 We have Lydia Diamond, Kirsten Greenidge, Keith Joseph Atkins, playwrights who will join us up here, who have all arrived this evening in Baltimore, some for the first time, some not for the first time. We've had a few moments to start the conversation, warm it up, but they'll be thinking fresh here along with you. And to moderate or really more to be part of the conversation, as I think everyone will be initiating many ideas, the Kwame Kweyama Artistic Director, who's joining us in a minute. That's right, are very, very wired, very well traveled. Just for the purposes of the conversation in here, perhaps make sure that your cell phone rings are turned off. However, you are welcome, as far as I know, to take photographs. It'd be great if you don't do flash photography. You can get in their eyes, I guess. But you can take photographs. That doesn't apply once you get downstairs, of course. Equity rules take over. But feel free to photograph for posterity also up here. We'll do 15 or 20 minutes, I think was the thought, and then ensure that we turn it out to there. Partly because of the logistics of the live stream. If you have a comment or question to share, once we do that, the mic will be set up down here. And I would ask that you make your way over here in your comments so that we can all hear it, and it goes out. But anyway, without further ado, Kwame. Thank you, Gavin. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to this, what I think, well actually, I know will be a wonderful debate with three writers and organizers. They're an activist that I respect so very much. I said, we discussed before we came in, that even though I'm in the moderator's chair, we don't really do things that way. These are wonderful minds and intellects. And so it's really, we'll start off with just a little conversation amongst ourselves, but really anybody can lead it at any one time. I want to begin, if I may, by saying hello to everybody at home. And hi, that's the nine. Have we got over 10 people yet? At home. Yeah, we have. Hey, double figures at home. We love you. Please send in your questions, because we will try to answer them as well. I suppose I wanted to begin, and anybody can answer this, really, by speaking a little to the world that you walked into as a playwright. I know we're going to be talking about expanding the black narrative, if in fact it needs any expansion. But I'd love to just kind of know the worlds that you walked into as playwrights. Lydia, we'll begin with you. I'll go first. It's interesting. It's hard to answer the question without thinking about it, without sort of backing into it from how things look now. But I'm going to do that. And I'm going to say, when I graduated college, we didn't do the Google thing. We didn't have Google. And so actually I was, in my junior year, I started playwriting. I didn't know I wasn't a playwright yet. And I was writing because I was an actor. And at the institution that I was studying at, I was one of two people of color in the theater department. And I was not being able to be cast as much. So I'd gone off campus. But then with a great deal of hubris, I was 21, thought I was inventing roles because I hadn't been introduced to the playwrights who had already written really beautiful things that I might have been able to do. So the landscape looked bleak. And that was good for me because it made me sort of have an activist sense that I needed to add voices and roles. I feel that also 23 years ago, I wasn't seeing contemporary plays for people of color. I wasn't seeing us get very often to wear elegant clothes on stage. I wanted to be able to make a space for us to be in diverse rooms and be horribly flawed and terribly funny and very clever in rooms with people who didn't look like us. And so the landscape looked a little more bleak than it was, but it was relatively bleak. And I don't think there was much diversity. Excellent. Kristen, do you want to go? I mean, I think I would have to agree that the landscape did look... When I started writing plays, I wanted to write roles that I would think that black actors would be proud to play. And I, too, wasn't... I don't think I was adept at knowing how many roles actually did exist already, that the plays weren't being produced or had been written 30 or 40 years ago and were no longer being produced if they had been initially. So I, too, walked into a world that I thought actually was much bleaker than it actually was, and yet. You know, when I started writing plays, I kept it a secret because I didn't think I could write a play being black and a woman. And so what was wonderful as I began to have more opportunity and go to more festivals and meet more people is I realized how many black writers are actually writing, and that was really affirming. And one thing that I think will stay the same is the amount of writing by black writers that actually does get produced is not, hasn't changed in a way that I would have thought it was 20 years ago when I started writing plays. Kate. I kind of agree with both Lydia and this wonderful alumna. Mike, we actually both went to University of Iowa playwrights workshop. Yay. For me, I was actually living in San Francisco, Oakland for a while, and I was part of what they then called performance poetry scene, then morphed into the spoken word scene. And so for me, I was inundated and surrounded with a lot of political conversation, political art. And one day a friend of mine challenged me. She said, your poems are like monologues. You should write a play. And so basically what I did, I read Raising in the Sun like 50 times. No lie. And I wrote a play called Plum Wine Dreaming, which was basically a rip off of Raising in the Sun. And so a friend of mine, my same friend came to one of my readings of this play and said, you basically ripped off Raising in the Sun. But I actually, and I admit I did, but instead of a check, they were waiting for wine, you know, whatever. But what happened, I fell in love with playwriting and I fell in love with politics on stage and social justice on stage. And so I applied to several different programs for playwriting. I got into the University of Iowa. And I was surprised that they weren't ready for me, even though they accepted me. They weren't ready for how anxious I was to put politics on stage. They weren't ready for the lack of actors. I had to go outside of the theater department where my peers actually could pull from the MFA acting program and I had to actually find people who were in the engineering program who one day did a church play, you know, that kind of thing. I should have given you some of my posters from those three times. Right. We had to go all over campus like hunt down people. So by the time I actually came out of Iowa and was in New York City, I was surprised even more so that the world that I was so allowed to play in as a poet and as an MFA student wasn't the world of theater institutionally. People weren't as interested in the layered, complex, funny, rich, poor black experience. There was this one narrative that everyone was sort of trying to force me into. It was like be August Wilson, be Lorraine Hansberry, be August Wilson. And I was like, well, I love August, I love Lorraine, but I'm from Ohio, my mom is Catholic, my dad is Baptist. I want to write about that. And that's been the struggle in that for me sort of showed me that it was a little bleak that I was going to be a struggle. The hallmark of all of your works. And when I arrived here, I mean, I knew of all of you before I arrived in America. Of course, I'd read your plays and been big fans. But I think, and forgive me for being if this sounds however it sounds, but I think I found you and maybe probably only a few playwrights who seem to have the hallmark of cerebral activity as part of their theme that seemed to write from the cerebral cortex rather than the experiential I have lived in the ghetto or I have lived or... Talk to me a little bit, either of you, any of you, about writing outside of the box, writing... And when I say the box, I mean a box that I... And I mean, no way chastising any writer that does that. I have written many of those plays myself. But talk a little bit about trying to stretch beyond the narrative that feels like if I do this, I'll get produced. When I was in Iowa, my first plays took place in like an unnamed mid-Atlantic type state, somewhat southern maybe, and I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. And I remember having a feedback session with Oscar Hustis. And he said, you know, I like this play. And it's a play that I had sent around. It had gotten a couple of awards and it had gotten me into grad school, certainly. And so I was very proud of it. And he said, I like this play and it's good. But where are you from? And I said, I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. And he said, what do your parents do? And so, well, my dad is a lawyer and my mom is a social worker. And he said, so that's not really in this play. You should feel empowered to write who you are in your play and where you come from. And it doesn't have to be from the ghetto if you're not from the ghetto. And that was actually mind-boggling to me that I could write about people that I knew and I had grown up with. And I didn't have to appropriate playwrights of past years to be able to get. I mean, so that was mind-boggling. And my writing changed after that. So that's what it is for that play. I think because I didn't identify as a playwright early, because I thought I was an actor who was writing plays for actors. I didn't actually... That's funny. Someone at home said you really like what you just said. I didn't actually feel the constraints of what I was expected to write or what I should write. I was very lucky that way. I was the girl who sometimes almost got beat up on the playground for talking proper. Or the girl who was the one black girl in the all-white college town and I'd be having a crush on the one black boy and he was having a crush on all the white girls. Right? No. And so I was only writing my experiences because to me they were very authentic and it hadn't occurred to me that there was anything else. And I don't think... I don't know. I don't think that I was unique in that. I think that it's just really hard for the diversity of African-American voices to get produced. So I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to say I'm sure there were other black girls getting their ass kicked for talking proper and I'm sure they were writing plays about it. But I think that what Center Stage is doing and I think that what now several more companies are doing is giving a wider range of voices that those of us who have been sort of screaming into the wind are actually having our screams have a chance to land. So... Okay. Okay, so I'm just kind of stuck with this question because I feel that there is a lot of advocacy and encouragement to break the mold and do things outside of the box and the promise of that outside of the box thing being produced. I feel like that is a conversation that's been happening. I do feel that a lot of theater companies and institutions are eager to see that happen in development and how they commission. However, I don't see the producing... I see a lot of development and not a lot of production. And I started an organization a couple of years ago called the New Black Fest, which is a festival... Woo! A festival that I wanted to do to encourage and celebrate the diversity within the black experience that I felt that, one, that the black demographic and black artists were not necessarily subscribing to because everyone was subscribing to the larger institutional narrative. And so I wanted black people to learn that they're black folks in Germany or there's black people who are from Massachusetts or, you know, but also exposed to larger community, theater-going community, to that diversity as well and to see that diversity as being potential things that can be produced and make money. And so I'm still not convinced that, although there is a lot of encouragement and advocacy around diversifying the black narrative, that it actually is happening and making a real impact. And I think that, for me, that it's taking individuals and smaller collectives to make something... to make the puncture happen. I would absolutely agree. I would absolutely agree. And I think that another conversation to be had is about the ethnically specific, the black theater companies and how they're struggling and the people who've been telling the stories consistently for all of these years aren't being able to do that anymore. That's really frightening to me. But then there's also an aesthetic thing that I find disturbing and really interesting, which is that there are safety zones around which... and, you know, maybe only not in Baltimore. In very few places have I seen regional theater audiences be diverse. And so I feel as though there's this comfort zone in white audiences around the way we've been taught to expect that people of color interact with each other and look on stage. And so aesthetically, we've been sort of boxed in. And again, I'm Pollyanna-ish about what writers write. I think writers write what they write. But even the very few productions that have gotten produced over a span of time have had to fit into a very narrow aesthetic, which I think is where we started. You started us with that. I think I agree. And this is going to be my last question before I jump out. Do you have something going on today? Yeah, just a little thing. Something that I thought I'd wear a really quiet suit to. On a scale of one to ten, I always worry about this question, but when it goes through my mind, because there are so many connotations, but on a scale of one to ten, how bored are we of having to talk through the context of race? I'll start. As I throw it out. I would say that on any given day and at any given moment, it fluctuates. And any different context, it fluctuates. But I would say on a scale of one to ten, and being someone who is behind this debate, I think I'm about a nine and three-quarters as an average on talking about race. And that doesn't mean that I do not feel that race is phenomenally important, but I do think on a scale of one to ten that I find myself frustrated by the perception of a box, rather than the world which says all of our writing styles are different, but they're equally as valid. And that while I can speak about it through the lens of race, I would far rather speak about it through the lens of a practicing playwright trying to tell the best stories that I can through my specific cultural lens, and that not being labeled. That was a long one to ten, but... Anyone else? Eight. But nine. Oh, eight and a half. And talking about it that I mind, I actually over the course of my career have been called upon to talk about it so much that I fancy myself as really quite good at talking about it. I don't mind talking about it. What I don't like is talking and talking and talking for years, and nothing changes. So that's the problem. It's fun to talk about stuff you're good at talking about, and you've got some anecdotes, and ooh, it's hard, it's hard. But it's the things not changing that I would make it like a 12. Very good. Good. Did anybody else want to jump in on that? No. I think I grow weary of it. I grow weary of it because sometimes the weariness does take away from being able to engage with being a playwright in a different type of way. So weary as well. Please, please. No, don't talk. The other thing that I will say that has happened recently is there's been lots and lots of talk around gender parity. And I only have recently realized that I've never been invited into that conversation because I always get to talk about being black. And so I also am becoming aware of what happens when we're called to talk about race. And I think that the people who've asked me to be on panels and talk about race have great intentions. And I've worked with theater companies that actually have really made progress and have listened to me. I mean, there are certainly people working really hard, but I think collectively the theater community really smart. We solve problems. We make angels come down from the sky. I don't know why it's hard to figure out how to diversify the audiences and diversify the theaters. Okay, I'm done. Okay, can I tag onto what you're saying? Okay, so a couple of weeks ago I was invited to sit on a panel to talk about race in New York. To talk about what? Race. What was interesting was that it was a Shakespeare production that was diversified in the way they sort of aesthetically did it and blah, blah, blah. So anyway, basically what happened afterwards was that we were talking about diversity and race. And the artistic director was telling us a story about how he sat on this panel himself about diversity. And everyone in the room was a white male except for one Korean-American woman. And the Korean-American woman apparently got up to go to the restroom. And as soon as she walked out the door, someone said, why do we have to be responsible for this? We have to be responsible for ourselves? Now this is apparently like as a legit grant given and receiving organization, right? I think you should say who it was. No, I'm not going to say it. No, I'm not going to say it. Legal? However, however, the artistic director who was telling his story was saying how he was appalled by it and rightfully so in that he just wanted to get up to whatever. So a woman in the audience who claimed to be a Ph.D. student who her work was around race said to him, that's a cop out. She said, no, what you needed to do is stay in that room and tell those people that this is how you deal with diversity. You deal with it head on. She said, because we need more view in the rooms with them to advocate for us because we're not in those rooms. So instead of you saying I don't want to be a part of this that I'm too good for this, actually, no, you are the warrior that they need in that room. So I just wanted to put that out there. My last comment is I had a remarkable thing the other day happen to me. I was in discussion with three or four different theaters and someone had written a letter in complaining about something that we had collectively done and they said but there are no black people in your organizations. And I was a bit like I was really in a dilemma. I was a bit like, do I say hello? On the flip side, do I go yes! Because actually in some bizarre way that they had disavowed me of my cultural attributes and that somehow it felt like and it was really weird because what I decided at the end was that the person who had written that letter had said that I am the black head of a white institution and I just saw myself being the head of an institution and so I find myself as I say, as I went home that night to talk about it to my wife and I went I am so bored about talking about race today but I am so excited to have other people across the country who actually can be jump inside the box when they're called for but can jump outside of the box when needed and can create work that speaks to all the interlocking communities in America that they serve. Let me go out to anyone in the audience please, there is a microphone here. Are you in the lobby? You're beneath her. We watched it. I am in the lobby. So Kwame, I think I've heard you say in the past that you find the conversation that many of us understand why you were bored by it more so here in the US than you found at home so I'd love some perspective on that maybe I misunderstood but I'd love your perspective on that. I think Benita I think what I think I may have been hinting at was that the debate around race seems to be more foregrounded in America than I am used to in Britain. That's not to say that it is not exactly the same thing and doesn't manifest in almost the same ways but there is a frankness to the American personality that allows conversations to happen directly that in Britain happen subtextually and so you find yourself having to go, what did you say? As opposed to don't say that again if that's a metaphor if that metaphor works. Hi, Kwame and the whole bunch of you it's great to be here and I can't believe on this world premiere night you're doing this an hour before your show which I cannot understand but you're an amazing individual. This is for Lydia really because my cover theater in the Baltimore Washington area for Broadwayworld.com and I had the privilege of seeing stick fly down in Washington I think was the arena and in my review I said this should go to Broadway and it did so I just wanted to get your feeling as a playwright what was that feeling like having this play done in an original theater being taken to Broadway? Well first of all, thank you You played no small role in that I'm sure and it was trippy it was really really wonderful you can't feel when you're sitting in the middle of a moment like that it doesn't feel as much like a moment as it does like you're putting up a play and then people say do you do realize that you're in a moment and but I've only actually now a year later been able to look back and really see what the moment was and we can have drinks I'll tell you all about it Good, thank you someone's coming straight to you Good evening, pleasure to be here um bored, being bored being black we are bored and it's interesting you mentioned that being white they don't want to talk about it that's why we become bored so my question to you and I got gray so I've been around a little bit I was in New York and there were bastions of black theater everywhere which the voices were there that could be seen you know if we were lucky enough so my question to you, what do you think we need to do um stick fly, wonder if I can see if I heard about it you know so that's commercial we're talking about commercial but how do we get those voices out what do you think we need to do to get those voices out like I said in New York all these and those statuses are starting to die also because of not being supported some are coming back but what do we do to really get the voices out there and even to change artistic directors' minds and stuff like that well I would say first of all it doesn't start out commercial theater it starts out my play stick fly started out in an all black theater company, Congo Square the gentleman who directed the gentleman who directed Kwame Shodanite came and saw a reading of it and I hadn't written the other half because I was pregnant I don't know why I looked at you that was weird she has children and we talk about being mothers and theater makers came to see it so I also think there's something about the way to figure out how my thought is to figure out how to acknowledge the ecology of the food chain of the way that theater works and to figure out how economically to make sure the people who are fertilizing the world actually are reaping the benefits of that fertilization economically later I also think there is an artistic or aesthetic thing we were talking about earlier that's a problem that I've noticed and observed within the black theater community in New York City there's a lot of recycling of the same types of storytelling although I pay major homage in respect to writers like Ed Bullens and the works of Woody King Jr those are some great folks and they're still doing great work however I do feel that that generation of theater makers are not necessarily engaging with the younger generation of theater makers and that there's this recycling of those same plays and they are also nurturing younger playwrights who I feel are sort of regurgitating the same style and aesthetic and that's fine there's a place for that but like we're talking about today there is a diverse aesthetic that has been growing that has been in existence I mean even Adrienne Kennedy her work when she was writing and still was considered way way way off base even for the black community and so I do feel like there needs to be some advocacy around what we as audience members demand to see of ourselves because a lot of times I think that the black community in particular subscribe to one narrative about ourselves even though it's not necessarily our personal narrative and that it's important that we actually one learn who we are specifically not generally learn our history specifically not when someone else is sort of sort of informing you about your history and then that for me is a way for us as a demographic and as an audience to demand those stories to be on stage to say that's great to do August Wilson for the second time this year but can you guys actually do a story about my grandmother's family who was actually from Cambridge Mass or boat sellers I mean whatever it is you know but just to be advocates for your own diversity while this question is coming up which I hope is a question and not a restroom break dash but here's something that I wrestle with guys I wrestle with a lot you know I am Derek and I sound as he's directed the raisin so can we talk about this a lot we are sons of August now Derek was very fortunate in that his direct experience with August and allowed him to set up his theater company or made him set up his theater company I am son of August in that though I never saw him or he saw him from afar was so inspired by his manhood and personhood through his writing and that he did not sell truth for access that I though 4,000 miles away and of a different culture could feel inspired to want to contribute but I hear a lot of this kind of I hear a lot of kind of and it's not August dissing and I'm not saying that you were doing this in any form but I hear a lot of oh my god I've always been asked to be August and so I want to push away from that how do we stand on the shoulders of our giants how do we keep them center of our universe build upon their canon and still find our own identity does it have to be an either or it can't be it absolutely can't be and I think that we I like to think that we have a sense of our history that way but it does concern me there tends to be even around the conversation that we're having about aesthetics it seems that there's always this either or this push this pull and I don't know why we can't all just be friends and make art I didn't mean to make light of that though what you're saying I think is really very important and I don't know that we're teaching our young people and you know what else the demographics of the theater programs in this country aren't actually changing another thing to be critiqued and really really scream about and so how would we learn how to have respect for and honor if we're not even being taught I didn't see an Audrey and Kennedy play until I was grown up I mean I think there's a myth that there isn't enough room for everybody at the table and that is a myth about America that there's not enough room and there is enough room at the table for everybody and I think once that myth is dispelled that there's only certain slots there's only a certain amount of slots you've got your four slots in February and that's it is ridiculous and I think things won't really change until that myth is exploded and then the art is better because we're in dialogue with one another I agree that actually leads to my question in some ways one of the things that you're alumni from Northwestern Performance Studies love it but wow cats yes but the real question that I wanted to ask and I'm really concerned about this idea of race fatigue and I think that this is a current with an American culture and I'm wondering if it's really not a race fatigue but it's the fact that race has been so static a concept that we don't do what Lydia suggested in terms of talking about race, gender, sexuality, and class as being collaborators like the way in which they collaborate and aren't dialogue and so for me what's fascinating about your work is not so much this question of the cerebral or the heart or the emotion but it's really when you can actually bring all of these worlds together when we talk about the fertilizers of the world as being equally important as these kind of patriarchal figures men if you will I think when they come together that's what made August beautiful to me was not his machismo manliness but the way in which he was able to create conversations between folks and so I'm wondering about that tension how do you find that tension in your work and do you find that to be a productive place to create as well maybe a clarification about what the tension is I would come back so you wanted me to clarify the tension okay so the tension between having to do quote unquote a race play if we think about them in that way I don't actually think that as producers of work at least for me I should say in my work I'm not thinking about I'm creating a black play but I'm often thinking about intersections so when I'm talking about when I'm building a play about a community I have to think about communities don't just involve brown people right it's women, gays, lesbians straight people, reproductive people who don't produce all these things like we have to really you know dig deep for that and I think sometimes we discount what's really going on in this race fatigue because we don't really realize that it's much more complicated there are real tensions here that we're kind of unpacking I think sometimes there is a push I can only speak for myself but I think sometimes there is the push to create plays that aren't as complex for whatever reason and that it's sometimes seen as easier to produce those on a wide scale I don't know I don't think that's true I hope it's not true but I know sometimes when you bring in a first mess of a draft and it's all complex there is the feeling sometimes to make it to put it into a specific box I don't necessarily create from that way but I know that sometimes that does seep in because of the commercial nature of what gets produced yeah I thought I had a response to that but now that I think about it that's a really complicated question I don't I don't know if I have an answer I don't know if I personally have an answer for that I do I think this whole idea of race fatigue is a nice diversionary tactic for getting our eyes off of the problem and I don't know why we would be fatigued talking about something that statistically is so tangibly a problem still so it's interesting because I just wrote a play I'm having the hardest time talking about it in press because I was sort of wiggling around oh what is it about it's about the intersection of the blah blah blah and how they bounce against each other and the blah blah blah and the tensions of the yada yada yada and you know what it's a race play and I was like white men can write race plays I can write a fricking race play and I don't feel fatigued I just think that we have now we're writing the race play at a level that is deserving of the nuance and the sophistication of the conversation it has to be worthy I worry it even trying to slightly disagree but only slightly you can't argue with you on your open you can it's all good what is that thing that's happening downstairs the only reason and I don't really disagree I just wish to throw into the mix if I'm in Nigeria a country of 180 to 200 million people and I write about my family and I write about my community is it a race play or is it a human play I'm just saying mine is a race play if that play was written in Nigeria would it be a race play I know what you're saying I hear you it's your house I'm giving you the room to fight me in my house it's all good in America that's the distinction in America race functions so much as culture so we can't really disconnect culture from race and we keep trying to really talking about a fruitful culture your work all of your work that I've seen in Chicago all over I know that it speaks to certain types of cultural richness I just don't know that we have the luxury thank you I don't know that we have the luxury it would be great if I lived in a place with 80 million people who looked like me but I live in a place in which the people who look like the people in my audiences enslaved the people who look like me there's a conversation to be had I think there is absolutely and I think the comment about race fatigue is a magnificent one and your comment about it is that it can be a diversion I think that's absolutely right what I fear however is that we paint ourselves into a corner of storytelling that means that the way we access it is often through our pigmentation or our culture I firmly believe and I describe myself as a black political playwright I have no problems with that but I also perceive it as being a member of the majority of the globe rather than a minority of the globe I think the tension no, you know what there's a lady on crutches and we're going to ask this to be the last question just so we can make sure we can push the cat back it's your house so Shirley go ahead Hi, I'm Shirley Bastfield Dunlap and I'm coordinator of theater at an HBCU Morgan State University and I'm very proud to be able to say that some of my students have gone on to graduate school at Cal Arts our actor studio and so forth because we do want to get rid of that stereotype that black universities are only training their students to be excellent audience members but I also am a Ph.D. student who is interested in studying race and gender but also from a directorial point of view I'm an SDC member and it really kind of hits hard when you have a board member say oh this was the best February play we had in years or for a person to say you know well so-and-so really doesn't have a problem with white people directing his or her play that becomes very challenging so I ask the question I'd like to know your thoughts on the black director and especially since New York Times had a wonderful article two days in which they talked about women directors making their way to Broadway as if maybe they had lost their way or something had lost the map but of all of those women it was only one black female director and I'm having some challenges about that I know my first gig was thank goodness that the playwright was the one that had a handle on her play and if it weren't for her I would not have been able to make that feel that she won for her recommendation so I wanted to sort of change it I'm not bored with race and I'm not bored with black plays but I would like to talk about the people who tell your story I would like to jump in first on that yes yes I feel you one of my challenges is to tell our stories and who has power over the production of our stories and it's a double-edged sword because one as an artist I want I think that people should be able to tell whatever story they feel they can tell and they should be able to do whatever they want to do but at the same time what happens is that because the larger institution the larger white community is running mostly all the theater companies that have any real economic whatever in the country that a black play can be produced and then the white director is chosen and then it leaves out the opportunities for black directors and so then as a black artist I want to be able to choose a black director because I want that black director to work even though at the same time I want to be able to choose whoever I want so I'm in this weird sort of dichotomy of like what do I do I want to work with whoever I want but at the same time limited opportunities for black directors and even black playwrights for that matter so it's a very challenging challenging challenging I mean I can keep going on and on but I want to be able to share my I mean it's interesting what I would I think I'm pushing towards a world where I can have a director who might be the director who I met you know five years ago and we really clicked and enjoy working my work and we get along and that when we work together it's not seen that that director was imposed on me that I actually chose that director I think there aren't a lot of opportunities for artists of color there are many opportunities but I think bringing them together to have a black playwright and a black director scares many people sometimes it's also really hard to book Kwame Kwame I actually I'd like to answer that and I know then we're going to wrap up we have a question from a Philly theater company a challenge a challenge from Ryzenwalk Theater who notes that the question after these forums always is where do we go from here which I think Dwight had alluded to but I wonder if in wrapping up maybe think about that challenge to us and in your way from them where do we go from here was that you directing me mate? no sir I would very much like to speak to you and I think what you've said what's very important is parity if a white director for once quote unquote is directing a piece that is quote unquote black cool in the gang are the black or the black directors getting the chance to work on the classics at the highest level all of the time and I think that's the dilemma that's the question the question isn't whether I can interpret Ibsen or whether someone can't interpret Elmini's that for me is a secondary debate it's about parity it's about equal access to the pie and I think when we get to a place where there is equal access then I think the debate around races and culture is secondary because if it's a new play in particular that playwright of colour is going to be sitting in the air of that director no matter who they are and saying we didn't say it like that in my house and is going to be able to guide so I think if there is a debate to be had about the future and about who's telling our stories and who's guiding our stories it's about trying to seek greater diversity in the palette of work being placed before African American director and I think I will just do a last round if I may and thank you Philly and as to I always worry about where do we go from here as if we are somehow going to reinvent the wheel here today I find myself far more interested in in maybe asking each of you to tell me a little and tell us a little bit about the best experience you have had as a playwright and what you would send out to the universe as the way that things really should be done I'm going to start with you Lydia when it all comes together sublimely when the art and the people that you're engaged with and the company that you're being produced by have a shared aesthetic imperative that meets a predesorial sophistication and then you laugh a lot in the making of it have you had one of those experiences? I've had a few of those experiences good so I wrote a play about that was inspired by my grandparents and them buying a house in Arlington Massachusetts and it was put on last spring in Boston and I think what was really warmed my heart as an artist was that you were telling my story simply because when we were doing the dramaturgical research we couldn't find anyone who would talk about it everyone wanted to say oh that never happened you're talking about this, you're talking about that this is what I'm talking about and this is what my play is about and so to have people say either thank you for telling my story and those were not all black people they were also white people or I didn't know about that thank you for letting me spend an evening we can nurture our theatres and as an artistic director I would also just throw in tell me and help me how we create the environment where those experiences that you have for each and every new play maybe that's post-show that's post-show discussion you want me to answer the last question? any of them brother I will say this I will say that I did a little bit on the experience being when people say I appreciate or thank you for that I think as far as how to make our theatre more vibrant and how it's what we can do next Philly I think Philly is that way is that support everyone's work not just your own work come out to everyone's theatre that's on the most remote part of town come bring your entire community and support that work because I think what happens is that we subscribe to only supporting institutional work and the folks who support and the audience in those institutions don't come to the black theatre they don't come to the Asian theatre they don't come to the Native American or LGBT theatre we're all telling each other stories we're all responsible for our own vitality to integrate in order for us to survive as artists and as a community of people that's what I believe Lydia, Kristin Keith I just want to thank you all for travelling from your homes to come to this house on this night to talk about not just race but who you are as artists and the future that you wish for all of us that you would honour me by being here tonight thank you everybody for coming to this can I catch it so you'll make your way down to the first floor and quickly we do want to remember