 For each one. Yes. No. Just projected towards the camera. At the note-taker. I'm writers and I'm the executive director here at Bay Area. It's a service organization from here in the dance here in the 7-2-0 area. We've been here so here in Bay Area. We have eight members and nearly 3,000 individual members and we're happy to be one of the co-sponsors co-hosts of today's meeting. On this, and all we now have with us, it's a slightly changing cast of characters that we have on the panel, Rob Perwick from the San Francisco Chronicle, Diane Rodriguez from the Center for Theater Group in Los Angeles. We've got Paul Walsh from Yale and Cory, we certainly just jumped in from traveling to about the Jewish theater in San Francisco. So we've got a couple of artists. We've got a director and an activist, and we have a critic. And what we're, and I think you all have longer bios on each of these, what we want to be doing in this next session, and I think we are already beginning to get there a little bit in the conversation in the first round, is looking at ways, how are we actually having the conversation right now about excellence and how might we be able to improve upon that. And then you've given us some thoughts and think about it as we were preparing for today and I've been mulling over it just a bit myself. And it hurts me that we're missing a panel. It's Dan Roberts first. Sorry. Excellent. I thought perhaps he'd slipped up. Here's Dan, also known as the insert artist here. Go ahead. I want the panel to think about a couple of questions as we begin to tackle this topic, which is why do we have these conversations in the first place? To what end? And I have the feeling that Rob's answer might be different within Paul's, which might be different than the artist in the group. So what are we trying to achieve? And it appears to me that there might be a couple of different reasons though. One, thinking from the practitioner's point of view is we want the artistic quality of our work to be better. Others might be thinking that we want to improve the experience for the audience. How is the work that we're doing impacting them? We might want to be growing as artists ourselves. We might want to be seeing the art form itself expand or go into new areas. Or perhaps we might be looking at some sort of community so that there's probably other reasons that we're having this conversation. Those came to mind. And then I think we need to be thinking about whom are we having this conversation? There seems to be three groups in particular. There are sort of the professional feedback givers that would include Rob and Paul. So what we re-critics and journalists in academic dimensions, people who do this, this is what they do as they live in regularly. Then I think there's practitioners, the artists and the ear company administrators who are involved in this conversation often appearing in it, but also involved in the conversation themselves. And then there definitely often is and probably needs to be more of a conversation with the audience. And each one of these participants in the conversation, I think, we have them in formal and informal ways. So particularly maybe with the critics and the journalists in the academicians it comes out fairly formally. It comes out in terms of a printed or broadcast review of a play or a preview of it or in the article about a piece of work. But increasingly there's more of a dialogue back and forth both online and in person. So there's formal and informal ways that we do that with each one of them, certainly with the artists and with the audience as well. So today we have particular feedback, you know, sessions or you might just watch an audience, watch a play or listen to what they're talking about in the lobby before or after or monitor your Facebook and Twitter sort of responses. So there's formal and informal ways that we're having these conversations. So with all of that in mind I thought I would start by asking each one of the people on the table who just jumped in and began to think about why do we have the conversation from your point of view and maybe with that how can we work in bettering that conversation from where you are coming from? I think as a theater critic we have we've given our responsibility to theorize our own work, to set our own criteria and we've given it over to people like Rob who has a different gender than we do in terms of the work and we praise the theater critics when they are brilliant and like our work and we can get them when they're somehow sleeping and short-sighted and don't acknowledge our brilliance. But I think that as a community we have really our own responsibility to have that conversation. So part of the reason to reinvigorate our conversation is not just to improve someone else's work but improve our thinking of our work and that way I can begin to think more responsibly, more collectively, more generously in terms of all three of those audiences that we're speaking of, each other and ourselves and our grandparents to be the critical community and to our larger audience. So Ben, I've been studying for the last five years in a group theater who I would say without doubt was our first American ensemble theater. I've been writing a play about them which I'm going to workshop as part of the factory. And their members were in constant dialogue in, around, between the work they spent their summers together working in the country. They also had a community of support that interacted with, that included people like Aaron Copland, Mark Strand, photographer. So it wasn't just theater people. And of course, Harold Klerman provided the initial vision. Never stopped talking long after the group theater and his collective reviews were like this. So he was a director, critic a public intellectual, a practitioner and for me, that is just an incredible inspiring piece of ancestral DNA that I would, I would if a tiny fraction of that could come through to our time now, wow. And so I think we do this with mammals, we have limbic systems and we can't survive without it. We need each other and we need to talk about it all. And when I say each other, I don't I mean about all of us here and more. Not just the people who literally write the scripts, direct them on stage do the right to design, but the people who care about theater whether they do it professionally or, you know, at the risk of jumping off the deep end in a way I'll say I think it comes down to a form of love. Yes, I would say though I am an artist I'll take the producer mantle today because I think that would be appropriate. I have a number of experiences with ensembles because ensembles are really my passion that's the one that I come from and yet I work in a very traditional institution. And so I really try to make relationships personal relationships with people that I've actually commissioned so that I actually go to their spaces and, you know, we become friends. And I feel that I put a lot of in supporting men and ushering the group through my theater I am putting a lot on the line. And knowing this I have groups that trust that my feedback to them is honest and in an effort to make the work better. In whatever they want they have to ask me questions because I don't want to say I don't want to put my aesthetic on their aesthetic. And so this is how, for example, with Rude Mex I've created a relationship with them we had a commission it was rough going I went to their space in 09 I've never been so happy as the piece went through a very rough process the piece wasn't working I gave copious notes and interesting I felt they really took them and they premiered the piece in their space in Texas our staff went to do it and we are now doing it in our season so it was a great success story on a piece that is not traditional of what we're doing but the relationship I feel was really personal slow going and trusting that we both were committed, passionate and had particular risks with each other and I think that that's a very important thing can I say another thing? So NIFA the New England Foundation for the Arts among the advisory panel very, very interested in experience in this last round it was highly competitive and at some point they could cross their teeth it was that competitive and so when we finally got down to the last 20 we were asked to mentor a group two groups and I picked people I didn't know and it's been an interesting experience because I could give them information that no one else was really willing to do because they knew that I wanted to help them and that's been such an interesting experience very, very open for example, guys people think you're like college that when you were early on your reputation started as if you guys were like this fraternity and now you matured you all have families and that perception has to change that's a hard note to give but because they were like at this point we want to get this what is it, how do we change perception of ourselves as a group that we're just not downtown New York and so again it's that I feel it's finding those people that you believe or trust that you can trust and not try to change your aesthetic but to listen to what you want to do and then respond I'm pretty excited to hear that and talk about the same part of things I'm a yeah, I'm a pretty thin-skinned person I don't think this would be more apartment for me personally but I do feel like of a lot I just think that there's a good life I think what audiences are doing for life I think that we're afraid of having an audience I see people in theater afraid of having an audience discussion in which people did say, I liked it, I hated it but that is, I heard people say that's not useful even today I guess I kind of feel like it is useful I don't think everybody has to be I think yeah and I do look to other forums and art forums you know, it just seems like in the world of music even in the music criticism in the weekly is people put out much stronger opinions with a lot less helping the audience and I feel like theater I think the interesting thing about this competing is sort of drawing a comparison between how we talk in the theater and I don't know what it is I don't know if it's the fact that our the material of plays is people being people on stage and maybe it's that realism is the dominant form so you can't talk about the work without saying without being afraid that you're talking about the person you're really judging the person I was so interested when Conrad said the most honest feedback I got was when we did a radio play and we sat and we listened and everybody knew that was art and not the person and so people could just say I don't understand as this isn't good and I don't actually know the answer to that but I certainly sense it certainly feels like the dialogue is much less robust and there's a lot of concern about the feelings and the way the words I think there's a way of talking about work and I think it can be very tough and very honest but I don't know I would want I don't know that I can have some chill about my work so I do think that there's a way of doing it that you can still be honest I think there's a side of the writers that I think we have we don't really invest in the conversation that late-night TV interviews now are just a series of one-liners or self-promotion and conversation is just a yelling match and I think conversation to really invest in a conversation is to invest a great deal of time and so we lie instead we give a couple of sound bites and that's good enough because we're not sure the other person is as invested as we are in the conversation we want to have that's why I never talk about a show when somebody well shows up I say it was really interesting if they call and say let's have a beer they're not willing to invest in the conversation I feel that I ask myself am I ready to invest the time effort it's going to take to really set up a responsible conversation how many of you tell the truth on the first date you just don't do that you just don't do that and you're not sure you want to address that person yet so the set up of a relationship is really difficult it takes time and then I ask myself have I done my homework am I prepared and is the other person ready to have this conversation the same like I am in those things all coincide then I'll have a real conversation about the work but otherwise I think my job is to be supportive to be enthusiastic to be committed and alive I was really I was impressed by what you were talking about the way with your work with Rude Max and that it was based on trust that you built up and that it was over time and then it was personal and so I'm thinking Rob you've been reviewing here in the area for how long? 30 years? so you have there's always been groups coming on in the water but you actually have a really long standing relationship with so many of the artists and so many of the companies and you can't wait until the show is over before you give your opinion so I'm wondering about that and I'm also wondering about who you see clearly you're writing for the paper within a very large circulation but who are you who are you talking to boy that is you know I still don't know because of changes constantly when when Dan was talking about constructive feedback I think I think the critic's job is to give constructive feedback constructive feedback in my definition of it means that you have to be completely honest about your reaction to the piece and it's true I would love to have the luxury and it's more than a luxury it's a it's an enormous gift to be able to talk about the piece in the kind of depth that you can in a conversation I'm carrying on an instant reaction to the piece as I've seen it at that particular moment in its gestation and I know that for many companies that that piece is going to continue to develop beyond the opening night but I have to talk about what I have seen on the opening night or as close to it as I'm there and I see myself, I see the critic as part of a continuing conversation that's been going on for 3,000 years with the art form with the artists with the audience and with my readers and a lot of times the readers really, you know let me know what they feel and I have never developed a signal I've heard it rarely count in fact if a piece generates strong feelings I can almost always count on getting a number of people who say I can't believe that you liked such an assertion and a similar number of people will say how could you not have gotten the magnificent work that's being done here how would you be so blind to it on the same piece right so I feel as if my job is to try to be part of that conversation I am always hoping always have to trust that people take what I say as being simply my response and not coming from some Mount Olympus some, you know and I don't see myself in that role but that I'm trying to be the most honest and constructive in terms of putting things in context within the art form within the society and it gets harder and harder to do that as a space within the paper shrinks but I do feel that that's where the critical field fits into this conversation Do you think they go back and forth by a wall? Yes Possibly What's that like? There are I find it a very useful and positive part of the job to be when theater artists respond to my work often privately and want to continue the conversation and in those cases it's always best to wait until some time after the show has closed but I've been certainly a number of people that I've encountered over the decades who have been there to tell me when I feel that I'm totally at this point of something or to continue to want to continue a conversation about what I've raised and I think that that's that hopefully I think that that's important that could be useful to the artists and to the art form but it's very useful to me That's important I know that these days as I get older I don't engage in a conversation that I can't hear something from that can't potentially change my point of view and I think that when I've asked a comment on a particular production or a playing process that I've been working on I want that conversation to really challenge my aesthetic challenge my criteria as I hope all great performances do and I want that conversation to really enrich me so I don't come at it at the point of saying okay let me tell you firmly and helpfully welcome a picture to play as a drawing director I expect you to do that I say tell me what it is you're doing and in my extended role and let's discuss that let's find out what this is about let's explore this together and give it an active conversation let's come to a truth rather than apply it Corey what you were saying discovering the reason for doing something in the act of doing it including the act of talking about it Absolutely And it's very important for theater artists to be aware of the difference and criticism I teach a program of Geology and Dramatic Criticism so that push and pull is really very evident to me I've certainly had the experience of going to see a play that had been you know rewritten a play that I had earlier reviewed that had been completely rewritten and then be able to come see it and go back to see it and sit there and think Lord I did just what I said It's terrible When we go back to this word trust because it occurred to me that you know I mean, Roger Mulroney for 30 years and TJT's been in the area for since 82 almost and so we have a lot of history and I don't believe there's another critic that we have that I have a relationship with that I do with Roger because there is trust in it and that trust has come from time and it's come from the conversation that has gone on outside the fact that Roger has to be a critic he's responded to what we've done outside of his writing so even though there have been plenty of reviews he's written I have to tell this we ran into each other on the street one day years ago after you did something and you started apologizing and I started comforting you it's okay it's okay but the trust that Diane spoke about makes all the difference you can hear the same thing and if the trust is there that you might have resisted from somebody you didn't know or didn't know where they're coming from and again going back to the biggest treaty group what I discovered was that for the first six or seven years of their existence they had a kind of amazing trust in each other and during that time they did almost all of their great work and they achieved the impossible and they continued maybe four or five years after that but trust wobbled for various reasons and all of a sudden the outer factors even though they had more financial successes in cases the ensemble was no longer the same it really came down to that factor the trust in each other in their vision in the audience Mark and I had a we're having so many hours to talk as we wait playing the lead but we were talking about the Mellon Foundation because the Mellon Foundation had a whole ensemble development ensemble discussion and really it's been a big long commitment and for me they really championed it and I love that word champion because I do feel like all of us have to find our champions like that champion is somebody that you know where they're coming from and they're coming from and I want you to be the best you can be because you make me look good because you make our community look good we want you to be national so let's go I'm going to help, I'm going to champion you and I think that we we need to find those people for each other and they're individual and they're different I'm not going to want to listen to the same person you might want to listen to it's all very individual but I do think you know what might have been a conversation about excellence look like is this notion of having people that champion us because we trust them to hold it in the mirror to what we're doing and let us see our reflection and so important because we don't do that enough we don't really do that so this is just occurring to me and I hear you trust and champion and understanding the aesthetic and I'm just wondering if there's is there a danger and I'm not sure if there is is there a danger by surrounding yourself maybe almost solely with people who really do come from where you're coming from understanders that you trust and maybe there's a circle around that that doesn't get what you're doing but maybe that doesn't get what you were saying Rob I almost agree with you that you have this that people will agree with you or people who feel like you've got it wrong and we're not trying necessarily to do our work for everybody right so I'm first I thought maybe there's a danger but maybe there's not that's such a question I was just thinking about many years ago I just worked with a theater company that's all over and the way I first started working with them we all came out of the same bar and they're chatting and I went and saw a production of theirs and we did a Romeo and Julia and after the production closed I sat down and talked with and I told what I thought about the show I told it in a very naively direct form while the concept was brilliant it did work for at least reasons and it was a very happy conversation as they got it and after that point the band director never spoke to me again he came into the bar and he said one day about six months later he said I know he's to talk to me about he said the company is doing this production and we'd like you to work with us and I said okay so you won't speak to me for six months but you won't be working with the show or myself or the people who agree with me and I said I would be happy to talk about this but I want to make sure that we are on the same page about why you want me there and we had an amazing deal with the relationship based on the conversation that you teach or my thoughts on Romeo and Julia it was fantastic but I don't think that's right for everybody but I think what we're talking about I'm assuming that trust and knowing where something is coming from does not mean only pay a favor it means a kind of openness everything on the table and an assumption that the person has that we have a common goal of making this the best rather than somebody from the outside coming they might want you to fail for whatever and certainly the other thing I just wanted to say is about the heart talk same heart of things I know for me it's been a lifelong struggle to stop saying the hard things to myself all the time I think all of us as artists and Americans face that in relation to you know convince ourselves that we suck and I think that's reinforced and a lot of that is the struggle so if we do need champions we need to help also I just heard this was on NPR I think the other night but that light from the inside always looks to the individual person it looks like one series of failures might be important to you there's two very different interactions we're describing one is private conversation you know and I think that all of them I hope there is out there doesn't have private conversations with some of them especially with some of them people who surround yourself with people who hate nothing and tell you they're great and nobody knows but I I am wondering about a different kind of public conversation about quality and resonance that somehow that somehow is exciting and robust and doesn't you know or there's a way there's a way of framing there's a way to frame where would the public I guess what I'm concerned about are two things first of all the way that these top backs are conducting I think are very like people are walking on the shelves and there's sort of a desire to have good argument happen in the talk so I think and whereas I think it could be I don't know if there could be something more where people have had permission to speak more aggressively and respond to this and say that feels terrible this is what I'm thinking about I don't know something more dramatic a nice friend like I need to I think the rescue run is there for people to show off what we're talking about in terms of more of a political discourse we just show off how cutting can be because they don't even care about it but to really get it that they don't even care about and I guess the other thing that I I don't know I guess it bothers me when people after the show tell me well I'm not an expert on theater and I'm like no, no, no, no, come on you know and I do there's some non-traditional work I often have people say well did this happen I don't know if this is what happened and I say tell me what happened I would say more than 90% of the time they absolutely got one but they didn't feel like they could and I don't know how I could lay the ground it just seems that it seems a shame to me that people would be provoked by theater excited about it and we even say well that's not something that I should be talking about because and that's something also where I feel like you can be more robust about it and I guess I sort of have this paradoxical notion that it feels to me like it's running the wrong direction that actually the talk bags people so we're really really gentle but actually I think the nervousness is what gets communicated and then people spoke more robustly angrily disappointedly happily all over the map then people would say well I have a right to I don't have to have all this I'm excited by the vocabulary and come on in instead I think it's something that people might say they're worried about I mean I do a lot of those discussions right and I think that nervousness on my part comes from the art coming from protecting the artist I honestly don't want discussion to be let me regret in me which is what we're all afraid I mean we don't want to hear that I think the conversation is often more robust than the artist isn't there and I think your question is how can we make it that robust with the artist in the room and I it's a bit of a just the training of the audience what are the things that we're doing we're in theater areas in the middle of a national we've commissioned a national study by Alan Brown on the intrinsic impact of the theater experience on the audience so in six cities with 18 theaters including the public and the arena there's a big rapid opposed to much smaller things and I've been wondering how it actually comes to Alan about this but the whole thing is to try to plumb with the individual audience how they respond to the work emotionally and intellectually do they bond with the people on stage do they bond with the people around them and I'm wondering if there isn't sort of within that that sort of construct a way to conduct a more useful feedback session because it would not seem to be quite impressive but it would give the playwright or any of the generative artists an idea of how the audience was in fact responding to what they just saw and heard and it might not even be what you imagined but it might be the lighting where they wound up even though you didn't expect them to go there or you might be like oh my god I have no idea what the lighting is that's not what I'm looking at but I'm just wondering if the more visceral emotional response that they had which cannot argue that you had it you had it you know what that was I love close-up sessions but I think that it's the wrong environment I think that close-up discussion is 25 minutes long you want as many people as possible to talk in their whole series of one line what I think is a better model is Pierre Kovac's Tinker a group of people come together for a couple of hours and talk about the experience and they become engaged as a community as well as others they are forged into a community and I think that's something that should be improved along the conversation about the individual audience members engage in different projects and they're learning how to talk about theater but we're also learning how they come up and where it's at about that it's a real conversation we actually found that because we find that we have a little bit more honest reactions to the show without the artist present that we have this program that we do at the Douglas do we agree? all of us we call it the Concierge program and basically we have these you know people they meet the audience in the beginning and talk and become friends and when people come out they stop them and go what you guys think of the show and people stop and they input what they want and we get these amazing reports and it's very interesting because it's very honest it's very smart and we share them we share them with the artist and it's a really kind of interesting it's almost production reports but from the audience first hand at any moment who are the Concierges their staff and a lot of them have been ushers for many years and then we develop this program and they've really taken it on they're very proud to do it every usher wants to be Concierge you know because it's a real interaction with the audience people remember them when they come to the show they have their favorite Concierge and it puts a face to the Douglas you know we really should be doing anything we should be doing anything at this point don't happen but I think they will move so at the beginning of the event we should move on to the next part of it what are we doing then I would say that if you were in the room here last time you should go to the union but no no we should mix up the groups yeah of course how about that third over there you're seated in that bank of chairs go over to the union and the rest of us stay here this bank of chairs goes to you I'm going to sit down and we've got 30 minutes and then we'll go over to the union that's a trade let me sit down I'm going to sit down what are you going to do let's do it