 But careful about what we recorded and what we recorded over. So those two VHS cassette tapes were, for us, a finite media entertainment world. Each tape held about three hours of material, a movie per tape with some extra space. We didn't have cable TV, which meant we had a total of six channels on TV to choose from three of which on certain Saturday afternoons would play movies that were laced with ridiculously long commercial breaks. So the two movies that we had were Ferris Bueller's Day Hour and Bruce Lee's Game of Death. You guys seen Ferris Bueller? Raise your hand if you have not seen Ferris Bueller's Day. And raise your hand if you have seen Game of Death. Ooh. All right, that's good. I like it. My brother and I memorized both movies. Every detail. Today we still quote them to each other. And I'm glad that this was the way it was. I never wish now that we had had more movies. Somehow it was better to know every single last nuance of two movies rather than to have simply enjoyed innumerable others. We clung to our two movies. We examined them as if they were precious stones. And this actually turns out to be a useful thing to do. Without knowing it, I was getting my first master class in dramatic structure. Ferris Bueller's Day Hour is about a brilliant and brash teenager named Ferris Bueller, who fakes being sick one beautiful spring day in Chicago so he can hang out with his girlfriend Sloane and his best friend Cameron. There's a heightened theatricality to the film, in part because Ferris directly addresses the audience. Ferris is one of the few protagonists I can think of who undergoes no personal change in course. There's a lot of fantastic dramatic and comedic elements going on in this movie. But sadly, I guess, I think I took more storytelling lessons from Game of Death, which is inferior to Ferris Bueller by pretty much any conceivable metric itself for Kung Fu. But for me, at the time, Kung Fu held a lot of sway. In Game of Death, Bruce Lee, who at the time was a young martial arts movie star, played Billy Lo, a young martial arts movie star. Billy Lo fakes his own death in order to avoid the mob and then, using a secret identity, hunts down all the mobsters and beats them to death using Kung Fu. In real life, Bruce Lee shot only half of the film before leaving the project to shoot a much more lucrative film called Enter the Dragon. Lee died before he could complete Game of Death and the movie languished half-complete. Until six years later, a new director took the existing footage and added in new material to complete the film. He did this using two stand-in actors for Bruce Lee. Usually, these guys were cast in shadows, given dark sunglasses, and for one sequence, even a beard. But what's incredible is that sometimes the director would also just use a life-size cardboard cutout, obviously, which is crazy. He had his stand-ins, his understudies, who seemed to be fine, but sometimes the director was like, no, no, no, for this take, I'm going to go with the cardboard cutout. But here's the thing, it worked. My brother and I watched Game of Death so many times, we considered ourselves scholars of the film, which is why I could not believe it when my brother told me years later that sometimes, but not always, two other actors were pretending to be Bruce Lee and that also sometimes, but not always, Bruce Lee in a kung fu movie was a one-dimensional piece of cardboard. How did I not notice that? The hero fakes his own death and then comes back to skies as someone else, but then the actor who plays the hero dies in real life so the filmmakers fake his life to finish the story. And the story is better, the story about the story is better than the story. Or the story about the story changes what the story is actually about. Whatever, I'm curious about the act of paying attention, whether it be a film, a play, a work of art, your own creative project, or life itself. Because I'm constantly frustrated and amazed at how much I never see. I'm amazed at how the sort of blindness settles over us when we stare at the things that matter most to us. And I'm also interested in how we might combat such a blindness, which is to say, how can we try to notice more than what we notice? Now there's a saying that I love that is meant as an insult towards someone who's absolutely clueless. You're like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. The layers of this appeal to me. As if blindness and the darkness of the room and the blackness of the cat aren't bad enough when you throw in the fact that the cat isn't even there, that's when you're really screwed. And this makes me think about the creative process. When I'm beginning to play, I feel like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. I feel my way through the dark for something that isn't there. But sometimes I find other things along the way and those end up being way more useful in a black cat. The writer Sherwood Anderson in a letter to a friend once wrote, I'm trying again. A man has to begin over and over to try to think and feel only in a very limited field. The house on the street, the man at the corner drugstore. I love this. I find that I go back to this quotation often. I feel like I have to constantly remind myself to notice things. Sometimes on the subway in New York when I'm angry and pissed off at everyone, which happens more than I'd like, I try to calm myself by imagining everyone and everything around me is an illustration. Suddenly everything has a purpose because somebody intentionally did that, made her look that way, gave him those shoes, made him take up two seats, scratched the window like that. Somebody intentionally drew everything a particular way and the reason it is such a good illustration is that it got all the details perfect. The artist noticed everything. I think this is also a way of thinking about God. Only God could make everything and remember every detail. The rest of us are doomed to overlook at least one thing, probably many things. It's impossible to notice everything. I'm currently in rehearsals at the Cleveland Playhouse for my play Mr. Wolf. This is the second production of the play and I've been working on it for about five years. But every day in rehearsal, I'm having these moments where I suddenly see a problem or some luckiest solution that has evaded me and I wonder why did that take so long? How could I be submerged in this story for so long through readings and rehearsals and productions and not have noticed the deep dramaturgical flaws that were staring me in the face? There's a deeper concern about noticing things that doesn't have to do with writing plays but just being alive. Being a human being with a limited time to walk the earth and accrue memories. If we're not being vigilant about noticing as much as we possibly can, what are we even doing? And knowing how hard it is to notice things like that Bruce Lee might be made of cardboard or that my play's last scene doesn't make any sense. Then what should we do? How do we combat the blindness? How do we notice our own lives racing by? And for me, it's about keeping a journal. When I was in the fifth grade, my family went to India to visit my dad's family. And I was gonna have to miss a lot of school. And so my teacher, Mr. Triple, instead of giving me three weeks worth of homework, suggested I keep a journal of my time there and that will be my grade. I happen to have an entry from that journal with me here. I'd like to share with you. 10 years old. Saturday, sorry. December 15th, 1984. We had to get up early to leave for Agra. We took a taxi. It was a long ride. On the way we saw cows, bulls, oxen, and cows. We stopped at a rest stop and rode an elephant and a camel. When we got to Agra, we saw the Taj Mahal. It was the most beautiful monument I've ever seen. It was built by a king when his wife died. The king was so sad that his wife died he built the monument for her. After we finished looking at the Taj, we went to a hotel for dinner before we entered the hotel we saw sneak. I found this journal a few months ago when I went home to my parents' house. It was in the attic. I had not seen it in 31 years. When I read this, it was obvious to me that the seeds of my play, Guards of the Taj, were planted that day in Agra. Now, if this is true, it means that those creative seeds sat in dormancy for about 27 years. It also makes me wonder, what if I hadn't kept a journal? What if Mr. Tripol had just given me stupid homework to do? Would I have written Guards of the Taj 27 years later? Maybe. Or maybe not. But it may be interested in tracking through my journal's other moments where I might see that the creative seeds were planted. The habit of keeping the journal did not take off when I was 10, though. I would wait seven more years before journaling again. I was 17 and again went to India, this time alone, without my parents for the entire summer and stayed with relatives there. July 14th, 1991, went to the Calcutta Zoo. It was lame as hell. They were two cages between you and the animals, so you couldn't even see them, and the elephants were chained by their ankles. The whole place was like a goddamn prison. Anyhow, all the tigers were sleeping like lazy bums, so it was a waste of time. Decided not to go to Mother Teresa's tomorrow. I'll go later when Mom comes. Tuesday, I go to Puppy Aunty's house. Finished the Catch and the Ride by J.D. Zahndra. It was great. It was great. It was great. It was great. It was great. It was great. It was great. Besides the fact that this is very embarrassing. And the fact that my hand-budding hadn't changed from the before. There's some interesting things happening now. Number one, I'm obviously parroting holding Caulfield's voice. Very obviously and transparently. Thinking that was cool. But then when I look closer at it, years later, I see these weird little clues emerging. My first play that was ever produced out of grad school was called Huck and Holden. And it's about a young Indian college student who comes to America and has to read Cash or the Rye. And because it becomes obsessed with Holden Caulfield and imagines Holden Caulfield, it is dwindling with him, except that Caulfield is not the guy we know. It's an Indian kid, a Sikh kid. And this is one of the characters in the play. And I wondered, thinking at this, I was like, wow. I wonder how much having read that book in India at the age of 17 made that kind of impact. And then I looked even closer and I also see the seeds of Bengal tigers somehow planted in here, these lazy bum tigers in a zoo, in a cell, in a prison-like zoo. And it just felt so strange that in this kind of formative trip to India, so much might have been planted in my head. When I go back and I read these ancient journal entries, I realize that I don't always fully understand what I'm writing down or I don't understand the impact it's having on me. And we don't always understand ourselves. We don't always understand our brains. We certainly don't always understand what it is we're really writing about. We plant clues without knowing it. And we notice things without noticing that we're noticing that. April 23rd, 2007, 228 AM Sunday night. Weekend with Keith, epic day today. To Coney Island with him and Katie. Went up in the Wonder Wheel. At our picnic table, we ate corn dogs, Italian sausages, onion rings. A man and a woman sat across from us eating corn. Katie started eavesdropping before me, so she got more. But the first thing I noticed was the woman returned from getting napkins and said, so your wife's not much of a swimmer. And the man after prolonged thought would be not necessarily. The man and the woman were having a conversation about their dead children, presumably from cancer. The man said, my wife can't go to the Upper East Side, I can't go to Central Park. And the woman said, because those are places you went to with your son. Yes, he said. And Katie told me, he said his son loved Coney Island and yet he was here surrounded by children, laughing and eating cotton candy and going on rides. We left although I wanted to stay. Katie and I immediately started talking about it. Keith was too far away and couldn't hear the conversation but we talked about what we had heard and Katie got emotional. She said, I don't know why I'm always getting so emotional. Maybe it's because of Virginia, the Virginia Tech shoot which happened this past week. I put my arm around her and we passed a concession stand on the boardwalk and I asked her if she wanted some ice cream and she did and I bought her a vanilla cone. It's 2.47. I need to go to bed, I need to get to work. The new play, gruesome playground injuries. I wrote the title on a napkin while drinking with Keith, all his crazy injuries. A girl skated by him when he fell on the ice and slinked open his eyelid. And isn't the girl like Blackwell? She kisses him. He exalts shyly but unable to contain yourself and she's put off by it. And after he tries to explain it and sweetly, awkwardly she says, you weird leaves. 3.01 AM. That's OK. This entry I just read from 2007. I dug this out the other day as I prepared for the speech thinking maybe it would illustrate part of the process of discovering gruesome playground injuries. And it does a little bit. But what was really much more startling to me when I found this was the seeds that are there are actually for this play Mr. Wolf that I'm in rehearsal for right now. A play that includes two parents who have lost children and bond over their loss. I was stunned to read this the other day because I didn't think I had the idea for Mr. Wolf until four years later, but I think I was wrong. Around the East Village near NYU, there's a lot of guys who sell used books on the sidewalk. And one day I picked up a book called 1920 Diary by Isaac Babel. I had read a book of his short stories in college called Red Cavalry and had liked them a lot. So I bought 1920 Diary to find that it was literally his diary in 1920 when he was a journalist with the Russian Red Cavalry Army as they marched through Poland in a fierce and bleak. You can see in reading his diary that he was forming the ideas and characters for the stories in Red Cavalry. But what I found even more interesting was the style in which he wrote his diary. Throughout his entries, he commands himself to write a certain thing. Describe the kitchen you will write, and then he does. Describe the night, describe the trees, describe the wind. I found he would usually write these prompts in moments of fatigue. Late at night, after a grueling day, he doesn't feel like writing. He doesn't want to remember anything about the day he just had. But he forces himself. Don't put down the pen. Describe the orchard. Describe the bathroom. Describe the night. These are incantations, pleas to oneself to continue to work, to write, to think, to be creative, to plant seeds. It's like when Anderson said a man has to begin over and over to try to think and feel only in a very limited field. So about two years ago, I did a project with a third year graduate acting class at NYU. This was a project that headed roots in the joint stock method, where a playwright and a director and several actors developed an idea together. Carol Churchill works this way. My task was to come in with a shred of an idea. Then the eight actors assigned to me would all independently do research on the topic and then report back to me and the director performing their research. And we discussed what they found. And it was all together a thrillingly creative process. We spent two weeks playing around with the material. Then I took the summer to write a draft. And in the fall, we all got back together and produced a play. The topic I came to them with was I wanted to write about Isaac Babylon and his diary from 1920. That's all I said. Besides the diary, I knew precious little else about his life, work, and the historical moment that he lived through. Having eight very smart actors helping me do the dirty work of early research and inspiration was suddenly like having eight arms. I felt super human. I had eight incredible brains, buying to notice all the things that I was not noticing. We found out a lot of interesting details about Isaac Babylon. Despite him being a subversive political writer in Russia in the 20s and 30s and 40s, he became friends with the head of Stalin's secret police, Nikolai Yezov. And then he had an affair with Yezov's wife. And then he was probably killed or condemned to be killed by his friend for being a subversive writer. And Nikolai Yezov, for his part, was also convicted of subversion and executed as well in his picture in the many photographs where he stood right next to Stalin when he raced. So I'd like to share with you now the first scene of the play I wrote during the joint stock process with the NYU graduate acting students. And the play is called Describe the Night. Scene one, 1920, Poland. The countryside not far from the Ukraine border, night. Isaac, 20s, a member of the Russian Red Calorie, sits on a rock or a stump apart from the troops. He's seen a lot today. He tries to write in his journal. Describe the night. A sullen patchwork, a sullen patchwork of stars. Stars align in a sullen patchwork. Describe the air. Describe the fields. Nikolai, a brusque, imposing soldier, enters. Sees Isaac writing. Nikolai lights a cigarette. Isaac senses him, shuts his book, not wanting to speak to Nikolai or be noticed by him. Writing, writing. This is you writing. It's what I do. Babel I, correspondent, you grossed a wire service. Yes, that's me. It's what I do. Babel I, I stands for Isaac. What? Isaac, what? Isaac, Isaac, Isaac Babel, Yezhov, N, N stands for Nikolai. Yes, I know. I know who you are. What kind of accent is that? I'm not sure, Odessa? Jew? Kind of accent is yours. Standard Russian, straight across the middle, with a little to no effect out of the people. What are you writing? A report for today, wire services. Here is the war. Here is the war in writing. So you who are not here at the war and know what the war is like. So is that the wire report? No, just writing. Just writing what? In my journal. Journalists for journalists. Now my journal is my diary, personal reflections on my daily life. I don't understand you, maybe the accent. OK. OK, what? OK, you don't understand me. Army journalists, corresponded from Yugoslavia, you report on such events as they let cavalry dubs. You send reports across the wire, such reports are based on observations, or as you say, personal reflections. You have a journal in which you write these, but you report to Yugoslavia, not personal reflection? Not really, no. Then they are lies. I mean, I write facts. Facts then, facts are not personal reflections. My diary is just for me to write to myself. I don't understand you, maybe the accent. Sometimes I write to myself to make sense of the day. Point is, corresponded battle, the report for today, what of it? Today? Today's actions, what did you write today? Today? Your report, have you written it? Not yet. When? Commander Yezhov, you can be assured I won't. You won't what? You are concerned that I will write about you, what you did today, that I will send it along the wire. Right? What you will write, I don't care what you write, as long as you write facts, as long as everything is true. I don't know what's true, I'm the worst person to determine what is true. Don't be stupid, true is what happens, false is what does not happen. Writers, I don't care what you write. So a man was killed today in Jutomir. This happened. I did it in front of everybody, and everybody saw him. The man had an axe. I know. The man had an axe. I know. And so the man was killed. It doesn't matter if he was old. He was very old. Old people fight too. Old people die too. If you are old, and if you have an axe, and if you approach a soldier, a soldier like me, then you should expect, well, you should know what to expect. I agree with you, and anyhow, it wasn't newsworthy. It wasn't? No, wire services want basic generalization for the touch of humanity. I have humanity. Of course, but you don't write about me. Not to date. I'm saying in the future you could write about me, about my humanity. Of course, you're saying you will. If something happens, newsworthy, yes. Right, well, you wouldn't just make something up. True is what happens. False is what does not happen. Describe the night. What? The night. Describe it. Which night? This night, right here, now. Why? I just described it in my journal. I'm wondering how you would describe it. If we both describe the same thing at the same time, would one of our descriptions be more true than the other? What? No, shut up. Quiet. Not so quiet, not so black. I don't know, the night can't be described. The night is for sleeping. The night is for smoking, when one can't sleep. Low in the eastern sky over there, Venus. Where? That glow there, Venus is called the Morning Star, but it's not a star, it's a plant. How did you describe the night? Isaac Hansman's book, Nicolai Rizzo. Mine is more true than yours. It doesn't make sense anyhow, what cat? He reads other pages of the book. Don't read the rest, it's personal. Hey, what the hell is this? It's nothing, it's not supposed to be true, give it back. You said facts, these aren't facts. It's not for the wire report, damn it, it's just my personal diary. This isn't real. Of course it isn't real, I told you that, give it back. The daughter didn't cry out like this. She didn't cry out like this when he was killed. She simply knelt beside him and cleaned his face. She didn't cry out. And you blamed the polls for this when it was me who killed the old man, not the polls. Isaac grabs his book. Don't read my journal, don't lie about me. Have you ever put your nose into the ass of a goat and just breathed in as deeply as you can? No, if you do this, then you can read people's minds. What, read their minds how? I love reading minds, I love reading minds. There weren't no goats today, but I have such advanced powers of smell that I can smell a goat ass from miles away. Really? No, none of these things are true, I've never seen a goat ass. It can't be people's minds. Am I a liar? No, I'm not, I tell stories. Stay out of my diary. You just invented it? How'd you do that? Wow, I told you I'm a writer. Tell me how to lie, make something up. My father was a French spy. Really? No. Tell me another. I have seven toes. Really? No. How did you do that? I can't believe how good at lying you are. Tell me a lie, make something up. No, I can't. Everyone can. Just prepare to say something true and then say the opposite. I can't. Lies are lies when it comes. I can't. The old man was actually an old woman. She had 22 children. No, I don't have that. The old man was an old man and he had an axe. Maybe he wasn't an axe. My lie is the old man didn't have an axe, he had a shovel. And he was going to dig a grave for his son. And he wasn't angry or attacking, but merely weeping. I didn't like the sight of him weeping and dressed in stupid rags. The idea of digging the grave for his son was disgusting to me so I cut his throat to the world's happier for him. Is that a lie? Only you can say. It is a lie. A man attacked with an axe so I killed him. You're better at lying with me. Is that really Venus? Particularly visible this month of this hour. How do you know other plants? My wife studies these sorts of things. You would like her. She can tell the future or so she believes anyway. You would like me. I say to her, well, darling, if all you do is predict the same thing over and over then it's not really a prediction. War. It'll be war. What kind of prophecy is that? But here we are at war. War thinks she doesn't sleep. Not in the witty. Anyhow, we aren't at war at this moment. We aren't. Now, look. Look. The sky is like a chandelier in Moscow. We are like men having tea. The crickets are some violins and the horses are breathing over there. There's a quiet, soft murmuring of pretty women in the tea house. Maybe one of them is about to sin. Listening to me this morning and as I leave you, I guess I would just say, keep a little notebook. Keep a journal. Keep scraps of paper in your pocket and every day or every other day or once a week. Write something down. Something you saw, something you felt, an idea, a worry, a jealousy, a yearning, and then hold on to it. And after a while, go back and look at it and be amazed at how much it changes. Thanks for hearing me today. And I can take some questions now if you guys have any questions. OK, so the first question is what it was like. I'll take the second question first. The second question is about someone warning the administration of Virginia Tech about the shooting and the listening. How do you choose to tell a story and what if people don't listen? And I think that for a playwright or a dramatic writer and you're thinking about the landscape, the political landscape, the world as we see it and the problems that are there, there's an urge, I think, that a lot of people have, myself included, to address some of the urgent, dangerous, horrifying stories of our age in the theater on stage. And I think that's a great impulse. The thing that I have to remember for myself is that you can't just throw yourself at an idea or an issue. It has to kind of find its way towards you. For example, I was really troubled by the Iraq War, but I had no idea how to find a way to dramatize any of my feelings about that. And I think that's the key. It's like you have to find your entryway into a story to make it compelling and dramatic and interesting on stage. Otherwise, it's just a piece of adjunct prop theater and no one wants to be lectured at. And so I had found a small article about the tiger in the zoo that affected me in a little deep and visceral way. And I found that this was my way into talking about the Iraq War. I had this tiger who was a narrator who could talk about it that was apolitical. It wasn't an American talking about Iraq or an Iraqi talking about Iraq. It was like this wild animal who had no idea what was going on. And a ghost for that. So I was already kind of lifting myself out of the nuts and bolts of the political arena and writing a ghost story. So I think that when you're dealing with kind of especially like volatile issues as an artist, I think it's who's one to kind of find your way into a story organically, rather than saying I got to write about this because it's important for the world. It's more about how it's important for me as a writer. As far as Robert Williams, he was just terrific. He was a great, great performer. He never deviated from the script. Like many of us thought he might. He was a, he was a, he was a, one of the interesting things about him that he was very, he was a great castmate for the other actors on stage. And he was always conscious of the fact that he had taken someone else's job, the guy who lived in Tiger in Los Angeles, Kevin Tye. He was a great actor. When he went to Broadway, they needed to get a movie star, you know? And Robin kind of was conscious of that. And he was always very, you know, had a lot of humility surrounding that. And he was a great man. I'm going to do some Playground Andrees at our university next year. Because I'm, some of them have been replaced. I'm really interested to know. We're performing through some Playground Andrees at our university next year. And I'm very interested to know about the, you know, wide variety of experiences that obviously happen within that show. And I guess your personal connection to some of those stories that you'd be willing to share with us. You know, some of them, obviously, relatable to everyone. Some of them very specific. And I'm interested to know how many of those actually came up in your life that might be based on something that you actually know someone that's experienced or something of that nature versus how much of it was purely out of imagination. Well, like we saw in my journal entry before, it did come from a conversation I had with my buddy Keith. And he was telling me about all these injuries he had accrued in his life, many of which are related in that play. And we talked about them. I had, I don't know, almost my whole life. I hadn't known that so many of these things were terrible, awful, grotesque things that happened in. And I started thinking like, well, if you go into memoir, every chapter could be an injury. And that made me think about marking, like the story of one's life through the injuries that we have endured. And that led to a thought about like, what, you could chart a love story that way. And it started to emerge a dramatic question. Why didn't we sometimes hurt ourselves to gain someone else's love? And that's a provocative question to me. And I think it's the question that both Doug and Kayleen are grappling with now. How would you describe your process with writing? Is it very thoughtful or I guess just, what is that? And do you have any advice outside of journaling and writing for future writers? My process is different for every project that seems to me. I think that sometimes I will outline a work and try to adhere to the outline. Other times I just start writing scenes. Other times I just do a lot of note taking about a project. But I think if there's one kind of constant, it's that my rewriting is so intense. And the early drafts of any of my plays, almost none of them actually resemble the play that ends up being. Characters are changed, are cut out, are added. The entire approach might be changed. The lens from which we're watching it is changed. Guards the Taj used to take place over 40 years in these two guys' lives. And I changed that after writing a few drafts to make it over a few days. Some of my other plays have just been entirely different types of entertainment. They've gone from being dramas to being comedies or vice versa. And so I always feel like you don't know what you have until you have a full draft of something and then you have to start to work on it. And so it's a matter of grappling with that and kind of, I kind of always see the idea of it being a sculptor. And the first draft is the piece of clay. And so now you have to start actually shaping it and making it into something that makes sense to an audience. Yeah? I was just curious about, when you talked about the truth in the playhouse. Yeah. Of Guards the Taj, and like Bangal Tide with Ben At-Zoo, various places within the United States without. I'm just curious like being from Cleveland, like what, maybe like some of the playwriting, like writing books in general. How Cleveland's like influence to you with your hometown? Are you from Cleveland? I was born in Cleveland, but I'm back mostly from Columbus. This is really my first play that's been done at a major theater in Cleveland. It's been, so it's very exciting for me to be there. I grew up kind of going to the Cleveland Playhouse. And so it's very exciting to be there. And I think that like growing up there, there's a lot of arts in Cleveland. And I was exposed to a lot of it, but I didn't think I wanted to be a theater artist so much later in my life, well after I had left it. So I look back on the experiences there of the plays I saw, the music I saw, as being kind of like, you know, like in this presentation, like early, early seeds that I didn't even know were affecting me the way they were. I used to work at this outdoor arts venue called Cain Park. And I used to, I was a garbage man there. I literally would empty the trash and clean the house. It was a big amphitheater. But I would watch the musicals that they did every summer. Like so, like, you know, like repetitively, I'd watch every night and I would absorb it, not thinking that I was studying it, but I was. And again, it's like that, I think the act of repetition ingraining something in you is something that's really helpful in terms of studying the craft. No matter what you might be doing, directing, acting, designing, writing, I think that to experience a piece of art over and over and over and over again so that you know it inside out is a really useful endeavor. Yeah, you get a shout out. I think I can get you. Did you talk about the time in your life that you kind of had a strong artistic block and how you worked through that? And perhaps in the same breath you talked about a time when you truly feel like you have failed and how that influenced your work. Yeah, it's a great question. Being blocked and feeling like I have failed. Let's see, I feel blocked often. And you have a million ways of talking about it saying like I advise people all the time about their blockages while not being able to address my own, you know? It just sucks. I don't know how else to describe it. I think that like there's a certain point where you have to start trusting that even if it's bad, it's okay. My screenwriting partner in college used to say that like anyone can write half a good screenplay but it takes a real artist to complete a bad one. I think it's a real good thing to remember is that like it doesn't matter if you have a great idea and it doesn't matter if you have a great first act and that doesn't complete something and then move from there like I said before and I think that as easy as we stand up here to say that it's something that I continue to not believe sometimes. And in terms of like failing, I mean like, again it's like, I feel like failure in my head always comes like very like retrospectively. I think I'm lucky enough that I don't feel like I'm ever failing in the moment. I feel like if I'm actively working on something it can't be considered a failure. So only things that can be considered failures are something that you look back on and in retrospect say ah yeah, that was a failure. But most of those in my life have less to do with writing and more to do with behavior. And what I mean by that is that I have some regrets about how I did not assert myself as a person in the room during certain productions in my life. That I let myself be steamrolled by theaters or by producers or by directors. And this was early on in my career, I think I've learned from it. But I still wish that I had a little more grit and kind of courage when it came to standing up for myself. Because there's a trap that I think any young artist is gonna fall into which is you are just so grateful to be given the chance to do something. So you'll be like yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you. And that's actually, well there's an element of truth to that because everyone needs their first break and you don't wanna alienate people by being an asshole. But sometimes you need to be. And it's a real fine line and it's everyone has to figure out who they are when they reach a different level in their career. And I still am. And I think that every time I feel like I enter a different phase in my life and career, I'm still figuring out what that means. But I think it's important to just remember like at least for me when you ask me about failures is like that's the thing that I feel like I feel is not being assertive in the room. Oh yeah. Hi. You mentioned working in both drama and comedy. And I was wondering two things. One was how do you differentiate them like in your writing style? But also you talk about like actually switching something that wasn't common into a comedy. And what is the process about going through that and how do you do it? It's a great question because I say that as if I see them as like discreet entities, drama and comedy and I don't. I think that like the funniest shows on TV are dramas, you know? Like I think that like The Prans and Breaking Bad are the two of the funniest shows I've ever seen in my life. And because the comedy works in a different way when the stakes are high, when life or death situations are on hand, there's a certain gallows humor that comes out. I think that, you know. So I tend to see, I tend to feel like I write dramas that hopefully have a lot of comedy within them. And I feel that when I have gotten, when I started out some plays, the self-importance of them or the importance of the material, going back to his question about Virginia Tech and my answer about like how do you approach a subject? Sometimes I approach a subject to head on. And so it became too, you know, boringly kind of didactic and serious, you know? And so like you have to kind of start shifting a lot in there to really discover the characters. And I think what your question really gets down to is the question of character. When your characters in your play or your screenplay are well-defined and complicated and have a backstory that you understand and suddenly kind of leap off the page in one or two lines and are there, are present, are real, then you're gonna find I think comedy within that and the comedy can come naturally. It's not about cracking jokes. It's about finding that kind of the humor in even the most tragic circumstances. Yeah, you guys hear that? Okay, the first thing I did out undergrad was my play Huck and Holden that I mentioned. I had written it my last semester in grad school. Fearlessly, it was like not an assignment. I had my other assignments that were plays that were bad. And I suddenly was like, no, I have to win the contest. I have to, we had this contest every year in the dramatic writing program at NYU. And it was like only one person or two people got the actual full-length play produced. And I was like, none of the stuff I'm working on is gonna win that, it's not gonna win. I just need to write something that's gonna win that award. And so over the course of the weekend, I wrote this draft and I only had three characters in it because I knew that was the thing with the things. Like they would only do a play with three characters. So I wrote it and it won. And then I added two more characters immediately. I got in trouble. Great technique, you know. It got produced at NYU and then it got selected for the Mentor Project at Cherry Lane by Teresa Rebeck. And it became my first produced play and it really was a chain reaction from there. Some people from second stage came and saw that production. They gave me my second production at second stage uptown and it's sort of like, you know, swing from line to line since then. And so, but I got real lucky with that Mentor Project which is one of the great, developed my own, you know, you know, kind of institutions in American theater. It's still going strong. In fact, this year, 11 years later, I was actually a mentor to an employee named Christopher Munoz and he decided to production at the Mentor Project last month. So it was a nice old full circle thing for me. Yeah. What's your writing department? I said to my writing department, everybody else is writing. I can tell you this, one of my professors in college in grad school said to me, and that's something I really think about a lot because one of the things that I think we can all fall victim to sometimes is jealousy. Someone writes a play or a movie and I'm like, man, I wish that career was mine and how come they're giving so much attention and now I'm not, blah, blah, blah. And this is kind of like one of these self-defeating things that happens. And Janet Leipzig, who's my professor at NYU said to me once, she said, here's the thing. She's like, there's a playwright that I grew up admiring. He was my contemporary. And she's like, I made this image in my head saying, okay, here's the thing. You can make a trade. You can give them all your plays and you can take all their plays and we'll call it even. And she's like, I'd never do it. And it's like, no, you wouldn't. You would never give up your babies like that, you know? As a matter of you think that these are the most amazing things in the world and that they won Oscars and Tonys and close prizes, like these are mine. And so they become party and it's like your identity. And so that's a way of kind of overcoming petty jealousies but also thinking about like the importance of the selection of what you write because what you write and what you produce as an artist is really a part of you. And so it's interesting to think about that as you move forward with like, you know, take on your projects. One more act, I'm from many. There's so many hands up. How are you? It's trying to change and we're right or wrong. So when you approach a work particularly like the North Pole, how do you humanize the character that in real life is a villain or is doing something so wrong? How do you reach that person? There's two things happening. One is that like there's an impulse on my part that I want to make these characters sympathetic even if they're doing terrible things. I think that's a challenge that anyone needs to do. The way to do that or the process for me was really about seeing other people read it, working with actors. Actors are like this most incredible resource for writers because they read it and it comes to life and you start to see the nuances or the lack thereof. And so you read, someone reads it and you see exactly, in your mind it was going one way, you see how it comes out of their mouths and you're like, oh my God, I hate this person. How am I going to not hate them? And to me like in North Pole it's a really good example. It's also like that was one of the most difficult plays I ever wrote because I just, I couldn't figure out the tone there. It's actually, there is a big reason why that play got written by giving me the workshops and the resources and Palo Alto theater works to complete that. And that was a play also that started off with two characters, went to three, went to seven, went back to four, went back to three, and then went to two. I also had two acts, multiple scenes and ended up one act, one scene in real time. So there was a lot of moving about the space to figure out what that story needed to be. Take a poll, yeah, are you back there? I think what I mean, from what I understand, I mean like, I think that anything that can enhance a presentation on stage and make it more theatrical and more interesting and more alive is a great thing. I don't think it steps in the way of theater and in my opinion, like what makes theater great and what sets it apart from TV, film, the internet, everything else and why I think it's been around for so long is that it always comes down to actors on the stage saying words that someone wrote. It's this live performance that makes it amazing and it is this notion of us being in a room to get the community of it. So mixed media, all that kind of stuff, anything that can help the show is great but if those things break down, if your tech person's not there, if the lights go out, if the sound goes out, we're still on stage acting it and the play still works as a play then that's what's important. Anything else? Yeah, do I speak other languages? I certainly do not write, I speak some French and I speak the language I spoke in the Peace Corps which is called Mandinka but that's a lie because I probably couldn't speak it at all anymore. I was like 20 years of this. Mandinka's a West African language. Mandinka, yeah, but when I spoke French in the Peace Corps I could speak it a little bit and I speak African French. I became very aware of why and how people could be literate because I have no way of writing in French. I can't write a single, if I write it it's just, it's totally misspelled so. I was in my 20s, early 20s. Yeah, I became artist only when I realized that I was only doing, when it became like when I was so disciplined with it that it was something that I would do no matter what and it wasn't about expressing myself and it wasn't about entering a contest. It was well after grad school and when it was like I had three other jobs and I was going home for the weekend and I was not gonna see anybody because I was like I gotta get my writing in and when it became sort of like a labor of love that had nothing to do with anybody except myself I think that's when I felt I was actually. There's so many young actors in the audience today. What would you say to them about working on new plays? Do it, it's great. I think that like, I'll tell you that like there are the actors that I love working with are actors that are nimble and that don't care about getting new pages the day of the show and can memorize quickly and can embrace that process and help writers with that process and so that becomes a real active way of it's a totally different way of being an actor than doing the classes and they're both great and you should do everything but there are definitely actors who can't do the new plays and so don't become those actors. Yeah, I mean, she asked me what was the one thing I would want to inspire and clarify is to leave here with and I think that that, you know, should just keep writing? Yeah. I don't know, I think that it's like, it's hard work and it's nose to the grindstone stuff and it's like, I think that you have to love it and you have to enjoy that time alone and then you also have to enjoy the time with other people and I think that like the sign that you start to mature as a writer is when you're able to hear notes and discern from the good and the bad ones and not feel self-conscious about it. Like I'm also, I've done a little bit of lyric writing but not a lot and I'm very self-conscious about it. When that comes out, when I get notes on my lyrics for musicals and workings on it, I get really defensive and I'm like, no, that's fine, no, it's not, it's fucking. And I have to sign in maturity and when I get notes on my plays, I really hear them and I internalize them and I think about them and I can choose which ones I want to take and which ones I don't want to take but I don't ever get flustered. I don't get flustered what somebody's like as a mess and so I can see now that I start writing lyrics, the difference between me and the mature writer as a playwright and an immature writer as a lyricist and I really need to work on my maturity as a lyricist so I can get to that place where I'm able to hear people. You really do have to wrap up here. Okay. I'll be around.