 I'm Howard Talwoods. I'm the artistic director of the Woolly Man with Theater, of the Women's Voices Theater Festival. I think it was about, but a little over two years ago, that about seven of us, seven artistic directors in town were sitting around. I believe it was at Eric Schaefer's lovely house in Arlington. And a series of discussions where one thing cascaded to another to another. Is there something we could all do together? Let's do a festival about two seconds later. Let's focus on the work of women, and then it wasn't more than several, a few months maybe, or even weeks before word got out. And all of our colleagues around town said that they all wanted to participate. And very quickly, we had 50 theaters producing, or almost 50 theaters producing, over 50 plays. I've already seen four of them. That's amazing. I've only seen one so far, but I think I've got tickets to another dozen. So I want to encourage all of you to make sure that you see as many places you can in the festival that all of them take place, more or less, during September and October. They are all world premieres by women playwrights, which is a historic event, I think, for our city, for our nation. I think it represents, obviously, a commitment to doing all we can to push women artists forward within our field. It's exciting to be doing something which addresses a dialogue we've been having in the field and is part of the solution to that. And for me, personally, I know the opportunity to see, I hope I can see 50, I don't think so. But to see, I know we're all, the seven of us though who kind of cooked it up originally, we're collectively seeing all of them. And I know we already have a post-mortem schedule, I shouldn't call it a post-mortem, to sort of get together and just to ask ourselves, what did we learn? That's what I'm excited about is 50 plays by women. Okay, it's great. We just from the numbers point of view, but what will we learn when it's all over about what questions and styles and commentary and subject matter those 50 women are bringing to the table? So I hope you'll all join me in seeing as many of them as you possibly can. We need to thank for helping us make tonight and this festival as a whole possible. So to start, we want to thank the National Museum of Women in the Arts and its director, Susan Fisher-Sherlock. The donors who generously underwrote this festival, Polymerie Black in Miss Dupler, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Prince Charitable Trusts. We also, of course, when I acknowledge the first lady, Michelle Obama, who is serving as the honorary chair or the chair of our honorary committee. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to be with us tonight, but she left a really lovely note for us in the program, so make sure you check that out. And we want to thank our programming task force. There have been members of all of our theaters working together, members of our staff working together for many, many months to coordinate all of these events, including this event tonight. They worked incredibly hard, so we want to thank them. Honestly, the two women without whom we really could not have pulled this off, and we sat down together early, early on. We said, okay, well, if we're going to do this, we need to get some people better than us to coordinate this thing. And so we- We come up with great ideas, but then we need people to actually execute them. So I want to thank our coordinating producers, Nan Barnats and Jojo Roof. My two men have the distinct honor of introducing two women who really need very, very little introduction for a conversation that goes right to the heart of some of the themes of this festival. The, one of our guests of honor tonight is Lisa Crone. I have to tell you just personally that I know, I've known Lisa for many, many years through her work years ago with the five lesbian brothers, but I also know her because I run into her every time I go to the theater in New York. And I've been asking around to see whether everyone else runs into her in the theater in New York. I think she's the most supportive theater person in New York. I know Lisa is a writer and a performer whose work has been widely produced in New York, regionally and internationally. Her plays include Well, which was done here at Arena Stage, 2.5 Minute Ride, and The Verizon Play. She's a proud founding member of the Obie and Bessie Award-winning collaborative theater company, The Five Lesbian Brothers. She wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Fun Home with music by composer Janine Sissori. Yes, she and you know it's the winner of five 2015 Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Lisa and Janine were the first all-woman team to ever receive a Tony for Best Score. Just learned this, I also just want to say that Paula was one of the producers of Fun Home. Interviewing Lisa tonight will be Susan Stamberg. Susan is a nationally renowned broadcast journalist and a special correspondent for National Public Radio. She's the first woman to anchor a national nightly news program and has won every major award in broadcasting. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the Radio Hall of Fame. Beginning in 1972, Stamberg spent 14 years as co-host of NPR's award-winning news magazine, All Things Considered. Then for three years, she hosted Weekend Edition Sunday. Before we start, please take a moment, turn off your cell phones. We don't want to interrupt them. Thank you so much. And now please join me in welcoming Susan and Lisa to the stage. I'm a deep public radio groupie. Like splendid table, sort of a pastor on your health, deep. And so it's one of the best things about getting a certain amount of success in the theater is getting to sit next to this extraordinary voice and actually, plays are different from each other. Linata's plays are different from Ann Washburn's plays, are different from Sheila Callaghan's plays. They are as different from each other as David Mamet's plays or different from August Wilson's plays are different from David I's plays. All of those plays are equally different from each other. I think that there are a couple of things I think that are important though. One is that plays don't have a single narrative voice. They don't tell you a story in the way a novel tells you a story or a storyteller tells you a story. They show characters moving through situations. And they do it by putting each one of those characters. The story might focus on the events that happen to one character more than another. But each one of those characters has ideally an equally whole, full consciousness. So what happens in a play is what my partner, Mattle DeGeorge, called that there's a democracy of consciousness across the stage. So the trick of writing the play is to figure out from the point of view of every one of those characters what the world looks like from their perspective. And in the great plays, in Shakespeare, when all of a sudden a tendential character speaks to you the apothecary speaks to you, what you hear is the story of Romeo and Juliet through the eyes of that apothecary. So I think it's different in subjects. Don't you? I've known that in our newsroom, for instance, and 110 years ago when I started at NPR, women made a difference in the newsroom because we said, wait, we've got to talk about family. Wait, we've got to talk about glass ceilings. Wait, we've got to talk about elder care. Where were the ones who brought subjects and ideas onto the radio news air? Don't you feel women will do that same thing? I don't know if the subjects are different. I think, you know, Eugene O'Neill writes about family. Edith is about family. You know, I think a lot of many plays deal with family, but what's different is indeed, and this isn't just for women, I think this speaks in favor of diversity and playwrights in general, is that different women, individual women, and then within that spectrum, women who come from different backgrounds can fill in detail about individual perspectives and add them into the culture. And the more that there is, every writer gets better. That contributes to our understanding of each other and what the world looks like from different perspectives. I was trying to think who has given us great women, which men, male players have given us great women, full-rounded and deeply understood, and the first that left mine was Ibsen. But who else would you add to that? Someone quickly said, Shakespeare, I don't know. He made witches and he made women with bloody hands and he made women who dressed as men or the other way around, maybe not as rounded, but more providing pieces that you would talk about to show the experience. Right. I have been thinking a lot about Richard Greenberg. I play several parties, you know, which on the face of it is a play that I would say a bunch of wealthy people in a living room on the Upper West Side, you know, I've seen enough. But that was one of my favorite plays of that season. I think it's exquisite. I mean, I think, I don't know, there are... Well, your whole mission and your whole life has been dedicated as a woman to being a female flabberhead as well as a actor, presenter and all the other things. Once the situation is a new servant that has been taken, that you were telling me about before we came out. Right. People here know, the Lilly Awards Foundation and the Dramatist Guild Collective Nationwide Survey, the COUNT, it's called, that we presented at the Dramatist Guild convention in the summer. And it's extremely helpful. You know, they did a gathered statistics from theaters across the country. There were criteria. They had to be sort of nationally recognized theaters that had produced and were currently producing. They produced for at least three years, had at least three productions. A number of criteria. And they were looking specifically for gender and diversity statistics for the seasons, I think, 11, 12, 12, 13, 13, 14, I think that's right. And you know, nationwide, what they found was that productions of place by women is at 22%. And this is up from 17%, where it's helped steady for a very long time. And individuals, some individual theaters are doing much, much better. And some theaters are doing better than others. Yeah, in theaters. Interesting cities, Chicago, this one. Well, what else is on that list? Was the blessing interest not so much New York? No, New York is at about 25, like, yeah. And New York is the city that I'm most familiar with. New York's very interesting. There are theaters in New York who are now above Paris and have been for several years. I think, you know, one of the things Marcia Norman is one of the movers and shakers of that study says is that the reason more women aren't being produced is that artistic directors aren't producing them. I think that's exactly right. And I think that when, I mean, I think this festival is an example of how, you know, if we want it to change, it can be changed. It can be changed immediately. Women tend to do, and for others, I guess economic reasons as much as anything else, to do better in regional theaters, right? Or in non-constructional, or in marital, yeah. Well, I think there are, I mean, I don't, you're taking this from something I glibly said backstage and now I'm sort of backtracking. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's something that I read, it's fairly basically in that, I'm trying to take it out on you. I think it is true that we were talking about this. That the farther you go down the economic ladder, the more women there are. And, you know, certainly women directors, for instance. There are a lot of women directors. I think working in the, I think, many more of the regions than often off-off-taught Broadway, you know, Bruskins Theater and then as you move up and get to Broadway, those numbers drop all the way off. So, what's... But I would prefer to be trusted with that. What is the added value? I mean, why do we need more women running through theater, or directing it, or? Well, I think a great, a great deal about this, and I think it's a very interesting question to sort of parse. You know clearly if we're at 22% of plays being produced are written by women, then we can agree that's not the natural order of things. Unless we believe that men are inherently better writers than women, then there is some implicit bias that's keeping more women from. The beauty of these statistics is that they help us to understand that this isn't a feeling that women have, that they're not getting as much opportunity. The numbers are there, right? And the other thing that's useful is that we can never really know, we can't understand, we can't judge bias based on any individual's experience. We don't know why a play is produced or not produced. We don't know, we don't, you know, maybe a play's not good enough. You don't really know. There's all kinds of questions there, and I think also life for playwrights is not fair. I mean I could also name a number of white male playwrights, straight playwrights, who I think are extraordinarily talented, who aren't getting the shot that they should get. So being in the theater means that chances are you're not really, it's going to be really hard and it's not really going to be fair. But I think that one thing that happens is that we start to look at the primary relationship, we playwrights start to look at our primary relationship, and what we talk about this issue is being between writers and institutions. The primary relationship in theater is between productions and audiences. And institutions are the conduit of resources between those two things. Now this is very, I don't understand it really, what kind of institution in that case, the NEA? No, no, it produces the theaters, the theatrical institutions. There, we, playwrights need them to help us, theaters collaboratively made. You can do it with very little money. I think that's the only thing that's confusing is that you don't need, I think sometimes we have a complication. If you can make your money making your art, it is a wonderful thing. It's very fortunate. But making art and making your living making art are two different things actually. And so we get confused sometimes when we can play those things. But in terms of the argument for diversity that I'm interested in, which has, it has to do with what happens in the theater. It's not really, I think theaters need to get rid of, theaters need to deal with the clear bias that's making it so there's only 22% of women being produced. But the reason to do it, aside from the fact that it doesn't, you know, we've got clear bias going on from an artistic point of view, the reason to do it is that it has to do with what happens in a theater. And theater is, I spend a lot of time thinking about what is the difference between theater and other art forms, particularly television and film, because we live in a world where those have much more power now than we do in the theater. So what is it that happens in a theater that can't happen? Theater and film, they're completed by the time the audience sees them. I mean television and film. But theater is the only art form of that kind that is made in collaboration with the audience. It doesn't exist, except for the moment when the audience is there. And it is made in the group mind of the theater. It is an imaginative project between what goes on stage in the audience. So in a great theatrical experience, and you probably had this experience, when you've been to the play that you never forget, I was thinking today that it's a little bit like choral singing. You know, when you sing together and you have that incredible experience of losing yourself into that sense of making extraordinary music together and that experience of singing harmony. You can't sing harmony by yourself. You can't sing counterpoint by yourself. But all together you can make this thing. And I think in the theater, which it's nothing, it's nothing. There's nothing. It's all imagination. Nothing. When you watch a movie and someone's driving a car down a road, they're in a car and they're on a road. In the theater, nothing is real. So everybody just pretends. It's just this incredible thing where this person is going to pretend to be this other kind of a person. And we're going to pretend that these things are other things. And we enter into this imaginative enterprise together into what Thornton Wilder called the group mind. And the bigger that imaginative pallet stretches as with choral singing, the more the more divine that experience is. And when there are different kinds of people, people who don't live in your own personal empathetic reality, but all of a sudden in this imaginative world of the theater, you see them and they see you. There's this incredible, unforgettable experience. A great example of this. Two of them happening on Broadway right now. One, of course, is Hamilton. The way people feel in Hamilton doesn't just have to do with what's happening in on the stage. It happens to do it has to do with who's in that room. It has to do with the fact that you can sit in an audience with Buster Rimes and Tim Geiger in the same audience. And just hearing that, you're like, I want to see that show. I want to sit in the room where those two people are seeing something that feels so alive to them. And it's the same thing. And I want to be in that mix as well. That's what diversity theater is made of. And that's why diversity matters. And what I love about that is such a wonderful description. I've interviewed Ethel Merman years ago. Anybody? And she talked about hers and hers and hers and hers, and then getting it down. She said, we freeze the show. About two weeks before we go on, we freeze the show. And I said, Well, what fun is that? Then you're doing the same thing night after another stage. And that particular performer, she said, Well, that's what you do because you have to give the audience the same performance every night. But you would say that, would you? I would not say that. That's not what she was doing here. I mean, I, you know, to me, I started as a performer before I was a writer. And you know, I started just telling funny stories on stage. And I sort of did that spontaneously. And in the very beginning was quite successful at it. And then I did a little more in that I was not so successful at it. And then I was interested in what those skills were. And so because I was in the East Village and I was on, you know, there were all these other clubs. And so I got to be on stage all the time. And, you know, I often say I train myself when you're like billion, being on stage all the time. And as I took those little storytelling performances and started turning them into these solo plays, I became interested in how you could gather an audience's attention and sort of focus it and then sort of move it through a story, carry them through you know, that sort of that it's that creation of that imaginative group imaginative experience. I felt when I was really, you know, performing all the time, I felt that physically. And I didn't, you know, it was really an interesting thing as I learned more and more about, you know, your first performing and you feel like you've got to do everything and people will watch you do it. And I think, you know, at some point I heard some comedians say, I've been performing for about five years or something. I'm just comedians say, well, you have to perform for seven years before you're really good at it. You know, in my way, I was like, well, I think I'm pretty good at it. But then at seven years, I did have to switch. And what I realized was that that what you do is not just to present yourself, it is to gather the audience's attention and allow it to move through you, which changes you as you change them. So you're reacting to your grabbing for attention. If you see that it's wandering, or there's something sneezing in the front row, yes. Well, they're sneezing. They're always sneezing. Yeah. Yeah. But what interests me in that is how that's one thing when you're a single player doing that. But it's quite another thing. You have an entire cast. So how would that work? If you feel that they're wandering off somewhere, you just give signals or you don't start talking faster, or when I did when I did my show, Well, which had other people in it, I mean, you did it well. Would you tell us? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So you get in the radio hall. And I have been doing, you know, mostly solo performing in that I had written this show, well, they had people in it, you know, the sort of Joe inside the show was that it was a solo show with other people. And I was acting opposite the great Jane Howdy shell, which was like a graduate school to be on stage with her. And it was a cast for the people as well. And the director and my longtime great collaborator, Lee Silverman, at some point, you know, basically said to me, you have got to just act your part and stop. I can see that your subject is why you say that line. And that was not helpful. That was not good. So, but I think part of the part of the problem was that I was still trying to move the show through myself. And I needed to understand that it was going through the entire organism and learn to act in a different in a different way. Do you put on some good ensembles, they feel it together. Yeah, I mean, the cast of fun. Yes, they are. And they're very intimate with that body, you know, because they're in the round. And they're very, very, I mean, you know, sometimes they're this close to the audience. And so they definitely do that thing as a group of, you know, pulling, you know, coalescing the audience and making them one with the show. How precious are your words to you if they change two lines in a performance of the night? No, it's fine. No, no, that's fine. No, it's really bad. I mean, never once in, well, they would never do that. They're the best. He changes the lining. They go, I can see where they did it. And sometimes not. But actors should say the lines that play right. I've written them and put them aside. That's a good thing. Number three. You're going to get some good tips to these folks about ways to, oh, this is a serious question. Well, it depends on what kind of a person you are. And it depends on what kind of place that you're in. Right? I mean, I think this question of the artist's relationship to an institution is an interesting one. And so I think there are different ways to put this. So I don't know if I'm only hesitating because I don't know if this, you know, how helpful this is to everyone. But I do feel that it seems to me that it is helpful to know that your primary relationship is not with an institution, it is with an audience. And that you need institutions, you need to figure out what you need to do to get your play in front of the audience that you want. So when you think about having relationships with institutions, you should know what those institutions are and what they do. And if their audience has a relationship to your work or work that you want to do, it's a little, I mean, I feel like people always say self-produce. And I think for some people, that feels like liberation. And for some people, it feels just like a slap in the face. So I don't know. I think the path for everybody is really, really different. And, you know, because I came at it as a performer, that was, and because I was in East Village at a particular time, and at the, you know, I was at the Wild Cafe. With, you know, at that time, you know, I saw the Split Bridges Company, I don't know if you guys know Split Bridges, Peggy Shalva, as we were at Debar Golan. That was the, you know, their place, they're the place that totally rocked my world and changed my life. And I thought I have to be wherever they are. And I found this theater collective where there was the most extraordinary work going on. And some of it was, I mean, all of it was exciting. It was, you know, fear. One of the things that was amazing about it was it was made by many, many of the people who worked there didn't know anything about theater. And watching theater be made by people who didn't know the rules of theater, who would leave the stage to answer the payphone in the back in the middle of a performance, but were electrified. It was, it taught me so much about theater. Also, because that was that world of the people making the theater and the people in the audience, they were making this lesbian theater. We were making it only for ourselves. Nobody was paying any attention to us whatsoever. That was maddening in a way because it was extraordinary work being done. And critics would come, you know, nobody was paying attention at all. So that was maddening when there was extraordinary work being made. However, for me, the experience of getting to make theater for no other reason than to see what we could put on the stage and how we could delight ourselves and the audiences who came in was the biggest gift I could have ever had as an artist because it's total freedom for me to know that that is always available to me. That is why I've been extremely fortunate. And I've had a lot of opportunities and a lot of support. I always know when I walk into, when I'm, when I walk, when I'm dealing with a producer that I don't need them to make work that matters. Wow. We're going to one of your questions from you all. But while we're waiting, are there microphones out there for people to go to? Or just stand up and chat. But while we're thinking about what they might want to ask, it's something that always puzzles me with, in theory in particular, as a play gets up involving a group of people. And the director needs to keep coming in and looking and play right to tinkering. How you, how you can keep it fresh, you see that for 7,000 tons, you know, 7,000 at first, how do you go and say, Oh, there's the problem. I mean, it is a, it is an organism that's made by the most extraordinary thing. There's this ancient art. And then, and, and who cares? You know, if you say you work in theater, and people are like, theater, I love theater. Paul Rudnick said to me one time when they say that it's as if they're saying, I love plaid. Lace maker. People within this arcane field have their own, and then everybody just sits there and looks at the thing and just, just days that stretch into nice, stretching days and just eating twizzlers and look at them. And then you don't know until the audience comes and then they come and then you see it and you're like, Oh, that's not what I thought was going to happen at all. So either that's better, or I have to change the arrangement of the doc. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, great. So it's like, he's not likable in the book. Yeah, he's a father. I was just thinking, there's a little three year old who lives downstairs from us. I don't know when times the story's not very interesting. She likes for me to, she likes to come up and for me to play the part of the CD of Fun Home where the father screams as a little girl. She has a wonderful father. She's just, you know, like little kids, they just like, just like to play the part where he yells at her. I didn't want to sentimentalize him. But we would say about what we did have to calibrate that a little bit. I suppose the way we did it was by thinking the way you do about any character, which is, you know, like actors want to make positive choices, you know, what did that man want and what were their points of connection. But I also felt like I didn't want to let him off the hook either. You know, he was, for those of you who don't know, Fun Home is based on Alice and Beckel's graphic memoir about her relationship with her father. When she came out as a lesbian, when she was in college, she found out that her father had been living as a closeted gay man for her whole life. Her mother told her this. And it's true that things might have been easier for him. I don't know that it would have been if he had been born later. However, there were also people who were born at that time who did come out, who didn't get married, didn't have kids and sort of live a lie in that way. And you know, you can't, certainly, it's very understandable why people did that. And he was a person who also bought himself as being a very kind of brave artist at the same time. So anyway, we have slides up, please. Yes, well, he was. Yeah. He said, I mean, that's the story. That is the story. And, and indeed, we needed to, you know, have people want to be in a room with that character and be interested in that character. You don't need people to like him. We needed people to be interested in him. Sometimes the most unlikable ones are the most on stage or sometimes in life. Questions. Yes. And I just want to read your musical before. I did have a feeling when it was first suggested to me that it would be a musical. And in the, you know, when we first started being interviewed, you know, doing interviews about these people would ask me and I would tell them the reasons why I thought at that time that it should be a musical. But then it occurred to me that since it was my first musical, I could have easily have been wrong. Akes with yearning. There is an undercurrent of yearning in that book. And I think that I think, I think that well, what both Janine and I sensed could be musicalized was that yearning. And I don't think that either one of us thought that it was that it was that we were wrong about that. But for both of us, it was the hardest thing we've ever worked with the most challenging piece we've ever worked on. And I think we did wonder at points whether we would succeed. So but you know, Sam Gold and Janine Tesori are both people who sampled as the director and Janine and also our actors, many of whom were with us for many iterations, Beth Malone in particular, who plays adult Alison, which was the most difficult part to write and really just like, we couldn't have written it if she hadn't been willing to give her all to so much bad writing. And it was, I mean, I was incredibly generous and brave thing for her to do. And there was no if we, you know, it's because it has these three time periods, and she's watching. You know, so I knew early on that because of the I felt the structure was right. But I knew that it wasn't something that you were ever we were never going to be able to understand that on paper, because we were going to have to physically watch those three allicens in space next to each other to really understand it. And one of the things that I love most about making it is that it is a piece it is made out of every theatrical elements. It's made out of its staging and its set design, and its sound design, and its lighting design, all of those things are profoundly grammaturgical. And so it was a real great, you know, it was a great experience to be in the room with a team of people who were not afraid to not know the sort of ethos of the room was someone would say, what about this? Other people would say, I'm quite sure what you're saying, but let's take a look. Let's see. Nobody ever said, no, no, that's not gonna work. Once we look at it, and somebody might say, we always want to write it. How was the lyric writing for you? My advice to anyone who wants to write lyrics is to win Janine's story. So I really, I really loved it. It's really hard. But I learned so much, you know, from Janine what I thought lyrics were what I thought the actual song was. I learned a lot about that actually reading this book right now called, this drama maybe by Scott McMillan, which I'm really, really loving. And I feel like it's clarifying for me so much of what we sort of worked our way through and fun home about formally how theater musicals operate. I don't know the score. So tell me if you rhyme, do you have to rhyme things? Did you get it right? I think it was more musical than rhyme. What did you do? Did you get rhyming diction? I had, you know, I've written a lot of parody songs in my day. So I had a rhyming dictionary. But yes, yes. And Janine, you know, Janine was always like, not a true, that's not a true rhyme. No, she rejected a lot of my rhymes. Did you write Staten Island? Oh, Manhattan, Staten Island, too. Any more questions? Yes. Your view of when those dots have to get connected, because you might not need your You have an experience. All right. So I feel like you're talking to a producer right now. You're talking to a dramaturge. There's a difference between having people be able to say at the end of the play, this is what the play was about. You know, one of my favorite stories is about Kurosawa, somebody asked him one time, what are your movies about? And he said, if I could tell you that, I would write it on a piece of paper and hold it over my head. I wouldn't make movies. You know, the point of making theater is to capture something ineffable. And it's also about paradox. All art is about paradox. And also theater doesn't tell you things. It's not, it doesn't, you see people interacting, you see things about the human condition playing out. So there's a difference between the sort of dot connecting I was talking about is an audience going, what's going to happen next, being invested and being like, what's what's happening? I want to know what that's what I'm talking about. I think what you're talking about is at the end, can they say your play was about this? Which, yeah, you don't, nobody wants that really. You do want your play to play out in people's, you know, the dream is that it becomes part of this is what we do here. It becomes part of somebody's internal landscape is for the rest of their life. When they have an experience, they will associate an image from your play. That's, that's why we make fear is that we're hoping to become a Shakespeare guy figured that out, you know, that you could come back and back to it and it means something different in it. You associate it with any number of unrelated things. This is from you giving us a tutorial. Thank you so much.