 All right, I'm going to start talking. I saw it in Boston. I didn't feel that way. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. When I was texting Jojo at seven in the morning, we were having really fun texting times at seven in the morning all week. She was like, how many shares should I set up? How many shares should I set up? I'm like, people were out late last night. I don't think that meant. So delighted. You all were coming. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. You're trying to stack the Australian deck. You don't know what. But you don't know what the project is. So I was very fortunate playwriting Australia, and I'm sure many of you have already met them, which is the director of their international programs right there, very kindly invited me to see the National Play Festival earlier this year and I was in Melbourne where I met Vanessa. And I had a marvelous time and I just remember thinking, and I'm struck by something that you said to me after your first trip to New York, which was last week, you know, how amazingly crazy and wonderful it felt to you. And I said, but Dan, it's strange. You've lived in Singapore. You've lived in major major cities, bigger cities than New York. Why does it feel so wonderful and marvelous? And I think what you said rang very true to me about my experience with Australia, that it is extremely foreign but extremely similar to my experience. And while I was in Australia and seeing the marvelous work that I saw, I was really struck by the way the playwrights were, so many playwrights were dealing with many of the same issues that American playwrights deal with, issues of race, issues of gender, issues of sexuality, because the country is very similar, much closer to the United States, frankly, from a cultural perspective than I think of the UK or Scotland or Ireland, or any other English-speaking country, because the geography is similarly spread out. There are similarly two poles, Melbourne and Sydney, one LA, one New York, or the United States. We're trying to be very nice to you. Make you feel a little better. No, but very similar, and also dealing with crushing migration problems, long history of racial oppression, and trying to deal with those things creatively and emotionally, and that was where the idea of this panel discussion or conversation or whatever came about. And we called it a smackdown, only because here at Willie down the hall when we were putting this together, the elaborate entrance of Chad Deity was playing, all about wrestling, and so I saw the play, and in the morning I was like, I'm going to call it the Australian-American smackdown. So Dan has a prize for whoever wins. Do you want to show us? Yeah, it should be a surprise. It should be a surprise. Oh, because they'll throw the game. This is a prize. It's full bottles. A blueberry beer. It's a traditional Australian beer. And it's very bad manners too. And the moderators smack down the panel and win the beer. So indeed, in order to make this even, even when we couldn't do just one moderator, we had to do two moderators. I've already given last night that we're here in Incomium to talk about it, and I'm not going to do it again. Sorry, I told you. But Todd London is artistic director, is a new dramatist in New York. If you don't know the organization, go visit the website, which is quite beautiful. Learn all about Todd, who is, in addition to being, a vital force in American theater, a novelist in his own right, and an artist in his own right, so you should go out and buy his books. And he's also got this fabulous book coming out. And you've got... Give it up, I don't say I'm not going to do it. Done. Let me talk about Christine Evans to your left. Christine Evans is sort of... She's sort of a switch-hitter, right? I'm on the cover agent for Australia. That's right. You're a bi-curious playwright, because you're Australian, but have lived in the United States for the past 15 years. An amazing playwright. 12. I'm sorry. An amazing playwright, plays in Food Trojan Barbie, waitlist, one of my favorites, Pussy Boy, for reasons I'll tell you later. And many times awarded with fellowships and honors and so on, you can certainly go on to the website to learn more about it. And I'm not going to tell you, I'm not going to give you all the information about the playwrights that are here, because they're all in your programs. You'll be able to read their bios, but I'm delighted that we have Carson Kreitzer here. Jacqueline Lawton, if you didn't meet Jacqueline or Jackie last night, you can so... What rights am I in so... I wasn't there. Oh, you weren't there, yes. You weren't there. She is delightful and wonderful. She's been blogging all week, actually. Is it JacquelineLawton.com? Yes, JacquelineLawton.com. So I'll be taking lots of pictures and just be prepared to be gorgeous. Yes. She's one of the four playwrights on here. She's West. Carlos Murillo, who's played Diagram of a Paper Airplane, will be seen very soon. Duck and Green, who's played Moth, will be seen very soon. And that's a base, who's played every second, will be seen very soon. All right. Let the smackdown begin. I suggest keep your knees. Thank you, Duck. Well, welcome, everybody. We thought that we would just start by talking a little bit about something that's pointed out in the program, but people may not be so aware of, which is some of the differences in the landscapes of the two countries in terms of theater and art. And then, then we'll hear from the one of the playwrights. So Australia's population is 23 million, and the U.S. is 315 million. I just want to point out here that the federal arts money per capita in the United States is 46 cents per person, and in Australia, it is $16 per person. Oh. So I'm out. I'm out of here. I'm really going to that beer. Who's buying dinners? It's a really big difference to the kind of landscape and to the way that artists are able to go about their work or the kind of partnerships that they make to do something. Some other interesting stats before Todd speaks. In 2012-13, in Australia, 57% of players were written by men and 43% were written by women. In the United States, 70% of players were written by men and 20% were written by women. 60% of Australia were by Indigenous playwrights and 7% by playwrights from a non-English speaking background. In the United States, 10% of players were by ensembles and 21% of players were by playwrights of colour and that means produced players and statistics collected. So I just thought that would give a little framing of some of the factors operating in the larger landscape before we hear from these wonderful playwrights about their own work. Todd. So just one thing, are we live streaming? Okay, because I don't feel very alive at this moment, it's kind of... but just so everybody knows and we're going to try and turn to everyone for a conversation after the writers speak. So, within that framework that Christine has laid out, we want to talk less about the... try and sum up our cultures, I think, the way you do when you meet in a cafe in Paris, when you're taking a trip in college and you meet someone from another country and you try and sum up your entire country in two beers or something like that. We've got six. Or six. Or two. Then, then ask you guys to speak through your work about this particulars of your whatever you mean, Americanism or Australianism or being an American playwright or an Australian playwright through the work. You know, I was thinking to 20 years ago in this country and I was noting that plays were very invested in plays. So, we had within a couple years of each other, we had Angels in America, the America Play by Susan Lurie Parks, the American Plan by Richard Greenberg, the Kentucky Cycle, we had we were in the middle of August Wilson Century Cycle which was really about the American Century, Twilight Los Angeles 1992. You know that there was really an investment in plays and thinking about how the prevalent sort of identity politics and gender conversations of the time really went towards defining communities within America and that the conversation in a way had moved more towards race and gender than towards American-ness and what that meant what about your project is not specifically or all about race and gender but really about nationality or plays. So, I think this is a little bit where I'm interested in going and Christina and I seem to be on the same page about this. The only other thing I want to say is before turning to first to the American writers and then to the Australian writers I was in Boston and Arts Emerson, I guess it was last weekend or the weekend before and learned this great game. It's a kind of cultural mapping game and a woman named Obey He Janice taught it and she had learned it from Michael Road of Sojourn Theatre and it's called Where I'm From and it's like a it's a kind of musical chairs game where there's one space too few in the circle and the person who's stuck in the middle has to say something about the place that they come from and then the people who share that go into the middle with them and somebody gets the empty space in the ring so there were things like Where I'm From we refer to our elders as Sir and Madam and anybody who came from a place like that or Where I'm From we wear bikinis in winter or Where I'm From children are not allowed in the living room because it's covered with plastic who shares that sort of cultural thing so we're not going to do musical chairs unless you guys decide to do smackdown but this is a little bit about Where I'm From in the most specific terms that you can so let's just start maybe I'll start with Carson and we'll just move this way geographically you know the question is really a simple one what about your work in specific do you see as part of being an American writer or as an American project we've asked everybody to talk for about three minutes so that we can sort of get through that and then maybe we'll talk across and then we'll talk around so Carson you want to start sure well that's what I get for sitting on the end it's interesting I consider myself more consciously a citizen of my gender in America but probably very unconsciously in everything I do I am American and it's probably just the edges I can't see I am definitely engaged in filling in the gaps in recorded history or the history that we are taught which often is missing the interesting women so I have been sort of play by play filling in the gaps of the women that I wish I had known about growing up most recently Lee Miller who was man raised muse and with the surrealists in Paris and became a World War II combat photographer and I was so upset that I had never heard of her because she just lived her life so so bravely and in a way that men are allowed to generally aren't but I also I definitely have more American plays I have a play called the love song of Robert Oppenheimer about the atomic bomb that is also sort of about re-racinating the atomic bomb as Jewish because again the way it was taught to me in school was this very sort of abstract weave the bomb against Japan and learning that it had really been created by Jews who mostly had fled from Germany to stop Hitler was a very different different thing I also just recently wrote a play called Flesh in the Desert or recently produced I have been writing it for a while about Las Vegas and that one very much felt like a play about America and a sort of tender and exasperated play about America and all of our foolishness and headdresses and just trying to make it work and the last sort of truth that will be reading on Saturday is I somehow keep coming back to the World War II era and there are many many plays that touch on that and this is about the man who invented both Wonder Woman and the lie detector machine and which is also is a sort of very American striving for truth and justice in the American way and the little strangenesses so I think that may be what I have to say about my Americanness Before we move on to Jacqueline I love that phrase too the edges I can't see I think this is what we're getting at Kristine and we're talking this morning about and I don't want to paraphrase you but you said something really moving about this sense of whether you can or cannot see the culture that you live in and the politics, the economics and how they come to bear on what you wanted to say I think I need more coffee Okay Jacqueline So it's really interesting this idea of being an American playwright I first actually went to Australia in 2002 as a part of the World Interplay so these young artists and I was with three other American playwrights and I was told by these lovely Australian gentlemen you always know when the Americans into the room they entered with such confidence with their heads held high and she thought that was really quite interesting this identity so I was all 25 at that point and I was very much a Texas based playwright so this idea of Texas is south meets west with sheer determination and always the willingness to leave the country which I very much was left the country a lot but in terms of the work I do the piece that I wrote for the podcast plays for you all here takes us west so that takes us past the FBI building with how American can you get with that with our own sense of national security it takes us past the IRS Dear God help us all and it takes us to Freedom Plaza this marble concrete honor to that which we fought for which is freedom and we continue to fight for our freedom every single day it feels like and you turn east and you see the Capitol yet again in your two blocks from the White House my gosh that's all these American symbols that are in the way and so for me specifically as a writer I'm a race based and feminist conscious playwright so I'm very much aware of roles for African American men and women and also other people of color I'm very interested in the race conversation that we have in this country I'm more interested in the conversation that we don't have the one that we're really terribly afraid of having the play I have that's about to be produced at theater J the Hampton years the second world war two and I'm very interested in that time period it was a pinnacle moment in our nation's history for many many reasons we gotten ourselves out of the Great Depression we stood firm on ground to fight for the freedom of the world and women left the home this new definition of who women were that then changed who women could be and it's still changing we're still trying to understand the role of women in this country so that play specifically is looking at the black and Jewish relationship which is an ongoing very tenuous delicate relationship and so that's what that play also looking at the role of artists these are particular visual artists so there's sculptors and painters muralists how does gender, how does race allow or deny access into the field of profession something I'm very interested in this play that I wrote called Blood, Band and Tongue Tide which was my first big play out of the Kennedy Center Playwrights Intensive it looks at self-hatred within the African-American community so that specifically is looking at how this construct of beauty from an American perspective be it television, magazines what is beautiful defined nationally how that impacts other being whether you're a heavy set person whether you're autism but what is that other word is beauty lie so that's and then often times how internally a culture can turn in on itself and start to feed on itself which happens a great deal in the African-American community and it comes to with skin color so you have the paper brown bag test which is to say if you're darker than a paper bag you're not as beautiful as say if you're lighter than a paper bag which I think is quite fascinating so and then with my play The Devil's Sweetwater it looks at right after 9-11 there was this message if you see something say something so this idea of what happens for me specifically if you fell in love with the other, with the monster with the terror in the room so I adapted Faust and had a woman fall in love with a Muslim man who might or might not either save the world through curing cancer or a huge jihad so so at the core of my work as an American playwright in dialogue always with race and gender I'm really trying as Carson said to look at these conversations that just that really aren't being had because there's fear in those conversations and I think that if we can at least start the dialogue getting a room with people then we can start making progress moving forward and I think art is such a beautiful way I feel we all would agree that theater is such a beautiful way to be able to start that conversation because you're good at the three minute thing yeah you can say that I know the wife thank you is it my turn? I guess so alright I actually think this question has been at the center of my work for the last 10 years what it means to be an American I think that partly comes from how I grew up on the child of immigrants in Columbia my mom was born in Puerto Rico and I grew up in the suburbs in New York in a very kind of middle class assimilated lifestyle so throughout my entire life I've always felt like well I have some connection to my parents culture but then I also listen to the Ramones and where that sort of fits in for me has always been an operative question and I think it really crystallized with me in relation to my work in 2003 I had this Grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to basically travel around the United States and the rule of that particular trip is we couldn't ride on the interstate highway because we could only ride on the secondary roads and as a life on the east coast where I live in Chicago now I just moved to Chicago when this grant happened you know when you live on the coast there's this place you fly over which is the rest of the country and you don't really pay attention to like the little nuts and bolts that make up the whole picture and that trip was really amazing and we spent 7 weeks traveling 13,000 miles in pretty much every region of the country and the kind of lesson I gleaned from that is that we live in this kind of insane work in progress that shouldn't work and should have destroyed itself and has destroyed itself in the past and rebuilds itself and creates itself and then I found myself in very strange situations but why am I more comfortable why do I feel more of myself than I do in New York City or anywhere else or why do I feel really alive in this little town in Nevada where I'm meeting these weird collectors who collect artifacts and mines and that sort of thing and so that really sort of sparked my imagination since then and really asking a question like what is American identity and having grown up in that area you're talking about when the sort of how did you describe it the sort of pockets of identity kind of speaking as opposed to a larger American picture having grown up in that era and beginning writing in that era I thought the sort of next project was to really ask that bigger question while we all do possess these separate identities but what really links us together what's the what's the kind of blue that holds this bizarre fabric together because it's really astonishing when you go to these places and you drive to my wife crazy and you tumble down a road trip and you kind of go see the ball of yarn and go to these really bizarre places I find this really enriching and that's informed my work the player you're going to see this afternoon there's a character that doesn't actually appear in it but is sort of central to the entire play he's really sort of like a demented version of myself and he's asking that question and he's sort of the author of several of my plays this guy named Javier C and I think the most kind of crystallized example of where some of these ideas come together is a recent play by Calda a big description of Harry Smith which is about Harry Eberich Smith who was the musicologist his most well-known work was the Anthology of American Folk Music which came out in 1952 but he was also a painter and he was an occultist and he was part of his Bohemian scene in New York everybody knew him but nobody knows him and so I created this piece which was really like this I wanted this to be kind of like a road trip through the United States using some of the music from the anthology with new lyrics telling his story as a kind of as a sort of underground denizen who shaped the culture in a lot of ways and trying to be really optimistic because I think there's a lot of certainly in the last decade there's a lot of negativity about the idea of being American certainly from the last administration and some of the conversations that we've been having in the last election and I kind of want to find a way to celebrate the idea of being American that we are this kind of weird, wordy, monstrous beast that is constantly readjusting itself and trying to find what it is, what it means so that particular piece is described as a proto-psychedelic prairie hum companion which tries to capture some of that spirit but certainly a big preoccupation and the current plan I'm working on which I'm going up to New Dormers in two days to work on deals with some of the same questions it's so interesting to hear of all of these wonderful stories and the specificity of the angles there's one thing that comes to mind especially listening Jackie to what you're saying about the tour and about this idea of freedom and American freedom I just want to share one little anecdote that I think may connect into the Australian stories that we're going to hear I first moved here in 2001 and I was looking for the hanging chads and the election of the George Bush and September 11th happened but I'd only been here a short time and the thing that really struck me after that day walking around the streets in those first days of complete shock in the country was that I heard the word freedom everywhere and I really didn't understand it as in Australia I felt as though in that moment I saw this kind of hidden side of the country in the sense of what is the gut value that comes out under pressure and I was wondering all the time and I was wondering around thinking what would happen in Australia if something really terrible happened and people articulated the sort of gut core value of the country and you may have a really different feeling about this but for me it was the idea of the fair go that feels like the absolute core value that is ideologically embedded in the Australian mind that it's not freedom in the same way at all but this idea that everyone should have a fair go that people should be mates and of course this has its undervalued which is that if you're too good at something you're stepping out of line that is the tall poppy syndrome in Australia but it's just one of those really raw moments in this country that suggested to me that the core felt value that meant being Australian was different than the core felt value that meant being American I just offer that in a late response to your question As a captain over here I'd love to first hand to Declan and would love to hear about your work and how it relates to where you come from Sure I think for me most of my work is really kind of concerned with culture and kind of mass cultural dissemination and the way it actually arrives on Australian soil so I think my work is kind of deeply about Australia in the sense that it's actually not about Australia at all and it's about Australia as a magpie culture and an extremely young country and a country whose sense of national identity is a very warped and strange pastiche of other cultures I don't feel like even this sense of fair go I think it's a very kind of splintered and fractious idea it's an idea which is kind of reiterated constantly in our national psyche but at the same time is a complete odds with the massive human rights disgraces that are occurring in our country as we speak, we're a country where we incarcerate the people who turn up on our shores seeking a fair go from overseas escaping persecution and put them into detention centres in the desert it's a real disgrace so in a sense I think that that shame is kind of at the core of my work as well that said I'm also very passionate about my country and I love my country but it's a very kind of difficult love pay relationship and I'm sure that's something keenly felt for a lot of artists but the majority of the work I kind of create is on one hand I'm kind of really interested in creating work that's very very kind of localised work that kind of embraces theatre as something which is resistant to mass production and so in terms of the work I create in my hometown which is Melbourne in Victoria it's very much about looking around the resources I have on hand which might be which will be not necessarily actors which might be people who are my friends from the queer community people who are kind of like strippers or drag queens or kind of MCs or party hosts or DJs and then kind of getting them to enact narratives which are appropriated from other cultures and actually this invariably tends to be these tend to be American narratives because this is kind of the country with the greatest kind of influence I think on the development of Australian national identity so I did a work recently which was about making the great American Civil War epic so the idea of like going with the wind and staging that in a garage in the suburbs of Australia with the cast of Drag Queen in in Cronorns so kind of I guess in a sense that's kind of about thinking about the way that we kind of structure ourselves in relation to this kind of constant kind of a pressure from other cultures and then next year and that's kind of with this theater company and we've we've made about five shows now and I think they all have been kind of a cast of non-performers kind of struggling with American accents to some degree tragically but it doesn't really matter I'm kind of like with this theater company I'm really interested in creating kind of very messy kind of live experiences that even where the play text is not the kind of sacrosanct thing it's something that shifts constantly and that's why we're trying to work with non-performers like people who are comfortable in front of a crowd and we'll kind of roll with roofs falling in and neighbours screaming at us to be quiet and we're kind of a sense we're a queer theater company and I think our interest is thinking about queer theater and thinking about queer narratives and queer narratives not in the sense of kind of the queer narratives that find their way onto the Australian main stage which are invariably narratives where kind of the gay or queer community are structured as embroiled in conversations about gay marriage or invariably structured as kind of a pedophilic influence or struggling with HIV or AIDS and thinking about queer as a dislocating social force something which can kind of disrupt the I guess white, heterocentric narratives that are at the core of our cultural identity and we do that by putting drag queens in dresses and making them talk in American accent. The play I'm presenting in the festival has nothing to do with any of this. It's done. It's done. It's a truly interesting hearing you guys talk about the kinds of work that you do and the subjects that you're interested in and at first I was thinking my work is really I don't think it really says something about Australia about being Australian but then when I kind of thought about it I come from a kind of non out of the city so not Sydney, not Melbourne and bizarrely there are actually more places in Australia than just those two. So I spend a lot of time in kind of regional areas and the first play I wrote, Darling Oscar that kind of got out there was a play about a girl with a mother not dissimilar to a character that we saw last night in a reading, a character with large hair. This girl gives birth to a fish and it's all about that whole thing of leaving the family getting out and when I think back on that it's so of that time and me leaving getting out again one of those sorts of plays and also being not in the centre of things not in the city so I think regional being not city, being regional has actually played quite a lot of a part in my writing the plays that I'm writing there's always been gender things I've always been attracted to these kind of female characters and also families and mothers and daughters and the plays that I've just written recently Porncake and Every Second which is on here are now about relationships between people of my age and they're about long term relationships and they're kind of small kind of these really tiny little mysteries that happen within those relationships and how they impact upon people and in terms of the regionalism in those plays I think it's probably it's about people missing out and feeling like they've missed out either missed out on the most important moment somehow or missing out on the potential that was always there for them so that makes me feel really sad about myself sad and it's a game wallow in that I'm wondering about the questions you have for each other actually but while you think about that I'm struck by this notion of value whether it is this sense of fair go or freedom and how it's articulated in so many different ways it makes me wonder and this is maybe a terrible question because it's so general it makes me wonder if in a way as artists you aren't always finding a way to actually assert the real value inside the stated value of your culture like what freedom really is in a complicated and contradictory America what fairness really is in a place that detains its immigrants and if there isn't that sense of the opposition of you as artists to the either the dominant culture you live in or the dominance of other cultures that come to you isn't in some ways to assert whether it's in a more domestic or in a more social realm the truth inside the stated value that I don't know if that's a question or just amusing or if you want to pick it up or not but what I'm really actually more interested in is what you think of what you and each other said what you might ask in relation to what you and each other said I love the notion of the fair go and that does seem so alien to the way we run things around life but I something I should have mentioned in the work I do with its Americanness is I am very attracted to female anti-heroes which I think is just a basic right of male characters to be unattractive and make bad choices and hurt people and women are not allowed so that so I felt like desiring a fair go that but that notion of freedom and the individual rights and the fair go has led me to write three plays about women who kill which is not admirable but but is something that we should be able to speak about it is something that is often admired in men and it is absolutely promoting women I think it's interesting that quite a few of the plays that you guys have talked about are kind of a character that's within them or maybe more is actually a real person would that be right? it's like it's about history it's come from actual history yeah most of my plays are based on real people and that's really interesting I think the one I'm writing now is the Hanson years but traditionally I don't write about yeah do you guys have that sense? partly to me what I hear is this sense of unwritten history writing unwritten history and I guess we're both fairly young cultures I think I find myself drawn to historical figures there's something about them that embodies all the complexity of America so Harry Smith to me he's sort of unwritten and underground circles he's sort of worshiped but there's something about the contradictions within that person that embody the whole idea of America for me you use a great phrase things to be ashamed about and they're all kind of wrapped up in this particular individual and at my new play there's also another minor unknown figure who seems to embody these things I guess I don't know I think of films like Citizen Kane where there's the kind of iconic American as the central figure in the storytelling I'm interested in the city a little bit but the Farago freedom I think if you sort of hold Americans both from the right and left about the idea of freedom certainly people on the right would say that oh that is the Farago that everybody's after themselves and if you're successful great and then other people would define freedom on the left hand side of the spectrum that Farago needs to be part of freedom in order to achieve so it's just interesting the way those two ideas have you ever heard that phrase from you know when you were trying to I think it just told him that all the time there's something interesting to what you're saying this idea of artists speaking to so there's a notion of freedom there's a notion of Farago and then there's what everyday people are actually living and experiencing which often times is very different from the lovely writ that's at large and I remember two years ago Washington Post critic was asking about the DC playwright's voice so there's always this desire to define the DC playwright's voice we're all individually fighting this question we're not wanting to be defined and what he was getting behind is this idea we're in the nation's capital I live seven blocks from the capital from the Supreme Court and we're not really writing about politics we're not really writing about the things and I don't know if there is a grand desire to because we see it played out right in front of us all the time but what I think is really compelling is I do adhere to the charge of artists speaking to what actually is happening speaking to what is the truth to dispel that national myth I think that that's really important because it is giving voice to people who aren't allowed who don't get that national platform to say this is how it is this is what's going to this is what we accept but in fact it's quite simply not the case I think it's really interesting to speak to this idea real people this play Armand Beverly Snow is about this free person of color and his restaurant was actually at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue so just a block around here and it was in 1835 and there was this race riot and he was actually he snuck out and got away and the restaurant was attacked and he was attacked because he was a free man of color at a time when free people outnumbered slaves for the first time in DC's history and he was successful and the large white community which was very poor at that time was enraged that this free man of color became successful and I decided to write it because I see that echoed in what's happening with President Obama you know I just wanted to show that but this raises a question to me do you know what is our time we do really well oh great so we'll have lots of time questions so start thinking what you want to ask too so I have a question for you guys what Jackie said about being a DC playwright there has been a century long conversation in America more than a century about local playwriting, rural playwriting local playwriting as opposed to bicoastal or metropolitan playwriting and I was talking to some of our friends from Buffalo last night and they were talking about cultivating the local Buffalo playwriting community and so on and so you know this thing about what does it mean to write from outside of Melbourne or Sydney what does it mean to write from Melbourne or not Sydney or where do you come from this notion of where I come from and being important to my voice as opposed to having a national voice or this sense that oh you're a New York playwright therefore you speak for America in some way is there a conversation around locality, ruralness specific place in Australian playwriting I think one of the main conversations that's occurring at the moment is actually about particularly in Australian playwriting culture is actually just about a larger shift that's occurring away from a playwright driven theatre where we're moving towards being a reggae theatre culture where it's completely director led and actually the role I think a lot of playwrights are being kind of moving towards now is kind of being putting this position of kind of like adapting canonical texts for and actually trying to locate a very kind of specific voice that's astringent and speaks to the local audience from your city or the theatre you're writing for in kind of a relation to a much older canonical text which I think is kind of interesting and kind of again feeds into this idea of Australia as a pirate culture actually trying to locate our identity through the stories of other cultures and I think that what's kind of interesting especially is that you know we have the kind of view with the audiences who come to theatres in the kind of major city centres in Australia are kind of by and large wired middle class over the age of and if you're adapting a text a canonical text to make it relevant for this audience you end up adapting it specifically for these audiences and for these people there was a production at the salesman that just went on to kind of create a hyphen to claim in Melbourne in Australia which was done completely in Australian accent where they completely stripped the set and just had a car sitting on stage and all the action was kind of hovered around a car and this action of kind of adaptation was kind of like really massively controversial firstly because I mean it was almost embarrassing. I went to see I thought it was an incredible piece of theatre but at the same time I was like it's incredible that the kind of values of the 1950s finding 50s American can still kind of speak to Australia in this way that's almost perverse like you know but then also that the director kind of cut out the final monologue and then got a massive bitch slap from the estate of Arthur Miller yeah it was hugely controversial and kind of like but yeah the same theatre company kind of did a version of It's Since the Wild Duck where it was set kind of behind a glass box and the text had just been rewritten to make it about white middle class people that you might see on television and it was kind of behind a glass wall which kind of made it all the more about white people that you might see on the television. It's just anyway so that's a very long and roundabout way of saying that Australian local identity on the main stage tends to be about white middle class people and urban centres and those are the voices that are articulated by playwrights and I think that's kind of a problematic thing. So it's a kind of self-reflecting thing that the audiences, the work has written for and to the audience absolutely. Yeah I think it's very close. Well I think that's true what Declan's saying there are other kinds of plays that are being done as well and other kinds of other kinds of work that's less text based and more performance based and that sort of thing there are plays that I've written that I think now they are kind of middle class kind of plays I guess but I don't think of them that way I'm Eurasian and I don't think I'm running a white play you know I'm just writing a story about these people that this thing happens to them You said that you didn't come from Sydney or Melbourne, what's the place you come from? Well I would say probably Newcastle which is a couple of hours north of Sydney and I've lived in Sydney for a long time I've actually just moved back to Newcastle but being from Newcastle you know being not from Sydney and Sydney being the major centre that was kind of nearby but you know obviously I'm not from there I don't want to say I get a massive chip on my shoulder or that people do but I think there is something about that and it's this fair go idea I think comes into that it's excluded and exclusion I think playwrights do feel very strongly about exclusion for whatever reason or you know Do you feel any need to represent for Newcastle or that you're source material I've written a play that it was about that siege in Moscow when the the Chechens took over the theatre and on the weekend that that was resolved in Newcastle a young guy tried to hold up a bookshop with a son of shotgun so there were two newspaper articles that I was kind of looking at and it was just interesting that in both stories there was this young aggressive young man out armed and an older woman who tried to negotiate with them and in one all happening on the same weekend but on different parts of the world and in one story it ended really badly and in another story it actually ended okay and I kind of woven through What's the name of that play? That's a checklist for an armed robber and and the thing with the Newcastle that play is being done over and over again in Australia loads of universities and drama courses are doing it now but it's never been done in Newcastle and there are theatres there but it's just sort of I don't know why that is I don't push that interesting kind of thing and the plays that are being done there are not often often not Australian plays and I was really excited because I did a one of the local theatre companies did an Australian play just recently and I was like Yay! It was a lot man So I have a question this is very stimulating for me feeling my bipolar relationship to our countries one of the things that strikes me about coming from Australia and hearing you speak especially what you're saying about the shards of American culture that are reflecting everywhere there's a difference between the two countries that is that Australia is always within the shadow of American power and America is almost singular in the world in being a country where you can live in America and only think about the country you're in there's very very few other these dangly centric countries where that's even a possibility because everywhere else is within the radiance or the shadow of American mass culture and the other thing about Australia too is that it's an anglophone nation a very multicultural anglophone nation on indigenous land in Southeast Asia I mean Australia is geographically in Indonesia and East Asia Thailand and Japan and India we're much more we're much more in that part of the world and so this Australian idea of identity in country is really complicated by being in place and out of place you know Australian identity is always in dialogue with other countries and displaced geographies you know one of the things that's really struggling about coming to the stakes is this sense of the mirror ball that this constant thinking about America and what is America is somehow not always oriented to the fact that America casts big shadows in other places so it's sort of like being inside of a mirror ball with all the mirrors shining inwards outside of a mirror ball with a lot of light getting in your eyes in some ways so I wonder if anyone could speak to the complexity of place that that generates in either place because I think it does have effects in this I think with Australian playwriting there was a period of time not very long ago where it was really kind of frowned on to do a play about being Australian or I remember a director saying to me oh god another Billabong play and because getting then to the that tricky subject of actually getting on if a play doesn't get formed does it exist really? it's on paper in your desk drawer so if you're kind of worrying about who's going to produce your play and they don't want to see a Billabong play then you may not write it it's like a little tract of water and it's really swag man it's like it's good you're going on so it's just a kind of it's like yes Rick the other thing too that maybe Americans would be interested in knowing the concept of the cultural cringe which is very pervasive in Australia and still exists which you guys are sort of talking about and the cultural cringe is sort of a unique embarrassment of one's own culture that still exists a lot in Australia and what Declan was talking about about our little kind of a new tradition of producing, of adapting old classics is sort of a bit of the cultural cringe in action we're far more comfortable at taking other works and trying to find ourselves in them rather than defining ourselves or championing new stories to be told Bethan I do what do you feel cringe at all towards your own culture American narratives and stuff like that like not necessarily about the kind of like your heart and destiny and freedom thing but just more about how like you've been the narrators it's upon you it's upon you I will say I had an American cringe moment when I was actually in Belgrade so this was in 2002 and I was teaching at this embassy because a friend of mine was working there you know they were going through, in 2002 they were going through a really huge transition this was after Milosevic was ousted they were really coming into their own and so I was there and I was watching television and oh my gosh so they're very nationalist which I love and I think it's really tremendous because I love that when I go away I want to go away on television was The Simpsons and Friends but it was in Serbsky so and I was like well Ithia have to have of all the American television shows to bring over I had it not to denounce The Simpsons or Friends product placement but it was just quite something I was thinking of all the things that could have been transported to this little place going through this huge transition how fascinating that it's these two pop culture shows but thank goodness it was in Serbsky so America hadn't completely taken over so I had a little but there's also a kind of automatic legitimacy when British companies come to the United States and the Brickham Academy of Music then British company comes and automatically comes with a stamp of approval regardless of the quality of it I'm just fascinated to hear that Australia seems to feel more in dialogue with America than with England I think because we still have this weird it's true of the whole world it's Christian's point that we're the only ones who don't see other countries in any field I was just going to say and is that Australian society that feels like that or the Australian theatre society that feels like that because I would say in Australian theatre society that the UK and their works are I think at least as you know I'm jetland but half of it is really it's doing that to me the beautiful thing is this is the UK and this is the US so that's kind of even hands with theatre I wonder if there's something about the two countries being born out of exile communities having some connection I mean we're both kind of constructs and these vast lands that we're populated by regional population which I think feeds into a lot of the shame we feel or the kind of ambivalence we feel about our history that we sort of grafted and it's hard to talk about American identity because I don't think it's a fixed thing I think it's such a complicated thing and like I said being at urban centers is a totally different experience than being out in the middle of nowhere and how we define that but that sense of no one is from here except the original peoples who were here and they're not many of them so I wonder how that translates into the thinking there and if that influences you guys or yeah I sometimes think that cultural cringe is kind of about a very specific set of Australian frontier narratives and about like even that kind of thing like Billabong or the jump-up or waltzing the children for me these are ideas or motives that are really deeply entrenched in colonialism and I think that even in an intuitive sense sometimes I feel that cultural cringe I get when I hear waltzing the children or when I hear somebody talk to me about Australians riding around in wallabies or something like that or wrestling crocodiles or fighting the struggle against the land for me that is actually these are motives of colonialism and are about the core of terror and genocide the foundations of our culture and yeah sometimes I think that's kind of a really knee-jerk and voluntarily kind of discussed about the way we came to have it in that country I think these are such huge topics and I hope that we can continue them all weekend I mean one of the things that we haven't touched on but would be great to talk about over the weekend is the Indigenous theatre in Australia and the strong kind of rise about the last 20 years I guess but now we need to make some time for our audience to be in conversation with us and I have anything to say ask yes we started out hi my name is Jamil Jude I'm the NNPN producing residence at Mixed Blood Theatre Jason made me say that you started out by quoting statistics comparing the US and how we fund and produce plays I'm interested especially here about new play development in Australia and how that compares to the style of new play development I think we're here to champion the best practices of the new play field so I'm wondering if there are things that we can learn from you all and just talk to your experiences and how do you all get to the point where you're almost at 50-50 equity when we're still like 70-20 what are things that we can talk about as far as new play development and then also more specifically for me in new play production how can we get towards that equity that may not be a 5 minute question Dan, do you want to weigh in on that? well it was interesting when Jason came to Perth and talked about the rolling the rolling premiere can you speak a little louder sorry to put you on the spot it was interesting when Jason came to Perth to talk about the rolling premiere because I think the key issue for playwrights in Australia is is that sense of getting a production past its first production and having the opportunity to reflect on the work and work with not one company on that work and when Jason explained the model there was a lot of excitement within the theatre community there because it was something that was a practical solution to a problem that we've been grappling with equally another problem is the idea of emerging playwrights and there's a lot of support for younger writers in my other capacity for another organisation I've run an emerging playwrights programme and there are a number of mentorship programmes for younger writers offered by the Australia Council and other organisations but there's a point where you've gone through that and you've had your first production but then where do you go from there and certainly I know that even established playwrights when they've had a considerable success with a new work or Vanessa said this year once that success has been had it's almost like people move on and they're looking for next again the exclusion not just Vanessa not just me so it does seem that as I was saying when Jason was talking to us in Melbourne structural issues were facing quite similar structural issues you also though just quickly to tack on a lot of the companies that specialise in doing new plays there's a certain kind of territorialism about it because there's ability to tour those plays and offers for those theatre companies so nothing against like the Belvoir which is a really fantastic theatre in Sydney but they'll produce a new play and it'll go to X theatre in Melbourne and X theatre in Ferd and X theatre all around the country so there's with the same cast with the same so it's more of a touring model like the UK than anything we have here and then the other thing that I think is hugely different about new play development I'd like to say that PWA playwriting Australia and New Dramatists are occupied by similar places in their respective cultural landscape but PWA is funded by the government you have a brief from the government to develop playwrights in Australia and so there is it's not like you have a giant budget but you are given a budget from the Australia Council to go to every city every territory in Australia to develop those playwrights there's no whereas our gameplay development systems in this country are highly regionalised highly based on where you can get funding there's government funding the government has no only local governments if anything and state governments have any interest in making sure the playwrights are supported and that playwriting as a cultural form remains vibrant I just want to do we think that because I have a friend who I'm sorry I'm Bridget Bridget O'Leary from Boston I have a friend from Canada who talks a lot about and I don't know if this is still true but at least six years ago that Canada was investing a lot in its artists but mostly in the exporting of the artists and that there was incentive to produce if you were in Canada to produce Canadian playwrights I know we don't do that in America but I wonder if it has anything to do with what we're talking about this idea that we feel like we have our solid identity and that is very easily getting out there into the world if governments of countries that maybe don't feel that they have such a global presence need in some way to incentivize that getting that out there I mean certainly that in our conversation I mean you there's an international programs manager they're at a very important senior position in PWA which is all about getting that out the LARC the LARC here in the United States well it's really more about bringing people in I will tell very briefly the story of when I was talking about the Rolling Rope premiers and Chris Mead the former artistic director the former Todd London at PWA he was explaining an NPN and this exchange and there was a whole I won't go into all of the details because it will be embarrassing but there was a lot of debate about NPN at the senior level about whether we should do an international exchange with a national new play network why are we possibly bringing in and supporting international playwrights and Chris Mead is introducing me saying we're so lucky to have Jason here from NPN they're very nervous about the Australians possibly taking over the entire theatre so this is you again is that I know why please Seth Rosin with the interactive company curious to know about the relationship between the new play industry in Australia and the media particularly reviews and the relationship to the major metropolitan centers because in this country one of the things that we face still even in our own in our midst of the NPN is that the New York Times is the de facto artistic director for much of the country or for most of the country really I'd say in that if at times gives a good review that play has a better chance of getting produced everywhere regardless of what theatre's mission is and regardless of what community they're in and is that is there anything similar to that in Australia I woke up this morning to find my play I got a one star review from it's from the major right wing tabloid rag in Melbourne so I'm actually very proud it's you exactly I hope it's going to funnel the right people through the door what do you labour under as playwrights in terms of reviews and which papers and is there a singular voice in the way I don't think there's anything anyone who has the kind of power that the New York Times has and I'm very grateful for that because that sounds more I think it's one of the challenges in this I mean do you feel like the I don't know that much about the New York Times but do you feel like the I'm kind of critical to that paper for a particular standpoint or a particular taste I don't think that's the issue I don't even think it's our industry's criticism of their criticism it's the fact that by virtue of its influence it makes decisions for how sellable something will be anywhere that's all it's not I think people who read it regularly might have think more or less about any particular critic but that's not the issue it's that a single person in one review can determine the success or failure of that piece but also can determine what's on everybody's seasons next year I think I could weigh in on this just looking from both countries that I think the ecology of arts funding has a lot to do with the lesser dependence on critics and I think there speaks to Richard's question as well which is those kind of programs that look out would there again more to do with the politics of arts funding and the capacity to fund art is something of independent value that these things all look together that's interesting because it puts the economic context in because when you say that about the New York Times and I think you get no disagreement for me it's an indictment of the theater community it's not about the New York Times it's about the people who program and so what is the economic context of those decisions that they make I just want to go back to Jamil's point and ask you guys this sense of gender equity for one thing on the stage in Australia you know this is a 30 year really battle in America that just keeps coming up and we keep coming back to the exact same statistics you know it's actually more like 17% of the plays on American stages are written by women do you labor under a sense that you have a different kind of struggle as a woman playwright in Australia statistically you don't seem to you know I'm really surprised that that's statistic you know because I thought I mean but what's happened in Australia just recently is there has been this huge kind of you know again with the hands but the you know kind of rise of indignation of women playwrights and they're all kind of getting together and the Arts Council I think last year wrote a big report on how women were women playwrights how many were getting up and you know asking companies to be accountable for that and I think companies took that on you know they they really did so I think this year with the new kind of announcement of which plays are being done is a lot better than last year and tons better than the year before and years before that you know that statistic is only last years and I just want to quickly say about that statistic because the statistics in there if anybody has questions about the statistics please see me no no because we assembled them from cobbled them together those are PWA statistics from last year but from a select group of theatres the Australia Bureau of Statistics that looks at even a smaller group but of larger theatres and the statistics for women are much worse at that of course is there a difference are you all aware of sorry David Goldman none of that large board member there's a group in the Bay Area which you may know about or not know about called 50 50 2020 heard about that parody by the year 2020 and that's a completely devoted group whether they're going to be successful or not who knows but the fact is that it is a groundswell and it's important and people are devoted to you've heard of it right in terms of your MFA writing programs what's the percentage of it's much more equivalent actually I think it's a greater percentage of women yes and in organizations like membership based organizations playwright center it's very much 50 50 or even leaning more towards women other questions a lot has been said Alice I'm Zell I'm the playwright residents at Interac Theater on the point of MFA programs I'm actually curious what the training system is like in Australia in comparison to here as taught the book 20 out of a few years ago we have a system that is very very beholden to seven programs in this country and I went to one of them and I'm very fortunate but honestly we don't have a system that is where we get the vast majority of our stories and our storytellers so we're going to places that are very expensive that require you to be able to take a significant time out of your life so if you got family or if you aren't from a background where you pay for that type of take on that type of debt you don't get a chance to really be a storyteller I feel like here what is the training system like in Australia do you are you dependent on MFA programs are you how does it how do you actually get how do scripts get to there's only I mean I don't know that much about the history of Australian theater but certainly in my time like practicing out there the only MFA playwriting course in Australia started last year that was there was there was Knight had a playwright studio Knight had a playwright studio that was like one day a week afternoon a week for a year for a whole year it's much more like just doing work experience I feel like I learned how to write on the job completely and just by doing kind of scratch shows which has been a really great thing because I think that I've kind of ended up with I feel like my strength is that kind of like sculpting live text and about and I think it does mean that there is kind of a greater variability in the stories because actually you don't need this kind of degree to work on stage you just kind of need to be good at your job as a writer but um and I think we're very different kinds of writers Declan and myself because Declan is very involved in making his work putting into work on stage which is great and I did do that originally but I don't really do that anymore so it's very my works really reliant on a company picking up a play and doing it and that has its own kind of momentum I suppose that's how you kind of learn seeing your play on and then getting another one up and you know so are the theaters there actually accepting of work that isn't by people who already have representation or who aren't the non-study program are they accepting of it? how do they accept scripts? how do they combine? most Australian theatre companies don't accept unsolicited manuscripts but the organisation down works through playwriting Australia that you send your script to them and then they'll generally do kind of like an assessment report or something and then recommend scripts to theatre companies and that kind of becomes a mediator between kind of the reading and is that is that fee based? does it used to be an Australian National Playwright Centre? so you could just send called you could send your scripts also because the country is so small I think the pathway happens a lot quicker so if you work with an independent company saying you go on in a small theatre and you're not being paid you're really likely to get an independent theatre company Griffin and Belfly to come and see your show and you can kind of in a year or two break through and have your name known to the people that need to know your name and start a relationship I think that relationship happens a lot quicker in Australia so I think we have time for a couple more questions maybe like one or two more minutes I've actually got a question for the American Playwrights being in the United States it's been incredible to hear how much Spanish has spoken and how in terms of the demographics and the changing demographics and I wondered in terms of the structure of the industry and the number of Hispanic Playwrights coming through how that will be how the industry will change in the next couple of years and how are you representing bilingual productions ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? it's a question about bilingualism and the presence of Hispanic voices on stage Karen Zacharias is here who's a Latina Playwright do you want to speak to that first and then I'll jump in I think it's something that American theaters are struggling with because the excuse for sometimes not putting on a Latino play is we can't get Latino audiences to come and see the work but that doesn't seem to be the problem when they're putting ips in they're not running out to find sweets more regions exactly but anyway that's what the country is struggling with and the fact that Latino is a term to use a multi-national multi-class type of community that is here that I think we're treated as a foreign entity people who have not been at the table and I think just as the politics is turning around and realizing that we can cover the political spectrum it's a roaring lion that's starting to get out of the cage that hopefully we can start shaking things up and largely ignored or scared or you know they we haven't been treated as if we're part of the the fabric of what makes the United States and I grew up in Mexico I am really not even a first generation I'm an immigrant myself and so in Mexico the big saying is and it seems like in Australia poor Mexico so far from God and so close to the United States and it's a prevalent type of feeling of what I mean there's always this defensiveness of Mexico as part of the Americas too we are America as well and yet moving to the United States is a profound changing influence that's why so many people are coming here and I think it's a really interesting complicated story I mean Carlos is Puerto Rican and Colombian I'm Mexican and Danish and that is what being an American is starting to be it's a really interesting it is interesting because people I think from a producer standpoint and not only Latino culture I think all minority cultures in this country are sort of lumped into these monolithic ideas so there's an Asian American play what does that mean there's dozens and dozens of countries and then the various mixtures that we come from and I just find it really interesting I don't have a dialogue anymore and I think one of the interesting things about the last election was looking at the two ballrooms on election night and there's the ballroom in Boston where everyone is glum and everyone is of a certain demographic and often I walk into theaters and that is the demographic and then a lot of coming in how do we outreach or how do we connect with minority culture and the ballroom in Chicago and it's not even a question it's just the fabric, it's just the reality we live in a multicultural society we're not even talking about it in that way how do we do this kind of outreach of course they're doing that in the back offices but there's just an ease to it that I think is entirely absent from the theater in this country and I hope for the day when all stories are just part of the fabric the question of what is American I think there are a handful of theaters that play Latin plays because I think the Goodman Theater in Chicago is a great example where they do African American plays Latino plays, traditional white plays but it's not part of the conversation where like here's the Latino play it's just what they do and I hope that more and more theaters will take that mindset because there is a sort of slotting mentality where we have a grant to do the multicultural play and then there's these like concentric circles of monoliths so there's the Latino play and then there's the black play and then there's the Asian play and then there's the multicultural play so if we do a multicultural play we've hit everything do you know what I mean so if we did the Latino play this year then we don't have to do the Asian play until next year or we don't have to do the black play for another three years so I still think that a lot of the mentality from the 90s where there was a real focus on identity is still part of the vocabulary from the producer standpoint and I just wish there was more visionary voices that reflected what happened in the ballroom in Chicago Really quickly from Barclay Borderlands Theatre Tucson Barclay about 80% of our work is Latino or binational but there's a song that kept going through my head as you were speaking and I don't know how many people in the room know it it's called and the plan played Waltzing Matilda which is about returning World War II veterans to Australia who are wounded and the play we just did on the border in one of the background songs about what this Mexican family that had a veteran was and the band played Waltzing Matilda and that says a lot about what we're doing doesn't it Thank you Barclay Thank you to everyone I mean it's interesting just to squeeze in one last word after Carlos two is this this sense that I guess it makes me want to say this to you and you guys you know the question is also geographical it is a big country as Christine said at the beginning so the Latino population of California is really different from the Latino population of New York and the waves not just the demographic waves but the theatrical waves so there was a time in the 60s when Puerto Rican culture was so booming in New York at least and then Cuban culture and Miami is so different than Arizona and so this sense of wanting you to see our country whole and particular and wanting to see yours in the same way it's just such an ongoing process and so I just want to thank everybody for sharing in that. Thank you guys for sharing your work and your thoughts and all weekend and thanks for bringing us together and thank you to the people at home for taking care of us I would love to get a hug for everybody