 Okay, I am, can you, can everyone hear me? Yes, yes you can, I can tell, but you're quieting. Hello everyone, welcome, and I just wanna, before we sort of really get started, I just wanna say this is a very informal gathering, so feel free to get up and get more toast, feel free to continue making toast, feel free to get up and leave, if that's, you're so moved. Anyway, Sarah Williams has some things to say. Thank you, Madeleine. Hi everyone, I'm Sarah Williams, I'm the Associate Managing Director here and Manager of the Ground Floor, just echoing Madeleine's welcome to our informal conversation with these amazing artists. Before we get started, before I turn it over to Madeleine, I just wanted to thank our really amazing sponsors who helped make the Ground Floor the amazing program that it is. So thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts, Artworks, Time Warner Foundation, Inc., The Ternosal Project, Bank of America, and the many individual supporters of Berkeley Rep's Create Campaign, thank you so much, so Madeleine, take it away. Fantastic, hello everyone, thank you for being here. My name is Madeleine Oldham, I'm the Director of the Ground Floor, which is Berkeley Rep's Center for the Creation and Development of New Work. I wanna let everybody know we are broadcasting live on HowlRound, hello, HowlRound, and so you have that knowledge. And let's, so just artists, because we are broadcasting on HowlRound, it is important for us to talk into the microphones that some of you will see on your shoulders. And so we don't have enough for everybody, so just feel free to share with the people next to you. And so I would love to start by just having us all, well, no, hold on, I'll give a little context for what we're all doing here. So this is our sixth annual summer residency lab, and during the summer we have four weeks where we bring in artists from all over the country to work on new work in all phases of development. So you will see, you'll hear about projects that are just being started, like with an idea in a writer's brain and being started to be written, all the way up to artists who have actors and a director in a room and are trying to kind of get their script, excuse me, towards a rehearsal-ready entity, and everything in between. And so, with that, if we could just go down the line and have everybody tell us who you are, where you're from, what project you're working on, and if it makes sense for you to describe that project, if you can do that as well. Hello, my name is Tony Specialli and I am from Louisville, Kentucky, and I live in New York City. I'm here directing between here and the city of Mexico by Tony Meneses. Sorry, Tony. Hi, my name is Diana Small. I live in Austin, Texas, and I'm here building a new show called House Play, and it's a kind of performance party, hospitality ritual, being built explicitly to be performed in homes. My name's Mfunny Soodafia, and I'm from New York, and that's, I mean, that's not true. I live in New York, and I'm here working on Adia and Chlora Snatch Joy, which will end up being the ninth play in a nine-play cycle. I'm writing the end, and then we'll go in and fill in the three plays in the middle that are not written. Dustin Chin, I write the play. Colonialism is terrible, but it is a three-part, it's a triptych, it's a three-part look at food culture and authorship in food culture through the lens of the evolution of Vietnamese noodles. I'm Tony Meneses. I'm the playwright between here and the city of Mexico. I'm from Albuquerque in Dallas, and I'm based in New York now, and my play is a three-act play, sort of a typical coming-of-age heroine story, but told through a Latina protagonist's perspective. Hello, my name is Byron O'Young. I'm a composer from Seattle. I now live in San Francisco. I'm working with the playwright Eugenie Chan on the Chan Family Picnic, so I'm composing vaudeville music. Hi, I'm Eugenie Chan, and I'm born and raised in San Francisco, where I live, and Byron and I are making Chan Family Picnic, which is a vaudeville. It's a second in a three-part trilogy that looks at my family's 150-year history on the West Coast and their origins as sex traffickers. Chan Family Picnic focuses on my grandfather, and me, my grandfather, is the son of my great-grandmother, who is a brothel madam, who sent him to Stanford on her earnings. That one. I'm Alex Harvey. I am a filmmaker and director and musician in various entities. I'm none of these, also. I am from New York, well, live in New York, not from New York, and I'm working with my dear friend Glenn on The New Frontier, which is, well, I'll let him describe it. I'm Glenn Berger. I'm a playwright originally from the D.C. area, now live in upstate New York, and I'm writing The New Frontier, which is the second of a trilogy. Very important trilogy about folk music in America. This one takes place in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis in a cabin in Big Sur, where a very, very successful folk trio is trying in vain to get one more album done for Capitol Records. I'm Lisa Peterson. I'm associate director here at Berkeley Reptory Theater, but for these two weeks, blissfully, I get to be a writer. I'm writing a, don't know whether we're calling it a musical or a music theater piece with Todd, called The Idea of Order, and it is inspired by the abstract poetry and the life of Wallace Stevens, and this is my third time working on it here at Ground Floor. This time, we have actors and we have musicians, and I'll let Todd talk about that, but so it's the first time that we're actually adding music in, which is exciting. I'm Todd Almond and I am writing Idea of Order with Lisa. I'm the composer and co-writer of everything else, and yeah, this year we have musicians and actors, and one of the big ideas that Lisa had early on is that the band should be a, this is my dog, Dingo, by the way. He's sort of voiced with me. Then we would have a brass quintet, and so that's been a major piece of the musical, and so we're lucky enough to have, we had rehearsal with them this morning and with actors, and so yeah, we're really digging in, so. Hi, my name is Donate Lavinia-Grace. I'm writing a play called Laid to Rest, which examines armchair activism and social media, and its effectiveness, and also the chaos and noise of social media measuring that against the personal tragedy of losing a child. Hi, I'm Marissa Wolfe, and I have the great pleasure of directing this workshop of Laid to Rest with Donata, and I am currently based in Kansas City, Missouri. Yay, hooray. I could not be more delighted by the breadth and spectrum of projects and work that are here with us. It is so incredibly delightful to us. So I have a question that I would love, we don't have to go in order, but I would love for everybody, every project to answer this question. What did you do today? Sorry, we had band rehearsal this morning, so five brass musicians came in. Sorry. We had five brass musicians this morning, so basically they were learning music that we had written, and then I'll bring in music that is yet to be written, and then we had music rehearsal with the actors, and that took up the rest of our afternoon, so it was a big music day for us. Well, today we not only read some 25 rewritten pages, but also experimented with the personification of social media, which is a major part of the play, so how that's communicated. We tried all different sorts of things and how it can be balanced and played with the play. We are doing, the structure of our workshop is almost like what I might call live dramaturgy, where the play looks at this folk trio splitting up, but our entire workshop is actually taking place two years before the play begins while the band is recording their music. So Glenn and I get to actually watch this band and the seeds of the problems that by the time we get to the start of the play have become a major sort of problem. So today we got to watch them work through and fail and succeed at two different songs for an album that they're all developing two years before our play starts. Although, yeah, I think I've just changed my mind about that. I don't know if it is two years ago anymore. This is what live dramaturgy does. That happened today. So Byron and I did different things today. I ran away from my collaborator and everyone and turned into a monk, so I could write a new story storyline into the piece. But we saw you in the tea shop. You don't know this. That's where she was. Yeah, I was calling and texting and her phone was in the room. I don't blame Eugenie because today was a lot of playing through vaudeville music from the late 1800s early 1900s. So such classics as Blinky Winky Chinatown and Chin Chin and a bunch of racist stuff. So yeah, so it's really like, okay, dig deep. Here we go. Can I also say we added an actor today who came in from Utah drove 16 hours to be at our rehearsal today. So and added so much to our process. So that was really interesting and really lovely and we had such gratitude for it. And we appreciate ground floor for making that happen for us. Can you say a little bit about how you came to the realization that you needed another actor? Well, yes, I can. No, after our first table read, we tried doubling some of the characters, some of the roles, but it became very clear that we wanted to focus on the trajectory of at least two of the main characters and that each of these pieces of social media have very specific personalities and that they needed to be in service to those people we're following. And so some of the doubling sort of took away from that. So we needed to be in a place where they could live in support of the main characters that we were looking at. Okay, other people, what did you do today? I took a field trip, I got a boulevard. As you will when you're writing and play about food. I'm based out of New York City, but I'm from Seattle, so I'm very partial of West Coast foe. There is a difference and I don't know, it's maybe it's because like migration patterns of Vietnamese-Americans, most part West Coast foes better, sorry. Yeah, and then I went to work on rewrite space upon rehearsal yesterday. I have actors of a lovely cast and a lovely director and I took to doing some rewrites and reformulations with a billy full of broth, which I highly recommend. I came here with four co-creators, a designer and three performers, and after two days of intense hive mind, this morning I was by myself for about five hours to write and find everything that I'm unsatisfied with with my part of the creation at this point. And then we all gathered again and James, who's our designer, he wrote a lullaby about the moon and being an animal and sleeping in different positions and we all learned it. And a performer learned it on the toy piano and that was so nice to be alone for five hours and write and have and be scared and then meet friends and sing a lullaby. So I think we should do that every day. I won't tell you which days I'm scared. And then the three performers this morning, their job was to think up group games that required gift giving, that required minimal embarrassment or audience participation. So then they came and we played a bunch of kind of little weird games. I spent my day thinking. I wrote a page in a play that is not the play Berkeley rep brought me here to work on. I am in the middle of writing, like I said, a nine play cycle and I'm following one family from 1968 in Houston, Texas all the way until future days. And so members of that family keep coming up in the cycle and in Aria and Chlora Snatch Joy in that particular play, I'm gonna be looking at Adi Aga who's trying to figure out a second stage of love. Adi Aga is a queer woman of Nigerian descent and that is problematic on so many levels. And I look at that in the grove and then in Adi and Chlora, what it is to decide to choose and go forth in a path that's right for her. And so I have to go back to the old play to understand the terror of the beginning choice of going, I think this is who I am, I think this is who I am. Then to look at Adi and Chlora and have not that fear but the fear of I know what it is, how do I get? We spent five hours around the table with a wonderful cast dissecting the script and Tony brought in three to four new pages and we spent the whole day dissecting and trying different interpretations talking through the world of the play. And it's one of my favorite parts of the process to be in a room with actors and to without the confines or the challenges of staging and design but just to really focus on the written word. And this play in particular is very different than anything I've ever worked on in the sense that is it okay to use the phrase that I feel like is so coined now with the play? So it's Chicovian but since this is set in Mexico it's Mexicovian is our phrase and so and I don't take respond that's Tony's invention but we spent most of the day talking about how scenes end and reading them and they end in a very, many of them end at a very gentle sort of soft ending and to experience that all day long was really lovely. I love that question because it highlights something that I'm very interested in sort of getting out into the world which is I think when people think about somebody writing a play they think about a writer in a room writing some pages by themselves and that sometimes happens. There are people here who are doing that but there are so many ways like that's just one way of many to create a piece of theater and so the theater that you go see when you see a show at any theater could be made like that but could also be made in collaboration and in conversation with so many people and in so many different ways. Here's what I would like to know now. You all, those of you who filled out applications to be here which is most of you, Lisa and Todd didn't because they're a commission. Glenn's project is a commission but Glenn did fill out an application which was very charming. And so those of you who did, those applications were due to us last October. It is now July. Is your project in the same place as it was in October? And if not, how has it evolved? If you can even remember what your application looked like or was. And I guess another way to ask that question is sort of, is it, maybe the question is just is it in the same place as when you applied? Absolutely not. I had a dream and maybe 10 pages and I was flabbergasted when I got asked to interview with that. I was like, oh, you do that? And Adam was like, yes. I'm like, wow, that's new. And now I have close to a draft. I've written out about 73 pages I guess from when I applied and yeah, I'm still flabbergasted. They've let me in on basically a pitch. So glad to be here. I came in with the full draft. The longest play I've ever written at this point. It's 175 pages. So I just came in with this giant task to figure out the shape and the scope of it. I knew I wanted to be like a long epic play. I just was fearing that no. It's like, no, this should be a 90 minute play. So so far I have not run into that conversation. So I'm embracing the length and I'm embracing the ambition of this project because I think I'm at that point now as an artist where I just want to sort of write a big three act play and not be hesitant about it. And so far the collaborators in the room have been very supportive of the structure of the play and the scenes and there's a lot of scenes in a react. So I thought like a good playwright writes like a 10 page scene. Some of my scenes are like a page. I'm like, this is hack work. I'm going to be found out. So it's just nice to have. I think right now I'm in the self-flagellating point of writing where I just keep asking my actors and director like, is this work? Is this okay? Is this all right? So we've had a lot of good conversations based on my insecurity and questions. It's different because it's very different to turn a script into something that's so driven by story and music. And the other thing is that Byron's making me add a new storyline, which is a big deal. Mine was the same coming in because my play deals with the loss of black life and police brutality. So it has to be updated, unfortunately. So it's a thing that I didn't want to deal with. And also it was written pre-election. And so it had to come into a voice of today and what... And just if you think about the behavior, our behavior online has actually changed because I've had to pay a good bit of attention to it of pre-election, post-election. So having to bring in the patterns of our communication online today is a thing that I just wanted to wait and do when I was around happy people. And in a place where if I needed to wail, I could just go ahead and do that. There's a lot of humor in the play. I just want you to know there's a lot of humor. There is some lightness. But it was dependent on examining, going deeper into an investigation of news events and of how the nation is dealing politically and how that is reflected online. So I waited. I think when I applied, I applied with an idea. I had no pages. I didn't know what was gonna happen. So I've stayed true to form that the questions that I was positing in this application I'm still kind of grappling with. I wanna know what happens to queer African bodies. I wanna see if I can see the lineage of a line between two bodies of the African diaspora that don't always talk to one another and build vocabularies of love between them. I know those things to be true, but I didn't understand the way. So I think I turned in a page and a half of like, blah, this may be. And when I got here, I had 50 pages of that blah down. It's not cohesive. It is seamless and snatches of thought. So I think it's the same thing, but I still don't know. I didn't apply with any pages. And I'm not sure if, I don't know if we have pages yet, but I applied with, I kinda asked if I could do a thing I've never done before. I've written some plays for found spaces, but I've never written a play for a private space. And so when I first applied, it was kind of brass tacks. I produce a lot of my own work and tour it and I was becoming frustrated that I could only show my work in spaces that had black box theaters. And I was frustrated with myself for having an imagination for black box theaters. We did a play of mine called Madden A Goat. That's a two woman show. And a friend of mine named Gabby Reisman is producing this cool new theater project in Brooklyn called Brooklyn Yard where she's doing new plays in backyards in Brooklyn. And we did that show in a house in Brooklyn and I was very excited to be there. And the play was great. It was not its best self because it was written for a black box. And so I saw this opportunity to do performances in houses and if only I could have that imaginative space from the get go. And then I could bring the play to my loved ones and also strangers who don't have access to theaters, theater spaces. And it just, it seems unfair to me that you only get to see theater if you live by a theater or can afford to go to the theater. So that was sort of like, there was kind of that brass tax idea. And then as the year progressed and I chewed more on the project, I've become much more invested in this sense of like, of the act of hospitality. What does it mean for somebody to host experimental live art in their home? What does it mean for me to be the stranger in a community asking for hospitality? So the questions have got to feel more reverent. The like producer brain brass tax stuff is like less of a concern. And it's been really fun to like almost get more spiritual with the project. Thank you. The reason that we asked that question is just we at the ground floor believe that new play development is a living, breathing, ever changing thing. And I think sometimes people sort of think you can like mark it as a thing that is fixed and you will do this next step and this next step. And we just don't think it works that way. We think it has a much more organic path to it. And we try and be as flexible and responsive as we can to that path and just meet people where they are. All right. So you've all now been here for three days. I would like to know if anything has surprised you either in your own rooms or about the experience of being here. I have stumped you all. Donata opened up our room on the first day of rehearsal with a really profound sort of sense of, this play is hard and it deals with trauma and that's okay like that. And that whatever comes up in the room is okay. And that set the tone and the stage for the day in a way that I haven't experienced in a four hour chunk on the first day of rehearsal of any project before. It was a really powerful. A lot of times when you read a play around the table together for the first time, you know, it can be nerve wracking and everyone is like, you know, should I be at this table and where are we gonna go with this? And you know, but this felt like, I felt very privileged to sit next to Donata, be witness to the journey of the play. And it felt like I was surprised by the journey that the room went on with the play in sitting with how hard the devastation that the play kind of exposes. So I wasn't surprised by the devastation, I was surprised by allowing it into the room. For me personally, if the process isn't painful, I must be doing it wrong. And so what was surprising for the last three days, I didn't have a lot of pages as many as I would have liked to have had, but I did quickly write some songs. And Alex assured me it would be fine if the rehearsals were only going over these songs. And I thought he was saying that just to console me. But so what's surprising to me is actually watching these songs get developed, it's beginning to break open. And beginning to see a way out of this habit of mine to seek out the path of most resistance. And I'm seeing a way how, because it's taken me a long time to write this. And it's because the dialogue has been making me, I've hated all of it. And now I'm looking at these rehearsals and thinking maybe there's a way not to have to write so much dialogue after all. And so yeah, so there's a tiny little crack that light is getting through and it's encouraged. Yeah, just to like throw a little context around that, it's just, you know, I think I'm like a big proponent in bringing in things, adjacent to the play. I'll sometimes I don't even like to work on the play itself. I like to kind of bring in something right next to whatever the play is or whatever the source itself is and just let it live in front of us for a bit. And I think that, you know, I was just saying to you yesterday, you write on a page the word, you know, banjos and fist fights or something like that. And it's got a great sort of ring to it on the page. You bring a banjo into a room in front of you and suddenly, you know, the word that you wrote on the page, which meant something, of course, suddenly there's somebody holding a banjo in the room and a whole other set of things starts to happen in and around on the sides of it. And so that's part of I think what's, I think has been surprising both of us because you're inviting something to live in front of you without necessarily knowing what the play is or really anything about it. Just kind of letting something happen. Although I would like to say one other thing that surprised me, just walking around. You know, I really like talking about things on the side of what you're supposed to be doing. I like walking around these spaces. I like the ceilings. One of the most surprising things is these skylights which are unbelievable to work in. I've never, ever experienced anything like that in my life, skylights that big in a room, that roomy that create a kind of holiness to the rehearsal room that I've been in rehearsal rooms since I was a kid and I've never seen that before. So that's one surprise. The other surprise is walking by this room and you're always peeking in all the rooms when you're walking around. And today Glen and I walking by this room and seeing the brass in the skylight reflected in the skylight, we were just flipping out. And it's just like, and it's just that kind of kid at a candy store thing of just all the little advent calendar things. Open it up and there's some crazy motherfucking thing happening in there and there's brass in the summertime. It's really exciting. And just to rip off that, I think today, because mostly it was a music day and a lot of our focus these two weeks is to get as much, to try to force as much of music out of Todd as possible. And so I was sitting there listening and kind of piddling around in the script here and there. We changed a character's name. We'll see if that sticks. But so often today, I guess because I was in the holy room, I was feeling so like weeping and very grateful because in our case, the idea of saying like, I really like abstract poetry. I wonder why like occurred to me probably, I mean, when I was in college. So this, I call it like a back pocket idea. Like I've been walking around in my life with this, like I think there might be some for years and years and years and not doing it, not doing it, not doing it. And you know, a year ago, we sat on the floor in the Tony Kushner room and we kind of like, what? We just like threw together this draft, trying to write intuitively, which isn't comfortable for me, but to hear today something that started like really long ago and was just awkward words, embarrassing to me, trying to kind of write, put myself in it. And today something became a song. And sometimes in these, a song then had a harmonic line and the lifting of a melody and a harmonic line. I mean, even beyond the brass, which is amazing, but is just so miraculous. So I don't know if that's a surprise, except that I was feeling a lot of like, oh, how did this happen? This is, you know, even if, I mean, it just was, there's a funny, when you make things, sometimes you think about, you think ahead and you think about the future and you think about audiences and you think about, yeah, the business part of it. And sometimes when you're lucky, you don't think about that. And you just experience it yourself with the people, like a few people in the room. And so, and hopefully that becomes something bigger, something that's shared. But today it was just that, which was really special. I have a hell of a room, which is not a surprise. I love a very warm room that's very collaborative, like to open up the process. I view actors as artists who can contribute a tremendous amount in a room. And I think that the room is smarter than me, if that makes any sense, about like a wiser than me. I can see where my blindspots are, that sort of thing. A surprise happened when we're going around and doing introductions and sharing things. And one of my actors, Steven, hello, Steven, Steven Ho. Hey. His last name is family name Ho. I thought, oh, fellow Chinese brother, you know, that was the deal. But it turns out, Vietnamese American, his family owned and operated two pho restaurants. And I was like, I didn't ask for an actor whose family owned and operated two pho restaurants, but here I am. That was amazing. That was magic. I was like, whoa. And then my follow-up was like, wait, am I just like, I'm a Chinese dude who's exploiting Vietnamese resources and then perpetuating the cycle of Chinese colonialism. Oh my God. Um, but I think we're cool. So it's, it's... Steven is giving the thumbs up. So as a composer, I am lucky to do some theater workshops. The big surprise was walking into this room and like there was this gigantic oval. So this is only like maybe a third or a quarter of an oval or a circle. But then all the seats filled. I'm like, who are all these people? And this is the working space. It's like Berkeley rep rehearsal spaces, shop spaces. Like this is one big room. There are many other big rooms. Eugenie and I are lucky to be in the fitting room, which is in the costume area. And know that we have gone through like the hangers, like the different guys like, wow. And then so it's definitely like this, like theater. Really like theater, the arts is a place of abundance, right? And yeah, let our imaginations go and let's take these detours and let's take a break and peek into other rooms and see what the other rooms, how they're being activated. So it's super surprising that there are so many people here. I thought, oh, writer's retreat will be off in the woods somewhere in the East Bay. But no, it's not, it's active. Yes, we tend, oh, yeah. I came to a realization that made me like shake. I'm still, I still have that little shaking feeling. Since two, I haven't written a play that terrified me since 2011 or so when I wrote Run Boy Run and I gained 20 pounds in a year. Just because I was like, eat, fill, I'm bleeding on pages. And I think, yeah, well, yeah, very dramatic. I think I'm in the middle of a process like that right now. It's like there's always like the personal cost of writing and then there's like the macro level. Like one of my missions is to write nuanced bodies so West Africans can see themselves represented well on the American stage. This is a play that's gonna piss them all off. You know, the Nigeria has got anti-gay laws that are just as stringent as Uganda. Like that the homophobia runs so deep and can cause actual damage to bodies in a way that sometimes I don't think we think about here like what that is. And so I'm writing a play where I'm putting lineage, actual lineage and line with two women. So when I think really hard about it, sometimes I get scared. I think it's gonna cost a thing. And I realized that and understood why I spent like half a day dancing around. Thank you for sharing that. That's amazing. Anybody else before I move on? Okay, so this is gonna be my last question and then we're gonna open it up to a few questions from the audience. We don't have a ton of time left but just be thinking about what you might want to know from this wonderful group of people. So just a show of hands. How many of you have met someone up here for the first time since coming here? Everybody. That's awesome. And so, and the theater community is relatively, it's small and large at the same time. I mean, and I think probably I'm assuming there have been people here who you've heard their name but you haven't actually met them. What is the, like how is it different working with everybody here than just being on a retreat on your project by yourself? Like what makes this different? Well, I met my collaborator for the first time three weeks ago. Sort of, we were set up by mutual friends. Sort of like speed, like a date. And then this is kind of like speed dating. And so we're really, I think learning how each other communicates and work together in the room in real time with actors. And for me, I think it's really exciting. And as a director, we're, I think by nature, very result oriented. We see the finish line and we sort of, at least I'll speak for myself, I work backwards and there's always a part of me that as we get close to tech that clicks in and I'm like, okay, this is where I have to get stuff done. This is where results matter and there's a whole other side of me that is triggered. And it's really great in this sort of environment to meet someone for the first, a new collaborator to be faced with a play I've never, a type of play I've never worked on before. I think if I would have maybe, I was saying this to Tony and the other actors on Monday if I had maybe met up 175 page scripts like five years ago, my impulse would have been maybe to try to, I don't know, maybe not move through it but just think about that and how to calibrate that in a way that is, has a lot of forward momentum towards a result. And this is really satisfying and illuminating to meet someone who is a huge talent and to be in the room with a new play and letting it unfold in this natural, in the pace that it needs to unfold. I think as writers and artists we're always very inspired by what other artists and writers are doing and most writers are readers and most musicians or most composers or listeners of music and there was something I had never experienced before but that giant circle that we were talking about when all of the writers were talking about their pieces it was, I was so inspired by every single project like Vanessa was talking about her plays and I was like, I can't wait to see all nine of those plays and then Dustin was talking about his play and I'm like, I cannot wait to see Dustin's plays. And Tony and Eugenie and Glenn and Donetta and every, it was like, it made you like want to get into your room and make the best thing because you thought I am surrounded by people who are taking this very seriously who are here because they want to be here. It's not easy to be a writer. It's not easy to like, you know, to like to give up a lot of comfort to like chase this thing that you feel like is important and to be surrounded by people that aren't casual about it and who are dedicating their lives to it. It was really inspiring and I was still really inspired sitting up here and so that was, that I think is the joy of being around other writers. I'll say this, breaking bread with each other is tremendous. And I think for me, community is a huge thing in all the work that I do. It's to have a place to be is really extraordinary and know that after six hours or whatever in your day, you're going to come here and break bread with people and check in with someone. So there's a place to land if your work is, you didn't have a great day, you had a wonderful day, you want to share it, but to really look into someone else's eyes and like sit down and just chat with them about how the day went. It's a huge deal so you aren't sort of suffering on your own and there is that click of inspiration that'll come from some, what you'd imagine and it would be a casual conversation, but oh, wait a minute, that's how people talk. Oh, I can put that, I can put that in a plate. You can do that, I can do that. And this is the first time that I've met Marisa and what a joy, what absolute joy. I think that what you all have done is you've matched people really well. Like you took a really good temperature of people and it was one of the, I'd said a thing about who I'd love to have in the room, just energy-wise and that was heard and so it's here and it's all around so it makes a thing successful even if a page isn't written already, so that's it. Thank you, that's lovely. I just want to, for people who might not know this, the structure of what happens here is that we, everybody sort of arrives in the morning and disperses to their separate rooms and works and works all day and then at six o'clock we all gather to eat dinner together and so that's what breaking bread together actually means. I found too the breaking bread portion to be such good dramaturgical work after having a day a crew and it's overwhelming and there's a lot of information and then sitting next to someone and they ask you what you did that day and you get the opportunity to try to sift it down and also your breaking bread so you get to approach it from a place of gratitude and then so there's been so many helpful realizations I've made getting to talk about the day in a way that's polite and in a way that is clear and efficient and also knowing I'm sitting next to a person that understands what I'm doing that knows how to talk about theater that is a playwright and it shares a kind of brain is really good for I think for how I then take, I figure out what my next day is going to be. I just also, I mean, not to sound like an asshole but I just, I don't, I have never seen isolation, the kind that you're talking about in another kind of like a McDowell type situation. I've just seen it work so rarely and all of my friends who do this work including novelists I know. I mean, it's except for the dinners there. You know, I mean, I just, I think that collision, I mean, I wouldn't even do it. I remember I'd done a couple of those before in the deep, deep past and I just sitting in seclusion with a writer or a collaborator or a co-writer or something. It just, it's, I don't know, for me and that may just be my own attention deficit, you know, obviously, but I just, I can't imagine going to work on something again without a real collision of entities and in fact, the best thing about this kind of program is the opportunity to obstruct that very thing. I work completely with obstruction. That's basically the only way I've ever worked in any of the forms that I've worked in and it's much, much harder to obstruct things when you're sitting alone in a cabin with either yourself, which is the, I mean, maybe that is the obstruction. I mean, I could get very zen about that but I think that throwing human beings in the same room and not to continue to be an advertisement for this thing but I have to say that the strange thing is, it's like they have been, you know, Madeleine has basically, has never, every single thing we asked for was there and those things included bringing a recordist out from New York to engineer recordings on a reel-to-reel recorder as a part of dramaturgy. I mean, you know, that's like, that's just a wonderful obstruction to the danger of becoming isolated and getting stuck inside of your head, you know. So I hope that, howl around or whoever that the other residencies, the other residencies keep this in mind because I really think it's hard for things to be productive without people literally crashing into each other. As many as possible with as much velocity as you can. Hadron collider style is sort of the way to do that, I think. Amazing. So we're gonna open it up. We have time for just a couple of questions from the audience and I'll just let you all know, I'm gonna repeat the question for howl around because they won't be able to hear the audience. So does anybody have a question for this delightful gathering of people? Yes. That's amazing. The question is many of the people up here are doing multi-part plays. How do they know that it's a multi-part play and should be that as opposed to something that should be a lot shorter or is a separate thing? Yeah, that's a great question. Just speaking for myself, I'm always looking for opportunities and structures to cover large amounts of time because it's hard to get a perspective on life, really, until you get geological about it. And so sometimes I do look into an idea where in one evening we can cover a lot of that time and space to galaxies. For this one, it was originally one play and you find you need more space for any of these characters to not just seem like cartoons. And so eventually I came to this idea of this kind of song like an underground river is kind of flowing through these three plays in three different time periods. One takes place mostly in 1910, but also in strange ancient past. This is number two, which is 1962, sort of reinterpreting what happened in the first play. And the third one takes place in the future, which is when I started writing this, the future was 2010, but move it forward. What is it now? I will not commit. But yes, but to answer your question, at least for me, and obviously, yeah, no one has to watch all three plays, but there should at least be a sense that there's more outside that door than just what's going on in this play. Well for me, the stories are so generational and they're all about legacy, how legacy impacts today and tomorrow. And also within the plays, it's also they're not so much, although there is a protagonist, it's really how communities of people or women or families create character and lineage that is our inheritance, that is a dynamic, dynamic living thing that propels us forward or obstructs us or is a real thing that I find so very American too, that really it's much more about, I feel ensemble than this one hero or heroine or single trajectory. It's how people impact in social circumstances, public policy, a whole lot of things really drive us. It's not that we're shells, but we are so much impacted by each other in our world. And I find that fascinating and I can obsess about it. I think the first part of your question too was how do you do it? I think I heard that as well, did I hear that too? How do I know, okay, how do you know that they're separate? When I first started, I first wrote The Grove, it was one and I thought it was done and then the characters started bleeding outside, which I think people have said a permutation of that thing. And then I discovered when you're tracking one family, when they come here in 1978, the way they interface with America is different and then they have children and their relationship to America all of a sudden has to change. And then their children start growing up and their relationship to America has to change from there and then their kids' relationship to America, they have to start identifying and grappling with in relation to their parents. So it had to become that, to tell the full scope of an immigrant experience and I'm not even sure you can do that for real. Nine plays is probably too small, but it has to be nine because we're done. But yeah, so it was a discovery over time that it was more than one play. But maybe it's the sign of the times. I was surprised when we went around the room on the first day and everyone had. So maybe that's the zeitgeist. Maybe that's just for whatever reason, writers now more and more feel like no, things are connected and you gotta keep going back and keep going forward. Yeah, maybe something's going on. I will just offer one of the greatest things about my position and the vantage point that I sit in is that so we received this program 600 applications this year and we read them all. And so it is this amazing snapshot of what's going on in the writing community in this country and I will say I think it is exactly that. And sometimes you can, and I also think writers tend to have their finger on the pulse of things that are coming a few years down the line. I don't know how they do it. I don't know how you do it. You're amazing people. But I think there is a real impulse towards work of duration, whatever that means for people. And I have my own wanderings about whether that's a response to our sort of insta-culture and whether that's a response to the 90-minute no intermission play. I don't know, but I do think that something is happening. I think it is. I think it is. I think, I don't even have wanderings about it. I think that the thing that you're going to find in the next 10 years, 15, 20 years is you're gonna find a real desire for durational experience design. And I think that our entire field may start to shift towards that on many different levels. And yes, I believe it is a rebellion against the truncating of the attention. I'm just putting that out there. Other questions? Yes? Ah, the question is to me, and how did I do the final selection? Oh boy. It's very, very hard. And I will say out of those 600 applications, we had 175 projects make it to the next round. And we asked for 175 work samples. We read them all. And we then kind of whittled down from there to about, I would say 70 to 75 projects that really just for whatever reason grabbed us. But that's still far more than one can accommodate in a situation like this. And then it was really, and I genuinely believe, and this is not a commentary on who is up here, those projects in my mind are interchangeable. They are that exciting. And we're so excited about everybody that's sitting here, but we're equally as excited about the people we didn't invite. There's so much amazing work being made in the American theater right now. It's incredibly, incredibly exciting. And the way that things just sort of shake down is we tend to have to start plugging people into spaces. And this is where we get out our matrix and we get out our budget and we get out our everything and try and kind of wrestle a thing into shape that, as I mentioned earlier, accounts for a really broad spectrum of work in as big a definition as you can come up with for that broad spectrum of work. We want to make sure that things are in a different state of development. We want to make sure that, and so we just kind of look at a map and figure it out. And a lot of it is dictated by how much space we have. I mean, as Jeannie mentioned and Byron mentioned, we sort of tend to like, we're in the conference room. We're in the fitting room. If they're not painting, we take over the paint deck. I mean, we fit ourselves wherever anyone will let us. We're in offices. People are giving up their offices and working from home for a month. It's amazing. So, yeah, but that's, it's vague, but that's sort of the best that I can answer. Okay, we have time for one last question. Does anybody have anything else that they're wondering about? No? You are all satiated. Oh, two hands. Who wins? Who's burning? Who's burning? You're not. Okay, yes. Yes, that's you. Okay, so a question is, is, uh-huh. So we're having a variation on an earlier question where we asked the show of hands of how many people didn't know somebody and how many people met somebody for the first time. The question is, okay, let's go deeper into that. How many of you show of hands knew less than half the people? Is that everybody? That is. Wow. Although, can I add a little caveat that as a new works person myself, I knew the names of almost everyone here, and so I was like, oh my gosh, we get to be in the same place. That's amazing. Yes, well, and the hope, and the great thing about this is when you encounter somebody in a situation like this, even if you don't see them again for another few years, you automatically have a shorthand the next time you see them, you have a shared experience, you have a shared vocabulary, and it's a really cool way to kind of make connections. Well, I want to say, that is all the time we have for today. Thank you for being such a great audience. Thank you everyone for your time and generosity and being here, and enjoy your evening.