 Okay, again, people move a little bit further forward, please. We like to fill up here. It becomes a lot more interesting for our presenters. Okay, do I have to talk that close to the microphone? Can we turn up again? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. How's the sound? Are there people in the back? Can you hear me okay? A little low. Can you hear me now? Are you getting there? Okay, pick it up a little notch. Okay, I'll put it on and just start the presentation. We'll see how it goes. Okay, my name is Michael Evans, and that's a he, him, is. I'm a dramaturg in Norway, which is kind of strange, I know. But that's just the way it is. And I've been a dramaturg since the 1980s in Norway. Now, when I first got hired as a dramaturg, my artistic director said, you have to really follow American theater and get hold of a good place. That was actually fairly easy in the 1980s because all the good theater, just about all the good theater that was done in Milwaukee or Boise, I wound up in New York. And I could subscribe to one magazine called the New York Theater Review, which was a conglomeration of all the reviews from New York. And by simply reading that one thing that came once a month, I could follow fairly well in American theater. Kind of strange to look back at how centralized everything was. But with the growth of the continued growth of the regional theater movement, that all fell apart. I can't follow American theater. I don't know where it is anymore. Because there are a whole lot of playwrights who have terrific careers and never get anything done in New York. So suddenly it's a whole new ball game. So I feel it's very difficult for me to follow the theater in my own home country of the U.S. And of course, Canada is even more difficult. So that was the impetus behind the idea of playwrights under the radar. There are a lot of good playwrights in, I don't know, Boise, Idaho, there, in Milwaukee who never make it to New York and they never get on the national radar. Because today you could have a good career being a regional playwright. It's not always necessary to come to New York. So that's why we have the panel today to put some of these really, really good playwrights on our radar. The format is stolen from Hot Topics. Everybody gets five minutes. After four and a half minutes they get a warning. And then they have to start wrapping it up. Afterwards, we'll have a question and answer. So if you have any questions, write them down or something or whatever you do and put it on your iPad. And we'll do that afterwards. So, our first presenter is Art Bereka. Michael, thank you for organizing this. This is such a great idea. My name is Art Bereka. I'm entering my 20th year as, well, I was first head and I'm now co-head with the Air Club of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Can you hear me in the back? So I'm entering my 20th year, which is either a great accomplishment or a sign of great inertia, depending on your perspective. Maybe a little of both. And I feel a little bit like I'm committing a level of betrayal because I opted not to represent an Iowa playwright on this panel, but Iowa playwrights are being well represented by two dramaturgy graduates of our program, so I'm happy about that. In the last several years, I've developed a relationship with a second MFA program at Holland's University, which is a low-residency program in Roanoke, Virginia. It's really quite a good program. They've done amazing things in just eight years. It's run by Todd Restau, a graduate of our department. So part of this is not only promoting the work of the playwright I want to talk about, but it's promoting that program, which I think is doing great things and making it possible for people who might not be able to pursue a regularly structured MFA in playwriting, because they do it over consecutive summers, four or five summers, for six weeks at a time. And I've developed a teaching and dramaturgical relationship with them, and the playwright I want to talk about is named Ben Jolivette, who is a candidate in the MFA playwriting program at Holland's. I got to know his work by directing a play of his titled Cold in their New Works Festival. They do a festival, a long weekend festival of readings of ten new plays from the program every year at the end of the six weeks. And that experience of working with him as a director, as well as dramaturgically, got me interested in the body of his work. So interestingly, when I asked him to send me as many of his plays as he could, he did. He gave me eight or ten, something like that. There's a handout that has been distributed that describes a lot of his work. I thought it would be good to do that, so I don't have to try to describe in five minutes each of the plays I want to refer to. Where he's been doing his work. He's been doing his work in so-called semi-professional companies, small theaters like the Willbury Theater Group in Providence and the Arcadiana Repertory Company in Lafayette, Louisiana. What he says about his work is, and this is from the New Play Exchange website, quote, I write darkly funny plays about good people doing bad things and modern riffs on classic tales. Now these are the two things that engage me about his writing, reading through, I don't think I've read every single play, but reading through the general body of his work. The classic riffs, there are two plays on the handout, Cain plus Abel and What Went Down, which fit into this category. They are really less adaptations than new works constructed on the raised foundations of the originals that they're working with while exploring in contemporary terms the essential themes of the original. And the most interesting one of the two, well they're both very interesting, but the one in particular I want to call your attention to is What Went Down. Was that a signal for four minutes already? No, okay. Was What Went Down, because if so, I'm in trouble. Which is based on the Japanese short story that the film Rashomon is based on. If you read this play or see it produced, it will not remind you of Rashomon at all, but when you learn that that's what it's based on and then go back to the original story, you begin to see kind of the amazing way in which a work of short fiction can inspire a writer to do something in contemporary terms, a work of classic short fiction. The other category is a category of plays that are very contemporary dramas of people facing extreme situations made worse by their own actions. This includes Cold, the play I directed at Hollands, which dramatizes two characters, a lesbian couple in a hospital waiting room confronting the question of whether or not they should cryogenically preserve the head of their terminally old daughter who was about to die. The thing about this situation is that one member of the couple announces to the other one that she's already done all the research and all the paperwork and all the planning for this and doesn't tell her until, like, hours before the child is going to die and this throws up a confrontation between them as well as a very, very interesting discussion about cryogenics and the possibilities of that, the questions of life and death. So that's one of these very contemporary plays. The others are on the handout. What they all have in common is a sense of being on a ride with the characters. There's long established relationships in the plays that have been destabilized suddenly and there are quick turns in events, relationships, and choices to be made moment by moment. This all resides in the language, which is very realistic but also very theatrical. The characters are very self-dramatizing in their use of language. Where are we, Michael? And an improvisational sense of character and a sense of making up the self at the moment. Now, one thing I was thinking about in the past day or so is how does Ben's work fit in with the theme of this conference and the question of inclusion and access and diversity? And I think it's interesting. You can apply this question to individual writers in terms of what is their comfort zone? What kinds of characters do they write about? To what extent do they write about what they know according to that terrible axiom that we still teach in writing classes? Write what you know. Yes, write what you know, but write what you don't know. Go out and find out about other people who are not like you and write about them. And Ben, that said, writes about openly gay characters like himself, he writes about women and gay women. And, do I get to finish the sentence? While asserting the positive presence of these characters and their inclusion in the drama, he explored the darker side of these characters as human beings, and he's begun to move into more political work with his most recent play, Community Garden, which is being read at Holland's this summer. That was a very long sentence. Okay, next up is Lucas Brasherfalms. I haven't met him in so long. Eric Michael Holmes is a consummate entertainer. His plays run the gamut from realistic two-hander to outlandish picaresque to Brechtian social commentary. He cites as influences in equal measure John Guare, Maria Bamford, and Adventures in Babysitting. As a playwright of color, his work is often concerned with how people of different racial make-ups attempt to make connections across cultural divisions of class and status. While addressing numerous crucial topics, Eric's dialogue is the energetic flair of a seasoned stand-up comedian. In his play Falls for Jody, Eric imagines the life and activities of John Hinckley Jr. in the months leading up to his failed assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan. Hinckley, holed up in a New Haven hotel lusting after Yale undergrad Jody Foster, strikes up a self-destructive relationship with Eddie. Hotel's concierge, a relationship that will literally end and blows. Eric's portrayal of Hinckley as a spoiled, privileged, and familially estranged loner, digs underneath the tabloid surface to find a hopelessly naive and prejudiced boy whose infamous act was motivated not only by an unhealthy obsession with a character from Taxi Driver, but from his own failed artistry, parental rejection, friendless existence, and inability to view himself as others did. The result is an unsettling drama with much humor in its 80-minute runtime within the context of what Eric himself calls his two dudes one set play. New Haven also serves as the location for Eric's jackets in May, only this time we are transported to March of 1969 in a run-down apartment serving as the headquarters of a Black Panther splinter group. The group's leader, Crazy George, has had troubled relationships with the Panthers due to his extreme actions and methods. Over the course of the play, George and the two women who occupy the house with him, Erica and Maude, attempt to enact deeds that will put their outfit on the map of the Black Power movement, only to end up murdering an illiterate 19-year-old named Alex, whose haplessness and innocence ends up making him a scapegoat for Crazy George's rage and malice. In the porn play, or Blessed are the Meek, Eric reverses Brecht's strategy of highlighting contemporary issues by placing them in a distant past by using a pornography studio in current-day Virginia to address issues of racism and subjugation in the antebellum South. The family-run porn enterprise draws parallels with life on a plantation as a Black family initially only casually involved with the white pornographers as a malicious empire built on prejudice, sexism, classism, and all-around discrimination. The play addresses catastrophically large topics of institutional racism and does so with subversive humor and chilling economy. My personal favorite of Eric's plays, Cut and Run, details the late-night adventures of Misha, a Pakistani woman who has recently moved to Staten Island to marry her arranged husband, Kazi. However, the pressures of New York and home life proved to suffocating for Misha as she lashes out against Kazi by attempting to, quote, an act of violence both unsettling and humorous. This outburst leads her down a spiral of goofy adventures to the New York underworld where Misha learns her own potential through confrontations with cab drivers, cult leaders, trust fund radicals, and douchey art patronizing stockbrokers. This combination of picaresque fantasy with personal revelation drama creates a dramatic form without obvious precedent and I personally applaud any play that begins with a wannabe revolutionary named Francis La Francis crying out, Dear Mr. Guggenheim, we have your daughter, so give us the fucking fellowship. To conclude, Eric's plays combine the audacity of Thomas Bradshaw with the insight of Ayat Akhtar and the wacky humor of Larry Shue. Eric is currently wrestling with a notion for a play about Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP chapter leader who was outed as white after years of pretending to be black, a character whom he finds endlessly fascinating. Eric is self-proclaimedly compelled by Brecht's idea that the good might be defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak. Such a troubling notion lies at the heart of his work, a growing canon of drama entirely deserving of a wider audience. Eric Micah Holmes Micah spelled M-I-C-H-A Google him. Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you. Next up is Elana Bromstein. She needs an introduction. I'm the director of Newark at Company One Theater and I'm here today to talk about Josh Wilder, who has written a play called Leftovers Among Many Others. And in fact, there's a handout going around if you don't get a copy and you want one, please holler at me after this and I'll be happy to email it to you. His other plays include The Highwaymen, Salt, Pepper Ketchup, and Wrong River. But I want to talk about Leftovers today because Leftovers is the first play I ever encountered by Josh. I was a reader for the Many Voices Fellowship at the Playwright Center and I remember getting this play and it was, I mean, maybe all of Act One was done. I can't really remember but certainly the whole play wasn't finished. And yet the conceit of it, a couple of boys in Philly sitting on a stoop in front of a row house and all of a sudden a giant dandelion cracks through the sidewalk and begins to distribute wishes. And the question is what do they really want? So that play really caught my attention not just because of the audacity of its imagination but because of the specificity of its voice. And I remember communicating with Josh before even he was announced as a Many Voices Fellow. I remember saying to him, I don't know what this play is going to be but by God can you please keep sending me drafts. That was about five years ago and this last season we programmed the play at Company One for a summer 2017 production. Sadly the city of Boston decided to tear up the streets in front of the theater and we had to cancel our production. But we're moving it to next summer. So we are actually getting a whole other year of development work which is fantastic. But I wanted to take a second to tell you about the play. Mostly I want to do it in Josh's words. He says this, so many things inspired me to write leftovers. I think the pursuit of happiness and the struggle to achieve our dreams is what made me write this play. Growing up in the inner city as a young black man I felt that my dreams and my environment were at war. Growing up I've witnessed so many smart and talented people become casualties in this pursuit to their ideal selves. Writing this play helped me understand why people in my neighborhood gave up and it helped me heal the wounds I accumulated in my pursuit of my own dreams. And it made me understand that I loved The Cosby Show so much. What's really interesting to me is that this play doesn't just include a giant dandelion that distributes wishes from the sky. It also includes Cliff Uxtable who takes on the role of a guide for a hero's journey in the entirety of Act II. And that is as complicated and complex as it sounds because the young men in the play wish for a kind of Cosby Show family happiness. But their own family structures don't obey the rules set forth in public media around what a good family looks like. And so as the news of Bill Cosby's own legal problems related to his assault of numerous women as that becomes known in this real world and the real world of the play the boys have to contend what it means to still hold that sense of Cosby Show happiness as a central part of their idea of who they are supposed to be in the world. So that is a really complicated story structure. And Josh's voice is one that I find in we've discovered in our workshop process and it's certainly on the page and in relationship to audiences. I've watched over the course of our past season our actors and our audiences experience senses of true authenticity joy and discovery as the actors and the audiences alike are taken through this journey. And it's actually been one of the most gratifying experiences of my dramaturgical life recently to be able to work on this play and I can't recommend it enough. I mentioned earlier we're going to be doing it this coming summer instead of this current summer. And if you want to talk about collaborating if you want to roll a world premiere you come talk to me. Thank you Elana. She's won a long list of prestigious awards, fellowships, stipends and residencies. Her plays have been given at least a hundred productions and have been translated into something like 16 languages and you haven't heard of her. The reason you haven't heard of her is that she doesn't write in English. She writes in Danish. Her name is and as I said she writes in Danish in theaters in North America just don't do contemporary plays in translation anymore. So what are her plays like? Well, they're maybe not as reader friendly as American plays typically are. Solbach writes very few stage directions. The scene might take place in an office but she doesn't describe the office. She writes an office and she writes none of this pause or a beat. Things like that she leads up to the actors on their territory. Her plays beg to be interpreted by really smart directors. And the look and feel of the same play in two different productions will be quite different. What is sacrosanct for her are the words. She doesn't want anybody to mess with the naked dialogue or the fractured dramaturgy. Every word in the text means something. She typically spends a year and a half to two years writing an 80 page play a lot of the time devoted to research. She has never ever workshopped a play. She tried that once. As she once told me, she trusts the workshop in her own head and she has never had a play stuck in development hell and she only writes on commission. She does, however, value input at various stages from two or three trusted friends but her knowledge of the theater and how it works or how it could be made to work is absolutely impeccable. She knows how to write lean spare dialogue and she knows how to craft well rounded scenes. What's most innovative in her way of writing is how she links scenes together. She doesn't do well made plays, tidy packages with a beginning and middle and an end in that order. Her plays are often associated. They add up in strange ways. As one critic recently wrote, Saul Buck drips a little magic into each scene. The most recent play, everyone I would be talking about today, is called Cold Call. It premiered just a few months ago at a big theater in Orhus in Denmark where it got rave reviews and the Swedish premiere will be coming in a few months. Cold Call takes place in the call center of a telemarketing firm. You know, those irritating people who call you when you're taking a nap after dinner. The thing is, all of their callers are blind. When the play starts the center has got a new IT guy a computer nerd who's fascinated and scared by all these blind people around them. But something about these people feeds his paranoia and confronts his other lack of social skills. You see, his best friend is his PlayStation. Cold Call is anything but an identity play about people with a disability. It's a play about disabilities between people and in society. Saul Buck shuns the uplifting stereotypes, you know, the disabled hero who overcomes a handicap. These blind people are always tripping over things. There's a lot of slapstick in the play. What she does is she shows how marginally integrated they are into our increasingly fractured society and in fact, she may be claiming that that's a good thing because these blind people have formed a vital functioning subculture full of inside jokes and camaraderie. Now in Orhus it was played by actors who were sighted. But they had eight weeks of rehearsal and they had a lot of people in helping them and they visited schools for the blind and whatever. They did everything they could. They did a wonderful job. They got very high marks from the blind society in Denmark. The play would obviously be better if you could cast blind actors in all of the roles. But if you just have one, you can find one black actor in the show that will resonate throughout the rehearsal period. The play is translated by me. It's very easy to translate. There's no specifically Danish things going on in the play. And I just conclude by saying that the rights for the North American premiere are pro-grabs. Back again as your favorite moderator. Jess Hutchinson. Here she is. Michael, I actually directed Red and Green by Astrid Talbot in Chicago. I didn't direct the production but I directed the first reading at Octavia. She's great. But I'm here to talk to you about another female playwright named Sarah Saltwick. I invite you to turn in your internet handles to the new play exchange which so my name is Jess Hutchinson. I'm a dramaturg and a director. I'm a freelancer. I also work for the National New Play Network. So I will extra invite you to turn to the new play exchange. Here's Sarah's beautiful NPX page. So Sarah Saltwick. So I'm excited to tell you about Sarah Saltwick today. She earned her MFA from the Michener Center at UT Austin which is where we first met and began collaborating with them. She was also a Jerome fellow at the Playwright Center but she has since returned to Austin, Texas which is for hometown and that's where she's based now. Sarah writes love stories. She writes them about the complicated ways that we love and the complicated things that we love whether that's romantic love, love for our work, love of ambition, love of liquor, of success, of saving people from fires or the love of an unfinished robot who just wants to see the ocean and meet an octopus. Sarah creates the worlds of her plays using what I call half step heightened language. I think of it as distilled realism. She takes what it might take people in real life a paragraph to say and she says it in a sentence. She essentializes what her characters are trying to communicate by doing that work. Her text also leaves room for the physical inhabitation that comes from collaboration. She's leaving space for us to come to the work and bring our contributions as her collaborators. She has the full theatrical event in mind obviously when she's writing but she's not going to tell us exactly how things should happen on stage. I want to tell you about three of her plays today. The first one is Tender, Rough, Tender which she calls a sad, catchy dance song of a play. It's a play for one male and one female character and it's about Belle and Mike who are trying not to fall in love with each other during the hottest Austin, Texas summer on record. Belle is choosing drink over people and Mike is fighting a real wildfire while Belle is setting one inside his life. One of the things I love about this play, I did a workshop of it with Sarah in Austin and she's written a physical gesture based text alongside the spoken text of the play. So she's challenging us with this play to see everyday routine actions like working like physical routine kissing, drinking to see these actions as if for the first time so that we can interrogate what do we mean when we kiss somebody? She was seeing a lot of plays where she knew that the whiskey people were drinking on stage was tea and she knew that the kissing wasn't real and she was frustrated by that and feel like I know you're faking that. I know you're not really kissing that person. So she wanted to estrange to make them new and make them feel more for the audience like the experience of when you do that in real life. Europa is a play for three women and one man and it's a very sparse contained pressure cooker of a play. Two women meet on a park bench while their children are playing a few feet away and discover over the course of their conversation that they both know the same man. The man is one woman's husband and the man sexually assaulted the other woman and then 14 years later we see their children who were off stage playing meet on that same park bench and they're still grappling with the issues that their parents weren't able to solve and finally the pleasure trials is a play for three women two female researchers are working to find a libido drug for women and they begin the clinical trial for the third woman plays every woman who's coming in for this clinical trial and it's a play about the nature of desire for women what women are allowed to want and how they're allowed to want it both sexually, emotionally in terms of career, in terms of ambition and it's a beautiful it's a beautiful play and we did a workshop of it at the Libyan in Fort Worth and it felt like a radical act to have a room full of women talking about what it means to be a woman who wants things so Sarah Saltwick the new play exchange you will find for work more about her and I want to encourage us to keep mentioning the National New Play Network and the ways in which that organization make productions happen S-A-L-T-W-I-C-K thank you next up is Sarah Keats I want to get to my guy but I will do a second endorsement for Sarah Saltwick Seattle is having a Sarah Saltwick moment I've been to readings of all three plays that Jess mentioned in the past year and they're all great so hi I'm Sarah Keats I use she and her strategy at Umbrella Project for a new play accelerator in Seattle I will take up much of my five minutes with what that means but come find me and I would love to try to explain it to you I've been trying to explain it for two years today I'm here to talk about one of our umbrella playwrights Benjamin Benet he has lots of like fun flashy resume things but I won't take the time to read to you but right now I'm in Minneapolis doing the Many Voices Fellowship at Playwright Center he was a large finalist like he's got all kinds of fancy early career playwright stuff going on so check that out Ben describes himself as a jutino of guanamal heritage he's a Jewish and Latinx playwright and like you guys he's going to be a big deal like get on board he's amazing and we consider him a Seattle based playwright because we're really proud of him and he lived and worked there for a long time he's still a company member in a couple of spaces in town and did a lot of work there but right now he's in Minneapolis like I said so Ben's primary influences are definitely a lot of pornoes so some of that magical stuff that's happening there and as he said in an interview once the seras came in rule which I just really like that weird topic which definitely resists the term magical realism I think there's like an impulse to put it there because there's lots of magic in the plays but who's this that label for his work but there is indeed both magic and reality at the core of his personal drama 30 on subjects that could trend towards rebel or intellectual he talks a lot about immigration 100% he instead pluses an unparalleled emotional intelligence he crosses characters generously and lets us not only into the situations into their thoughts but leads us into an an exciting journey into their emotional landscape oh it sounds so much better when I read my notes I love Ben's work because it is rigorously emotional by which I mean that both the creator of the world and the characters on stage are doing a lot of emotional labor for us and we learn a lot from them and I also love his work because it is meticulously magical I mean like we talk about world building it's just like oh he's so smart um I asked Kilar O'Connell who is a Seattle director who has worked with Ben a lot and collaborated with him quite a bit to send me a couple things to add to this conversation and she said that he expresses the pain and pleasures of growing up a lot next in a beautiful melodic way and she said that directing his work is more like conducting a symphony than staging a play it's I mean it's poetry it's totally great um so a couple of his plays I'll mention Terry and Cognita which is about therapy and a ferris wheel in Seattle uh at the very bottom of the of a body of water which is he also calls the fish play which is great Pryncia which is an imagined autobiography about forbidden fruits uh it's about uh coming out as beer and um bananas and er I'm just mangling sensations my apologies um and No Wall which I actually haven't read yet uh but is I believe is the next stage of development of a play called Trumpt uh that like a lot of feeling uh really good so um he's an NP and NPX so check out his page read the plays and if you have questions about getting in touch with him or some of the other fabulous umbrella project playwrights like I can't believe he made a pick one that's just so hard um I would love to talk to you about all these people doing great work thanks uh it's Benjamin and then the last name is B E N N I feel like I'm in a spelling game okay thank you very much okay D V equal blue Larry Trombley Larry Trombley teaches playwriting at the University of Quebec in Montreal he's an actor and director who's published one of the thirty books his playwright poet novelist whose writing transports us through a universe with multiple meanings often exploring the wellspring of psychic and social violence Abraham Lincoln goes to the theater premiered in Montreal in 2008 the 2010 English language premiere was directed by long time the play is an engaging puzzle full of comedy overtly political that wrestles with disturbing elements of contemporary culture I bring this play to your attention because it is inexpensive to produce the performance takes place during a series of devising rehearsals the stage is bare except for a table of two chairs there are only three characters Laurel Hardy and a wax figure of Abraham Lincoln all three could be played by women and performers from any cultural background John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln during performance at Ford's Theater but scratched the surface of history and underneath he will find layer upon layer of fiction masquerading as fact the play alternates between fourth wall rehearsal moments and moments of direct address the characters of Laurel and Hardy begin alone on stage they introduce themselves as actors Leonard Hardy and Chris Laurel popular as wandering detectives on the TV series Case Unclose they tell us that Mark Killman a deeply feared but much admired director hired them to reenact the presidential assassination in a performance about the schizophrenia of America they wheel on the wax figure of Abraham Lincoln a role played by the director Mark Killman as actors Laurel and Hardy provide broad comedy but there is violence in their slapstick their relative size is also significant while trying to motivate Laurel and Hardy director Killman says fatness is not just a matter of fat imagine a bottomless heart a megalopolis and its suicidal suburb a heart that pumps like a hungry machine a heart that eats, shits and doesn't know why that swallows the skies and spits back emptiness American fatness is a cancer American thinness is a fish help cast in the eyes of newborns they are pulled from the digestive and thrones still flapping about onto the sets of commercials commercials to diapers that will absorb their innocence down to the last drop and break in more money it's a thinness that hides a fatness can you play that Laurel and Hardy have eventually revealed that Mark Killman fell ill and died during rehearsal they hire Scott Johnson to replace Killman both as director and as Abraham Lincoln so the actor is sometimes Killman sometimes Scott Johnson sometimes Scott Johnson playing Mark Killman playing Abraham Lincoln Scott struggles with the role and asks how do you play a wax figure with Abraham Lincoln most of all how do you play Mark Killman hidden under layers of skin and wax Chris and Leonard assured me the goal wasn't to look like Mark Killman or Abraham Lincoln Killman had told them repeatedly that we are living in a time when the imitator is more important than the imitator the truth can't hold up to the flashiest lie as more layers peel away we discover that Chris murdered Leonard in a jealous rage because of the movie undaunted Scott continues the production as a tribute and hires new actors Laurel and Hardy now introduce themselves as John Hardy and Stuart Laurel in the only scene outside of rehearsal the new Laurel interviews the old Laurel who says I'm happy it's you you're a good actor Stuart I hope I'll be a good character near the end of the play director Scott explains to the new Laurel and Hardy the first understanding of the assassination John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln because he was an actor that's all what I mean is Booth killed the president of the United States to make theater you understand John Wilkes Booth is the first American star the actor kidnapped reality to transform it into theater in the disdesserting world of 2017 where layer upon layer of fiction masquerades his back where truth can't hold up to the flashiest lie where reality has been transformed into theater Larry Tromblay's Abraham Lincoln goes to the theater provides a perfect antidote and thank you I have to confess I read the play about three months ago it's an amazing play next up Jeff Crawl the playwright is C. Roslyn Bell Roslyn I thought the best thing to do today would be to let you hear let you hear some of the words from one of her play Steven Anthony Jones has stepped forward to do that he's the artistic director of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater the premier African American theater in San Francisco Bay Area he was in the original cast of a soldier's play which which won an oboe award for ensemble acting and the Pulitzer Prize for best drama he's performed, taught and directed at a conservatory theater for 22 years as a member of the core acting company Steven thanks for coming today we on the roof waving like a fool at the helicopter over here, over here my daddy here amputee got diabetes and he goes, goes, goes we don't know if he's gonna make it man we got a roof we can be on I drag my daddy all the way up into the attic dead weight then I put him on my back like he used to do me when I was a little baby he say I used to bite the hell out of his neck when he carried me around like that my old man was a union man along shoreman he worked the dots a long time ago he knew Aaron Neville and them when they were out there too my daddy said it was hard on us that's why he wouldn't let us go out there after no matter how good the money is he say go work with your brain any monkey can work the dots that's not to you that's physical labor all right but it's mental too don't let nobody fool you try to work along shore without your brains and see how many hands and feet you come home with wiping daddy forehead he hardly responding to us she's lifting his head back spitting in his mouth giving him the saliva out of her own mouth because we don't have no more water two days up on the roof mama say hey they don't see us I learned with the little voice I got left hollering and croaking and stabbing my feet and crying and if the two feet told I was hoping he'd hurry up and die and get out this misery because hell man and I can't do nothing to save him my spirit to my mama and he come to the point he can't swallow that I complain cause I'm 18 years old and I'ma make it some way somehow you this can't be happening to us that'll get their attention we got to get your papa off this roof shoot over at some empty space bang bang bang thank you so much Stephen that's some New Orleans monologues set around Katrina also on a handout 1620 bank street Louisiana 60s school integration C. Roslyn Bill thank you very much pretty amazing next up is Allison Ruth Allison and I'm talking about Nina Morrison she's in Iowa City pretending for many years that I understood what people meant when they said the word wrecked in I didn't understand it until I encountered Nina's word her place hit a sweet spot between social commentary and emotional urgency right between laughing and crying is where you find yourself she's a queer feminist playwright who writes plays that are off the wall really fresh and just really fun to be in the theater with I describe her work as highly theatrical realism her place focus on re-envisioning history she states that she is uninterested in how things were but how she wishes they were and how they could be her work responds to a particular source material and she takes certain parts of it reimagines and reworks it Ibsanity is the play that Nina wrote after she directed Ibsen's Lady from the Sea it's in a reverent and heartbreaking she calls it melodromity doesn't require that the audience knows anything about Ibsen but it does capitalize on tropes of his work it begins with a woman walking on stage and telling the audience it's 2 a.m. I'm driving a car through the drive-through of the McDonald's in Oslo, Norway I'm speaking Norwegian and it follows this woman as she visits a friend an old crush Ilan who is haunted by a mysterious lover the dialogue of these characters trying desperately and futile to find connection with each other is hilariously deadpan and full of jab that the absurdities of relationships and the workplace and the values of our time her other play or another one I replaced, Feminal responds to Brex Ball and Jean-Luc Godard's masculine feminine and produces an experience that for me is far more enjoyable than either of those two pieces of work and the play is in disjointed almost rearrangeable epic style scenes it's set in a fictionalized 1960s Paris at the start of the play we see Clara a photographer in Madeleine a pop singer become a couple after bonding over their mutual shallowness and the play culminates with a full cast song and dance where they try to woo each other an important goal of this play Feminal was to write female characters that despite being unlikable or misbehaving are not punished Nina is completely uninterested in holding up a mirror to society and she's sped up with plays that can only manage to have strong women if they're being beaten down by a sexist society so she takes Brex model of Ball a character that is morally and socially despicable and somehow charms everyone in the play and creates women who are celebrated for their anti-hero behavior and additionally the play is not about changing these attributes in the women it's a world that encourages rather than punishes their hedonism Nina is currently working on a play called Ballou set in 2070 in Ballou North America it's a city where DC used to be Queen rules the monarchy of North America in concert with the parliament of banks the play imagines a world where humans are labeled with their net worth and the queen has a harem of young men who live only in service of her desire and there's a stirring of a rebellion that uses the language of Sappho to plot and this plays is not quite finished yet but it asks questions about the language of politics, social norms and the play between personal and political and I experience a type of awakening when I encounter Nina's work her work it really asks us to think about what we consume visually so if advertising works and we know it does then so does art and she really is interested in breaking patterns seeing different types of structures and women on stage and I know that there's a Nina Louise Morrison in the world who I'm sure is also a wonderful playwright but this is just Nina Morrison and yeah I don't have a handout but just Nina Morrison and now it's time for our last presenter of the day Gavin Witt you see there'll be a question and answer period afterwards if you have any questions presenters here and the presenters can ask each other questions too Baltimore Center Stage Associate Director I'm here to talk about Nathan Allen Davis object of my massive bromance pictures of us working together and I've had the opportunity to work with him several times usually after me he's amazing, longingly at him admiringly I'm completely enraptured by his writing, his work and the experience of working with him so I encourage you to discover his plays he has a great website I thought long and hard about bringing handouts and distributing paper but in the interest of being, no I didn't think of it but in the interest of being green you can go online and find him there but it's not just reading his plays it's getting the chance to work with him as a collaborator incredibly receptive, incredibly responsive to directors, to dramaturgs to the actors, to audiences incredibly generous worker and render so with that advocacy I would say he's trained at Indiana and then Juilliard he's had a fellowship at New York Theatre Workshop I was lucky enough to meet him and encounter his work initially at the Playwrights Workshop that NNPN and the Kennedy Center jointly sponsored if you don't know this project or this program come to know it because even if you don't get a chance to work there knowing the playwrights they take about a half a dozen MFA playwrights annually who get a professional workshop and they're launched, it's a tremendous program and great writers come out of it Nathan is multiracial he's a father of three daughters he identifies as Baha'i and very strongly informs his work with a kind of spiritual strength that I think goes with that an embrace of all he really explores characters on the margins certainly in an organic and intuitive way but I would say he doesn't so much move them to the center as insist on the center coming to them characters who willfully locate themselves in or as the fringes on their own terms and insist on being heard or living on their own terms in a beautiful way I think he's really on the cusp he has had recognition he was early in his career recognized with a Lorraine Hansberry award I can't read through my glasses anymore he was a Steinberg ATCA new play finalist for Don Trail Who Kissed the Sea an exquisite piece set in Baltimore no less that imagines both an extraordinarily real world and real family and inhabits that with a kind of theatrical mysticism that's wondrous to behold so he says of himself I love to be transported by language I love the event of it all I love it when a play becomes a ceremony I love grandiose declarations I love it when a moment is so raw and honest that time stops and everyone feels exactly what's happening and words aren't even needed I don't think it's about the genre or style of a given piece so much as the honesty and depth of thought emotion, idea, spirit behind it I agree I think that is cool with his work I think he says it very well he has the wind and the breeze he has a piece Nat Turner in Jerusalem that premiered in New York that imagines Nat Turner in his cell as you would picture but the piece I really want to call your attention to or the work I really want to call your attention to is a massively ambitious trilogy the refuge plays the story as he says of an eccentric, mystically inclined black family traced through four generations over three plays intended to be produced in reverse chronology so you gradually uncover the secrets of your family a family who have carved out an existence for themselves in the forests of southern Illinois where there really are forests it is at once an extremely real world and a world that seems utterly mystical and magical and as if it could never have existed has never existed and has to exist the play span 60 years and as I said are intended to be presented in reverse chronology MacArthur is getting behind him the public is sniffing around him this is your chance we missed the opportunity at center stage I think despite I had a chance to work with him he worked up I've loved every minute of it but get on the bus because he's going to be huge he's a unique voice thanks for the opportunity thank you for putting this panel together okay that's our 10 presenters for today with 10 playwrights are there any questions they can be trivial ones they can be deep and heavy ones or just anything so as I alluded to in my slightly manic spelling bee moment there are lots of other playwrights that I think we would all love to be like no but also this person so if you're doing the like LMDA on twitter thing I just threw up a google doc we can all add to just be like my runner up were these other two people or if you like didn't do the microphone thing but you want other people to be reading this person please add their name their npx link where the first play of theirs that you would recommend people read and like a praise or a sentence about why you love them and thank everyone at LMDA should be reading them thanks great idea any questions, anybody comments something you forgot to say testing Ben Benet absolutely read his work the play that I guess preceded the current trump play was when I read it titled scene stars and he applied to our program at Iowa that's how I know his work we offered him admission and a fellowship twice and we almost had him but the playwright center offered him another fellowship right after we did and if anybody from the playwright center is here I'm not bidding but the what's interesting is from having to get to read his work from the one year to the next is the first year he sent us Karencia and he sent us I forget the title it's kind of long has a body at the very bottom of a body of water you can see the influence of magic realism and Irene Fornes and Latinx drama in general and you see him kind of working through those influences but the trump play that he sent us this year it's grounded very much in realism still has some of the magic realist elements but you can see him kind of really wrestling with the current moment politically and it's just one of the fun things in my job is getting to see the art of people's work even just if they are applying to our program that's just one thing I wanted to mention about Ben the other thing I wanted to mention is if you want to get the right Nina Morrison you can Google Nina Morrison Iowa because she is she is actually an MFA student in our program shameless self-promotion but it's interesting because she was in the MFA directing program and in the third year of the MFA directing program there was a production of one of Feminal which Allison dramatured and it was our first encounter with her playwriting and on the basis of that we said to each other I wonder if she's interested in pursuing an MFA in playwriting which she was that she had originally planned to do that but somehow through somebody in some program said somewhere along the line she ended up feeling that she was more of a director than a writer so it's really great to see her now pursuing her writing yes Megan Monahan Rivas she, her, hers and y'all in addition to the recommendations and deserved praise to the National New Play Network and the New Play Exchange I want to bring to everyone's mind the work of the Kill Royce and the list that they publish every year and have recently published focusing on unproduced or underproduced work by writers who identify as female in France and that has focused particularly this year on the work of writers of color it's crowdsourced from numerous well-informed passionate sources so it's a good place to shop if you're looking for additional broadening pool this is more just a request to I'm Jen Pamp she, her and hers I teach at University of Wisconsin Madison in the Interdisciplinary Theater Studies Program and we have a particular course that's been great for ITS which is literature and translation where we do a play that was not originally written in English and it's a great last semester we did this Givgeny Schwarz play called The Dragon which is this crazy fable from the 40s but we'd like to do some contemporary work so if you do have access particularly to living writers if you're a translator or have access to a good translation because I feel like it's one form of writing that's so difficult to get in translation I mean I can count on one hand the number of times in the last few years I saw a play that was not originally written in English I'm Plants at U or Jen Plants like a sentence on Twitter so it's easy to find me so I was excited to hear of a work in translation and if there are other works of writers you know I'd love to hear about them Anybody else? Anybody else? I have a question for D.B. Kugler I read that Abraham Lincoln goes through the theater play I mean it's really it's a huge mind-talk that's what it is it does something to your head in kind of a weird way that's what it's produced is it sort of a modern canon or what? As far as I know it's only had those two productions the original French language production and the English language premiere in Calgary I mean North America is huge there should be productions in every other city in Milwaukee, in Boise, Idaho it really is that kind of thing okay let's wrap it up thank you all for coming I loved hearing about these playwrights myself and I hope that you did too I didn't notice very many people leaving in the middle so I guess it was a success maybe we'll do this again next year who knows thank you very much