was great for us say your name I didn't hear it no no, my brother was the brother of Boston in the last couple of weeks a great actor Robert Bill was great for us no actually I was trying to figure out what the hell to say and that really helps me because one of the things I thought it was worth saying was like the names of people not around the table who are a part of the conversation and a lot of us stand on the shoulders of and stand aligned with and I know you mentioned Goal before he was the friend and mentor of mine for years so I think about this Goal and his relationship to this work and I was just trying to think about like so I was trying to think about the questions in this work because I really it's amazing to get to listen to people talk about their experiences and to hear your stories and where you're at and a lot of what people have shared is the when we think about theater and plays we think a lot about story I'm slightly estranged from the idea of story being the center of what theater is and needs to be I love story, I believe in story I can make shows and tell stories like going to the theater and your stories I also feel like we have been and can often be colonized by the notion that a singular narrative or even a collage narrative can be the experience that might have the impact we want around certain things and it gets to what Chung is just saying and it takes me to Boa just in this idea that personally I have become in the last batch of years of my company and on my own I don't know as interested or more interested in making spaces not where strangers come in the dark and watch something and leave but where strangers come together and my job is to build an experience where strangers have to connect with each other publicly because I actually think that this is not the instead of this is in addition to I think in addition to all the work we are talking to it is really important that we are making spaces where what theater and the arts bring to public discourse is actually leveraged at the practice of democracy which is terribly dysfunctional and practically non-existent in so many contexts where are the public spaces where we are with strangers and actually communicating and connecting and having what we want to call a dialogue or discourse or discussion or whatever where we are wrestling with stuff and we do wrestle with things internally when we watch them in front of us we are asked to sort of be wrestling within ourselves and perhaps that spills out but I don't think that's what we need as much as what we need is spaces where people who are not like to be together in space and have an experience that's what I'm personally interested in and I think about people like Augusta Bois and the question that he was always asking so when we make work especially in his about five, six years ago in the latter years it's like what we're doing dealing with nuance what's the role and intention of activist work is it to make clear protagonists and antagonists to hero and villain and make that obvious which was how he started that work in the favelas in Rio that's how he started but that's not where he wound up decades later and I think about somebody like Bob Alexander great artist who nobody in this room never heard of Bob Alexander one of the most important theater artists of like the second half of the 20th century and the reason we don't know who he is is because A, he didn't write anything and B, because he spent his time on the other side of town from where Arena stage is creating the living stage where he worked for decades with what he turned the forgotten people of Washington DC he worked with single moms he worked with folks in rehab he worked with released folks he worked with any population that wasn't going to the theater and his goal was let's make creativity available he wasn't just making place for them he was constantly making performance work with them in a space dedicated to their lives and that experience and his question especially towards the end he passed about 6 or 7 years ago maybe a little longer it was always who do you choose to work with and for and why who do you choose to work with and for and why and then I think about Ping Chong who's another friend and mentor who's been seen out here over the years and Ping's got these two strands of work Ping's got this history of like avant garde abstract stuff that he made for decades that's really beautiful and at times inaccessible but so like super moving and beautiful and then in the last 20 years he starts creating this series called undesirable elements like 55 of them around the world where he works mostly originally with immigrant communities in cities all over the world of people who are considered not welcome and then he has started simply working with populations who are other, very publicly other in the communities he interviews them, he researches with them and then they perform their stories he has created what we call a seated spoken word opera there are seven community members who have never performed before generate their stories with him in a collaborator and it was me some about 15 years ago that gets turned into a 90 minute script and they sit at microphones with a beautiful sort of aesthetic around them and they perform the script that they have worked on with them of their life and the question that he's always asking that I find fascinating is who tells their own story and what process are they invited into to participate and reveal and share their own story so I just kind of want to offer an add to the conversation that in addition to all the ways we're talking about gathering and sharing stories and making space for ourselves to be heard and making spaces to tell audiences what they need to hear the act of listening and the act of being in relation to and the act of making work with the spaces that look or feel like this some spaces don't look or feel anything like this and in practices that don't necessarily look like plays and in events that aren't necessarily deemed like a traditional performance but are performative that involve imaginative acts and expressive actions which is personally my own definition of theater a time based event that engages imaginative acts and expressive actions which might happen here for you to watch somewhere and might happen in the classroom and might happen elsewhere and might happen over three days and might happen in two hours are we stretching the boundaries of our form to work not just within the systems of distribution that we can have access to or break into but also to engage around these issues and with our fellow community members in ways that are surprising and impactful through what happens not just through what gets witnessed so that's what I think about it I think that's important actually I'm glad you said all of that oh god that's so much I'm sure everybody is that's exactly why I said in the very beginning that since we're talking theater in the traditional sense in this room I'll say I'm doing theater but I take in that vein theater where I go I'm an athlete I train people it's theatrical in the sense that they're creating their experience most importantly there's a spoken word event that I've been hosting for the last year and it has been a traditional spoken word event for seven years but there's always the audience there's people who sign up on your list and other people that come and listen and there's never been public discourse while the same time that these people are coming to listen there are these world events going on and so as of late ever since I came in I'm not taking any credit except that I am very interested in the conversation I'm very interested in the in the full creative aspect of everybody taking part in the conversation telling their story everybody grappling with the world around them not just coming to listen not just coming to watch the traditional sense of theater and so yeah just yeah I mean I even think like you know there's I think about American night a little bit which I didn't see here but I saw at Oregon Shakespeare Festival which I love and thought was like a great show and I saw it with like an audience that like you know in a lot of ways couldn't be further from some of the experiences than imaginable and it was great to see that show with that audience and that show like had such a life of spilling off the stage in a way but you know just because I have a particular interest that I have I don't know you that well Richard we've crossed paths a lot over the years there's this point was like oh you just want to go like in a room with Richard way for a week and figure out like how that thing is this event that everybody in the room is a part of in addition to being a witness of because it's just got such a rich set of questions in there and it just made like I did a lot of writing a couple days after that which is great it's usually successful experience for me as an audience member but then I wanted to like get in there and like be a part of it in some way and I just get interested I've been thinking about that a lot too actually in terms of going into this century and all of the changes we've gone through so quickly with technology and it seems people are more more isolated and wired in and we're always here and I've been thinking a lot like how is that shifted in theater and I'm wondering a lot whether people need more to connect in this day and age and the idea that there's the audience and then the stage and the fourth law is like an iron curtain and whatever maybe you know people say theater is dying but maybe it just needs to change and evolve to fit what's going on with what people need now to feel connected and more part of a whole experience and that's a whole separate panel an interesting discussion but I've been thinking about it a lot about it too it's exciting and I'll shut up because one of the things that came up a lot was people talked about audience and sort of audiences who our audience is the other thing that we're really passionate about is audience design at Sojourn meaning like I'm not interested in making shows where I'm not a part of who I'm making it for that's not like what I'm interested in as an artist anymore I still like sometimes it's exciting to be in those spaces but in general I'm interested in making projects where the development of the work and the way that the host producer is engaging with the community is not just like we're going to market and we'll see who comes and then we'll contextualize the work somehow so for this audience it's interesting I actually want to be working to build audience and do this is what we do we put as much energy into the album I just want to say how much of that is actually shaped by your perspective of what it takes to create change because I think about the companies here that have a long trajectory are definitely products of the 20th century the long 20th century talking 70 years of a type of what Gramsci would have referred to as war of maneuver right now what we're seeing in this day and age is the need to be able to engage deeply in a war of position where we're entrenched and the political action was happening already in the streets for a period of 75 years the theater was only reflecting what was happening reinforcing that now it's a different scenario these practices in terms of bringing people into the mix inevitably are political acts in and of themselves and so is that part of your theory of what it takes to make change and so I say that's something that's happened for some of us the companies that were born out of that popular theater movement where you were already embracing and reflecting the beauty of human culture to this particular moment where we actually need to engage just in the process of being human once again with one another in time and space it's also not an either or kind of thing and I think that's what can be in political theater not sponsored too much whatever one theater company is doing is the model it's like different audiences, different situations a show that might be really big in New York and that theater for a new audience is doing something that's here or what Robert was doing in DC may not fly in someplace else that different theater different communities and communities inside of communities I was in Denver and I did this thing where all of us just knew the wall thing wouldn't work in San Francisco was they took a bunch of students and I had them have argument two people had to have an argument about abortion on a bus loud argument and then they would get off the bus argument had to go on for 10 minutes just improv-ing, they get off the bus and then the two people who were still there had to go, isn't that interesting and the conversations that happened on the bus but I was doing it to have the impact on the community because it's Denver a very conservative community but also to let the actors know it's okay to talk about politics because that's not when they were getting at school this is the stuff you avoid this is exactly what you want to talk about also if something is not a play we have to be real about that too when it doesn't fit we just we call up there, we finish the film about mission hotel buyers based on the Hondo Mokio short story gentrification is going to be so fast so swiftly in the mission that I personally am not sure that I have a year to write a play about it but last week we made a film about it you know, get a crew be nimble, go out there and what we do, we drag Sean into it we drag Christopher Ward right into it we drag Jeff Boyle into it Michael what's his name Mike Croke Mike Torres and now do it, now that doesn't bow well for a theater panel but it's taking exactly our theatrical and our theater form and taking it right to cinema cinema is also a popular form they know that in Havana they know that in Mexico City it's only a very elite festival thing here in America but I'm looking at what our theater goes for us is on movie screens, not Hollywood but in the cinema we'll quick about what Sean the theater changes man in New York last year speaking to you in the Post Cafe we met a girl from Brooklyn, 18 years old pregnant, had three kids all by ourselves mother been killed, brother been killed Sean together life the same week we came to do the show we came to the community center that she was at, did the show and we separated after that like no one was coming into this place called The Door no one was coming in doing theater live, I mean we're working this place is five, six stories and we're right on the ground floor and all these kids are coming to do like a thousand kids just doing theater right there that's specific and I'll be on that one second we did that, you know what I mean she said, I'm almost going to take my life next thing you know, not only is she about to take her life she's staying alive found out she had three cancerous tumors gave my cast members power up attorney not her, not her grandma, not her cousin she gave us power up attorney when she went under the scope if she didn't make it to Porter Club gave my cast members before she comes out, cancer free removed, one of my cast members wanted to adopt her we brought her out here now that goes over to the world do I mean exceed you know and I had to also just when I was coming up for the younger generation who by the way is going to be quadruple threats in the arts kids are at five years old singing, dancing, acting editing their own video spoken word and these kids don't even know that theater is a reunion with the arts you know what I mean like when I came in got a glass set of papers from Boston said I asked her can I bring hip hop into my theater and she said the most profound thing yes can I infuse different things so now we're in the generation of filmmakers and you know for me I like Chinese opera I like ballet I'm going to incorporate there with everything I do and that to me is a part of the outreach for the younger generation to be like it's not just a standard though you know but come up and do a monologue I may just want to do some collage and pee pot and then come out to something you know I mean give the kids an opportunity to be creative and actually you know from my experience it was 12 years it's created a generational art of multi-disciplinary arts who hasn't yet don't even have a field for them these kids are about to explode onto the scene and I believe to take over this kind of torment theater space it's not giving them the creative juices to go bup wild and then sprinkle them with some social consciousness to not only give them up but they already have a nape lead to just be seen and shown I mean these kids are doing stuff I'm telling you the stumbles and diapers still dance like in the theater community I believe that all the other genres are great but the discipline inside of theater helps harness that energy even more there's nothing like theater training I've trained rappers I've trained spoken word artists better in that field than they were before they started and so to take the techniques we have and help build up other genres and say okay look no more of this isolation stuff okay you do your field over here let's start more of you more let's start being creative let's talk to these digital people down in cell phone valley and get some technology in it too like kids need to be entertained they need to be educated but they need that entertainment aspect as well do you think also this is like how people keep themselves ignorant for instance like last year when I did like the movie there was a couple between here and good there's only one theater in New York that was willing to do it and the reviews were very good but also again I have had here we go I've had theater people say this makes me uncomfortable this personally makes me feel uncomfortable so as a playwright I did my job now I've given you permission by talking about the subject matter to be uncomfortable because also the audience you as audience members have responsibility we have to keep in tune with the world we have to keep ourselves skittlessly alert when I was I went on to the Met and I forgot the name of this painting it was a turn of the century painting last century yeah and this person painted homeless people and this woman said I can't look at this it's too depressing now the artist did his job she chose to keep herself ignorant so at what point does an audience take responsibility as well because you know I'm not saying that it's utopian when you're talking about Havana and you know when you go to Europe people you know again are it's older aesthetically they don't freak the way a lot of people freak I mean that's why a lot of people are color-moving there's a reason for that man because people are much more open in certain ways aesthetically than we are they're used to stories being told and they're not afraid to go to that place so again it's like you also have people's individual comfort zone when they're in the community and they're speaking for the audience audiences here were great people came up to me because what I think because I realized the subject matter was so heavy there were incest survivors there were all kinds of stuff going on we dealt with people from RAIN the rape and incest network and I knew as a writer that I did have a certain kind of responsibility it did open up possibilities it did open up dialogue where those people could take that and individuate it and go and talk about it I was sitting with a certain person Oscar Eustace hey yo I said nothing man and this person I love your work I said let's just cut to the chase if you're going to make love to me through the full play just don't call straight through the phone that's exactly what I said sorry for those of you who freak and so it's you know do the work you're going to do the work I didn't even hear this and of course this person did not do this because they were worried about their board members and this kind of stuff and also again it also underrates audiences because again I know people they would go for a lot of the work they were talking about but you know the big problems I have is these theaters who say these things and I think it's bullshit I think that you know and I said this at another panel they put up all these little graphs and they say well if you do this then you're going to lose this and that it's like no that's not true because every single time I've done a play that was controversial or was a different voice people love it it's like you are the person who's afraid and you need to let them see what is real because they're eager for it they want to see it but also what happens is a lot of people have certain board members that are of a certain age because again age it has to be diversified race, gender, age and so if people are given a certain amount of money people allow certain board members that have a certain amount of power and you can't do that either one great theater in New York is a theater called Radler Street they do an interesting work but I don't know well I think another thing in terms of we talked about diversity it's also a class you know I feel like you've got this group of generally speaking for most theaters rich people and it's a theater it's normally going to be started by some working class that's the original idea it's a group of people who get together and in order to get grants they've got to get a bunch of rich people to sit on the board and those people from you've got everything on your board you've got Wells Fargo and there's going to be stuff where they're just going to go we don't know if we can fund this I had one artistic director come to me after a play I wrote it was like five extended runs in LA and artistic director in the Bay Area comes up and they rejected my play the same play and he came up to me in the audition and he just whispered to me I can't do it you can't do it right and I was like first of all yes you can but he was scared and that's like to reduce somebody who's supposed to be this fearless artist and reduce them down to this fearful little person is what a lot of times I think that that's what class has to be a part of exactly what you were talking about stop I'm going to speak for a moment just to end incredibly moving and rich conversation there's so much more there's so much more but I want to do it again and kind of we started to edge into the conversation about form and form content and place and time period like where we are now but we are out of time to do that but I wanted to sort of just lead that with what you were saying which I'm not sure I completely understood but only because the theory behind it is something we developed and I don't know what that is but the idea that we have as a country and as a culture transformed to a new time and that the richness that is in this room and the passion of work is continuing forward both within those of us who are older those of you who are emerging and creating new work that exists in a whole different kind of way but is still theater and thank God thank God doesn't rely upon an artistic director saying yes or no or a corporate board saying we can fund this or we can't fund that so I think that is so important that Javier and Ryan and all of you who are doing this work and bringing up young people our children to be empowered to create and I'm really excited about that and moving forward and I hope that you guys know how to keep in touch with each other and I'm really excited that this came and we're going to connect in the lobby there's wine there are some refreshments please share the refreshments please there's light snacks and this is the lobby thank you thank you thank you thank you