 Good afternoon, everyone. So glad to see everybody. My name is Molly Smith, and I'm the artistic director here. And I also am the recipient of many of Zelda's words and speeches and ideas. I was a young artistic director in training here in Washington DC in the 70s. And I used to read everything that she wrote in great detail. And it really helped me launch my theater in New York. I'm one of literally thousands of us around the country who have been informed and energized and inspired by Zelda's words. So on behalf of Edgar Dobie, who's here, Irina's executive director, our board and staff, we appreciate your attendance here to listen, discuss, and celebrate the thoughts and radical questions that Zelda Fitzhandler had. She was always eloquent in everything she wrote from the handwritten card to the business memo to casual remarks to formal writing. She understood and used the power of words. Now, we've only chosen a few. There are so many brilliant speeches that she wrote. But we wanted to choose some from throughout her career. And you'll hear how effectively she uses language to convey significant and serious ideas. From the burgeoning beginnings of the movement to very recently, Zelda was always urging us forward, questioning, like a rabbinical scholar, our place in the world as theater artists. She gave great consideration to the role of the artist and the arts in our society and communities. She wrote copiously about the company of actors she created here at Irina and the role of boards and artistic directors, the role of money and the art form itself, stability, the role of risk and failure, what it means to be a theater in today's chaotic world. Now, as I said, this is only a small sampling of the speeches that she wrote. It will continue to inspire generations to come. So we thought of this as a community reading. And I'm so pleased that so many of you will be reading. Because Zelda affected so many of us, the idea that all of our voices are raised in this moment to really celebrate the incredible person that she was, thinker, and shaper of the American theater movement. I particularly thank Peter Marks and Eric Schaefer, Howard Shawwitz, Paul Tetro, Joy Zimmerman, and Michael Kahn. They're all joining us throughout the day to lend their voices to kick off the speeches. And we know some of you are coming in for an hour. Some of you are coming in for two hours. I think that there's going to be a nice flow of people coming in and out until this evening, until 7 o'clock tonight. After each speech, we wanted to have a little bit of time for discussion of ideas in the speech led by each leader. And I want to thank you to all of you who are readers of this as well, all of our volunteers from the community who will join us in reading Zelda's words. We appreciate you. This is the beginning of what we know will be a two-day celebration of Zelda. We know so many are coming in from different parts of the country to be part of this. People are re-meeting each other after not seeing each other for 10 or 20 or 30 years. It's really exciting for us to be able to have this moment to celebrate our visionary. It's wonderful to hear Zelda's words through so many voices. And thank you for coming to celebrate Arena Stage's American Giant, Zelda Fitzhandler. Thank you. And Peter Marks. It is absolutely wonderful that Arena has chosen a two-day series of events to honor this extraordinary woman, because an extraordinary woman deserves an extraordinary length of discussion. So we'll start off today with a speech of hers from 2009. The Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation established in 2009 an annual award in Zelda Fitzhandler's name. Here are her remarks given on November 8, 2009 at the unveiling of the award at the 50th anniversary gala for the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. I believe in New York. Sounds right. And excuse me, this is my prop, because it figures in the speech. This is my dream of an award. Thank you so much. Not too heavy to get it home. Not so bizarre. It has to be hidden away someplace in my apartment. An award that belongs to someone else each year. One of you, perhaps, or a colleague or to a talented child, maybe one of yours, aesthetic or biological, or some artistic leader ready to move forward. And the award will go on forever and ever as long as there are arts to support and there always will be. When the arts fade, so does the civilization from which they grew. We won't allow that to happen. We swear that to each other. Fans of Saul Bellow, our great master of the art of the novel, will remember a certain dog barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of Soviet domination of Romania. It's overheard by an American visitor in the novel of the Dean's December who imagines these wounds as the barking plea for God's sake, open up a universe a little. And that's what we will all try to do every day. What this society has done and will do for the next century, barking even louder for God's sake, open up the universe a little more. I'm so honored to be chosen to stand in for the six or 12 who almost simultaneously asked the question, why is it that our performing arts are concentrated in New York when people live all over the place? We couldn't find a sensible answer except the one we found. We'd make the arts in places where we found ourselves. Grow where we were planted, so to speak. Why art? Why? The everlasting persistence of and seemingly biologic necessity for human creativity. We have always had our griot, our storyteller, who seeks to unravel the mysteries of the world for us, hoping to find hints, clues, by walking in the shoes of another, gathering up the cultural strands of time and weaving them into a tapestry of meaning, trying to pierce the opacity of the world and of our human nature in particular. Kamu has told us, if the world were clear, art would not be necessary. Art helps us pierce the opacity of the world. It seems that we humans are creatures without defenses, but for our creativity. Subject to huge vicissitudes of fortune in the course of a lifetime, poor forked animal, Shakespeare identifies us. Aware, despite our talent for denial, that those we love may die and that we ourselves will die and that in the end, life's a failed enterprise. On top of that insult to our self-importance, we can't run very fast. We lack the tough hide of an elephant, the long neck of a giraffe, the teeth of the shark. We're subject to a range of bodily and emotional illnesses. Each of us is isolated in our own separate skin, the only creature who is outside of nature. And unlike the other animals, we find out to our surprise and sometimes indignation that the world was not made for us at all. We only dwell in it for a time. The gods, or the one god, or our internalized conscience, exact a heavy price for the pleasures of this life that they allow us. For those of you who didn't live through the earliest years, say 1950 to 1965, the years the Ford Foundation finally gave in to the notion that our theaters would never, ever balance the books on box office alone. To those of you who often say that it was easier in the olden days, I respond with a different view. The problems of creating a theater institution or inheriting one and sustaining its development have always been insurmountable. Then we find a way to surmount them. Then new problems take their place or old ones reappear in a new guise. It was never any easier and won't be. Isn't creativity itself the overcoming of resistances? Things like getting actors to come out of New York or LA. Still difficult. I recall an actor asking me if you could get fresh tomatoes in Washington. Each contract was an act of personal persuasion. Subscriptions, 300 was a bunch. Single tickets, don't ask. Boards, how to work with them smoothly and in all around happiness was already a mystery. Sleep, recreation, time for personal relationships. Creating something new where there was nothing there before has never been for sissies. What we need, we always needed. And what every artistic leader needs in a country that doesn't provide sufficient subsidy or have genuine respect for culture and stamina to persist, capacity for a deep interiority on one hand and a practical manipulativeness on the other. Concentration to hear one's own voice and the courage to listen to it in the midst of cacophony of other voices. Toughness in the service of something that is tender while you try to remain tender to yourself. Or sorry, tender yourself. Through art, we can confront the final core of uncertainty that set the heart of things. On the whole, artists do this far more bravely than engineers or lawyers or politicians. In a culture of specialists, the artist is something else. When the students and faculty at NYU gathered with me after 9-11 to meditate on what it meant to be or to become an artist in relationship to this terrible event, I recall that I knew of no play, no Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, no contemporary work of darkness and despair that hasn't concluded with some however faint stirring of hope, even if that hope presented itself only as a recognition of the worth and dignity of the human experience. Playwright and former president of Czechoslovakia. Right, either we have hope within us or we don't. It is a dimension of the soul and it is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. Hope in this deep and profound sense is not the same thing as joy, that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success but rather an ability to work for something because it is good. It is an honor for me to be among you tonight if only in spirit. I would like to add something that I learned from Zelda many, many years I worked with her. She loved actors. She taught us to not be afraid to fail. She said you can try any crazy thing on rehearsal that you think of. I don't care, turn cartwheel of anything but don't be afraid to fail. Thank you. What was the show? The first show is She Stoops to Conquer, my God. It's fantastic to have you here. That's just marvelous. Makes me kind of emotional to think of that connection that doesn't get any deeper than that. And I was thinking as each of us were reading we just have a few minutes to talk after that lovely speech. We're only here in this room because of her and a couple of other people obviously. But that's an extraordinary thing. I was thinking as the remarks were being read to us that it has endured. Theater is so ephemeral and it needs so much going for it to survive especially in this culture, my God. The idea that it not only sustained itself but it spawned an entire constellation in the city of theaters, of theaters like it that tried to emulate it that found routes of their own, paths of their own to expression of all kinds at all levels and that has created a lively theater going community. People who now take it for granted that there are 50 companies of varying sizes and ambitions in the city doing what they do. And I think that clearly when you hear Zelda's words which are remarkable and reveal so much about her celebration and her passion, you realize how much of what she thought really sunk in. It really, really did. What an achievement for an artist. What a legacy. I wonder if any of you have any personal responses to what Zelda wrote. Did it make you think about any aspect of the struggle that the arts have in this culture to be relevant, to find a constituency, to have against the odds. And we see the barbarians at the gate in the newspapers reported on every day. This seems a particularly dangerous time for the arts in this country. But did Zelda's words at all resonate with any of you about the struggle that you've seen in the city and this country in terms of making sure that the arts survive? Yeah. Lee Rubenstein. Words that you said have been said to everybody connected with arena stage. Don't be afraid to fail. I worked with Zelda quite a bit in the 70s and 80s. And I recall the difficulty of selecting plays that she had. You know, you have to have a certain one for opening, she would say, another one for the holidays and then you need one where you can bring donors. But one thing she always said is don't be afraid to fail and she would talk to the company, the actors, as well as the staff and the production people. I recall one conversation we had with having finished a fantastic season. I don't recall what year, but it had great reviews for everyone and the financial part worked out beautifully. And I said there, aren't you excited about this? You may guess what she said. No, we didn't try hard enough. It seems to me that those words about not being afraid to fail are even harder to follow today because the stakes are so high now, you know, financially for theaters like arena. It is hard to fail, even if you are not gonna be afraid of it. It might be an easier thing to consider in a rehearsal room than it is in planning a season for a place that has to generate revenue. Anybody else have any thoughts that they wanna share? Please. This speech that you just read is actually one of my most favorite of Zelda's and there's a passage in the speech that I printed up and had taped to my office wall and would look at it every day. And in particular, it's the section where she talks about what we need to persist in this field. And she talks about stamina. She talks about a healthy interiority coupled with practical manipulativeness. She talks about the ability to hear your own voice amidst the cacophony of all the other voices. And then she talks about being in service to something that is so tender while you try to remain tender yourself. And that always spoke volumes to me because I can see that working in this field, sometimes you're moving so fast. It's easy to lose your tenderness. And I would every day get into the office, look at that, read that to myself on the wall and say, yes, this is what we must do. So thank you so much to everybody who read that speech. Okay. No, you want more? Okay, I can talk a little more. Because I was really, the thing that struck me about the speech was sort of the really pragmatic aspect where she said that an actor asked, can you get fresh tomatoes in Washington? Because that is kind of, the analogy makes sense to me in the sense that people always ask me from out of town who haven't been here, are you the theater critic? Is there theater in Washington? Is there a lot of theater in Washington? Which of course, and I'm always saying, there's a huge amount of theater and I find over time, that question gets asked less and less. But I think that that goes to another thing that was extraordinary when you think about it, that Zelda and people like Marco Jones had this, and it's reflected in the words of the speech I think, this intellectual and emotional need to bring, to share this form with the rest of the country. It is insane that so much of it is based in New York, as if that's the center of culture that excludes other places from having that opportunity. Yes, ma'am. Oh, actually we needed for the recording. I moved from DC to South Central PA, very rural. And I was amazed, theater was everywhere. There are little tiny towns with like 10 people doing shows. So I think what she said is right, it's there because it needs to be. And you can get places where Broadway shows come through and tours come through. It's amazing that if you really want to find it, you can. My story of Zelda, my first show, I was sitting in boxed cakes, I was an understudy. And it was the crucible, I was understudying Francis Foster and I wanted to go to the bathroom right before the show and I go behind boxed cakes. Which is Zelda's office? And I figure, okay, the next day guy's gonna call me and go, you are out of here forever. But it didn't happen and I was able to spend many nice, wonderful years here. Just a footnote, Zelda wrote this speech in 2009 for the first SDCs out of the Pitchlander Award, but she wasn't able to make it to New York and deliver it. Jane Alexander delivered this speech for her and then at the fifth award in 2014, it was readdressed by Mark Lemos. So these words have been heard by many people. And I think this speech started at about 60 minutes in length. And Laura Penn, who's the managing director or executive director of SDC, was cutting it down to the last minute with Jane and Ed Sheeran's help. Well, you also see from the speech, I mean, I think even in the part that you've excerpted, she quotes Camu Bello, I think Homer. I mean, this is a woman who thought a lot and deeply. This is, as one of my other fellow speaker readers suggested, it's a dark kind of speech in parts. It talks about the frailty of existence, the ephemeral nature of all her lives. It's not the most always uplifting. She ends on an important point, which is that hope is always at least some granular part of a play, but she had a way of looking at the world that I think wasn't necessarily the characteristics you always found in a person thinking about the most pragmatic aspects of the theater. She had both spheres in her wheelhouse. Anybody else wanted to offer anything? Well, yes, Helen, please. All right. Okay. It's just something that I'm sharing my first experience here which ties in with that speech and daring. I don't think it was ever daring. And I never got it. I got it on the littles kind of a, I never got it personally in the 80s when people started talking about non-traditional casting. I said, I don't get it. I grew up on it. I grew up on it here because of Zelda. Here watching the shows in their tour to the Soviet Union. They had John Marriott, who was in the original cast of Little Foxes and the film. He was played Cal. Ida was cast and totally non-traditionally, Gail Gray, period, yeah. I mean, things that, I mean, it's like, I don't get what you're talking about. And I mean, that's a wonderful thing not to get. And it was all began. And then when I came back, it was even more amazing and more wonderful. Cassie was even better. But that Zelda, even the artifacts up there, my first show here is Caucasian Chalk Circle, which was everything. You know, it was everything altogether. And that was so Zelda directed by Tazzle Thompson. Yeah, I wonder if Lin-Monwell Miranda realizes that Zelda actually cast Hamilton in a sense. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Peter, and to all the readers of the first speech. Now we're gonna move on to the second speech, which is Wither or Wither Art, which will be kicked off by Eric Schaefer. I'd like to first gather over here in this corner, everybody who's reading, speech number two, so we can kind of organize. For those who aren't reading, you've got probably about two to three minutes to sort of relax and run to the restroom. So everybody on speech number two, come on over here. Thank you. Oh, he's here. Yeah. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for your patience. It's been fun to watch all the reunions taking place today as well. So we are all lined up and ready to rock and roll with speech number two, Wither, Wither or Wither Art, and it's gonna be kicked off by the Artistic Director of Signature Theater, Eric Schaefer, ladies and gentlemen. Now I just wanna thank Molly and Edgar for having us, and I think as Peter said, Zelda was someone that all of us who worked in the regional theaters looked up to, and she was actually an inspiration to all of us, so it's great to be here. This speech is the longest speech we're gonna read today. I think we have 26 readers to read it. So, here we go. The following article was written by Zelda Fitchandler as part of a sometimes heated dialogue taking place at the time about the state of American theater spurred by a series of critical articles in American Theater Magazine in the fall of 2002. These articles challenged whether theaters had failed their original purpose and become too institutionalized to maintain a healthy balance between creative art and fiscal responsibility between art and money, and whether established theaters remained sufficiently open to new artists and new work. Zelda's article was a response to these sharp challenges and reflected her role as founder of the regional theater movement and one of its most thoughtful and articulate spokesperson. Not this or that, but this and that, because one thing is true, it doesn't necessarily follow that opposite is not also true. Up and down, back and forth, move ahead and drop back, no straight staircase to the sky, but growth in a kind of spiral. Success, success, success, then failure and disappointment, then this struggle to get unstuck and push ahead and to keep on keeping on, and the one who finishes his last wins. Brecht has Galileo say, as much of the truth gets through as we push through, we crawl by inches. Over the holidays, I had the time to catch up with the October, November, and December 2002 issues of American Theater Magazine and was astounded by the thought-provoking riches I found in them. Every theater worker in the land appreciates and needs Ben Cameron's recurrent cheers, which is not to say that TCG consistencies are not always encouraged to think outside a box, but here was something else again, something new, I believe. Challenges to and warnings about the box itself. Serious questions were posed about the very form and nature of what we have come to known as the institutional theater, a kind of theater that in the past half century has transformed the way we produce bring forth our art. We are pushed to think about whether these institutions do or do not, did but now don't, nurture the art and the artists. Since those who challenge and warned are our friends and colleagues and raise their voices not only out of anger, disappointment and frustration, but also out of love and a sense of responsibility, I took their queries very seriously. I hope we can avoid being defensive and can listen up. Here are some personal ruminations. I co-founded Arena Stage in Washington DC in 1950 and was its producing artistic director for 40 years. I left Arena Stage in 1991 and I know that much has changed since then. It has become increasingly difficult to keep a theater pressing forward in a creative way. In my several years with the acting company, Margaret Harley's spirit young ensemble that tours the country with classics and new work, I continued to learn about the aspirations of young talent and about the amazing audience across America that is hungry for theater. Now chairing an intense actor program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, I have been taught how the weight of a highly structured, top-down institution actually feels. I have a deeper empathy with the artist's sense that the largest issues are decided above. I speak in this essay as a representative of what has come to be called the institutional theater now under scrutiny if not attack. My six-year-old grandson is one to ask me how things were in the olden days, starting with the age of dinosaurs. Followed by an unimaginably long historical period pre-TV and baseball computer games, followed thereupon by more hospitable president which he very much enjoys. My point being that I may be able to bring some information from my experience with the dinosaurs that others of you may not have. Are the critics saying to us, what do they suggest as the next crusade? What have they misperceived and what enlightens us? What is feasible and what is pie in the sky? And the big issues, a new generation of founders, challenge the power of our boards, no longer an alternative theater as we were founded to be. Pass the torch to the new alternatives, fold up our expensive tents and silently steal away. Out with the old, in with the new and every dog has its day. These are provocative questions indeed. How do we respond to them? One critic acknowledges that not every theater or board or mission statement is like every other but feels that the pressure of institutional art with the emphasis on institution rather than art is widespread enough to warrant sounding the alarm. What does she mean by institutional art? The following I think. Art that is made with the right eye on the dollar, the left eye on the stage with the right eye dominant. Art that doesn't fly because it's tethered to the bottom line. Formulaic art. This was a hidden Cleveland, Boston, Milwaukee or on or off Broadway. This could attract a star. This one got a Tony. This one would be great for group sales or students or at Christmas or for spring vacation or for St. Patrick's Day or around Rosh Hashanah, et cetera. Too many lows, not enough highs. A sense of uniformity, predictability, a sense of low grade depression. Where is astonishment, daring due, originality, hoopla? Is it one from column A and one from column B or does it all add up to something intentional and brave? Does what we think the subscribers want or what quickens the theater's artistic heart come first? What the subscribers want? The circle the critic traces really exists. I've felt the clutch of that circle closing around me and it's a circle from hell. To starve off death, the maw of the box office must be fed. We count on subscribers who make up one half or one third or two thirds or 90% of our audience to feed it. Indeed, if we appear plump and chipper, other sources of nourishment may open up. No foundation or corporation wants to feed a dying theater. If things work well and we give our subscribers what they want and of course what we can afford, they'll be back next year and we'll be set for another season on a full stomach and while there's life, there's hope. This looks like a fair exchange. Almost too good to be true, but we become suspicious and look around. Aha, it's the audience who is running the theater. No, the box office is running the theater. No, the board and the executive director and his PR and marketing colleagues are running the theater. The institution in general is running the theater. That's it, we've abdicated our creative freedom, that which defines us and for which we struggled to be born so as not to bite the hands that feed us and where does that get us? What might be the unintended consequences? The criticism serves to open up thoughts that we have probably thought before and pushed aside for where do these thoughts lead? The theater gets the audience it signals to and deserves and the repertory is destiny. As in any real life relationship, the response we get springs from what we send out, give off, invite. Are we underrating our subscribers? Why should their taste, curiosity and capacity to chew hard on some tough thoughts or forgive a well-intentioned miss be less than ours? Presumably deep down, they're very much like us despite differences in ethnicity, age, range of income. They come to the theater to be awakened emotionally, psychologically, even intellectually and politically and to have an adventure, to identify with a life that's similar enough to theirs so that they can recognize it but that plays out in different circumstances. Maybe their numbers would increase if we shared our own personal tastes more fully, opened ourselves up through our work to our own deepest concerns. And how do we know what they want if we don't offer what we want? And how do they know what they want when they haven't seen it yet? This is a better line of speculation. We should think further. And what if the real audience, the one we must have to complete our work drifts away and another audience replaces it who is satisfied with less? Audiences are not interchangeable integers after all. Do we think that when the world turns, which it will, and a new president, maybe John Kerry, stimulates a change in the zeitgeist, do we think that then we can return to what we really wanna do and recover the audience we've lost? The future grows out of the present while the present seeps up out of the past. The choices we make today describe the theater we'll have tomorrow. Process is everything and the outcome can't be predicted. It's possible for a theater to die of starvation. And that, of course, is very sad. It's also possible for it to wither away. And that is even sadder. So how should we consider the relationship between institution and art? I think of an institution as a cradle and the thing we call art as the baby. There is reciprocal need, the baby needs the cradle, but the cradle is an empty, useless piece of wood without the baby. Baby Eugene O'Neill didn't have a cradle. He slept in a dresser drawer on the road with his actor father and mother, but he created anyway, or perhaps because of. The institution can be as lean and simple as that dresser drawer, or as elaborate and multi-leveled as money will buy. The sturdier yet flexible it can be, the more support it can offer. The cradles slash institutions function is to provide a continuity of comfort and stability, an opportunity for growth and empathetic responsive face of respect for organic creative process, tolerance of behavioral slips ups like flops and pride in the baby's hijinks. The institution accepts that the baby will develop according to its own internal laws and dedicates itself to providing the environment to encourage that. Or this metaphor, the main event is not the institution. The main event is under the big top where the performers with their feats of magic and daring and the audience with its imaginative belief and its empathy get together and all breathe the same air at the same moment. All of them are grateful to the management for seeing to it that everyone has been paid, the lights are on, the event has come in on budget, the seats are filled and that the tent doesn't leak. The president of the board and other board members have the best seats as they deserve and will later throw a party in appreciation for the extraordinary audacious circus troupe. The clarity of this relationship is harder to maintain in threatening times because the board has the responsibility for the survival of the institution and can become excessively interested in what goes on in the tent as well as how much it costs to put it there. Tensions are to be expected and worked through, always remembering that while theater is a business, its business is art, not business. Because one thing is true, it doesn't necessarily follow that the opposite is not also true. The artist must have freedom to be playful, to work from internal impulses, but he also shares responsibility for the fiscal health of the institution. It may surprise the board to hear that, but I've always found it to be so. The various production departments struggle to stay on budget and are proud when they do and actors extend themselves in many ways to build audiences. As an artistic director, I have always celebrated the box office. The dollar that came to us through it was twice blessed, once for what it could buy in goods and services and twice as a vote of confidence that brought us freedom. The first law of the theater is success. Without success, there can be no theater. That thought wraps around everything else one can say about what's right or wrong about our institutions. It's the iron framework of fact. Since the norm of theater is failure, not success, and since times are generally out of joint, the box office has come to be a place of special honor. Looked at it in this way, the link between creativity and fiduciary responsibility is unbreakable. It just surfaced from my memory, all of a piece down to what I was wearing and where I sat. President Eisenhower had moved into the White House and the Republicans moved into Washington with him, buying houses from the Democrats that were moving out. Our audience at Arena dwindled and it would take several years to cultivate another. In that Republican year, we lost $10,000 at the box office, a large amount on such a small budget. My teacher and the co-founder of Arena Stage, Edward Mangum, had moved on. So that fingers pointed only at me at the final board meeting of the season where the loss was to be explained and justified. I did my best. The board members were my friends and picked by Ed and me and Tom Fitchhandler, the executive director for their love of theater and their willingness to put in $1,000 each to get this idea off the ground. And they were pleased enough with the season. After I spoke, there was a fraught silence and then the chairman spoke up heavily. This was the gist of it. Of course, we're committed here to a balanced budget and no red ink. And so we regret that $10,000 was lost in this year's operations. Zelda has explained to us how this happened. In the expectation that this was a one-time circumstance and that she will be able to guide us to a balanced budget next year and the years following, we accept the explanation and the loss. And then the chairman asked that the board give me a vote of confidence, which they did. This was very sweet of them and I appreciated it. But I chiefly remember the gesture as a moment of profound and unexpected learning. For I had not for a minute anticipated that a vote of no confidence was anywhere in the cards. What I learned was that while I was entitled to enjoy the freedom to fail, it was anticipated that I would not indulge in it too frequently. Further, that it would be much more comfortable for me if the failure could be attributed to some outside power, the Republicans, the snow, a parade, a flood in the Potomac River and not to my own bad judgment or creative mishap. The vision thing was mine to have as long as whatever that vision generated by way of art could pay for itself by way of money. When the Ford Foundation and W. McNeill Lowry entered the field toward the 50s, Arena became not for profit to qualify for gifts and grants. But the same implicit understanding applied over the successive decades and I never signed a contract. We would both know when it was time to part. Boards have become more sophisticated since the 50s. Through experience, they've learned the ways of a creative enterprise up and down, back and forth. But I lived through my long tenure at Arena in a state of not this or that, but this and that, money and art, art and money. In later days, the unresolved dialectic was not even imposed by the institution. It had become internalized because that's how things had to be. Since the late 80s, the balance has become even more difficult for the artistic leaders to maintain as financial support has dwindled. These critical voices ask us to cease looking outside and turn our gaze inward to the inside of our institutions for the source of our sense of oppression and ways we might free ourselves from it. And indeed, we must do that. But the outside is the primary dimension within our theater's live. A theater is an organism, an artwork in and of itself, and the person who holds that vision is its primary artist. It's her angle of viewing that like the super objective of a play animates all the rest. Ralph Waldo Emerson was wise to note that an institution is the length and shadow of a man. For man, read person. It's as she confronts the sounds, sights, political conflicts, rhythms, scientific achievements, timber of human relationships, status of minorities and women, contemporary forms of theater and other art forms, and especially the economic support systems of her time that her vision for a theater forms itself. An artistic director belongs to both worlds. One foot inside the institution, one outside. Consciously or unconsciously, a personal vision is born in a reaction to a world. Just imagine how the artistic director's vision would expand and her heart lighten if suddenly there were a generous amount of infusion of funds and she could pay for everything that she and the artist gathered around her had ever dreamed of. Then the tension between art and money could resolve. Then the relationship between institution and art could become crystal clear, unclouded by the pressures of survival. To think this way is to play with fantasy, of course, for the great benefactor has retired and departed on a long tour of the universe and we don't expect him back. But it's a good bit of fantasy for it helps us to perceive the difficulty of artistic freedom in a culture defined by success in the marketplace. He who pays the piper calls the tune, may be an overstatement of our situation, but that notion does now thread through all aspects of our institutional life. But let us imagine that the great benefactor does indeed return with a new perspective on the good and the beautiful and particularly on a particular way on those needy arts institutions that are impeded in their flowering. Could he lull our anxieties? Am I talented enough? Was that the right decision? Is this play going to make it? Or endow us with the talent and wisdom that isn't already ours? Of course not. Take away our heartaches, help us to sleep more soundly, provide more time with our families. Not a chance. Attract collaborators who will stake their creative faith with us. Show us how to build acting companies and use them well. Teach us how to be effective diplomats, fundraisers, problem solvers, writers, speakers, psychiatrists, and still be prepared for rehearsals. No way. Reveal to us how to treat Moliere and Chekhov as old friends we would never betray, yet move their texts into a contemporary world, or how to read a new script in an unfamiliar form, and be able to imagine it living on the stage. Strengthen our will so that we can take the hills and valleys and not flee. Endow us with humor, tact, wisdom, patience, and the capacity to affect others with our exhilaration in the work. Make clear to us the language of budgets and balance sheets that we know how to match, so that we know how to match expenditures to a value system and spend money without wasting it. Sharpen our judgment and broaden our taste. Awake our capacity for attention and support to all the work, not just our own, and to all the people doing it. Keep us on the pulse of our community so we can fathom our neighbors deepest thoughts, maybe even before they themselves are aware of them. And keep us in touch with our world so that its preoccupations can be reflected on our stages. No, he can't, of course he can't. I've just set down a job description for artistic leadership, the artistic director and his comrades who share the vision and contribute to it with their own skills. And that was the short form. So what can Mr. Great Benefactor do for us, where it is suggested that we are to fulfill our artistic dreams? Planning for the future would cease to be merely a function of budgeting and become one of dreaming. We would be able to plan out of the images in our minds rather than within the vise of this year's reduced budget and or the nagging weight of accumulated debt, accumulated debt. What else he could lift us from the fears that repress the creative spirit? For fear, it is fear, I suggest, rather than the lack of talent or imagination or goodwill that leads us to making what the outside voice calls institutional art. Which one of us wants to be the one to fold up the tent? Fear encourages caution and conformity and caution and conformity are antithetical to what we refer to as art, since art is always personal and original way of knowing the world. Creativity is born out of the capacity to play and it's the very capacity for meaningful play that defines us as human beings. We can play with political ideas, with scientific hypotheses, with new forms of literature, with bodies in space. We call a theater production a play and we play the piano and the violin. The notion of a play is indissolubly connected to the idea of freedom and I left something out of the job description. It's the artistic leader's role to create a quiet and concentrated and non-judgmental environment so that the entire community can play within it without fear. Benefaction can help her with that. I emphasize the organic connection between funding and fear for I'm not sure that it is fully understood by those several who are pointing to our lapses, unfulfilled commitments and seeming in hospitality to artists, et cetera. One of these bravely opts for a new generation of artistic directors and a new generation of theaters and for the companies and playwrights within them, not just a place at the table, but the table itself. Where is a new generation of writer founders of playwright managers, he asks. That's a rousing manifesto and certainly anything conceived in the imagination has the potential to be born into reality. Let some talented, courageous new leaders come forward and hitch themselves to the wagon. They will be warmly welcomed into the field and gently warned. For founding today is very different from founding yesterday. News from the dinosaurs. Beginning in the 50s there was but a blank slate and only a few of us were scratching on it. No models, just us hanging onto skyhooks. An almost primitive instinct for improvisation and testing of reality was released. What is to be done? By chance, the title of Lennon's Revolutionary Pamphlet and how is it to be done? Were the subtexts of our daily lives? The sands that lines unknown as the poet said, even as a painter lays down on his canvas a random sketch that will define the painting to follow. At arena, we sketched as we went, rapidly producing one thing after the other. 17 shows in the first year because the audience was very small and we had to turn productions over quickly. Poor, so poor, tireless, no, tired. We lived play to play and all there was to the future was right now. Modestly, slowly, the audience grew. Unexpectedly the foundation circa 1957 and the NEA 1965 and later corporations and our own community found us. They gave us money, but better than that, they gave us respect. Respect to look more at, to give attention to, to regard. We felt important to more than this tiny unit on this tiny budget. We seemed to matter to the culture of our country. It was a heady ascent during those middle decades. The kind of promise was made to us, not in so many words, but a promise. These agencies would continue to be there for us and would participate in our future, caring that we survive. The promise was kept over many years, deepening as the time went on and as we evolved artistically. We enjoyed the sense that if we came up with an innovative idea, artistic or organizational, organizational was also considered creation. It's sort of chance of being funded. Then for reasons you know, the promise was broken. The official culture turned its back. The final signal for me theatrical in its commutative power was that during her term as chairman, Jane Alexander was able to pin down only one meeting, one private meeting with Bill Clinton, which lasted 20 minutes and offered no assurances as noted in her book, Command Performance. There was no longer any political capital to be gained for a sitting president to support the arts and nothing has happened since then to suggest that the climate has changed. The need it has suggested is to move out from under institutional shadows and that the time is ripe to look for a new age of pioneers. Pioneers will come or not come without our intervention and will always be welcome and our theaters cast far more light than shadows. Just imagine the American theater without them. I salute the work of Avant-Garde theaters, community-based theaters, ethnically diverse theaters, ensembles of form seekers. I admire their creativity and freedom. I've watched them proliferate since the 60s, often out of a singular aesthetic vision, the product of a single mind or in response or antithesis to the institutional theater. But while we come from the same line, the same route, these theaters are not an alternative but a parallel to the institutional theater. They will neither replace nor inherit it, nor do we need to choose from one form over the other. We are on different paths, with different tasks and structures that reflect them. Variants of the same species, each of us a vital and essential part of the wonderful variety within unity that is the American theater. These parallel theaters are in great need of increased funding, which their flexibility and very variety make it hard for conservative funding agencies to categorize and therefore to support. That's a great injustice that won't be set right. I fear, until we have the seven years of plenty, to do us. We should work together to discover and to elect a president with an affinity for the arts. We should write and disseminate broadsides, making the case for a new deal for the arts in America. We should make immediate contact with Dana Joya, the new chairman of the NEA, who promises to restore grants to individual artists and to find a way to increase federal funding. We should take inspiration from and look for another Helen Clark, elected prime minister of New Zealand in 1999, who promptly declared herself minister of arts, culture, and heritage and within months injected tens of millions of dollars into a cultural recovery package. Something like this grand boost could happen to us. Hope is a thing of feathers. This isn't the time. I suggest to man the barricades and whip up an assault against a form of theater that in the past, century has become so embedded in our theatrical way of life as to now be its dominant form, which at the same time finds itself in the same position as many solo artists locked inside and knocking at the gates. But it is not the time to listen hard with our inner ear and ask again as we asked before in the age of the dinosaur, what is to be done and how. There is an old Russian saying, circumstances alter cases, which I take to mean depending on where you sit is how you see it, or a thing changes depending on who's looking at it. It's about relativism and the subjective nature of truth. Institutions feel betrayed by the spate of critical articles in American theater, kicked down, kicked when they're down. After all we've done for you. While the artists are frustrated and angry and prob the institutions to set new imaginative goals that will include them. The feelings of the institutions are justified. Since the mid 20th century, they've been the primary developer of talent for the American theater, for stage, as well as film and TV. Go to a movie, turn on the tube, get tickets to a Broadway or off Broadway show. They, there are our artists, that is where they are. We promised opportunity for artistic development. We delivered that promise. There are more jobs for artists outside of New York than in it. The so-called center, the institution say. Taken all together, our theaters constitute a kind of bizarre, a kind of national bizarre where Broadway producers shop for next year's product and next year's Pulitzer playwright. Where else can our new playwrights and their plays be developed but with us? And we've created the possibility of a new way of life for those who want it. Actors, directors, designers, playwrights can move from theater to theater using themselves creatively in dialogue with intellectual and intelligent audiences, often evolving a sense of belonging with one or several theaters or they can count on coming back. With what these theater gigs, plus film, TV soaps and commercials, voiceovers, designing or directing for opera, teaching, an artist can have a respected, even fulfilling life while building funds for retirement. Besides, say the institutions, artists don't really want a home. They prefer moving along from choice to choice. It's hard to pin them down even for one project. Their agents stand in the way of long commitments out of town. So what's wrong with this picture? Nothing, if everybody's satisfied with it. Don't institutions tell it the way it is? Yes, but there are other voices speaking up now, loud and clear. They ask for involvement and a kind of permanence and continuity, the sort of emotional security you feel in a personal relationship. They want their work to add to the overall work of the place, to build something with others and watch it grow. They wanna belong to an idea that they believe in and can serve with their creativity. They want to have a sense of self-determination and a role in defining the destiny of their institution. Transient, temporary work, sometimes feels as nothing but a high form of what the manufacturing industry calls piecework. You get paid for the number of pieces of work you turn out. How man you turn out is the measure of things, not you yourself. On a rainy day, jobbing in our word for piecework can make one feel devalued. A gig can only be followed by another gig. You may be moving along but only from here to there, moving but not evolving. If an actor is always cast because he's right for the role, with no consideration for the development of his own range and versatility. If with each role he starts over again with a group of strangers who have no collective experience to draw upon, if he sometimes gets the sense of himself as a kind of commodity paid for to fill a need and then times up and thanks, what is that we're saying to him? That theater is a precarious profession. We always knew that, be glad you're working. Is that okay? Is that enough? Of all the artists, the playwright gets the most focused attention from the institution and never more so than right now. That's been my experience and it's what I observe and read about. But the number of productions the playwright receives may not be the main point to her. To have her voice mingle with the voice of others in a collective consciousness as the play is evolved from within itself into production. To know that even if this one fails, the next time she knocks with a telephone book of pages in her hands, they have to let her in. Might weigh more than any number of exposures of her work produced out of any number of disparate motives in any number of theaters. There is a tendency to romanticize our beginnings as if we were an early ideal community. The beginnings weren't romantic. They were exhausting, impoverished and full of anxiety. But yes, there was a specialness about that time because our intention was so clear and un-conflicted. Each of the small band of beginners flying blind in our separate airspaces was struggling to create an artistic home. A company, an artistic collective living and working in one place over a period of time, all of us with the same notion of why it was important to be doing that, having compatible skills and talents and view of our world and the role of art within it. All of us together engaged in an ongoing dialogue with our audience via theatrical means. It didn't seem very complicated. It seemed very natural, inevitable, not even requiring elaboration in a manifesto or a mission statement. What else could theater be? How could you call it theater if it wasn't a place? Who else could define the culture of a theater but its artists define its style? Didn't the collective art form require a collective? Weren't we here to protest and even replace the pin-and-up smash-it-down one-shot system of Broadway? Our earliest banners were emblazoned with not a hotel for theater but a home and a few of us held onto these and still have them. But not very many of us. As years went by, other slogans came into style. Professionalism, you can count on us or good plays, well done, that's the ticket or even eight for the price of six. And until I picked up my October, November and December issues of American theater, I had come to think that no one objected to the ways things had become, except some of my professional friends and my students who want to be in companies, haven't been trained and proselytized for that kind of life in art but have not been able to find them. The fact that the artists are angry, frustrated and disappointed is not necessarily bad news. The other side of these feelings is that artists are insistent, energized, geared up to make larger commitments. They want it. Artists have become eager to become part of the wrath and wolf of institutionalized life and even take responsibility at its center or as one of our commentators puts it, occupy that center but find institutions inhospitable or simply close to them. Is this perception an illusion? How many artists have these thoughts and feelings? Six, 600, 6,000. If we were to throw a party would they come? And is it true that the institutions are inhospitable or close to artists? Is it too much of an ongoing responsibility to nurture a group of artists, drawing them in the center of the work? These questions are, of course, no use in a theoretical way. They need to be answered in practice and the theaters would need to make the first move. For starters, I suggest an effusive display of understanding that audiences come to the theater to witness and partake of the work the artists have made. That's that it's art that makes the money and not the other way around. Imagination is the nose of the public, wrote Edgar Allan Poe, by this at any time it may be quietly led. What else? Pay those who are mature and committed artists the top salaries within the institution, at least equal to that of any other fundraiser or audience builder. This gesture more than any other will signal where the artist stands as to recognition and power. In the deepest sense, artists are teachers. Out of the darkness they bring light and their salary should be pegged at what a full professor makes at the university in the theater's community. In some smaller communities, that may still not be enough so that allowances should be made for commercial timeouts. Timeouts for creative refreshment need to be possible. Artists should be invited to become involved in the total life of the institution in order to provide it with their special knowledge and point of view and to have their say. I read that while Eadmar Bergman was heading the Swedish National Theater, he established a five-member artist council that he consulted about repertory, company membership, casting and the like. I don't know how this idea would play out in America, though I wish I'd tried it myself. And a proportion of board positions should be set aside in the theater's bylaws to be established by common understanding for artists to occupy. This would be a very important change in the way we have operated, but must be pressed for. The presence of parties at board meetings will necessitate a transposition in vocabulary from a bottom line. Market share, brand conscious, focus group, lingo, brought into the boardroom for a for-profit culture to a language of emotional meanings, thus bringing the board closer to the heartbeat of the theater and unifying everyone around the real ideas that underline the theater. Significant issues come up at board meetings, but are presented in such a way as to disconnect them for the life of the theater as is experienced by those living it. The artist's presence will focus on these issues in a more appropriate way. Remember that artists are smart, planning in their strategy by which they bring art into the world. The artist's ability to juggle the animating idea along with time, money, and materials is an aspect of her talent. Artists have much to contribute to the deliberations of a board. To keep the artist outside the business of the institution, which he's engaged at any rate, is to romanticize him. Artists are above business, at the same time that it miniaturizes him. Artists just don't have the head for it. They're fanciful and worldly creatures. We need to take care of them. Why has it taken so long to see this? The creative courage of the artistic director will inspire artists. They, in turn, will support the risk she takes on their behalf, whether or not they succeed. The transparency she fosters so that information, whether good news or bad, is available to all, up and down and all around the building, will deepen the sense of mutual respect and a communal destiny. And she will see to it that no one is made to feel intimidated to speak up. In story and myth, the figure of death is always silent. The artistic director's acknowledgment of ambiguity, relativism, second thoughts and struggle that exist behind difficult decisions will draw the artist even closer to her, revealing her as worthy of having, using and sharing power. The blinding glare of certainty always reduces the intimacy and trust and so on. There are myriad ways for the institution to build an interactive relationship with its artist that will create the sense of a home where each can be for himself and also for the other and where all are for work. Eventually all of us must come to a much deeper understanding of the nature of the organism that we call a theater. I hold close Aristotle's statement. What a thing can be, it must be, whether it be a horse or a man, or a theater he might have added. At some point in the future, we'll want to define ourselves by whether we insisted strongly enough on becoming what we can be and therefore have become it. We will have come to consensus that artists are the theater, but administrators who protect and advance the artist's work are also the theater. And the theater is also the board, volunteers of time, money, and caring on behalf of a profession that must sometimes seem to them a total mystery, operating as it does on hunches, gambles, and the unknown. What else is theater? The repertory is the theater. It's very flesh and bones. It's ticket prices. It's brochures and ads and newsletters. It's spaces even if they're humble. The intimacy of people pulling for the same thing. It's respect for the intelligence of its audience. It's restlessness and unceasing workload, and so on and so on. And even the way the very fair air that hangs off the walls tells a stranger what kind of place it is. All of these are the theater. Everything both tangible and intangible is what a theater is, and everything is a part of everything else. A theater is a refracted image of life itself, and life is all one, as Barbara exultantly discovers in the last act of Shaw's most revolutionary play. Being all one, a theater must organize itself in circles, concentric circles, not vertically as in Enron, but rather like the rings of a tree trunk with the artistic director and her artists in the center. Yes, but what's a center without a circumference? It's the outer border of the cell that guarantees the integrity of the nucleus. Since theater is both art and money, money and art, how will we pay for our ultimate epiphany? How, the question hovers and Aristotle is silent. Margot Jones, who had the original idea of professional theater outside of New York, and with her small 198 seat theater in Dallas, Texas, began the long revolution in which we are still engaged would say, if you have a million dollar idea, you can raise a million dollars. She said this in the late 40s, however, and I don't know how many millions it would take to pay for that idea today. It might be that the roughly 100 million plus or minus that seems to be the price of a new theater building could just as well be raised as endowment to support the idea of an artist's theater, or if the building is a must have, then a half of what is raised, or if not a half, then a third or even a quarter, but no less, could be set aside for an artistic leap forward. What is a building, but the enclosing of an idea? In the November 2002 issue of American Theater, there is a national call for manifestos concerning the American Theater. It's sponsored by Polly Carl, Executive Director of Playwright Center, and the Guthrie Theater, Joe Dowling, Artistic Director with other distinguished associates. Anna Devere Smith's Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, Actors Theater of Louisville, and Vanderbilt University Theater. The call asks for manifestos to imagine new possibilities for the future, engage in the idealism of the past, step forward and define our changing times, address the needs and necessity for the creation of new work theater today. Among the judges of the winning manifestos are Morgan Janus, Tony Kushner, and Diana Sun. The engine of the call seems to be the, quote, need and necessity for the creation of new work, end quote, and the search for a contemporary American Theater that will define itself by responding to that thought. It's of note that the Guthrie, one of America's most esteemed theaters, whose artistic director is committed to developing new work, and the Actors Theater of Louisville with its long history of important new plays and playwrights will be involved in bringing the chosen manifesto to life. I hope the negative perception of our behemoth institutions with their repressive powers will want to be abandoned and that the rhetorical cry, excuse me, the rhetorical cry, quote, where are the theaters worthy of these artists, end quote, will come to seem hyperbolic since the glass that seems only half full holds the half that promises well-equipped stages, experienced staffs, practiced audiences, in place administrative systems, the pro-staffs, practiced audiences, and in place administrative systems, the protection of an institution able and interested to embrace new thought. While our institutions may not currently be satisfying all needs and expectations of artists, it's only through and with them that there's any hope for growth. In both a Marxist sense and a practical theatrical one, only the institutional theaters possess the means of production necessary to carry the work forward. Acquiring these took labor, love, grit, and guts, as well as an act of large imagination sustained over a long period of time. There was accumulated wisdom within the institutional theater. Suspecting or undervaluing these theaters as partners would be more than foolhardy and would demonstrate to the world an unfortunate lack of historical perspective. All of us have to listen up, not just trust the institutions. Nothing is so irresistible as a good example. If the time is right, one or two examples can become two or four. Two and four can become eight or 12 and so on. Transformation via contagion is the evolutionary pattern of the resident theater movement. I too send out a call. It's not as resonant as the other call and won't reach as far, but it could evoke an immediate response and it's achievable within current circumstances. I can call out to a leading American playwright whom the world admires and trusts to step up to the plate to take on the responsibilities of the artistic directorship of the next theater that's looking for one and wants to devote three quarters of its repertory to new work. Our playwrights seem to be the most angry. The sense of exclusion of disempowerment seems strongest among them. Since their art is seminal to all the other arts, if it can be empowered to flourish, the other arts will bloom along with it. Beneath the rage of powerlessness noted in one of the articles can lie a deep and rich source of creative power, but it can be released only by opportunity. A director, designer, or actor as artistic leader can surely provide this opportunity and each has done so. But a playwright leader is one of their own and could serve them with a special understanding. The playwright whose authenticity is already established and whose empathy is assured carries a natural authority with other playwrights. It is to be an impromptu table reading, a workshop, a lab production in an informal space, a full production, which is best for the playwright. The workshop to death syndrome will be resolved by someone who has already been there done that. The act of auditioning will have a different intention. From a test, a judgment, it will become an exploration, part of the overall process. A number of our theaters focus on very, a number of our theaters focus on very successful new work, but their relationship to the world's classics is casual if they produce them at all. I would hope that a playwright's theater would find the classics essential to its lab-reaching component. No playwright, no artist was born yesterday. Every artist stands on the shoulders of other artists working in other forms in other times. Classics in new adaptations and translations are new works and representing profound excavations of the human spirit belong in any theater that claims contemporary. In the work of a theater, the playwright provides the scaffold of meaning and intention to which all other arts attach. In performance, the actor is at the center. Theater as a performing art is an art of experience. Through the flesh and blood of an actor, the playwright comes to life no matter when she lived. Playwrights and actors are natural companions, creating a different way, but always symbiotically. Anton Chekhov wrote to the company of the Moscow Art Theater, never be afraid of an author. An actor is a free artist. You must create an image different from the authors. When these two images, the authors and the actors fuse into one, then an artistic work is created. There are soft rustles in the air. The idea of acting companies is blowing in again, and of course, in a few theaters, the idea has never left. Could it be that the playwright actor-director could come together in a place in such a way as to form a dreamed of golden triangle? There will be a board who will understand that precious nature of the undertaking, and yet find it irresistible. The notion of research and development will be familiar to them. They will understand that it takes a lot of chaff to yield the wheat. That, without bad plays, there's no field from which the good ones can emerge. One doesn't know if the idea rates as a million-dollar idea that could raise a million or whatever that is in current dollars, but it's not beyond imagining that it could. The budget has been large enough to support the goals. The budget has to be large enough to support the goals. Otherwise, fear will take over from imagination yet another time. Art requires luxury. Even abundance, wrote Tolstoy, indeed. There is a level of fantasy to my line of thought. For is there an established playwright who would set aside his own writing for the arduous time-consuming life of an artistic director? A playwright is the most solo of all theater artists while the artistic director belongs to the entire society of the theater, last to herself. But there needs to be but one of you who hears the call. The example that occurs only once, and what follows is up to the others. I was given for Christmas Mel Gousseau's book, Conversations with Miller. Here, from a conversation in 1986, is Arthur Miller's response to a question from Gousseau about the use of time? If I had a theater that I was connected to, a theater of my peers, a working theater, with a good group of actors, I probably would have written more plays. I have had one experience like that and that was before Lincoln Center collapsed. I had done After the Fall and Harold Clerman came to me and said, look, we've got to have another play. Do you have anything else? And I wrote Incident at Ricci. It worked out magically. There was a part for every actor in the company that never occurred to me. There was an excitement about it. You didn't have to run around finding producers. It's very important. It's a defense against the outside. We're all in this together. Yes, we are. A big round of applause to everyone who participated in that speech. Take a stand and take a bow if you wish. And now I would like to invite our kickoff speaker, Eric Schaefer, back to the podium. We've probably got about five minutes for a little discussion on whether and whether art. Yes, thank you. No, I mean, for me, it was fascinating just hearing the passion behind Zelda and the whole sense of the institution theater. I mean, it's interesting that signature, I always tell our staff, I never want signature to be an institution because I feel that word sometimes can be actually stale in creativity and I never want us to be that. And it's something that everyone on our staff really is passionate about. And I think, you know, with Zelda, what she wrote here, it was not only about the artist, but also the playwrights that was really, really fantastic and just gave a huge overwhelming sense of theater. And I loved how she always referred to everyone as she. I thought that was fantastic. Artistic director's playwrights, everyone was always she. And it reminds us we need to keep the she, keep more she. So does anyone have any responses or any reactions that they'd like to, yeah. We're gonna ask you to use the microphone since we're live streaming. Thanks. I have to repeat myself. Yeah, repeat yourself. It sounds dead. How close must I hold it to your knowledge or to anybody's knowledge? How many playwrights took her up on her challenge of becoming artistic directors? Well, I do know here in Washington, I mean, the great thing is we have this new theater company called The Welders, which is actually like five playwrights that are, run a theater for five years and then they hand it over to five new playwrights, three years. So, but I don't know nationally. Do you, Howard? Well, yeah, Ari Aroth, yeah. This was 2002, yeah. But he really hasn't been writing since then is that much. I think others might be Emily Mann. Oh, yeah. Kwame, we're at center stage, also a writer. Right. And I'm sure there might be a few others. Who did you say come to mind? Ari? Yeah. So some are crazy enough to do it. Yes, yes. Yeah. Any other observations? Howard. I was just gonna add the, I mean, there's so many challenges in that speech. It's a speech I've read several times, but the challenge to sort of integrate within the institution, I mean, we all hate that word, but to integrate within it all the different functions, the artists with the board members, with the audience, with the staff, that's like such a huge challenge for us still because the, and she talks about, it has to be enough money to make the ideas possible. But I mean, finance is always mitigate against the kind of unity that we're looking for, but we can always find ways to bring people together, and I know that I'm struggling with it. It's constantly a struggle to not let the organization get kind of separated into these various functions that don't actually intersect with one another. I don't know how you find that in signature, but. Yeah, no, it's the same thing. It's, I always say it's like all of us, we all have to be in the sand pit together. It's really, and the bigger you get, the harder it is to do it. Absolutely. I was very heartened by her remarks that had to do with cultural specificity as well, culturally specific organizations, and the fact that the landscape probably wouldn't change. So I have to say that as far as we're concerned, Agala, it's still not changing as much as it should. So she was really sort of a pre-seer. A pioneer, yeah. Yeah, a pioneer in that regard. The other thing is I wanted to mention new playwrights and Harry Baghdazi, and again, if anybody remembers, they had also, I believe he was a playwright and artistic director back in the 80s, right Agala? I'm found 70s, late 70s, so that was another person. Anybody else? I guess I'm heartened and disheartened at the same time at the plight of the actor who wants to be a part of the theater and finds it more and more difficult. I think we must remember that when Zelda started, she had a company, and she had that company for many years, and when she had to, she even went to New York for some small parts, but this company flourished, and we all loved them, and I'm afraid that's not true anymore. Yeah, you don't see it very much, unfortunately. I thought the other interesting thing that she brought up was about the audiences too, about when she said, are the audiences that are, are they gonna be satisfied with less compared to what they were back in the times, and I think with all the media and everything, that's a huge, I know that's a huge thing that we struggle with daily, yeah. I noticed that the reliance on federal funding to have robust theaters was a big constraint that she spoke to, so in my naive young mind, I'm curious if we can experiment with different business models that can sustain theaters. And then I noticed she talked about the exclusion of playwrights as a big piece of her story, and I was curious, I know Arena has a resident playwright program or something relating to that, so I was wondering if her comments about that and how playwrights are excluded, kind of inspire or inform Arena's resident playwright program and how they go about doing the playwright resident program, whether the playwright's in their own home and being able to be comfortable wherever they are to continue working, so I just noticed that connection. Yeah, well, Seema, you could probably talk to that best. Yeah, we do have a resident playwright annually that who's on a salary and is given the freedom to come here and we'll do some programming around their work. This year's resident playwright is A. A. Dr. He'll be here in November, will be his first trip, and then we've got several subsequent trips. We also have playwrights Arena, which is a program that's focused on local DMV artists as well, who are generating new work. But yes, I would say Zelda's clarion call hit all of us at theaters across the nation to respond. I think there's a comment over there. Yeah, there's one right here. I wanted to speak to the idea of acting company. During Zelda's time, she thought that was the best way for the professionals to learn from each other and react with each other and it was brilliant and it really worked. But as was noted in the first piece that was read about do you have fresh tomatoes in Washington? There weren't that many actors in Washington in those days, and I think today our city is one of the richest in the country. With the talent that we have actors who not only act here, but they marry, they have children, they have a life here, which is much different than it used to be. So I think that we have something to be very proud of here in the city. The other I wanted to speak to a minute is about institutions and so forth. I was a board member, I wasn't an actor. I did a lot of acting when we raised money. The concept of theater used to be, like Zelda explained in the letter, the first year they did 15 plays. And I don't know if you really caught why she said that. She said that because you only had a limited audience so they wanted the audience to come back so they had to have another play. And they did that 15 times and they could work. But there are many ways that a good artistic team and a good board can work out how to raise funds in a way that you're not raising money to spend now, but you're raising money for the future. And we had a great deal of success doing that here in the 70s and 80s. And I would only suggest that it is possible not to give up on it. That's great. We should probably wrap up. Okay, well thank you so much. Thank you team for reading that speech. It was really inspiring. And Howard Chowitz is gonna be next. Yeah, thank you so much Eric and all the readers. So now our next speech is the Long Revolution. It's gonna be kicked off by Howard Chowitz. If you are one of the readers in the Long Revolution, please come and meet with me here by the table and we'll go over some instructions. If you are sitting in the audience during this, you've got probably about a two to three minute respite. So Long Revolution readers all the way here, thanks. Right here. It seems like it's changing right now. You can try it. You know what, it's been a whole sense of improvisation. So just so we're sitting here, I would say the first person. Yes, when the person, it worked out just fine. Yeah, okay. The first person. The last two, so then we're covered. Yes. I don't hate to recommend. I was, whenever anybody went on this, I looked over at you because I remember you talked about it. I remember the conversation. I remember the conversation. Is it okay if I start Howard, if I introduce you? Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all so very much. We're about to start speech number three, the Long Revolution. For those of you who are just joining us, as you probably know today, we're celebrating the words and the ideas of Zelda Fitchhandler, who was the pioneering founder of Arena Stage. This next speech, the Long Revolution, has 18 sections. We've got our speakers all lined up for it. And following the reading, we'll have a discussion of the ideas. This entire event is being live streamed. And so if you are participating in the discussion, we have a couple of us who'll be running around with mics. Since that's the only way it can get picked up for the live stream. And now, if you will indulge me, I'd like to introduce our kickoff speaker for the Long Revolution, Howard Shawitz, the founder of Woolly Mammoth Theater. Thank you. So hi, everyone. So we're going back in time. That last one was early 2000. So this is heading back to a speech that Zelda gave delivered at the Theater Communications Group National Conference in 1976. For those of you who don't know, TCG is the national network of professional theaters all across the country. It's still going very strong today. And just to understand the beginning of this speech, she's addressing Peter. And Peter, of course, is Peter Zeisler, who was the legendary founder of TCG. And who was the person who asked her to give this address. I think it was one of Zelda's first TCG addresses of which over the years she gave several. All right. So this is a speech by Zelda Fischlandler delivered at the Theater Communications Group National Conference in 1976. Friends and colleagues, I take pleasure in speaking to you tonight. I wish we could all speak. If we could, if we could tell our separate stories, how much there would be to hear and learn our individual ways and motives for taking up the task, how we see what it is we are doing, the weights and hindrances we feel, the dream images should the manacles fall away. No two stories are really the same. When people meet, two pasts meet. And so it is with theaters. Sorry, I'm gonna do a little housekeeping here. Henry James wrote that art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon exchange of views, and the compassion of standpoints. What richness and diversity there is represented in this room, and she's referring to the room of all the theaters from around the country at that time. We talk over the next several, the talk over the next several days cannot help but be full and ripe, even though we must try to fit our personal stories to common themes. And the ancient mariner in all of us, eager to tell his tale, may need to clasp his hand over his own mouth from time to time. With all the available voices, why mine to launch these days? What special usefulness could I bring, I wondered? Just how did Peter and the TCG board see my story and see me? A conglomerate, is that it? Is that me? That is what Dick Netzer in his new book, The Subsidized Muse, Public Support for the Arts in the United States, calls arena stage in passing. No longer imperiled, one of the establishment institutions that seeks funds because, quote, any individual organization can always find ways to use more money, end quote, perhaps or perhaps not entitled to continuous public funds on the basis of its programs. It is hard to determine what a proper level of support might be, he says. If not a conglomerate, then maybe a local mother courage. Is that who, Peter? Good strong shoulders and a wily mind, survivor of a 30 years war, pulling that damn wagon back and forth across a hostile landscape, buying and selling, getting and spending, wheeling and dealing, whining and sometimes winning, threatening and haggling and arranging and improvising, but always surviving. Losing a child here and there, God forbid, but maybe, maybe losing some portion of innocence and hope, but surviving. Well, it has been 30 years and it has been a war, but still I don't know. Not the Wizard of Oz, not the wonderful wizard. Follow the yellow brick road and at the end, final wisdom. Oh, surely you wouldn't expect that from me, Peter. And anyway, the wizard turned out to be all razzle, dazzle and sham stage effects, a charlatan. Although, of course, underneath there was only a poor human caught in the tornado of being alive, like the cowardly lion, the tin man, the scarecrow, and from Kansas Dorothy herself. Well, who knows what was in Peter's head? At any rate, I am here. Thank goodness I don't come empty handed. I have with me a snatch of wisdom, a nugget, a pearl even, stumbled upon and shining, out of the belly of the establishment, or from the windy steps, or masked within a hokum booth, an idea befell me between the invitation and tonight that I think is worth sharing. It is this, we must hang on to our despair. Without despair, everything is hopeless. That is an injunction that applies to all of us. Story to story to story. In the past 20 years, longer for me and for a few others, we have made a revolution and while revolutions can pulse with the joy of change and ride on the back of optimism and imagine good, the energy of them comes from despair. Despair creates anger and anger creates energy and energy turns things around. The dictionary offers up a number of definitions of the word revolution. I focus on these two. One, a sudden radical or complete change as a revolutionary thought and two, a basic reorientation and reorganization as a revolution in technology. We engaged in both a revolution in thought and a revolution not in technology, but in methodology. Close enough. And it was despair that transformed the one into the other. One page at a time. Of course, everything had to start with thought. If the very fabric of our thought had not changed, we would not have been able to change reality. The new perception of theater that came to us had many facets and implications and each of us takes a different emphasis. But the basic synapse is our thinking was as simple as apple pie. It was that theater should stop serving, should stop serving the function of making money for which it had never, never been very well suited and start serving in the revelation and shaping of the process of living for which it is uniquely suited, for which it indeed exists. The new thought was that theater should be restored to itself as a form of art. There was a lot of confusion about what this radical, those simple thought really means. In his new book, Dick Nexter talks about art, art, but never really defines that except to say that the arts are generally viewed as merit goods, are good for us and that their production and consumption should be encouraged by subsidy because they are meritorious. Nor is the Congress or even the endowment as yet comfortable with the thought. There is the struggle to define professionalism, the use sometimes of geographic and other extraneous criteria as guidelines, the blurring of aesthetic considerations with considerations of availability, enhancing the quality of life or increasing the multiplicity of services and the broadening of definitions to include funding for activities that may be worthy but are not art. There is a general confusion in public policy about the arts because of this confusion. There is even confusion among artists themselves. What is an art form? When I say we wanted our theater to be about art, what does that mean exactly? Perhaps some of these things. That art is something of its own and not something of something else. It is not education. It is not social betterment. It is not about civic pride or better international relations or group therapy. It is not merit goods. It is not goods of any kind. It may serve many worthy ends and indeed it does all of the above and more but tangentially. As a spillover from itself, it is not created for these ends and does not exist for them. It is self-serving and lonely, self-standing and fragile, self-defined and searching. It is what it is what it is. Art always objectifies a private reaction to some portion of the universe. That means it is always personal. It originates as do our dreams, neuroses, ideas, beliefs, as does thought itself from within and from within a single sensibility. It is a way of looking at reality and rendering up that vision in one medium or another. Even though theater emerges in a collective way and sometimes as the aesthetic will of a collective, still its core is a singular vision. The social aspects of art come from the human need to share from our nature as gregarious and empathizing human beings. We want a need to share what we make and do as deeply as we want and need to love. Having audiences filling up our houses has its economic necessity, but it has a deeper psychological one. As in, look ma, no hands or take a look at this, will ya? Ain't it something? Or back to the ancient tribal teller of tales. Gather around and let me tell you how it happened. Art is a way of knowing reality. And people want to know. It gives them pleasure and power. It is quite possible that the need for truth has some physiological basis that ultimately we can no more dispense with it than with oxygen. Art is a necessity because it is a way of knowing. It does not only record civilization, it is civilization. It is the process of the mind knowing itself and sharing what it knows. Art exists outside of time. It is not fatty. The images at different periods may be different, but there is always an echo. Always a thread. Unlike technology which accumulates upon itself, in art there is always a repetition of past forms. Art does not age. It is as persistent as human nature because it is rooted there. Art mediates primary experiences through form. That means it requires technique, study, training, and the mastery of the rules of the game. And art form is a special discipline as complex and as serious, even though it is a kind of high playfulness, serious as the law or medicine or banking. We have to make people understand these things. First, we have to get clear about it ourselves in order to sustain our energy and keep ourselves on the right track. And second, we have to explain them to other people or else our national sources for the support of our revolution will be drained away into things that look like art, but in fact are not. We should talk about this at Princeton because it is important. A revolution in thought seems to have certain motion. It starts with a question. What is it that I want that I haven't got? Then goes to the question, what is wrong? What's standing in my way? Then goes to what is to be done. When you can answer the third question, you are at the beginning of the long, long labor required for the second aspect of the revolution, the basic reorganization and reorientation in method, the pulling of the damn wagon back and forth across a hostile landscape. We have said that what we wanted was theater as an art form. There is no point in going too deeply into what we were getting when the despair set in. Broadway, it is still there. Though paler and weaker and floundering around for infusions of creativity, we can all take a look if we want to. Briefly, there was an industry built upon the theater experience having little to do with art, quote, art. Or if there was art upon occasion, it was because there were artists and artists are airborne and will arise. One-shottedness, mammon-mindedness, crisis and hysteria, lest all be lost on the throw of the dice when what was needed was quietude of spirit, continuity, the freedom to fail and still go on working. Actors stuck in long run hits and stagnating or not working at all. Directors and designers with limited outlets. Architectural monotony, the proscenium arch and nothing else. The classics of the stage lost to us because they couldn't support a commercial run. New works have established playwrights but new playwrights unable to get a foot in the doors. Some exciting activity off Broadway but nothing very much around in the rest of the country. In Washington, not even road shows, no theater at all. I remember trying to press a New York actor into the company in the early 50s and being asked if you could get fresh tomatoes as far away as Washington. The American theater was a contracting knot of insularity and predictability and the turning of a buck shut off from the lives of the American people and with its high ticket prices from all but the well-to-do and expense account audience, even in New York itself. And it made us sad and mad and we looked around for another way to organize things and we found it. And that is essentially why we are all together here with differences in style, world outlook, taste and personality but with a unity in the way we are set up in our needs, in our deepest concerns. To sustain a revolution, you have to deal constantly and well with a lot of little counter revolutions and that's what explains our headaches and the troublesomeness of certain topics for this conference. Alas, things do not evolve in a straight line but rather in a spiral as Lenin put it about the big Russian one, two steps forward, one step back. Every revolution partakes of the incompleteness of all human endeavor. The instrument for the development of our theater as an alternative to the commercial theater was a non-for-profit corporation before then associated with education, science and charity but not art or culture. Arena stage was an anomaly since it began its life in 1950 as a regular profit corporation. It did so deliberately to better maintain control of its artistic policy and through necessity because we didn't think we could raise the $15,000 we were after in 10 days. We had in any other way, we became a non-profit institution only in 1957. In order to become eligible for gifts and grants, especially from the Ford Foundation which entered the field that year. Also, we made all our expenses at the box office for roughly the first 15 years of our existence. It was as late as the mid-60s when we conceded that we couldn't continue to do this but had to become a deficit producing organization. I bring this up simply to point out that while we are gathered here in the name of the non-profit corporation and indeed without the non-profit income tax code, our American theater would simply not exist. Being non-profit does not really define us. Our goals, our aims, our aesthetic, our achievements. What defines us measures us is our capacity to produce art. This, it so happens, has come inevitably to produce deficits as well. We are still, however, very much part of commerce and have to deal with all aspects of commerce in our working lives. Raising unheard income, for instance, takes up far too much of our time and energy because we exist in a culture that still values us too little. Mr. Netzer quotes Hilton Kramer from the 1976 presidential campaign that, quote, "'Everyone agrees that the government has an obligation to subsidize the arts in this country," end quote. Well, yes and no to some extent. Surely things have changed for the better since the creation of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities in 1965. Nonetheless, if we really seen and really valued as art qua arts, after the manner I outlined briefly earlier, we might be given a larger share of the pie. The share for the TCG theaters being now only 6.5% of their total budgets. We would not have to be involved so deeply with commerce and perhaps topic number five would not be on the TCG conference agenda at all. As it is, our non-profit commercial theater still has a tango with that other commercial theater from which we broke out of our despair and our anger because that other commercial theater offers us some opportunity to make ends meet. For example, the public theater covers 16% of its expenses at its box office, 9% from other earned income, 25% from grants and contributions from government and private sources, and the remaining half from a chorus line and for colored girls. Without these two productions, it would not be surviving. Since it cost the public around $4.6 million a year to do what it does, if that represents a blurring of the purpose and function of our theaters through increasing participation in the commercial sector, as topic number five on the agenda suggests is possible, then we have had this greatness thrust upon us. I think it behooves the arts to get their act together and talk with American business, the government and the public at large about this matter of art as art, how important it really is and how much commerce it takes to produce and sustain it. I read that the museums and performing arts institutions with budgets of $100,000 or more account for 30% of NEA grants. That doesn't seem to me to be nearly enough. At the same time, not enough funding is available for the smaller and younger producing groups. It to encourage their development before an inflationary economy wipes them out and to identify them in the first place. In the meantime, I don't produce in New York. I agree when we lose actors to Broadway which still hold some vestigial attraction for them and experience dread and fear when they come down to Washington to discover what is called properties ripe for the picking, offer percentages that are grudging in exchange for risk, development, labor and love and then more often than not, turn what they saw and liked into something altogether else under the terrible pressures of the Broadway producing system. It is regrettable that the American experience doesn't allow us to keep our cherished work in a permanent repertoire as is normal in the European theater. There is particular pain and waste in tearing down productions that demonstrate the special character and style of a theater. Knowing that these productions don't come along routinely and that the tradition of a theater is built precisely on its most self-defining work. We should try harder to find a way to extend the life of these productions, not turning over to be improved for Broadway and not disrupting our own schedules or breaking up our companies. One of the answers is touring but that is expensive for our larger theaters. Except for our tour to the Soviet Union in 1973 with State Department support, we have been unsuccessful in funding them. An interesting and ironic result of this tour incidentally is that the arena company is more highly acclaimed and more accurately perceived in Moscow and Leningrad than in Washington or New York and indeed found there a new kind of cohesion and pride that lasted for the following several years. However much we circle it, however impractical because of other polls and incentives, production by means of the permanent acting company remains the method organic to theater as an art form and the ideal. Our own best work has always been done at those times when a company has evolved to the peak of its powers. I learn this and relearn it since we have had a long history and roughly four companies each of which eventually drifted away either one at a time or in response to the power and the glory of commercial transfers. And we are now in the process of building another. I have had ample opportunity to learn. Some of you have done much better at this than we have especially those of you who work whose work centers around artistic method rather than a more or less eclectic repertory or who have younger companies. But I think most of us are experiencing increasing difficulty in holding actors together over a long period of time and evolving that unity of style, camaraderie and the identification with a common goals that we so passionately want. Is it futile for us to want this? Is it impossible to achieve? Should we abandon the idea? I put the following questions to myself all thrusting off of the central question. How do you keep them down on the farms after they've seen the Perry or even before? Perry being of course Broadway, the TV series, the commercial film. Are we at fault by not enlarging our loyalties to company actors in the roles that we offer them, the plays that we do for them and in continued professional training in return for longer commitments for them? How would we fund the continued training and do they really want it or could they learn that they want it? Should actors have some more self-determination, participating more directly in the affairs of the theater and in setting their own working conditions? How can we involve actors more directly in their own destiny? Can actors' equity be persuaded to revise its current stance which leases actors to management's already presumed to be all style? Recent rhetoric that likens us to the threatening producers of 1919 and sees us as self-serving exploiters acting under the guide of saving culture is anti-historic to say the least. Can actors themselves help to turn these attitudes around? Must a theater create its own academy in order to create a company? Are there enough teachers to staff so many academies? Who would fund these? Or should close liaisons develop between theaters and particular training institutions already in existence? How many young people can a theater absorb each year? How many compatible training institutions are there? Can theaters, through direct participation, help to strengthen these? Do training institutions want that? Could chairs be endowed for mature actors, much as for leading players in an orchestra? Who would do this? What other mechanisms might there be for permitting a mature actor the same economic participation in his or her society as say a college professor or an accountant? Should we turn into the skid and allow our actors' intervals away from commercial projects? Will they ever come back, except for on a one-shot basis, in the face of a current rush to the coast that reminds us again that there's a lot of gold out there? What is to be done about this troubling aspect of the counter revolution? While we're on the subject of actors, what is to be done about the directors, producers who lead them? How are they to be developed to replace those now at work when it comes time? Artistic leaders may be born, but surely not full blown out of the head of Zeus. Man, woman is the animal who learns. Why not make use of this aspect of our adaptive nature? Is it right that when a theater needs a new artistic director, it calls upon the people currently doing the same thing elsewhere, and that the few resources in this area are then shuffled around, diluting the aesthetic identity of each theater involved and causing a rippling of crisis? I think not. We are rich in the resources to train the talented people capable of top leadership. It would not cost very much to attach a few potential artistic producers to specific institutions on the basis of mutual choice in the manner of the old guild system, or even to subsidize the training period of someone from within the theater itself, and or to set up an institute linked to a university where the wisdom and know-how gained over the quarter century of our long revolution could be shared. We are wasting what can never be retrieved, human experience, and we are not preparing the inheritance of the traditions of any given theater. However, they may be altered in the succession. Perhaps when the government understands deeply that theater is an art form, and therefore dependent on a single personal vision, money for such a project will be made available. Right now I fear they see this idea as a way of subsidizing something called general operations and are suspicious of it, and that is too bad. Organization is creation. The greatest achievement of our revolution has been to decentralize or make popular, that is part of the lives of people all over the country, including New York, the art of the theater. We have done this via what might be called elitist institutions, not elitist in the pejorative sense of snobbish, but elitist in that they by and large have been founded and run by people who were self-chosen, who had an overriding personal vision of what they wanted to do, and who strove for the highest possible standards of production that could be reached to make their vision palatable. It is not snobbishness rather than elitism to think that people should have or make do with any art but the best art, and do we not mistrust people's capacity to respond to better things than they may be used to when we assume that art has to be watered down in order to be popular? In an unselfconscious way, and I think in a way that we did not even fully understand or were not able to articulate, we provided living examples of the proper creative tension between elitism and popularization, and neutralized that debate a long time before it got to be so noisy. We wanted to create a form for theater that would enable us to insert meaning and beauty into our culture so that people could reach out and touch it simply and directly. Despite hazards and harassments, we have in our various ways done just that. It is a miracle of sorts. For not only did we have to construct the method to carry our idea, but we had to train an audience to know that they wanted to have what we wanted to give them. And that was not an easy struggle. And of course, it still goes on. Of absolutely critical importance to this achievement was the role of the Ford Foundation in the years between 1957 and 1975. I said we were self-chosen, self-elected, but it was W. McNeil Lowry, more than any other single human being who recognized that excellence was not a function of geography or frame and who, by identifying many of us outside the then culture capital, and some of us who operated within it, but not at its center, enabled us to have the wherewithal to do our work. Mac created a pattern for the dispersal of theater art via the leaders of nonprofit institutions that made our history. This is a pattern that one hopes will be perpetuated. It will have to be if our art form is to be kept alive and changing. For, as we said, art is personal, and new artistic leadership has to be continually identified and supported wherever it can be found. We must all fight for that. We have talked about the highest possible standards of production, and we have talked about the decentralization of the art of the theater via institutions. Something further needs to be said. It is wrong thinking to automatically equate standards with expensive costumes, large companies, and new buildings. The matter of standards is more subtle than that. It has to do with discovering and gathering precisely the right means for making a vision clear, and the means will vary with the vision. Every artist will need to define his or her own. Stark Young wrote about this as follows, quote, behind every work of art is a living idea, a content that will achieve a form that will be inseparable from it. A perfect example in any art arrives not through abstract standards, but when the essential or informing idea has been completely expressed in terms of this art and comes into existence entirely through the medium of it. This is perfection, end quote. If one considers a performing group to be an artwork in and of itself, which I do, then this statement applies exactly. Some artistic leaders will not want to penetrate the culture via institutions and all the baggage that institutionalization entails. They may want to hang loose, free, improvisational, and structure, and indeed their work may die unless they are permitted to do so. It is important that they not be pressured into more conventional modes by the need to qualify for funds, lest the energy and originality that they provide be lost to us. On the other hand, some artistic leaders may find a continuing permanent structure an essential form for their living idea, but may want to keep it small in scale. Growth for the sake of growth should not be imposed upon them in exchange for financial support, nor should they succumb to it. Bigger is not necessarily better. The very grain and texture of certain work can disappear through enlargement. For many of us here, perhaps most of us, growth, stability, the capacity to plan ahead, and a staff and company of a certain size are organic aspects of our vision. Art required comfort, even luxury, wrote Tolstoy. We wouldn't know how to handle luxury and we don't expect comfort. We do, however, need to have what we need in order to do what we want to do. I don't think I have to spell that out. Liviu Ciule, my director friend from the Boulandra Theater in Romania who directed our Hamlet this past season, sends me what he calls data about the typical subsidized repertory theater. This is in Hungary. For example, the personnel list, four directors, two assistant directors, three set designers, two assistant set designers, two literary managers, one librarian, 70 actors, I'm gonna say that again, 70 actors, four stage managers, two technical stage managers, two master sound technicians, two sound associates, two masters for makeup and wigs, two assistants for makeup, one hairstylist, six gentlemen tailors, six ladies dressmakers, one shirt maker, one hat maker, one embroiderer, three warehouse keepers, one laundry person, 30 administrative jobs and so on and so on and so on. This is just an introduction. The total company and staff numbers 232. The Boulandra operates two theaters, mounts eight to 10 new productions a year and keeps 18 productions in repertory. The subsidy covers all the salaries and represents about two thirds of the total budget. The rest of the budget is covered by the box office which needs to sell 87% of the seats. There is an average of 600 performances per season in Bucharest, 300 for each house and 30 to 40 performances on tour, usually in the summer. Now we do not ask for much. Yet Levy's letter should be required reading for the writers of books about the subsidized muse in the United States. It should certainly be read into the congressional record. And I brought it with me in case any of you want to look it over. At least it will help you understand your fatigue while you find it so hard to sandwich in a personal life or go to the movies and it may relieve your guilt when you're next to fend your actor budget to the board of directors. There is another meaning in the word revolution that the dictionary says is obsolete, quote, a winding or curving form or course, colon, twist, comma, bend, end quote. Well it may be obsolete, but it is familiar. It rings a bell. I think our course will continue to be a winding one that a great suppleness as in twist, bend will be demanded of us for many years to come. We are not, sorry, we are not one of us part of any establishment. We are alive, all of us, by the skin of our teeth. Sweet are the uses of despair. Without despair, everything is hopeless. And there is still so much to be done. And now we invite Howard to lead us in a discussion of some of the ideas of this speech. We are live streaming on HowlRound. So wait for one of us runners with a mic to come to you if you do have something to say so we can be sure to capture it on video. Thanks. Well I just wanted to start by thanking, for those of you who don't know, there were so many illustrious arena alumni and other American theater luminaries who were participating in this reading, so I want to thank all of them. You know, just to kick this off, this is a profound, profound speech and it's still, it's so overwhelming to me not just because of my friendship with Zelda, but also because of the profundity of the line between hope and despair that is sort of buried in this speech. And this is still what 30 years, well, 25 or so years into this experiment. And the comparison, of course, I've spent a lot of time in Budapest myself with my friend Phil Arnau out there and seeing the work of the National Theater of Hungary and other of these enormous repertory companies whose work just makes our mouths drop. And it's fascinating that Zelda was already thinking back in 1975 of how do we, in this country, where we were just getting started on this revolution, you know, hold up in front of us the standards of these great repertory companies from around the world and looking at them, how do we understand our own despair and our own exhaustion and our own struggle to keep the work going. There's so many things about this speech that I could reflect on, but let me hear some of your thoughts. How much time do we have, Sima? You probably have about, let's say, seven minutes. Okay, not a lot, but enough. I think what's so important and what makes or made me break down in you a little bit is that it's 40 years old and it's the same struggle today. It's the same, same stuff. Same, same, same. Yep. Yeah, our government support has not gone up, it has gone down. Yeah. I'm just a lowly usher who was ushering for the play this afternoon, but I am an ex-New Yorker, and in 1964 when I told my mother that my husband and I, newly married, had to leave to Washington for him to go to law school, she said, so, what's in Washington? And when we came, we really found very little and when I read my piece, I choked up like you did when you read yours because there's so much, I connect with it in terms of what Zelda wanted to do for this theater world here and broadly beyond. And I feel so honored that I had a chance to convey it in my little contribution. And here in Washington, we have made a lot of progress. Obviously we have, as Lee Rubinstein said earlier, we have a much bigger community of artists. We have a lot of theater institutions that are supporting those artists and creating opportunities. But the struggle to create each show, as Guy said, feels like the same struggle it's always been. So there's steps forward and steps back. I'm so struck in this material. You know what a Russo file, is that the right word? And what a reader of Marx's Zelda was. I mean, you know, the language in her speeches is so derived from her experience in Russia, her knowledge of Russian as a language and this idea that we are forming a society together and in starting a theater that this was like, you know, Guy? Yeah, that this was a revolution, that this was part of the constant struggle of society to have value and to bring value to the lives around us and you just feel that, because she was deeply knowledgeable about Russian culture and certainly was a close reader of Marx and all of that. And you just feel it embedded in this material. Yeah, Clayton. This has been quite an experience for me as well. I had an opportunity to personally get a phone call from a lady named Benita Hofstetter. Is Benita here? I got a call from Benita Hofstetter after I wrote, directed and produced a play, it was the first play that I ever wrote. It was about South Africa. I mounted it in Washington DC at the Sanctuary Theater. I received a call from Benita Hofstetter and she said, Zelda Fitzhandler wants to meet you. She was more nervous than I was because she asked me that I have two prepared monologues and in the tone of her voice, I heard, if you don't young man, you have a wonderful opportunity. I did. I met with her, we talked and then I was cast in Leblanc by Lorraine Hansberry. So when I read and I come and I get this piece, how this genius, Zelda Fitzhandler, without question, a revolutionary, personally touched me and I'm reading the revolution when I come in and didn't, wasn't prepared, so she's still serving them. I find that Raisin in the Sun is a very unique production in regards to what she's talking about because it's done quite a bit as we know. Very few people know that Lorraine Hansberry wrote a fantastic piece called Leblanc and Zelda Fitzhandler turned this arena into an atmosphere of Africa starring Lilia Scala and if anyone who does not know Lilia Scala, she was the first head nun in the feature film that Sidney Poitier did. Someone help me right now. Lilies of the Field, that was my introduction to Ms. Fitzhandler and to Arena Stage and to Guy and to everyone else in the theater community. Thank you, Howard. I think I would just share one phrase that, I got together with Zelda several times over the past few years and she came to see a lot of my work and was very, very supportive but we had in I think the last big conversation that I can remember with her, she used the phrase that I'll never forget and that relates a lot to this speech. This idea of, there's a lot in this speech about art involves a whole community of people but it comes from a vision from an individual and she was someone who always believed in that. She was always looking out for those individuals like you Clayton, who she felt had that spark and had that vision and she used the phrase with me, the arrogance of the artist. Which again, like despair, sounds negative but it's like that there's this need to honor this arrogant and it's not even arrogant but the kind of chutzpah that says I have something worth saying and I believe in myself and I'm gonna gather people around me to help me say it and that that was somehow the kernel of our art form and I think that she was concerned that that sense of, you know, arrogance was perhaps being watered down a little bit in the field. I know that was something she expressed to me. Other couple more comments or anyone? Yeah. I just wanted to say something in general about this afternoon. All of these speeches were Zelda wanting to communicate her ideas and hoping that she would be able to be influential and persuasive and people would get what she was saying and I think the genius of this format of having people in the community and other artists read these ideas is the community responding back to her saying yes Zelda, we get it. And one of the things that also comes through in the speeches that I think relates to that is she wrote and spoke just as though she was thinking aloud. Do you know what I mean? I can't even imagine how much time did she have to work on any of these speeches but they're so brilliant but you feel as though you're getting a firsthand report in all of her speeches from her own internal struggles and thoughts and I think that gives them this incredible intimacy and power. Yeah. We might have time for one more comment and then we'll move to the next speech. Hi, I just wanted to say this time I have immense aspiration for the Washington Theater and what Zelda started and what is here today, you wouldn't believe. No, I really think that the despair and the hope continue. She has given us that. And she was very, very proud. I mean, she was very aware of the growth of the whole community around arena and I think was extremely proud of the whole scope of it not just of what was accomplished here at arena. Well, thank you all. Thank you, big round of applause for Howard and all the speakers of speech number three. Now we're gonna shift gears to the next speech which is the panel on the open stage. Everybody who is part of speech number four, if you could come and meet me over here by this table we'll just sort of organize ourselves and those of you who are sticking around, you've got probably about two or three minutes to maybe run to the restroom and then come back for these speeches. So speech number four panel on the open stage, meet up with me here. Thanks. Now what is the date of dinner? Oh, that's fine. It's time. So it's one, two, three, four, five, six, six, seven. Well, stop by if you could give me all the time. I do. I'm gonna do that. I can't do it that way. And also, thank you. Really, really great. So I'm gonna see you guys in the front row here because I see there's so much of you. You're right here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. We'll have fun and rally everybody right before we start. Yeah, and you're eight, nine. All right, we've got everybody. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back. Thank you so much. For those of you who've just joined us, as you know today, we are celebrating the words and the ideas of the amazing Zelda Fitzandler, the pioneer who founded Arena Stage. Our next speech is the panel on the open stage. We've got one, two, three, four, five readers lined up to go. Following the reading, we invite you to join us for a discussion of the ideas of the speech. And there are a few bound copies of the speeches roaming around somewhere in the audience that you're welcome to follow along, if you wish. And now, without further ado, I'd like to introduce our kickoff reader, Paul Tetrow, artistic director of the Ford's Theater. Thank you. Thank you. These were Zelda Fitzhandlers, introductory remarks at a panel on the open stage, given at the International Theater Institute Conference in New York City in June of 1967. Past the lobby, one enters the auditorium through a long, low ceiling link, and suddenly, the space, quite unexpectedly, almost to the point of shock, opens up. It is high, vaulted room, with a ribbed ceiling pierced by the infinite sources of lighting. The stage cube is not small, 30 feet by 36, and 24 feet to the bottom of a large catwalk, a brooding, dark, gray metal machine, larger than the stage rectangle. Bicected several times in both directions, hundreds of lighting instruments hang on the catwalk rails. All the machinery of lighting and sound is exposed. Four concrete tunnels for the movement of actors and scenery intersect the stage at the corners of the rectangle. Because of the geometric laws that are not of a direct diagonal, the four tiers for audience seating are steeply banked over 16 inches for each row. There are eight rows. Behind the tiers is the circulation aisle from which the audience is seated downward, and behind the circulation aisle and above it by several steps is a ring of boxes. The auditorium seats 800. The vision is always to direct to the stage, to the very feet of the actors with no heads in the way. The floor pattern is perceivable from every seat. The stage space is totally trapped. The cube is usable, acting area extends from below the stage level to the catwalk above. Objects can be flown in and out between the sections of the catwalk as high as to the grid, 40 feet above the stage. The theater was built in 1961 on the basis of 11 years of experience with the arena from two other locations. It is called an arena stage. The name of our company is arena stage by virtue of historic accident. At the time we began in 1950, the District of Columbia building code defined a theater as a place of public assembly giving regular performances which had a proscenium arch, a fire curtain, smoke pockets, and where the audience sat an area that had no step arrangement. In order to get a permit to open, we had to demonstrate in writing and in a public hearing that we were indeed not a theater, but an arena much like a boxing arena, a circus arena, or the ritual hillside theater of ancient Greece. By compiled, erudition, and strained analogy, we got our permit with the proviso that we could not use the word theater in our advertising or indeed in our name, and that is how we became arena stage. The code, incidentally, has been changed since that time to include us as a legitimate sister of the proscenium, but the echoes of association remain. We are, for example, much more of an arena than we are a theater in the round. For a theater in the round has overtones of the following, improvisation, the reconversion of gymnasia, abandoned warehouses, and movie theaters, where there is an air of makeshift and make-do, bad sight lines. The rake of the seats is usually no more than six inches per row, and one can usually see the actors only from the waist up. Inadequate lighting, poor angles, insufficient sources and instruments. When lighting is the heart of this particular form, an intimacy of the quality of eavesdropping, which is talked about as a good thing, a desirable thing, but which usually implies, one, that there is no separation of audience and play, no isolation in space of the event from the people gathered to witness it, two, insufficient acting area in which to release the life of the play in choreographic terms, and three, the audience crawling over the set to get in and out of their seats, and no separation of the traffic of the stage world from the traffic of the real one. While we are talking about what the arena stage is not, surprisingly enough, the arena stage has only some things in common with the three-quarter or thrust or platform stage, less than is commonly supposed. It shares with this other related and incidentally far more popular form. There is a rash of platform stages being built. It seems that we are the only one arena for future archeologists. It shares with this other form the fact that it is not a proscenium stage, that it is a stage which has pushed itself forward from behind the proscenium arch, has wiped out the imaginary fourth wall, has gathered the audience more or less around it, and has chosen to deal with the change of time and place more in terms of the succession of dramatic events than in terms of literal scenic description. The three-quarter and the total arena form also share the Brechtian dictum via Hegel that truth is concrete. Cabinet makers, not only stage carpenters, sculptors, not only painters, and workers in real stuff, be it leather, metal, hair, or woolens, are what we need. But there are significant, and I believe, quite fundamental differences between the arena and the platform stage. For example, the arena playing area is a totally neutral space. There being no back wall and no permanent stage platform, a new stage, a new place, a new plastic and physical world may be created for each production. This has certain practical disadvantages for the production budget, but it is nonetheless true that in the arena there are infinite possibilities for the creation of totally fresh spatial environments within which the place can happen. The stage can be small or large. With light, it can alternately expand and contract within one production. It can be sunken or raised. Platforms can be built up into one or all four of the tunnels or into none of them. The space may be used at one place or because of the capacity of light to define numberless areas within a totally neutral cube, it may be used as an infinite number of places. It is all a matter of light in combination with form, even the simplest of forms. In the Caucasian Chalk Circle, when Grusha crosses the bridge over a deep gorge, a rope was tied to the railing of one tier and then to the railing diagonally opposite. A transverse beam of light became, for the moment, the stage and, in combination with the rope, the footbridge. When Grusha tripped and almost fell, the audience gasped. So strong was the illusion of isolation of place. Floor, ceiling, and walls of the building all disappeared and the physical world became, for them, for that instant, precisely what the emotional reality made of it. The three-quarter platform stage acquires a dominant access for composition and movement from its back wall, the architectural memory of the proscenium stage. The arena has no one fixed reference point architecturally. The closest it comes to a facade is the audience. But since the audience is banked on all sides of it, this gives the form infinite variability in terms of plasticity and movement. As a result of the dominant access of the three-quarter stage, the dynamic thrust seems to be from the back wall toward the tongue of the stage and the strong position becomes the point where most people can see the face of the actor selected as focal. This tends to be somewhere rather upstage and facing downstage. Many key moments on the platform stage seem to derive their compositional arrangement from these circumstances. The arena, on the other hand, is a space comprising numberless points of primary focus. The focus can be anywhere, wherever you want to put it. There are at least four upstage points at the corners in front of the tunnels. And in point of fact, there are now weak areas since the audience is everywhere. Combined with total control of light, the possibilities become literally infinite. Contrary to popularly held notions, the arena does not require the actor to jump about sharing their faces with the audience. In a courtroom drama, for example, it is easily accepted that the judge will have his back to one tier for long periods of time. Since it has no back, front, or sides, the arena becomes a highly democratic form for the audience. It is true that the individual witnesses the stage life from one particular point of view depending on whether he sits north, south, east, or west. But he has, kinesthetically and emotionally, fundamentally the same experience wherever he is sitting. That is, one is satisfied to have been present at the same event as one's friend, though having seen the truth from a different angle. I have not found this to be true with the platform stage. I have noticed that the plays in this form have been designed, sculpted, directed, and acted more or less from the front, the aesthetic weight of the rear wall finally prevailing. When I have sat on the sides, I have not merely seen the play differently, I have seen the sides of the play. That is, the experience of the play intellectually and sensually has been weakened. I think this is a correct observation and surely it is born out of the pricing policy of these theaters. The most expensive seats splay out from the tongue of the stage, the cheaper seats, edge around the stage towards the architectural wall at the back of it. The dynamics of movement and relationship in the arena form seem to be based on the principle of collision and withdrawal, attraction and repulsion, as if one were watching a series of moving bodies on a slide under a microscope. Rather than the event moving towards and away from the consciousness of the spectator, as if the arrow was first pointed away from the back wall and then towards it, one perceives that the positive and negative charges are attracting and repelling each other within a totally free field where the current is on all over the place and equally potent in all of the places. This gives to the dramatic event an enormous sense of aliveness, of irresistible pulls, of spontaneity, of reality in the fullest sense of the word. The laws for the stage space appear to give rise to, and indeed, to insist upon an enormous contact between and interpenetration of the forces in conflict. They release ultimate polarities and connections and allow them immediate visual expression. The impact on the audience appears to increase in direct proportion to the depth and volatility of this stage life. This, of course, holds true on any stage, but it seemed to us to be particularly true in this arena form. The implications in terms of acting and directing, in terms of searching for the truth within style, and the style of truth are enormous. And though our work in this form has gone on since 1950, we do not feel we have, by any means, exhausted its challenge. I go back to the word arena, where the basic clue to the aesthetic of the form is to be found. A young reviewer on a local college newspaper wrote about our production of The Crucible, quote, the word arena originally signified a sandy place, and especially the gladiator ring. Something of this ancient and grim sense has gotten itself into arena's current production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. A sense of the stage is a pit where a ferocious struggle is taking place. Mingqiu Li's set is a large square platform of unpainted, rough boards, lifted a foot or so from the floor of the building. This is exactly right, for the elevation is just enough to call our attention to the depth of the pit itself, and to allow us to look down from a great height on a terrible contest, on a terrible Aegon. We are distanced, but involved. Milton Katsilis, the director, exploits what the staging gives him. His players enact a tortured set of movements on a platform hovering just above a bottomless well of darkness, and they vainly struggle to evade or to wrestle with invincible emanations from the darkness beneath their feet. I've been unable to get this young man a job on one of the major Washington papers, but I applaud his description at this gathering. Not intimacy, involvement, not being part of the action, but being a witness to it. Not eavesdropping, but attending the event and really looking at it. Not gawking, but watching. Aroused, alert, emotionally involved, but watching, and learning. For truth is specific, and truth is sculptural, and truth is mobile, ever shifting, ever changing, ever presenting different faces of itself. And further, the first law of relationship is self-containment. In the arena, the audience and the player are separated, but one surrounds the other, envelops the other, and when the art happens, the impact and connection that can be achieved between one and the other is simply not achievable in any other form. Thank you. A huge round of applause for all the speakers of the panel on the open stage, and now we invite Paul to lead us in a little discussion about that speech, thank you. Well, do you think she loved this space? I think what's extraordinary about this speech is that she gave this speech six years after the theater had opened, and she was marveling at this arena concept and this sort of in the round. And I think that she makes reference to the arenas that she had studied prior to that in Nine of Ants in Houston and Margo Jones in Dallas. And I think, thinking back to Howard's, the speech that Howard led just previously with the sort of emphasis on the actor, and that was always Zelda's thing, the emphasis on the actor. And I think for her, nothing did that more than sort of this kind of arena concept where it's not about the scenery. It's not, you know, this sort of says don't put a lot of scenery here, and it's really about the interchange between actors and the audience. And I think that was, and something she said in this speech was she talked about truth. And I think for her, that was critical. So others thoughts on this speech about a space that I think she clearly loved. I'll say something. Well, I feel my feet being held to the fire right now because I'm about to direct in the proscenium space. And I'm thinking about that statement she said about when I sit on the sides, I don't see a different play. I see the sides of the play. And so just really thinking about that. And I know we have a number of directors who are here in the room right now. And I guess I'm sort of curious about how that struck you or how you've faced that challenge when you are not in a space like the arena stage, when you are in a proscenium or a platform and to ensure that it's not the sides that you are showing. I'm looking at joy. I don't know if you'd like to comment. It's a subject that I am passionately interested in. The degree to which the form of the stage affects the work. I myself have built three thrust stages in my life at the Studio Theater and one completely flexible space. But I am a tremendous admirer of that arena. Tremendous admirer. And I love every thing that she says. The issue of course is finding actors and directors that know how to work in that form, which is not easy. Because for example, just to be brief, the center is the strongest place, as she alluded to in the thrust and certainly on a proscenium. But the center is the weakest place in the round because your back is to the most number of people. So the farthest you go toward a bomb, the stronger you are. So this notion about being on the side, almost everything, for example, two characters looking at each other, which one would normally identify, hello Helen, with intimacy or violence or more dramatic relations to each other, produce something which is totally closed. Two characters in an arena looking at each other, no one can see either one of them. So you have counter-intuitive staging requirements. It takes a lot of experience. I was just telling my dear friend here that I gave a lecture last week about directing in the arena and there is this notion that almost anything is wonderful if it doesn't last too long. So I'm at note. But just to say, I probably love that speech more than anyone else in this room. Thank you. Anyone else? Yeah, towards the end of this speech, the importance that this space places on the audience and audiences engagement with the work, that you're not absorbing it but you're engaged. There's a real active quality to that and it's what you feel very alive in this space. And I'm just hearing that. I connected it to a phrase that has been like a bell in her other speeches I've had a chance to hear today which is, what is to be done? And there's just some connection for me between that question that she seemed to be asking her whole life. What is to be done? How can we come together and make this space? How can we come together? How can we understand theater as that? There's some direct connection between that question that she asked and this space. And I think it's really pretty profound. All right, yeah. Thank you. Anyone else? The other thing that just I'll say briefly in that, she doesn't touch on it directly in this speech but clearly she was aware of it is that the other thing that's amazing in this space is not only do you have a direct contact with the actors but you really interact with all the other audience members. I know everyone in the room has sat in this theater and thought you look at the actors but you're also looking at what the other interactions and reactions of the audience are. And I think that's something for her that probably also emphasized that truth. That we're all watching each other to make sure we're all staying honest. So I think it's something else she probably was very aware of. I was actually just thinking the same thing and I was thinking not in an arena space but one of the most potent theatrical experiences I had was actually at Shakespeare Theater Company seeing black watch in which the audience was seated across from each other and I wept profusely. And I remember seeing other people doing the same thing and a colleague of mine was actually across the way and we worked in the same space but not closely. And I remember him coming to me afterwards and having a very interesting conversation with someone I'd never had a deep conversation with before about our shared experience of this piece and what we felt about this piece because we had that interaction and we were able to have that shared experience from it. So it's such an excellent point not to detract from the work that's going on on the stage certainly but sharing that is, yeah. That's the involvement that she talked about. Well I guess I just, yes I was going to say too there's nothing like the shared experience of a play which you do feel anywhere but you are aware of it here at the arena and also as an actor, my first show here was in 1990 and it was such an amazing experience. It does make you truthful. You are very aware that that person might not see you but they're all around you and you are. There's no way to hide. Well, there's no way to hide, there's no way to do your tricks. There is, there is, it, for me it helped me, it was a great lesson for me than to incorporate in everything but it doesn't matter, proceeding or anything. It's about your whole body but it's about you have to be truthful. No messing around. That's what the arena did for me, I think. Maybe it's the being so close but I was watching a show in arena and there were a group of ladies in the very first row and one of them was eating a tuna sandwich as the show went on and as soon as intermission came, excuse me ma'am, you realize there's no eating here. She goes, oh, but I was eating it very small and I said, no, no, no. All of the actors on stage could see you eating that. You're in the front row and the smell of it I could smell three rows back and she, oh, oh, I'm so sorry so it is sort of, you know, I felt empowered to say to her, you need to stop doing that. There you go. Yes, exactly. Well, thank you all very much for being with us. A huge round of applause, thank you, everybody. Yeah, yeah. So now we'll do a little organizing again. Our next speech is Casting for a Different Truth which will be kicked off by Joyce Inamon and I am still recruiting speakers so I see some of you who have not yet spoken today and or those who have before, I invite you to come over here with me. We need a total of 10 speakers in total, including Joy and let's sort of organize folks. All right, I see the mass of humanity coming my way. Thanks. Sarah Hope, let's see what the speech number five, so let's see two of them. Hi, welcome back everyone. We are now about to do speech number five, Casting for a Different Truth. For those of you who are just joining us, as you know, we're celebrating the words and ideas of Zelda Fitch Handler, who was a pioneering founder of Arena Stage and we are live streaming on HowlRound and following the reading, we'll have a discussion of the ideas of this speech. So it's a great honor for me to introduce our kickoff speaker for this speech, Joyce Inamon, thank you. Things can fall about you. I want to introduce this speech by pointing out the date in which it was written. May 1988, it's an article by Zelda Fitch Handler, which was published in American Theater Magazine. Just think about where we were then and where we are now. Where belongs to the world of the imagination? It is no one place. It is every place and any place. An empty space to be filled in any way we wish. We have always have had it. It's as old as our curiosities, our fears, our hungers, our need to understand and control our lives. It is a game we organize quite deliberately and play out with the proper sense of seriousness and ceremony to discover what our dreams are telling us. Why we have done what we have done, where our feelings could take us, and how we can overcome our enemies from within and without. It's a universal game. Everybody believes it in one form or another and grown-ups believe it the same way children do. You be daddy, I'll be mommy, we'll have dinner, then you get mad, and I, that is we believe in it even though we know it's all make-believe. We believe in it because we want to, because we need to, at the very center of the theater event is the will to imagine, both for the actor and the audience. Think when we talk of horses that you see them, Shakespeare's prologue to Henry V tells us, suppose within the girdles of these walls, suppose. Suppose that there were a fine acting company made up of white actors and black actors and Hispanic actors and Asian American actors, women and men, young actors, older and old, deaf actors and the hearing, actors with other special characteristics, and suppose that one assigned roles freely, without prediction from history or from one's old habits of thought. What if one took non-traditional casting as far as one could? Suppose the premise of this theater company, its founding principle was that the human spirit could be embodied in unpredictable and newly imagined ways, astonishing the spectator, and revealing meanings never before anticipated, sloughing off old ways of looking at things and opening up to their very heart. Suppose in some universal space, the actors could strip private identities to the core, lose the accidental shells of personality, date of birth, gender and national origin, and become purely human. Thought answering thought, feeling responding to feeling, action following directly upon intention. Anthropologists tell us that we sense our belonging first to our species, second to our gender, and last to our race, and that we would give up these attributes if we were forced to in reverse order. We are all more simply human than otherwise, and isn't it that which speaks out in the end in the theater? In every culture there is a resemblance between the face of anguish and the face of ecstasy. In the theater we recognize, relearn, re-remember, re-know our common past and joined fate. I can imagine such a company, and it excites me. I can imagine it, though I wouldn't yet know how to make it real. Surely it is not an abstract possibility. A thrilling aspect of Peter Brooks, the Mahabharata, is that actors come from 18 countries, and speak English in their various individual accents. Here is a beginning model for the kind of company one could envision as an ultimate form of non-traditional theatrical expression. Every play is an archeological dig that tells or suggests how people live their lives, what their mode of thought was, what gods they believed in, how they made their money, what books they read, what they ate, sat on, and wore. Plays are temporal and age-rooted, and for that reason go in and out of focus for the culture that looks back upon them. They are now dated, now relevant, showing themselves this way and that, like phases of the moon. Casting is a role given a specific living and breathing persona to the imagined figure who exists in a specific social, political, and philosophic imagined world. The tapestry of events and relationships is created out of the actor characters of this world. Once you've cast this play, you have more or less predicted the outcome of the event, or you have a bestowed life upon the characters. Before choosing the play itself, the single most important creative act of the producer and director is to quote, fill the roles. For once those two have removed themselves, the actor and the audience will be left to share the implications of each other's presence within the tale and acted between them. The actor and the audience then share a highly political act of communication and empathy. They speak to each other through and under the lines of the play of their daily lives and of what they want to come of them for themselves and for their children. Non-traditional casting in the end becomes a matter not of employment, but of politics and of art. John Connie is appearing now as a fellow in Johannesburg's Market Theater, South Africa's first professional production of a fellow with a black actor in the title role. An example of non-traditional casting with a twist. He plays to an almost all white audience of 520 a night and it comes as no surprise that in a country prohibited, that in a country prohibited, that prohibited interracial marriage until two years ago, a fellow in Desdemona's first passionate stage embrace briefly but palpably startles theatergoers. Not very long ago, the spectacle of Connie kissing blonde and fair-skinned actress Joanna Weinberg full on the mouth would have triggered a national debate and probably violent demonstrations by white supremacist groups. Indeed, Connie recalled when he appeared in Strinberg's Miss Julie at the Market just two years ago, half the audience walked out as he put his hand on the thigh of the white actress playing the lead role. The next night, Connie needed the protection of security officers to leave the theater safely and subsequently, the government curtailed the run of the play. While one can doubt that two years ago have changed fundamental attitude so radically and Shakespeare's perceptions from 1604 can be used as a smoke screen for acceptance, still production photos of a fellow's racial intimacy now appear on the review pages of South African newspapers without a murmur of indignation. Howard Sackler's master play, The Great White Hope caused a similar, though much milder kind of ripple when it opened at arena stage 20 years ago. Basing the play on the career of Jack Johnson who in 1908 became the world's first black heavyweight champion and on the subsequent search for a white hope to topple him and redeem the Caucasian race. Sackler tossed upon the stage a microcosm of American attitudes on race. With James Earl Jones as Jefferson, a figure both heroic and personal and Jane Alexander as his white love Ellie, a woman of heartbreak strength. The play rocked audiences in Washington and later in a shorter and more melodramatic version in New York. Jefferson is picked up on a man act violation in the midst of one of the most romantic, most tender love scenes I have ever watched on stage. I remember that the audience audibly reacted when the lights came up on Jack and Ellie in bed and several of the actors felt the need to have their phone numbers unlisted to eliminate harassing calls. The social climate changes. Every reaction is special to its time and place. There is an identifiable feel and even sound for what passes between the actor and audience as the world that lives in the play meets the world that the audience brings in from the outside. The issue of non-traditional casting derives its electricity and, yes, its complexity from the contemporaneity of the act of theater. It is certainly right that the ideas behind it are being put up for examination and discussion. For in many instances or theater casting policies have not kept up with American life, much less led the way. 20 years ago, I wrote in a grant application that the creative casting of black and white actors in a repertory selected with that end in mind should make it possible for us to explode the theater event to a dimension we have rarely experienced and to connect our work on stage with the reality outside. New images should pop out at us. New understandings jump to mind. We are given new eyes with which to see old plays and old plays find fresh facets to touch the present day. One wonders what arena's experiment in the late 60s with a totally integrated acting company would yield today. For a variety of reasons, this experiment was not successful, despite goodwill on all sides and a number of productions that were, as I remember them, both the theatrically vivid and revealing human. I recall with pride and warmth Frank Silvera's Lear and Mary Alice's vulnerable Cordelia with Ned Beatty as the fool and Olivia Cole's tempestuous stepdaughter in six characters in search of an author. The second family was cast with black actors. Opposite Richard Bencher as the father, alternating as the leading man in a rotating repertory schedule with Robert Prosky. The accompanying third production, Brackton Vile's Three Penny Opera, missed somehow, but the idea of an integrated society for this work has always seemed just right to me. The idea for the company began to pale with Marat Saad and Indians. Actors and audience drifted away, the center would not hold. Was the idea ahead of its time? What variants would make it work today? Were black actors more preoccupied then than they are now with new black plays and burgeoning black theatre companies? Should the aesthetic have been based on blind casting, casting without regard to color rather than on the casting of black and white actors when a conscious man are meant to be creative? Is a traditional western repertoire of any more interest to a black audience today than it was 20 years ago, even if the company is totally integrated? Do mature black actors want a place for themselves in a classical white repertoire with only an occasional black play or would they prefer as do the majority of white actors? Opportunities in film and TV, revisiting live theater now and then for a role that is particularly compelling. Are we training young black actors for our theaters and the plays they produce? Do young black would-be actors see a future for themselves in the American theater that weren't spending the time and the money to train for it? What about the repertoire of an integrated company? Is our earlier concept now out of date? At the time of that company, James Earl Jones said in an interview, if I walk on stage in a part where race is not supposed to be an issue and the play is not broad enough in scope to support me, it doesn't work. I did Lenny and of Mice and Men and it worked perfectly. He's a classic loner. Only plays that are large in scope can be appropriately integrated. Is this still true? Today, would we believe James Earl Jones as Willie Lohman or Big Daddy? Have times changed? In the same interview, Jones suggested that white actors should at some time play black roles so that they can find out what it feels like to be black. I like that idea. In the graduate acting program at New York University last year, Fayeta Lampley, a highly talented black woman, was cast as Amanda Wingfield, the mother in the Glass Menagerie. We presented the play as a companion piece to the crucible, especially for the four students who needed major roles and a large growth of experience. It was at first very difficult for Feta to empathize with this white Southern woman to personalize her needs and her past. But then there was a breakthrough, a rehearsal where the identification occurred. The performances were luminous. Fayeta grew both as an actress and a human being and I can't help but believe that the two aspects are intertwined. Would the same kind of personal transformation occur for a white actress if she were to play Lena Younger, the mother in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun? Or would this casting be creative only for the individual actress and blur the racial issues central to the theme? There are many questions still to ask and many ways to look at the answers and many conditions still to suppose. Another interesting question. Should actors be cast on the basis of talent only? And I think the answer to that one is yes. Quickly adding, not necessarily on the basis of evolved and mature talent, of talent that is already ripe and visible, but on the basis of talent that can be perceived to be there if the person seeing has penetrating and sensitive eyes. That thought holds true as well for the training of very young talent. The responsibility of a training program is first to be able to recognize the talent in the bud and then to organize a curriculum and faculty and environment that will bring it forth. It is a crowded and difficult profession. Only the gifted should enter there. At the same time, producers and directors, especially of companies, are responsible for the evolution, the development and growth of artists and must provide experiences, roles as well as continued training that will ask for and can cause growth. This is ultimately for the benefit of the audience and the art itself, but it is the individual going to the edges of his or her own ability that causes forward leaps of creativity in the group as a whole. No latent gift should go untapped. Leaders in the arts are responsible for unleashing the power of the talent that lies crouched within the person and may still be locked up there. And especially for providing training opportunities for young minority actors who might otherwise never find their place in the American theater. What about women and men's roles? When women occupy such roles in society? A female willy-loman, the brochure asks. One is seeing the exquisite performances of men as women in the Japanese no dramas. Roles that are inherited from their fathers and studied for years and every minute gesture in nuance. And one knows of the successful all-male production of As You Like It in London a few years back, even as Shakespeare wrote it to be played. Several women have played Hamlet, Dame Judith Anderson and Sarah Bernhardt among them. As chair of the graduate acting program at New York University, I recently cast a number of young women as Cassius, Brutus, Mark Anthony and other conspirators in Julius Caesar. Not for reasons of non-traditional casting because we needed juicy roles for these women and this play was enticing for them to explore. I was astonished at both the expressisivity and the validity of the experience and at what was opened up about the nature of women that traditional casting would have repressed. But non-traditional casting poses a different question. Can Willy Loman become Wilhelmina or Wanda Loman without destroying the fabric of the play? How large are our imaginations? Death of a Salesman is a play about children and parents and the parents of those parents. It's a family play and it contains profound information about primal relationships. Mother and son, father and son, mother and father, sibling rivalry, as do all family plays, Oedipus or King Lear or Raising in the Sun. It is also very specific. It centers on a family in a particular culture and the roles that different members of the family play. In its furthest extension, Salesman speaks about the American value system about selling and about selling oneself, about America as a nation of consumers who are losing touch with the land and about lying to other people in order to make money and to oneself in order to go on pleasing mother and father and the rest of the world. Salesman's point of view and primary images are male for its roots are in American business created by American men. Willie grew up at a time of the robber baron when America was turning from an agrarian country to a country whose business was business. The clash of Willie's failed dream of being a salesman and Biff's dream of being himself. I'm a buck an hour Willie. I tried seven states and couldn't raise it. I'm not a leader of men Willie and neither are you is the substance of this work played out in its specifics between a father and a son and in its furthest resonance by a family who internalize the American myth. I've directed Salesman and I'm very close to that play. If I could accept a Wanda as Willie, perhaps I would have achieved the furthest reaches of my humanity and created and concurred that gender is a secondary characteristic of being human. I would also have been able to tear myself from my aesthetic viewpoint that plays contain complex information about the life that gave birth to them and consist of dense psychological moments upon which all this information is brought to bear. I would be lying if I said I had yet arrived at either of these two points and yet they are both worth deep and considerable thought. Thank you. Thank you to all the readers of Casting for a Different Truth and now I invite Joyce Inamon to lead us in a discussion of those great ideas in this speech. Thank you. Whoa. These questions and issues remain with us today. None of them have been answered or solved in the slightest way. Frankly, some of this speech would not stand the test of time nor a politically correct sense of time. Certainly we've had James Earl Jones play Cat in the Hot Tin Roof. Surely we can all agree with the thoughts in the speech on training, but almost 30 years on we have had and continue to have social upheavals, integration, immigration, producing changing demographics, huge influx of Asian and South Asians, much larger Hispanic population. We are in a post-August Wilson era, which is tremendously important to remember, including his own theories and speeches, the ground on which I stand. So in some ways, to me at least, this speech seems almost quaint. At the same time, it is remarkable the degree to which almost 30 years on, it brings up the questions that remain for us today. It's impossible to suggest discussion topics. Because I'm both interested in her issues about species, gender and race, the anthropologist's suggestion that first we identify a species, then is gender and then is race. Zelda's anthropologist, circa 1988, suggests that gender is a firmer identification than race. But now perhaps we see gender also as more mutable, less fixed. So how do you feel about gender-based casting? You can go to the Only Theatre in Cicero Marshall, be brilliant playing Lithuanian Jewish rabbi, she made me cry. But I think one place to start is that Zelda's first thoughts on casting assume a universal game. She posits imagining a human spirit in new and unpredictable ways. Extremely noble kind of way of looking at the theater. But what about plays that are not universal? She seems to pull back when discussing Death of a Salesman. And so the question then, and the question even more now, is are there some plays that cannot be non-traditionally cast? I think nowadays almost everybody agrees that the classics have no limitation. But what do we feel about family plays, about race-based plays, for example? Well, I know as an actress when I was getting cast, I was told, well, if it's not a familial relationship, if it's not brother, sister or stuff, you're cool. I think James L. Jones was sort of talking about that. If it doesn't create dissonance, there, and there's something to be said for Raisin' in the Sun is about black people. Now, I'm not saying that a white person couldn't play the part, but how would the audience see it? And what that person might bring might be very interesting, but would it fit into what you were trying to say in the big picture? I think you could do it, but it would be fun. Well, there are the problems right there. What about the play that's unquote about white people? Is it about black people? Is it about white people? Exactly. So the idea that if it's a play about race, then you've got to stick to the races when you cast it. That's sort of what you're saying, right? It depends. And family. I have an African-American grandson. I wonder, you know, in her speech, she talks about universality. And actually, I wonder if it's about our own evolution of what is universal, right? So she was writing from that particular time point. And actually, I really appreciated that she said, she called it out as her own limitation of her own imagination of where she is right now. So it makes me wonder that, you know, what we define as universal today, 20, 30 years from now, well, we have also hopefully evolved. You know, I just directed a production of The Fantastics at Pasadena Playhouse and deliberately cast the parents and the children in different races quite deliberately so. And it worked, you know, I think it worked. The audience seemed to think it worked. But, you know, that question did come up for a few people, like why would you do that? And what was great was rather than us answering, we let the audience answer each other. And they talked about why wouldn't you? It's so universal. It's a play that deals in metaphor and allegory. So maybe it's about our own limitation of what is universal. And that is exactly why the diversity of perspectives and the diversity of artists participating in our art form and in our audiences is so essential so that the multiplicity of voices helps us expand our own, expand our definitions. Widen, what does it mean to be American? And she does wisely suggest that casting could be conscious or blind. So she does very much present a more nuanced look at that very interesting question. I'm struck listening to the speech about how much I miss what she would say right now because this is of its time, this piece, and anticipates some things and it didn't anticipate other things. But to your point, Seema, one of the things that I feel is very loud in this speech that I think she would have a different thing to say now or something to say now is about traditions. You're talking about broadening universality, allowing something to actually be universal. She's talking about traditional notions of casting and roles. And I think we've come to the point where we're questioning whose tradition we're talking about. Precisely. And Zelda would have asked that question because the speech is threaded with the tradition of the Western theater. And yet it's constantly looking toward Peter Brooke and his global company and the market theater and no theater. She's trying to get out past the confines of that tradition. And yet she's still arguing it from inside a trap, a mind trap. I think that's what she's talking about, the limits of her imagination. She's still inside this accepting thing that the traditional theater is Western theater and that the traditions will resolve to, it will resolve to whiteness. And so all of the questions we're asking are about, can others play whiteness? And can whiteness transcend to otherness? And I think we're moving past that now and need visions. Half move, half happen. And we need visionaries for where it takes us. And she's gone. So the other thing I just want to speak into the room that she's talking about, Oni Faida-Lampley in there. And Oni, a tremendous performer, has also passed. And there was much we were learning from her. So yeah, time passes and the learning goes on. A little addendum to what David was saying. Oni wrote a play that was performed here in Washington called Mixed Babies. And it was speaking of mixed. And it was performed by adult women but it was a girl slumber party. And they were all different, all kinds of different degrees and where they were coming from. And so you had a little bit of non-traditional with adults but she had intended that. And you just wonder what she could be playing with now as far as writing. Azelda also suggests that black actors were perhaps more preoccupied with new black plays and burgeoning theater companies. That's an interesting quote. I would say yes, new black plays but where are the burgeoning theater companies if we look 30 years on and what has happened in that regard? I wanted to briefly chime in about this idea of universality and we all identify as a species and I can empathize with you because you're human and that's what species I am. I really struggle with this as an actor because my empathy bank is really big so I do empathize with people based on my species regardless of their race or national origin. So when I perform logically I'm looking at roles that do cross national origin or race because that's how I see universality but I think in the audience I'm not sure if their eyes see that the same way obviously and what they would perceive as me telling a story that's not of my national origin or not of my race and I think maybe universality's in the eye of the beholder and as an actor I'm restricted to what the audience would see in me and I have to take that into account I guess when I'm trying to put something together for an audience. The thing that you mentioned Joy about black theater I moved from the Midwest and I go I'm going to D.C. Great there's gonna be all this really cool black theater this was in the 70s like crickets, crickets, crickets and I myself have wondered these 40 years later why there still isn't and I know as a beginning actor I said I had to put my foot down and say I'm not gonna play any more maids because for a while the only parts that black women could get I did it three times in what that Helen Keller or the eggs under the and then you can't take it with you and I mean there was always black maids but you have to eventually say I'm just not gonna do that and in some cases people decided they need to write that if you want good parts if you're a minority person if you're a black woman if you're an Asian man that the way to get the part is to write something. I think one notable thing about time again there Joy your question so this is 30 something years ago this speech right 28 I think 28 years and 20 years ago is the ground on which I stand and in the eight years in between was that burgeoning and in that burgeoning we started then to see the co-opting of these voices and these performers into the big institutions the white institutions and so that flowering never really happened and even the organizations that still exist are struggling they're still marginalized organizations that speak authentically first voice African-American organizations of that age so I think it is she was asking a question just ahead a thing happened he spoke to it and that thing was co-opted too fast and the question is whether or not now there was any change whether or not people like Tana Hisi Coates for example and Terrell McRaney and even the ideas of black lives matter whether it's time for a new look theoretically. Yeah and in my experience that looking now is at the owning and being equity power access all of those things in the existing institutions of power rather than trying to create an alternative network an alternative field there is now this sense of no actually we'll just we will take a seat at the table that exists and that's a long time trying to make space at that table and claim space at that table but the original impulse was to create in what Wilson was talking about was to create our own and now I think the impulse is no actually these things exist the infrastructure belongs to us as well and we would like our space in it that's how I'm experience. Got a comment back here. Yeah I appreciate the artistic perspective that people have advanced and move forward but I challenge us to look at the general public to see if they have and I also want to just make a comment with regards to Zelda's perspective from the artistic perspective of it but also she asked that of her administrative staff she asked that of her audience to the theater was opened to everybody when it was opened there were audio description and sign interpretive performances here before anybody imagined the American with Disabilities Act so what she brought to us as a perceived way of being human is artistic and everything else. Anyone else? Well clearly it's an extraordinary speech to take a look at and I'm honored to have the chance to do so. A huge round of applause please for Joy and for all of you for participating in a robust if brief conversation. So we have had such a wonderful marathon of our day and we are on the brink of our very last speech which is let me grab it here. Artists set the stage which will be kicked off by Michael Kahn artistic director of Shakespeare Theater. We probably are gathering more readers and so let's all meet up here those who are still here and we'll assign some reading spaces and this is also probably a good time for a little five minute break if you do need to run to the restroom. Thanks. Good evening and welcome back everyone. As you know we are today celebrating the words and ideas of Zelda Fitchhandler who was the pioneering founder of Arena Stage. Our next and final speech is titled Artists Set the Stage. It's a speech she gave in 1974. We have about five of us readers lined up to read it and of course following the reading of it please join us for a discussion of the ideas of this speech. And for now please allow me to introduce our kickoff speaker Michael Kahn who is the artistic director of Shakespeare Theater. Thank you. I have to say that Zelda not only was a brilliant director and a brilliant writer and a brilliant thinker but she was also a brilliant speaker. So it's so actually say any of Zelda's words is a little inhibiting because I have listened to Zelda speak for over 30 years in my life and so I'm very glad to do this. Okay Arena Stage had a love affair with the Soviet Union last fall. That there was a love affair in both Moscow and Leningrad is simply no denying that it could not be a love affair pure and simple is also a truth. Indeed the truth is rarely pure and never simple. For me the experience was highly charged and deeply important and not easy to sift through or sort out in a short time. The experiential sense, the taste and feel of it was a kind of love and appreciation that we had never before received in our 23 year history and surely that I never have received as a creative worker. I was not in any way prepared for the waves of it for the continuum of it much less for the documentation of it in press from theater people from the audience. It was almost more than one could take this daily bombardment of love. One lady in Moscow saw every performance wrote us impressionistic poetry in her minimal English brought flowers to the curtain calls and one night wrote a garland of large gold coins covering chocolate discs which she put around my neck. The station Vladimir studying to be a drama critic at the theater institute in Moscow saw us off the train from Moscow to Leningrad met the train on its return and came to wave goodbye at the Moscow airport. Each time he brought flowers and records and notes of admiration and affection. Your technicians have taught us how to sweat blood. He said. A young woman from radio Moscow who interviewed me said she had stood in line every day for a month trying to get tickets but the box office opened for unannounced hours and closed by whim. A toothless babushka made an appointment to give me a book of prints of old Russian icons and to say everywhere I look on the stage I see the actors living. I see life in every corner. She pinched my cheeks and said she was glad that I was married and had children as well as a professional life. Three young directing students engaged me in conversation for nearly an hour after the open dress rehearsal we held to accommodate some of the theater people who couldn't get tickets. They asked me how I had made the crowds and inherit the wind so individualized and so alive and inviting me to come and lecture to their directing class at Moscow University. The audience is stumped and clapped rhythmically and shouted bravos at the curtain call standing up in all five tiers of the theater calling the actors back again and again. The press bestowed the mantle of Chekhov and Stanislavsky upon us. A higher compliment they did not have to give. Pravda acknowledged our serious and humane art. Izvestia noted our broad and diverse artistic methods and the actor's capacity for transformation from one character to another as shown in the two contrasting productions. The press was astonished in general to find out that a theatrical company of this kind even existed in America. They had thought of American theater as musical comedy and slick commercial plays put on on a hit and run basis for profit. But here was a company who spoke to them about the universality of man's fate and about as Pravda summarized inherit the wind, the triumph of reason over folly. And then there was the radio and taped scenes and interviews for television and besides all this, the endless autographs on the streets and the flowers and gifts and the embraces and hand kissing and the thanks and misty eyes of the fervent pleas to come back. After a few days, we hardly knew ourselves. At the same time, of course, in the back of our minds, it was not possible to forget that we were part of a larger phenomenon called detente. Further, detente itself was not primarily about love but about bread and about the fact that war by some awesome developments in technology was ruling itself out as a viable instrument of policy. In the midst of the love affair, the Yom Kippur War started. I first learned about it from a member of our company who had heard about it from a Jew who had been in contact with, who had heard it from the voice of America. On the outset of the attack, the Soviet media from all I could tell did not report it or information about Soviet airlifts of military goods to the Middle East. So there was our love affair. At a midday reception at Spasso House, the US ambassador's residence in Moscow, Mr. Voronkov, the Soviet deputy minister of culture, thanked the arena stage troupe for presenting your art of realism by coming here and performing, he said. You have made a new contribution to developing cultural relations between our two countries. You have provided a new stimulus to relations. He offered a toast to the friendship of our peoples, to the friendship between artists of the two countries and to the further continued success of arena stage. At the very same time, Soviet Jews were attempting to send messages to Senator Henry M. Jackson to convey their appreciation for the sponsorship of a measure which linked most favored nation trade benefits to the right to emigrate. Madam Firsteva, USSR minister of culture, left her box under the American flag one evening in Moscow to appear backstage at an intermission to thank the company for coming to the Soviet Union and to invite us back to a list of other cities. At about the same time, Representative Hanson of Idaho read into the congressional record from the house floor commendations for arena stage for bringing to the Soviet Union a play about freedom of speech, inherit the wind. Reminding house members of the harassment of the Russian writer Alexander Solhezhinsen and others, that was making the performance of such a play in Moscow so unfortunately timely. A passionate love affair and a complex one. Oleg Tabakov, the director of Sovremnik Theater in Moscow. Perhaps the Soviet company that most resembles our own in temperament and style, said it well. It was at that historic party their company gave us hours lasting until 3 a.m. Oleg made a speech in which he said that artists could not really do anything. Only politicians could do things. Artists could only point out what had been done and set the stage for the feelings that were needed to bring them about. He quoted Karl Sandberg in Russian. What has been? Already has been. But the future is in our hands. We said, we shall never forget this evening. And he said, it is not enough to not forget. Something has to come of your not forgetting. And he noted that the children in the room were not sleepy or bored even though it was very late because as he said, children know when something important is happening. Another meaning of love. Pinned to my bulletin board above my desk is Hegel's comment. Love is a little moment in the life of lovers. And love remains an inner subjective experience leaving the macrocosm of history untouched. Human history cannot be grasped as the unfolding of human love. This admonition for objective action rightly taken has been useful to me in the past. It has urged me to make decisions I thought were right rather than those that make me popular. It has kept me from setting too much stock by what is called whatever it may mean success. It has kept my nose to the grindstone, my principles essentially private and my eye upon the sparrow. Human history cannot be grasped as the unfolding of human love. Surely the ambiguous and confused situation between the Soviet unit and the United States over the past several months as rail politic rattled the house the detente had built reminds us that love is not enough but there is something deeper to be said. For love does not need to mean precisely love in the sense of pleasurable subjective experience as I have been describing to you. It can mean something far less personal. And far more basic, more imperative, tougher, more biological if you will. Over and above man's search for pleasure and his desire to unite with his world, pleasure or no. Man's attempt is for union, for being one with the objects of the world and among those objects first of all his fellow man. Saint Augustine, I did not yet love and I loved to love. I sought what I might love in love with loving. Man, the discontented animal, seeks the life proper to its species. And his history consists of a forward moving search for a lost time when he was indeed in that prehistoric life without effort or anxiety, a part of all around him. In this search, art plays a unique role for it makes objective and transferable our deepest human impulses and yearnings. There are times when you meet another human being on terms that are neither yours nor his. You simply show something you have made and it pleases him. This is when we are at our best. At these times, the optimistic element of life takes over. That conscious tendency to synthesize, harmonize, reconcile, organize the conflicts that we find in life is in the ascendancy and we are for a moment fully human and most alive. For that moment, what we all too lightly call cultural exchange is taking place. So we played on a very large stage, larger than the Moscow art or the Pushkin, a stage set by the two great powers of our contemporary life. That there are conflicts and divisions between them is not the final point. And surely we didn't alter the course of history of these two great powers with 14 performances in Moscow and Leningrad. But we feel that the things we made and shared cause important feelings in them and in us. And we feel that if those who have political power, as we do not, will exercise their will and insight, their intelligence and leadership will, as Walter Lippmann once posed as a final requirement of his diplomacy, keep talking. Then it may turn out that we have set in motion uniquely important reverberations. That love affair could turn out to be more than a passing fancy. It is our fervent hope that it shall. And now I'd like to invite Michael Kahn to come back up and reflect on this speech with us. No, how, did you have different responses to my responses come from then and now? I wonder in this beautiful speech that article Zelda wrote about what a communication between a theater company and the populace of a country that was strange to them resulted in some beginning of relationship that was important to her, which she then saw as happening in a wonderful way, much larger than the two theater community. Did you have any response to that as an idea or what was in 74 and now in 2016? Is there a difference in the world right now between this? I'm not really answering about the world, but I would say that for those individuals, I can't say a big picture. I can't say, oh, this was the thaw. This is what happened when they saw Inherit the Wind. But I think for individuals, yes. Well, it seems today our relationships with Russia are completely different than during that period of detente. I wonder if you could talk a bit. You said you went to Russia right afterwards and what your reflections are about then and now. I'd love to hear. I was personally a lucky beneficiary of this visit because about, it had to be a few years later during Glasnost, the acting company was invited to Russia with five plays by Tennessee Williams, which I directed and I went to Moscow and to Leningrad and then to Eastern Europe and it was still a time when cultural exchange was one of the largest ways that two communities could meet. And it was, we had very much the same response to being there and the actors also. I think that was an important experience and for the Russians too. But I also remember a couple of things. After the United States won the Cold War, if that's what you'd like to call it, I've been reading a book now called Second Hand Time. Just finished it today by a woman who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, a Russian woman whose book is sort of oral history of people who lived in Soviet Union then in the new Russia. After we, the United States won the Cold War and there was a kind of, I think, hubris that we did not need to change the hearts and minds of the rest of the world anymore. And so cultural exchanges stopped. There might have been financial reasons but there was no longer the political need to send our artists abroad to make for a different kind of understanding of Americans to other countries because we had won. And this article only made me sadder in a way that this, at a time when America needs to do this more than ever, ever, ever before, we're not doing it at all. And I wish this article could be read everywhere in Washington at the Congress to see, for people to be able to see what kind of a country, what kind of people we are, not from the headlines, not from the fights, not from the fact that we are now, perhaps as bad a relationship with Russia as we ever had before the Cold War, but that this could happen and it could happen again. And we need to do it in many parts of the world. So this was a very moving thing for people to watch. So I'm talking because you're not, that's the only reason I wasn't gonna talk at all. But for me, it shows in 32 years from when this article was written that we don't listen to each other in the same way and we tend to not try to understand the other in the middle of an election where a lot of awful things have been said about everybody. And we need to be reminded that art can change this if art is allowed to, so. Thank you for that. That really resonates a lot with me. And I think what you said also applies not only just to American relations with other countries but even within conflicts, like we're seeing conflicts in Africa, for example, where Rwanda and the Congo are fighting, just using art as a way of communication of diplomacy in other places is a really interesting idea that I don't think is being done today but could. Something that I was really struck by in Zelda's words was this idea that the politicians are the ones that are doing and the artists aren't doing. They're making people feel and kind of awakening people to these issues. So that really speaks a lot to me because I wonder what the power is of making someone feel. And if as an artist or an actor you can make someone feel to the point where you're mobilizing them to actually change a belief or refrain from making a decision that could be injurious to someone else because a lot of violence or bad things comes with dehumanizing someone or having these beliefs that are enabling you to take an action. So if you cause someone to feel a certain way that then re-orients this person's thoughts about someone, could that then change their actions and therefore be doing something? Like I don't know, I mean is that made up in my head or is that possible? I think it's a great question. Does theater build empathy, right? It seems like, I suspect for many of us who work in the theater or have gone to the theater on a daily basis you might feel like yes, it builds empathy. The audience walked out and said, I felt that. I stepped in that person's shoes. But it's an interesting question. What then is the next step from empathy to activism? What is the role of our theater companies in that spectrum of artistry and activism? Do we have the political space to occupy as activists and or are we limited by our nonprofit status in certain ways? It's a great question. I've been doing some research with neuroscientists and psychologists around this question of does theater build empathy? And did a little research project last year where we were using a drama intervention with older adults and testing what its results were. And what we found, and we just published this scientific paper, what we found was not empathy. It was just a six week research project though. But what they discovered by engaging in the act of acting which is what we put this group through, they became happier. They reported more self confidence and more empowerment at the end of this research project that we put them through. In the midst of it, they reported greater feelings of anxiety and nervousness because the material they were dealing with, the play that we had them working on brought up all that stuff. But when they got to the end of it, they felt like I conquered this, I could conquer anything. Went a little bit skew, but it's the sort of question, like what is the neuroscience? Do we, does it build empathy? Does it lead to activism? And I guess I pose that to the room if anybody has experiences around that to share or an answer around any of that. Perhaps your own experiences. I saw a lot of shaking of heads, of nodding. Yes. Oh, they can't hear you at all. Paul hold it for her in front of her mouth. That's great. I think, I love what you just ended with. If there's something you can do, you're happy to do it. And maybe that's part of it for all of us. We need to be really intentional about naming what the power of the arts are. And intentional and deliberate in a way in terms of how we invite others to participate with us, electeds, those who we perceive to be in power, how we deliberately engage them. And then even here at arena stage, we have this Voices of Now program that does go internationally through the State Department and does a lot of this sort of work, ensuring that we sing it song loudly as well, so others know. And we're not the only one. I think a number of theaters are doing work that does travel elsewhere. But it often, we don't shine the spotlight on it bright enough, so you can help us with that, certainly. Just as an addendum to some of the things that others have said, I'd like to share an image of metaphor that I've had with me since I've decided to enter into the world of theater. Very early on when I decided this was something that I wanted to do, someone said to me, oh well, every day people have their coffee. You don't wanna be the coffee. You wanna be the cream and the sprinkles on top. Is that what you mean? And that was just absolutely wrong because for me theater and getting out and sharing between theater makers, between the performers and the audience, it's not the whipped cream, that's the caffeine. That's the thing that brings people to the table that energizes them, that gets them looking around and opening their eyes and starting conversations. And so I think that that's one of the most important tools we can have to have a meeting together of people is that caffeine, that piece of theater that helps you to open your eyes and helps you to talk to the person sitting across the table from you. Any other ideas? Yeah, I have a question. It's for Michael and because I don't know which came first, whether the production came and then somebody contacted the State Department and what happened with the acting company as far as... I don't know what happened with the arena. Which came first. But it was a very important sending of the company to Russia. So I would assume some things were decided before the production. And then you were a pro. I mean, the five by ten was... We were asked to go to Russia and we did this play. But doing Inherit the Wind was a very interesting choice because Inherit the Wind, if you remember, is both a celebration of freedom of speech but also quite a criticism of the suppression of freedom of speech by Americans in America. Because it was the Snopes trial and it was about evolution. At that time, the religious right, it wasn't called that, did not want evolution to be taught in the schools. Can you believe it? And there was a trial over a teacher. And so you had both the forward side of America and the, if you want to be pejorative, backward side of America presented on the stage in a country that we had not been friendly with for many years. So it wasn't itself a very bold choice, not just by the arena, but also by the State Department to send that particular play. I just thought one thing, it didn't actually pay it forward to the Soviet Union at the time, but what it did, this is, I'm talking about a different play, but it made Americans aware of what was going on. There was a play called Zalman or the Madness of God, which was done not long after the company came back. And it was about a beetle, which is about who spoke out. He went crazy, he went mad. And he encouraged the rabbi, Joseph Wiseman, to speak out. And it was a direct result, certainly of their experiences over there. So it made Americans aware. It opened up their eyes to what the censorship was like over in the Soviet Union. And I guess maybe on that note, the whole point of the cultural exchange isn't that it's in one direction that one of the country transforms and opens up, but rather that when it comes back and transforms ourselves is really when the exchange has happened, when it's a two-way or multiple-way street, if it's possible. I think this is a wonderful day in celebrating the wisdom of Zelda. And I think she would have been very pleased. So thank you all for coming. And have a good evening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.