 Thursday. Yeah, Thursday. Yeah. Um, yeah, it's a time here. And I've just got a couple. I'm remembering the place land. Um, the basket is down there. Um, and yeah, just put your copies in there. It might be helpful also if you had copies for all your readers. So Saturday, I don't need to make a bunch of copies for all your all your readers. Um, they can help you down there. And it's going to better one at a time. People are making those copies rather than eight at a time. So keep that in mind. Again, it's kind of first come first served. It's going to be Saturday over the mule barn. Um, yeah, does anybody have any questions about it? Yeah, pretty straightforward. Looking at work that is newborn. And, uh, I think that's everything in my will. Okay, I have no weather report. I just have the weather plan for the day. Um, we take me to the river will be happening at Creighton as the lead center for performing arts element. You should all be good. Your boss and everything. It'll get you there. What I need is the people at the fort. Here's the plan for today. Um, we are actually had to move dinner indoors. So the people who are staying at the fort, everybody, your dinner will take place downstairs tonight in the bistro. Um, scheduled for six o'clock, not 5 30 and we'll have bands if it's pouring rain, we will have bands that just start running that loop at starting at about 5 45 to get you down here. We also now have a bus that will get you to Creighton. It will be leaving from the bistro. So you need to know to be ready when you come over to dinner. The bus will leave from here for the night performance and you'll probably be closer to 7 7 10 right around there because the performance starts at 7 30. So spread the word for those at the fort that you don't see here. I'll try to get the word out, but just know that's the weather plan for today. Um, and I usually right around this time in the week every year, I just put a little reminder in because it's a long week and everybody's been putting a lot of effort in take a breather and everybody needs to try to reenergize for those last couple days. There's some incredible plays that are going to be coming up in these next couple days. We all need to give our help and efforts and focus to those playwrights. And if we can do that, then we'll finish out really strong and wonderfully here. It's been it's been great so far. Um, one other thing, Mark Cuskello came up with a great idea. He's going to put a sign up sheet down by the registration desk for playwrights who have plays here now. If you want to get on to a Google, a special Google private group and share your plays with the other playwrights who have been play lab and main stage playwrights here, he'll set that up for you so that you guys, if you weren't able to go see a reading, you'll be able to still read those folks works and even respond or talk back and forth with each other. Is that right, Mark? Thanks very much. There's a movement about the movement workshop tomorrow. It's not in the description, but for those who are taking it, would you please bring a small chunk of text that could be in a dialogue form or a paragraph found text from any sources find? Is that okay? I want to say happy birthday to Boston and to Eliza. We're, our national audience is with us now and we're going to turn it over to Eliza Bet. No applause? No applause. Today's topic, dreamed up by the GPTC staff, I just had a very spicy vindaloo party move, is the T and C, the function and malfunction of theater in a capitalist consumer society. So as we've done in the last couple of days, I'm going to briefly introduce the fabulous playwrights on the panel. They are Constance or Connie Comden. Connie is the honored playwright this year. She has been called one of the best playwrights in our country and our language that our language has ever produced by a playwright Tony Kushner. Her tales of the last four micons and other plays is a wonderful publication. Many of us got to see that play last year. Pardon me, the vindaloo really. Connie, why don't you say a few words about yourself? I teach at Amherst College, which is a great gig. I'm playwright in residence, which means I don't have to go to any ten-year meetings. You're going to see my play tonight called Take Me to the River. And I'm just really happy to be here and be with some of my new friends and some of my extremely old friends like Mr. Wellman down there. And Mr. N there and there are others out there. Okay, great, thanks Connie. Connie also is an alumna of New Dramatists and a member of the Dramatist Guild of America and Penn. Then we have Kate Snodgrass. Kate is the artistic director of the Elliott Norton and award-winning Boston Theatre Marathon and Boston Playwrights Theatre, which is a home of new plays in Boston. She's the author of the Actors Theatre of Louisville's Heidman Award-winning play Haiku. Snodgrass has been recognized with two independent reviewers of the New England Awards for best new play and a Steinberg Award nomination from the American Theatre Critics Association. She's a professor of the practice of playwriting in the Boston University Graduate School and is a member of Actors Equity Association American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Dramatist Guild of America. She's been acknowledged by Boston Stage Source in 2001 as a theatre hero. Snodgrass is a former national chair of playwriting at the Kennedy Center, American College Theatre Festival, and she received their inaugural Milan Stift Award as an outstanding teacher of playwriting. Also awarded Boston's Elliott Norton Award for sustained excellence in 2012 and she is a playwriting fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company. We also have Ruth Margraf to Kate's left. Ruth has written Marshall operas with Fred Ho for BAM's Not Last Wave, Next Wave Festival, the Guggenheim Museum, Japan Society, Apollo, La Mama, and a C-A-M-I Cami produced tour of performing art centers nationwide. She has toured with her cafe on Tarsia Ensemble. Thank you. Another place to rush to India, Japan, Isar Vajjan in Egypt, and Chicago Margraf's Anger Fly opened to critical acclaim at Trapdoor in 2001 and Stadium Devil There is running now at Red Tape and theatre Three Graces will open at Pivot Arts Festival this June and with other work at Chicago's World Music Festival. She's received awards from the Rockefeller, McKnight, Jerome, and Bullbuck Full Bright Foundation as well as numerous other highly enviable accolades. Eric N., we have with us as well, he recently completed a writing workshop with the Belarus Free Theatre in Minsk, Belarus in addition to producing the annual Arts in the One World Conference which engages themes of art and social change and conducts annual trips to Rwanda and Uganda so that students and professionals in the field can study the history of these countries and explore the ways that art influences recovery from violence. He has taught in universities across the country including the University of Iowa, Naropa, University of California, San Diego, and University of Texas, Dallas. His plays have been produced in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, New York, Chicago, Belgrade, and elsewhere. And he's currently a professor at Brown University. Yes. And then we have Mack Welman who defies an introduction. I'll do my best anyway. In addition to his many plays including three twos or afar that are Beers, Jenny, Richie, and Anything's Dream, Mack Welman has also written the novels The Fortune Teller of Jest, Annie Salem, An American Tale, and Linda Perdido. His collections of poetry include Miniature, Strange, Elegy, Left Glove, and Split the Stick, The Miniature's Divan. In addition to his obi awards including the award for Best American Play for Bad Penny, Toadwork, and Probar, Welman has received National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller, McKnight, and Guggenheim Fellowships, a number of various awards as well. Anyhow, so here we are at the TNC, the capitalist and theater panel, and me, I'm Eliza Benton, I'm no economist, but I do live in the United States so I guess that makes me a consumer and a capitalist. Let's just get straight to work. Communism is dead, capitalism is flawed, life is short, brutish, and dark, or something like that, the Hobbes quote. How does theater and capitalism, how do the two talk to each other? I'll start. I have as bookmarks some checks I've gotten from William Morris, my former agent that's now William Morris Enterprises. One is for 43 cents, one is for two dollars and two cents, and another one is, I think, about 34 dollars. I will eventually, you know, cash these because some poor schmuck will have to trace me down if I don't. That being said, the history of American theater has always been a commercial enterprise because America is a commercial enterprise. And so I think it's an uneasy alliance. Yeah, alliance, thank you. I was looking for the word there. Because theater does not make the money back it takes to produce it. In Minneapolis, a mixed blood, Jack Rule just started doing place for free. The actors get paid, I believe. He has a budget. He got funders to step up to the plate. But the fact was that the ticket sales barely paid for the box off, the running of the box off. So unless you bump the ticket sales way up, it's really hard to make the money back. And so we get into this whole critic driven, New York Times criticism driven theater, which is commodity theater. And the regional theaters have become commodity theater because they have to present place to pay for their buildings. And of course the actors should be paid and the designers and you know, you have to pay for the costumes that somebody has to make them. All of the enormous costs it takes to produce theater are not made up by ticket sales unless the ticket sales are enormous. So I didn't see the Lion King even though I had two close friends at it because there were no comps. And because the tickets were I think $150 and that in my life is four or maybe five new plays I could see, which I'd rather spend my money on. Okay, that's my, oh and I want to thank all the funding throughout my life that's allowed me to continue as a playwright, the Rockefellers, the W. Alton Jones, the Albee Sloan, all of these corporations sometimes who are using it as guilt money, they're unhappy to have the money and that's really, that's what kept me alive and the theater should produce my work going. So theater functioning in the capitalist society, I feel like I should probably amend that question a bit. I don't know if I asked it in a clear enough manner. This is more about the malfunction, but I do have some things to say about the function, but it seems like every five years or so I end up shaking my fist at capitalism and in some kind of article and when I looked at the question I thought about an article that I wrote in a 2002 book called Theater and Crisis that Karadzic published and Eric, she actually in the introduction writes that Eric and I, I'm sure she includes Mac as well, I think you guys are all in this. Anthology of passionately and fearlessly breaking down the walls of holy commerce. So I think I know we should be gone. But anyway, in that manifesto I tried to unfurl Robinson Crusoe as the father of all of our stories and the plots of all of our plays and as a self-absorbed island of imperialist conquering of time and space and I tried to create a girl Friday as the protagonist with a parrot who could speak Crusoe English on her shoulder and my title was I'm just going to read a little bit from this. Toward an evangelical capitalist message in a bottle to the next millennium of Robinson Crusoe's in proscenium, which is all the rest of the playwrights. What if someday this girl Friday type of figment rid were to wake up in a state of pregnant omniscience that would be above the wilderness of melodies in the third act? What if she could read from east to western gold rush? What if she had a far sight further than the 15 minute killing spree ejaculation sold to us evangelicaly by the same old likely cross we lust and gamble for in every pop star? What if it's too hard? What if we give up? What if she starts writing what we can't possess at all? To dumb it down, pointless. It's an act of oppression to write our characters in Crusoe English, first word master, with our foot placed firmly on Friday's head. Any play with a blurbable single meaning valued at the ticket price makes a jump deposit. These plays are childless. These plays are uninhabited. Shut your eyes, the Crusoe's murmur to the parrot, because it's very green here. Girl Friday, green, but in the pitch dark everything is black and white like an old film. You only know it's green because you recognize the parrot, or maybe velvet, and they say it feels like velvet too. And the parrot says, oh, I always wonder what it felt like, velvet. And they hesitate a little in the way and tip the parrot back into the night until it feels of courseness holding it up, which used to be a tree. We're shy. On the note of evangelism, a priest was saying in church the other day that he asked if a shark eats a baby, does the shark sin? And he said, no, the shark doesn't sin. The shark is just filling its nature. We don't understand why the shark was given its nature, but it's not sinning if it fills its nature. So capitalism is just fine, like a thunderstorm or a shark is fine. And a thunderstorm will wipe out your neighborhood and flood it. It will kill your children. Capitalism gets things done, but its nature is really indifferent to you and your happiness. Capitalism serves capitalism. And in the wake of that, it can also serve theater. But it has nothing to do with the making of meaning. It has to do with the making of money. And the making of meaning is people in Congress with each other reflecting deeply to no benefits. It's being alive to each other. And that has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism per se, which wants money. And money is fine. Money gave us these microphones. I used to rail against capitalism, but it's like railing against sharks. Let it continue to eat the babies of the world. I'll just try to keep my babies out of that water, for example, I'll look for the fins. So I look for alternatives to the capitalist system and try to build my life around the making of meaning. Indifferent to outcome and certainly indifferent to money. I think it's been said often that every exchange of money is a failure of hospitality. Every time you have to give someone a dollar for a pack of gum, it means that you don't know each other well enough to have a free exchange of goods, a direct exchange of goods. I'll also say that theater is ultimately doesn't matter and can be as full of guilt and can be as brutal as capitalism can be. The making of meaning can be precious or irrelevant or biased or cruel. Theater artists have been involved in genocides and repression throughout time. Dictators often align themselves with artists because artists are as useful to the control of the population as the control of capital is. All that really matters or what matters absolutely is everything and nothing. And capitalism and art are equidistant from everything and nothing. And they aspire to both that there be nothing in opposition to capitalism and that capital own everything. It seems to be aspirational that theater be able to reach into both disaster and heavenly chaos seems to be aspirational. So in the middle of this grid I will separate myself from capitalism as best I can, not because it's evil but because it's irrelevant to my purpose. Can you talk a little bit more about the alternative models that you seek out despite living in the capitalist world? Well, as per the Catholic worker, don't sign written contracts, avoid payment. I never ask about money and sometimes it happens that money comes. And pursue projects without outcome or that are only inappropriately assessed. So I like plays that don't mean any, you know, that don't deliver meaning like a commodity but open up the possibility of making meaning. So you bring people together through the trauma of a play to a crisis of indecisiveness and that percolation of a community, desperate for meaning and not in possession of it, that's exactly where I want to play to end up. Just prior to the moment of possessing meaning because as soon as you possess it you can market it. I want to preface my remarks by stating that I intend to be the first off-off Broadway billionaire. I think if you read Adam Smith he's not so different from Karl Marx. Capitalism as a regionally invented and construed is not a wicked, awful set of theses. I do think something has happened in the last 30, 40 years. Corporate culture in the country has become distinctly disturbing. My own feeling is that this move to the right is not the fault of the Republican Party, it's the fault of the Democratic Party, particularly the Carter and Clinton wing which moved deliberately to the right. We don't have the language to talk about politics anymore. Most good journalists are losing their jobs. I don't think theater has done a particularly good job of addressing political issues in a very, very long time. It doesn't have the vocabulary for it, people don't have the knowledge and distance from it. I agree with Eric that we tend to produce message art which ends up in the horrible realm of the already known. The thing that's dangerous and provocative about theater is that it's a stupid low income craft. It's about people in a room or help us outside in the rain with Connie. And that's what makes it provocative and dangerous. You can trace the history of theater very neatly by tracing the opinions of the people that hated theater. Going back to Plato, the Christian Fathers, Augustine, right down to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It's also interesting that every new development in theater comes from people saying, I don't want to do that old shit anymore. I want to do something new. So anti-theatricalism also gives rise to new things. I think it's a very tricky time right now because there's not many ways of communicating with each other or for us to communicate with the public at large. And that is a big problem. When I think about capitalism, I think about the people I know and playwrights in this business, so-called business. And, you know, what Mac and Eric were saying about, it brings it down to the individual writer. And what I think in terms of years ago, I worked over in Cambridge and a little bit with Robert Bruce Dean and he was mad at me at one point because I was a young teacher and I had a friend who was making a very good living, writing screenplays and I wanted him to come and talk to the class and tell them, regale them with stories and Bob was really upset with me because he did not want me to encourage in any way a playwright to go to Hollywood. Which, believe me, I agree up to a point and, you know, we live in a cap, we live in the United States where we want to make a living and want to pay our rent and we can't do that. So there's a conundrum there. And it comes down, for me, it comes down to we have to be very, very, very careful because there's a little preposition, two prepositions. We are either, like in Hollywood, writing for an audience where we want to make money, we want to have people come and see our movies and we're writing for a specific, to connect to a certain demographic. And in the theater, I hope we are writing to an audience. So we are writing to communicate something that we all share. And it's very different. One is, can be very lucrative but it also, it's, it's, it introduces you to the devil because then we somehow think that it's the same thing and it's not. And if, if we do start writing for an audience it seems to me that what capitalism encourages us to do is then, then we go down the road where we are lost, all of us in terms of just our souls if I may be so silly. I want to say something that's good about Hollywood but I will also include New York in that. I actually encourage my students to think about writing for cable television. And I don't mean like, you know what I mean, HBO, Showtime, et cetera. Some of the best writing in America actually is on those shows. I've had students do well there. And Mack and I have an old, well Mack has a really, really good friend. I have a person that I've had a complicated relationship with. Barry Overmire who, who's, whom I admire tremendously who was a pioneer in changing the quality of the writing on cable. So you can find really wonderful writing on cable and you can find people who write for that and also write plays. As far as a theater not doing a good job, I would say that it's really, there, there, when we talk about theater we're talking about, well a lot of people but we're talking about the people who actually make it, who write it and then we're talking about the people who choose the plays that get produced. I certainly know lots of work that is political in the best sense of the word but you know, it doesn't get produced. Or if it does, it's in what I believe has kept me alive as this small network actually is large. There's hundreds of theaters all over the United States who produce new plays and there you find a voice that's critical and I mean critique in terms of apologia, apology, explanation as well as being critical of what's going on, what we would call political theater. These are not the places you're going to see for the most part in New York City you're not going to see them you're not going to see them in regional theater which is a commodity theater as I mentioned before they have huge budgets and they have huge expenses. So, but the, you know, America is about, America is a capitalistic country it's a cycle of small period of history where we had the barter system it's really been about the making of money and I don't have any problems with the making of money I think it's a good thing I hope to make more before I die. The problem is greed and in socialistic societies the problem is still greed that's the problem. I think capitalism is a system works in terms of what works works pretty well. Socialism and communism haven't really been tried in their purist form so I can't really make a judgment certainly a mixture of socialistic principles and capital in a capitalistic system that seems to work okay. I, I'm going to stop there. Thank you. I want to clarify that I said I don't mean I'm not telling everybody not to go to Hollywood and make money we all need to know the difference. I think it's all part of a continuum that has non-commercial art at one end of it and this very highly commercial art at the other side and I think we all need both sides and what's interesting to me about the visual art world is that the space of painting has lost its dependence on the figurative not the prefigurative human being that is representational and also the line of the horizon that is mirroring back reality to the viewer but theater still has these two forms of what is figurative or real and then the horizon line of time and I think that I mean I think it's interesting that I do commercial projects I have made money somehow in the theater and yet I'm constantly pushing the form and I think that that's part of capitalism because those innovative margins and thresholds and vanguards of the form are where all the ideas eventually trickle up to the places that make money my problem with capitalism is that the people that are sometimes making the work generating the ideas and doing the labor are not getting the money so I would like to see it trickle down a little more and I don't think it's trickling down in capitalism so I think we need a new model I think Connie's right socialism when I read Marx it sounds like a poem I don't know and if it hasn't worked yet how is that going to work so I would like it to work and I'd like somebody to come up with a plan but I think that they can actually the capitalists can look to the artists because we're both entrepreneurial and we are making this art and theater is really in between because we've got people collaborating and sharing like Eric saying the hospitable bartering of services and spaces and time and we also are somehow able to survive as an art form so I guess what I would like to see happen more in theater is more like what's happening in the art world where somebody like Rem Kuhlhausen architect can say the luxury is rough so where everything in the world is smooth art is rough and if things are common art is uncommon, art is unique so my question is why is it that people that are really stirring up trouble with those margins of the form why are they not in the luxury of the form and I think they are in the art world a lot of times and they are sometimes in architecture and other fields science so why aren't we honoring those margins and really looking to them as fertile crescents of productive work and I think okay the university does and I think even television does television is attracting a lot of our great writers and there is really great writing on television somebody needs to write a new 30 rock in office because those are now gone but so I don't think we're trying to say I don't tell my students either not to write for Hollywood because they've got to make a living they've got to also figure out a way within the system to pay their rent so we are as artists we are very resourceful and entrepreneurial in finding those little tiny bits of money under every rock or some rocks at least we have a very short amount oh please my first plays were actually done in the Netherlands which particularly then was a socialist scene the thing I found impressive about Holland then and I still do now was the extent to which people living there have what I would call institutional imagination sadly lack in this country we have one idea of how to structure institutions in this corporate institution when I applied for a grant from the Amsterdam City Council to do a play the committee met the committee does not meet unless there is a proposal there are no application forms I had to make my own application I made a big cover with the script in it three quarters of the money went to an insurance policy which meant the show could not fail it traveled for six months all over the Benelux countries there is nothing like that in this country because we do not question forms, institutional forms of any kind and that I find important we also don't argue about anything Americans are very good people we do as we are told that's true as much as the left is on the right let's get into some more arguments shall we and open up open up to some questions comments, debates, concerns diatonic the panel the panel that I spoke to the other day about the impact of internet on internet I'd like to go over to it and ask the panel to comment on the phenomenon of the new kind of funding mechanism of crowd funding such as Kickstarter I know two theater companies that have done quite well in getting projects launched using that rather innovative a new form of raising money anybody out there have any thoughts about that and maybe the future of crowd funding I think it's great I think it's successful Connie thinks it's great Eric has something more concrete to say please give that man the mic before he has a heart attack I'm going to be a little disruptive a little sort of impolite personally I say to people here the people of the panel and myself I'm a lifelong Marxist so I don't know that much about capitalism neither the people of the panel I urge all of you to go read about it find out as much as you can about it because it's an important subject you're living in the midst of it and you're swallowed up by it so learn about it we don't all know about it but you can learn about it we don't all know about capitalism here capitalism is in front of me a lot of clouds and separation by the ownership of basic things in life that's what capitalism is it's not just money it's only the factories, it's only the land it's only the resources, the mines, the labor that's what's meant to money it's ownership of the way in which we stay alive so what you learn about that also the ultimate respect is by fellow Ivy Leagueer I think we're mystifying talk about it, it's like a shark it's mystifying, it's created by human beings sharks are not created by human beings as far as I understand these the structures of living and ownership of all that you can just trace it historically that 70th and 80th century as the aristocratic class collapses of its own place and the bourgeoisie moves in to things until and all owns everything the United States is probably not a very successful capitalist country maybe 30% of people, 35% are in poverty or just barely out of it trying to stay out of it and that's success it's not success, it needs to be challenged to find observations Baal said a great thing he said changes will happen in art when it's not a matter of what you do and for whom, with whom and to whom now the women's movement is an example of this women begin to make theater for women American people the deals for the deals workers for workers that's how change finally new people to dialogue with and not creating it as a mind of a period ago, not to be inherited of the individual of the civil playwright but out of a community of people what about their stories it's another model who's doing it right now it goes for Baal with the theater the oppressed in which you work the community, you don't come in as you know it all the theater doesn't know that much about politics, you're right or how to change things they don't know much about that but we do know how to make structures and help other people tell their stories and in that sense but Baal is challenging the individual performance coming from the stage in a monologue and coercing people to think and believe and feel certain things it's a profound challenge that Baal is offering and I think it would be good at the great place theater conference to sort of took that up to something to think about in the future thank you very much just one argument one point of debate it's really great what you said I did have class between Robinson Crusoe with his foot on Friday's head and also the parrot I just didn't call it class I want to add that there actually is quite a lot of theater that does what you thought so eloquently talk about sir and class is becoming more important than race in this country or gender however I still love to go to a play and have people on stage pretending and enjoy myself and I even like plays that were written 400 to 2000 years ago so I do know that I them and surrounded by people who could pay for that and that's a very different experience than what Baal wanted to do and what communities are doing and what we've done a bit at this conference I just want to add that my father was a welder and a union man and one of the things that we in the theater always have to deal with when it comes to community theater is that in the so called professional theater we have actors equity and we have the stage hand union and those people need to be paid should be paid but of course that is a large expense community theater is amateur theater which I believe in theater for the love of it and it has extremely important part in our present and I hope future I know my students are very very interested in doing it and I know there are a lot of young companies that are doing it they're going out in communities and I think that's a tremendous part of theater in any country I'm afraid that's all we have time for we barely even touch the class but so it goes when you have a short amount of time thanks for everyone's coming to be here