 If you go ahead and get started. I'm A.B. Webinar, I'm a literary director current actor scene, which is also the culmination of actor theaters 50th anniversary. And I think so much for joining us for this conversation, which is titled, The Art of Collective Invention. I have a couple quick announcements I just want to make before we get started. This event is live streaming on HowlRound TV. So hello to folks who may be watching us from afar. You can follow the conversation on Twitter at 18google using the hashtag humanapest. And there'll be an opportunity for questions a little bit later on in the conversation. If you have something to say, please raise your hand and wait for someone to run a microphone to you so that we can make sure we can hear you in this arena and also folks out in cyberspace can hear what you have to say. So with those logistics out of the way, this conversation features members of five very different ensemble-based theater companies talking about their work. And you'll meet them in a moment, but I'd just like to introduce the person who is going to guide us through this dialogue the next 55 minutes or so. Lila Moigamauer, I don't think, in there. So Lila is a New York-based director. She's the director of Dorothy Ford Berry's play Partners in this festival. And she recently has directed new plays all over the country. She's, this season, she received a Princess Grace Fellowship Award in partnership with Actors Theatre. And so she's been around our artistic community for quite a while. And most importantly, for this conversation, she is a co-artistic director of the Mad Ones, which is an ensemble dedicated to devising visceral and highly detailed theatrical experiences that investigate cultural memory and nostalgia. So I'll turn this over to you, Lila, now. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. Hi. I'm so delighted to be here with this particular group of people. And before I ask you to introduce yourselves, I guess I just want to acknowledge this context that it's, I just, it feels appropriate and wonderful to be having this conversation in this particular room. This institution has supported this kind of work for a number of years, for many years. And I actually have seen the work of all of these companies in this building, this beautiful city from the civilians. I want to say it's Humana 0808. I just saw the hypocrites prior to Penzance in this very room this winter. City Company has a long and rich history in this building, most recently, currently, Steel Hammer, and prior to that under construction. And the moving company, we'll have a show here next fall, right? But I also just learned that Fisher's, which I saw at Humana 09, 10, was the beginning of the moving company. So that is just to say, I think this is an excellent room in which to be having this conversation. So I would love to invite our panelists to introduce themselves, and can you tell us the name and the company you're here representing? And maybe as a kind of contextualizing snapshot, could you tell us a bit about maybe what your company is working on right now? Thank you, keepers. And I am associate artistic director of the moving company out in Minneapolis, which is a bit of an offshoot of Theater Village and Lune. And I co-run the company with Dominic Saran and Steve Fett. And currently, we are working on a production of Los Labor's Laws that we are gonna bring here to Actors Theater next fall, and going out to California to do Tartu at South Coast Rail. Hi everybody, I'm Colleen Worthman, and I'm here representing the civilians. And we are doing a show called The Great Immensity, which is a musical about climate change. At the public starting April 11th. I'm here from Chicago representing the hypocrites, and we will start rehearsing an adaptation of all 32 surviving Greek tragedies, which will culminate in a 12 hour long event play, opening in August, food and drink provided. I also am an associate artist with the Neo Futures there, and I'm a member of the Ruffian, so I create sort of ensemble based work in all three of those arenas. Hi everybody, I'm Barney O'Henlon, and I'm with the Ambo Guard City Company, and we are here in the festival doing a new piece called Steel Hammer. And shortly after that, we'll be doing as Colissa's The Persians at the Getty the Life in LA. Oh. And I just want to add a comment, because she's a member also of a company that I love called Elevator Repair Service. Yes, that's true. Yarns. So I guess before we jump into talking about the work, also to contextualize for this room, for people who are maybe more or less familiar with your companies. I'd love to also just hear you talk a bit about how the company started, what the genesis was, or maybe how you started working with the company, and also what constitutes the company in terms of how many people, is it a small resident company, is it a group of rotating owners, anything in there, and also how long has the company been in existence? Do I have to start again? Okay. Yes. Let's see. Well, the moving company is about four years old, I think. But I've been working with Dominique and Steve, I haven't been working with any of them for about 16 years. Dominique is one of the founders of Jean-Lune, and Steve was there for about one and five years, so they've been working together for about 30 years. And what was the other very question? What constitutes the company? Oh, what constitutes the company? The moving company is, the artistic core is myself, Dominique and Steve, and then Christina Baldwin is a singer who we work with quite a bit, and then we kind of pull here and there, but the core is Dominique and Steve. How did we start? Because Jean-Lune closed in spring 2008, and we needed to keep working. So. That's a long and a short event. Okay, so the civilians have been around since 2001. Started by Steve Costa, and he had gone to UC San Diego and was a director there, and worked in San Francisco for a couple of years, then he came to New York, and I met him doing a workshop of a play by Anne Washburn called the Communist Dracula Pageant, which was done a few years ago at ART. And while we were doing that very, very early workshop of it, he told me that he had this idea to start a theater company that used real life as its springboard, but was also really fun and entertaining and had songs, and I said, hey, sign me up. So that's how I started with the company. And now the civilians are a loose configuration of about 75 people. Not everybody works on every single project. It's sort of on a. It's cause for good. Come in and come out, work on a thing, get the hell out, you know. But yeah, so they're all the company managers, or all the company members are, you know, actors, designers, stage managers, directors, playwrights, everybody. The hypocrite started in 1997 in the basement of a vegan coffee shop where we did an ESCO play. I wasn't part of it, but I accidentally saw it, and then that changed my life. We started as a company that mostly did absurdist work and over time moved into adaptations and new work as the artist's interest grew. And we're a loose, we have company members named, but we sort of call it a group of admiring artists. There are a lot of set responsibilities in that realm, but we just tend to always work together, so we made that into a company of designers, performers, writers, and directors. About less than 20. City company has been around for 22 years now. I've been a member for about 20 of its 22 years. It was formed as an agreement between a Japanese, amazing Japanese theater director named Suzuki Tadashi and Anne Boebert. He has a company in Togamora, Japan, which is a small farming village up in the mountains, and he wanted to create something similar to his company in the States. And there were a lot of American actors who had been doing the Suzuki training and would go over to Toga to train with their company. And so eventually what happened was the late great Peter Zeissler brought Anne and a few people out to sort of, as an audition. And Suzuki and Anne hit it off, and they started the company up in Saratoga Springs one summer, and we kept it alive during the year. And Suzuki funded us pretty much for our first five years and then said, okay, I'm done in two hours, and so we're still here, God bless us. I wanted to talk about the process and how these companies create works. So I'm curious to hear each of you give us a sense of what a kind of typical incubation period looks like for a new piece, and that might include, but feel free to answer whatever part of this is most interesting to you. How does a piece start? Where does it start? With what kind of a thing does it start and who usually brings that idea in? And then what are the practices or mechanisms or methods through which you create material? And then how does that generated material evolve into a production? Turn it off. Right now. Do I have to start again now? I'll start. Okay, I'll start right now. So a typical civilian's process will start with an idea that either somebody in the company has had, or most of the time, an idea that Steve Cosner has had because he's very much as the artistic leader of the company. And we will try to find and interview as many people related to that idea as we possibly can. For example, this beautiful city, which was done here, came out of a company meeting where we were trying to figure out what we could do next, and we spent a weekend together talking about things that we really cared about and didn't understand and wanted to know more about, and it turned out to be about beliefs, especially regarding the right wing of Christianity. So through that, we started investigating evangelical churches and focused on Colorado Springs, this sort of epicenter of the right wing evangelical Christian movement, and then went out there to meet people, and while the company was out there interviewing people, the whole Ted Haggard thing exploded. And so that was awesome. In terms of a narrative event for Michelle, but interviewing people in the Air Force, people in alternate groups around town. So, and we've also worked with playwrights where maybe they'll use some civilian actors to generate material and then go away and work on that. So, in a certain way, the playwright becomes a journalist, and the actors become the subjects. And what we say becomes what they work with. That was a case of this play that Anne Washburn just did at Playwrights Horizons that was directed by Steve, it was called Mr. Burns. And almost the entire first act of that three-eyed play was based on a conversation that happened in Rome. Verbado. Yeah. I mean, edited to be called for a verbado test. Indeed. Carefully called. Carefully, you want to wait. Yes. In that it's an annoying answer because it depends on the product that we're looking to make or the piece itself. The hypocrites are interesting in that way. It's almost always director led in that a director has an idea or a show that we want that a particular person wants to do. And then whoever that personality is ends up leading the type of process. So when Sean Graney, the directed pirates here, wanted to start adapting those Gilbert and Sullivan shows, he had a really specific goal in mind and drew in talent and people to collaborate with him that were specific to that. So people could play their own instruments, rearrange the music, singers, dancers, athletes in that way to come in and collaborate on that process. So when I was interested in creating a new adaptation for six characters in search of an author, that was a little bit more of some actor-based verbatim adaptation based on our company and some just playwright writing a play their way as sort of more traditional new play develops. And then another show that I worked on was based on a historical fact. The idea came from the playwright. Then we brought in a group of clowns to help us make the physical part of it. But then ultimately that material created in the room was handed back to a playwright to adapt, edit, and form as a whole. So I think what's nice about being in a company and the reason I think a lot of Chicago artists are company-based actors and writers and directors are because you have the freedom to change the form of how you wanna make that piece based on what the piece wants to be. Can I actually just do a quick follow-up here? The idea of using verbatim text from actors in conversation with six characters in search of an author, what did that mean? Like what were the prompts for the, how did you involve their text? You know Steve who works here was the one who did that adaptation for us. He's here somewhere. He came to Chicago and I hired the actors who were the acting company of that play way in advance and we're friends of mine, people we've all worked together. And he came up and we gave them scenarios and they improvised through ideas knowing some history of the hypocrites because we said it, the hypocrites are here doing a remount of pirates again for the millionth time and that was the sort of joke of the premise. And so we played those games out and cast someone as the director and sort of just got to play in a room for a long time and their characters were their names so we didn't, there was some neo-futuristic in that. And Mr. Burns, our characters were our names as well. So it was like it became a fun like psychological and philosophical issue because it was always their names and so it was them playing themselves in these situations and then these characters coming in and then that was highly scripted when characters came in but they were allowed to improvise even during performances within a certain set of roles. It was fun. You want to wrestle, Marnie? I'll make mine quick. For the most part, the ideas come from Ed Belgard and then we make them. Oh, there you go. Sorry. Could you tell us a bit about the way that you make them? What are some of the practices you use? Actually, Ed, it's changing now because Ed's interest is changing. She's really into collaborating with other artistic organizations right now. So for example, Steel Hammer's a collaboration with the amazing music group Bangor Can which we will eventually do live with them, perform live. Before that, it was a collaboration with Bill T. Jones, our music dance company and before that it was with the Marnie 3M Dance Company. So she's heading in this direction and taking us along. But in our other work, she has the idea sometimes to year, sometimes to an advance, she reads a lot, just states on the material and then brings the material to us. And usually we workshop the material with our students at our four week summer intensive at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and they do a lot of compositions or devised short pieces based on material and we sort of get a sense of what the piece can or should not be. And then we'll go into a typical rehearsal process three or four weeks and just work really quickly and put it up. I'm also just traced for you to name for people who are not familiar with your work. It's like if you have the privilege of getting to observe any part of a city process, they have one of the most rigorous practices I think in the American theater. And I'm just curious if people just add sort of what some of those practices are. For those of you who don't know, we train in the Suzuki method of after training every day and also the viewpoints in improvisation practice and it's a part of who we are. It's a part of our DNA. It's how we get ready. It's how we spiritually, mentally, physically prepare ourselves to work. And you know, and it's not unlike dancers, you know, you have to do a class before you do your show and similarly musicians have to do your scales and they thought, well, why should that be any different for actors? So if that's our, these are our scales or our ballet bar, if you will. The moving company, it kind of, it's the same thing, it depends on the project. And it sounds a little hokey, but at Jean-Luc we always said, we don't pick the place, the place pick us or the project picks us. And there's a practical part of that, I think, which is there's a bunch of ideas. You know, we all have a lot of ideas about what to do and somehow as we talk and say, oh, there's this, there's this, there's this, the one starts to tell us what we should do. Like that one seems right right now. We can go at that one. Or we feel like we need to go back and do something like that. So a creation, for instance, something from scratch. Sometimes we find that it's like, we haven't done that in a while. Let's just do something from scratch. And then we start to go on theme, on idea about what that could be just so we can work that muscle again. Recently we just did a show called Out of the Pan Into the Fire, which is a fairy tale, that we ended up writing from scratch. But when we originally went at it, we thought, let's go at the fairy tale, sort of investigate what the fairy tale is. And what we, we started with the grim stories and we thought, oh, we'll just adapt those things and put them on their feet. Or we'll kind of improvise them up on their feet. And it's impossible. They don't live on their feet. They live on the page, you know what I mean? So we really found that you had to write. We had to write and we couldn't improvise it either. It was something that felt like we had to do the research and sort of get the characters pulled out from the stories of grim and then create them ourselves and by discussion, a lot of conceiving and discussion, and then going and saying, let's write this thing. And then put it up on our feet and it shifts and it changes and we edit and there's improvisation within that as well. But as opposed to a creation where you just get up on your feet or an adaptation where you're deciding what part of the thing do you want to tell? What seeds from that book or that even that play do you want to focus on? So that's my answer. I think that just made me think of a thing that is important in our company and the civilians that I think is really cool and sort of private. The actors generally play the people they interview and ideally the actors are the people transcribing the interview. I mean now we tend to use recording devices for a lot of different reasons but in the beginning we didn't. We would just listen very carefully. This is similar to the joint stock, the British company that Carl Churchill was involved and was Waters too, where you sort of go away and what you remember the most is sort of what gets distilled into the truth of the character and we go back in and play. We present to everybody in the rehearsal space. We'll play that person as sort of a model of it and then people will ask questions to that character and if you don't know the answer you have to sort of just make it up and that's where the really cool graph of actor and character first occurs. And I should add that in our company, Mike Friedman who is a fantastic composer, a brilliant incorporator of real life into music. He will often make whole songs out of verbatim transcripts so there'll be lyrics like, yeah, I don't know, maybe. It's hard to say. And much more complex thoughts than that. So in our pre-panel chat there's a threat of song and it's begun. My very brief follow up to that question that I meant to add is, I imagine it might vary but how long does a piece typically take to make or what's the range? Let's start. We liked, in the ideal world we always say we love to have a year to make the work, right? But we never do. So I would say from first talking about it to actually putting up could be a year but that's first talking about it and sort of throwing it out there could be a year to six months I would say. That's the gestation period problem. Some pieces of ours have been developed in as little as three weeks. Some have taken six years. Some, it just sort of depends also on the institutional mojo. If there's a company or an institution that's like, ooh, we want to work on that with you then we sort of do like mini workshops building up to that full production. And do you guys, we do, do you go back and follow pieces and putts with them? Like remodels? Like remodeling shows? Remodeling shows and then significantly altering them? Yeah, we haven't done that quite at the movie company yet. We did at Jean-Lune, we opened up a show and then it wasn't doing well and we closed it and we re-worked it and then we opened it again. No, it didn't, it didn't. It didn't really help. But it felt kind of bad-ass to do. But we generally, once they're up on their feet we continue to tinker with them. Yeah, because there's that moment where you have to you have to get it in front of people. It doesn't matter where it's at, you just have to. And then you need that information and then once you have that information you can go back and you can say, we're going to remove that scene over here. We're going to do that because tracking wise for the audience, they need that, you know what I mean? So we tend to want to get up on our feet and we honor the rehearsal time for what it is and for where it can get to and then we're like, we need an audience. We just have to have it and then usually we fuss after that. The civilians I don't think has ever revived and significantly reworked the show. We have definitely done shows on tour, Gone Missing, which I was one of the original people in toured for like five years. And then we did an off Broadway run for about eight months at the Barrow Street Theater in Manhattan. But my other company, LV Repair Service has reworked shows significantly a number of times. We did this one called Language Instruction which was about Anna Kaufman and the nature of his manipulative style of comedy and his transgressiveness. We did one version of it in 94 and then version of it in 94 and then I think another version in 98. Something like that. That was a lot of fun. And now the company is reviving its production of The Sound of the Fury which we did at New York Theater Workshop a few years ago. And now I think it's going to be reworked somewhat or maybe not. It sort of depends on what John Collins who is ERS's artistic director wants to do with me. Yeah, first I think it's more that each of things grow into bigger things and then are completely reworked. So I was an actor in the first adaptation of Oedipus which was about a three person maybe a little over an hour long thing and because that was so successful and so artistically interesting that started our training moving forward and doing all the stuff hopefully so that was like a six hour night. Oedipus got reworked and snuck in there a smaller sort of different version and now we're on to it. So that process from beginning to end is something like six years I guess that's something and ideas started and it keeps growing and growing and then some ideas start and then they're done when they're done. But similar it's so hard to answer that question in a you know short panel but if we all get to hang out sometime and have a beer you can talk about projects and how much time they take and again it is I feel like what the project asks which is the gift of being in a company versus being like hired to walk in and say this amount of time to make this thing I think that's the freedom and probably why all of these companies make such unique things because you have some freedom in that process to take some real time to even hundred or talk about it a lot or get people in a room to mess around without a product necessarily being the it's just to live and that's the pleasure of having a company or the work you live and live on its own it starts to be its own beast totally the good ideas you know the bad ideas put them away but that's the pleasure of working on samples that you can those pieces grow and they live and you just follow around and live with them I would love to talk a little bit about the dynamics of collaboration in the companies bearing in mind of course as anyone in this room makes work that every room in which collaboration happens no matter how purportedly traditional or non-traditional is totally singular based on the project and the human beings and the context nonetheless in a room in which there is maybe less traditionally articulated hierarchy maybe which is a less traditionally structured environment would you just talk a bit about how collaboration works who has a say in what everybody has a say in it in our work even people are just sitting watching rehearsal just observing and ultimately we function both as a company and when we make work through consensus and it's hard and it can be hard work but it seems to work best for us to work that way a lot of ideas in the room a lot that can be a pain and ultimately we're all searching for the best answers so that's really the goal for the civilians I sort of identify a pattern of what we call sort of a slap off where it'll be like a very very raw version of a script that Steve's compiled from all the interviews that we've compiled and the actors generally highlight things in the text which we think are amazing or transcribers are like oh my god 24k jam right here and so he'll call it's insane there'll be like 700 pages of stuff on Steve's desk and he'll have it all stacked in piles so we'll do a wild, raw version and usually it's full of life and really wild and then he goes back into it and he gets very geeky and then there's a very well-behaved draft which is very well considered from all sides and it's a little dull and then he freaks out and then he adds some touches by this point we're usually on our feet and then he goes Steve why are you having us you know, bat around balloon moves or in this case with the show about the Atlantic or to dribbling basketballs which was my personal nightmare because I generally shun hand-eye-coordination you know, activities but that's why I'm being a prank it'll be like because I have to lighten up this part and so then usually afterwards we'll go and have a beer and he'll be like I don't like this part and he'll be like Steve you've got to fix this thing alright, alright and so then we'll reshape it and then we'll have a show that has recaptured the raw aliveness and then also has some limousine and has the dramaturgical geeked out thoroughness and go on you know, another thing that's if you came into launch one of our rehearsals you'd see Anne Bogart sitting on a big stool with a music stand in a script looking very intensely at the stage but in a way you'd never know that she was directing because as she would say, and I think this is true that all of us are following the person in the moment who's got the scent as to where the thing should be going and so the listening that we're doing is really, really intense and the leader can change from moment to moment to moment and you're really just trying to track who's in charge in a different moment whether it's the designer in one moment might be one of the actors might be the dramaturg so it's constantly shifting I remember watching a few hours of an under construction rehearsal here this was six years ago, five years ago and what I caught that afternoon was there was a couple of hours of conversation about how I think we were going to duct tape Stephen Weber to a pole and how it was going to happen and what the implications of it were practically and dramaturgically and I actually remember leaving that session thinking this was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen truly the kind of listening that was going on about taping a man to a pole of course I called it Tuesday everything I say I mean it's in our room we're all doing it together Dominique is the one directing all the shows but you know a lot of the time he says I don't care if I figure it out we always talk about actor authors so there's a lot of ownership over you bring it I have to bring it so whether I'm working in the movie company or I'm actually going somewhere else I'm doing a show I have that muscle that I have to drive it I have to follow if I do so that just sort of permeates the room the only difference I think when I'm directing yes to all of this stuff is that there is a point especially when I have writer and performers in the room there is a point really close to the show actually opening where I ask them to let go of that editing part that questioning of the writing of the material part that we have that conversation in a literal way where I feel like for the way that we work the freedom to fully have joy on stage there they have to stop criticizing the writing or the structure of the piece in that moment right before it first opens and then later we go back and do it but it is a moment where they entrust me with the keys to that that's a nice feeling on both sides to be able to take ownership in a different way and then there is a little bit more of hierarchy than we have prior to it when we're building it I think in a moment we're about to transition to questions thank you she's so dark this is going to be my last question then we're going to do a couple of questions my last question is if you could talk a bit about again I know this is a ludicrous question with the amount of time we have but change of longevity so I'm interested in if there's a way to just speak to that and what the endeavor has been of maintaining your relationship to that company creatively, professionally, practically what keeps you with it I think for us it's a necessity so as long as the necessity is always there it'll keep going someone's going to get tired and want to stop I'm sure but I think and that's the beauty of an ensemble usually why it got created why it happens that there's a need there to make work whatever kind of work you're making and I think that need is what drives us so I think as long as that's there that's what's going to let it keep going I think the existence of the civilians is so entirely about Steve and his vision that it's hard for me to imagine somebody else being its artistic director I think that he's such a singular mind and such a singular creative force that I'm very curious how it would be run by someone else if it were to be run by someone else over time the company has developed an infrastructure there are 8 or 10 people in the office now and there used to be zero at the beginning you know I know there are great many people who are connected with it it's a much more diverse ensemble now which is something that's totally great and what keeps me wanting to keep working with the civilians and I think I speak for more than a few of my fellow company members is that what we do is really fun and really provocative and exciting I don't know that anybody else is hybridizing theater based on real people and real events in real life with the sort of highly theatrical cabaret ethos and to me that's super unique about the civilians and fun as hell that's a good lead in because the immigrants who started by Sean Graney and he's a very unique artist and a really strong personality and a real famous in Chicago and a particular looking person and I think the feeling would have been that he's just a character and a visionary and everyone in that company was there because of him similarly including me and so I feel like we probably thought that the same thing for a lot of the time but I came out to stick director with Graney just said I don't want to do it anymore I wasn't in town at the time and he sort of said you come back and do it or we should call it quits and that was a pretty big thing to say and we had a lot, I said no at first because I was like it's a terrible job to take over for Sean Graney who would want to do that you would fail immediately and we had a lot of conversations about that and the company had a lot of conversations about what the hypocrites were like what were we now, have we grown past just being Sean Graney's originally something else and we decided that we were and I decided to take the slow road to that where I asked Graney to direct two shows in a season for the first few years that I took over because I wasn't having a crew and we were just going to it seemed important to stay and that there were more voices and more interesting work to do and Sean was initially we changed as Graney's interest then desires changed and lived to Anne I think that was an exciting thing to be a part of as a performer and a director to be moving and shifting through a landscape of theater and that changed enough where I feel like we grew past his singular vision and grew to some larger questions and challenges theatrically but there was a style and a aesthetic that stays true because Graney, that we've learned to expand on, have new directors and new visions within the over the last five years I feel like so it's a pretty we're still working on that it's a really interesting question and way to think about when companies are ready to change hands that have such singular visionaries as their leaders what do they grow into and do they have a reason to continue and I think if you want to be an institutional art force in your community it seems important to find ways to do that and I feel that way about the hypocrites and the community around it and all the artists that survive so now moving forward for me is the joy of trying to support those artists trying to find ways to make sure that everyone has that kind of artistic home is a fantastic job This is the question that I'm living with as I approach age 50 I'm having worked with Anne since 20 years old it's been with me for about seven years I can't answer it because it's right there but we still want to be together we still love to make work together even though it's getting harder physically emotionally but it's the desire to be together and we'll ask Anne flat out do you still want to do this do you still want to be in charge and she's still saying yes so here we are being on the road is kind of a drag for me now I miss my partner, my dog a lot and I'm looking at 10 weeks in LA away from New York so that wears thin it wears thin but it's also it's like a drug it's also amazing but I don't know, it's hard we had a little bit of time for a couple of questions and also I think we have to run a microphone is that right? Thank you so much right here right in the front and then we'll take one over for you thank you I'm doing work in San Francisco how often do budget constraints influence your artistic and do you have daytime jobs? all the time and no I mean budget is always a question money is a question, we'd like more of it obviously but we got to make the work so we do it with what we have and try to stretch that out as best we can sometimes actually having nothing is better to have that constraint really helps the work certainly and then it decides for you as well well we can't do that show because we can't afford it and then I'm lucky enough to not have a day job in terms of the civilians I would say that if Steve had his brothers we would definitely have millions more dollars and be doing all the shows at once he's a voracious and creative person and he's always got great ideas and things in development I will say to his great credit Steve has always insisted on paying actors on equity contracts which many ensembles do not and could never do so I really give him props for that and it also enabled him to get a wide variety of actors because actors need jobs and they need to work and get health insurance and all that jazz I do have a day job I work as a joke writer as a comedy writer which is a wonderful day job I think budget constraints should probably stop us but they don't very often for better or for worse and I teach I teach a lot of theater I don't make a full-time living as the artistic director presently but we're only going to move our company towards paying artists and our staff a little better but we do have some people who do make a living full-time as staff so we're right in between the two I'll see yes Glenn and I will meet New York TheaterWare I forget I came in late whether it was the citizens or the civilians the civilians well I don't know whether it was you because there are a lot of these groups normal theater of Oklahoma they do telephone calls and Colorado I hope that was fantastic but have you ever had long suits libel suits you made me look like a racist homophobe never did they recognize themselves people always come to see themselves and those are the very exciting performances for us as actors sometimes we've gotten notes on ourselves as characters I mean we have everybody sign contracts when they read the interview you have a release we have people sign releases we definitely honor people's feedback but we make the shows that we make and we don't apologize for them as anybody who's been in the theater noticed that not everybody's blessed enough to have somebody like Ann read the show but then somehow her influence helped make the right decision so my group requesting here or in other ways risk is a two edge sword getting up there and doing something to get on your heart is going to be fantastic wow and then Tuesday you get up and do it again and it falls flat on its face so as in a collaborative sense does the collaboration sharpen the sword or does it beating the sword and kind of deft it to where it's not sharp as it would be so we are singularly making the decision I think in our case it sharpens it definitely because there's a shared history and that shared history is so much a part of any piece that's being made and there's so much in collaboration about what's not said and those are sometimes the most important moments when actually a word is not spoken when it's just understood where you just psychically read each other's minds with being together over a period of time and it's invaluable and on a very practical level being together over a long period of time with the same people allows you to make work really quickly and in this country you have to we don't have the luxury of months and years as was mentioned earlier so that collaboration that being together allows the work to go on fast traditional playwrights tend to be very concerned with subsequent productions of their work for your devised projects how comfortable are you and what has your experience been with productions of the work beyond that aren't handled by your own companies do you have set policies on those things have there been subsequent productions and how do you feel about them in the case of Gone Missing which is a civilian show that has gotten quite a lot of productions at colleges and universities and whatnot I love it I think it's wonderful but to me the idea of taking a devised thing and actually just copying it is kind of not the point although it's certainly possible and people are welcome to do it but I think something that's more interesting is if you could say to that college or university why don't you guys go out and interview build your own show because everyone you interviewed is going to be different and have a different response and to me that's the cool part of the process is not making you zerox we work with Chuck me a lot he's a company member and he loves to get his work done by anybody and so we just have to check in with Chuck to make sure that he's not sending it out while we're still working it I'm not sure it's ever happened not that we're against it in any way but I'm not sure it's possible I don't think for the work that we've done or that we do I'm not sure it's possible to say in the sense that it's our work and even if you looked at it on a paper you wrote I don't know how that means but on the other side of that we like to go to universities and create shows with students and so we create a full production with them as sort of research and development and so it's theirs that is theirs and then even when we do it's much different than what we did with them that's just the first draft so if that answers it I just worked on a show at our university that was a new feature show so it was written by individuals and their names and the script were their real names but it was also the story of a great circus trainwreck that part of the story is really exciting for university students to work on because there's a lot of different performance styles and so the playwright the main playwright came with me there and we started to rework it to see if we could do exactly that if it was possible to take something so particular to the original creators and turn it into something that could be opened up to a larger group and I think it was pretty successful but regardless it was a really great experiment trying to take new people to a piece and they the college kids got to help us so in a way it was just another journey like similar to the original one but I think we ended we recently finished though I'm still contemplating whether or not that's a project to continue because some of these plays are amazing and they have these small lives in Chicago that I think they should have bigger lives just to share them with more people share performance styles and writing styles that I think you need to our city but who knows because we never send it outside of our into a little world sometimes and so I think it's a really great question of can you take something so unique to your world and get it out to the rest of the country people who I think are really interested in that Please Hi, I have a question about belonging I guess particularly in terms of like the actress and performers like Colleen you mentioned that you couldn't imagine the civilians without Steve but could you everything like this company wouldn't exist without this performer and also just like in companies that are open I imagine they're like different levels of belonging where someone has been like working for 15 years versus like a new collaborator so how do you sort of like negotiate those different levels of feeling like you belong to the company well I will say that I don't believe in the civilians that there's one person who's absolutely essential as an actor because these pieces are so about everybody on stage they're definitely some of the most egalitarian performance experiences I've ever had as an actor which is great and I love that I mean I'm in two different ensembles so clearly that is my jam but I will say that with the civilians it requires a very special kind of actor somebody who can be extremely selfless like very shape-shifty because we play lots of different characters so you have to have those technical chops to really transform and make it not about one's own self at all and play people really accurately but not slavishly so and you also have to be able to be funny and entertaining and provocative and I call it the Olay Factor and it's a unique sort of combination of things and not all actors have it so that's the thing that we like about each other as actors and I think that Steve appreciates about us that we don't take things super seriously we're not very chin-strokey or self-reportive it's a spirit that the actor has and if it's someone that's been at the company for 25 years someone is out of school you know if they have the spirit we harness it or we let it flourish you know what I mean but if they don't there are OGs grizzled veterans veterans and fresh faces we need fresh faces because they keep us older people inspired thanks so much for joining us