 We can show a little clip of it or something, but nothing about actors interacting with it. I guess it does sometimes come down to actors. But this global idea is incredible to me because I've traveled in Greece and Russia and Poland, and all of those places I've done some classes or what have you, and their ways are very open. The Russian school that I was at and the Polish theater companies are very, it's almost like we are more parochial. We have a more limited way of looking at it than almost any other country. Like Berlin, none of this is really an issue in Berlin. Berlin is like right at the fore of all of this. Of course most other countries would agree that some of our policies would seem to imply that we think we are the center and maybe we're not listening to the rest of the world as deeply as would be important to do. In the theater we always used to say, if you're thinking about who's in the audience or how we get people in, and people would say, well, do they see themselves up on the stage? Are we putting people, can they relate? And that was sort of our job we thought, I think, to put people on the stage and their stories that the audience could identify with and I heard someone say, and I'm forgetting who it is, that maybe that's not really our primary job anymore. That maybe our primary job is to put up on the stage not who people are and know in the audience, but who they don't know from other cultures, other people around the world, whatever, that one of the theater's jobs may be to bring the wide world of other into knowingness. Into knowingness, that's what it says. Are you facing this, you're a director of Ferry, a great note and you do a lot of movement work. Are you able to record your work and show it? Is that an issue for you ever? Yeah, I think that, I mean, I'm not allowed to tape my work under certain equity codes. I am able to tape it when you move up a few contracts and then you're able to keep a record of it, but it's... So you do it archival-y? You do it archival-y, you're allowed to tape something archival-y. I don't want to misspeak and say the wrong thing that I've been involved in, but I know that I've not been allowed to do it and I have been allowed to do it and it depends on what equity contract I'm on, or sometimes you're only allowed to tape 10 minutes and sometimes you're only allowed to... Usually it's that you cannot show any scene in its entirety. You can have 10 minutes of taping overall, but not more than something like a minute nap. It's very, very... Well, and when you do... Do you think it will, Jackson? Yeah. Jackson Breyer is the president of our board of full disclosure. Well, I'm involved in an organization in Washington, D.C., which as many of you know has a very thriving community of theaters. And it's called the Washington Area Performing Arts Video Archive. It's the only archive of live theater outside of New York top, which I'm sure most of you know about. And it's an interesting situation because it seems to me, and you guys who are equity people know more about this, it seems to me the obstacle is not entirely equity. It's not. Because equity now, I think, begins to realize that they've got to come into the 21st century. And that's what I mean when I say eventually it's going to change. I hope so. Let me explain what happens in D.C. We literally can take any equity production in D.C. and archive it. Once we get the permission of the actors who are in the production. On Trenoux, we've never really dealt with the other unions involved, which we probably should, but there's not been any problem. Right. If we do them incidentally, and perhaps some of you can anticipate this, we don't have a lot of money. Right. So we have tried very hard to get theaters, some of which are extraordinarily wealthy theaters, like Arena Stage and Shakespeare Theater, with millions of dollars in budget to agree to help us take these shows, which we will then archive. And they don't want to spend the money taking the shows. The artistic, you know, Arie Roth, the late Arie Roth, would say... Not literally late. No longer artistic director at the moment. No artistic director of a new theater. Yes, he has his own theater. You know, Arie would say... So it roughly costs us about $800 to $1,000 to archive a show. We're talking to theaters that have $50 million budget. Yes, I daresay. Roth would say, if I had $1,000, I'm not going to put it into taping. I'm going to put it into the show I'm putting on. On stage, yeah. Well, I mean, I think the big question is, when you're archiving a piece of live performance, like, not to be crass but like, what's the point? And I think that's like a really important question. And I think a lot of the time, and I mean a lot of regional theater shows I've designed, they come in and they do an archival taping. I would actually say the majority. And then that tape goes into a file cabinet somewhere where no one has access to it. And so I think a lot of it, even when the union contracts, like, I know I'm not equity because I'm a designer, but I'm a party united scenic artist. And so most of our collective bargaining agreements allow for archival tapings, but you actually can't do anything with them other than keep them in the office of the theater. And someone can then go physically view them in person at that theater's office, which like, why, if I'm a theater, I don't even know why I would bother spending $1,000 to tape a show. No one's gonna come to my office and watch it on my laptop. Like that actually doesn't do me as a theater good. I guess it does theatrical historians good, you know, 50 years from now or 100 years from now. Now archiving is a very difficult thing to sell. But I think you also look at, you know, organizations like The Metropolitan Opera, which are doing these like direct to theater things. And now there's this like really clear like, well, we can archive it. And not only that, we can make money off of it in the short term because now rather than you having to see Metropolitan Opera shows by like going to New York and buying very expensive tickets and going to the opera, you can watch it from a movie theater in like Independence, Kansas. And maybe not independent. Maybe not independent. But I mean, I was in Mississippi and like you could watch, like I worked on The Ring Cycle at the Met and like I was in Oxford, Mississippi and I got on a movie screen there rather than seeing in New York because of like my travel plans. Yeah, absolutely. But for instance, this is an issue for us here at the Williamson, at the Inge Center because we have archives of 34 years of incredible workshops and conversations and tributes to the honorees, you know, the most distinguished writers in American theater. And unless you come to Independence, you can't, we can't make use of that. And my fondest hope for this place is that the whole thing cracks way open. I've said that twice now. Like a big egg because I think if we could put it out there, it is an invaluable resource for artists. And theater has always been an art form which was apprenticed and you learned from others about how to do it and you had master teachers. And we have a fundamental, I feel, responsibility to sort of give that stuff out and we can't. And being in a position I'm in right now I'm really frustrated by that. Well, there are, I mean, I'm not going to try to speak for what the actors or the other artists should rightfully benefit. I mean, I understand that's a big and difficult question and I'm not able to really address it. But in terms of, we know that every industry, I mean, if you're not online, if you're not able to, it's communicating. If you're not able to as an industry, I would not feel particularly hopeful about the future of that industry. And the, there's so, as far as taping, there's so many different, but archiving is one use and to archive a production, you may need some certain kind of, maybe you have a single handheld camera, I mean, you know, one camera, you're just archiving it. But if you want, and if you were doing it for a major movie presentation, obviously that's a whole other ball game. And in between there, there are a lot of, a lot of gradations. I mean, if you're doing it, if you're doing it to develop a work with other companies in other countries, you wouldn't just want to be taping a final product. You're sharing back and forth as you go along throughout the development process. I mean, you would really to do the kind of international development project base, you need, I would think, a fairly free hand in terms of being able to share things back and forth just as you go along as well as the final product. I mean, almost any stricture would seem to be pretty limiting. I have a question. So do you find in your experience, or really all of you, that the unions are cracking down on this? Or do you find that because of the way the technology and the culture is changing, that in many cases they're turning more of a blind eye, as long as you're not, you know, broadcasting it for profit and that sort of thing? I feel like there's this bit of a stigma about the whole thing because the second I'm doing, like I just did a project that happened to be all non-union actors. It just was where I was and I have the whole thing, you know? I guess maybe it's partially my thing because being in that union also, I don't feel like I can even, I don't even go there. I don't even try to go there, you know? But I don't know. Turning a blind eye is good enough. I'm a withdrawn equity actor at this moment, so I'm not current, and don't pretend to speak currently. Sorry about that. But a blind eye isn't, I don't feel comfortable with that because people don't feel free to do things. They don't know when something's going to crack down. They don't know. To me, I've always felt that the rules are complex, often different by, certainly, levels of work by contract, maybe even by location. It's so complex that, you know, people don't think creatively because there is so much. I would just throw out one other aspect we haven't discussed. The global one is big in my mind, but beyond that, if you think how theater is developing, and you've heard the old coffee bean analogy, right? What's that? Theater and the coffee bean? No, I don't think so. This has been repeated many times. And I'll no doubt screw it up right now. That's okay. Up until the present moment, you can kind of equate the development of theater with the development of the coffee bean. So it started out, you had people just kind of doing their own thing. You had the coffee bean, the point was the product. Just the, there it was, the bean, and people would sit at home with their ukulele or whatever. Then things evolved. We're talking going back over the century now or whatever. And you had a service economy as, no, a distribution economy as in Folgers, or Chase and Sanborn or whatever. And there began to be theaters would tour and you would have some kind of reaching people. Then it kind of evolved in the coffee bean industry, I believe, a service economy, as I previously said, which you could equate to Dunkin' Donuts where, you know, people are coming and so forth. And we began to build theaters that were residence based and served, you know, a community. It was, we were putting on plays, we were giving the community plays. We were providing that service, a charitable service. Okay, then the coffee bean, what the next stage of the coffee bean was, Starbucks, which one can define as, it was big because it was an experience. You went there for the experience of being at Starbucks. So theater began always later than the other industries. It kind of began to get that. We think, oh, okay, we need to be experience based and we'd start doing more with lobby displays or maybe people are hanging out at the coffee bar where you would go to the theater to be an experience. But we're now, not necessarily in theater, but the world, the coffee bean analogy kind of falls off here, I have to admit. But the world has kind of now moved a lot of people would say into beyond experience into a participatory realm where the point is in theater it's not to how do you get people into the audience? How do you build your audience? It's how do you connect with people that will be your audience? How do you build an impactful connection with people where they are deeply, they're participating in the organization, they're engaged, we're maybe engaging their own creativity, they are not passive receivers, they are actively involved. And the theater companies that are really doing exciting work, I mean there are many possible manifestations of this, but a lot of them are really engaging on that level. New, deeper, different kinds of connection with community where the community is creatively engaged and collaborating. Well if one posits that that's kind of the way forward, I think it is, you've got one of the biggest tools and it's not certainly the only tool, I mean theater is in person art, but it's digital. I mean that's one of the ways you can really engage people by having them involved with the artists, with the creative material, with where you are in development, with all kinds of things. Like every aspect to participate in. Yes, very, yes. An expansion beyond the post-play discussion, if you will. Completely. I remember we did this thing, we did David Edgar's Pentecost at the Old Globe, which is an amazing play, but there are many, many languages that are part of the script of Pentecost. It's about a world in turmoil at war. Many refugees take sanctuary in a cathedral, an abandoned cathedral, in which a priceless antiquity, a fresco is discovered on the wall and by the end of it, the fresco is destroyed, it's bombed. But there's all these refugees that have taken refuge in the church and they speak many different languages and I remember we were putting it up at the Old Globe. I had actually stage managed the American premiere of it at Yale. I think, I forget if it was Stan or Liz, I can't remember who the director was, but now I was producing it for a San Diego audience, which is a city San Diego, it's no longer a sleepy beach town, but it's not really cosmopolitan. It's not, I don't know, at the time we were producing it, it wasn't so much of an international city and I really wanted to make it accessible for people and I wanted that kind of participatory thing and we did a whole bunch of stuff sort of pre-show interactions in the lobby to help people become more familiar with what the various cultures were that were in the play, so that they weren't just able to relate to the white priest or whatever, but also the Iraqi young child and what that culture would have been like because the play is about the clash of all those cultures and where's the meeting ground and is art actually the meeting ground in a way? I'm sure, please forgive me, David Edgar, if I'm whatever, simple find your play beyond understandability, but anyway, the point being like that to me was really important and we have the tools to do that and I guess that's the thing is that we need the tools to reach people and to include a more diverse and larger audience than just our local population. Like the Inge Festival this year, we are making an effort to be out there and to be accessible not just right here with Howl Round and on the Internet, but downtown and our very independent downtown writers are working in public to interact with the locals to show that the art of writing even though it usually is a very private and solitary art that there are writers everywhere among us. I wanted to kind of demystify that act and put people out there to encourage the young people around us who might have an interest in creative writing that it actually is a thing they could just sit down and do just like they're seeing all these people sit down and do. Well, we're doing that because we have laptops and we have flat screens and I can actually, we can show what writers are working on as they're working on it in real time. So I mean that's kind of a simplified digital thing but to me it was, that is a participant, now they can kind of participate and see what that creative act is like. Yeah, so, yes. Thank you for your such a... So in light of this interesting comment that you made, an important comment about reaching out to all the such a real audience and diversifying as we consider the future of American theater or something we might all agree on and suspect is that the future depends on the generations really beneath most of us or younger than most of us in this room. So who are wholly seen to me anyway being mightily dependent on digital media and so forth. So what are some ways that we might perhaps, I don't know if this question can be certainly answered in a discussion today but comes to mind just in the light of what you guys have talked about what are some ways that we can use digital media to encourage inspire if you will younger generations of all racial and ethnic and social class backgrounds to get interested in the future and to come to it without which I think the future belongs under all of us I'm not a social media expert so I may not be able to answer very directly but I think you're really hitting on the challenge and there are putting it in a larger construct again I love the thought that if you do think back well really to the prior century whether back everybody was engaged because that's all there was there were little theatricals and people had stages in their living rooms and everybody told stories and sang and I don't think we realize how huge an event the development of the light bulb was because it was in the whole history of theater it may be the biggest event because all of a sudden once we had the theater lit it was what was happening on stage that was where it was and everyone was cast into darkness and passivity in the audience and they slowly and quickly began to internalize that they were to be polite, be respectful they no longer threw tomatoes and eggs as they had in prior times but it meant that they were listening to the elite who were giving them the benefits of culture this has all to do with high culture, low culture mass, popular are we thinking of culture laterally or is it we've been thinking of it up and down is that really the way to think about it going forward so now with digital everything and again this is a widely discussed concept the means of creation of work and both production and distribution somebody can put something on YouTube and get it out there just as they can publish their own book or whatever so where everybody in the past for decades and decades has been reliant on the gatekeepers be it the big theaters or whoever now an entrepreneurial creative artist they can do whatever they want really if they know how to they can make the work they can get it out, they can build an audience we are all makers now there is no separation in a way and yet we still have our theaters not all of them, a lot of them really get this but a lot of others may not and so some are still operating on this old perspective that you have people just sitting in the audience and I don't think the younger generation is interested in that they want to be much more actively engaged and there are many manifestations of how to do that I mean some of them involving sophisticated social media but others just if you do surveys about what do people want from the theater I think we are coming more and more to know what they really want is for it to matter to them it has to have meaning to them and they want to be able to connect with each other it needs to be a if not social, maybe social is not they want to be able to talk about it to engage with other people to be part of this they don't want to just come and my experience is they are looking for a very rigorous experience that they are a part of that they are a part of they are not watching they are of it I mean you are of this generation you said as someone who is definitely part of this generation I will say I see a lot of theater because I work in theater and people give me comps and then I go see their shows out of obligation quite frankly but I do not see theater by choice particularly because it is mostly boring and it is often not very good and because right now we happen to be living in a period of the greatest growth in television storytelling that has really come about since the dawn of television it is having this renaissance there are amazing TV shows out there I can go watch House of Cards and actually with my workshop tomorrow I will talk a lot about the crossover between playwrights and screenwriters and what the effect on both television and theater that has had but I think I can stay home and watch really amazing acting and really amazing design and really amazing storytelling and also have my choice of snacks and my bed that is the real challenge you are talking about a group of people young people who are screen addicted and it is very hard when what is on the screens I agree with you entirely I am a very good friend who is probably the best scholar of American drama in the world who says the best American drama in the world is in television is Breaking Bad is The Wire all of those series are better written than the majority of what you see on the stage there are exceptions when you have that situation combined with the fact that getting a generation that wants to look at screens into a situation where we can introduce them to live theater that is a really big challenge I think especially when you look when you look at people who work in theater like I do day in and day out it is our choice and I would say my general not going to theater is highly representative of all the other people I know who work in theater in the 35 and below age category it is a choice that is not made due to a lack of exposure to what theater has to offer obviously we have chosen to go get our BFAs in theater and to work in theater all the time we know what it has to offer and are still choosing not to go which I think is even more illuminating it is not a question of getting us in the door cost is one factor cost is one factor and actually I think cost has a broader issue the cost for people to produce films and television to produce recorded visual material that has the production value of finesse of what we expect from sort of commercial reproduced material that cost has come so far down over the past couple decades whereas the cost to produce live stage performances that look like what we expect that to look like has gone so far up so there has been this sort of weird inverse cost thing where I can now go out and buy a camera for maybe $10,000 that is the same camera that's being used to shoot feature films I can like use the web as a resource to learn how to use it I can have digital editing and digital animation and sort of post production tools that are the same people the same that professionals are using accessible to me for free if you have a student discount whereas the film and television has really driven up people's expectation of what production value should be you see these action movies and now in theater we have to have special effects that look like what films have and so theater has just gotten more and more expensive and complicated and technically rigorous to sort of produce things that look like what people are expecting and so it's gotten actually much harder for like a school group to do something that sort of looks like what people are expecting it to look like grown an audience that has a certain expectation right and I think there's this you see it sort of in a very literal way if you go look at a show like Phantom of the Opera which the lighting design hasn't changed since that show was originally created it's much like dimmer than a show is now and so like just in lighting all of a sudden we get used to one level of brightness and then they have to sort of amplify a little bit everyone gets used to that it's the same if you put on headphones volume up over like two hours of listening because you just sort of get acclimated to it that happens to everyone with visual spectacle over you know decades and so when we go back and look at these sort of old pictures we're like oh man like how did or even if you go back and look at a movie from 20 years ago you're like did people really like buy that special effect like I can see how they did that that's ridiculous we did that Wizard of Oz no of course right exactly that's a great example I was like oh you can like this was like done so badly by modern standards but yet you choose to make work in the theater so even if you don't go to it the people are much more fun to work with oh is that it no that is actually I think that's a big part of it honestly I think the people who work in theater are like some of the most interesting artistic people I think you know we're failing in really big ways but it's really awesome to work with people and I think there is good work getting done but it's really hard would you agree that from a design perspective that you're speaking about that there's been such a just ground shift in terms of I mean we used to talk about that long ago that sets were the thing and sets kind of go by the buy not totally but to some extent significantly replaced by design elements lighting, sound design whatever I mean so it seems which puts a much greater creative possibility but also demand in terms of design but it's as if that has sort of shifted away from what we used to think of as a theater product hasn't that just changed a lot we'll take your questions just a second two productions from New York that I've seen within a couple decades I would say like Wendell Harrington's work on how to succeed in business for instance and then forgive me the musical that was an ensemble but it was all Johnny Cash's music ring of fire thank you you look at those two things and how to succeed in business the one that Wendell did Matthew Broderick starred in Broadway it definitely used projection as a design element changing your orientation to the scale of the thing essentially and then you look at something like Ring of Fire but there were there was three-dimensional scenery Wendell was projecting within as part of that environment and it was about or like Julie Tamor and Spider-Man for instance George Sipin set you know changing your perspective greatly and they were utilizing projection in that way but then you look at something like Ring of Fire that had no set really it was only projection and that is a real ground shift I don't personally find it as satisfying as both like utilizing but we're using in the creation of Donald's tribute we are Matthew we're not only projecting interviews and still images from his work and his life but we are also using projection scenically but within a set like we're not doing one at the expense of the other we're using all of that to make a sort of much more dimensional and more complicated environment that I think is what his work calls for. Yeah and I mean again I'll talk about this a lot tomorrow during the workshop on media in theater but I think a big part of it is like we've got television that's being influenced because it's playwrights going over to right there but then they're coming back and still writing plays but now they now have the sensibility because they've been working in film where you can write like 200 locations into your movie and you can you know bump between them with like no consequences logistically and they and I get these scripts and again like I'm almost exclusively do new work and I exclusively do new work that calls for projection because I'm a projection designer so I get these scripts that'll be like it'll be a play it'll be in 90 minutes and they'll be like 32 locations in it and the playwright hasn't put any effort into figuring out how that's going to exist on stage beyond writing what they want those locations to be and so you know you look at like a Shakespeare thing where like in the first 14 lines of Hamlet we know that it's like you know a freezing cold midnight in Denmark and we know that because the characters you know say that in in various ways and then you look at like any new play even really awesomely written ones like really amazingly written plays there's no effort that I'm seeing to expose what our environment is and so then we as like directors and design team get these pieces of text and it's been left entirely to us to tell the audience where we are and when we are moving through so many locations that you know with all the money in the world we couldn't cram 32 unit sets into a theater so it's like well we should probably use projection I guess like you know which is not necessarily very interesting but which has to do a lot also just with the kind of work being produced think how recently so many times maybe on Latina work would be rejected because they say oh it's you know magic realism and an audience isn't going to be able to quite get that you know first we're here and all of a sudden magically it's over here and of course that's what's happening now all the time everything you just described apparently Philip well just to your point I saw a wonderful production of a new play in Miami called Cuban Spring and it does take place in fantasy land and in the hall and it worked beautifully on a set that was probably no bigger than this room the stage of this area one's an observation 60 years ago when television started so it hit the market movies went crazy trying to feed television because everybody was staying home spending a buck and a half to go to movies so they were going to stay home and watch so they went to all the, they went to Smelvig and they went to 3D it didn't help the product at all the product actually just stayed the same or even got worse so people were worried about production guys but television and film where people exist and realize they were after different markets the point that I come to with that is look at the Lion King is running forever on Broadway it's a completely different how many people who have seen on Broadway also saw the film so they are learning to differentiate and I think looking at the idea and on the third hand we should give our audience more credit you may think perhaps they know they're going to the theater and I'll mention there are people saying well this is different than the movie but yes but that's going to be a very small, they're looking I hope they're looking for a new adventure when they go see Lion King or go see Spider-Man it didn't face all those challenges I wonder how it would work but the third thing that comes around in this is that you have when you have something like a playwright who's writing 35 different locations you obviously can tell well this person is maybe they'd be better off writing a screenplay and say this is going to make this is going to make a wonderful film but if you're turning all of your messaging over to the set designer you're giving up a great deal of your job but is that I would argue that that's not a bad thing that's just a different kind of creative collaboration I'm not saying it is you're changing the collaboration which is not a bad thing but it's putting a different perspective but in the US we focus so much on playwrights in Europe they focus on directors really more and now designers are getting us but I also think for me I feel like my work is interpretive unless it's something like you devise work you create it all together I take it I didn't get to take your workshop sadly because I was in another one but I feel like the creative act is in the writing and that I'm my work is more of an interpretive I am collaborative and I'm a very I'm the dramaturge that Lloyd Richards Toodleidge made me I guess I should say and so I do have a real rigor in the dramaturgy of it but that's what I feel like is part of my job I feel like you know everybody I've talked to this year says the most exciting piece of theater in New York on Broadway is The Curious Incident of New York which is a completely totally theatrical experience I read that now and that could not exist anywhere except in the theater and in terms of what you're talking about it takes place all over the place and it's a very coming the irony is of course it's bare stage which is transformed into every conceivable environment exactly and that is a show as I watched it a couple weeks ago that could not have been done what ten years ago even I mean even when they had the capability of doing some of those things they wouldn't have conceived it that way so along with what Phillip is saying and believe me I'm the biggest naysayer about theater audiences and the future of the theater you can imagine people do adapt and people do both within you know within the theater I mean I am sure every single performance of The Curious Incident of the dog ends with a standing ovation I think so it's also standing o's are a dime it doesn't these days but no idea what they were going to see when they went in there I read the novel on the radio talking about the novel so I knew what the story was these are people as you know particularly at certain times on Broadway who just go to a show because it's there and they have been exposed to perhaps the most complete kind of theatrical experience you can have and they love it and it utilizes all the things you guys are talking about and yet is still theater yes and a very expensive production to mind you sure that is a huge a huge price to get that production I also think you have a 32 setting play that you don't need all that expense to deliver either regional theater can do and even small theaters can do what Curious Incident of the dog does theatrically maybe not on the same scale what I'm talking about is the reimagining of what theater can and is based on a lot of the technical stuff that you guys are talking about that reconceives the whole notion of theater that can be done for millions of dollars it can be done for less money I don't think it's actually a reconception at all I think you sort of hit something very early in what you're saying which is like to me the shows that should be being done in theater are the pieces of storytelling that can only work in theater and I think you know what is making the really the television that's happening right now amazing is there's a group of writers who have sort of realized okay here are all these things we can do in this serialized format that we can't do in film and that's why you end up with amazing writers and actors who until a couple years ago never would have lowered themselves to do television they're off doing feature films who are now sort of seizing this opportunity to tell stories that they could only tell in this long format which they couldn't make as a movie and I think you know the same conversation on the same sort of thought process needs to happen with playwrights especially is like should this actually be a play should it be a screen play and if it's going to be a play like why is it going to be a play like why isn't it going to be a novel why isn't it going to be a like a concept album you know what is it about this story and or how I want to tell this story that needs to live on stage and I don't actually think the sort of like rise of scenic automation and projection like all the very expensive toys we have these days like actually has or should change the like fundamental core of like why you do things on a stage versus why you do things on a screen I think that's a good point but I also think that some really really good films made out of really bad books and vice versa so it tells me that this should be the same as it was and I did not see the recent film of the great cast so I can't comment on that but here I have had people tell me people were very strict about their Fitzgerald to say they liked it and they loved it the only cast we have seen besides the I saw the Owlman one by the way whatever 49 49 then the one with the lifeless one with Robert Redford and Sarah that proved to me that you cannot make this book into a movie very easily it's very sharp to do there's that part when he said something about is this a play or is this when I'm writing this it's a play and it's an Owlman and he said all the time and I have to decide and he tells I have to listen to what the characters tell me so I think the one thing that is interesting this idea of do I take a play and stretch it out over two or three films or in television Steven Bosco did it 25-30 40 years ago with and did that he had a story arc that started in one episode continued in the middle in the second episode and another arc started and he kept right the story right right the story arcs leapfrogging Luke you had a question I'm sorry I think a couple of different things first of all relating to this from a very personal standpoint as a playwright who also is trying to break into film and television I find myself writing my plays very cinematically play I just did utilized a lot of projections it didn't have to but that was how this first production was done so that then not only does it work theatrically it doesn't play for a modern audience but also it's something where people are saying I can see how this would work as a film so that to quite a phrase doubles my chances for a date on Saturday night right exactly and another question I had that is unrelated but along the lines of social media at the risk of sounding like a dinosaur probably a question for you Matthew could someone explain to me the value of Twitter I totally get all these people saying you have to have a presence on Twitter you have to have a total I just personally I don't see the value if someone can explain that I don't have a Twitter so Karen can cover that one he's an odd duck I am not only am I on Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr and Facebook I have a love hate relationship with Facebook frankly I came to those medium very early on by younger people in my life who open my eyes to them and I saw them as an opportunity to help connect with an audience or first an audience of my friends and then my friends expanded to colleagues and then my colleagues expanded to audience people who were following my work actually and that was interesting to be connected to audience with nobody no middle person in between us and for me being a news junkie as I am my favorite thing about Twitter is there's nobody between me and the news maker so I can tweet to an astronaut who has just taken off in space and he'll answer me there's nobody in between us and that's a phenomenal again open started most of the recent revolutions exactly and kept to those people who are trying to overthrow or trying to come together connect it or enable them to connect in any way you know so I find it amazing and it's brought me to a much more I mean I've worked all over the country and now I have audience all over the country I mean you work many many different places and Twitter enables me to stay connected to them for instance and I have my phone here is I am tweeting about the Inge Festival and the panel while we're on it to engage in a dialogue with people who are like for instance the panel this morning we had a couple of people from Ireland who were watching and we got a question from them and so you know we were able to have serve as a resource but you know because we also talked about resources available to playwrights to get it's a very very interesting way of connecting but it catches catch can because it's a constant feed you either see it or you don't it's gone unless you check back in on somebody's Twitter page so to speak and see what they tweeted but for instance I think I either found you on Twitter or on Facebook when I first asked you not this time but on some other occasion would you come and that's how we first got connected and I've been an admirer of your work for a long time so to me that's what those social media enable me to do and yet they require maintenance they require time and resources and you have to keep at it like I brought on two interns for the Inge Festival this weekend to tweet and you know Snapchat for us we have Inge Snaps which is what all the people even younger than even younger than Matthew and the colleges are using Snapchat and that's a very visual medium and it's a dialogue that's just image related and with a snap you throw up an Inge Snap for instance when you open it it's gone in 10 seconds so it's a very fast and ever changing medium and I'm not quite sure how to use that so I'm like you are with Twitter I'm like that with Snapchat like really but it's going to be gone there's going to be like no trail of it like not even the you know when a shoots through the sky and there's all the you know the after the flow of the jet fuel or whatever there will be no trace of Snapchat unless you create a my story whatever that is and when you open Snapchat it's all icons with no explanation so I had to have lovely Annabelle Howard who is acting as our camera woman for our live stream thank you Annabelle she had to explain Snapchat and she set up Inge Snaps for us and she's the one doing the downloads you know but these are ways these are access points I mean do you do all of this do you do any of this yeah I mean I do some of it I but yeah I'm not actually that facile with it so yeah I do a little bit of it but not so much business related and in a way you know it's interesting because you have an incredible process that is very uniquely grown that is mysterious to me and I wish I knew more about you know but there's you know you've made a choice to sort of like that's a process that I do in this arena whatever you know creating work but isn't you do not want it to be completely accessible you want to create and then share you know whereas you know some of what we've talked about is people want to be engaged in the process you know when I I've and I felt this too as a producer like with donors you know donors giving us oodles of money to put on work and I've just tried to open up the process a little bit for them so that they see what it is they're enabling and yet not in such a way as to you know effect or adversely affect the actual act of creation you know so I think some of these media people that kind of work and certainly they are great marketing tools because this is the first time at the inch festival that anything at the inch festival seen beyond independence Kansas today and that was incredibly exciting to say you know we were talking about the premier conundrum and the issue of development to production and you know Donald's had his plays where they've you know not been sort of not not worked in their first production you know how to strive to get a second one well for people on the net to see Donald or hear Donald talk about that kind of experience is extraordinary so these these are all access points to me and that's really what Twitter is about and and on Twitter you can follow sort of any any event or any conference or whatever they every conference every event sort of chooses a hashtag like number sign right and ours is ingefest so to the entire company here I said as you're here and you're taking selfies which you know we probably should do that but I don't not so good at that or little vines these little short videos when you upload them you know like them which is the going thing right but more importantly share them and use hashtag inch fest and then our name gets more and more out there so that's that's the way I see it interesting that you read about it that people on the if we're on the wrong side the right or at least the other side of the digital divide well I would consider myself on the other side I mean I'm older than you've been whatever anyway for those on the young side of the digital divide you know people say they literally experience much of the world and everything they're interacting with but specifically theater completely differently I mean we me for most of us theater it was linear it was narrative it had a certain track that's just not true for many young people where it's much more it's fast it's interactive it's collage it's whatever it is it's a whole different way of experiencing there's somebody who writes about this really interesting her name is Kathleen Hall Jameson and she writes about how people are experiencing this work but that affects both the kind of work you're doing but we were talking about what kind of work should is properly or to its best advantage a film or TV or but you think about it if people are watching Homeland that's kind of become the Ed Sullivan you know something like it of past years where everyone sees it and to some extent they can share that experience it's almost around the coffee cooler whatever water cooler but on the other hand you come back to theater and it is still only theater where people can come together after the production and argue and talk and everybody may have seen the same thing on Homeland and that's great you talk about it it creates our national ethos in a sense and you can't discount that but it still doesn't really allow people to just come together and argue it out and whatever and people want I think people want that I mean it's not like either or I mean those are both good things but that's true but they're not all together in a group to do it I mean the question I have for you Matthew is assuming and I'm not a tech theater person so I yield to you that the capabilities of theater are greater now than they have been let's say 20 or 30 years in terms of technical things that you can do on a stage would you grant that? Yes but I would say that that our technical capabilities has expanded does not necessarily mean that the capabilities of the art form have expanded or changed I draw a distinction there I would definitely say the art form has expanded and changed 30 years but I don't think many artists projection designers are a big component of that honestly well it's a different it's a different tool of storytelling The hardest thing you know I taught theater in the English department for many many years the hardest thing to get literature students to understand is theater as well as text in other words it's something that happens here's where I think the big difference is it's something that happens that cannot be replicated in any other way exactly and what I'm asking you guys isn't the ability to enhance that experience that live experience been improved or changed in certain ways over 30 years definitely been changed so therefore the kind of thing we're talking about in terms of the theatrical experience has been a great asset to theater as theatrical experience now what Karen is talking about is a whole different area where there are no obstacles to having people in Australia see what we're doing mm-hmm and this was a joint the thing that HowlRound did was a joint performance this was not just watching I'm not exactly sure how they did it but they could all interact and they were sort of working with each other in three different states and a number of people are doing that lots of people are doing it I hate to get back to this incident but it's such a good example as I was sitting there I was thinking how inclusive that experience is now in a way that it wouldn't have been inclusive in other words it included a whole lot of people some of the people that Gigi is talking about who come to theater with different expectations now and yet are satisfied in that situation by an experience Luke saw recently too where we as old time theater guys can still appreciate the inclusiveness of an experience like that I find very exciting well the wonderful thing about Curious Incident of the Dogma Nighttime is that although it uses incredible technology to achieve the creation of the world if you will that it exists within it still is a very very human story and it's still about human interaction as all great theater is you know and you transcend somehow the technology like you're using the technology you're quite aware of it and yet you kind of suspend your disbelief into it you release into it and you take that world on you allow yourself to get immersed in it but I think you allow yourself to get immersed in it because of the human element the event yes it is what happens in the Curious Incident of the Dogma has nothing whatsoever to do with technology just movement of bodies around the stage and the stage pictures that are made to represent certain things could have been done a hundred years ago by an event director but it's the challenge of all those things I mean that's exciting to me I mean look I think this one is I think like at its core theater is we've got an audience we've got actors on stage everything else is I think ultimately optional not necessarily for a given piece of text is an optional but overall we can cut off the set and the lighting and the costumes and the projection the actors don't even have to be on stage I'm sorry we can cut out all of those things and we still have actors and we have an audience and we have some sort of space that they are existing in simultaneously oh for a window and that's different and then all the other stuff we add helps or hurts depending on the piece but is additional we've been having two separate conversations about intertwining them which is their sort of media as it is part of theater which is a great conversation and then there's also media as it is used as an audience building tool which we like sort of drifted in and I think you know we specifically on the latter point that's an area where the theater industry I do think has not done a very good job keeping up with like nearly every other industry and like my company works a lot with companies in the fashion industry like a lot of makeup brands and clothing brands and that's an industry that like they have gotten very very good and they weren't always very good at this but they have gotten very good over the past several years of like understanding how to create an experience for their audience which is their customers that allows them to feel connected to these brands and because of that they buy more clothing so you know we do all these things like I went and did this Armani GQ Grammy after party thing and so basically there's a giant room and they've got lots of celebrities having a fun time and then there's a whole another room that is like people who are like live tweeting it and live sharing images and I don't actually use any of these things so I'll like I'm not even totally clear what they all do but someone I have Facebook but that's it but the point is like you know they're creating these experiences and then inviting audiences into it for the purpose of selling clothing and they're inviting audiences into sort of an experience whether or not it's a really particularly accurate one of the process that like these clothes get designed so there's all these like open studio videos that they make about like the design process and stuff like that and that allows people rather than feeling like a consumer to feel like a participant as we were talking about oh but I have such a problem applying that I do no it's a huge problem so I as a designer as a designer I don't want producers meddling my process I sure as shit don't want a billion audience people meddling in my process but but I do think there's a difference between actually doing that and creating an experience which is ultimately a marketing idea that lets people feel like you're doing that in our area there's room for improvement but I'm curious to hear what you think because I think we probably agree on the challenge and problem of actually opening up the process in that kind of way I just think that that process of creating an experience from a brand perspective is all about commodification and it's so hollow and I don't think I think nobody wants that we've all been manipulated told what to like totally I don't think it's a commodity I think this is a totally different process do you use media in your work do you use I have not used a lot of media in my work I tend to be a little bit more on the Peter Brooke empty space end of the spectrum and I work with incredible writers who are expanding the medium and reinventing what theater can be and how it's relevant through structure, design, content in all kinds of different ways I know incredible artists who do work with media in completely experimental mind bending ways so I just I think that theater is ritual I think it's a sacred space I think it's about people witnessing great vulnerability and I do not think it should be treated as a commodity but you I mean some of these artists do somehow manage to use these things to a great end because you're actually being completely disingenuous and I sort of asked them to be very contentious in this panel because I was like well we sort of all agree because you have done this very thing I mean you know the Our Lady for instance where you you're really pushing the envelope of what that whole world and environment is and you're using it absolutely but if no one shows up to Our Lady to see it we haven't made theater and I have had a really fun collaborative process as a project and cost some regional theater a bunch of money but to you you can be doing the greatest thing you want and if nobody shows up what difference does it make and so do you I mean believe me I'm being contentious now too because I don't totally believe this but the end justifies the means to some extent I mean particularly today when we can't get people into the theaters at all you know if you have to perhaps go against some of your principles if at the end people will come in and have that experience isn't it worth it? Sure I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to communicate and make invite people in but I think as theaters like jump through hoops to try to figure out new ways to convince people that it's interesting you know theaters spend so much money on their advertising department and freelance artists don't get paid a living wage so I'm like come on if you make I think when you make work that speaks to people people come and sometimes you do it in a downtown theater where there's 25 seats and sometimes you do it in a big theater and sometimes it doesn't work but I just I have a problem with it becoming all about selling a product because it's too it diminishes theater to be something that's about customer relations experience and going to the theater should be challenging it should expand your sense of humanity it should deal with something a controversial topic that you don't feel comfortable with it should be expansive and customer relations is all about making you feel good making you feel safe and fit in I so think that all of that noise it has to be and look I'm not a producer so maybe I shouldn't be the one qualified to talk about this but as an artist I just find it like I just I don't diminish the value of finding new ways of connecting an outreach but I don't think it should be treated like a commodity I feel so strongly about that that the actual point of connection is the thing that it makes you feel that that's going to bring an audience no matter what but it is I mean we might all agree about the commodity aspect and about if it's just about marketing and so on perfect example you know when I did the Ephraim's play right so you know Love Lost and What I Wore with Nora and Delia we wanted to do it with as many great broads as possible that was what it was about and I don't want to lock the play I don't want to like say this is the only way we're ever going to do the play because I want to remake the play with every great group of women that we gather and that's what it was about it people perceived it as a marketing idea it was never about that never it was about showing how many different women can say this play and bring themselves to it and keep opening the play up again and again to more and more examination that was rich and more and people came back you know so that and that wasn't marketing that wasn't but yet it was perceived as like artistic but then that's even different from I mean Jackson's right that a lot some of the attendance figures are going down however to the extent that they charted participation audiences wanting to be engaged directly with the process or with the artists or doing something being asked to get in some way themselves not to the work itself but engaged is going up those numbers are going up dramatically so it's not so much changing how we view the work per se but how do we view the audience and what does it what does it mean in terms of going forward in terms of what we're hoping for them and their experience maybe beyond the work not in changing the work that's all I think about really actually when I go to tell a story it's how am I going to affect them or me like if it was me out there like what's the most effective I think we're out of time actually we're actually going to go out to the playwrights garden to do a little memorial for Marion Seldies if you'd like to join us thank you thank you gotta get you all to sign my poster it's a venerable tradition