 of three of the past, I think we figured out, 17 Hayes Awards winners. So with us today, if you'll allow me to introduce everyone, I'll introduce myself first. My name is Steven Clalla. I am the outgoing VP of Grants and Awards. So I've been administering the Hayes Award for the past six years now. First, I'm going to start at the end with the original winner. I'm not going to be correct about that, which is Louie Douthit. She spent 12 seasons at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She's been the production dramaturg for more than 40 productions, including 14 world premieres and more than a dozen Shakespeare's. She's been the co-producer and producer of the Black Swan Lab, the interim director of literary development and dramaturgy, and she won the 1999 literary LMDA Eliot Hayes Award. Second on my list and in the center there is Melinda Finberg. Melinda is the associate professor of theater practice and critical studies at the University of Southern California School of Dramatic Art. She is a dramaturg who's particularly interested in reviving the plays of historical women playwrights. She's the editor of the 18th century women dramatist, Oxford University Press, holds a BA for Miele and an MA and PhD from Princeton. And one of her proudest achievements in this field is the acclaimed Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Hannah Calle's The Bell Stratagem, wrote she was awarded the 2006 Eliot Hayes Award. And last but not least, we have last year's winner, which is Nekisa Edamon. She's a San Francisco-based dramaturg, producer and director and French translator who has worked for 24 years. She's LMDA's executive VP freelance until July 9th, and the regional VP of the Metro Bay Area. Her career began in regional theater institutions as a dramaturg and literary manager for the Wilma Theater, San Jose Rep, and San Diego Rep. Her recent world premiere credits include dramaturgies for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this season on the riverbide, and Orta's heart-shaped nebula at the shotgun flares. So apparently all you have to do is work at OSS and you will be at Eliot Hayes. That's what I've learned from doing these introductions. Today. Today, right now. So the question I'm gonna start with for all three of you, which is gonna be, I think, a fairly lengthy answer, is what was the project for which you received the Eliot Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement and Dramaturgy? What made it distinctive for you, and what compelled you to become involved with or start the project? And I'm gonna start with Louie. Okay, it was 17 years ago. Can you just start with that? And here's what you will see is the difference between analog, I'm not joking about this, to digital, because they've got all kinds of stuff that they're gonna try to show to you, but. Ah! You just tried. No, I'm gonna show the original document, which is like something out of an archive. You know, in hand, how I got to make the production script that got the attention of the award in 1999. The project was Lae Blanc by Lillian Hansberry, directed by Tim Bond at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and it was one of those comprehensive assignments where you did research for the production and the cast and designer, but also was making the script with him in what we are now calling text workshops and also doing lectures and exhibits. It was one of those kind of comprehensive jobs. That said, what seemed to be the thing that made it very unusual was the text work that we had done and that we were examining three texts at the same time and seeing the differences in them and making our own script and asking the estate for that is something that people do a lot with Shakespeare, but hadn't really done in this way with mid-20th century plays. And it was a really fun archeology assignment and we came up with what I thought was a really great script and a really fun process and it is something that I continue to do today. So that was the big project. Melinda, you have some AV aspects. Okay, do you want me to share them now? How would, do you want to do it now or do you want to save it? It's up to you. I think I'll save it. Okay, great. I became interested through accident, trying to run away from theater as an actor. I wound up doing graduate work and discovered a trove of professional women's playwrights' works from the 17th and 18th centuries. And at that time, nobody had paid any attention to them except for Afro-Benn and didn't really even know they had existed or they had been an important part of 18th century theater. So I began to look and I found out how important they were and I became, and I was commissioned by Oxford University Press to do an anthology. And one of the plays in the anthology was Hannah Cooley's The Bell Stratagem, which was one of the most popular plays at the end of the 18th century. And the women that I worked with, all these women had their plays performed at Covent Garden or Verilien. They were completely part of the theater politics, the theater of the day. And these plays struck me, what struck me about them was how producible they were, how accessible they were, how much more the 18th century was like us than 19th century. And I had a pipe dream, I had a pipe dream of getting them published and then maybe produced. And I got the commission, so that was great, but I really thought it was just a pipe dream that was getting them produced. But I had a mentor in graduate school who was also the mentor of a young director. But without my knowing, I had shown my mentor manuscript that I was working on editing of The Bell Stratagem and he slipped it to this director who got interested in doing it. And when he had a directing fellowship at the OSF, he called me and said, I've been asked to do a dramatic reading. Are you interested in having me do this play? And I was like, yeah. So he did the reading, it was a big success. And then we did it in New York, full production of it. And then the OSF asked us to come back and do it. So this was the first time that this play had had a full production in 150 years. And what was special about it was what I had on earth, which was how unlike our stereotypes of 18th century theater, it was. And that as we go on, I will show you some of that later on in the presentation, but it was a gorgeous production. We had tons of people coming up and saying, why aren't we seeing this in our regional theaters? This is so much better than Goldsmith and Sheridan. And I said in my acceptance speech, I really felt like an acromance for us. I brought her back to life. And I'm continuing that work now and hope to see more of these women's work on stage. Nekisa? So I worked on a play called The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry by Marcus Gardley. And if anyone was at the New York conference last year, Marcus Gardley came and presented my award to me, which made me utterly happy. I've worked with Marcus on eight different productions and six or seven of his plays. And we had, this came about because the Lark to Play Development Center had an initiative called the Launching New Plays into the Repertoire Initiative to handpick plays that may have difficulty being produced, which have, want to have a lot of conversation around the play and they wanted to support the playwright to give them a chance to have multiple productions and community conversations around every production of that play to give that play a full launch into the world of theater as a new classic for the American theater. So in around 2010, Marcus and I had been working together on Every Tongue Confess, his first big production at Arena Stage. And we were doing, and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi at a small theater called Cutting Ball in San Francisco. And he said, I've got, you've gotta be my dramaturg on this, I need you. So it was a four year, four to five year project from inception to completion for companies across the country. We were all part of the Road Weeps Consortium for the Launching New Plays, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Nathan Cummings Foundation. And we had four world premiere productions across the country in partnership where the lead producers and the members, three members from the Lark, me and Marcus traveled to each production and had convenings, we called them. And each production was different, had a different director, a different concept of production, different design, different cast, different stage management teams. The only consistent artistic personnel were the playwright and the dramaturg. And the Lark's initiative has three cycles with three different playwrights. And this was the only cycle, cycle two of three that had a dramaturg attached. So it was a very satisfying and happy making for the playwright. It was very important to him to have that support. So we started in Juneau, Alaska at the Perseverance Theater. And then we went back down the continent to Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pillsbury House Theater. Then we went to Los Angeles Theater Center, LATC in California, and then back to University of South Florida in Tampa. And the productions happened between 2013, 2014. All the prep work was in the years before that. And the wonderful thing about the project was that I was in residence most of the time. Marcus had a very busy season those two years. So I was the representative for the playwright and the person to carry the knowledge from each production to the next. And I became a key person in all the community outreach events. So in all of those four communities, and when Marcus was with me, he did it with me, we went to high schools, universities, community organizations. We had community partners helping the production happen in each city, sometimes museums, arts organizations, other theater companies. For example, Native Voices of the Autry and the African American Museum in LA were partners there. University of South Florida also employed some professional actors because the characters, some of them are older elders of the community. And so it would have been very hard to cast very young students in those roles. Do you wanna show some of the images from that? Does that help? My project's a little far-flung and complicated. So, visual aids are fun. We will, everyone please close your eyes and pray for a few seconds. That would be delightful, cause there's nothing. So do I just click on one slide show? Oh, I'd like that, I'll go back. How can we go back here? Yeah. Watch dramaturgs do the tech dance. Yeah. There you go. I'm the sad dramaturg who hates track pads, so I'm at a loss. Ooh, stop, stop! Okay, this is the map of my journey. So it's a good visual aid, but it keeps moving forward. Stop. Is there a pause button? Yeah, let me see if I can. Yeah, see if the slide show does it up. Okay, who out there knows how to pause as well? Let me see. There we go, right click. We are progressive and technologically sound in our practice. Okay, so the play is about the migration of black Seminoles, also known as Seminole Freedmen, who started the Native American tribes were in Florida. And this play is tracking is a fictional tale based on history with poetry and magic and covering themes of migration, education, identity, spirituality, sexuality, and myth. And so it expands from the 1820s in Florida, the migration of a certain group of characters who travel all the way to Oklahoma and it becomes the Seminole tribe of Oklahoma, but they are all, it's a mixture of freed, free black men, former slaves, runaway slaves who joined the tribe of the Seminole Indians in Florida because the Seminoles had a tributary form of slavery and it was a way that the black folks could actually be protected if they became the slaves of the Seminoles. And it was the Seminole Indians didn't have a violent or an aggressive or a slavery type of situation. So they actually could live among them more as friends and colleagues rather than as slaves who had to serve their masters. So they had their own towns and crops and weapons and lifestyle and once a year, they would contribute corn to their tribe, to the Seminole tribe. So this is how they joined forces, this is in history. So there are characters that are black, there are characters that are mixed race, the results of years of blacks and Seminoles cohabitating, you end up with a mixed race and some pure Seminoles and there's a witch and there's a medicine man who's an elder. So the play travels that shows us that migration of this family, this town. And they founded the first incorporated all black town in America is called Wewoka, Oklahoma. And our fictional name for Wewoka is Freetown in the play. So the play actually has two acts and there are 16 years separating the two acts. So you see what happens to the, and it's one day in their lives that's a Seminole day and then the second act is another day. So it was fun to do, it was fitting and fun to do a play that was about a road and we took our show on the road across the continents from all the way between Juneau and Florida. So the one play is the constant in the four productions as are me and Marcus, but we are all in partnership and meeting after we put up the show, every producer comes and we talk about what we learned, the challenges, what the audiences were like, what the community responded to so we could transfer knowledge to each show. So I like looking at the four posters shows the difference that you can have different features on the same exact play. So this is Perseverance Alaska, the first production. And I was very happy that Drama Churchy was featured on all the publicity. They were very open to that and it made us all very happy. This is the Minneapolis production, so already huge differences in the feel of it. As a sidebar, as a dramaturg, I thought it was very interesting, it was contemporary clothing because the show was 1820s to 1866, so that was an interesting choice. This is the Los Angeles production. It was the most abstract set design. The director Shirley Jo Finney chose to use Capoeira in many instances in the play to have the two leaders of the town fighting. It was stylistic and the stage was a big giant square with big ladders on the side, very different from other shows. This was University of South Florida. So this was largely a student cast, student crew. I went there two different times in the beginning of their semester and then when they started rehearsal, I was part of a song and audition workshop. This is the cast of Perseverance and we used the native Alaskan tribe called the Klingit tribe. You can may see, there are like two black folks literally living in Juno, Alaska. One of them is an actor, so he was in our cast. He's Ibane Bailey with the H on his sweatshirt on the left side. So we imported all these New York actors to play the other black characters and our lovely Klingit friends were our tour guides. So in order to create a town on stage in this play, we were creating a real town among ourselves where we were joining with the locals and the outsiders to share their community with us. And Marcus is the gentleman with the white hat standing very proud on the right side. Our director is the redhead, Aaron Davidman. So sitting down below is, I think I'm taking too long. This is our native Alaskan Klingit composer, Rory Stitt. I am a singer by love, something I love is singing. I became his musical director, his assistant musical director and I carried those tunes and songs into every production and I became a musical director as well. I also carried the native language for the play where we had to create from bits and pieces of research and books we found. The language spoken by the Seminoles is not recorded. It's from the 1820s, so there's no recording of the actual language, proper recording. There's no one wrote it down. So a big part of my job was helping Marcus shape the language in the play and he also fictionalized some words, whatever he thought sounded good because he's quite a poet. This is the set that we're standing on the set. In Alaska, the same Juno cast and all the, some designers are mixed in there and the artistic director was the set designer. Then the cast changed. This is Marion McClinton, our director in the middle. This is Minneapolis, Pillsbury House Theater. The cast was a lot of very well known African American actors are in this cast. So some of the parts, when it was a mixed race, a black Seminole character. In Alaska, they were Klingit actors to show the Seminole side and here in Minneapolis, they turned, we had African American actors. So they took their black side of their mixed race character, so it really was interesting how the project changed. This is Los Angeles Theater Company. Some of these actors you might recognize from television or movies. Marcus is in the middle with the hat in the back row. This is the student cast at University of South Florida. Something I suggested to Fanny Green. She's the director I'm arm in arm with. Fanny, we had an advantage with the student population to add the townsfolk whenever we do plays that have townsfolk. We don't have enough money to hire townsfolk, but at a university we do. So this gentleman with the red shirt on the bottom is actually Iranian, he is not black or Seminole or anything close, but he could play a townsperson. So the cast ended up, there were a few more than what you see here. Here's their set was much more realistic with the magical twist. A very detailed set. This is the student cast again, University of South Florida. Marcus and I at the Alternative High School of Juno, Alaska. We spoke to their entire student body and some of them came to the show that night after we spoke to them, so that was very fulfilling. This is the consortium group of every leader of the four theater companies that produce the show and John Eisner in the center is heading the lark. So he, this was the launching new plays, Road Weeps Consortium Group. We travel to all four places. This is the cast of Minneapolis again. Okay, thank you guys. Okay, you have to come back now, Louis. Sorry, Melinda. Are you still, do you want to show yours now too? No, I'm not sure, we have the lights up. Well, we have, sorry, okay. They like movies. You guys like movies? Okay, hold on, I'm sorry and I'll apologize. That's all right, I can find it. I should sing native Alaskan songs now. Before I get started, I'll just say one of the things that I wanted to show you today, which is, I didn't want to show you the whole, I could show you pictures of the whole show, but which is beautiful. But what I wanted to show is one of the aspects that dramaturgy added to the piece. As I said, in essence, my goal, rather modest, is to reconstruct our idea of English dramatic history and to reincorporate the professional women playwrights into it. And when, because they were essentially written out in the 19th century, we have had a view of English theater which does not include them. And they were kind of, people were able to say things like, oh, there were some women playwrights, but they only were at sentimental place. So a lot of lies got mixed into the history. And that's one of the obstacles to teaching it or to producing it. People don't understand this stuff was really good. This stuff was cutting edge. This stuff was much more radical than anything to Sheridan and Goldsmith were writing. So it was, so what I wanted to do is go back and look at this work with fresh eyes and try to get down to what these women were trying to accomplish. And what I was finding was that indeed, they were writing more radical pieces and some of it had to do with their attitude towards women. There were, in these plays, there were a lot more women characters and they violated this normal stereotypes. So if people are familiar here with Restoration Theater, you'll know that if there was an older woman, she is generally a laughing stock. She is basically treated as she has any sexual urges that that is completely unnatural and comic. And that there's no use for any woman after she is past her ingenue stage. So what I wanted to look at is that the women playwrights, first of all, they have a great deal more women characters. Women characters befriend each other. It's not all catfights. And that older women have actually a life that goes on, a sexual life, a social life that goes beyond their early marriageable state. And the other thing that's really interesting is that there are women left unmarried on the stage. Not everything has to be sewn up. So what I wanted to do is show you one example of a place we had a wonderful actress named Demetra Pittman who played Mrs. Rackett. And Mrs. Rackett, let me just get this going here, hello? Great, okay, here we go, let's try this one more time. Okay, and then. Okay, this is Demetra Pittman playing Mrs. Rackett. Mrs. Rackett is a character, an older woman, she's a widow. She's been out of town for a while because she had to go through her official period of mourning but she has now returned to town triumphant and ready to enter social life again. She is the friend of the heroine, she's the cousin of the heroine who kind of operates technically as a chaperone. But what's interesting is when she comes back into town, she is welcomed back into society by this gentleman here, Mr. Villiers, who may have romantic intentions towards her but they certainly flirt a great deal and flutter the foc who admires her style very much. And Demetra played this part, she, Demetra talked to me a great deal about the part about what the stock characters of the time were like, what kind of role these women played in society and what we tried to do was make her a real person and not a stereotype. We did this with all the characters but this particular, this particular character is, let me just pause this again here. Okay, oh yay, okay. This particular character is really central to the play. She is the soul of wit in this play and she tends to operate as the person who unifies all the different plots. She's involved with the plot with the Angeneux and her fiance. She is involved with the plot that is a take off of from the country wife of the Pinch wife Marjorie plot where a man marries a young innocent woman from the country with the idea that he can keep her pure but he has to bring her to the city to be presented to the queen and Mrs. Rackett decides to free her. So she acts as someone who breaks down a lot of the patriarchal structures. So let's go next, here we go. And this is our heroine Latisha who was played by Heather Robison and here is Mrs. Rackett giving her advice on how to deal with this complicated situation with the man that Latisha is supposed to marry. And what's interesting again is that it's not Catty. She actually gives her serious advice. She's trying to befriend her. It is advice in this case that Latisha rejects but nonetheless, this is not the, it's not the prudish, if we think about like way of the world or we think of Mrs. Malaproc where these characters are just incompetent. Mrs. Rackett is extremely competent and fun. Here she is plotting with her friend, Ms. Ogle, to take down Sir George and free his wife. So it is, it is done, I mean, you can just see in this, just how light and airy this feels. This is not your dusty, dark, you know, little drawing room comedy. And there, so here they are plotting against Sir George. Oh, so the dog, I have been involved in several productions of this. Two of them, the actress decided the character had to have a dog and it's a dog puppet. Oh, my God. Anyway, here she is taking on Sir George and defeating him utterly. Sir George has tried to keep his wife who is, Lady Francis played by Miriam Lauba who is, you may have seen it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. David Kelly playing Sir George. And he is trying to say, tell his wife that, no, you don't wanna go out in town, it's really corrupt, it's really horrible. These fine ladies are just really decadent and horrible and so Mrs. Rackett gives her idea about what a fine lady is and enjoys lording it over Sir George. Okay, oops, that went backwards. I won't go into it, Latisha plays a joke on her. Fiancé, but this is her fiancé, Dora Court and he is now totally disgusted and he doesn't know whether to commit suicide or just break the engagement or whatever but Mrs. Rackett is the person who has to keep him from going to too many extremes and making sure he shows up at the masquerade and so there's this little flirtation going on between them and you can see from his expression that he doesn't take her as some kind of, how dare this older woman flirt with me. He is taken with her. He is impressed by her and she makes a little joke afterwards of, maybe I won't let Latisha marry him, I'll take it for myself. Later, yes, yes, and here she revels in it after it's done and I just, I love this and I mean, who doesn't want to see these plays when you see these types of characters? It's not the stereotype and it does give you a sense that when women looked at what was going on in society their take was very, very different. Dora Court decides to play mad to get out of his engagement and everybody knows that he's doing it and so she's imitating him here. And so, again, he's the butt of the joke, not her. And I think that may be the last picture I have. Oh no, and here she is at the end when everything works out. Latisha and her fiance are reunited on better terms and we have Mrs. Rackett celebrating with Latisha. Again, there's no bitter feelings. It becomes a real, a true celebration on very much more feminist terms, as you would say. So the women take, the women are at the forefront of the play. They are controlling most of the plot. They control a lot of, most of the comedy in the play. They, and it leads to a very different feel than most plays from that period and it feels like, no, this is not your grandmother's 18th century. And that's because we don't know these things. So what I've been trying to do is continue my research into this area and I'm finding more and more places where these playwrights were extremely radical and where this has been tamped down by the 19th century historians who have wanted to write them out. And part of the significance I feel about this, I love these plays. I want them done. I think they need to be back in our repertoire and I think it gives us much better understanding about where our drama comes from. But the way in which these women were written out of the history is a warning for all of us that they were very well established. One of the, like for example, Susanna St. Lieber wrote in the beginning of the century. And at the beginning of the century, well, like at any time, a playwright, a playwrights had to have a day job. There were only two playwrights who year in, year out account on making their living by their plays. One of them was Henry Fielding and the other was Susanna St. Lieber. So, I mean, that's how important they were. She wrote in 1709 up to about 1720 and her plays were being done by actors. David Garrett used one of her plays as his farewell performance, Soda Kitty Clive. She was an actor's writer, great, great parts. And then these people were written out. That's a warning. We think we've come so far. We have not come so far. I did a little study, 1779, 10 new plays opened on the legitimate stages of London. Four were by women, 40%. 1979, Broadway, 50 plays opened, two were by women, 4%. We have been hearing through the kill boys of all kinds of organizations right now. This has been, people are taking this on that we have come, we have made so little progress. What we don't understand is you can make progress now, but it's really easy for you to be written out of the history. And that's why it's so important to make our theater history so well integrated to have the women and other minorities so integrated into our idea of what theater is that they cannot be written out. And that's become more of my goal. And when I teach, now I make sure I teach very diverse curricula to my students, no matter where we are in history. And in order to make sure that, I mean, it is propaganda. I want the students to think this is the way it's always been. This is the way it has to be taught. This is what you should expect in your theaters. So yeah, that's partly where I'm coming from and what my dramaturgy was about in this particular production. And it was extremely successful. It was a gorgeous production. It was a very successful production. And I'm thrilled with that. All right. My dramaturgical entry into this project was definitely just text-based. It was a production that subsequently came but I want to talk a little bit about going into the archeology of a text. My early apprenticeship at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was going through Shakespeare texts, right? Which text is it? Whose text is it? Whose is your authority? What version are you going to do? And we did a lot of things where we look at quartos, folios, art in one, two, three, whatever, and compare them. So what had come as a philosophy of script, which I still practice today, is that it's a matter of when somebody asks whose script is it? Which script are you using? It's gonna be made in the moment with this director, this play, this space, this group of actors for this audience for this time. So what I get from Shakespeare is this sort of vissness of it. And so I basically applied that to this particular project, Les Blancs, which if you know anything about the stories, a little bit of a Hamlet story, a man comes back to bury his father and a revolution breaks out. There were two published versions of the script and in the old days, when you were signed with Sam French to do the production, and it says, you must produce the published version. Well, that's really interesting since there's three published versions of most of Tennessee Williams' work and most of Arthur Miller's and even a little bit of William Inge. So which version is the right version? They don't specify that, they say published. So there were two published versions of this play and we started to look at it, Tim Bonner, and we were like, oh my God, there's differences. And there was a very famous production done in the arena in 1970. The big deal about this play was that it was unfinished, that she was working on it at the time of her death. She never saw it produced, it was produced five years after she died and that had been finished by Robert Nemeroff, who was the executor and ex-husband of hers. So I came into it with a prejudice of like, wow, she never finishes, not that good a play, it's never anthologized. To Melinda's great point about anthologizing is because Goldsmith and Sheridan get anthologized so we think they're good plays. I'm like, be more critical. You know, I put together anthologies and it's like, who gives you the right is who you put in the book. So be more critical about that thing that you give to students or they're just like, well, it made the best play. I'm like, be more critical of that. So here's a great discovery and sort of like my own humility to say, here's a great play and I had a prejudice about it because of what I had in time. To just say dismiss it out of hand because it wasn't finished. So there was this great production in the arena in 1970 and that sort of recreated and put together a play and then was revived in 1989 by the Huntington. So we had the arena stage version and that was what we were asked to do, that particular version was the arena stage. And as we began to look at the differences between the two, there was a really great big structural difference and this is what I'll spend a couple minutes talking about. And that is that the Paul the plays, all versions start with sort of the silhouette of an African woman, a female African dancer in silhouette and you see Shembe who is the man who's coming home to bury his father who was chief of the village. And there's sort of this beautiful kind of provocative, evocative theatrical gesture that is some of the material for the play, right? And in the arena stage version, it opens up in the, goes immediately into the town where Shembe will come and meet his brothers and we will learn about that world before we go to another world. And so what seemed to be happening, and I had to kind of look at my cheat sheet for a second here, it is that in the first scene of the arena, it went into the hut and then went into the mission and sort of worked that way through the end of the first act. There's a very famous speech that Shembe does at the end of that first act, which for me really sort of sums up the theme of the play and it's really about how he has been around the world and he has seen the way men have treated men and that it seemed to be universal that men are in human treatment around the world. And I thought that that was a very potent and very hands-barrying philosophy and I wanted us to have the emotional and physical sort of ability to absorb that speech. And what we were finding in rehearsal was that there were two great big scenes and it was just so hard to get to that particular scene and have the energy for the actors and the energy for the audience. And we did this experiment one day where we flipped the scenes which is what the Sam French version really was and all of a sudden the play just revealed itself in a new way and we all had energy for that speech. So we wrote the estate and said could we flip the scene and this is listen, this is the days when we faxed things. And I was like, oh I gotta fax, she's in New York, it's five o'clock and we need the answer because we're about to go into tech, it would matter a lot, right? If you flip two big scenes which scenes first for the lighting designer for God's sakes, right, so I faxed and we got the fax back. We got the fax back, you know. And I went screaming in like, we got the permission. And there was an award given for that. Yeah, well deserved. Go back to fax technology, you may have a chance to win the hate. That's the other thing we've learned. I'm kidding. So as a result of either these projects or receiving the award, what effect has that had going forward on you in your career? Sorry for the confusion. Since I just won the award, we will see how it affects my career. However, we had a lovely time, Marcus and I at the banquet last year, when Louis Douthit came up to us and said, you too, I need you too to do play on, let's talk, I'm calling you in a couple weeks. And so we have been commissioned, we're part of play on. And Marcus and I are doing the first, the translation exercise of working on King Lear and putting it into modern English in this first phase of what might become an adaptation and might become a production. So that was a fun result of that. Which also has its textual challenges, right? So yeah, which one are you gonna use? You know, do you have the, and so I said I want all of them, so you have to conflate it, because I want every scene, I want to get my money's worth out of Marcus, but sometimes you do a version without the trial scene, right? And sometimes, I mean, there's a couple of other big moments like that too. So which one were you gonna use? And so we had a lot of conversations about which text you're gonna start with, which is gonna be great fun. Yeah, so we're doing a conflated version, including basically all of it. Yeah, everything I want. Yeah. We have to please Louie. That's a full meal deal, yeah. Go big or stay home. Hey, you're right. And we're up for the challenge. Awesome. Melinda? Well, since I work in a very obscure area of dramaturgy, what it did was it gave me more credibility outside and opened other productions to me. It still did not help get a job for a long time, a teaching job. I did a lot of adjuncting. But as I said, it did give, it did score me a lot of brownie points. And what it does is when I have talked now to people about doing productions or talking about what I've spoken in guest talks, it has helped people be willing to admit that this area is worth looking at. So that has been really useful beyond me, but for also just publicizing that there are historical women's playwrights. It also makes me more credible when I tell people like right now, now I'm teaching at USC. And so when I say, look, we need to be producing some of these plays and yes, they are producible. And yes, look, there was production done at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We did a production in New York. Got a great review in the times. People listen to me. And so that has been very helpful. I mean, it also helped that at roughly the same time my edition had come out with Oxford and so it became accessible. So what has happened is now the plays are being taught. And it's my goal to take it farther. And I am, as I said, turning up even more radical things that these women were trying to do. And I'm working with that and hopefully that this background will help them take it seriously on that. It made my career. Because it happened at an early stage in my career and to get the encouragement that this project got from our colleague. Unfortunately, I encourage me to keep doing this thing. Because I am as obsessed with the structural plays as I ever was. I believe that that is a crucial point of beginning. I am still pulling plays apart. I'm still looking at what this time, this particular document is going to do for this particular production. I'm as obsessed with sort of the ethereal nature as much as we're filming this. The ethereal nature of the event that everybody gathers together to do. It has led to play on. It has led to creating workbooks for directors. It has led to talking about Shakespeare in a different kind of way from a different perspective. It has led to a methodology on how to analyze plays. So I mean, it has meant everything to me in terms of who I am sitting here in front of you today, the way I examine a play because of this quirky little exercise I did, which I still find eminently fascinating and maddeningly elusive in a way. You can't kind of nail the damn thing down, right? But that seemed to have unleashed in me this perspective. I think you've answered it to some degree as well, but did it create change in the way that you approached your work? As a result, not just the project, but getting the award that it changed the way you were thinking. I mean, you talked, I think about... Yeah, I do a lot less research, obviously. I mean, like I, and I can do it. I've got the books. I was like, wow, you used to do a lot of research. And I did a lot for this, too. I'm sorry, I just don't kind of remember some of the details of it. I just moved my office and so therefore everything's not where it should be, but I find that I am laser beam focused on the event from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. and of course I work at the Oregon Three Hour Shakespeare Festival. So it is 8 p.m. to 3, 11, 05 p.m. That I am absolutely hold the line as story editor and that is one of the things that this project focused on. I did all that other stuff. I know what she was reading when she was writing the play. It's not like I didn't do the archeology of that, you know? I know what she was referring to in every, like you wanna annotate it? I could have annotated it, which is also something we should all do, by the way, because even 60 years later, we actually don't know a lot of what's being referenced in plays anymore, right? Not just the Shakespeare thing, but yeah. So that's how I enter the room now. I just enter it as like that's my line. You all do this other stuff and if it gets in the way, I will say you got in my way, but you know and then let the director figure that out. But that speech that I was talking about, I mean I went to Tim and I said, if you don't plant that guy's center stage and that we, so everybody hears it at the same time, I'm gonna be really mad at you. So that was, actually I think I said I was gonna punch him, but, and he's like six foot eight or so. I mean he's like really it was a silly threat, but it was enough of one, apparently, because he did exactly what I wanted. And after that I didn't kind of, you know the details don't really matter. I know it sounds strange for a dramaturg to say that the details actually don't matter if you say, this is about this group of ours playing this together. There's certain things, integrity, structural integrity. There's so few you can say about artist intent, really even with the artist in the room it's hard to say what the intent was. You don't actually always know. It's kind of great when Marx is there saying this is what I wanted. But look at these documents you and I work with. I can't say what Shakespeare wanted, we're desperate to do this, right? We're desperate to say, well biography of Lorraine Ansbury must mean this. We can't do that Shakespeare, so it's unfair. So I am absolutely, this is the ground. That two dimensional art object is the ground on which I stand. And I think that this exercise and this having to put, Doug Langworthy really encouraged me to do this. I don't wanna write all this crap out. You know, it's a lot to do this award thing. You remember? I don't remember. The application took months. Like you want what and what and what. And I was like, my God, I've been to college three times. It wasn't that bad. So I thought, oh, I can crystallize some people. So it is the same damn exercise. Maybe I, you know. Okay, look, if you wanna come up and look at this, it's cut and paste. Honestly, it's like with tape and I do it in front of baseball games because those are great. You know, you don't have to pay attention to baseball. It's like, oh, you know, then you can go back to your project. But it's like, we're just lining things up now. I do them six. Quartofilio, Arden, OSF 2003, 2010 notes. I put together three books like that for directors. We do it with Sarah Ruhl. She had three versions of Edmonds' cell phone. Which one was the correct one? Right? There's five versions of August Wilson's plays across the country. Which one's the correct one? I don't know how that's fascinating, right? They were produced. They were true. They were produced. So to me, this is what Shakespeare opened up. And then what I looked at from Shakespeare to put into all plays are new plays. That's my philosophy. All plays are new plays. So I think that this is the thing that sort of launched how to codify it. Because I had to do the elaborate application process. Well, if I can add on to as far as what I learned from methodology and how that worked putting this play on the stage, obviously it became the directors. But what I was able to provide is I had spent a lot of time looking at this woman's plays. And I knew the structure inside out. And she was just brilliant architecturally. There was never anything wasted. But I also felt like the first scene, there was something funny about it. There was a lot of sort of exposition. But she wouldn't just put this stuff in for exposition. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it was. And I remember talking about it with the director. And I finally realized, first of all, it's a play that starts with an empty stage, an actor upstage center, comes in. We have no idea who he is. We have no idea he's looking for somebody. His first line is, well, here I am at this play. Lincoln's in. So where is he? We don't know who he is. We don't know why he's looking for him. We know nothing about him. And he says to the servant, go take the horses and let me know and ask questions. So we still don't know anything. And he doesn't know anything. You know what's going on. Someone else enters the stage. We don't know who this person is. But it's not the person that the guy's waiting for. It's somebody else. But he knows him. And they start a conversation. And that's where this exchange of exposition comes in. And I'm like, this seems really weird. Until I realize, oh, it's not about the exposition. The exposition is being used to establish the relationship between these characters and what you have to learn in that time is where your sympathy's lost. Who you're rooting for in this play. Because in the next scene, it's going to take off like a roller coaster. And if you don't know already where you stand, you're lost. But if you do know, it's like you take a deep breath and it never dies. It just goes on and it doesn't wind up till the end. It's nonstop. And it actually was really brilliant. We realized eventually that what it had to be done is hadn't played almost like God-built pattern. It was always each of them trying to one up each other. And that's what it was about. Just it was about one-upsmanship. And ha, I have this information that you don't know. No, oh, really? I've got something on you that I bet you didn't know. And so that's what it was about. And having to learn that and having to learn how it was creating the relationship with the audience at that moment so that the audience was hooked. And now I think whenever I read a play, the first thing I'm looking for is, okay, how is this setting up the relationship with the audience? And I think that especially doing historical plays, we just start out with a lot of preconceptions about what the play is about. Oh yeah, they just talked a lot in those days. They just, you know, they just get... No, everything, if a play is any good, everything's there for a reason. And if you get rid of your preconceptions and you start asking questions about what the drama is supposed to do, that's when you're gonna find out if you've got something new here. And that's when I started to find out. There was a lot in me there. Is when I stopped, I didn't treat it. I really started saying, well, where is this, why is it structurally like this? That there's a reason. Nekisa, I know you don't have quite the amount of time between the award and now, but, Louie and Linda do, but how did it change the way that you were thinking if you had time to reflect on that? I'm not sure how to answer the question. Or how did, has it changed the way that you approach your work? Can I ask it differently? You certainly can. Which is, in some ways, because you've been in the field for so long. I mean, 20 year, what? 24 years. Yeah, okay, who's counting? Yeah. Like really, another year? I mean, in some ways, this is a combination to a certain degree of sort of a methodology that you have honed in. You know, I mean, like the consummate travelogue, you know, chronicler that you're certainly described in this particular project, but I think that you've been doing that all along. So I mean, in some ways, does it feel like, yeah, here's a recognition or here's an acknowledgement of the kind of thing. I mean, if you're getting anything out of this, there's six different ways to do drama, Jersey, you know, like with, you know. So that's my question. Yeah, it was a perfect project for me and it did feel like this is, it's time for me to ask for an award and this project, it was four productions of the same play, but totally different production. And doing the application process to try to wrangle all of this, I showed you guys maybe seven photos. I have 500 plus at least, just photos. And the application, I couldn't make it shorter, I think it was 25 pages. But I had to put photos in there. They don't request any archival material, but it did feel also that it was our 30th anniversary last year and I've been an LMDA member since about 19, probably 95 or something from the early, maybe George Mason University conference. And it felt like if I'm going to, this project combined all my different skills and the ways I do do drama, Jersey and whatever I did in the first production, I could expand upon or change or develop or try another angle, another perspective in the second production and then the third and then the fourth. So it's true that it was kind of a good sample of all the things I do and the fact that I became the native language guide, I had my own packet just for that. The music director providing research and then script development and all that entails and helping manage the changes in each production, the script changes for Marcus. Does that answer what you were saying? Thanks. And in a way too, it's a bit of a distillation of what both Louie and Linda are talking about and instead of hundreds of years apart, you have four productions quite close together. So how was it being the dramaturg keeping them both live but also keeping them true to being a play that was being created and developed throughout the process? Because you're trying to in a way be this vessel that brings knowledge from one show to another but at the same time you also have individual productions that are being created and want to be their own thing. So how are you managing the balance of those two things? It's true. It took all your skills as a dramaturg to also keep stepping back and not saying this is the only way and offering the research and if they say I'm not focusing on that, take it away. And then two actors in Minneapolis, the second production were really wanting to know all the scripture references in the play. So that was a brand new research document that became 22 pages long because I'm thorough and detailed. And yeah, then Marcus is a preacher's kid so his plays are strung throughout with Bible references all the time. And this was about the fighting of the native customs and spirituality and love of nature and gods in nature versus Christianity creeping in through the black slave culture. So there were a lot of religious debates in the play. One final question before we open it up to the audience is have you returned to these collaborations since the project? I know you already kind of answered this question in the case of someone Linda, have you come back to this in a way? Well, I'm expanding the work that I'm doing on these playwrights. I've been doing a lot of work in Susanna Sontliever's work as well as on Hannah Cooley. I'm really fascinated right now with how she adapted both a play by Afra Ben. I think she is the first professional woman playwright who adapted the work of another professional woman playwright. But I also found in this work that there's all these violas and Sebastian's and Olivia's. There's this twelfth night in there as well. And when I'm finding out a lot that first of all, my hunch was right that it is she was indeed making allusions to and adapting twelfth night within the play and that the audience was in on the joke. A lot of questions that I'm finding that all they need to do is be asked and the answers are there but no one's asking them. No one has ever asked them. But I've been finding out more about how women were using women writers were using Shakespeare as a way of asserting their right to their place in the world of letters. And that what Hannah Cooley did, she always went a step further. She said, well, fine, I'm gonna take twelfth night, which is a play about Miss Rule and I'm gonna make a twelfth night version of it. I'm gonna turn it inside out so there's all this homoeroticism and incest and imagery, but it's all comedy. And it was designed to be played on twelfth night. It caused a little bit too much of a scandal that had to be taken down and rewritten before it could be put up again and the only public tradition is much tamer than the original but I always have been going back to the manuscript versions because the late 18th century and the early 19th century just both rise all the parts out of these plays. So yeah, so I'm going back and I'm trying to do more and I'm trying to get them done. But also, and I've been back at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I've worked in education there in the Institute there. I've taught, I also got to do a stage reading, direct a stage reading of one of the women's plays which was a great deal of fun and it made me see how well all audiences responded to it. So yeah, so I've gone back and I established a relationship that I hope will continue. Louie? I heard a definition of success the other day which is that you return back to where you started, which is a sort of sign of having a successful career. And in 2014, we produced The Signed Incident, Producing the Window by Evan Hanfrey which is my favorite play of all time and I've been trying for 23 years for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to produce it and it was the same method. I think maybe look at six strips. I can't remember. I mean, Juliette Carrillo and I mean, that was a really fun product. We did old school, it was Scotch tape because there were three different scripts and we just kept cutting it up and we liked that one and then we would paste it in there and it was like I might have one and we liked that one. So it was this crazy quilt script that we came up with for her production and that was a really great one. So I mean, I'm a hands bare girl through and through and so it has been a great joy to have the privilege to walk with her on these two beautiful plays. Are there any questions from the audience for anyone up here today? Norman, we have a microphone coming your way. Thanks, this is a question for Melinda. Aside from the Bell Stratagem, the play you've been talking about and these two productions in Oregon and New York, have any of the plays in your Oxford anthology been produced in the 20th century? I'm not sure that I can answer it. I have not been involved with productions other than the fact that I did a staged reading of The Times at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I am dying to do a production of The Busy Body. It is a fabulous play. It would shock people to know that in 1709 there is a really major play in which the title character is openly gay. As I said, these people are much closer to us than 19th century. So I would love to see that done. I've also had some interest in doing the innocent mistress at a university because it's a great mess of a play. It's five interlocking plots, 10 major female characters, 10 major male characters. So great for a college production. But I think that there have been attempts at Bell Stratagem and The Busy Body, but I don't know that anyone has done any of the others. So I'm still out there crusading. Melinda, I think shotgun players did an Afro-Bane play. Is it The Rover? Is that Afro-Bane? The Rover has gotten to one a lot. That's not in my anthology. That's not in your anthology. Afro-Bane is sort of the only female playwright that most people know from that period. And she's very problematic because she is, she is one of the bodiest writers, but she is extremely politically conservative. She is a royalist. The women that I'm working with are mostly wigs and they are perfectly comfortable in turning patriarchy on its ear, but she wasn't. The play that Cooley adapts of hers keeps a similar plot, young woman marrying old man. Two of those situations. But in the plays, the young people are overthrown aristocrats, the old people are rising middle class, and so to defeat the older people is to re-establish the hierarchical order. In Hannah Cooley's play, everyone's kind of equal status, so overthrowing the older people is overthrowing patriarchy. Do you have a theory why in England, why the National Theater, the World Shakespeare Company, the major regional theaters, why none of them have produced these plays? Mostly it's because they're very conservative in what they do as far as that they have an idea of what the history is, and they are even more resistant to redefining the canon. That's been my experience with it at any rate. I do know actually, to your point, somebody did do The Times in England, and I found that out because I discovered that they actually had plagiarized some of my work. And I called them on it, but they did do the play. But it was in Bristol, not in London. But I would love to work on these plays anywhere with someone. I think by giving ourselves, recognizing a history that is not just white male, it empowers diversity today. And I use that in my teaching as well, is that by referring back to, well, yes, there was this person writing then, or here we have Lin-Nottage writing now, well, there was Hansberry. It's really helpful to bring in the history. It establishes legitimacy. And especially when the players are so good. Really, really good. Any other questions? Hi, Nikisa. Hello. I was interested in Marcus creating a new language and how you worked as a dramaturg of that. And I was also interested in the sexuality in the play and the two-spirited bromance story. Because when I read your reference material, there was nothing about, historically, in your reference with you about sexuality. So if you could talk about that, that would be great. So with the language, we believe that Seminoles of that time period spoke a combination, a language that borrowed from their cousins, the Creek language and Mikosuki. Muscogee Creek and Mikosuki languages. And you can find some vocabulary and alphabet and sounds in research from the Creek. But the Mikosuki wasn't recorded properly. And so what I did, Marcus had fashioned. There was one, there's usually one book that becomes my Bible on every show. And one of the main resources was Oklahoma, Seminoles, Medicine and Magic, something like that. And it had a lot of poems and lyrics of songs. It was a very cultural custom book and it had hand-drawn illustrations. One of the few things. So we would, Marcus would, he's a poet, so he liked what he heard and wrote down. There are a lot of songs in this play and chants and magical moments of creating, like trying to call the rain, a rain dance and singing, the mother who, the grandmother of the tribe had passed away, but she becomes wind song in nature and they follow her song through, past the Trail of Tears to get to their new homeland. And so that has language. So what I did took Marcus's words and then discovered that certain letters don't exist or didn't exist in either of those two languages. So the J's are actually Y's and he had spelled the J into the script. So that was one example of, we decided, let's make it more authentic, the sound. So let's change all those J's to Y's, for example. And then sometimes I'd say, this is the actual corn ritual to make the corn grow and is a green corn ceremony to try to rid the town of evil. And so here's the real one. And then he said, I actually like the sound better if we switch these two words. And so it was kind of a mixture of three languages. Marcus, Mikosuki, and Creek Muskegee, that's the language of the road weaves and the people of Freetown. So that's how we came up with the language. And then I had resource material to back up some of that stuff and even illustrations for those moments. And then your other question was, a big part of our play is homosexuality and the two men who were best friends growing up became lovers, which wasn't that uncommon in Native American, in the seminal at least, seminal culture. It wasn't that as taboo. And so it existed, but people may not have been a couple. But a lot of characters in Marcus's work, sometimes there's homosexuality in the plays. And so we actually came across a lot of trouble with some local tribes in each production. In Minnesota, there were some people who had a real problem with the men kissing on stage. So what I was trying to say, the leaders of the tribe, there's a number two is the black man and Trobridge is the seminal. They're both full blood and they become best friends growing up together and then lovers, deep true love. And then they landed Freetown and found the town together and then they have a break because they decide one of us has to be sheriff if we're gonna do a real town for the first time, we're gonna race for it and Trobridge cheats and number two has never owned anything in his life and he's so upset he breaks with him and they become mortal enemies. But there are flashbacks in the play where they go back in time to their love making the first time they kissed, the first time they got together, first time they declared, I love you, you're my one. This was the phrase we had, you're my one. And so they, the other part of the story when you meet them is that they have each had kids who become mixed race because their wives are another culture and it's a Romeo and Juliet story because a lot of people now don't know they were lovers before and now their kids are getting together and number two ends up killing the boy to protect his girl, Sweet Tea. So in any case, yes, it was some, does that answer your question, David, a little bit? How we grappled with it? Yeah, so early on in the writing, Marcus had found a gentleman, I hope I remember his name, he was a native Seminole, he was an elder of the tribe, he read the play, he gave Marcus some feedback, he actually gave Marcus his blessing on it. And Marcus, one reason he wrote the play is that he found out that he has Seminole blood in him from his father's side, his father who's a preacher in Oakland who is an African-American man and he says, Marcus, don't talk about that, that's ancient history, we're not Seminole, don't talk about it. So Marcus said, all right, I'm gonna write my play. So I'm losing my trade of thought. Does that answer your, okay. Any other questions? So my question is for Louie and my question is in what way do you, you were talking about the analog and the digital and I was wondering in what way do you employ technology now in your dramaturgical work and do you find it hinders or enhances your approach to structure? I still don't use technology because it's still a handmade document. I still wanna be in the room talking things out and over and so far yet I don't think a computer can do that conversation for us. Now there's some improvement in terms of different kinds of formatting programs to manipulate the text, to line them up. But still it's just go old word tables, very old fashioned and I just talked to a guy who's doing an app called Shakespeare which is fantastic and he wants to figure out how to be more accommodating in the rehearsal room in terms of when things change and how do you do annotations. It's still very, very, very crude and time consuming. You know that said there's certainly lots of great platforms to share materials with casts and audiences, right. There's box and there's Dropbox and there's Google Docs and still and yet they all have their challenges. We still do old fashioned notebooks in the members lounge where we have hard copies of stuff like just really old school and people are pouring over that stuff which is kind of fascinating. Like it's some document from 1620 or something. Do you know what I mean? Like all right but we have less and less of that kind of tactical part of our world anymore, right. So not for the kind of entry or comment I would make in the rehearsal room or with a playwright. It's still pretty much sit around and talk about stuff. Now I do diagram things and so I have a whole kind of like but it's all pencil, it's all really old fashioned note taking. I tried really hard to figure out how to do that for a long time. I thought it's just taking so much longer than to just do it and I learned by this we're losing that sort of connection I feel. So I'm getting a little, it's not like I'm a Luddite but I'm very much respecting again the handmaidness, handmaidness of the work that we do and the embody work and the effect of that and I'm much, I still wanna stay close to sort of those roots. Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. So Louis, this is Shelly Orr, proud past president of NDA. I just wanna say that when you archive that, when that goes into a librarian's, under a librarian's care they'll call it collage because I know that's from archival work that anything that's mixed media lets more than one piece of paper they call it collage. But I just wanna thank you all so much for helping us to see the gift that dramaturgs can give in so far as amplifying the personality, the personality is not really the right word but the details of a playwright's process and the way that they are able to communicate with an audience. And I think that at least some of my most famous or favorite discoveries have always been those little details such as the one that Louis brought up about knowing what Lorraine Hensbury was reading when she was writing the play. Or for me, when I worked on a piece about Flannery O'Connor, noticing that from early in her days in the 40s, she was using one typewriter that had a weird thing where a C, the capital C didn't line up. And then after she's a world famous author she is still using that same typewriter. And it's just that little moment. I mean, not that that adds anything to anything but it just gives us a sense of the personness of these people and Melinda's looking back and understanding like, let's assume there's a reason that this structure is used. And of course with Marcus saying, yes, this is a combination of free languages and one of them is the playwright's language like his own personal language. And so I just wanna thank you all for sharing what you shared today and helping us to see that dramatrix can both discover, amplify and record these kinds of very valuable understandings that our playwrights bring to us and for about our culture. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. Shelly kind of saved me the trouble of having to do a wrap up. So thank you for that, Shelly. No, no, that was great. That saved me from having to think on my feet. I appreciate it. So I just wanna take a moment for all of us to thank all three of you for joining us and for reminding us about your project. Thank you. And so now I think we have a half hour break until our next set of sessions. So go, be free, enjoy. Thank you.