 Well, Jerry Patch, Mame Hunt, when we were putting this together, this was way back. We had a false start on this one, and some of you who are listening out there today were part of the false start, because where it actually landed, you weren't able to join us, and I apologize for that. But when we were first starting to work on it, Mame Hunt was the one who said, well, just ask Patch, he knows the entire history of this conversation. So I'm just going to ask Jerry Patch one question. I'm just going to ask Jerry Patch one question. Tell me the history of this whole thing. But we're very blessed that you took the time to be here, and we're willing to launch us down the history path. Jerry, you're currently, what's the title of Manhattan Theatre Club? Director of Artistic Development. Great. And you've been at Manhattan Theatre Club for about four years. And then you were at the Old Globe for a year? No, I was there for four years. Four years. And then, but South Coast people? For about 34 years. So let's go back to the beginning of South Coast. Well, your beginning in South Coast. Because what I really want to get at in this conversation is where, how the notion of the literary office has evolved from your perspective. You've been in a long trajectory with it. You were in the early days of it as a concept in the theatre. And then you've been in multiple institutional settings around it. So I want to go through that whole journey. Well, this would begin back in the 60s when South Coast started. And there was always a thought of doing new work in this company. And again, as we sit in a structure like this, this is not how it was. There's a famous S.E.R. story about touring in a station wagon, which we did. The, everybody had a day job, everybody. And so all the work of the theatre was done at night and on the weekends. It was the 60s, so most of us were married with kids in our 20s. And that took a toll in terms of putting that together. So when, particularly, I work with young people at MTC and other places, you're all coming into a world of institutions that didn't exist when I started. And another thing that didn't exist in the institutions that were there, for the most part, were literary offices. I think a place came into a renazel and read them. Or Nine of Ants in Houston. Or whoever was running regional theatre, Blau and Irving in San Francisco. And there wasn't a literary office per se. And there wasn't a literary office in South Coast. The way we got one, which is, I think around 1972 or three, a play had come into the theatre. I don't think this is impactful, but I have no first-hand evidence of it. And it was declined and sent back to the writer. And the play was American Buffalo. And so then it was decided, well, maybe somebody who has some background in the speech. So my background was in contemporary American fiction and poetry. And not at all in theatre. I majored in what was then called Speech and Theatre, the way back. That was right before my apprenticeship with Lessing. I had come into it because I was married to a woman. And what that means? Lessing. Your apprenticeship with Lessing. Got the whole blessing? You don't know who he is? Yeah. Oh, so you did an apprenticeship? It was a joke. Sorry. Yeah, so I started reading plays. And in terms of setting up a literary, I mean, my job was just to pass death on plays. I had no training in particularly the literature, the theatre, other than what I'd gotten as an undergraduate, or certainly not in any kind of literary management or dramaturgy, even though I was performing that function with playwrights who came into the theatre. And my longtime pal John Glorick joined us in 1984. And John was a huge, you know, move up for us because he had gone through the Yale Dramaturgy program and knew what that actually was, as opposed to the faking it that I'd been doing for about 12 years. So it worked out very much through the theatre's advantage. And I think to my, because he taught me a great deal as well. So, I mean, the point to carry, I think, is that these things didn't exist. I think the first graduating class out of Yale was 74. And the first two graduates were Anne Catania, who still at Lincoln Center. And Russell Vandenberg, who for a long time was at the Mark T. Cormac in 15 years, went to, I think, St. Louis, and then North Light, and the last I heard was his teaching at the University of Kentucky. But Russell was known for two things, I think. One was the famous quote, No Kid Ever Grew Up Wanting to Be a Dramatur, which has changed. We hired Jen Keiger on a VRT, and Jen Keiger grew up wanting to be a Dramatur. And John and I think noted that, gee, the world has changed. The other thing Russ said, which I think is a very apt about dramaturgies, is when you give a note is more important than the note. And that's a good thing to know if you're working with writers and directors. Let me come back to something here before we lose it. So you, American Buffalo came into SCR, somebody who knows, read it and didn't find it compelling for them. And then they saw the success of it, and they realized they had missed something. And so, and when they came to you, were they already creating it as a literary office? No, it was, you have to understand, nobody was getting paid, right? There was a company. Okay, somebody's got to read these plays. Who can read the plays? Who have we got? You know, the actors didn't want to read the plays. The directors wanted to direct the plays. So, I was the guy. And I was literally by sort of reduction. All new plays at that point? Because that's what SCR was doing. Yeah, and then ultimately, no, we also were doing revivals. But as I gained some kind of credibility with Ems and Benton who were running the theater, then I would be asked to, well, we're thinking about doing this one next year. What do you think? And so, I would be asked to read that as well. One of the things that I should have brought up in Polly, and I mentioned to David, is this idea of part of the literary management, dramaturgy. We've been talking all about new work, but for those of us who work in institutions, there's season planning, which is a big function. If I work for Arena, my job is to give Molly choices. So, and that's just not new plays. So there's that aspect as well. All right. So, you're in there and you're reading plays and helping South Coast Ems and Benton and whoever else does directing on this, find new work for production, right? Yeah, and part of it was a commitment that evolved in the 70s, which was if South Coast repertory was going to become something, because Gordon and his behemoth was 35 miles north, and we weren't going to out-produce the taper and the center theater group. So what, how could we make a name for ourselves? And Jack O'Brien was down the freeway in San Diego, along with Dez and La Jolla. So what could we be? And we decided in about 1978 or 9, we'd shoot for new plays. And then the commitment became institutional through the board, and I think 8081, something like that, that we would try to gain identity nationally as a producer of new plays. And that would involve creating relationships with writers. That's one thing we started off very early. It's a belief that we wanted to be involved with writers over a period of time, not just project to project. And also that we should commission work for those writers and that we needed to raise the funds to do that. And one of the things I think that David Martin did that probably served South Coast as well as anything was creating an endowment that turned out money for play development every year, and that could only be used for that. And that's been in place, John, for one time. Well, wherever I arrived, 84 was when I came on line. Yeah, it came on line, 84, but now it's a substantial amount of money, it turns out. I didn't know it was that much. Yeah, it's into six figures, a good six figure amount of money. So we were commissioning 10 to 12 plays a year, I think. And as the literary manager, you were advising on which playwrights to... Yeah. So you're coming at the plays and you're saying, this is a writer to develop a play. Yeah, I mean, it helps if you have a relationship as we did. I could go in to Im's or Benson and say, you have to read this in 48 hours. And they would read it. But you can't do that three times a week. You have to, you know, you do that six times a year maybe. And so when you really get something that you want to move on, you do it. The rest of the time, as I say, John was a tremendous addition to our staff. And so John became a literary manager. I was the dramaturg because they didn't know what else to call me. And so the four of us met regularly on plays and investigated the stuff, you know, writers. And we would go to the O'Neill Sundance and other places, covering the ground to do well and where new plays gathered and try to find writers with whom you related and felt a lot. And how many scripts were you reading through this base admission? Was it open submission at that point? I think we would just start at the top, obviously. But we had, there were years, we had something called a California playwriting competition. That doesn't sound like much. You had to be a California resident, except there were, you know, 27 million people in California. 24.6 of whom brought play. And you would see stuff come in that clearly had been mimeographed in 1952. Every year the same plays would come in. But you would get, what, 1,200, 1,300 plays a year, 1,400, something like that. But it did go down once we got rid of that competition. But it was a lot of play. At what point, because you just did it here a minute ago before I asked that question, at what point did your job move from that part of the literary life where you came in to say, oh, well, here's the relationship between what's written on this page and the world of literature or coming out of fiction, you were looking at it from that lens. At what point did it move from that as a primary focus of helping them understand the literary nature of the plays to dramaturgy of new plays as a role for you? It's not something that I could point to, you know, in 1983, October, I remember, you know, this kind of thing. It just happened. And you sort of, it's interesting as I listen to the desire for protocol, procedures, dramaturgy then. I don't know that you can do that. Every writer is different. Every play is different. And to the extent that there is a protocol, one thing that I came to understand was one size did not fit all. That you had to treat every writer differently according to who that writer was, where their play was, what they thought their play was. And that's the first thing you had to do was get them to trust you. And that took three, four months, right? Something like that. They knew you were on their side. You wanted to do their play. You were going to promote them to the people who could say yes or no. Then second, you had to understand what they were trying to do to play. I'm always fond of quoting the late Romulus Lenny, who probably half the people in the room have heard this, but Romulus talked about the three primary drives of mankind, who drive for food, who drive for sex, and who drive to rewrite someone else's play. And so, for you younger ones, Romulus was Laura's father. Wow. Yeah. Anyway, there's some substance to that. The reason Richard and Terrence and the people who wrote those dramaturgy articles wrote them is that there was some truth to it. You know, I don't know that you can make a procedure for working on a play like that. You have to first develop the relationship with the writer and then understand what the writer's play is. And then you are in the room to serve the writer if you are doing dramaturgy. So David and I talked the other day. I was deposed in a rent suit should the dramaturgy be paid. And my first question was, was she paid a salary? And I said yes. And I said then she deserves nothing because if she chose to write material that God produced, that was part of what she chose to do as part of the job she was paid for. But you're in the room to help the writer make the play better. And I mean, part of what you learned in this is I've been the head of two organizations, the Artistic Academy of Globe and the Sundance Theater Program for a while. And I've been what I would call a military staff officer, which is where now I work for Lin Meadow, I've worked for David Anderson and Mark Benson. And you have to be willing to be satisfied with the staff position. And that's something you need to find out about yourself, I think, is are you comfortable not being the person who pulls the trigger? If you need to be the person at the center, and John would back me up, David Ames couldn't work in the theater if he wasn't running. You know, I mean that's just, and David, I would say that to his face, he knows that. He just did. Yeah, he was watching David. Yeah, no. And to our benefit, because he was very good at it. But he's one of those guys that he's in the room, he's got to be running. And if you're going to work for him, you have to be willing to take that position. So that idea of serving somebody else is not something that everybody in theaters come. But, okay, and I'm going to come back to it. You moved into that role, which I think it's easy to acknowledge and I'm honored to be able to acknowledge. You're one of the best at that. And it's a tremendous thing you've done. A tremendous body of work that you've done as that dramaturg. But there was a literary component to your job in the beginning. And did that then become, was dramaturg the point of that job, or did that job still need to be done and someone else did it, was that then John's job? What happens, because we slide so fast, I'm trying to figure out what happens. John, I can't remember that I had any system when you came to work there, did I? We still don't, Jerry. No, John was much better. I mean, really, it was organized. He'd been trained to run a literary office. I hadn't. And my thing was to go out and find writers I'd like to bring them into the theater and hope them to vent enlightenment too and then support them. And that was essentially my procedure. So to this day, you know, it's really interesting to me, I was talking to David earlier, maybe it's a place to get into this. Manhattan Theater Club is in there. It's a machine, man. Everybody there is working. And I'm used to walking into offices. You walk into an office, man. It's all done on email. And even the kids who work for me now, it's hysterical. I'll come to their desk and they all start typing like, here comes the windbag. The guy who's going to take up 10 minutes that I don't have. And I get it. You know, everything is done to maximum efficiency. And it's terrific. And I can't work that way. You know, I mean, I just, I do do the best I can, but it's sort of, I'm going uphill all the time. I need time to talk. A guy who's done better than I am who has my disease is Oscar Houston. And I think Oscar and I, who work together a lot at Sundance, have a similar approach in dealing with playwrights, which is we like to spend a lot of time talking about the plays. And on the rare occasions now, when I see him, it's one of the things he complains about, that essentially he's running meetings and raising money. And you do less art. And for those of you who, you know, going back to that point about what do you want to do? You want to be the person that pulls the trigger. I think Molly would tell you and other people in the room as well, you give up one hell of a lot to be an artistic director of a theater that a ton of your time every day was one of the most frustrating things I had to blow, was that whatever fire happened that day torched about 65% of what I had planned to do. And you have to take care of whatever comes up. So-and-so just got a series. This guy's in jail. All that stuff, it has to be dealt with right now. And the time that you thought you were going to get in a room with artists just keeps getting less and less. So to have the job I have now, where Mamedo has to do that or Mandy Greenfield, they do that kind of work. And I'm really lucky. And I see Mandy looking at me like, Envy. You know, even though she's much more prominent in the organization right now. So it's a good thing to think about. What do you want to do? What kind of day do you want to have with artists? You have-you brought up- I probably am getting nowhere near what you want. No, no, I keep pulling you back. Okay, good. You brought up MTC and you and I have talked about this prior. Manhattan Theatre Club reads everything that you can find. When I say it's a machine, we have, I think there are five of us in the military and we cover everything. If it's in English and on stage on the planet Earth, we pretty much know that. And before it happens. And what's driving that? Lin Meadow. And what's driving Lin? Well, Lin, I think, you have to understand, I think not applicable, but it's, you know, wrapping was our literary manager so he understands this. I mean there's a tremendous pressure that no rock in the screen bed goes unturned over, right? You have to look at everything. And part of that goes back to a time when Manhattan Theatre Club basically had its pick of the litter on new plays particularly out in London. But from the United Kingdom and other places because there were three big nonprofits in New York. And Andre Bishop was essentially the new work he did was largely written by his friends who were great friends, people like John Quarren, and Todd Haynes was running a revival theater. And so Manhattan Theatre Club was the new play venue of size in New York City that was nonprofit. And in the last 15 years that has changed. Todd and Andre are producing New York in a big way. And a whole bunch of tech money, biotech money, divorce settlement money, you name it, has come in, right? It's in New York. And people who want to stand on the stage and be there for the tone. And they're all looking for New York. So as that has increased, Lynn has, you know, gone more and more to whip, I think of a literary office too, to get there first, to find it, you know. The big sin is not only to miss it but not to be there early. So because it's competitive. It's competitive as hell. And if, alright. So I have two less institutional bound questions. One, let's go here first. If the push now, we haven't really defined it yet but I'm anxious about getting my questions to you. So let's just say that the literary office and we'll do it the rest of the day tomorrow. But the role of the literary office is changing. We're going to talk tomorrow about sprawl and the amount of different things that the literary office is now expecting to come. So there are a number of people in this room and myself among them who feel like let's figure out what's the 20% So if I put to you, we're going to tip over the top the literary office of the 20%. And we're going to write it back up and make it the 20%. What would you say is the baby that we're looking for? What are the critical things about the role of the literary office in the health of the field? I'm not going to talk about the health of the institutions but in the health of the field. What are the critical elements of the literary office and if we could separate for the moment let's see if we can even do that. I don't know if we can. But in terms of the opposite self the critical interventions or contributions of the literary office in the theater that would be at risk if we said let's just get on with this different story. Well, I think the great thing that we have going for us now is all of this technology. And, you know, David was showing me the tweets that have come in, you know, from the last hour and this kind of thing. I had no idea how to do any of that. And my next door neighbor, Tom Wilk, who passed away left an audio tape he was dying pancreatic cancer very fast and they played this, his funeral was at the Nixon Library because he served President Reagan and President Bush in the White House and he said on the tape he said, God, I'm dying at just the right time because I don't get any of this stuff. I would just be a fumbling bumbler if I stayed on. I think that's, you know, I can identify with that but it's terrific. It's amazing what we get now out of technology and out of the Internet. Part of what makes what the literary office at FTC as functional as it is is the capacity for and new websites coming on every month that give you more and more information. So from the standpoint of literary management knowing what's out there sharing stuff I mean, Christian and I compete. We don't share a hell of a lot but John and I talk because he's 3,000 miles away and so there are those kinds of relationships that you have but what you can get just out of the technology is terrific. I think dramaturgy is another thing completely that I would be concerned with is that the way I see office procedures protocol time spent by people who are running artistic activities you know, they get incredibly efficient at doing the day to day procedures a meeting happens it's 25 minutes long everything that has to happen happens but there's no humanity to it it's all content and there's no exchange of something that I have found during dramaturgy is really useful it's one of the things I think people like Craig Lucas and David Hoang value most in Oscar is the guy that hit the ball back just to sit and talk about their plays not that Oscar or because of that as well and John does not that we come up with the answers but maybe because of the conversation something occurs to the writer that wouldn't have occurred otherwise and that takes time it just does and it can't be I've got a 230 so we have to fix your act in 12 minutes that to me is the danger of going as we become more and more efficient less and less and less human in terms of how to deal with artists can I throw out another one for you and then I'm hoping you will all come in on all of this stuff so that's why I'm beginning to talk on multiple topics and then we'll open it up I have two more topics in the beginning could probably introduce this session with that quote that I found really provocative I want to get it right so this is from the establishment John maybe you have a sense of this too establishment of that program originally yeah the goals of the program are to resolve the antipathy between the intellectual and the practical and diffuse the two into an organic whole in your experience is that is there that antipathy? is the intellectual life antipathetical what is that, how do you make that a verb antipathetical to the academic, is that so that's a stated purpose of creating this role in the theater to use the intellectual life with the practical as if it's missing and it says earlier in that paragraph about how there was a dearth of intellectual rigor in the artists is that a necessary function right now you feel like that's a relevant what do you call it, dialect intellectual and artistic in the America you know I can't go at it that way if that makes any sense it's a case book example of what I'm talking about when I came to work at the Globe Jack O'Brien gave me the Coast of Utopia he says it seems way too long cut it and I read it and I came back and I said I'm not cutting tops cut it in my and I it's been my good fortune to spend some time with Stopper you know and wonderful about conversation I'm not going to walk in as the intellectual rigor guy with him or anybody else I just don't think you can do it that way you start having a conversation with the writer about their play and what's in the play the intellectual rigor is and there are times not in frequently when the intellectual rigor of the play is less than it could be but the conversations can help to amplify that and it's you're not you don't set out to do that but if it happens it's cool so the conversations there's the function and there's the label yeah I go back to what Polly was quoting just to make sure I get it the function and the label she talked about the idea where the conscience of Utopia my first job was in this building well not this building I'm not going to come here and tell Zelda Fitchhand where I'm here to be your conscience thank you very much nor will I say that to David Martin or Mark Masterson but I think there is a value in having someone who whose primary purpose is to be conscious of the intellectual rigor of what we're doing even though everybody else in the room also is trying to be aware of that they just have a million others so the function may exist but I think it's a mistake to walk in and say I'm here to be the intellectual rigor guy or conscience guy and let me just add on to that to the extent that we played that role it was times like when we got into it with the LA Times and over our critical thing and some other stuff or Noah Hidles play Mr. Marbley when it was done and people were freaking out and literally on the editorial page of the Orange County Register the play was condemned in previews as something because there was a child portrayed admittedly by a 25-year-old actor but this kind of thing in that case we were not intellectual rigor for the artist but rather indefensive artists to the community and I think there is a role for that for the people who do our job but the idea that you're doing that for a playwright is presumptuous this should be provocative because I found it very provocative in reading this thing and I'm embarrassed to say I also came up just through practice and just a guy wanting to direct plays when I landed in San Francisco and so I just started going and so I'm going to say right here in front of God and everybody that these two pieces of writing I only read in preparation for this convening I've been working in this field for 20-plus years and these are new pieces of writing 25 years old, they're foundational I didn't know them, I'm working along one of the things that Shock was this notion that the writer that the artist in the room would need and invite a critic into the making of the art when I read it it felt like well if you're that role is actually between the audience and the production and not between the artists the production is the art that's where everybody's working on it but if you're inviting a critic into that process it seems like you're making your case for a critical dialogue between you and your audience you're giving your audience the capacity to understand what you're doing as a theater as opposed to leading it to Isher Wood or Peter Marx, hello Peter to decide for you what your institution is trying to do with your audience, more than with the artist and if you look at how you're articulating what's absent from all these role descriptions is humanity okay I mean you finally have to have a relationship with artists you work with first where nothing happens I mean the critic has no relationship with the playwright ideally it was an interesting observation to what extent do we meet with critics Dan Sullivan who was the critic in the Los Angeles Times not the director I used to meet with Dan once a year at The O'Neill where I think he still runs the critics lab and Dan reviewed South Coast Preparatory you know nine or ten times a year and we never had a conversation with Los Angeles we would always spend 90 minutes or so every summer under a tree at The O'Neill and I would tell him why he was wrong and he would tell me why we were wrong and no holds barred for a couple of hours one day in the summer and then no discussion and I thought that was one of the most useful things in that sense because you could articulate all your concerns and the beliefs that you had about how you have been not well served by the paper and they could come back with what they felt you were short on what you had so it's a good way to work so it's a nice thing to do but you almost have to take it out of the context of the institution and then each side goes back to their institution I have a story that I'm going to have to interview about later because I really want to get it on the record but I want to give other people time questions for Jerry on this topic or comments about stuff that you've heard so far let's get to you guys because this is not a seminar this is a gathering, a working group yes Nan you mentioned early on your desire and the importance of finding a playwright that you liked and taking him forward about how we continue to advocate for playwrights when we're in institutional theaters with artistic visions can you talk a little more about that and how you're doing that now well it's interesting first of all I think the commission is the most powerful tool the literary office has to support and write a production obviously is great but first they have to write and we gave David Huang his first commission I think in 1982 he was still just graduating from Stanford and David's father ran the biggest Chinese American bank in the United States he didn't need the money but what it did for him was authenticate him as a writer and that means a tremendous amount to the young person coming out what have we done with David I think I was just golden child I think we commissioned him after Golden Child and he said I'll write your play about that I mean it's interesting because a writer like David goes away from you because Disney wants him and Joe Pap wanted him and Jory wanted him and so that's okay too because they go out and they're getting work other writers like Richard Greenberg we commissioned ten times in a row and the point for us was we thought Rich needed to be supported because he was one of the best writers we knew and I think that's all that you can do is find the writers that you think are in the front rank of people working and you don't know who they are you know I mean over a period of time we knew Richard Greenberg was that but over a period of time Karen came in through our Hispanic playwright project Amy has been commissioned at South Coast a number of times and yes as those relationships progress you keep the support going but how that works now in New York is very funny but New York is coming around for some reason the way development Christian helped me out with this it doesn't exist in New York the way it exists in the regions I mean we worked on the width I met Maggie Edson in 89 or something or no 91 and we worked on the play through 94 I think and did the play in 95 and that just doesn't happen you know where the play is almost 3 hours long and ends up being one act in 95 minutes that kind of thing you don't do that kind of work it's thumbs up or thumbs down we do a reading and that's it and there's a reason for that there really is it's not necessarily hostility maybe Sanford you guys do a little more of that a little bit more we're starting to but nothing like we did at South Coast we don't work years on plays but also the funding for that activity has changed when I worked in a theater club over 10 years ago we did a lot of it and none of it was going anywhere and so there was a paradigm shift within that institution to stop it I think it's going back in that direction I don't hope but yeah it's very interesting so going back to your point part of the difficulty in New York is branding stuff in that particular way so that a show that's on in your central space Christian is the bar should not be up here it should be here and critics and everybody else has to understand that and it's cut when it's in New York and particularly if you've got Simon Russell Beale you know that kind of thing but they need to understand that so I don't know it's harder to do it honestly in New York I think there are places now because I've gotten out in works of different places there are theaters like Tonians that's got the best of everything I think they've got resources they've got a great city to work in they're not in New York but they can go to New York if they want and they've got something that belongs there that's a really nice way to work New York carries a lot of pressure doesn't exist yeah I'm curious as a person who's been around and watched the regional landscape it seems to me that the literary office is largely a function of the non-profit leader number one would you agree with that number two there's this conversation of the commercial world and the non-profit world together and where do you see the literary office fitting into that there are people working for commercial producers who have my title director of artistic development or creative director I think Jack Rotel was one of the first at Jujanston from Rockham and now all the producers have Erin Weisler's got somebody Stuart Thompson's got somebody our friends and they're all sort of going to that literary office model but it very quickly gets kind of taken away and that's not bad that's another thing going back to that staff officer example I mean your job is to bring it in to help it grow and then ultimately somebody else is going to realize that that just is how it works so with Witt, Martin Benson directed the first production of Witt and it fell to Martin to realize that play even though I had spent two and a half years talking to Maggie about it so that's just the way the work gets done and so that's not how it happens in New York theater in New York theater particularly commercial theater if you find a property you want to do the first person you hire is the director and directors are very territorial about that more the sense of given the work that we do once it goes to the director unless they know you it's taken me three years to get Doug Hughes to take me seriously and it's just because Doug's had a lot of bad experiences I get it as to why that is but that's the reality from what's out but is that function that you're talking about there is that the literary manager or is that the dramaturge dramaturge and Madeline are you asking also about the literary opposite self in the commercial world and what's your sense do you have a sense of it from where you're looking or you haven't been able to see into there yet where my brain is with that question is there's a lot of talk about nonprofits having identity crisis these days and if sort of nonprofits don't know where they are is the whole system kind of breaking down and what happens to the literary office if that happens are we just a product of the nonprofit theater or are we essential to the happening theater everywhere yeah it's interesting on that phone call Morgan talks she tells a great story if you haven't had a chance to listen to it it's probably like 20 minutes in but she tells the story that she tells frequently which is when she went into there was a play I don't know maybe she was calling you or I guess she was calling Maine they would play that the public had commissioned and spent some time developing but Joe Papp wasn't going to produce it and he said you know call the playwright let them know instead she called somebody a colleague in the literary office at another theater he said we're not going to do the play maybe you want to do it and Joe kind of called her on the carpet because she was acting like an agent and he said I'm sorry most of you have listened to the call but he said to her you work for the public theater and the way she says it no Joe I actually I work for the American theater I work at the public and you know in the end of the stories as she told me originally is the way I like to believe it he understood that immediately now on the phone call she applies something else maybe the latter is true but I think it's the way a lot of us feel that we work for the we work for the American theater and we happen to work through an institutional context so are we working through is that institutional context does the American theater include the commercial theater or are they separate when we say that and to what extent does the literary work that we do in these institutional context a contribution to the whole or is it even necessary at the point of a commercial but I would argue in that case Morgan was working for the playwright and that's what I think you do above everything you have to take that and champion the writer and defend the writer ideally then you have to believe in the writer right and that's going back to the first thing so find people you really believe in if we all do that because we all have different ideas then the American theater will get served I mean I do confess I'm more concerned I know I think Liz I think when we were at Louisville it may have been you for many talking about doing stuff that was local that realizing things with local emphasis and great I think with somebody like Liz Engelman making that point that's going to get served my concern is I think we've lost you know as divided as this country is as much as theater is supposed to build community where are the plays that bring us all together that can be done in Miami and New York and all the more in San Francisco and Seattle who's writing those plays and I don't see enough of them I really don't it's interesting England is more compressed they're able to do it better than we are right now and it's not surprising because we live in a splintered society we are a fraction of the artists that can pull us back together let me pull on you Rachel right there because it just sort of stated your mission in a way aren't you as in your ensemble the theater of the emerging American moment how do you do that we're an enormous fractured society how do you approach it even I mean we approach it often through a region we have found the past number of our works wasn't something we intentionally did but we found that we were latching on to a piece of the geography and sort of using it as a lens so Mission Drift our last work we researched in Las Vegas for a month Adrian was there for a part of that and was a dramaturg in the room for a device process where yes we are aggressively inviting a critic into the room actually pretty consciously and then our casting out from that geographic location into elements of mythology and history that's what I'm going to essentially create an echo chamber hopefully and through through the layering kind of look at the current moment through distinct elements of the past so we used to go under the wind to look at Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath in the 1994 and I'm using Las Vegas and sort of not so much the gambling culture but the building in Busting, Las Vegas as a the fastest growing city in America the turn of the millennium using that against the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam to sort of look at the founding mythology whether American freedom is inextricable from the freedom to make as much money as possible so so it's I think trying to have a distinctly short view of a particular place and then trying to scope back and situate that really really large campus often too large and I'm more interested in work that is too large rather than just one I really impressed that you were able to just sort of come up with that whole answer out of the blue would be poking at you I see we have time for one more question and then we have to go ahead, yeah Rachel was saying is that too large a question I think that is interesting to me because I think the question of applying intellectual rigor to plays has often manifested itself in bad drama and so far as we have encouraged we have as Richard Nelson suggests encouraged plays to be too tight and to be too neat and to conform to the actual instance in a way that doesn't always serve the core vision of those plays that's bad drama to me it may be sound structure but what we aren't always doing is taking a long view actually has to play right to play itself to apply intellectual rigor to create the most engaging play moment to moment that then is sufficiently complex actually or not sufficiently exceptional complex so that you're actually trusting the audience to follow as opposed to sort of squeezing something into a box that looks nice so that the audience feels good about it yeah I want to read again, it's part of my own surprise at what I hadn't already read but this is from that Doug Anderson article how many people have read that Doug Anderson article? oh, interesting yeah, read it, it's amazingly prophetic in a way that's really disturbing sure, we can mail it to people we can email it to people, I don't know are we allowed to just send it around I don't even know what book it's from it's from something called New Play Development yeah oh, it's from the drama review but anyway, this is Bob Falls in well, 1989 we're talking about a specific the kind of workshop process as they go through the process, plays start to look like other plays you start clarifying dramatic action eliminating unnecessary things you start talking about the arc of the play and anything that's wildly original or wildly unrealistic is thrown out I was at a major workshop last summer it was very strongly actor oriented what interests me is that plays do not come into the festival as realistic works they leave as realistic works actors are essentially realistic artists 99% of them want to know how to get from A to D, which they need to do they need the psychological underpinnings in order to create the role but if the playwright comes to them with a play that for some reason does not have the psychological underpinnings well at this festival the actors could demand that of the playwright so the plays were actually the playwrights were actually rewriting the plays to accommodate the actors I can't say whether the plays got better or worse but they did get more realistic and in a way what you're talking about about the intellectual rigor that gets applied external to can push a play in a particular direction but is that what is that progress? you have to be able to recognize a playwright's voice and when you start taking the voice away you know our thing was always the medical deal first do no harm and you start taking the voice away you're killing the life it's where the art came from but I'm struck that this is so when we all hear that we go um, you know, not along yet that makes so much sense this thing happened they did get more realistic and this is 1985 or 1989 this piece was published and I think it's still something we're not sure we're doing well I absolutely agree so the other presumption and what I just said is that the playwright has a voice and all playwrights don't okay and that's the important thing about who you pick you know, who you've got back because the worst thing you situation in my experience that all playwrights have a voice in terms of an authentic voice as an artist and a certain voice in the process yeah, no, no, a voice as an artist part of the skill now in writing long-form television which is enjoying at golden age is being able to write in the voice of the writer who created the project and that's a different skill than what we have in theater, I think and so there are people doing that kind of work who are really good at you know, who are terrific at what happens next and coming up with that and we like that we like to follow that kind of writing but you know a Joe Orton voice, something that comes along a Christopher Rank voice something that's so original and distinctive, they're not going to write plays like everybody else and you have to protect that and not cut it off and the most discouraging thing you can get into is doing a play with a writer that has a voice that isn't perfect and so then you start giving these notes and that's how it turns out like that and everybody goes home unhappy it's really not a good experience so they're looking for the voice looking for the voice, you're just talking about that is what you were originally hired as an artist to recognize David Maverick you can put it that way you know, we weren't that skilled we were just you know what I mean you're just kind of you're reading all this stuff like I said I go back to poetry I wake to sleep and take my waking slow and learn by goal where I have to go that's one of the best ways to go about now and excellent we're going to stop there I want to say thank you very much for everything you've done I'm really scared the hell out of me with her narcissism I think it's enormously helpful for you to share it I know it's been enormously inspiring