 times the things that I get overly passionate about are not always things other people do. But let's see how we hold out. They're telling me that we can go until 3.55 so we're gonna talk for a little while and then want to engage you guys to hear your questions and thoughts about other organizations you might be involved in and NPN some of the other organizations we're gonna touch on and any other questions you have or things that you'd like us to know. So here we go. I'm Nan Barnett. I am the executive director of National New Planet Network and I'm joined today by a little bit of a panelist switch up because we like to keep you on your toes here. I'll let you introduce yourself and do just a little brief bio since you're not in the program. Hi I'm Livina Jadwani. My pronouns are she her hers. I'm a freelance director and based in Chicago and I was really excited to join Nan today because I was part of the first cohort of the National Directors Fellowship which is a fellowship that is through the O'Neill the National New Play Network the Kennedy Center and SDC. Yes? Got them all. And so I have benefited from getting to know Nan and NPN through that and since then I have joined the Affiliated Artists Council. What else do you want to know? I'm a Virgo. I think that's a good start. Okay. Hi everyone. I'm Kristen Jackson. I am the connectivity director for Woolly Mammoth in Washington D.C. I'm a Leo. August? August 7th. 29th. There is an affiliated blurb about me in packets somewhere but Woolly Mammoth has been a longtime member of NNPN and one of the core members actually of NNPN and I have recently become more involved in some really interesting ways that we'll talk about later. So how many of you are familiar with the network? Yes? No? Some? Okay great. So you'll be subjected to my spiel because they're people in your dead nose. National New Play Network is an alliance of professional not-for-profit theaters across the country all of whom champion the development production and continued life of New Works. We have a secondary statement that we use which is that NNPN is interested in the innovation and implementation of new forms of communication between theaters and theater makers. Voila! That's the mission statement at least for the next few months because we're in the midst of strategic planning and one of the things that we've learned is that vision statement the innovation of implement and implementation part is something that we are actually now doing instead of it being just a part of our vision and so that's going to be moving up to the top of our mission statement. All that said what it really means is that we're a group of theaters of all shapes and sizes and missions that have come together around the creation and development of New Work and this idea of continued life and that has manifested itself from the very beginning of the organization. So 20 years ago a group of about 10 people came together most of whom were running small and mid-size theaters not in New York across the country who were doing New Work and were struggling with the fact that they were supporting playwrights local to them or playwrights that they had fallen for and couldn't get enough of and yet they would have a wonderful successful opening of a wonderful new play and that was the end of it. That there was no pipeline, there was no system to move those plays across the country if it wasn't coming out of New York and they knew that there was really great work being done that other communities would be interested in and wanted to be shared so they came together to try to find a way to be able to talk to each other on a regular basis and help share that work out. That group grew slowly and by the time it reached about its fifth anniversary it had begun a program called the National Showcase of New Plays where they were those theaters those by that point about 10-12 companies were getting together once a year and they were bringing a show a reading or a fully produced play to show to other people that they thought they might be interested in. Out of that discussion came this idea that when a play was done and ready to be shared it wasn't always finished and how might we be able to support a play getting a second production or a third production. How do we break that mold of premieritis that the only good production of a play was its first production and people wanted to theaters wanted to be able to lay claim to having the world premiere and nobody was really interested in doing after that unless it had a major New York run. So a group again of those people gathered and had a discussion where someone said well what if we gave theaters money to basically it sort of bribed them into doing a second production and after a great deal of chatting I who was at that point running what was then the largest theater in the United States doing exclusively new and new and developing work Florida Stage down in the Palm beaches made the famous statement that I didn't think it would be a problem because they would never get three artistic directors to agree on anything so I didn't think we were gonna have to worry about raising much money. Luckily I was ignored and that conversation turned into the NNPN rolling world premiere program. In that program a playwright is once three or more artistic directors agree that they would like to work on the play and NPN provides support to help them gather the rights work with the playwright with their representative set up the schedule do the some shared billing and in many cases actually pay now it's about $25,000 to be split up amongst three theaters. We provide staff support for coordinated conversations that happen with the artists with the marketing teams with the connectivity teams of all the theaters that are working on the play and the playwright then gets three or more entirely separate and distinct productions in a 12-month period. An NPN now has about 115 members ranging in size from $50,000 a year budgets up through the big guns Oregon shakes and Lincoln Center and so a playwright has the opportunity to experience that play on its feet in front of audiences in towns big and small in theaters tiny and magnificent out of the mouths of actors and in the hands of directors that can vary vastly over the course of the year the play then we are paying for that playwright to be in residence and work on the play as it moves across the country so what we've basically done is created a community of these theaters that are not in any way restricted by budget size or location we have theaters literally from who I guess Juno to Miami and San Diego to Vermont we're in now I believe it is 37 states and 69 cities the idea of taking companies that would normally be competitors and turning them into collaborators encouraging them to work together on the script and many other programs which we'll talk a little bit more about in the beginning or as we move forward that where we actually again pay them to work together we pay them to come together there are travel funds any theater core member theater can have up to $500 a year to go and see any other new work anywhere in the nation people can get $250 stipends to go to any festival in the country to see and then come back and write a report that's shared with the membership about the work that's being done there so it's a little tricky but we've determined that dollars help probably more importantly we've provided opportunities for people to come together on a regular basis to talk about new work we host online chats with artistic directors managing directors literary managers affiliated artists and associate member theaters every other each of those groups talks every other month we do monthly pitches where shows that are eligible that people think other people know about go out in communications to bring those people together constantly to be talking about the work that they love that they think somebody else might love we'll get those calls of I found a play it's really great I can't do it but somebody else should know about it I want somebody else to know about it so we're providing a space for the work to be shared and made in multiple spaces thereby raising the profile of both the play and the playwright so that's the main program we'll talk a little bit more you want to tell us actually I'm going to skip to you talk a little bit about the connectivity work that you guys have done at wooly which has inspired a huge amount of work to happen within the network and has now become a part of that framework of what the network does yeah so I don't know how many of you have heard about our connectivity program at wooly it's what I would call a kind of I would probably best describe it as a mix of audience engagement with like a touch of community engagement and maybe like a touch of audience development but it primarily lives in an audience engagement space I would say and we started connectivity we made up the term in 2009 and it's basically a show by show strategy for thinking about for whom will this show be particularly relevant and how can we deepen the conversation around the plays that we produce so part of my job is to constantly be thinking about okay what is the kind of civic provocation in the play what are the conversations embedded in the play who needs to be in the audience in order to have an actual meaningful conversation about this play and and that really shapes it shapes the the way that we select the work that we're going to do every every show is kind of its own baby and has its own plan and has its own audience and has its own programming surrounding the piece and I would say kind of one of one of the things is as we've it's still kind of relatively new right 2009 wasn't that long ago I don't think but over time a number of other theaters have used a lot of the travel programs that NNPN provides to come and spend time with woolly and to learn from us about what's working what's not working how they might be able to kind of infuse our learnings into the work that they're doing at their home theater and in a way it's actually that like interconnectedness and that sharing of resources particularly I think in in audience engagement and community engagement where I feel like we're only really now starting to have these like deeper conversations about what it is that we're doing and even though ironically so much of our work is about connecting people I think that we often find ourselves in these kind of silos ourselves as the administrators so in that way that ability to kind of be in these spaces of exchange with other practitioners in this community engagement audience engagement space has been an opportunity not just for you know folks to come and learn what woolly is doing but for me to learn from them what's happening in other parts of the country so that has been kind of a beautiful exchange opportunity so to speak through NNPN one of the things that NNPN really loves to tackle is what is that thing that everybody in the country is talking about that every theater is struggling with that everyone is bitching about sorry mama you're watching but no one's really doing anything about those conversations that keep happening you know you go to all these convenings and you go to things and everybody's talking about the same thing over and over again and no one's kind of moving forward and NPN tends to be a doing organization in the sense that we don't always know what the answer is but we know that doing nothing is not going to create a solution so we love to try things we love to pilot things because when you pilot something if it goes bad you've just finished your pilot but if it goes well then you've got a great success you never end up having a failure because of it so we like to do a lot of these pilot scenarios where we'll take that question wrestle it to the ground hopefully and say here's one thing that NNPN can do to try to move that forward so for example the collaboration funds were created exactly for that Willie was starting this whole concept about engagement that's different than other ways some of the other theaters were engaging and we wanted to be able to share that mixed blood in Minneapolis also one of the core members when they first started doing radical hospitality we did a lot of sharing around that system and many of our theaters now are using a modified version of radical hospitality one of the the things that we decided we would wrestle at one point was this idea that there weren't really any and this is ten years ago we were along now there's quite a few of these there were no real in bed residences within the American theater in small and mid-sized companies so we're not talking about internships and we're not talking about part-time staff jobs we were talking about taking playwrights initially and then people who were interested in leadership positions within the theater we term them producer residences but they sort of take all different forms NNPN will up an NNPN member theater and an artist come to us with a proposal we generally have five to seven of them a year and then NNPN pays basically a half salary it's about fifteen thousand dollars for ten months and the idea that the is that the theater then matches that with either additional work or additional compensation but that NNPN is providing a salary so that that artist can spend time in that working theater learning about what it means to be in an American theater on a day-to-day basis and also infusing that theater with a specific project that they are interested in having but can't cover within their regular staffing out of those residences which proved hugely successful for people both that are playwright residences and the producer residences and for organizations developed this idea of there's no way of doing that really with directors in America so the project that we worked on with the O'Neill that became the national director fellowships it's kind of a again a another tweak off of that you know talk to them a little bit of how the program works yeah and I think I'm trying to remember exactly how many emerging director fellowships I've done I've done a lot of them and I've struggled with a lot of them actually I don't know that I've told you but the fellowship I had done right before I committed so I was in the middle of doing another fellowship and somebody showed me an article in American Theater Magazine that was announcing this partnership between the O'Neill and NNPN and I was having a really hard time in the fellowship that I was doing at the time I'll be early career as long as there's money in it because I was feeling like I wasn't getting a lot of individual attention and because even though I've been really clear in the interview parameters that being a New York director was not like the end goal for me that still felt like that was built into that was their idea of success and that that was the trajectory of most of the successful participants at that program and so even though I had said hi this is not my goal I still felt very much push towards that trajectory but I decided to apply for the National Directors Fellowship and something I really so first of all new play directors should get to direct right not assist and there aren't very many fellowships that actually allow you to assist and certainly not at the level but my cohort ended up at so built into this 18 month program is the idea that there was a cohort of five of us and you know talk about competitors to colleagues right like five very different people with five very different goals and because I felt like those goals and those different standards of success we had set for ourselves was just so clear from jump we became a really tight group of colleagues because it was just very clear oh the thing that I'm working on is not the thing that you are working on and that's great how can we lift each other up right because this idea of scarcity it's not all decide from east-west players like recently pointed out to me that like oh yeah the scarcity mentality like that comes from a colonialist mindset right like there's enough work for all of us so we spent this group this first group of five of us I mean we were finding out what the program was because we were the first we spent about a year getting steeped in new play culture at the O'Neill at the Kennedy Center attending NNPN convenings and then the match was a professional a professional hire through an NNPN theater at the end and so what was amazing I remember sitting down with you in the O'Neill it was very very cold in January right and saying at the time I was splitting my time between Chicago and Ashland Oregon spending some time at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival I was like man I really need I'm a nice Midwestern girl I am tired of all this like back and forth and I really want to do a show that like my parents can drive and come see who live in the suburb of Chicago and this is the type of theater that I'm working on these are the questions that I'm interested in asking and out of that came successful in my view match with the Phoenix Theater which is a core member theater in Indianapolis where I directed a new play by Seth Rosen who is the director of Interact Theater in Philadelphia called Human Rights so I got to direct this like sleeper little summer sleeper summer hit of a play about female circumcision which I would not have done and was so grateful to be able to start that conversation with Indianapolis audiences and felt so supported in starting that conversation in that community because though I was new to town I was not new to the network and Brian Fonseca their producing artistic director I think had such a great sense of the community and really gave me I mean so much trust and so much agency and the the because right these amazing collaborations happen because Nan is able to find money for them the incentive for all these member theaters to hire my cohort in that first year of the program not knowing any of us right I mean that's one of the hard things about being a regional director to write is like how you get hired if you haven't come to Chicago to see my work so the incentive for these theaters was that through the collaboration you know Neal National Play Network SDC Kenny Center that that cohort had money to pay for our travel and our director stipend right so the incentive for those theaters was well hi we're asking you to sure hire somebody whose work you may not have seen somebody who you've gotten to know through at least two NNPN convenings but the incentive is you know you won't have to pay for that director and you won't have to pay to house them and so I know like for my colleague Everett Ajkin was able to go to a theater in Ohio that is really not otherwise able to bring in out of town artists and Everett was so his skillset was so specific and I think important to the project that he did was I call my brothers right and like I have to about I don't want to speak on behalf of that company but I have to imagine that they were so grateful to have his specific skillset which was not local to that community right it feels like we're having a lot of conversations today about like how do I authentically give voice to artists that are not necessarily local to my community right and how do I how do I support that and so that then that conversation gets had and that we make conversation connection between that community and the community that already exists in our theater and that for me was part of the success of that program so you see some connecting threads here with what we're doing it's all about putting the right people together with the right pieces of work and out of that discussion came the project that I hope all of you familiar with but if you're not I'm about to blow your minds and that is the new play exchange one of the problems that we were all wrestling with in the field was the idea of submissions being closed that theaters were either no longer accepting submissions for new work or they were accepting submissions and never reading them literary managers had entire offices made out of furniture stacks of scripts and when they needed a play that fit a certain something there was no way of finding it in that pile if they didn't already know that writer then there would be no way of getting to that work and it seemed foolish to us when we stopped and really looked at it that in the age of electronica there was no system for being able to access scripts through a long process that involved partnerships outside of the network you've heard a little bit about what we've done with with O'Neill and Kennedy Center this project was with LMDA and the Playwrights Center and the Playwrights Foundation and Chicago Dramatists we began with the great and wonderful support of Doris Duke charitable fund and the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment about an eight month national tour of going around and sitting in rooms like this and saying if there was a database of new works what would you want it to do talking to artistic directors to literary managers to playwrights to dramaturgs to actors to anybody that might have an idea that they needed to read a script and out of that came a process of beta testing and in January of 15th of 2015 we launched the new play exchange we had learned over the course of that year that there really was a need and desire for that and we set of course some goals for ourselves that said we want to make this much money and we want to you know have this many people at the end of year one year two year three at hour 17 after launch we surpassed our number goal for the year now three years in there are more than 18,000 plays by living writers in this database and it's a highly searchable and interactive database with a social media aspect as well you can go on as a writer and you create your profile it's your photo your bio and a list of your work and then you upload a play you may upload a sample a synopsis or the full play and you tag that work with metadata and keywords things like genre and cast size and that sort of thing but also what it's about who it might appeal to is it a short or a full link is it take four actors or does it take 18 actors all of the stuff and then you are sharing that script with the world and by the world I mean the world we have people from I think it's 54 countries that are using the database then you then there's a reader platform which is basically anybody again that might want to read a play you go in you can look for a play by a playwright so you can pull up their name see everything you pull up a play by a title and see that work and in a lot of cases downloaded to either your own computer or your private library which lives on the site but if you are looking for a play and you don't know the name of that play and you don't even know whether that play exists or not it works like kayak so if you want to read a play about global warming by a woman playwright you can do that but if you want to read a play about global warming that's by a woman playwright you want that play to never have been produced you want it to be two acts you wanted to have six actors two of whom are over 70 and African American and you want it to be a comedy you can do that it's kind of astounding you also have there's an opportunities module so if you are a theater and you want to read 10 minute plays about social justice you go in you fill out a little form you hit click everyone who is in that system who has a 10 minute play about social justice gets a note on their phone it comes up and it says you're eligible for this opportunity would you like for us to send them your play they press yes or no and that's it it's gone you as the theater then get a list of all the plays that meet your criteria and if you say 10 minute plays about social justice you don't get 20 minute plays about social justice you don't get plays that might be about social justice if you hold it up through jail cells and looked at it play that doesn't meet the criteria you get what it is that you are asking for it also has a contact piece so you can reach out to the playwright you have a place to take private notes you have a place to take notes that can be shared so those of you who run reader competition we're about to activate a new feature so that you'll be able to gather all the notes from the people who are reading for you through that system we're still doing fifty to seventy five thousand dollars a year of new play of development on the site we're about to roll out a whole big bunch of benefits those of you have college and university affiliations we're about to be able to be we have a now an isbp something addressed so that college library systems can subscribe to it that's about to roll out as well oh and by the way it costs ten dollars a year so you as a playwright it's ten dollars a year as a reader it's ten dollars a year and if you want an organizational profile I'm sorry to say it's twenty five dollars a year but that's less than the cost of two scripts from drama bookstore and you have eighteen thousand scripts that you're available to you yes is there a component of the database that protects new work from being co-opted or like when you upload that work is it already a trademark right so basically once you put the work on then you are protected and I will tell you that in the three plus years we've had one complaint about someone who's ten minute play got selected and was supposed to get a twenty dollar stipend and they didn't get it and that is as far as we know the only problem that we've had with the system the opposite of that however is that we now hear pretty much daily from a playwright saying I just got a reading I'm getting a full production my play just got selected to be in a festival and from theater saying oh thank God I had to have a forehander and I just found it I really needed a piece I wanted a piece that spoke specifically to my community on this subject I was able to go in find it read it and give it to my staff and we're gonna produce it it is having it is changing in a very real way how theater is shared discovered and made in the United States and around the world we built it with the capacity to switch it over to 15 different languages right now it's only in English but I think we're probably getting within the next year maybe we'll start thinking about activating some of the switches but as I said they're already placed from around the world on it as well so to to go back to the idea of community and for us now for an opinion community has gone from being those five theaters to those 30 theaters to those 115 theaters to those 300 plus artists who've now been through the program and are a part of the affiliated artist group to now these it's over 9000 users on the system for new play exchange and over 50 countries around the world so the idea of what community is has changed really drastically for us and we wanted to be able to just share a little bit about the power of what that can be and how you can come up with solutions for things I also want to just say and I see you I'll come right to you we are now in the 20th year we're in a major strategic planning process now that Kristen is being a part of I'm gonna talk a little bit about what's happening and what the next big thing might be so I think what made me most excited to join and be a part of this strategic planning process was that it began with a day and a half of unpacking systemic racism that is huge y'all it's huge I don't see organizations all the time who are literally laying the groundwork right for anti-racist practices to be embedded within the fiber of the work that they're doing and not just anti-racist practices right but we're talking about the entirety of what Edie and I sort of encompasses so I think that that really holistic approach to thinking about what is you know what what is the mission of the organization what's the vision of the organization is something that is really really beautiful and really really necessary and so for just speaking for me personally why I'm so excited about this and I think the other reason why I personally am so excited about this is I think that I I've seen a practice of engage community engagement folks or audience engagement folks not being in the room when season planning processes happen and I think that the plays that we produce are part of the engagement work of the institution I think that the folks who are doing your engagement work should be at the table and not only should they be at the table we've got to also think about season planning processes that are far more inclusive than they currently are because we're still practicing a lot of power hoarding and not a lot of power sharing and a lot of determining what someone else needs right we've decided I decided what this community needs as opposed to actually reexamining season planning structures and actually speaking to and soliciting feedback from said communities not just about scripts that we're considering right but also about in general what are some of the stories that you are are interested in or want to hear or don't see but need right because the stories that we tell sometimes are literally the difference between life and death for people right some people need this art our art form for survival so like it's serious business y'all so back to NNPN what I am really excited about what I'm really excited about is how to think more inclusively around what a new play network is and what is a new play and what are barriers to access as we think about also like different white cultural norms that we've accepted like worship of the written word how can we help that's just one example right but how can we how can we subvert that within a structure like NNPN those are just you know some small examples of things I get really excited about and gosh we're wrestling with this what's the next big thing question you know I have a feeling that it may go towards audience and community we'll see we'll know more in the next six months but I think NNPN has spent a lot of time focusing on its theaters and a lot of time focusing on its artist and it seems to me that the third leg of that stool is very obviously audiences if you have not yet seen it I want to point you towards the triple play study that was conducted by TDF with NNPN where we did what amounted to the largest data grab ever in the I guess the history of theater in America of single ticket buyers and how they interact with new work how they why they buy when they buy how they want to be engaged who they want to talk to before the play after the play what did they want to know what is turning them on what is keeping them coming back what turns them off and makes them never come back again it has been published but there's a top line report and the full report and NNPN will be working with TDF in the next year to really come out with a toolbox that we can give you some really specific steps forward to be able to use that another example of partnership we have about five minutes left yes absolutely we we tend to run about 50-50 men women it sort of will fluctuate a little bit over the year 48-49 we just did a big push into the Middle Eastern community working with the MEA group that was formed out of New York to bring in more writers native voices at the Autry has joined us and they just did an offer to all the writers that they're working with where they actually gave them a new play exchange profile for a year so we are definitely looking at that data and continuing to encourage and bring more organizations to the table who can bring us the writers that we're seeing because we have requests for it same thing academia we've found out that universities are desperate to do new work but before this the only way they had to access that work was after it got published in the same old French catalog or the drama is catalog so now they can actually access and find a say to playwrights all the time if you want to be a produced playwright write a play for 20 women under 25 like university will do that play they are desperately seeking that work especially when it's work that has a social impact that they want to have on their campus so yes we're actively seeking looking at that data on a monthly basis as to who's in there and who's using the system and how we can keep that as diverse as possible yes it will be we're just now because we're just at the three-year mark we're getting to where we feel like we have a really significant amount of data that we can start looking at it and we're starting to look at the next round of funding that will be going out after for inward to build out the program we just did the International Women's Voices Day project where we had we offered free profiles for organizations that wanted to do readings by a play in the week leading up to or immediately after the first anniversary of the women's march in DC we had 275 plays that were read around the world and produced plays by women so finding projects and being able to bring together groups of people is a part of that partnership thing that we're going to be focusing on this is beautiful thank you so much just a couple questions about the exchange the first is that well it sounds like you have a really strong analysis and that's so crucial the idea that a play and an artist could be turned into metadata and searched upon like leads me down a tokenization rabbit hole place and so I'm curious if you have kind of a way to share your analysis with the organizations that might be using the exchange so that they are not googling black lady playwright plus environmental justice and sort of just like shoving you know shoving a play into a hole in a season because that does like sort of give me pause and then I also am curious to understand if you have any kind of community guidelines around artist pay and remuneration because my colleague so rightly pointed out there are a significant number of IP concerns and so I'm yeah I'm just sort of curious because like a resource like this is so critical a library is a beautiful space and but one wonders about how to create a way of utilizing that library that also shares a deep analysis and a deep respect for the artist and I'm just super curious to hear your thought like all of you so there's a randomization part of the of the exchange every day there's a randomly chosen playwright play organization and reader that pop up you also can all make recommendations that 250 words or less only positive and they rotate literally as they are uploaded there's a screen that rolls so that there's exposure for those there is no adjudication of the scripts in any way so we don't say what a play is the playwright themselves does that and so we're not controlling that piece of it we also don't even say what a playwright is one of our early successes was a seventh grader who'd written a play who got that play produced at a college on the other side of the country because it fit the criteria that they were looking for so I think we are we are absolutely having those plays be available through those categories because that's the way people search right now I would love to change that I it used to be that I would go in and put in the letter a and see how many plays popped up you can't really do that anymore I think the randomization part of it that does work is the opportunities module where somebody says I needed to you know attend me to play about this and then they got all of that stuff so I don't know that we're answering all of your questions now the the the focus has been on making those plays available to everyone in a unadjudicated way but it's something that's a great comment and I'll take that back to our gang to continue to look at do we are we at time I'm so sorry thank you all so much for joining us today we're all around if you for the next few hours beauty for the next few hours beauty for the next few hours beauty for the next few hours beauty