 the way to regulate the behaviors of economic man. The market will allow what the market can bear. Ethics and values really only enter the conversation when wealth is compromised. We don't investigate the made-offs of the world while they are filling our pockets with a return on our investment. And yet, most of us here see the spiritual emptiness of this model. It's why we've chosen the arts. We care about story and beauty and ritual. What better ritual than the tech process that sacred stretch where our singular gifts be they in writing, directing, dramaturgy, or design enter the process of becoming whole. This is church for many of us. It feels like magic. Production becomes something greater than its parts. And when at opening night, the audiences see what we see. And this doesn't always happen, would you? We experience the possibility of our gifts. We realize there is enough to go around. We feel the abundance in art that can't be equated with the cost of a ticket. This is what our founders realized. Pied says, again, part of the work cannot be made. It must be received. So long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit will remain a stranger to the economics of scarcity. In my experience, the bitterness comes for artists when they cannot share the gift. Pied quotes poet and novelist May Sartan. She says, there is only one real deprivation, and that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most. The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up. If art creates abundance, why are we living in scarcity? The not-for-profit theater room that came out of one of its founders, Bob Bruce Dean of Yale Rep and ART, calls a counter-cultural mindset. It came from the political milieu of the 60s, the mid-generation that sought individual pleasure over corporate accumulation. That moment was all about excess, about putting ourselves and our bodies out there with the hopes of not only social change, but of having a damn good time in the process. It was making sure that flow of life was not backed up. Brecht identifies the possibility for pleasure when he talks about the importance of finding sport in the theater. This is for Ivan. Ivan and I talked about sports in theater. No, no, no, sorry. Sports seem to have enough abundance for everyone. Even if you deplore the professional world and its hyper-commodification, you still find yourself engaging in its excess. As I did last week in a bar in Boston, cheering sadly for the Celtics. (*audience laughing*) Brecht presages our contemporary moment in describing the theater. He says, all those establishments with their excellent meeting systems, their pretty lighting, their appetite for large sums of money, their imposing exteriors, together with the entire business that goes on inside them, all this doesn't contain five penny worth of fun. No wind will go into anyone's sales here. There is no sport. We've done exactly as Brecht describes. We've built massive buildings and we've created big business inside those imposing exteriors. And more importantly, in all of this abundance, there isn't enough money for the majority of artists to live on. These problems impede the wind going into our sales and they make it difficult for us to think about new ways of making theater. These issues aren't a result of individual motivations. No one involved with not-for-profit theater decided it was better if artists didn't make any money. The opulent buildings and big salaries were more important. Most leaders involved in the growth and expansion of our field come to it with the hope of making theater more relevant, a part of everyday life. So it made sense to create corporate boards and build alliances with local governments. It was done with the intention of providing more opportunity, not less. What went wrong? In his 2009 report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Gates of Opportunity, David Dower, then Associate Artistic Director at Arena Stage in D.C., looks at the current state of the field for theater artists and institutions. After spending a year in 2006 in 15 cities around the country, talking to any and everyone, working to write, develop and produce new plays, he comes to two important conclusions. One, there is an imbalance in the distribution of resources in our field. He writes, at present, the distribution of philanthropic resources is heavily balanced in favor of major institutions. The majority of activity and opportunity, however, falls outside this segment and is being supported by sweat equity at levels of activity that are not sustainable. It's important to note in a more recent report that this imbalance is shown to be sustaining primarily white and wealthy audiences and institutions. And then number two, Dower says a disconnect between emerging artists and these major institutions opportunities gatekeepers, as Dower refers to them, helps to sustain this imbalance. There are far more artists trying to squeeze through these gates of opportunity than will fit. And for anybody who's training artists, we know what the problem is. In the disconnect that Dower talks about, we've separated the work that gets made from the artists who make it. We not only lose track of who owns the work in the separation, is it the theater's play or is it the playwright's? But in hiding the work behind big glass enclosures with enormous ticket prices, we lose track of who theater belongs to. Is it owned by institutions and artistic directors or should theaters be more like public libraries, a part of the cultural commons that we all own? Economist Peter Barnes in his influential book, Capitalism 3.0, helps us sort out what belongs to the market and what belongs to everyone. Barnes is one of the founders of working assets, a significant attempt to put a kinder jet of face onto capitalism with every working asset credit card purchase, you can contribute some percentage to a cause that sustains the parts of our society that we share. Barnes uses the idea of the commons as a way to distinguish what belongs in the sphere of the market and what belongs to all of us. By the commons, Barnes means the commons designate a set of assets that have two characteristics. They're all gifts and they're all shared. A gift is something we receive as members of a community, as opposed to individually. Examples of such gifts include air, water, ecosystems, language, music, holidays, money, law, mathematics, parks, the internet, and much more. Barnes believes our country needs a new operating system that puts the commons in evil alignment with the market, that there is room in our culture for both private enterprise and a public sphere that everyone is entitled to access. I'm saying the same must be true of the theater. I am suggesting that a significant part of the work we make belongs to everyone. The theater must have qualities that are like air and water, essential to our survival, and that our ability to share that gift is inhibited by a profound misunderstanding that art and theater can be reduced to a transaction, a marketing activity that focuses on ticket sales. Hyde distinguishes the commons this way. A commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. You can't put a price on it. If you've ever had a transformative experience with art, you know what Hyde is saying. To attach a price tag to the experience would defile it, like valuing the love of a family member in monetary terms. Our labor cannot be reduced to a price tag that lives in a private sphere ruled only by exchange value. Rather, we must find ways to house our work in the commons, let it live as books rest on the shelves of our public libraries, available to anyone to discover their magic. In the theater, we have become victim to what Barnes calls the pathologies of capitalism. These pathologies, Barnes says, result in one, the destruction of nature, two, the widening of inequality, and three, the failure to promote happiness despite the pretence of doing so. We experience these pathologies firsthand. We see artistic directors of not-for-profit theaters making 600,000 a year, or even a million annually, in some cases. We see shining buildings, we see escalating ticket prices. Just this week, Americans for the Arts reported that in 2010, despite the economic meltdown, the arts generated $135.2 billion in activity, and 61.1 billion of that came from non-profit arts organizations. These numbers reflected only a few percentage point drops from the 2003, from 2003, at the very peak of the wealthiest moment in monetary terms in American history. And as the inequality gap widens, as the artists who are asked to work at these shining new buildings for these wealthy leaders can't afford the parking fee, let alone the ticket price to see the shows, happiness becomes elusive. Institutional leaders made miserable by the costs of the overhead for making art, making art only to sell tickets, and artists made miserable by their exclusion from all of this abundance. Happiness. Let's digress and talk happiness for just a minute. I found this definition of happiness trolling Facebook while writing this keynote. It was written by an artistic director of a theater in Chicago. He says, happiness is working with amazingly talented playwrights, directors, actors, designers, and production teams to tell these stories, written from previously unheard perspectives to audiences hungry for a journey that is unique and challenging. What a simple definition of happiness. One that most of us in this room can embrace. And yet my experience working with so many theater artists over the years does not suggest we know how to get to that happy place very often. This lack of happiness in my analysis is based on what David Dower is saying about too many people being stuck at the gates and the growing economic disparity between institutions and artists. Early on in my tenure as the producing artistic director at the Playwright Center, a playwright I greatly respected in whose work I felt passionate about came to me and said she was planning to leave the field. The story that unfolded was one that I would hear at least 100 more times in the seven years that followed. In her case, she was approaching 40. She was single. She'd been surviving on small fellowships. Some of the Playwright Center had provided. And she had a temp job during the day writing advertising copy. And she was on the state health planet in Minnesota when Minnesota actually cared about low income adults those days in that plan have passed. Her father was ill. There was no prospect of inheritance or windfall. She had commissions, a few productions to a New York. She had an MFA from one of the best playwriting programs in the country. And still she had a hard decision to make. Choosing a more sure footed existence as painful as that choice was. In those early days of these kinds of conversations, I was pretty polyanna about it. I gave a brief talk about the soul and way of the artist. I truly believe after a lifetime of working with artists and examining my own ways relating to the world, for those driven by the imaginative possibilities of telling stories, suddenly deciding to enter the transactional nature of the day-to-day job as a difficult switch to make. These conversations drove me to try and fix the problem. I couldn't bear to see so much unhappiness. I became the self-proclaimed used car salesman of new plays. My dad sold used cars. It was in the blood. I knew these plays. I was pitching. I knew their potential and their impact. I had seen audiences respond to them, experienced their power firsthand, but even after closing a few sales, after finding productions for a few plays, I realized that the problem of so many good plays and playwrights stuck at the gates of opportunity could not be improved by fixing or improving my sales pitch. After many years of the futility of the sales pitch, I recognized that the American theater needed a new operating system. The pipelines jammed with plays and artists waiting to be recognized by the kingmakers, beholden to the pressures of paying for big buildings, bloated administrative salaries, and corporate expectations about what constituted success needed a complete overhaul. But art is supposed to be poor and consequently a little unhappy. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Before talking about what this overhaul might look like, I will drag us briefly to say that this issue of the financial poverty of theater makers is not uncomplicated. It is both a reflection of how we perceive the value of art in our culture and a result of how artists see themselves in relationship to the world. Hans Abing has written an excellent book on the subject entitled Why Are Artists Poor? So before we blame institutions or capitalism for the plight of artists, we need to spend a moment examining our own economic and psychological relationship to money and the arts. Abing identifies possible causes, mythologies, to explain why artists are poor, why artists are poor, they have less to do with the behavior of others and more to do with how artists see themselves. Abing's list reflects the stories we tell ourselves about why we live as we do. Number one, he says, the winner takes all markets are important to the arts and attract many competitors. Often the same people get recognized over and over again in the arts, though their work doesn't seem necessarily that much better than the work of their peers. I watched my peers respond with incredulity to the announcement of the Pulitzer or the MacArthur Genius Grants. We all think at some point, why not me? The highly subjective nature of what constitutes a good play or real talent is unlike many other professions. Think professional sports. LeBron James garners all of the awards and prizes and it's hard to argue that he isn't deserving. For a height, that was a compliment, my enemy. It hurt me right now. For a high school athlete, his or her potential to play college or professional sports is a path with pretty clear markers. The markers for artists about where they stand in relationship to their competitors is much less clear as are the gradations of difference between a Tony winning play and one that never gets produced. Number two, artists believe they are unfit for non-arts professions and believe they are better off in the arts despite the prospect of low income. We've all engaged this conversation and I think to a degree there is some truth to it. I see it most clearly in my partner, Lynette, who writes fiction and who spent 20 years writing advertising copy. For more than a decade, I watched her struggle to get to work on time. Struggled to care about the outcomes associated with her day job. You know these day jobs. She always felt it was just that, a day job to pay the rent and have benefits. From my firsthand experience, she seems terribly ill-suited to a nine to five job. I think she's watching my new play TV and I'm sorry. Number three, the average artist is more interested in non-monetary rewards than other professionals and such rewards are thought to be available in abundance in the arts. As Abing points out, the arts are considered sacred and bestow significant amounts of status on artists who as its priests share in the esteem of the artist. Even beginning artists share in this esteem and acquire a mysterious status that other professionals lack. This mysterious status allows us a certain sense of fulfillment. It's like choosing the priesthood. We embrace the vow of poverty for a higher calling and believe our lives will be more fulfilling as a result. I personally feel my own sacredness every time I sit next to a stranger on an airplane who asks me what I do for a living. When I say I make theater, there's an immediate sense of awe and a subsequent embarrassment about how his work for IBM is less noble or at least less cool. Number four, the average artist is less risk averse than other professionals. As artists, there is no story to be more fully embraced than the story I just told about Lynette. She left her day job, her benefits that still included a pension and chucked caution to the wind to pursue the dream. We take these risks always against the advice of our financial planner. You should see the look on his face every time we make these decisions. But once we make these choices, can we cry poverty? Number five, overconfidence and self-deceit, more than other professionals, the average artist is inclined to overestimate his or her skills and luck and at the same time, ignore available information. Therefore, artists overestimate the rewards available to them in the arts. The markers for success in our business aren't that clear. The idea that the path is supposed to be filled with poverty and unhappiness is part of the mythology and the arbitrary nature of identifying talent keeps us holding on, waiting for that break, our moment of recognition. We deceive ourselves as we wait and one of my career meetings was a director in a major urban area. She had figured out what she needed to survive in the theater, 32,000 years. I had done a similar calculation not too many years before. Don't look too far ahead, don't look closely at what it costs to live in the long haul. Don't think about children, a health crisis or a root canal. Adding helps me to understand why so many artists have been willing to accept the status quo that institutions hand us. The lie that running an institution costs so much more, so much money that we can't afford the real cost of our artists in our overhead. We accept these conditions too readily, deceiving ourselves that our day will come and until then, wearing our mantle of poverty with perhaps a little too much pride, we must hold ourselves accountable to the problems of our field. A new operating system for the American theater. Harold Clerman said, we must help one another find our common ground. We must build our house on it, arrange it as a dwelling place for the whole family of decent humanity. For life, though it be individual to the end, cannot be lived except in terms of people together, sure and strong in their togetherness. How do we find our common ground? How do we live together in the theater, this place we call home? Some suggestions for building a framework for a new operating system for the American theater. The first list is for the institutions, especially for those that call themselves not-for-profit and possess vast resources. Number one, every not-for-profit theater must have an organizational ethic statement. This statement must look at things like the disparity between the highest and the lowest paid person in the organization. It must assess the limits around its relationship to commercial projects. It must insist on artist pay that is equitable to administrative pay and organizational size. To every not-for-profit theater must contribute to a theater commons. It must locate within its building and its programming the portion of the work that constitutes the gift, the part that's for everyone. This might mean more free theater, more free space to artists and gifts we can't imagine yet. Number three, every not-for-profit must, every not-for-profit must have theater artists on its staff. Something I've heard Oscar used to say at least a hundred times now. I don't mean artists in administrative roles, but artists paid to see the world and the organization as creative contributors to season selection process, the marketing plan, the audience engagement program. Having artists on staff as artists recognizes the gift of creativity as having both worth and value. For artists, number one, give up the notion that you are more sacred stock than those you sit next to on an airplane. This holier-than-thou attitude keeps you believing in your own mythology and financially impoverished in ways that are gonna make it incredibly difficult for you to raise a family, pay off student loans, and survive the onslaught of the day-to-day transactions. Instead, think about the ways your gifts live in the world in looking for places to share your gifts, imagine that they might live outside of a black box. Number two, create a personal ethics statement about your behavior and responsibilities as a theater maker. Will you wish death on those who threaten you? Yeah. Three, stop lying. Stop bowing to artistic directors and king-makers who you think might produce your play by agreeing with their notes when in fact you don't. Risk being kicked out of the theater for telling the truth about your work and your aspirations and your expectations. Make the work you want to make. Four, only work for free when you're sharing your gift, whether it be mentoring or teaching or volunteering your gifts, you too must contribute to the comments. You too are responsible for making theater available to everyone. But when the power brokers ask you to come into their homes and take less than everyone else who lives there, just say no. And here's a crazy and unformed thought to end with. Let's do something bold and unimaginable. Let's create a new fund for artists that works something like the carbonfund.org. What's carbonfund.org? A not-for-profit organization that believes that working to protect the environment is for common good, not for private gain. It seeks investors to support companies and projects that are researching and developing renewable and sustainable technologies. So as an individual or as a company, you purchase carbon offsets as a way of accounting for your own carbon emissions. So for example, if you travel a lot, you might buy offsets to account for emissions used by airplanes. Buy offsets usually means investing in projects that reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in the short of the long term. Like investing in wind farms, for example. I often hear people bemoan the loss of NEA funding for individual artists. Given the way government organizations have become more consistently controlled by the marketplace, perhaps we use our not-for-profit structure to build this artist's fund. Artists who have wildly successful commercial runs would contribute a percentage of royalties. For every ticket sold, theaters could contribute a small percentage. If the arts generated $135 billion in 2010 and a 1% fund across all activities would generate more than a billion dollars, let's not wait for the NEA. This fund would represent the commons portion of our industry. All funds from the commons would be managed by its citizens and given to artists to create art for everyone. We've done much more complicated things in our time, like building a virtual marketplace almost overnight. We've maintained a social security system to exploit our best efforts to destroy it. We have the means to take our abundance and make it mean something. We have the capacity to make a new operating system for the theater to ensure its survival in the 21st century. We take up your question and then we can go on to another person in topic. Yes, Chris? Why did you object to the man who wanted you to be gay? That's the job that we have. Do we get three yeses? Which agent was it? No, I was moved when you were talking about how important the library was. I'm interested to hear about your two brothers also being in the arts. I just wondered if you were able to share a little more about the library and how you even thought to go to the library. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question and it kind of relates to the work that we're really trying to do now in the center. You need to say we started the center for the theater commons, which is brand new, based on this very kind of principle. So the library, my older brother is an architect and a wonderful visual artist and my younger brother is a creative director and also a wonderful visual artist and a writer. And they decided to have day jobs and so they have a lot more money than me, but they're really talented. And for all of us, my older brother was an artist from birth, he was one of those kids who was drawing recognizable pictures in kindergarten and he was being acknowledged. But for all of us, I mean, we didn't have a lot to do. We were from a small town. There wasn't a lot of cultural activity anyway, but whatever there was, we couldn't afford. We were a couple hours from Chicago, but we couldn't afford to go there. And so we had a few places we could go for free, truthfully. I mean, besides being in our backyard, we could go to the park. I was a fairly good tennis player, a basketball player, because I could do that for free. And we could go to the library. I mean, that became an outing for us, you know. And when you're in a period and when you're a kid and your life is around economic survival, there aren't a lot of places to go, so you go where you can. And so the library was free and we, you know, we all were all readers, we all love the library. And we've all become artists as a result. I think we have anything to do. We couldn't figure out a way to express it when we were younger. And so we, you know, and so part of building the theater commons, you know, New Play TV is such a great example. There might have been a lot of people who would love to have come to this, but couldn't afford to fly to Miami, get a hotel room. And so when we live stream these things, anybody can sit in the room and hear the conversation. Sometimes they can tweet in questions. It's kind of terrific. The journal HowlRound that I edit is totally crowdsourced, so anybody can contribute. I say yes to everyone who asks. I do curate it and sometimes an article doesn't quite fit. Usually those, our only real rule is that the contributions have to be a positive inquiry. So once in a while there are attack pieces that I won't publish, but we actually work to kind of publish everything and to build a conversation in our field that includes the field, not a few people at the top. And then we have this New Play map and anybody can locate themselves on the map. And what I'm starting, what I'm learning personally, I just want to say I'm a snob. The commons does not come naturally to me. I'm kind of like, you know, I like, you know, this, my aesthetic can be a little small and it's hard to figure out how to include everybody. But what I'm learning is, and it's really only been a, I've been editing HowlRound now for about a year and a half. And I'm learning that it's a lot of great people in this field that don't have a platform or a place. And the thinking is terrific. I mean, and it's smart and it's engaged. We do, every month we do a series on a city. So last week we did Pittsburgh. I didn't know what was going on in Pittsburgh. Cool things are happening in Pittsburgh, you know? And so it's really opened my eyes to exactly what David Dower says, how many people are stuck, you know, at the gate. Thank you. Yeah. Toward the end of your speech, it was wonderful. You talked about the gifts that should live outside of the black box. Could you elaborate on that? Yeah, it's one of my favorite, I'm glad you asked that, because I kind of, you know, every little sentence I could elaborate on for like several hours and that's one that I care about. So, you know, I, again, I had a career, you know, both making theater but really doing it because I ran a playwriting center just advising a lot of theater artists, you know, why anyone, what would I, as I've gotten older, I know less than I think. Like I feel less certain of my advice now as I get older. The, you know, the outside of the black box, so everybody's obsessed with getting in the rehearsal room, getting in the rehearsal room and some of the most, and look, I think we should all have things we aspire to, so that's great. But if you're waiting to get into one of the few black boxes that's producing a new play in the country, you might wait a long time. And the people that I see who are, you know, kind of saying, look, we have access now to the means of productions in ways that we never did before. Like it used to be, if I had wanted to start a journal 10 years ago, I would have needed a printing press. I don't need a printing press now. You don't need to print postcards to have people come see your work. So people make plays in apartments. People make plays, you know, there's really interesting work happening in, you know, sort of in, what's, you know, Aaron Lansman now is running around and people are working with, you know, community councils, you know, city councils. And so, you know, finding ways to integrate the work in the community. Michael Rood is somebody who inspires me a lot. And he's, you know, really looking at how does the art become a part of civic practice? Like how do we use our creative skills around election time, for example? And so I feel like, you know, we get into this idea of training people, training way too many people for way too few opportunities. And I think it's really important to figure out that there are other opportunities. So I'm just, you know, and I think now, because we can kind of put anything out there on our own, the opportunities are kind of endless, so yes. Oh, we talk about making art accessible a lot. But how do we work towards making audiences understand that they need to access the art? How do we introduce the work to people who don't think of it as an entertainment option or an educational option? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question because part of what we do, and you know, the marketing engine, and I've worked in these big theaters now for awhile, so I have more inside information on that than I wish. But the marketing engine, the idea is to bring people in, right? And that's a great thing, and some people do it really well. I mean, I had a real privilege of working at Steppleman watching the great conversation they're having with their audience there. But the truth still is that we're bringing people in to pay for a ticket and to go into a place where in fact, if you, I mean, I've seen a lot of theater over the last 15 or 20 years and it's mostly white people. It's mostly people with memes. And so, you know, what we know is we're not bringing in new people. That's the thing we know. And in fact, a friend of mine is doing some really good research right now about the history of the regional theater movement. And if you look at the history of the movement starting in the 60s, the same people that were attending in the 60s are attending now. Do you know, I mean, so it's not like we have not developed a new audience. It's interesting to note that the Tony Awards was the least watched ever this year. We're not building new people of interest. And so I think we have to really be able to wonder where else theater lives and how we exactly work. How do we work with City Hall? How do we work outside of the spaces that are comfortable? How do we do more? I mean, you know, many theaters have education programs but we think of those as a kind of afterthought. And in fact, they're probably the most important thing that we do. And it's the reason that not-for-profit theaters can get a non-profit tax status is because they do education. And so I feel like that the stuff we're doing in our education departments should be at the top of our, that should be the top thing we're doing is figuring out how students engage. And now we're in this weird place where everybody thinks they're professional about everything. So the amateur professional world is blurring in ways that are, for snobs, are horrifying. But it's also really exciting. And so we have all kinds of ways now to bring people in to participate in ways that we couldn't before. So, you know, we're doing a fun little project based on the Works Progress Administration. It's called a Here and Now project. And we're, you know, we're able to take these fun little plays that playwrights around the country are doing and put them on our website and distribute them, you know? And then from there, what else can happen? So I think it's about finding ways to let people participate with the tools that already exist in the spaces that you already own. I was going to piggyback on what you said. I'm a theater teacher in middle school in a maggot program where kids actually have to have to go in there. So basically all the parents that put the child in my program are going to attend here. But not everybody does that. And that's one of my biggest pet peeves is parents that are not attending when they should, even though 90% of mine do. But the highlight gets to train these, you know, these students and these parents for the continuation of the arts and so forth. Which I think is a great idea about actually increasing space to actors. There are so many actors, local actors and directors in Miami, which would love to produce our plays or anybody else's plays. But we don't have the money to access a theater. And if we do go to theater, they're going to charge so much money. So I think just pushing it out there and to make it accessible, we have culture shop, $5 for students. But again, not everybody goes to theater. So we are offering free theater out there. Just not everybody's getting the word out there and just only a certain amount of people. So we do need the help to get the word out there because, you know, like you said, theater is not made for the, for history. It's gonna eventually dissipate. So it's pretty in the moment. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that, you know, I guess I just feel like, you know, the other part of that is I really take, you know, Rex word seriously, like we haven't found the sport in it. You know, and it's not that everything has to have a sport. Don't get me wrong. I mean, yeah, I'm happy to go see something where I'm one of five people in the audience and one of one of people who loves it. You know, and I'm okay with that. But I think that we actually have a lot of ability now. I even think of like something like HD Live. You know, we're able to bring the opera in really beautiful ways to people that could never see the opera. Like anybody could watch opera now if we didn't charge so much for people to watch HD Live. And so, you know, that's the, so I feel like there's a lot more opportunity for the kind of, and I don't know the answer. I mean, I don't know what they are, but like, I think we're smart enough to figure some of those things out. Like how do we make it fun? Because I think those parents don't attend theater because they don't feel it talks, they probably don't feel it speaks to them. And I think that's, you know, part of the, and even, you know, we did, when I was at Stepmove, we did a lot of research on the millennial generation, which is not mine, but you know, that 20 to 30 something generation about, you know, it's not that everybody's sitting in front of a computer. They go to music events. They attend a lot of cultural events in fact. But, you know, I think theater is missing out a little bit on figuring out like, you know, what's the sport of it, you know? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Back there in the, yes. I'm not a writer in place. I worked in my own, and I go to the schools in the ranks of the administration office. One of the things that I've seen really encouraging in the last couple of years is the foundations like the Knight Foundation and the Target, and even places that wouldn't think they'd have a foundation, they're stepping up to provide an opportunity for the kids in day type of schools, which is the fourth largest school that they're in the country, with about $4 billion budget. But they're providing upwards of a billion dollars to get these kids through a program called Cultural Task Force. Taking kids at every school to see something in the arts, at the Art Center, by the way, and the Cleveland Orchestra. And the theater doesn't participate as much as it could because they reach out to them and they're trying to look at it, it is beginning to take hold. So there is a winner of hope. We're going into these at the kids of the grade five and the grade six from the middle school level. I think we're gonna get on. Yeah, that's such a great idea. And it's interesting that theater's the one struggling. And I know this, again, firsthand from, the theaters are so bogged down in overhead now that they actually can't afford to get free tickets to students. I mean, we have this problem all the time in places I've worked like, there's no margin for what's for everyone. And I think that's part, so built into our system is, we don't think about that. And I think, but I agree, I think those are the programs that will make a difference. And they'll change people's lives permanently. So yeah, go ahead. I wonder just a few thoughts about the idea because I know it's thrown around a lot that, you know, why can't we get the younger audience in or whatever. And I just wonder like this, is it ultimately, I as a writer and an actor, I think, well, this is the stories we're telling, right? We're not telling diverse stories. We're not telling the stories where you see a multicultural cast. Where I mean, personally, I guess I can always be for myself where I am tired of going to theater where I don't see myself anymore. And I live in Chicago for three years with amazing theater town and could not believe how whitewashed all theater is across the board. And I feel like that, you know, we're never going to get an audience. And theaters all over the place have these great programs to get ethnic writers in and develop ethnic whatever you want to call it across the space. But it's nowhere, it's still not the common place where I can go to students that I have and any, you know, wherever and say, you should go see this play because you're going to see people like yourself up there. And I think I totally say that we can, that until I can say that to someone, I'm not comfortable in this field. And I feel that that's, we're not going to change the economics of it or whatever you can talk about the system or whatever. But I think ultimately it comes down to the storytelling, I guess. And that's what I was curious to hear. Yeah. What you thought about that idea. It is, I mean, I can only say yes, although I would go caution you to say it does actually matter. The system, you know, I only am talking about these kind of larger systems because I realized that if I don't, if we don't start to change those, in fact, the people that you want to see see a theater will never see theater. But I get your frustration. And in fact, I don't normally recommend reading my writing but I did write a piece just about a month or so ago called A Boy in a Man's Theater. And I really recommend, I mean, it's a confessional in my part about how I never get to see myself in the theater ever. And so I, and honestly, I had an experience not very long ago where I did. And I was like, oh, this is actually, but I mean, I've been thinking about the theater in some way that like metaphorically, but you can actually feel it this really if you get to see yourself just periodically, even not every, I need to go out every day and, you know, look in the mirror. But I feel like this question of, I mean, so there was a, what was it just a few weeks ago was announced that there were more non-white babies born last year than white babies born. I mean, we're unprepared for that universe, right? Our field, and I think our field, I think our field is really bizarrely behind even, I mean, other fields in that way. I just, I cannot imagine. So, and you know, in my little Boy in a Man's Theater piece, I mean, I really talk about that, like we have to stop and we have to stop thinking when we run artistic centers that our view of the world is the world. I mean, that is, I think one of the biggest things, you know, when the amount of productions is pretty dark on small, and we think our view of the world is the world. I mean, that's gonna work really well until the theaters are totally empty, you know? So I, you know, I just, I have with you 100%, it's a huge problem, but don't dismiss those other things. No, there's so many factors. Because there's so many factors. You know, trying to get to a core, you know? I know, it's really difficult. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I want to bring up two points. One is, I worry about the emphasis on free theater, because people started thinking, well, it's free, it's not worth anything. When I was in university, we would charge a quarter of the one theater, because we found we had a higher attendance if we charged something. The other thing I wanted to mention was that Miami had this incredible theater event, Michael Theater, who started in Spain, and they lined up the shipping crates, and five of the players from Spanish, and they're all short, I think two or three were English, and they had a bar and a band, and you waited in the long line by your tickets, because you paid for two sets of heads, how many plays you wanted to see. And then just listen to the music, until it's time to see your play. But the limit is rather dirty shipping crates, about no more than 10 people at a time, so you're kind of on top of these actors, and there's nobody there to live with, okay? That's fine. It was really fascinating, because this lasted for weeks, this had a long line, this was extremely well attended, and instead of going to the theater, and I'm the youngest person there, I know the theater, and I'm the oldest person there. Yeah, that's always exciting, is that I like those boys. I would only say this about free theater. I hear that all the time about, you know, and I- You need some. Yeah, all I want to say about that is, you know, that we have this idea, and again, it is an operating change, you have to change your thinking entirely about this, like, and that's hard to do. We have an idea, we're playing around with it, Emerson right now, David Dower's idea about, you know, if you're in marketing department, and you decide, if you pick a percentage of ticket sales to sell over a year, you would be crazy to book 100% of your seats, right? So, like, you would know, you're never gonna make your margin, if you book 100%. So, people tend, usually 70% maybe, sometimes 60, 70%, but you know, you don't even do 90, right? So, you know, but, if you're in one of those theaters working as I have, and you try to give free seats to anyone, like, mostly I was trying to give them to artists, it becomes this huge thing, because they could be, you know, a money maker. And so, you know, so David and I, and David's really spearheading this, this idea of, you know, what if, calling it the empty seats initiative, although the marketing department doesn't like the names, but, you know, it seems very badly on them. But the idea of the empty seats initiative is, what if we said that those are, you know, so the people that are at the 70% who have access, and they're my carbon fund people, they're the people who can afford to consume culture, and so they're paying a price to consume the culture. So, we take that other, even if we took 10% of the seats and said, how do we build an audience, you know, for the future? And we just said, we're gonna give those seats away, and we're gonna have a community conversation about those seats, and we're gonna, you know, I mean, again, we don't know how it's gonna play, we're just gonna do something, we're gonna try, and we suspect we'll fail several times over, but I think that it's thinking about that, about, and not getting to that, oh, you know, you have to pay something, actually, you know what, I didn't have to pay for my library card, but I didn't value books less, you know, and I think there's a way to work that, and I think we have to think, we have to get out of this mindset, and again, I don't mean to sound like a, you know, I may sound like a crazy person, but, you know, capitalism consuming every single thing we do, that's not always been true. There actually used to be a relationship between the commons, and capitalism, we're gonna, you have to sort of study the market more in a different phase now, and we have to begin to go, hey, the market still matters, nobody's arguing, we can't have private enterprise, and really healthy markets, there's a kind of excess of consumption, I mean, Occupy Wall Street, it's come from the idea that there's an excess out there, and it's not trickling to anyone, and so we have to figure, we have to take responsibility that I can't fix that in the economy when I think like that, I have like a nervous breakdown, but when I think of a free seats initiative, I thought, oh, I bet we could do that, you know, so it's kind of finding your, how are you gonna get up this morning and contribute to the commons, you know, yeah. Just on that free seat idea, I was a stewardess for 22 years, and the airline would sell all the seats in the airplane, and if there was any seats left over, then somebody with the airline industry could sit and ride for almost three, so you could do it on that type of, idea, so that, you know, the greater mass is paying for it, and then you still have the idea that you're using those other seats, plus it always looks better for the marketing department because it's better to apply to a full audience than to a half full one. Yeah, no, I think it's, and there are lots of good examples of what you're talking about, and by the fact, I recommend Peter Barnes' Capitalism 3.0, it's less focused on the arts, but what I'm finding as we're talking about the commons is the arts doesn't like to talk about the commons as much as other industries, and so the arts are just now starting to go, but we have to talk about that, but there are lots of good examples of exactly that thing, it's dual, it's a dual proposition. Yeah, go ahead, I'm losing track of hands. I'm sorry, I got a free seat when I was in sixth grade was prize, it was given for, I don't even remember what it was given for, but I got the prize, and I don't think anybody else really wanted it anyway, so it wasn't much of a copy, it was for the symphony, it's Fort Lauderdale, which really did have a symphony back in the 1950s, strangely enough, and my dad was a construction worker, I had a stay-at-home mom, I went in a dress that came in a box from the ladies' guild at church, donated stuff to us, and I sat in a row of empty seats in the front row of the symphony. When I got up and turned around, there was this absolutely spectacular woman, I found out she was Eva Gabor, and she was an actress, and she looked like a fairy princess, she was this sort of pale, glowy, white blonde, sparkly dress with some guy in a tuxedo, she didn't see a lot of Fort Lauderdale in the 1950s, and I wanted to be wherever people like that were, and it really changed my life, competed a lot for prizes, for free tickets, got scholarships, got to do stuff, and I don't know that we perhaps don't offer enough prizes, you know, it just saying, okay, we're gonna put the bites in the empty seats, we may not do it, but it makes you look like a good guy to give awards and prizes, and possibly if we can persuade the theater people, the folks who run the box, obviously, that that's a way to not only fill seats, but inspire the newer people coming in. Well, I just think the emotion with which you tell that story is the part, you know, to me, it moves me to hear you tell it, and I think about the fact that you couldn't put a price on that, right? I mean, there's no, and that's the gift of art, that's the, I mean, you just articulated a gift better than I did, you know, for 40 minutes or whatever, but I mean, that's a beautiful way of articulating it, and I think, you know, that's why we're in it, you know, we do it for that, and we just have to figure out how we can last so that, you know, we don't have to sell it, you know? So, yeah, I think back, somebody back there. Yeah, back there, yeah. Two more questions? Yeah, two more, great, yeah. I've lived in Miami since 1865, there's one event here, and only one in the theater, where I've ever seen a complete cross-section of our city in terms of race, in terms of ethnicity, in terms of age, and that, sadly, was a worthless show called Stump. Yeah, I know, that's right. Yeah, a little bit, had a lot of impact for people in the tent, yeah. I saw here on your little bio that you work, or you will work at a university. And I just wanna ask you, and that like university level and section, like we go to school together, and we're in the theater department, and it's so hard to get our own people to come to our show. So like, usually if we do four shows a season, and because we're in Miami, like usually one of them is like, for the Hispanic community or in some kind of, and that usually is a show that does the best, with like an older demographic of Hispanic people, but the other shows, it's so hard, and we rarely get people from other majors, from other programs, and stuff like that. So I wanted to ask you, in that kind of theater, like university theater, do you have any suggestions on how to get your own people to come to your show? Yeah, God, I wish I knew the answer to that question. I'm sure I'd have gotten like 10 pay to come give me this, but I knew the answer, I knew the answer. I'll work on that for a second. No, I mean, I guess I think part of it is, I mean, I think it's that larger question of how do people feel like theater is about them and for them? And I think we, I mean, that's a kind of, you know, you're not gonna fix that problem. What I would say is, what we've become obsessed with, you know, for those of us who've been making theater in these other places for a long time, we've become obsessed with trying to figure that question out, instead of focusing on like making art.