 The difference is that group in here, they have been putting together some dynamic communities and those communities mean their regional community, their artistic community and then their institutional community and as they have been building their festivals, they're also running their theaters and they're working with theaters in Kate's case, a geographical region. In Joe's case, it's the city of New York but a collective of programming for play development that has just been building and building and building for years and continues to. So it's thriving. Andy Arthur is the Executive Director of the Theater, South Ward of Theater League and Jenny McConnell-Prebren is the Artistic Director of two things. Well, V.C. cultural and Rorschach Theater. So I thought that in this context, all of us as writers would probably like to know from these wonderful, wonderful people who have been doing a lot of work for a long time across the country what happened to the fish salt to make what they do happen. And by that I mean year in and year out finding places that both appeal to their audiences, appeal to them as artists to produce while at the same time building relationships that I'm sure grow ever wider especially with social media now in some ways taking what Woody had said to us as writers and also making our community of artists better regardless of where we are. So the good news is that the internet has allowed us to reach beyond but at the same time there's something absolutely wonderful about finding our community within our zip code, you know what I mean? Or within our state or within our institution. So that said, this is Jenny McConnell-Prebren from Rorschach Theater, Washington, D.C. Andy Arthur from South Florida Theater League. It used to be the theater league of South Florida. It's gone through three name changes since I've been there and I'm on my seventh year. And Joe Genesee, who you met earlier with Naked Angels in New York and I'd like to know how Naked Angels in New York and Naked Angels L.A. differ or apart at some point. Kate Snodgrass from Boston Playwrights Theater and artistic director of the Boston Theater Marathon and goddess of theater at BU. And then Mark Ruthier who is at Orlando Shakespeare Theater. No, Orlando Repertory. No, I got it right. I got it right. Orlando Shakespeare Theater and a new colleague and friend who I have now met through N and P and I'm delighted to share this data forward with you. In order, so, we have this time to have, I guess, however you're going to moderate it and then we'll have a question. Go from there. Great. Thank you. So, the idea of connecting with community I think has become a more dynamic phrase in itself. The question I think used to be, I used to be the literary manager at the Magic Theater in San Francisco and then I was the associate artistic director at Southern Rap. And there's sort of been an evolution of the question, how do we educate our audiences to new plays? And it used to drive me insane because my answer was always, well, make a good play. And the people that come to see it will say, oh, that was cool. I want to come see more new plays. But it's a very, very complicated question and I think now it's with the idea of connectivity and that there are theaters out there that are creating departments that are called, you know, our connectivity department. And how does one connect with their community I think is a much more dynamic question. And I thought that we would kind of move this along in three different tiers, which I would love to ask you guys for each of you how you identify your plays and your playwrights locally and then nationally. You know, is there a ratio between the amount of local people that you would like at your festivals and the amount of national people that you would like at your festivals? How you identify them and how you identify those plays? Do you find a play first and then your playwright the other way around? And then I would like to morph that into a conversation about how you effectively get that word out once you have a festival set up, how you get the word out into the community and create that dynamic relationship between community and festival, community and theater company. And then I'd like to open it up to you guys and find out what it is that is on your minds. So why don't we start with you, Kate? Okay. And go ahead and talk about the, you know, finding your playwrights and finding your plays for, you know, the university and the theater company. Okay. Well, it's two different things. The Boston Playwrights Theater is, we run the graduate program in playwriting at BU. So our population of playwrights are current students and alums of that program. And how I get the word out is we produce plays by alums of our theater, of our playwriting program. And then I send out letters nationally to about 70 theater companies with synopses and some quotes from the newspapers, hopefully. And the playwrights contact and then I let it go because I don't have time to do anything else. And actually that works. Our playwrights get about, I don't know, five or six bites every time I do this. So then I forget about it. But I think what you're really, for our purposes in 10 minute plays, I run a 10 minute play marathon every year now in May. And we produce 50 10 minute plays in 10 hours. And each one is supported by a different theater company from New England. So this, what happens is we get about 400 entries from all over New England. We ask the community at large to read these plays and we put it in packets of 10. We hand those out to all in sundry. They read, three people read the plays and we get scores back. I put the scores into the computer. I'm the only one who sees them. And then the highest scored ones go to the final three judges that read the plays. And then those plays, those 50 plays, and by the way I invite some playwrights in the area, like you have to have a New England address. So Theresa Rebeck actually has a house in Vermont. Bob Bruce Dean lives in the area. Israel Horowitz, et cetera. So we have these high profile playwrights but also everybody else then. So the net for 48 or 45 or whoever get into the mix. And then I match up those playwrights and their plays with theater companies. So there's 50 of them and they buy for these plays at a certain time on a certain day and I get 50 emails at the same moment. Giving me their top five choices and then I meet them out as that happens. And then the good news is that they rehearse it. They come on this one day, we rehearse, we have a week of technical rehearsals where they have 30 minutes in the theater. And then we put it all happening on one day. And over the years, next year will be our 17th year. And over 20 of those playwrights that have been, you know, the theater companies have worked with have had their full length plays done at those theaters. So it's a real, you know, the key is to hook up the playwrights with the producing entities and to let these people know that a living playwright is not a horrible thing to have in the room with them. That's all. That's what happens. That's wonderful. Plus it's a great community builder because all of these 50 theater companies are coming together on one day and over time. And I have to say, I think Boston, you know, 17 years ago was starting, it was very laissez-faire. Don't touch me and don't come near me because I have my actors, I have my plays. But, you know, I think the time is ripe for me to ask them, will you come together on this one day and for charity, by the way, all the money goes to the theater community, the Nebulant Fund. So it doesn't come to us. We're working for free. In fact, everyone is working for free. We only pay the stage manager and the stage managers in front of house now because that's a long story. But everybody else is working for free. So it's a real community builder. I think we've, you know, we're talking to each other and sharing so much. And new plays are starting. There's a Renaissance in Boston now with new plays. I'm happy to say. I think that's true. Yes, John? Yes. Yes. Good. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Joe. Well, Naked Angels, which is the company that I've worked with and been working with for about the last 20 years, really, we are, to a great extent, a development company. We produce plays, but the thrust of our work, our engine, is really play development. And that is in line with the original mission of the company, which is to create theater that speaks to today. And how we do that, which is quite community-based and oriented, is through this, what we call the three-step process. The program that I run, Tuesdays at 9, is really, it's a place for writers to hear work that we're currently writing. It's a place for actors to come to, to read roles. I've seen actors literally transform from young guys and girls who are sort of just off the bus. You can see the talent, but there's no craft and there's no sense of, where do I live in my body? And just by getting up week after week and cold reading, making quick choices and then just going with it, it's been, it's fantastic and exciting and it's a privilege to watch. And, you know, it's a community where about 150 people a week gather. We're in a theater downtown called Theater 80, which is, we don't have our own theater, so we're sort of itinerant. And it's a great space. And we do about six, seven pieces a night. The second tier of our program is called Angels in Progress, excuse me, is called First Mondays. And that's a place where a play that's been in development will get its first public reading. And we do that on the first Monday of every month during the season. And then the next step is Angels in Progress. And that is where plays that we've been bringing up through the pipeline will get their first productions. It can be basically a staged reading through to a full production. And there will be several plays during the course of Angels in Progress, you know, from A to B to C. And so we try to keep this pipeline going, but it really, the doors are open to the whole town, whoever wants to come in, people coming from California or from other parts of the country. I always like to think of Tuesdays at 9 specifically since it's sort of a ground floor as a kind of conceptual thing in terms of who's a part of it. John Lennon used to say when he was asked about, well, what is the plastic oh no band? And, you know, who's in the plastic oh no band? He would say, you're in it. You know, if you want to be, you know, and that's how I kind of feel about Tuesdays at 9. You know, if you want to be there, you're part of it. There's no membership or anything like that. You know, it's inclusive. And I think that's one of the reasons why we're successful for as long as we've been. You know, and the company, Nathan Angels has really gone through evolutions. I mean, when we first started out, it was the late 80s and it was a different city. And it was a young company of young people just out of school, you know, making marks and getting newsprint and doing work and this and that, and very sort of hip. And then we went through a period where we were really known for throwing great benefits. We would have big parties, right? Working out. And then we went broke, which in a way was kind of the best thing that could happen to us because, you know, there's nowhere to go but up and you take a look at, well, what are we about? And really what we are about is developing work. We have another outlet called Naked Radio, which basically, you know, they're podcasts of radio plays, which is fantastic because it's almost a lost art. And so writers and performers, you know, have a new, you know, have a new old medium to work in. And we are still producing plays not as often as we have in the past, but a couple of years ago, a play that was really got its start at Tuesdays at nine and went up through the pipeline called Next Fall being on Broadway and nominated for a best play. So that was gratifying. And it was also really, it was a really wonderful play that spoke to our time. And I think more than anything, that kind of speaks to what we aspire to. We talked a little bit about how you find your plays and playwrights. Is there a submission process? Is it mostly through people's? Well, in many ways they find us. You know, we don't really do any outreach, for instance, going to the ground level Tuesdays at nine. The doors are open and the submission process is very old school. Show up with a hard copy of 10 pages of your play, your screenplay, maximum. If you're a fiction writer or an essayist or any sort of prose, five pages maximum. And hand the hard copy to me. And my producing partner, his name is Andrea Siri. And we read everything based on the hard copies. We get about a dozen submissions a week. And through those submissions, we program the evenings. And then we try and bring the work up through the pipeline. Obviously we do receive submissions of plays the way every theater company does. And we read the plays, so that's also another avenue. But we really try to develop our own work through open doors right now. So it's really about showing up? It is. And in a way, that's what being a theater artist is. You've got to show up, you know, and you just have to do a little bit of, you know, have some elbow grease. So that's, yeah, it is. It's showing up. And it's impossible to put all of these submissions up week after week. So the thing that I look for is a voice. And I don't look for craft. I don't look for experience or credits or anything like that. You don't even have to know how to format a page. If there's a voice, we'll read it. That's it. Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do, Andy? I'm with the Southwest Theater League and we have our Summer Theater Festival. We are a service organization of 80 theater companies in this area. So ranging from Jupiter to Key West. And we came out about this a little bit different than I think you guys came about it because we're looking at it from the sort of above the general producing level. And our producing theater companies really wanted butts and seeds in the summer. There's a sense that people that live in, you know, Florida, you have the Snowbird audience who goes up to New York, and that there's people here year round, how can we let them know that there's all sorts of cool playwriting or theater happening, local playwrights. And so we started Summer Theater Festival. And last year we, for the first time, we had a reading series. So every Monday night from June until August, there's at least one reading by a local playwright. And how we sort of started that last year, it was going to theater companies that we thought would, you know, naturally make sense. City Theater would be one that we've gone to. Wants a local playwright just looking right at me. He has a reading coming up in a couple of weeks. And sort of like making it as easy as possible, sort of to match theater companies with artists since it was sort of trying to get it off the ground and letting folks know that that was the biggest part for us. This year for the first time we had an open submission process. It was blind submissions. That was my choice because I wanted folks to choose with not regard to gender or name or race or just sort of trying to get as blind as possible. It did not work as well as I hoped it would. We only had two submissions chosen from the pool that we got. But when you say you only have two submissions chosen, is that through the process? Right, which they chose to play. So the theater companies choose the plays that they want to work with. Oh, okay. I'm sorry, that could be clearer. So each individual theater company would choose the play that they want to work with. So City Theater is going to do Suzy West Falls Black because, you know, Suzy is their literary manager. She has a really great play she wants to do. And it's long. And it's long. She can't do it normally for City Theater thing. My theater company is doing my play. But a lot of times like Ricky Martinez is the... Is he in here? No. No, he's in here. He's the artistic director of New Theater, so he did the play of his last year's festival. And a lot of times theater companies have playwrights that they love working with or they have playwrights that they had wanted to work with. Walt Stuberter Theater, he did a reading for the first time this year, really wanted to work with Christine Mosfram. They came to me really early on and said, we want to be a part of the series. We really want to work with this playwright. And so a lot of those match-ups happen that way as opposed to theaters picking from this pool that we had available to them. Which, so my advice to all of you is be front of theater companies, which I know is difficult. So as the South Florida League... South Florida League. So you guys accept submissions? We accept submissions, and then I distribute them to the theater. You disseminate them to the theaters? I think that all of them get disseminated to all of the theaters? Distributed to all of the theaters that want to participate in the festival? Yes. Okay. So you don't look at them and say, oh, I think these guys would like this play and these guys would like this? I did that last year. I think I'm going to do it again, to be honest, to help that process a little bit more. I was trying to make it as open to folks as possible because last year when I said, hey, you would like to see this playwright or you might want to look at this play, I got pushed back from some of the theater companies who didn't feel that this was, you know... Would you force it on me? Yeah, exactly. So it's a weird balance since we're not actually doing the producing. So it's not... I'm sure it's similar to what you do. It's sort of... I'm curious about your special process. It's blending what you're doing. It's fine. All of it. And then once the theater company signs on though, they sign on. So they don't get their first five choices. They have to do their sixth or seventh. Or a choice that, you know... Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting difference because you're talking about a theater company coming from Bangor, Maine to come and get visibility in Boston. Right. Bostonites might be heading up that way for the summer or whatever. I have program. I'll show you all at some point. Yeah, all the companies get a paragraph about themselves and they can buy ads. It's very, very helpful to them for the summer season. Yeah. Whereas you're sending playwrights out to theaters that are already established in the Florida area. Right. And hoping that there's going to be a match. Hoping that somebody finds a home theater. Yeah. It's a place to work. I'm sure as playwrights, it's incredibly valuable thing to have as a theater that is like... I'm embracing you. We do work. We tell us a little bit about what's going on with you. Yeah, absolutely. So I run Source Festival, which is a three-week summer festival in Washington, D.C. We produced three full-length plays, 18 ten minute plays, and then three artistic blind dates. The artistic blind dates are interdisciplinary, devised collaborations that happened over about four months. All of our plays are centered so our first step in our process is to solicit the following plays. Anyone who's been... and we do that by invitation, mostly just because we don't have the scale of readers to have an open call, but we invite any playwright that's been produced by the festival. The festival's been around for seven years. So that list is ever-growing and hopefully we'll continue that process but we'll see how long that list gets. So anyone who's been produced in the festival gets an invitation and then we use a spotter system maybe some of you even, and ask for recommendations of playwrights you think are great and are really exciting that we should extend an invitation to. So we're inviting playwrights to submit the play of their choice. We're not soliciting a specific play from a playwright. And then we do a couple of other things like we reach out to NNPN and the NNPN- affiliated playwrights are invited. People, playwrights in the D.C. metro area are also invited to submit openly to the full-length plays. It's almost an open invitation and almost an open submission process but not going. We have a team of about a hundred readers that helps us read and evaluate all the plays. We select the three that are going to be in the season. That happens in the late fall early winter and then we put out a call, this is a totally open call for ten minute plays, around those three themes. So whether playwrights choose to submit plays they've already written on those themes or to write specifically towards those themes either is fine. We go through two rounds of readers each about a hundred readers total reading these six to seven hundred plays that we get submitted each year and then we end up with a festival after all of that selection process. The artists in the device collaborations are also come via an open call. They can submit kind of artistic statements. We have a panel that helps vet them and we pair them up into three groups of three artistically diverse matches. We have dancers, choreographers, musicians, painters, jugglers, tap dancers all kinds of stuff. They have about four months and very little money to create whatever they want. We also give them one of the full length plays to read so there should be some linkage to whatever that theme is and we're very open. Those pieces are very DNY and they get performed in our rehearsal hall upstairs in the smaller venue and they're only about twenty minutes long and they're followed by a talk back with the audience so really what we end up with are three different kinds of explorations of three themes. A long form six versions of a short form and ten minute play and then a devised exploration of that same theme. I think that covers what we do. So how long is your festival? Three weeks. It closes tomorrow if anybody wants to get in the car. And how do you go about choosing your teams? Really we choose the plays first and then pull the themes out of them so we don't select the full length plays to a theme we select the full length plays that speak to the kind of work we wish to produce and then pull whatever we feel like the dominant themes are out of those to work with each other. So we'll go backwards this time how are you finding your connection with the community and are you getting more and more people coming and how do you make that happen? Right well I can't say that we've figured that out totally but the connection to the community has been great and I think one of the goals of Source Festival overall is to help build community and to help people put down roots and that's why so many pieces of our festival are open you don't have to know somebody to be a part of our festival and that's true of the actors and the playwrights and even the directors of the full length plays we do an open ball for full length play directors but nobody does and that's a really cool opportunity and we get a lot of really interesting people and part of the reason we produce so much work is so that those people have a huge base of people to interact with we are in many cases people's first professional opportunities in DC particularly for the actors and for some of the directors for 10 minutes and I think that's a really important launch pad where people are starting to make the friends and build the connections that will keep them in Washington and keep them producing there and there's just a really long list of our alumni that are still working and producing things in Washington so Is it predominantly local? Other than the playwrights, yes so the designers, the actors, the directors are all DC based but the call for plays and the invitation for submission is a national and what's the ratio of DC playwrights to outside playwrights? Maybe it totally depends year to year but I would say maybe on average it's like 25% maybe less actually than the playwrights so it tends to be more nationally based with a handful of people producing Thanks So Andy your relationship to the community is a little bit different because your relationship is predominantly with playwrights but how do you continue to find them and how do you cultivate that relationship and hold on to them and keep moving it forward and growing it I think a lot of it is reaching out to the folks that are coming out of not writing programs with the university Mike Lignani who's sitting over there he's sent me a lot of his students who are fantastic writers and I asked them to submit it's letting folks know that a lot of word of mouth building community and then folks who come to the readings often so those people will be like oh how do I get involved in this oh great so let me know submit a play or let me know here's the web theater league and then we do theater league events throughout the year that also sort of cultivate local writers and allow writers to meet with actors and other folks that are in the profession to try and sort of build that So you need a south Florida Yeah you need a south Florida And then do you ever pimp to northern Florida not really would it get better about that I used to be more in touch with what was it the organization that was sort of like the central Florida arts organization I don't know like not Yes thank you which is now, was red chair and is now Orlando plays I think I'm not sure it's going through another one this is something you used to deal with sorry we just had a fellow paperwork to go to the news website one of the things like we allow you to self discount tickets yeah I was trying to connect with those folks so I'm like letting people know what's yeah those people know what's happening down here cool Joe how about you in terms of community relationships who's coming to see on Tuesdays at 9 is it predominantly industry people is there a community in your neighborhood actually I do my best to politely and discreetly discourage the industry per se as far as casting directors producers people like that to protect it sounds pretentious but to protect the integrity of the evening because it really is reliant it being the work and the so the delivery of the work for the writers to hear is reliant upon a kind of freedom that any sort of audition minded actor or writer it will be inhibited by I mean needs to have what I'm saying is if you feel like there's industry people there and oh this agent or that producer or that casting director and you're distracted by that you're going to play it safe that's not what it's about and also in terms of writers a writer has to feel like I can bring something in as rough and raw as I need as where I'm at right now and not be worried about well this literary manager here they're going to judge me based on this a long time participant is a wonderful writer named Jackie Grindgold and Jackie writes for theater she writes for television but she really will use Tuesdays in such a pure way she came in one night and she had 10 pages and we cast it and she's so she's been setting it up and providing context for what we're about to hear these are like three separate disconnected scenes and it's really not going to make sense to anyone but I'm tracking this character and I need to hear this character and you know it was not utter disregard for the audience but for the participants but bringing us into her process of this is where I'm at with my work and this is what I need to do and this is how this evening is a tool for me so you know and I encourage that because it's what keeps it alive and it's what keeps everyone excited and feeling safe and it is a great community because there is a strong social aspect of it there's always we don't do a Q&A or anything like that just really just for the writers as I've said but you know afterwards there's always a bar at whatever venue bar connected to the theater that we're in right now and you know there are wonderful discussions afterwards about what we've heard and what you're working on and what about that play that you brought in two weeks ago and it is a community I hear it over and over again from participants I'm so grateful for this it anchors my week because we're disconnected we're totally disenfranchised I mean you'd think oh New York City you know theater at the hub of it all no we're all disenfranchised artists we're writers living in a room with a keyboard alone you know miserable and you know and actors reliant upon audiences to you know make so I can do what I do and you know without that and what do you do who do you connect with so it does very much provide that I don't think that's potentials at all creating a safe environment for people to work in and I'm happy that I've been running Tuesday since 2001 I guess and you know wonderful how many of you have seen great plays come out of it it's very gratifying and it's a lot of fun so are you guys inspired to get to a place where you do great parties again? you know there's a danger in that we have one little fundraiser at the end of the season right now and we're fortunate in that we are now affiliated with the new school what had been for decades the new school for social research is now new school university so they've become a partner which has sort of financial advantages for us as well as there's symbiotic relationship we have influx of kids from the school we have a place for our archive and everything else that we've accumulated over 27 years so we keep the parties small and just kind of focus on the work a little bit more now Kate it sounds like you guys have a good dynamic relationship with the community going on especially with Boston I've heard great things about Boston I lived there 20 years ago under what you know like ART was over there and then it was over there and now it's everywhere it sounds like there's a lot of really good stuff happening can you talk about that a little bit? sure I think we're all talking to each other I can call up ART and go I need a piano do you have a piano that I can borrow and they don't sure here's this and Huntington the same way and they're calling us asking do you have so and so or can you introduce me to do you know this playwright and I'll say yes I do because they entered the Boston Theatre Marathon three years ago and they're fabulous and blah blah blah I think the community has changed over time and the people who are submitting have changed over time they're better writers 10 minute plays everybody knows how to write one I know that looking at Gary over here I invite Gary every year once I realize that he had a New England address Gary has a by the way he doesn't know how to write a bad 10 minute play so I get a great play from him every year and then suddenly he becomes the drama skill and then the drama skill is in Boston and all of those playwrights know more about it so much it's like connecting connecting everybody just it's like this all the time we have more and more women are in the marathon every year which I'm almost half of the plays this last year were written by women and over half were new playwrights that had never been in the marathon before and this is because of blind submissions we don't know who wrote it but oh my god it was a good play and does that answer just made me think of having blind submissions and blind submissions right whatever gets you right yeah no it doesn't just how do you go about making that dynamic relationship within your theater within the community of playwrights and within the larger community and I think through the marathon the day before the big marathon of the 50 10 minute plays we do three folding plays that the theater companies at the Boston Center for the Arts support so every time we have three full links that are again connecting with the Huntington Theater Company Speakeasy and usually it's Company 1 in various these are small, medium and large theater companies that every year are seeing new plays so it's a great weekend and I think the companies are becoming more and more used to new plays which is why more new plays are being done in Boston it just keeps going bigger and bigger and bigger we only have about 10 minutes left so I would like to open it up to you guys if you have any questions for any of these folks yes sir Kate how many seats in the theater were the marathons performed? that was such a good question because we used to do it at our little theater which has two black box and we used to cram them in and so we could see counting both theaters and we used to the actors used to do the play in this hour, in this theater and then move to the second theater and do it here so if you stayed in one it was a gas it was really fun and fun for the actors because they got to do it twice so if you sat in one theater all day you'd see all the plays but it got so that the lines were so long people said ah I'm not going to go so we moved the Huntington gives us the space not exactly free but we don't pay rent we have to pay their people so we lose giving to the charity but we can see 360 all day and the actors just get to do it once but we get more people in and they can come and go all day long so you don't have to sit for the whole 10 hours you got an all day pass stay here all day sit down sit down other questions yes how much does social media impact your building of community and over the years obviously the landscape has changed a lot and do each of you have someone dedicated to social media more than your company for us it's very useful because we have about 150 artists involved each year and they're our street team they're putting out their words to their networks and their friends and so it's a huge piece of the puzzle and I do have independent contractors essentially that are working as my associate producers and one of them is always one piece of their enormous job is to do social media I work with theater companies themselves so some of our more resourceful theater companies are able to sort of get the ground running and have twitter and facebook and do that in addition to what I'm able to do but since I'm the only employee at my organization yeah, sometimes that gets lost so yeah it's very helpful it's helpful in the moment you can get send out an e-blast on your site if something's coming up and it's helpful for the chatter that everyone generates and I think it's it's very interesting it connects us it connects us and at the same time I'm always feeling like we're the people you know I don't know I think it's useful we used to have postcards that we mailed out and spent a lot of money doing that and now we don't spend the money we just do facebook and internet stuff and radio things like that and we get just as many people there my goal is to get those long lines at the theater where we are now but I know that people twit just shows you what I do listen to them and you go twit right they do facebook has been good to save us Susie well I actually have a couple of things I first want to say I know Gary and John players who submit to us and when I will read a play before I'll go back and look at the bio or the production history I'll tell you how many times source festival comes up Boston theater marathon comes up naked angels comes up and that was why it was important this year for us to get you guys in this room mostly because I wanted to know who are the other people crazy enough to do this so there would be that but the other thing I'm curious about because Stevia is here he's one of your full lengths and he was beginning to describe to me how you found the theme and then how quickly once you know what those themes might be do you hold the call out for ten minute plays and how quickly do you turn that little process around right this actually was the first year that we've done it in two different in two different rounds we used to select the full lengths and the ten minutes concurrently and then try to muscle some themes out of what we ended up with and that was much more difficult so we switched the process to select the full lengths first but the call for the full lengths goes out at the invites in probably August we had those selected and put out the call for ten minutes by December 1st and I think the ten minutes were then due in so players had about four weeks over the holidays to submit their plays and then we started reading at the beginning of January and we had the full lineup announced by March for the ten minutes so it was all very quick I'm hoping in this coming year we can stretch that out a little bit, give players a little more than four weeks and hopefully at least get that stretched a little bit now that we kind of know what we're doing but it's all a very fast process in the meantime you're running another theater right, Rorschach Theater, yeah and Rorschach does another project which is relevant here called Plexography and we took it from the model of a 24 hour play project but we wanted to stretch it out and make the plays maybe a little better to be judgmental totally but we come up with usually six playwrights a whole team of directors and designers we have prompts and the playwrights have about 24 hours to write a play we do a development workshop in one afternoon and then they write another draft of it and then we spend the week fully staging directing and designing them and then we have a two night or one night run with two performances so that's another way we're engaging our playwrights and our community and the people that's owned a DC artist really that's great I used to live in Boston but now I live in Tampa and it strikes me that almost everybody in the panel is saying that they're not available to me the only one who seems available is Naked Angels and to utilize Naked Angels who more or less has to be in Manhattan then walk in you can submit this to me oh it's sourced alright so how can this work you're at Orlando Shakespeare can you talk to your availability to the Florida writers absolutely we don't have a rolling submission process we try to find all of the plays that we put on our stage through our play festival play fest in November and if you go to our website we usually have a March 1st deadline and we used to have a very specific submission criteria criteria that was about you know you either had to have a Shakespeare theme or had to be about a Florida theme or about somebody famous and forgive me for saying this to anybody who's an academic in the room we were getting a lot of academic plays and I convinced Jim to just open up the process to plays that that examined urgent social issues which pretty much opens it up to everything and we will accept plays from everyone so the only thing about us is that you have to send us a 10 page a 10 page sample a hard copy of a 10 page sample still so we're still a little old school and then we will ask for a PDF of your full length because we get about 450 submissions of 10 page samples and we just don't have the infrastructure to read that many plays so we like to bring that down to about 100 so yes absolutely go to Orlando Shakespeare Theatre OrlandoShakes.org and click on playfest and you'll see what the submission policy is and absolutely send me something great thank you I just want to say what I was struck by because I've worked with them in the Boston Theatre Marathon many times I've been to Joe's Tuesday at 9s several times I've been to the source and the device theater is that you all and I'm sorry I haven't been to any of those that's okay you just let me know where to go you serve communication levels there's this whole community of writers that you serve be they in your local area but nationally or regionally but then you also bring I mean I know for kind of been there that you bring in a whole community of people that have nothing to do with writing and what's lovely about that is that you're able to look for example at the Boston Theatre Marathon and see in 50 plays that there's no right or wrong way to write a play that you have 15 examples of the way ideas are expressed or Tuesdays at 9 for example and like that but there's so many ways that people express ideas or the source of the device just sit back there and that's what's so glorious about writing because it defies the definition it's organic it's lovely productions too there's not 50 ways there's not only one way to breeze a play there's a multitude of ways that's right and at the same play we're given to the company that's in Panger Main or given to the company that's in Vermont it would be a different play and I'm curious I would love to thank the four of you and I'd also like to just give you great kudos for this weekend because this is an amazing combination of local people and national people that you've brought together here and I couldn't be more pleased to be here, thank you and thank you all very much for your time