 Okay. Hi everybody. Good afternoon. Hi. It's a beautiful Sunday here in New York City. Mother's Day. Yes. Happy Mother's Day to the mothers and happy Mother's Day to the mothers of you all. My name is Teresa Eyring. I'm the executive director of TCG Theatre Communications Group. And I'm really happy to be here to try to facilitate a discussion with all of you about the Five Burrows One City project. And I just want to say I think this project is amazing. It's ambitious. It is creative and gets at the idea of really engaging community in the process of making theater in a way that is new and I think really is going to inspire a lot of others to try to make work in similar ways. And to inspire community members in our city but maybe in other cities around the country to get involved in theater making as well. So I want to start out just by asking everyone here artists and working theater to just introduce yourselves starting with Tamela. Hi. I'm Tamela Woodard and I'm the artistic director of the initiative that called the Five Burrows One City project that one computer is engaged in. I'm Adam Krar playwright and I was part of the team writing about Queens specifically in Lecchester. And I'm Rachel Falcone and I'm a documentary producer and I got to be one of the creators of the Manhattan Project. And I'm Mark Puzent. I am the producing artistic director of the working theater. I'm Ana Machinano. I'm a director and part of the community. Hello. I'm Ed Cardona. I'm a playwright with Brooklyn team specifically. I am Kristen Horton and I'm a part of the Staten Island team. I'm a director. I'm Chisa Hutchinson. I am a playwright who is also part of the team. What I want to start out with is just hearing from Mark. Where did the idea come from for you to launch into this project? I know you're celebrating your 30th anniversary but what made you think of doing this particular project? Well we have for a long time been trying to figure out ways to engage our particular audience of working people more in a deeper way. So it's two ideas, that and also the notion of bringing theater to communities where working people live. Which we were actually able to do. We produced a play that we commissioned Ed to write called La Ruta. Which was about people crossing the border to come to America to find work. And it was inside an actual truck. So we were able to move that truck to various neighborhoods where working people lived. But we wanted to take it a step further and really engage in the communities themselves. And the idea of actually creating a piece of theater by engaging with the community felt just sort of like a natural thing to do. So that was really the impetus. It was just that we wanted to dig deeper roots in these various communities. That we'd already sort of partially engage with by bringing theater to them. And then you engaged Tamela as artistic director of the project overall. Yes. Tamela. Tell us how you thought about how did you bring the team of artists together for each of the projects? And if so how did you make decisions about who should be involved in the project? Well we started thinking about like for me a really big part of the work that I love in the theater is collaboration. And so it's like who are great collaborators or who are people who are bursting to make something in a way that is a more lateral way. And that was the beginning of our discussion about who are the kinds of people who would prosper in this kind of environment and benefit from this experience. And so that was really the list of my folks who worked so long really well. Maybe not the place up for them because it's really about not just engaging with your other collaborator but engaging with the community as source for you and resource and being willing to be changed by what you're hearing and seeing and feeling in that world. And being okay with taking a chance with your own artistic process. And so we needed people who wanted to take a chance with their own process. And that was how we started. I think it would be really helpful for people in the audience people who are listening in or here with us who may not have seen any or maybe just a few of the pieces to hear from each of the teams. Just a little bit about maybe a couple minutes about the community you were in, the story that is evolving through your connection in that community. And maybe some of the things that you're learning or how you're imagining the piece to be produced ultimately. Whether in a traditional setting or more in a site specific way. Let's start with you Chisa. You're to my right. Well, I again was writing about Staten Island and before this project I really didn't know much of anything about Staten Island as I imagine there are a lot of people who don't know a lot about Staten Island. And what I discovered through visiting and interviewing people and sitting in classes at the college and having dinners. A thing that I discovered is that for the most part there's a big part of that community on Staten Island who they want to keep it that way. No one knows anything about Staten Island and they're just totally, totally happy with that. So it was really hard the process of actually getting all of the perspective that we wanted to sort of squeeze into the piece. It was a tough process sometimes. But I think we got enough information through the research and the people that we were able to talk to. And even I think from the people that we weren't necessarily, I think the absence of or the absence of a voice is probably just as helpful in a way. So there was that and then am I supposed to talk about the actual? Yeah, just a couple, just a little synopsis of the story. Well, it's a traditional Italian-American family style dinner. It's like a family reunion. It's the Tbilisco family reunion and all is well. And everyone is eating and having a good time and then in comes the other, this interloper, the black boyfriend of one of the daughters. The twist is of course that all the Italian-American characters are being played by black actors and then the lone black character is being played by a white guy. And it's very, the audience is the family. The audience is sort of invited into the event as family. So they get to be right there and feel the tension and sort of relate to these people who are feeling things as their family dinner is being interrupted. That's pretty much it. Ed? Brooklyn. I thought we were going to hear an XR. Specifically Bushwick, it's about some residents who kind of come to a corner of Bushwick, play dominoes, and there are some street artists who are going to come to this, where they play there's a wall and they come in to put up a mural on this wall. So they have to kind of interact with these Bushwick natives, or Bushwick residents as I say, because they're not all natives. And the kind of story that takes off from there, with penguins and polar bears. I don't know if there's anything else. That's pretty much the basic story. We'll come back to that. Well, no, go ahead. Just from the research period, some things that for me was the most tragic. Probably everybody, or most of the people here already heard the story, but I feel like I have to say it again. We were just approaching people on the street in the neighborhood, which was a major part of all the research. We also had arranged internships, but also just walked and approached. And we see some interesting people in the park, so we decided to just go right into them and ask them, tell them that we have this project about Bushwick residents and they want to talk to us. They are very, very happy to talk to us. And then when we say it's about Bushwick residents, they start hesitating. And one of them says, well, we live here, maybe, we work here, and live here all my life, but since two years ago, I'm homeless. So I don't know if I can say that I'm a Bushwick resident since I don't have a home, even though he was the biggest cheat from the park also. And this idea of people not feeling that they belong to a neighborhood anymore, or to a city, just because they don't own an extra place there, to me at least, makes a core of the search for some home. Rachel, do you want to talk about your project? Sure. So we were fortunate enough to be matched with this amazingly vast, beautiful space in Morningside Heights, St. John the Divine, it's a cathedral. And going in, you feel like you're kind of entering this mini city, and what we came to learn pretty quickly is that there's so many different elements of the cathedral complex. There's a school, there's social services. But one of the first things we were struck with going to one of the mass, like the Sunday services, was just that there was a bunch of people that are tourists that are coming that just coming for the first time and probably won't ever come back, but then there's obviously people that are kind of volunteering as part of the service and that are coming regularly. And so that was one of, I think, our first fascination, which is who are the people that are coming to this place to worship, and what does that mean? It was also a time when sort of the protest around Black Lives Matter was coming to a head in the fall. And so it was interesting, one of the first sermons was about this idea of Black Lives Matter. And they were sort of very much bringing that into the service. And we were starting to think about what is the role of churches in terms of sanctuary and our journey towards sanctuary now, and how does that relate to it was in the civil rights area. And I think interestingly we were sort of very, our piece, as we presented for the workshop, was very much molded by the people that we talked to. I think interestingly a lot of them talked about their journey with faith. And so that is very private in the piece now. It's less of a secular journey. It's more of a religious journey. And so we did actually different things. And at the cathedral we were able to do an actual walking performance where we brought people from chapel to chapel. They had this beautiful chapels that ring the nave that are actually named after immigrant groups that were prevalent at the time of the founding of Ellis Island back when the cathedral was built. And so we kind of were playing with that idea and also thinking about people coming to a place and being a stranger. And so what does that mean? And so the piece I think as we've been envisioning it combines original lyrics, songs, as well as interview texts that's both performed and in audio recordings. But it's also a sort of a moving piece where we take the audience on a journey. I don't know. Well, Gay Taylor Upchurch and I were sent to a Lechester Queen's. And as with many people in the city, I've never heard of it. And it's really a unique, to me, a unique corner of New York City. Lechester is a large housing complex built in the early 50s by the local three, the Electricians Union. And still many of the people, perhaps 50 to 60 percent of the people living there are members of the union or their families or descendants of their families. And a lot of the union activity, the union hall, their health facilities are also on the edge of Lechester. So it's in some ways a working class utopia unto itself. And for many people living there, especially the ones in the union, there's a fierce and lovely sense of community there. That's changed a lot in the last 30 years as the demographics of the place and Queens have changed. It's in Flushing Queens. But we were also very interested in surrounding neighborhoods and chiefly, right across Parsons Boulevard from Lechester is Pomona. A low-income housing project. And we were, among other things, got very interested in the very complex relationship between Pomona, which is in some ways a difficult place to live as we learned and Lechester, which is in many ways a wonderful place to live. And the ways in which the people in Lechester are insulated from Pomona and some of the ways in which people in Lechester are, there is for some of them an undercurrent of racism and yet many of the people who are part of the community in Lechester are of color and are part of the union. So the complexity of attitudes about race and class was just gripping and we wanted to capture that as much as tell a story. So in some ways the play is a play with a multitude of voices, but the story that takes us through this multitude of voices is about two young electricians, fairly new to the culture of the union who moved to Lechester, fall in love with it and then discover the various things about their identity and their time that they have to give up in order to be a part of this community and how that, the deep strains that puts on the relationship. Do you want to talk a little bit about Dan Hoyle and Maureen's projects? Yes, so in the Bronx we had the team of Dan Hoyle who is a solo performer and a playwright and Maureen Taube is a director and they were teamed, so each of the projects had a community venue a group called the Venue Host which in the case of Staten Island with Stan Carver and Bushwick it changed a bit, but ultimately it was the Salvation Army Community Center St. John the Divine in Manhattan, Lechester in Queens in the Bronx it was new settlement apartments which is a housing complex in the Bronx but as part of new settlement houses there is an organization called CASA CASA is a tenants rights organization and it has I think a thousand members many of them live in new settlement or in apartments around the neighborhood of the South Bronx where they were so they were exploring that community and I've written a play called The Block which sort of talks about really the lives of the residents of that sort of street in the Bronx, in the South Bronx so when you're entering a community and this may I'm sure is different for each of you but how do you, what kind of agreements do you make with the people you're talking to and with the people whose stories you're ultimately going to tell I mean what's the process like I don't know permission is the right word but how do you make sure that you're representing and have people's blessing if you will to be telling their story or do you not and I'm going to start with Kristin because Well I think our process has largely been comprised of individual interviews with people we've had a couple of small groups and I think the key things that have been important to us are just sharing the intentions of the project so talking about what we're doing our goals and intention for us confidentiality was important that we're not writing one person's story we're not going to feature one person's story and if that were to happen I would imagine that we would talk to that person but the aspects of the stories that we've heard find their way I think into the piece there's a couple specific references in Breaking Bread that came from interviews that we had with people but I think the main thing is also keeping the dialogue going because we're profoundly interested in in what experiences inform people's opinions people have opinions about a lot of things and especially right now on Statt Island especially post Eric Garner that's been under the surface of everything and so that's what we're curious about or what are those stories that inform people's opinions does anyone else care to comment on that? I came to think of it in some ways as a collaboration even though they weren't strictly part of our collaborative team as artists the people who were kind of most helpful and most illuminating about their community were people that we kind of went beyond the relationship of we're gathering information from you and as Kristen said they began to really trust that one of our chief aims was to learn from them what is it about your neighborhood that you want the rest of New York City and the world to know about your place, your home and once they saw that's really in large measure what we were about they became fairly invested in it and wanted to especially those who loved their community but even the ones who were very angry about their community wanted to make sure that that was represented and so that was part of it I think in some cases developing sort of ongoing friendships with some of these people was huge in terms of involving them in the process us because we tended to do more formal interviews and we actually recorded them there's this opportunity to kind of sit down and say what does that mean and share this later and sort of during the conversation we're really upfront about there's anything that we want to talk about but then we decide you don't want to share then we just have that conversation kind of upfront as we're sitting down and we did some informal interviews and then we met with people I went to different events at the cathedral and met people and then said let's sit down for a conversation and I'd like to record it that shift from a more informal dialogue I think with this because it was smaller compared to some of the other projects that I've done it was kind of great because we were able to really just keep that dialogue going so I was able to touch base with all the people that were featured in it particularly because we were really using direct excerpts from the interviews and sort of naming people in the program as part of this was their voice and so I double checked with everybody about what content was going to be shared so that they were comfortable with that and a couple for me it was two very distinct experiences we had some formal interviews set up those were usually folks that one would consider kind of the new wave into bushwick who were very eager to talk to us because they're very excited about what's happening in bushwick and living in that neighborhood and how it's hit and exciting and vibrant to live in that neighborhood and there were some of the not so formal interviews that we did a lot of walk-ups like I mentioned at first we were a little hesitant and a lot of those individuals were new immigrant groups so there's plenty of reasons why they might be a little hesitant to talk to a couple strangers just kind of cold walking up to them but once we explained the project to them it was a we're writing a play, doing research, writing a play and in the end most of them warmed up to us and we're rather open and kind of eager to share their experiences there was a couple of individuals I remember specifically about a man definitely want to talk to us but we got his son to talk to us but that whole conversation is very kind of very guarded in many ways where his father was still standing there so we did get some of those but overall I felt that once we kind of let them know what the project was about they were pretty willing to talk to us I would add to that about so once in another range that we just straight called the approach and specifically to me those who refused us and didn't want to talk most of them didn't speak English so we had that in this bandage somehow they gave to our project as much as the ones who did talk because they still they still said stuff about themselves even by refusing us so I don't know if that makes us a bit of thieves in getting our inspiration but we did took our inspiration and we did love them that's really interesting I'm interested in knowing since Byron Park by something Tamela said earlier which is about all the different connections you all were able to see in each other's work as just a lot of similarities in your experiences both making the work and in the themes in the stories themselves but one thing I just have to say is having seen your piece last night I'm very interested in what made you decide to move the audience am I giving something away no I sat down in the front row and I was asked what I paid for my ticket and then I was I just gave it away and then asked to move but it was really interesting the moving the audience throughout the piece which also really added a sense of what it feels like to be in a community where you're being moved against your will or without expecting to be moved on a somewhat regular basis it goes a bit back to the research my pre-conceptual idea was we won't talk about gentrification because it's too first gentrification we'll find something else we might but then we get talking with people and I remember basically after each evening or at the end of each day we were kind of resolved these terms and gentrification was and what is gentrification the fact that you are displaced you have to move, you don't want to move you feel you have a right to be in a place and the trust is taken out of you and this subject came kept coming and coming and coming and in the same am I wrong to say about gentrification? kept being somehow pushed out by each venue that we approached saying initially yes and then closing on us so we end up like basically not having a very last moment or having a venue but each day another one or each week a different time so we kind of thought I remember we were searching with Mark and Tanha for new venues some of them were in the process we literally walked into like the Salvation Army all the past and some of them were like if it would be summer we would just go on the sidewalk and do it on the sidewalk and not on the side of Bushwick but in which one? which one? we pushed out and I realized that it's a feeling I mean you understand it but if you don't feel it so it was my easiest way to make the audience members hopefully connected with what happens in those scenes it's very effective just touch upon that as I said we were hoping to kind of crack into something else besides gentrification because that was the obvious choice but it was almost it was impossible to write about anything else with everybody who talked to me no matter what generation what color it all came back to the red which in the end is the big issue you know reds are raising people are getting pushed out and it's about as a writer you kind of want to write what you're inspired by but sometimes you can't really write what you want to write you need to write what needs to be told so then I kind of surrendered to that and then there was a member of CASA that was here to see Dan's play and they came earlier in your plays before and very much they're dealing with tenets' rights and how to stay in the place that they call home to me at the end of the night the very end of the night the experience he had in Brooklyn was how it feels to live in the Bronx right now and he wanted to say thank you to you guys for like in a very clear way making that be a part like watching everybody else move he's like see, see that's what it's like and so that was his experience being one of the resources that Dan used for the Bronx and he thought you guys were making the deep conversation about his experience too what has happened when members of the community have seen these pieces have you had, have they been performed in the communities, yes I'm just, I'm just uniformly generally in front of the communities it's been like glorious, they've loved it, they felt so represented I'll just say that and it's definitely a part of obvious conversations which many felt eager to share and probably didn't have the avenues to share so they really kind of got into it and in one of the readings definitely touched the nerve with a couple of the residents who were the newer way newer residents but their experience is just as important to the beats so one of the the model is and the model will continue to be that the projects are created inside of the community they are premier, they're shown first to the community, shared first with that community, that their feedback is invited about that continuously and then it's taken to a place that is not the community to see what is the relationship that the larger New York has to this question or to this exploration that the team is going through and so very practically that's what we did, the very first sharing, public views of these pieces were inside the communities in front of the people who had been talking to these audiences as much as that was possible and then we engaged in a whole another week of work that was in response to what they were getting to what the community audience said and brought it here to Manhattan to mostly people who were not residents of that of Bushwick or South Bronx or North Staten Island or Electchester or congregate members and had them respond to that as strangers, as outsiders I have a question actually based on that because I was just curious listening to the Electchester play, there's so many similarities within that enclosed community with what we've experienced in terms of the dynamics of Staten Island and so are you imagining a panel at some point that for example Breaking Bread might be at Electchester? That's the point where we want to turn each of the pieces back to each of the other community members and that there hopefully will be some kind of cross neighborhood dialogue that will be generated as a result and for how many of you or is this way of making theater really different from what you're used to how you normally approach your work I see this This is not to say that I haven't worked on projects that aren't necessarily my particular personal vision of everything but this I think more than anything that I have ever is, has definitely been I'm just trying to channel whatever it is that I'm hearing and sensing and seeing and I just want to kind of like like vomit it back and have people picture it just like but you know I'm going to metabolize this and then respond as you will but the material is really not I think the stage direction of the play was like Breaking Bread an event because it's not my play and that is very odd to me almost every other play that I've written has been my little marine child I'm not going to say no input from anyone else but definitely not as research based like really very very much research based but it's very liberating because you're just and you can't take anything personally and when I got feedback from the community it was just like yeah and I just wanted to do whatever would make the piece more authentic or more meaningful for the community that I was trying to reflect so if someone says oh that voice that's not authentic at all and she wouldn't say that and oh you need to put more of this in there I would listen because I mean that's it would know so it was it was a very liberating experience it would you're going to do it again? I would I would and continue with this project of course yeah it's a different way of working for you yes yeah I guess I would say yeah because I feel like I'm very collaborative even when it's in my own work I go into the reading process and rehearsals for me I try to make it clear to everybody as brutal as it can be sometimes that nothing's precious this thing can continue to grow but in regards to starting from that's usually I have something already and then we're building off of that as a collaboration but this we had nothing and actually researching and just that and reaching out to the community that is a different experience for me I think I had because she's actually very good at it so she always did believe and it just was a new experience for me and trying to you know hear these different voices being thrown at you and then at the same time digesting that as a group and then seeing what if we heard the same thing put that on the page and then especially with our piece we're moving people around people are ending up at the end of the play not even seeing the ending so then we can get a lot of discussions about that in regards to collaboration of course as a writer you want them to be there but knowing that from the get go this was a collaborative project you have to kind of be open to that and I think I feel blessed and we had kind of a good I'm sure we drove each other a little crazy but I feel in the end we kind of worked well together and it was a great experience I would definitely do that so I feel like our team all do different kind of community engagement work Carrie Dodd is a playwright but she does a lot of work in community and then Michael and I have worked together for about eight years doing really interview based work and community based work I feel like I'm kind of the one that craves to do the solo project because most of my work is all community based so this is not really natural I think what's unique is that although Mike and Carrie Dodd have background in theater I don't for me to feel like we could take a lot of this interview based practice and then use it as part of performance and where the line between installation and performance was that was a lot of fun and for me it was definitely a departure from how I usually write a play because usually I start from something deep inside that I often can't even articulate and here it was very patently at the beginning starting with community and what they wanted New York City to know about them the other way in which it was so different is the nature of the collaboration with my director and the actors because even when the text was in a really embryonic state GT and I were able to she was able to look at this very early draft and sort of because of our shared experiences there the people we knew able to really understand what the play wanted to be even when that wasn't wasn't realized on the page so that was very useful and it was a useful reference point too because if I didn't understand something that GT was talking about or vice versa about what this play was becoming we'd say well remember remember the guy that we met at the bowling alley who was so swirly and that would instantly much quicker than talking about motivation or story like that would open up a lot of things and we brought the same thing to the working with the actors and I was amazed at how effective it was that rather than going deeply into psychology and the arc of the play which we certainly talked about a bit often we would just share our experiences in general about the ambitions of these various people in these communities about the culture the things that they don't talk about and the actors would just without saying much more the actors would then bring that into very specific character motivations that would really activate them and how I think I don't know that's the mystery of acting but it would it really allowed them to take a leap when they heard that yes there really is a guy that talks like this and this is why and this is the context in which he's in and makes him talk in this strange way and they bought it it's really the idea of trying to find out what another community would like another community in New York to know about them such a beautiful thing the ones that I saw I felt that I felt like I'm learning something about this community that I really didn't know and they're just really beautifully constructed and the stories are wonderful so I feel as if you're onto something Mark next so this has really been the research and development that is essentially we wanted to share them with various communities as well but they're all very much in development all five of the plays and the goal is to produce each one fully produce each one over the next couple of seasons and tour them back to each of the venues that's the goal and do you feel it just seems as if theater as being central in community life in some way and relevant and civically important is something that most theater artists care about and this project it seems to me just brings it right front and center it's like you cannot avoid the fact that this is really bringing communities together and bringing artists and community together as I mentioned it's not in every case was it co-creation per se but a highly collaborative process among artists and community so it feels as if you're onto something that well there's a challenge though at this point that I'm still I don't know the answer to it but the challenge is how do you keep that community engaged as we continue to develop each of the pieces and that is something I think we've all looked at this we're still producing theater company I mean this is a new step for us and so we've just been exploring it as we've been doing it fortunately we're working with artists who are very respectful of the communities that they've been in so it's all been good but you know it could have gone not so good but it's gone very well but now the next sort of phase of challenge and exploration and learning that we're going to have as a theater company is how do you keep the communities engaged as you more fully develop each of these works I don't know if anyone even wants to respond to that maybe I mean we haven't as a group had that conversation yet but we will maybe we can get started now my hope would be to try to have kind of a round table because we really never had that we always spoke to individuals I mean I spoke to a group one time at a senior center but they were still all they were employees of the senior center but they were all residents of Bushwick life on residents so for me it'd be interesting round table various perspectives which happened a little bit in the second meeting we had we had a young woman who was a Bushwick resident born and raised and then we had another young woman who was a Bushwick for seven years and or five or six or seven years I don't remember but it was the interesting kind of discussion that they were had and how they perceived each other so to get those different perspectives around the table at the same time I feel would be very interesting moving forward do you think ultimately we have a saying at TCG a better world for theater and better world because of theater do you feel ultimately I think any theater can make the world better or even change the world but do you feel ultimately can you see ways in which the work that you're doing is going to improve our community in some way or and if so how well I we heard that out in a left chester from both from people who live in a left chester and from one person who lived in Pomenok that they felt it would start certain conversations that they felt needed to be had but also again I think I think I think it was inspiring to a lot of the people who recognize their stories in this I think they saw a new meaning in their stories people hinted at some things and some people seem really moved by it but that was very much the feeling I got from a lot of the people in a left chester that they just they really wanted to help with where is it going next what can we do here's some I want you to call me to do this resource material I want to tell you about growing up in a left chester there's a lot of when they saw it they got very invested and wanted to get more to it I'd expand that to include new meaning in experience in experience in community because I think that what's interesting about several of the pieces that they have some sort of interactive or immersive quality to them in terms of the construction that's itself and there's something about theater it naturally brings people together physically in a shared space and a word that you used early on which I think has been really powerful in our process in terms of thinking about where the piece goes is when I ask you what do you want this piece to do and you said I want to create a bridge I want the piece to create a bridge between disparate communities and I think that that's one of the powerful elements of just this whole enterprise especially this idea of taking the projects to the other venues because within each of the projects you see issues and concerns that I think are shared by everybody they just might be more concentrated in one community over another and that's exciting really and I think what the project does is it brings all these really diverse stories like that make it into theater into theater that's the kind of the obvious thing but it's really incredible when you get to see the different pieces how these stories are not necessarily heard and so I think that's really beautiful I think also there's exciting moments that we're all trying to push within the communities where people that may be part of that community don't recognize each other through the power of art we're able to say your story alongside or show someone something new like I was really excited that two staff members someone was hearing someone else's story and they've been a colleague for years and never knew that aspect of their colleagues life or history and so the ability to build help be a part of building community and using art to do that within the neighborhoods that we're drawing the pieces from and then bring that to other neighborhoods Are there any questions or observations from members of our audience here? Yeah I mean I I mean so much have to compartmentalize it I guess I've been involved as an audience member and working with Mark at the working theater for about five years and I was lucky enough to get involved with him like fresh out of college and it's like here was this embodiment of this wide-eyed college idea of using theater for social justice for community involvement for what all of you have been talking about and so of course it's relevant everything I saw yesterday here and I saw five of them was relevant and it does force a discussion like you can read in the newspaper about the racial tensions that seem to be boiling now in my lifetime at least now more than ever and at least as a white guy I guess you can say yeah that's horrible and compartmentalize it but when you're sitting at a table eating food with actors who are living this conversation about the other disruptive their worldview or whatever I mean you can't help but think oh my god what do we do and what you do is continue the conversation so it's just and the same thing with the moving moving the seats that was very effective and just more so that anything you can read you're experiencing it yourself did you ever find out what happened at the end of the play about Brooklyn? yeah I refuse to move I refuse to tell what happened at the end I knew you'll have to see I have a question I think for the playwrights so in your experience when you basically taking what people are telling you their stories and what they are and you're trying to write that as realistically as possible portray that as accurately as possible especially in that community and viewing that work but as a playwright who has a point of view of your own at what point do you then step in as this project was forward you're in development start to look at this as well I want to write a play here that is part of something that would fit nicely with the other plays I've written taking their stories and moving it into your own point of view and I think it's not just for Jesus for all the playwrights what point do you assert your playwright point of view on these pieces I think I already have honestly in many ways because you know you draw inspiration from but in the end you know I personally created these characters in many ways still feel like they're 100% my characters that I create and though I might have stolen the line that I actually heard on the street for one of our interviews which is in the play there's a lot of stuff that set throughout our interview process that I took the artistic liberty and decided to use but in many ways I still feel that no there's bits of a lot of people that we've met but nobody is totally in nobody is totally 100% an individual that we mentioned so that's why in many ways I feel that they're still my characters do other things and I wish Dan was you to say this because this stuff is so accurately specific I was just going to say that Dan has more of a documentary style in his solo performances and Dan has gone through now a process where he's it's very much still in development in his piece because he has moved he's going to possibly be a solo show so he went in and did his interview processes and started to create it that way and then it became literally just wanted actors to read it the stuff that he had collected and he was so excited by the different voices of the actors being in the room that he decided to make it a play with actors so I would like to hear his perspective but I think he's very much involved in figuring that out right now I'm going to say coming from the world like the whole I think you kind of recognize how much you as a person even any one of us that went and talked to people I'm sure it varied when you were talking with them versus you we as people bring ourselves when we are in conversation and people respond to us really differently so the second we went into those communities and brought whoever we were that changed a lot and that shapes it and I think for me a lot of the beauty was trying to draw out from the interviews what were the things that resonated with us as a team and that we thought really should really did reflect the community that we could show them and sort of hold up a mirror to them so I think there's a lot of shaping that is possible even if you're doing verbatim stuff and similarly to what Rachel was saying I actually really tried to defer any preconceptions about what the play would be especially the more surprises that I encountered in these communities but there were things that shocked me and moved me and I realized that was starting to give me a point of view but really where even if I tried to keep myself out of it when it came to the stage of trying to make an evening in the theater to make an experience that an audience could follow and invest in that's where I think kind of inevitably my sensibility as a player and a lot of the things that I feel very deeply about began to begin to shape what the play was but it certainly didn't start there which was thrill and scary I put my little playwright stamp on it by choosing what to focus on it's like well the elephant in the room we're just going to go for it so it's sort of like you were saying well I chose what the piece was going to focus on that's like alright well we're going to talk about that that's going to come up there's going to be some great stuff because that's what I can't escape it but then once you decide that you just do the work as a writer and you find a way to love all of your characters you find a way to love even the ones who you just don't want to in real life so the guys that I didn't really get to talk to like that voice that absent voice that I mentioned earlier became like the most prominent like he's the the anger of the play was that guy and how do you love that guy like how do you love that guy who posts really horrible racist things on articles about Michelle Obama or like who you know tears his back on the mayor at the funeral of the cops the guy who approached the restaurant owner Italian pizzeria type joint and we go in and we're all excited because we're like oh Italians in that night okay we need to talk with you and so it's me Teresa the dramaturge who's also black and then Kristen and you know the only hand he goes to shake is Kristen how do you love that guy so it was work and really trying to understand why you know and where where that behavior comes from and just trying to treat every voice and every character fairly and not sort of rely on your your own personal your own personal crack you know like yeah yeah would you ever write that character if this was completely like not a prompt and you're just sitting in front of the computer you know I don't know I definitely do I mean in other places I've got characters who you know I don't approve of but I really think I've never had to work that hard to understand that I'm writing so it's great so then to expand on that is an exercise in developing characters that you wouldn't normally ever or have access to you know because really an inner circle player I yeah exactly you want those single voices that you can invent and you're trying to draw from your own inner experience and this exposes you to other points of view and people who may not are right do you feel that's true? Absolutely lots of these characters I wouldn't have thought of writing without meeting them and that's it this was one thing that came up in our sort of like passing time as we were switching casts and everything we did a quick survey of the last plays that we've seen our last workshops that we've seen and we've got five plays full of things that the community was bursting to reveal in some way that don't find their way on stages anywhere and one wonders as artists, as shamans you know what are we what are we what are we hearing when we're creating if we're not hearing the space where we live that's a great question our live stream on unless we have any twitter questions we have a twitter question really quick the question is did the teams get to pick their partners or were they hoisted upon each other hoisted I was hoisted hoisted with you hoisted I don't know who my voice is carrying oh did the teams have the opportunity to choose each other well it's different for it was like I took the first stab at it you know a plain match maker honestly because there are some interesting things about all of these artists that I love and know or know from afar that I thought oh these two people together are going to challenge and expand this process so some people were hoisted and and then in others found each other so Dan for instance you want to maybe talk about that Marine was the artist that we approached originally about the project and Marine said I'd love to do it and I'd love to bring Dan on I mean that's how that happened I think it happened in different ways in each of the parents but there was some foistage going on yeah Kristen you came on because Chisa originally had a different collaborator and we had already been in the community and when that collaborator was going to be available after all you knew exactly who you need to be looking at so we just were like well of course that's what we're going to do yeah I just wanted to say something I'm on the board of the working gear and I saw all the plays yesterday and I loved them all but thank you for bringing up that we're going to bring the different boroughs to the other boroughs because it's so great that the people who the cultish people like Chester who recognized the cultishness of the staff of the Italians watching them and I think that the people in the Bronx would appreciate the card that they picked up on the floor and Harry looking behind their back and saying help another person because they were always the person who needed it more that's a great point thank you for that well I just want to say congratulations and do you have a last word well thank you for moderating thank you so much and I'm sure that everyone and thank you to the howl around audience and I'm sure people want to stay and chat more so we will do that really my friends thank you