 So last year we commissioned Helicon Collaborative to do an evaluation of the first round of the National Playwright Residency Program. Helicon is a research and strategy consultancy working for a more sustainable, equitable and creative future. Helicon partners with people and organizations across the arts and other sectors to realize the potential of artists and culture as a force for community well-being and positive social change. Currently Helicon is exploring three primary themes, the role of artists and culture in advancing environmental sustainability and a just transition, more humane socioeconomic models to improve conditions for artists and all people, and equitable support and representation for diverse forms of cultural expression in the nonprofit sector. Today we're lucky to have with us Alexis Fraz, who co-authored this report. Alexis is a writer, cultural anthropologist and divergent thinker, enriching Helicon's work with perspectives drawn from acupuncture, neuroscience, psychology, design, Tai Chi, ecology, and economics. She has worked as a cultural strategist and consultant for 14 years. She is the director of Helicon's work on art and environmental sustainability, individual artists, cultural equity, and art and social change. Take it away, Alexis. Thank you for having me and it's really been an honor to be here and to hear the work. It's so inspiring and hard to follow in some ways. So we, as Jamie said, we were hired to really look at the original, the first cohort of this program and reflect back. So we started this project in 2016 and we're looking back and seeing what worked well, what didn't work well. I mean, as David mentioned, there's a lot of material out there and so what we were trying to do was synthesize that material and make some sense of it and try to, out of the very individualistic experiences that all the theaters and the playwrights had had, try to synthesize what were some common themes. So I'll share those with you and you may or may not have common themes. The program keeps evolving as Mellon is in how round are both so good at sort of responding in real time. So some of the things that may have been challenges previously are no longer challenges and everyone's working things out in their own way as well. So but I wanted to take it back to start with just the impetus for this, which you all probably know very well. But in, you know, in 2009 this book was published Outrageous Fortune and the quote is long and I won't read it, but essentially the idea was the economics of playwrights is challenging, people are struggling to make a living and the economics of nonprofit theater sort of with declining audiences and funding are leading to theaters making safer bets, continuing to put pressure on theaters to pay less or as little as they can and further commercializing the work. And so there was a, the book pointed out, Todd London's book pointed out that this was sort of leading to a vicious cycle where there were worsening more transactional relationships between playwrights and theaters and declining community relevance and artistic risk taking of theaters and it was sort of compounding. So that's made me laugh when I was looking for pictures about vicious cycles. So there we go. Okay, so, so Mellon as one of the few, really the few foundations that thinks in an ecosystemic way about the field as a whole, there really are not that many arts funders that think that way, asked what could we do if we were going to design something that would create the conditions for a theater field that would be artistically vital, relevant to communities and economically more sustainable for theater makers. And so in 2012 announced this program to see if embedding playwrights and theaters was an answer to that, not the answer but an answer and whether that could be sort of the acupuncture needle that could shift the field in the direction of greater health. So we undertook this process in 2016, the beginning of the second term of the program, so I attended this cohorts meeting in that year and we're really looking at impacts on three levels, on the playwrights themselves, on theaters and on the state of the field overall, which was the big question that David mentioned earlier, it's sort of your delegates to this larger question about can we shift the economic and power relationships in the field overall. So our methodology was we did interviews with everyone from that cohort in the program, both the artistic directors and the playwrights. We had a lot of conversations with how around staff, really trying to understand the nitty gritty of their component of the program as support, conversations with Mellon and review of a lot of documents. So that includes a lot of what was on how around site documentation provided by you all, but also any background material and things like that to understand the evolution of the program. So our core findings were that the residencies really have had substantial positive impacts on those who've participated. So unsurprisingly, it really makes a difference to playwrights to have a consistent income and some security. The theaters were all changed. Even groups that didn't have superlative experiences, there was a positive impact. This is a really unusual as I said in bold and well executed response to field challenges by a funder, something that conceives of the whole in the way that it does and commits over a period of the number of years that this has been going on, is a really excellent intervention. But unfortunately, it hasn't succeeded in changing the economic conditions for playwrights in the field overall. And in some ways that's really not surprising. The conditions that the field is facing are conditions that our society is facing, right? So whether it's pressures of expensive cities or the gig economy, these larger trends, it's sort of unrealistic to expect that a single funding program could radically shift that over the course of this amount of time. But there have been some inklings that there could be some pushing against some of those. So we'll talk about those. So when it works, why does it work? So what we found was that embedding playwrights in theaters as artists is not something that most theaters have experience with. And it's not something that most playwrights have had experience with. This is sort of a new role for playwrights in a theater. So doing it successfully really takes a lot of communication, flexibility, and effort, and the ability, the time to be able to put that in. So there really wasn't one size fits all recipe for what worked, but we did find some common characteristics. So having a previous relationship was really key. A lot of the playwrights that were most successful really had a basis with the theater already, and they knew each other. There was some trust. I want to skip to actually the aligned values and goals and expectations of the theater and the playwright, because that was actually maybe the most important thing. Making sure that that was very explicit, and in some cases having the previous relationship seemed to shorthand that. People could get into a relationship that felt very close without establishing clear goals, and that became a problem. So really being very clear, this is the role that you're going to be playing. This is what's expected, and sticking to that throughout the course of the relationship. The career stage of the playwright, being in a place where you can take the time away from other commitments, where you're ready to maybe give up some of your other responsibilities. Someone in the last convening spoke about one of the playwrights, how they were ready to let go of some of the adjunct teaching work that they had, and this was the opportunity because it gave them the money so that they could say goodbye to that and really make a play for doing this full time. The theater being committed to producing the playwright's work, that that was a really key thing, and there were a couple of tensions where that wasn't the case that needed to be resolved. The theater having the capacity to engage the playwright as an artist, so very different from saying, great, we have more hands on deck to do whatever we need to do, but really having enough space to play with what it's like to integrate an artist into the workings of a theater, including all the ways that that might require changing your normal operations, integrating someone new into deciding what the season is going to be. Sometimes that happened, or just shifting the way the staff thinks about things and works on things. As I said, the communication is really key, and the feedback and the flexibility, and when that was there, there were cases where things happened that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Someone in the previous Marcus Gardley, who was at Victory Gardens Theater, talked about how in the last convening that we had, he decided to shift and make a play that wasn't planned. He had planned to do a certain play, Ferguson happened, he felt like, I really need to respond to this moment in time, and the theater was responsive to that, and they were able to do that because they had this relationship, they had the trust, and they were able to say, all right, let's go, let's go on this journey together and see if we can make it work, and they did. But normally theater production timelines and budgets, they just don't allow for that kind of thing. So in some ways, if you look at the field as a whole to say that actually does result in more responsive work being on stage. And then finally, the playwright living in the community and really wanting to engage with the community. Part of this was really about relevance to community and trying to see if not only could we shift the economics of playwrights, but also shift the way that theaters engage with their communities. And so having a playwright who really felt that call and wanted to do that was really important. Sometimes it doesn't work so well. And this is actually from 10,000 Things. So that worked well. We didn't include any images of places that didn't work well. But when it doesn't work well, when there is a lack of clear expectations. So often this happened when the role of the playwright within the theater wasn't clearly understood by the rest of the staff and sometimes even by the artistic director. So when there's confusion about who is this person that has special status, why don't they have to come into meetings that I have to come into, their times that they show up are different, their responsibilities are different, which is appropriate. But when it wasn't clearly communicated, that became a problem. Sometimes the different rates of pay were challenging. So that could either be the playwright relative to the rest of the staff in the theater or it could be in some cases the playwrights across the cohort. There were different rates of pay and that felt uncomfortable in some cases. So the theater, sometimes there were challenges when the theater treated the playwright as an adjunct administrator. So there were a lot of theaters that were smaller. One of the great things about this program is the spread of sizes of theater. However, some theaters were financially stressed or didn't have a lot of capacity. And so would call on the playwright as, you know, can you pitch in? Like everyone's pitching in to do these things. And that was a tension because the playwright's role was really there to be an artist and so that took some negotiation. There were a few cases where just the playwright's working style or personality just didn't fit with being inside an organization. You know, there was an assumption, I think, starting out the program that this would be a good thing for any playwright. And some playwrights just felt like I don't want to be in that kind of environment. That doesn't work for me. There were a couple instances where the theater wasn't interested and didn't initially seem interested in producing some of the work the playwright created. That was a tension when the playwright has conflicting obligations outside of the theater. So this was a real challenge because unlike the person I mentioned before who was sort of ready to let go of a lot of other work, there were some playwrights that felt like this is, I don't know how long this is going to last. This could be three years. I can't stop networking. I can't stop doing other work. I'm going to need this. And so that sort of gets to the issue of is this an ecosystem field-changing thing, even if it's three years or six years or nine years. At the end of that time, the playwright still needs to sort of hustle, get back in the hustle game. And so that was something that came up. So I'm going to move on to benefits for playwrights and theaters, but I just wanted to ask, because Melinda and Will are in the room, is there anything from what I've just said that I missed from your perspectives about what worked or what didn't work? Sorry to put you on the spot. Oh, sorry. I'm screwing up the mic situation. We'll have the panel later. We'll have the panel later, so. I think you covered it pretty well. The only thing I would add is that, at least in my case, I can go into this in a little more detail when we talked, when sometimes financial things shifted from the institution, that might shift what's working and not working. Does it make any sense? Things beyond the Mellon Grant. So sometimes those things were fluid, not always set. Does it make any sense? Something could be working and then there's some issue with finances and then it's like, okay, that can't work for the future because X, Y, and Z. Yeah, there were a couple, and not just finances, there was a couple cases where, or at least one where an artistic director left. Right, stuff like that. Things like that that sort of throw the relationship, which really is a partnership between a theater and often artistic director and a playwright. Right. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so overall, as I said, even in places where there were challenges and where there might have been tensions, there were substantial benefits for playwrights. All the playwrights that we spoke with said, this was a positive experience for me. The security of the income was really significant. People were able to write more than they ever had been. They felt like they wrote better things. Some people tried new kinds of writing so that they had never tried writing something that was site-specific and now they had a place to do that, or they had never done devised work and now they tried that. And so there were a lot of things that people did that they hadn't done before. People traveled for R&D. They saw other people's work, which for some was a luxury they had never had. And some people just were able to take space and breathe and have reliable income for life expenses. So people contributed to their IRAs. They paid their rent. They took care of health care expenses they had been putting off. So those are really significant. And in fact, in a lot of our other research on artists, those are things that often come out the most in terms of what, you know, everyone wants sort of, what's the new funding program for artists that's going to change everything and it really often comes down to give people health care or pay people's rent and they'll make the work. So that was really significant. People expanded their networks. So a lot of people talked about the isolation of being a playwright inherently as part of the profession, but that they were able to connect to other playwrights and things like this and to other ADs, artistic directors in the cohort or travel to connect to other artists and other theater leaders. So really kind of starting to feel like they were part of a bigger community. And then also that the award opened doors nationally to theaters that otherwise they felt like wouldn't have necessarily been as receptive to them. Some people felt like they developed new skills. So people took on new roles relative to plays. So people tried their hand at directing or doing something else. Some people actually really appreciated taking on administrative roles in theaters and understanding what it's like to do the thing, to work the whole system, put on a play, and generally adding to their understanding of how complicated it actually is. A lot of playwrights said we didn't understand what goes into making it work. And then many, many playwrights engaged with the community and some already had that experience. That was already part of their work. But for some people that actually changed the way they work, starting to build relationships with community, whether it was teaching or trying to bring new community members in to the theater. And for some playwrights actually that changed the way they think about making work and who they're making it for. So that was significant as well. So for theaters also pretty unanimously felt like this was a positive experience. It changed the way they thought to have an artist in the room which was part of the original intent of the program, to have a playwright in the room. Many people who work in theaters are artists and so that was something that also came up as a finding. But having a playwright in the room when the planning was happening for the season sometimes changed what theaters put on stage. It made theaters sometimes more interested in doing new work. The playwright could advocate for certain kinds of work or for work from certain communities and in part the playwright cohort was very diverse, more diverse than playwrights overall or theaters by far. And so playwrights often brought networks that the theaters weren't already connected with and that actually changed the work on stage. So having a woman or a person of color in the room sometimes, unfortunately for theaters, this was one of the few times that they had that experience and so that actually influenced what they were thinking about. And then some playwrights actually helped advance the operations of the staff or the internal workings of the staff. I know Melinda helped the Huntington staff craft a value statement and using her skills as a writer to help people articulate something that had been difficult to articulate so coming in as an artist, this isn't being an administrator but giving the artist lens to things that don't normally have that lens in the theater. And then probably the main thing that the theaters felt like they got from this was really new relationships with the community, deeper relationships with the community they already had sometimes but usually this was engaging with communities that were new to them so whether it was younger audiences because of the work that was being put on stage or communities of color that they hadn't been able to access before and this was both as audiences actually and as writers because several people will parolically engage community as artists so did playwriting classes and things like that or had writers groups for writers of color and so that actually changed both the perception of the theater but also the theater's engagement with those communities. And often the artist was engaging, this is another important point, engaging the community as part of the artistic process not just as a marketing approach, not just come see my play but actually either doing research in the community about the community to create a piece of work or engaging the community as art makers themselves which is a really different relationship. So many people or a few theaters said that just these activities or merely having this diverse person in such a prominent position in the theater changed the community's perception that the theaters are a place. That's what one person said that this is now our place and it changed the theater's perception of its ideal role in relation to the community so thinking of itself more as a civic institution thinking of how can we open our doors more, things like that. And then finally I'll just say for both the playwrights and the theaters most of these positive outcomes came at the end. So there was definitely a period of time that it took for the relationship to gel and figuring out how to work together, ironing out the kinks. So just something for you all that maybe are just starting on this that it does actually take some time for some of these to accrue. So I've been sort of alluding to this but this was really significant the diversity and using that as shorthand for a lot of things but maybe the most significant was that two-thirds of the playwright cohort of the one that we looked at were of color and theaters are majority white. There's a huge diversity issue as we all know in the theater sector with audiences, with the people who lead theaters and with playwrights, with people whose work is commissioned not with playwrights existing in the world but playwrights who end up being commissioned by theaters. So some theaters really worked intentionally on this with the playwright and that was in a sort of stated goal for the pair. There were other times when the playwright felt by virtue of who they were the pressure to be the diversity advocate and that was sometimes a little uncomfortable if the playwright didn't actually want that to be their role if they were looking for something else. Some people just felt like they just had to do it anyway because if they didn't do it, who would? And so there were some complications. Even when the playwrights wanted to do that work they sometimes felt like it limited their ability to do other things that the work that they were focused on bringing into the theater their own or others had to be about a theme that related to diversity, for example and some playwrights just really didn't want to work on that. That was not what they were interested in the moment. So this gets again to the larger issue of the field of how do we actually shift this imbalance and whose responsibility is it. So there were varying levels of impact as a result of the varying levels of commitment to this issue but there were some theaters who really took it very seriously and worked deep really both the playwright and the theater saw this as a core part of their relationship and the theater has made substantial changes going forward. It has committed to diversifying the board. It has committed to programming more diverse work and changing the staff, things like that. So one thing that was really important that was sort of subtle but came out through many interviews was that class is as important as race There were a number of cases where people said this is actually the harder thing for boards to grapple with that there was interest in attracting essentially attracting more upward middle class people of different races but there was resistance to making the changes that would be necessary to welcome people who might either jeopardize the business model because they couldn't pay or weren't ready to pay, they were younger sometimes too or people who might actually want to see different kinds of stories told and that that was the real tension that just couldn't be it was sort of a third rail that couldn't be broached and so like the economic situation this is a field wide systemic issue this isn't going to be something that's going to be changed radically by one theater or playwright alone but it is something that's worth talking about because there is we are more here than just a single playwright or theater so it might be worth thinking about what a group could do together that one person can't do alone and then finally I just want to mention that some of the impacts of this might be delayed we didn't see a radical shift in for example the demographics of who leads theaters in the course of this program so far but seeing more diverse work presented on stage may change who ends up coming into theater that is what they see on stage or who ends up thinking that they can be a playwright because they see people like them making work and acting in work so we don't actually know and obviously our project wasn't set up to measure that kind of thing but there may be very long term effects of having more diverse work on stage and it's just the right thing to do so this was really just in summary really this was really a model funding intervention as I said there are very few funders who think of the ecosystem as a whole both national, multi-year, multi-year, multi-year various scales of theater and career stages of playwright the diversity of the cohort the flexibility of the program design and just the openness to feedback saying as Susan said don't worry this isn't a tryout you're going to get renewed but we really want the feedback of what's going right and what's going wrong that's very unusual as I'm sure you know and the willingness to change I mean there have been some changes whether it's the commons producers trying something that they thought would help and then deciding it didn't work out and getting rid of it allowing people to shift their plans in midstream the playwrights and theaters and then the transparency the documentation on how around of the progress and the challenges and so you know this could be a model for how funders and artists and arts organizations could collaborate on experiments that are really intended to change entrenched issues in the field and that's something that we hope will be will be picked up more broadly by funders who knows but that would be great so then you know to my the point I made earlier on which is just that unfortunately there hasn't been a massive shift in the conditions of the field right I mean playwrights aren't every theater isn't signing up to have their resident playwright that they're going to fund through their operating budget because they've seen how amazing all of you are so you know it's still hard to make a living as a playwright there's still transactional relationships between playwrights and theaters there's still not enough diversity on stage and behind the scenes and theaters are really struggling still in a lot of cases with declining audiences or being perceived as relevant to their communities so we still have the same challenges but this has been regardless this is incredibly worthwhile program and then just you know one of the things that this is a quote from someone we interviewed but you know even many of the theaters who participated and had such a great experience feel like this is a luxury they can't afford and so this goes back to what I was saying about this being you know the kind of entrenched economics the theaters economics are also putting pressure on this situation and they just feel like they're you know they're stretched to the margins and they can't afford to do things like this and so you know bringing in the question of what's the appropriate economic structure that can support playwrights plus what can actually support theaters is really important to think about those two things in concert oh whoa this color's got funny okay actually before we go here I just want to see if there's any questions or reactions to that and also give Susan or how around actually a chance to weigh in if you have anything to add sure hi thank you Alexis that was really a great synthesis of a fantastic research report and I think also in in truth and transparency there was a certain amount of tuning and throwing as we were editing this report and Alexis and Holly were really open to augmenting their first draft with input that we provided and I really appreciated that as part of the documentation we talk a lot at Mellon about high risk high benefit grants and I don't think I'd call this one a high risk I would call it a grant experiment because there were so many obvious benefits to be had from it but I do want to say and I think Alexis alluded to this that the impact of an intervention such as this is not necessarily felt over the grant period and I think that it's going to take the round one playwrights leaving the theaters some of them will leave completely some of them will continue to have different kinds of relationships I know that Peter Noctrieb is always going to have a desk in z-space I think Pearl Cleague will always have a presence at Alliance Theatre and I hope that Melinda will stay with Huntington in some way I know Will is moving on so that I think we need to look down the road ten years and see where we are there's an interesting analogy that the League of American Orchestras published a report last year on the role of fellowships in orchestras and there have been fellowship programs for 40 years in American orchestras some of which Mellon has been involved with some haven't and the benefit to the composers sorry the musicians has been profound I think nearly all of them have stayed in the field of music and in orchestras but the orchestras that participated in the fellowships have not changed measurably and that's a new challenge that we're trying to face now so I think it is a long-term process it requires long-term intervention it requires staying the course so this is something we will continue to monitor with this particular program I don't think we quite got it right because from day one at least a year pointed this out at the last convening that the playwrights were thinking about year four on day one of year one and Jack Ruler put it well he said that the playwrights were actually paid freelancers that they had that security but it was not long-term and we haven't figured out the best way to sustain this program at Mellon there's a great model of three rounds of funding and then endowing positions and a team will always need a curator and a university will always need a professor and I think a theater always ought to need a playwright but the relationships we tried to cultivate were between an artistic director and a playwright and that personal chemistry is significant for the success of this program I firmly believe that so if the artistic director moves on what happens to that relationship if the playwright gets an academic position who has just gotten what happens to that relationship so an endowment is complicated because if you're going to endow a playwright position in a theater that doesn't have an endowment because it's too small to have an endowment it's not a working model so I don't think we've gotten that quite right but we're working on it and I think we want to know particularly how this report is resonating with around two playwrights in the early period of your first Melon Grant and the finding that it's not yet sustainable the luxury we can't afford in funder speak that speaks to failure and I don't think we can put this in terms of failure in any respect of the word it will remain to be seen how these residencies have impacted the theater what goes on whether other funders come in on to this but I would not put it in terms of failure even if it's a luxury we can't afford I think it's really interesting and hopefully we'll talk more about it as we go there was never a stated goal of this program being a diversity program for the field in any way the process of selection both who were the what were the partnerships that were desired by the applicants both on the writer's side and then which of those applications presented the strongest case for the learning led to this really extraordinary two cohorts now in terms of if you look at the field and you look at these cohorts and I think that one of the unintended consequences that's also going to be measured over time is the amount of new work that has now been put into the field from writers of color through institutions that weren't necessarily institutions focused on voices of color initially and in some cases has elevated institutions that have been historically dedicated to communities of color and elevating that those organizations into this conversation as well there's I think there's a secondary benefit over time that we didn't intend but is was probably inevitable and also really overdue that is pretty significant when you look at both the results of the first cohort and then what's happening right now I'll just follow up on that before I turn over the mic in round one the playwrights and theaters were recommended by a peer panel and that resulted in a type of diversity in round two as you know we did an open application process so surely the panel that we chose to review those applications which was itself a diverse panel aided in the elevation of certain applications but I think there was a really source of pride about how diverse the pool itself was we also took bets as we were waiting for the applications to come in about how many proposals we would get and I was way off I thought we would get hundreds we got about 60 and that speaks to the intensity of the relationship we were looking for it had to work on both sides so more soon is it okay if I ask people for feedback now or are you planning to do that I don't want to cannibalize the panel but I'm just curious whether there is anything that sparks for you being newer to this program about your own residency things that you've already seen that are reflected in this or things that maybe this makes you want to do differently as a result of having seen this and no pressure I mean if there are no thoughts it's okay yeah I guess this question has only just occurred to me and it's for everyone but how would the playwrights feel differently about the grant so when I partnered with the Huntington it was important to me that my salary was being paid through Mellon it was important for me cataloging my presence in that office that my salary wasn't coming out of someone else's cutbacks we have to the costume shop famously goes on summers off because there's not enough work that kind of thing so it was important to me in understanding my role there that my pay was coming from another organization and I just wonder to self but also to everyone how would you feel differently about it if the organization was paying your salary as a playwright in residence and so that's something I want to think about for myself because it's never right it's a luxury we can't afford well so if they afforded it how would it change my relationship to my job there I guess that's maybe something we could think about and maybe come back to it's a really good question and it may be different for people at different size theaters depending on what the economics are but I like that question because I think so often in the dialogue in the field theaters and playwrights get pitted against each other and really the economics are problematic all around right does anybody want to answer that question or say something else I just wanted to I don't know if there will be an opportunity to talk to the round one people that are now it's almost over and I just wanted to know what the heck are you going to do I guess we all want to know what is your mindset what is going on and also has there been any discussions with your host theater about a part-time position maybe full times too much but I certainly see advantages of a part-time position because it's a less commitment for the organization but they might be able to get a lot more out of us on a part-time basis okay so we can ask those questions okay thank you I just I want to acknowledge as a small theater is an asking a playwright in residence who is there as an artist to maybe adopt some of the more administrative responsibilities and I just in hearing Susan your comment museums will always need a curator, university will always need a professor I love that idea I also hear Jack's idea that they're you know paid freelancers I think the tension there is is that empowering playwrights as they should be to have an impact that impact often has administrative consequences and certainly in a small organization it becomes difficult then to feel like the vision of that playwright if we don't have the capacity to realize their vision so I'm just restating I think things that have already been said but for us that's been we feel that yeah it's a great point Alexis I know in the research it came up some and it's not so much in this report I wonder if you could speak a little to the challenge of toward this end a little bit the notion of the impact to the staff of there being a salaried artist while there's other impact other work to be done I think for most of the residencies face this challenge in both directions the writer can feel the strain of that and the staff can feel the strain of it did you hear much that you can speak to about how that got negotiated yeah I mean it was attention and partly for the reason you're saying and you know there were just as an example a lot of playwrights thought oh great I have a desk I'm going to be in a place with people for the first time this is fantastic and then they realized oh it's really noisy here and I don't actually like to write from 9 to 5 and then the theater thought oh we're going to have somebody here all the time and the playwright was like well if you want me to write I actually can't be here so there were things like that that came up that had to be negotiated or you know I mean the most common was when it hadn't been discussed in advance and the theater made assumptions and the playwright made assumptions and those assumptions were mismatched but there were also tensions with other staff you know sometimes the artistic director and the playwright were really aligned and the other staff who many of whom as I said are artists you know people who are doing this administrative work but also think of themselves as artists and so you know felt some resentment about this artist this artist being able to be an artist on staff when they as an artist didn't feel like they could do that and so and you know the pay also issue came to play the playwrights being paid at a level you know commiserate with senior staff and that causing some tension with staff who had been there for a really long time and everyone in theaters underpaid for the most part and you know felt some so it was just it's a new it was a new function you know a lot of people have a standard for what a marketing director gets paid or something but it wasn't a function that had a and what they do but this function didn't have a role so I think that was partly it yeah I want to speak a minute about the staff resentments because they were real our goal was originally to give primarily to give playwrights time and space to work and as Lexis just says that doesn't necessarily happen at 9 to 5 in an office but we could have just given out fellowships and let you alone for three or six years but it was a more ambitious plan to see what would happen in by the notion of embedding and we may not have adequately defined what we meant by embedding in the first place and I think this has been a big learning experience for Mellon it's why we asked for a work plan from you both in the second round instance and the kinds of things that came up in the first round were the do I have to be here 9 to 5 and you know again salaried freelancer the rest of the staff had the permanence of jobs the playwrights did not so I think that was a distinguishing feature first of all the need to maintain networks of work networks whether it's commissions from other theaters the challenge of the TV the Hollywood writing period was a really tough one for us in one instance I think we extended a residency period but we can't deny the playwright the opportunity but if you're in residence you're in residence if you're in Hollywood for six months you're not in residence so this was really tough and the small theater large theater the need to chip in where it might not necessarily be a skill set of the playwright but those were defined flexibly chipping in was sometimes getting to know the board better helping make the case to the board helping with a development role that hadn't been anticipated sometimes it was communication but again writing writing theater writing drama is not the same as writing press releases or social media or blogs so again places we haven't quite gotten it right we'd like to help continue to try to get it better but it will never be solved because of the diversity of the cohort the sizes of the theater the aesthetics of the artists and that's also kind of part of the fun yeah and I should say there's a flip side to that negative side right I mean there were some playwrights who felt like it was so inspiring I mean I think well maybe you even said this that you know being running into people in the halls and those kinds of spontaneous opportunities to do something really different just it's not even a planned meeting which you would normally have as a playwright you're invited in for specific periods of time but just sort of being part of the flow and you know sometimes consulting on marketing for somebody's show that isn't yours and being able to inform it with an artistic perspective a lot of playwrights also really enjoyed that so I think it really is more about the ability of the pair and the theater as a whole to identify what the appropriate relationship is depending on the desire and personality and skill sets and all of that yeah another one that I didn't think we got quite right what about other artistic duties some of the playwrights wanted to direct okay now is that a fee that they should get separately from their salary they were being played to be playwrights not to be directors if they're directing there was an agent relationship and fees to be paid to third parties we did not anticipate that one and we had to work it out in real time some of the largest theaters were in positions to offer multiple commissions to the playwrights smaller theaters tended to think the commission the writing ought to be part of the salary and then what happened if a playwright was taking a commission from another theater during this period I had very complicated relationships but part of what we learn we hope to continue to spread out to the field I think one of the things about this part of the discussion here you're hearing things that relate to the experience you're having right now and we'll want to dig into the ways in which you're confronting these challenges the ways in which you're solving them or failing to solve them the whole notion here is that much of what has your experiencing is already embedded in the process itself so there's whatever especially where the challenge edges are you don't have to feel like oh my god we're uniquely failing hopefully you're hearing oh yeah these are the questions these are the issues as well as these are the benefits and you may be finding that oh there's a benefit that hasn't yet been mentioned that can be shared into the room when we get into the round two conversations but now I just want to acknowledge for a lot of you this is like people are killing you softly with their song in a way like oh shit I didn't know it was so transparent that I was having these problems or these discoveries going along yeah people have been in this place already and solved it in different ways and hopefully you also have more to add to and you'll hear from Nathan and Will and Melinda some of the ways in which they approach these things we have a couple more minutes before we break for lunch anybody yeah this is really idiosyncratic and personal to me but the idea of why not just a fellowship you know why not just give a bag of money to a playwright and they can go off and do whatever or even thinking of it as sort of like salaried freelancers I will just say that in my personal life I you know after living in New York City for 25 years and you know being with a partner who is also a lifelong freelancer even being thrifty and saving we weren't able to buy a place to live until this fellowship because I could show payroll stub to the bank so it's like that's and that's not I'm certainly that's not trivial for me but like I like to think that that has field wide impact ultimately for people to be able to stay in their cities and have and have security that's not what you're going to say at all here no but I mean maybe I'm going to say something like it because I feel like your your initial question was do we have thoughts I feel like I have about a thousand thoughts but one of them that I keep coming to is is sort of where Melinda started to and it went like this for me I was reading your report and and you know and getting through the first of it and this thought just kept coming to me which I kept trying to beat myself up for which was God because I was having from day one I had the the same as an artistic director I had the same thought that you're saying the playwrights had I wondered about the end day of year three is been my obsession and and as I was reading this along I thought the thing that just kept coming to me was God such a luxury this and I was judging myself for using that word and thinking of it in that way and then I saw that you reported that others felt that and I felt so much better about that but then I thought how do we saw because it isn't a luxury maybe or how do we make it how do we how do we understand that it isn't a luxury actually which was the thing that I've been excited about at the beginning of all of this and thinking old thoughts like what if we could remake to river theater like the Kingsman or the comedy Francaise or something where you know there's there really is the need for the playwright at the center of for the theater that there's that the need becomes really goes in both in both ways and I mean that puts a different kind of pressure on on what Madeline would do and it puts a different kind of pressure on a lot of things but I did I have been really wondering how because I had the same word came to my mind luxury I just thought how can we make it going forward that something that isn't a luxury at all that is a real necessity and I feel like I feel a bit advantage because I feel like there are things about my theater that could make that possible and I just want to figure out how to do that so yeah yeah and I just to say as we struggled a lot with what's the right question to ask like you know is it what's the role of playwrights in theaters or what's you know to ask this group right now but I like the way you phrase that and I would say even more like how can how is there a way something I'm really curious about it is there a way that this group and and all the groups that have been involved in this program can somehow do something as a group that individual theaters can't do alone to make the economics of playwriting and running a theater more sustainable is that even because you know the idea of thinking much bigger than a program or than a three-year time frame I think makes sense but also thinking about you know what's the what's the larger ecosystem that we want to create yeah I mean around that I mean I think one of the things that's most illuminating and exciting about this is that artists are being paid the same as administrators and that just isn't happening in our field and it's we continuously reinforce that inequity of artists and administrators and with the argument that well if the administrators aren't doing the work then the artists won't have a place to work so we should compensate the administrators so they can keep doing it but I just think this is like a major inequity in our field that isn't being addressed and it's really wonderful that this program addresses that and I do think we have to figure out as John saying how we can address this inequity and the way that this program is doing it yeah thanks one thing that didn't feel to me totally articulated here that has been deeply important about my residency has been the having a home even if you're not there and that is what's different than a bag of money and just to go play write just write all the things in your home and I say that completely guilty of not being as in residence certainly as I anticipated because much like the other playwrights you mentioned I have a perfect home office it's where I do the things and all the other people and the desk is different at Marin and how do I do this I don't know but having having the home not just the money but having the person to call the literary director and Jason to call and going I think I have an idea I think I have a crazy idea and having a place people to talk about it people to bounce off ideas and a cohort of actors that have been critical to my work that are located there development workshops to jump in every month every week I could do that and so that is kind of it's like having a virtual home but then it's real when you need it and that's something different than it's kind of in between the extreme of not there and always there it's the I don't know the hovering residency so that's something that I mean similar to what Madeline was saying how critical it is to have a pay stub it's critical for me to have a place to go I have a thing let's do it right now which has has been one of my biggest luxury is that person to call and something to put in place immediately that's what I've found has been the most exceedingly valuable to me yeah and I mean Jamie gave an inkling of some of the other themes that were obsessed with the Helicon but one of the things that we're really looking at a lot is kind of what are the economics of being an artist and what are the things that will actually shift that generally not just theater and we did a report last year called Creativity Connects it was with the NEA and basically the finding of that report it was about sustainability for artists you know it's actually this is a quote from it our systems aren't broken for artists they're broken for everyone and this is another one we continue to struggle with issues of inclusion, diversity and equity and the non-profit arts and cultural sector because our society continues to struggle with them so just to say for sort of the question of how do we deal with artists and not being paid like administrators, geek economy workers throughout our economy right now are struggling with the same things and so thinking again not to stand on a platform here but just that you know what is the organizing structure to actually shift these things and who are the partners to do that because this is a much bigger issue than what's happened whatever's happening in the theater sector somebody has a look there well to be honest we were all chosen here because of our reputation you know I see ourselves as a brand you know I see myself as a brand and anytime I have success outside the theater then the theater can also share with that can also receive for example I'm in Coco I don't know if you know that the Academy Award winning Pixar movie Coco and I've gotten tremendous press out of it but you know my residency is always mentioned in the articles so the theater also gains from my success my brand rises I think the theater should also benefit from that sorry you should talk if anybody has a burning point or question we can take it otherwise I'll close out and thank you for those of you who are participating online and so we're going to go to lunch now and when we come back we'll pick up the conversation kind of where we've been with the round one playwrights and super reflections especially this question of what does it look like on the other side which is terrifying them both alright so break and we're back at one thank you