 Hello, my name is Skylar Gray, and eight years ago, to this PPF, I was an intern here at the Pacific Playwrights Festival, so thanks Kimberly. I am now the Director of New Play Development at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. So I'm incredibly proud to be here. South Coast Rep is really where I figured out what literary management or dramaturgy was, and also really became an artist here. So it's so nice to be back, so thank you, John and Kimberly, for having me. So I am joined by some incredible people whose work you've seen over the course of the weekend. I'll have them just sort of go down and say who they are and what project they have here in the festival, just to get us started. Kevin RT, you got to roll a sheepdog. I'm Julia Doolittle, and I wrote Love and Contracts, I'm Mamie Freed, and I wrote Truth. I'm Caroline McGraw, I wrote I Get Restless. And I'm Kemp Powers, and I wrote Little Black Shadows, where am I set? You have the home field advantage here, Kemp. So when John and Kimberly asked me to do this, they said, what do you want to talk about? I feel like we've had an interesting year and a half here in the U.S. of A, and so it felt like a very important thing to talk about what it means to be a writer in America today. So that's sort of where our conversation will take us. I think to get started, I just want to focus on the plays in the festival and sort of know where the inspiration came from and how long you've been working on this play. Kevin, you want to kick us off? So this play's been around with me for about three years now, and the first draft was a very different play, and I wrote it at the tail end of this long fellowship I had at the public theater, and it was like right at the end. I brought in this draft, in the draft. So it was a very emotional response to what I had been seeing and sort of processing for myself, where I was at for on many levels. The issue of police violence, I knew I wanted to write something about it, but it felt very scary. I mean, it felt very scary just to be totally honest, it's just a white male to think I could say something that people might want to listen to and that could contribute. It was a really tough thing to navigate, and it took me a long, long time to do it. So sort of crucial to it was discovering my main character, who was really a side character initially, and people kept asking questions about her in the play. She's an African American female police officer, so those questions that came up for her seemed to be the most complex. And so I was like, okay, I think there's a play there, I don't know if I'm the guy to write it. And so then I spent about a year talking to police officers, and I did a lot of interviewing. I did that kind of work for all my writing, sort of pretend to be a journalist and my alternative career is a New Yorker writer. So I interviewed officers as many officers of color as I could, particularly female officers of color, and they were willing to talk. And I think in this moment, particular moment in our country's time, issues within department, racial issues that divide along race and class, and it's all being forced to the surface in new ways. So I think you saw this in the 60s in the Civil Rights Movement. You saw black police unions form for the first time, and you're seeing that again. You're seeing officers more and more willing to speak out and say, actually I'm not cool with this. Okay, so that's a really long answer to where the play came from. And what was the other question? How long have you been writing it? Yeah, I think it's been now about three years, three years with some very, I've thrown out drafts, I've thrown out entire plays. So yeah, yeah, yeah, great. I'll use this one. I started this play, I think two years ago, was when I came up with, when I pitched it to South Coast Rap, because it was a commission. And what was the other part of the question? What inspired it? I was at the party last night, guys, okay? What inspired it was, oh, it's so much less good than that one. So what inspired it was, I'm just going to move this. I am a young straight woman, and that means that I must contractually involve myself in the bonding ritual of complaining about men with my other straight female friends. So once when we were doing the ritual in the coven, one of my friends had just been ghosted by a guy, which is when you're dating someone and they just disappear. Not physically in front of you, but they stop responding to your texts, your calls, they dump you via inaction. And she was, understandably, very upset. She said to us all, I really wish that it was the way it used to be, that when a man was interested in you and notably slept with you, he had to be serious about you. So I got a pop as a child. There were more rules around all of this stuff, and it was clearer what relationships were. And everyone in the coven was like, ah, yes, absolutely, 1,000%, of course, and I'm sitting there like, but we don't actually want it to be the way it used to be, right? Because if you go back far, you know, and that was what inspired a play about someone ghosting someone for 220 years. The gay coven is very similar. I think it's a shame that we haven't combined. We haven't done enjoyment. We could get a bigger venue. Perfect, great. Okay, I'm done. I've been working on shrew for about two years in one way or another. I was interested in it because I've been extremely preoccupied and obsessed with theater for a long time. And theater as theater is a lot of what I'm interested in as a theater writer. And we're at a moment where the canonical plays that made the voice in form of theater are becoming, in my experience, unperformable in a certain way. And largely because of the absence of it in my particular area of obsession, the absence of women in those canonical texts or if they're written, they're written not in their own voices. They're puppets for other viewpoints. And I love those works. I'm interested in those works, but they're creating more pain and pleasure when I see them in certain ways. And I'm really interested in the question of how can we maintain and hold and accept our history? And yet when we present it, feel like we're presenting it now with the point of consciousness with which we kind of need to feel theater now. So we don't walk out feeling bad or just bearing the damages and the omissions as part of a given. So that's where I've been coming from. I'm sure trying to restore its delights and acknowledge its troubles through the text rather than through the theme of the production, which has been to deflect those questions more. So that's what I've been up to. I'm also going to move slightly. So I wrote, I started writing I Get Restless almost two years ago. And it was a confluence of two inspirations. I was talking with my now husband, then boyfriend, about we're talking about getting engaged soon. So I was, you know, in that whole mindset, thinking about what that meant for me personally, what that meant on us sort of for feminism. I don't know, I was getting very heady about it. And then I had also been talking with my best friend about we just started talking about the movie The Vow, which is an amnesia romance movie. And I was just thinking about how when I write, I like to take something that I'm sort of like, there's so many bad versions of that. What's my version of that? How can I sort of put it on its head? And then at the same time, the presidential primary was happening. So I was this intensely personal, very like, just very intense time in my life, and then this very intense time in our country. And I was thinking about how my life had changed and then how the country had changed and was constantly changing and the ways in which when we're in something, we sort of don't feel like when you said it's been a crazy year and a half. I was like a year and a half. Like it just doesn't, it just sort of time just works and it completely can work in these completely different ways. And I wanted to write this very protagonist driven story about a woman who in many ways is having of its, her issues are just like affecting the sort of small group around her and her life and her little life. And then sort of the shadow of change in America is outside of the play. Yeah, Little Black Shadows, we did a reading. It was actually a PPF reading two years ago. So yeah, this is how long you have to wait sometimes to get your production. But worth the wait for me. But yeah, this play, it kind of started with a true story. I kind of fancy myself a pretty informed person when it comes to American history. And I was reading a book and came across the first mention for me of a Little Black Shadow, this idea that in a slave, we have this idea of the field slave and the house slave. And they've become archetypes. But this idea that within the house, often the children in the house would get their own personal child slave called Little Black Shadow. And it just struck me this idea that a young child could be responsible for the well-being of another child as their job. And at night, rather than go outside or be with other slaves, they sleep under their bed or in a mat in the corner. So this kind of really sparked something in me. I started doing a lot of, this is a play. No one commissioned me. I just, it was just something I felt that I needed to write. So I took some time and went down south to Louisiana. I started visiting plantations and visiting the Whitney Plantation outside of New Orleans. I came across the bound copies of the Federal Writers Project, which from 1936 to 1938, the federal government, as part of the New Deal, sent writers all across the South to document in their own words the experiences of the last generation that had been born slaves before they died. So these people were in their 80s or 90s. They were very close to death and they were counted stories they remembered as slaves and understanding based on their ages, most of them these were the recollections of children. And so reading those stories verbatim was really enraging for me, largely because a significant number of the slaves, former slaves, mis-slavery and voice that, they talked about how wonderful their masters were. This is reconstruction, so there's the danger of lynchings and stuff like that. So a lot of them would be recounting horrors, but then at the end of recounting them say, well, but I really had it good because those slaves in that plantation, they were the ones who were treated badly. And it really brought up this, you know, this feeling of like how internalized how bred into us as a people the idea that we have no worth. So in that thought about like who wants to see a play about slavery, no one, white people don't want to see it, black people don't want to see it, but I'm going to write it anyway because it's our history and that's the thing. The reason we can't get anywhere is because we've all got our heads in the sand. So rather than focus on a story about a moment of change or an agent of change to inspire people, I wanted to approach slavery for what it was at the time, which was mundane. It was the rule of law. And based on that, anyone who looked like me, we were property, we had no value. So I want to tell this story where the slaves were happy and felt that they were a lucky to be a part of this family. And I figure in doing that, it would make the audience feel like I felt reading this, reading thousands, 2,300 tales of people, my descendants being brutalized and thanking the people brutalizing them for it. So like I said, it's the play no one wanted, but it's the one that I felt that I needed to write. Well, what's the power in looking at our history to comment on our present? For those of you that are writing or have written plays that revisit the past, like what is what is the power in that and finding or commenting on the world we live in today? For you, for you and your explorations. Well, it's funny because I'm actually happy that we had a two-year gap because when by the time we went back to workshop the play and would cast the actors, I mean, through no planning on my part, I realized that this play that I was working on, it was a history play, but it was more commentary on today. So in many ways, people say, well, how do you react to the current administration? For me, this is my police brutality play because I'm showing the foundation. This is why we have no value because, you know, a lot of people, there's some people who enjoy the play, some people who remove, some people who say it's unrealistic. It comes, things happen that come out of nowhere. And I'm like, oh, fancy that the idea that a black person could just out of nowhere be killed. That's really unrealistic. So once again, it's like I didn't plan it to be, but once we got back into the rehearsal room after two years, I realized, oh my God, this isn't a play about then, this is a play about right now, for me. And sometimes, you know, it's a discovery. I'm happy to see that some people made that discovery and sitting through the work. For me, I guess in that way, it's something of a question of art and the allowability of art, you know, because there is no art form that comes from human beings. Well, actually, there are, there's no theater art form that comes from human beings that doesn't have a component of its own time. It's just in the bones of it. So as times change and consciousness change and permissions change and culture changes, those pieces date, and they date severely and without mercy because, and particularly theater is vulnerable because there's no play that has a lifespan of more than five years culturally. Comedy dates instantly. And when you go back to old, when you go back to the 1960s movies, they're appalling. It's sort of like you see, oh my God, did we feel that way? Did we treat each other that way? Was that what people thought of women back then? Was that lobotomized baby doll in the 1968 sex comedy really how women were? And yet, and yet, and yet, there's a spontaneity and a vitality, especially in the language and the way we use language, and to just, you know, book burn or let things go obsolete or lock them in vaults. Seems like we're losing part of our voice, our past humaneness as well. So the reclamation or the ownership of that form, that form for us, has value and has pleasure, you know, in strange ways. But I don't think we can present those things now without touching who we are now as well. It doesn't feel right. So I think there's a double consciousness that needs to be brought to works, that keeps them alive and present and part of us, just like you can't whitewash history. And you shouldn't. It's with us. And I think that keeping all of those registers of what we were conscious and present is very important to our catharsis in our community as we go forward. You know, I think that theater more than any other medium I've ever encountered has the power to reach forward and back in terms of touching its audience and touching on things that are not only relevant but eternal. I don't know if that's because we're all here in the same room together and that we're all sharing an experience and literally our brains are having similar or lighting up in similar ways, all in the same room. It's just a scientific fact. I don't know, you know, as a writer, I think that when I happen upon the questions that still don't have any answers that we've had for basically the entirety of human history, sort of those bedrock questions, things like why cruelty and why tribalism and then on the other side, why love and why, in this particular case, why romance and why things that I don't think will ever actually have the answer to. And that's what always keeps this work alive for me and makes it eternal and mysterious in a way that, I don't know, makes me feel like there is something beyond us, not in their spirits amongst us way, but maybe there are. So yeah, I guess it's, I sort of let, like, give myself in to that mysteriousness even when I'm writing in the past, although my past is pretty fantastical, so it's less well observed than Kemp's past. So yeah, I guess that's my thought on that. And I sort of talked about this a bit yesterday with Kemp, but in terms of approaching a story, what does comedy and drama mean nowadays? Like, what does it mean to write a drama nowadays or a comedy, or when you have to explain, oh, it's a funny drama with, like, what does that mean today? Like, what is it to write a comedy or to write a drama, and how do you approach the differences? Or are they the same in terms of how you approach them? I think that, and I felt, I felt that when you said you have to kind of say it's a comedy, like I'm like, it's a comedy about a woman who loses her memory and then her life slowly unravels. So just, just a real knee slapper. But I think, I think that for me, I just think that people laugh when they see themselves or when they see a height, like a little bit of a heightened version of themselves. And when it's, when it's just, when they're, when they're something that they think is said, you know, they secretly think or that they, they kind of like think they might think is said back at them. I just think that that's the, those are the funniest things. And that that, that sort of, I don't know, maybe the distinctions between comedy and drama are not as useful as they, I guess they're useful for like, if you're like, this is a, if it's more than, it's more than three hours, it's probably a drama, like, so it's maybe useful. But, but that I think that every play here, that there were, there are moments of where, I mean, in your play, there were moments when I was just like, just laughing so hard. And then, then I, I immediately just could, you know, kind of couldn't breathe. So I think that there, there are moments probably in all of these plays where, where maybe I think the drama, now I'm just going on a ramp, but like, no, I think that sometimes drama, people think that drama means something heavier, but I think that actually if you can make people laugh, it means they're listening. And that's the sort of like most, that's when people are most invested. And I think the weight of, the weight of a story can really kind of make its way into people's bodies. Like I didn't realize until the very first, I, I like to classify things as a drama or a comedy. And I didn't realize until our first preview, I was like, oh, shit, I wrote a tragedy. You know, and no one writes those. Oh, what have I done? And then I realized I've written two in a row. So it was really kind of a, at first, I was alarmed because I'm like, oh my God, you don't write tragedies nowadays. It's got to be a drama, a drama with lots of comedic elements or, you know, a comedy that gets serious and not a, not a tragic story that has elements of drama and comedy. And it took me a while to get kind of comfortable with what I've done that I didn't realize I'd done until after I saw it in front of an audience. And I was like, oh, wow, they are not going to laugh at that at all. So it's, you don't really know what you're doing. So at least I don't know what I'm doing sometimes until after I get it in front of the audience. I'm a little old school about this. I'm a little Aristotelian. I should get a t-shirt made up. And I just classify comedy or drama as comedy, the characters get what they want at the end and in drama they don't. Or a tragedy, actually, is the Aristotelian way to put it. Because I mean, when I was in another play I wrote, which is about college hookup culture, I was like, what a tragedy I've written here because they just don't get what they want at the end. And that makes it a sad ending. I do think that it's weird in the American theater right now. Like somehow we are not, I think that just like you said, the populace is unsettled by happy endings because they feel that they're fake and they just don't, and that is, that's weird. That's, that they're cheap. And so sometimes I feel like writers are pressured to write. We're always told like, write messier, write, like, mess it up. Like, don't let it be happy. Don't let it, and which I mean, of course we should just not listen to anybody. But I do, I do feel the pressure to write like, like there's nothing but drama, like nothing but dramedy. Nothing but drama because that's real. That's true. That's true. The dramedy of people getting on stage and acting in front of you is the true, is the truest form of theater. And that's, that's a strange pressure. I feel it has come up in the very recent, in the recent decade or something. Well, it's a strange thing to remember that, you know, comedy has its origins in fertility festivals in the sense of divinity, you know, both of which are things that don't happen or occur in the same form anymore. And I think since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the sort of connection of nature, divinity and life force is not something that's front and center in the way, in the paradigm of ourselves. I think essentially we're kind of struggling with the displacement that began, began a long time ago that separated us from our, our natural cycles, you know. And that's, I think, very much a part and parcel of comedy is it's primitive in the best way in that it takes us to our emotional centers, it takes us to our life and love centers. And that's under siege for all of us. Yet we are that and we are born of nature. We return to nature and the nature in us craves the explosions of comedy, its exuberance, its hopefulness, because you can think you live without hope, but in fact we live by hope. And we've got to keep putting it back into our lives in certain ways. And comedy delivers that for us. And yes, we feel it's fake so we don't respect it, but we crave it and we need it. It's where our love centers are. And, and we do need to keep that awake. And the worse the times get, the more I feel we need to laugh. And there's good laughs and there's bad laughs. There's cheap laughs and there's sacred laughs. And we need them all. And it's part of our job and we're never going to confront pain unless we can laugh and love. So that's where I think comedy is crucial. And I think smart comedy makes us not, makes us sort of still respect ourselves in the morning, you know, and we feel enlivened and we feel like more love and we feel bigger towards each other and we feel closer towards each other. So although it gets no respect for any of us when we employ it, I think we need it like we need, you know, bread and wine. And I wouldn't want to be with an audience who didn't respect my comedy, you know. I would stick up for myself like that. And Caroline, you mentioned something about the primaries and approaching a work that you were sort of in the middle of. What is, what is the temptation to respond to the now or the yesterday? Since it's ever changing? Or how do you sort of push that aside and keep doing what you're doing regardless of what is going on around you? Like what is that temptation or how do you funnel it out? I think there is a temptation to, to sort of, to sort of be like I'm responding real time to the thing that happened yesterday to the thing that's going on and to sort of be just almost scarily relevant to just be like this is the play for right now, for this very moment that's happening right now. And for one thing, plays take a long time. Like to write but also like you said, it was two, you know, it's two years since you had this, you were here at PPF with the reading. So, and the way that you talked about like theater stretching forward and backwards, I think that that balance is very important and that there are amazing plays that sort of deal with the kind of like, like the sort of like ticker tape news, but that they're, that I think that what can happen is that a mood or a feeling can permeate something even if you're not literally writing about, you know, what's happening right now. Like we have 24-hour news for that. I think theater can take its time with a question. And what I, what I had, what I'm hoping to do with this play is to have the sort of, like I said, like the sort of shadow outside of the world of the play that sometimes the play world cracks and it comes in. But that what's the way that it's addressing, you know, the kind of like capital these current times is the way the plays that I loved, you know, observe the current times, which is just through the, through people, through just these sort of, I don't like to say small because I think that anything can kind of be epic, but the, that it's addressing it through the personal because it don't, these things matter to our lives, to our daily lives. And they're epic world changing things happening, but they're also happening to, you know, they're happening to us and they're kind of crash landing into our lives and fracturing them in, in these, in a myriad of ways, and our, and extending to our relationships and our memories and our hopes for the future. So that's, that's how I'm trying to deal with it. I'm sorry, what you said just sparked this memory in me of this piece I read, I think in the times, but I can't, I can't remember now, about this woman talking about her, she lost her very young son right the week before the election in 2016, he was 28, he had a brain aneurysm and he died in his apartment and this horrible personal tragedy for her family completely eclipsed and they were Democrats and Hillary supporters, they completely, they completely eclipsed their political tragedy. She wrote in this piece that the whole thing, that the whole country falling apart to her felt like theater while she was living this personal tragedy of trying to bury her, her 28 year old son. And that they, she and her husband and her remaining child sort of literally ran, ran away, you know, they went and they, they lived somewhere else for a while because they just couldn't, they couldn't take being around their friends for a while, they couldn't take being in that house. And when they came back, she said, I suddenly realized everyone is so much angrier than I remember them. People and not just, not angry on the TV, like personally angry, she would, she, she got into huge fights in parking lots over really small things, like you parked, you parked over the line and someone like broke her mirror and she said that she felt, she feels lost, like she missed a beat of this thing we're all playing out. And just like you said, it's weird that when we live in a country where both like personal and citizen and therefore we're living our own personal tragedies with, with national tragedies, with national triumphs, with personal triumphs and it is, it's, it's overwhelming and I think one of those eternal, eternal questions that I run up against all the time, which is like, oh my, like, oh my God, am I, I'm in this sea of, of shared emotion and I'm within, and my, my own personal emotion is also overwhelming me. So I just, that's something that to one person can feel so visceral and real to the person maybe sitting right next to them who just lost their child can't even register. And so when we talk about like, I have to respond to this right now because everyone needs this, everyone needs this, like you said, tick or take news, play, story, I go, oh, but I don't know, maybe, maybe there's someone who's living a different experience of this than I am and that seems weirdly more unsettling and real. Um, they pick up a lot. Well, I kind of wrote it, you know, tick or take play, I guess. You got, like, look at the synopsis you might go, this is, no, you didn't, it's eternal. Yeah, but we're not talking about, no, you wrote an eternal question. Okay, you're not talking about me because I'm listening. Um, so, so I feel like what a play can do right now that like media isn't doing that is really hard to do is bring in opposing viewpoints and not in a didactic way in a very like human real way. So that was really and for me, sort of, you know, the ghost behind my shoulder is Arthur Miller in this respect that like you think about him writing about his time where he went because he could have went a lot of places was to, you know, the enemy big E, the sort of going at the other side, his opponents, his political opponents, his, you know, and humanizing them and exploring that and and what that path leads you to. And for me in terms of like how I might understand the now for myself and bring different people together and um in complicated ways and like complicated nuanced ways that that's just what not what we're getting more and more in the assault of sort of the barrage of facts and information. Um, I think that's what makes plays special right now. And I almost feel like to be very grandiose about it. There's a there's kind of a civic role right now. There's like a place for a play to do that in an important thing is it's not just for elite liberal audiences, because that's not the point. It's like you I want that too. But I definitely do. But I also want to play that can be done in the Midwest in a smaller town. And that conversation happens there too. And the people who come to that play don't feel patronized to or excluded. It's a big ask. But I think like Arthur Miller was able to do it. And like I think that's because he he goes to sort of the tragic truth of the moment embodied in the character. And what is that thing that that we are all might be blind to that we're not seeing about right now. And reaching for it, reaching for it. You might not know what that is, but that's it's the pursuit of like, what is that guy thinking that guy I really don't like and and that opinion that pisses me off and trying to understand it. Also your place totally eternal. And I wanted to say this, because you live in New York, right? There's this there's this exhibit at the Whitney right now that's Civil Rights Art from the 60s and 70s. And it's disturbing how it's all basically the exact same stuff we have now, including there's this thing you should see there. I forget who the sculptor is. But it is a giant room of trophies. It is a police commendation trophy for every officer who committed police brutality in the 1960s. And it says exactly what he did. A trophy, a trophy. Yeah, literally, he just grabbed trophies and he would re sculpt them for it. He walked into that room and you're like, and it's like Mike drops. So you should just yeah, I will. Thank you. Well, yeah, it's it's it's funny because I don't know. I don't feel like the world is falling apart right now. I just don't. To me, it's like we've been a lot of us. We deal with this this shit every day. And the world I feel like this, this is a test. It's a test for me. And I think we have a lot of people who are on a custom being tested. And hopefully people arrive to the task of that, because that's part of life. All we are is a collection of our experiences and the tests and how they shape us. But I feel liberated and free right now freer as an artist than I ever did before. I was I was telling another friend of mine who's a writer, I said, you know, what is what is playing nice all these years led to what is what is suppressing your voice and trying to write what people tell you people want to see where where has that gotten you. It's gotten us right here. So now will you be honest and write the story you really want to tell. So I think as as artists, we now have an incredible opportunity to just do that thing we give lip service to. But we all know a significant number of people are lying, which is I'm just writing what's in my heart. And you know, and some of us are, but I mean, it's we can really do that now, I think, because I feel like what do we have to lose? And for me, I find it's a it's an incredibly liberating, liberating time as a writer. And there and and I don't know, I'm just I'm I'm a glass half full kind of guy. So I'm kind of like trying to put lipstick on this pig. And your ability to hold both I wrote the tragedy and I'm a glass glass half full kind of person is so delightful. For me, it's a it's a it's a catharsis though. You know what I mean? Like I get I was so enraged and then you get to the end of this thing. And I went from like rage to sadness to hope and inspiration. Because I'm like, okay. And from this, here we are now, you know, and and I thought about my own life. I'm like, I'm the son of a man who was functionally illiterate. I am my dad left school in fifth grade. And he like he he got piece from West Virginia. He was like beaten savagely as a young man by by clan members. Like it's it's my story too. And to go from a father who's functionally illiterate to a son who can work at Forbes magazine and get CEOs fired. I think it's pretty fucking incredible. So I mean, don't let the fact that I write a lot of dark shit make you think that I'm like, a guy who feels hopeless, it's quite the opposite. I'm like, Mr. Hope. Wait, but I love what you said. You're like, now we can all write what's in our hearts. How do you find out what's in your heart? Because I'm, I'm what's in my I don't know. Sometimes I'm old. That's why. So the older No, I'm saying like, I thought I knew that I'm like, yeah, have a divorce, have a couple of kids, you know, it's life fucking sucks sometimes. And at a certain point, you just kind of go like, all right, I'm just I'm a work in progress. I'm going to be one until I kill over and drop dead. This is called mentorship. Cam, can you just side, but let's just we'll talk later. When what you were talking about with like the liberation of the stories, do you find an urgency to tell certain stories right now or put certain voices or bodies on stage at this time in America? I mean, I always feel an urgency. I'm not going to I always feel an urgency to have black stories on stage. I'm going to be tribal for a minute. And and so that's something that I'm always the first play I wrote was six black male actors. And my one demand for the play was that I wanted a black male director to direct it as well. And when some people came back and said, Well, why is that necessary? I said, because most of these guys have never experienced this before. And they deserve a chance as artists to kind of feel like they're in a safe space for once in their lives. And they're like, Well, anyone can direct this. Well, like, well, this is my black man's vagina monologues. So if you can demand that a woman can direct that to help create a safe space and environment to explore the story about womanhood, I feel like I should be able to create a safe space and an environment as a writer, where men can explore their black manhood, since everyone else seems to be an expert on our black manhood, except us. And I want to be able to let these guys tell their own story. Once this published and licensed, and I dropped dead, then anyone can do any kind of version of it they want, you know, you can, but as long as I have a say, that was my one one stipulation with the play. And I'm, that meant a lot of theaters didn't want to do it. Or in some cases, well, we can't find a black director, in which case that got them off their ass and got them to go into a Rolodex and find somebody. And we, and we have an obligation, I think, to represent ourselves. And when we see other people not being represented to kind of step up in that regard, I mean, Kimberly can tell you that when we did this reading, what was my demand? I want a woman director, preferably a woman of color. And Kimberly went and found people and I'm, that's how I met Mayadrolis. May didn't know me. I didn't know May. I just, I, you don't, ignorance is bliss. So I am a former journalist. I had zero training in theater. I'm just the guy who likes plays and writes them. So I didn't know what I should or shouldn't ask for. So I have a tendency to make a lot of requests and demands that I think other writers don't because they feel like there's the, and so I just, I will ask out, because I do have an agenda, but my agenda is believe it or not, not the play itself. It's what's happening behind the scenes on the play because so much of what makes the play work or not work for me is the artistic staff that's executing it. I think the most important decision that a playwright can make, the biggest power we have is the power to choose our director. That's the biggest. And I've told so many playwrights that had them throw it back in my face and say, well, oh, but if this theater won't do it unless I use this director, and I was like, I'm just telling you what I feel. I think you wouldn't be seeing any of these plays if I didn't really kind of stick to my guns on the director. So I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants on this, but it seems to be working, but I'm just, I'm being honest. I mean, I do have a bit of an agenda. I think representation for every group has to stick up for their group to make sure that they're represented. I don't think there's any shame in that. That's not taking away from any other group in my mind to kind of, there should be more, there was a cover of Vanity Fair that like one of those Oscar covers. And I remember it was a few years ago, there were like three black actors on the cover, and everyone was great. And I, and you've got to kind of stop in those moments from celebrating and say, how come there are no Latino or Asian actors on the cover too? What Ken Watanabe doesn't deserve to be on the cover of Vanity Fair? You know, he had these number of movies. So we can do that. And we also have to kind of take some opportunity to push for some other groups. I mean, again, last half full kind of guy, see him optimist. And I'll shut up. Anyone else? No, I feel similarly to camp that I think there is there's a ton more focus in the American theater right now on on being more inclusive with our stories. Because that's actually what will give them their that eternal quality, you know, doing the same story over and over again about like the sad white dad who doesn't have enough and has an affair. No offense if that's your life. That's my story. Oh, that's your story. It's not about you, Kevin. It's just like we've seen it, you know, we've seen it and and and that doesn't and and the more people there are so many kinds of people in the world should write that down. They're they're streaming it. And that means that what we need to do is is expand our image as writers expand our imagination and knowledge of other people who aren't exactly like us, learn, learn and then put them in our stories. If our stories are calling for them and ask ourselves to call to put them in our stories, you know, that's not just, you know, race, gender identity, disability is important too. And I think that is going to give us a new crop of stories that are really wonderful and and will and and I think audiences are going to like love seeing seeing something new, but that's been amongst us forever, you know. So the funny trick about things about writing took me a really long time to learn this is that audiences don't it's funny. They don't really want to see our stories. They want to see their stories is the thing. And theater is not a precious bubble that gets handed from talent to talent on the long chain of being. Theater is an eruption that comes from the society from the culture from the people expression. And I think you nailed something really important with there's a power structure that enables theater and there's a populace that wants to see theater and those things don't move in lockstep. So there's the institutional things that produce art, this particular art form, but then they're always a little bit behind what's changing and what's happening. And so the taking of power often is just there reaches a kind of a tipping point when the theater is no longer speaking to the people that it comes out of and that's when you see these changes and we're in a big moment of that now where things are shifting and there's like a kind of a little earthquake or a big earthquake going on because the stories themselves are serving kind of the institutions that have perpetuated them. And I include academia in that also that the art school playground that produces writers is not the only way that art happens. It happens in much more unruly ways. It's always a forbidden and marginalized form when anything new happens. It happens in basements initially and works its way on the street level somehow with great pain to the creators. And the director issue is very alive for us all in that way because theater is so vulnerable to collaboration. It's not like the writer writes a play and the play goes out and takes wings. It's like you've got to launch a campaign then to get it realized. And that's like the hardest part of playwriting is finding that that shared consciousness and that care and that passion and it can't just be your passion. It's got to be the family around you that understands it. And then I think most crucially the people in your audience that start coming because that's really what we live for. That's we're all about that which is why most writers die of grief and sadness and eternal development loops. But not here at South Coast. Thank you. So unlike Kemp I guess I'm a little more of a the glass is half empty kind of guy with the way I've structured these questions with like but in terms of what inspires you about writing today like what is exciting about the world around you with what you're seeing on stage or what you envision will happen in the coming years. Like why is this such an exciting time to be writing in America or just to be in theater on that. I mean I think one thing I'm I'm I really really love about what's happening now. It's also really complicated is is what inclusion means moving forward and what the conversation about race representation looks like. And I think I don't see that here's where I'm a glass half full guy. I mean I feel like it's exciting to me. And even in the moments where I feel and it's not really me so much as colleagues you know like and honestly like I'll have occasionally a white writer colleague sort of come up and go like they're kind of shitting their pants a little bit and they're scared that somehow they're not going to get produced or something and those honest conversations like hearing that and to me that's exciting and those difficult conversations moving forward I'm not scared of those I think it's it's necessary and I guess for me my work in the theater and like why I still write plays is to sort of do exactly kind of what you guys were saying like find allies find collaborators I mean I didn't write this play alone I wrote it with my partner I wrote it with a whole bunch of people and I think that's why I write that's why I write plays and I think it's easier to do that for me more than ever find collaborators willing to jump in and make something together. I mean they're like a ton of cute boys in the theater right now and somehow they're all with each other. No I mean I wish I had a great answer to this question because I've just it's just in my blood to write now and I'm alive now so I I mean and there are a bunch there are a ton of exciting new plays but I feel like they're like that's been true all the time you know I'm I'm when I see a revival of something from the 90s or the 80s that I love I'm like I'm like oh it was happening then now it's happening now to me history um so I wish I wish I had a better question because that's cute boys um but that's sort of my go-to. I mean I guess since um based on how this is going this will probably be like the last panel I ever do I might as well just keep kind of go out with a with a bang and stay on point um I gotta I have to say um 10 15 years ago if you were going to a Lord theater and you you talked about seeing a black play there's a 70 chance it was going to be an August Wilson play and I love August Wilson America Shakespeare but the fact that now we're not even just limited to black history month to a February slot and and I'm and I'm meeting black playwrights all the time who I know their work before I've met them it's kind of stunning um I met a playwright um Chisa Hutchinson who who's at the summit and I know who all these people are and just three or four years ago if you would have said I'm an Asian playwright I would have heard that I thought like David Henry Wong or young Jean Lee and now you have Quiguen you have Lauren Yee you have Julia Cho I mean I I I am seeing and again this political climate can make everyone kind of circle the wagons and say like now we need to be cautious or we can just keep on pushing doubly hard because I am I'm seeing an incredible amount of progress for for women and all different kinds of ethnic groups because again 10 15 years ago that's why I saw the whole August Wilson cycle because it was the only thing they program and and now you have Dominique Mara so who's you know first play was produced in like 2012 being one of the most produced playwrights in America and Katori Hall I mean if I start on black playwrights it's um it's incredible you know and so yeah I that's that's exciting the the hell out of me because when you you see that it doesn't turn into like this crabs in the barrel thing where it's like the only one I mean I've jokingly said now let's see someone program two or three of us in one season you know now you have a lot of choice now maybe be a little bit less afraid to to let a season you know have a little bit more inclusion and parity but but it's like baby steps but but I see I mean I shouldn't be here you know I'm a guy who wrote a play that ran next door to a fried chicken joint that went to the west end so like crazy like that's never would have happened 10 years ago so so the it's a pinprick of light but I I think there is an opening here and and that's been the thing that's excited me the most I've been excited that I feel like we are hopefully getting it's happening and it feels like it's happening at maybe at an accelerated rate that women's stories are are starting to be it's not like the male protagonist the story with a male protagonist that's the universal story and the story with female protagonist that's the women's story that that that I feel like women on stage and all the amazing female playwrights and writers that I'm that I'm sort of like just can't get enough of are the stories are feeling like they're attaining a universality in the culture and it's they're still so so far to go but it has been I mean even you know outside of theater just like writers that I'm excited by and and tv and film that I'm excited by where it just it does feel like there's been an explosion of of hi hi hi hi we're here we're here we feel we feel things is deeply and we are the we are the protagonist in our stories and it's it's just been I I feel like I'm just like what's the next thing I can read what I feel like I'm devouring not just not just theater and film like just books and and and web series and just everything at this this rate because I feel like I kind of can't keep up and I'm so excited that I can't keep up like it's just amazing I'm like is this what it's like to be a man everything is like kind of like about like everything's about you like everything is like is like everybody is like able to kind of you're able to because you know and not that there aren't there I mean I grew up with just Babyster's Club and of Green Gables like I've had many many role models in literature but but just the the feeling that like I could always see myself in boys and men in stories and I I feel like it's happening that men can see themselves in the women in the women and in the female protagonists in this amazing cultural way and I'm just like I'm just thrilled about it and I'm also just like I have so much to I just like have so much to take in and it's really that's really exciting I actually think that that is a beautiful way to end but thank you all so much thank you all so much and enjoy Madri's reading like I was just like yeah I was so smart and amazing I just think you're awesome and just like