 Hello, so sorry for the beginning technical difficulties as we are beginning this and we want to thank you so much for coming to Directors Lab West Connects. My name is Ernest Figueroa, I'm on the Producing Steering Committee of Directors Lab West. This is an annual event that happens every year with volunteer participation, supported by the stage directors and choreographers society, and also the Pasadena internship with the Pasadena Playhouse, and also with the Boston Court Pasadena. Of course, because of the COVID virus this year was an easy decision to basically postpone this event until next year. We still wanted an opportunity to reach out to all of the directors and choreographers in this time of isolation. So we developed Directors Lab West Connects. And it has been a volunteer effort and we are very grateful that you are participating. Directors Lab West is for mid career and emerging directors. And we did not want to be thwarted this year. And so this is our opportunity to offer something to the directors and choreographers in our theatrical community. And we wanted to make sure that it was accessible. So too, on this call also is Jess Whitehouse, who is our ASL interpreter and wanted to thank Jess for all the time that is being donated to this project. Also the rest of the week, they'll be at 11am every morning, an offering that you can check into. So if you check into this one, we hope that you check in the rest of the week. It's going to be eight days of conversations made by, prepared by theater directors and choreographers live streamed to our partners HowlRound and to their website and our website Directors Lab West. And you can ask questions during the time and those will be fed to me. And I think that's where we're at right now. We are really, really honored to have put together a whole week of incredible artists. And today, though, we are speaking with, as would be appropriate, Ann Catanio, who is a dramaturg at Lincoln Center Theater and with her and Andre Bishop originated the Directors Lab at Lincoln Center Theater. And she is also in addition to working with all of the different playwrights she's worked over the years and many awards. She just won a Guggenheim Award and are very, very appreciative to have her here with us to talk about Directors Lab Lincoln Center and moving forward. She was to celebrate her 25th anniversary of the lab. And of course, that had to be delayed because of the COVID crisis. We were in our 21st and we are delayed as well. So I want to thank Ann for coming and she is going to about turn on her video. Also joining her is Sheldon Epps. Sheldon Epps is what is actually currently on the board, president of the stage directors of Coriartis Foundation, and also 20 years at the Pasadena Playhouse as artistic director, also Tonya Tonya Ward nominee and also his director on Broadway and off Broadway. So he has a unique perspective not only from institutions but also from being a practicing director as is Ann a practicing dramaturg. So we are really pleased and thankful that you are both here. I'm going to zip off at this point and make sure that the answers are being fed. I'll let you discuss the questions that have been submitted and I'll join in about 25 minutes and pop in and give you some other additional questions. So thank you both for coming. Thank you. Good to be here. Hi, Annie. Hi Sheldon. This is our third conversation this week. By Zoom. The second on Zoom. I wish I were out in California. Yes. I'm very happy to be here. I wanted to actually start by thanking the committee and they've put together this whole thing online, which I really wasn't expecting. And then I really have to thank you because when the director's lab began 25 years ago, right away a group of directors earning was among them said we have to start a lab in Los Angeles. And the question was how and where and you were gracious enough to invite us up to playhouse where we've been happily ensconced ever since. And Danny Feldman has continued that tradition as that since you left so I very, very grateful to you for that. The LA lab was I think our first offshoot. Then we have a lab in Canada and Toronto. We had a briefly had a lab in Melbourne and one for a while at Chicago. And now we have a baby lab, a Mediterranean lab that started in Beirut. And it was going to Barcelona and then Cyprus. So it's, it's remote in Barcelona right now. So it's sort of a lab empire that has emerged over these 25 years. Thanks to you, by the way, and your great initiation of the lab in New York. Yeah, we've had so many conversations. I looked carefully at the questions that had been submitted. And, and there were obviously many, everyone's concerned there were many overlaps. So I, as I emailed you earlier, Sheldon I've known each other for like 40 years. Yeah, I wrote so yes, I said, and role me in others. I wrote some notes. It's okay, can I just lay out these because I think they may respond to questions that people of course yeah. It's just the way my mind works and I was lying there so I figured I would just get a lot of things these are not going to be responses that anybody expects so get ready. I wanted to begin by acknowledging our time of trouble and the feelings that we have. And if I had more time than Ernie gave me, I would take more time to honor this it's very important. So let's assume I'm doing this for an hour instead of two minutes because it warrants that there is always trouble in history. Our generation, perhaps years in mind has a memory of this trouble from our families our parents from the generations before us. I've just spent nine weeks inside an apartment two blocks from the Javits Center in Midtown Manhattan. My father, who was an emigrated to United States from Holland, my father's closest friends spent seven months in Holland in 1945 hiding inside a wall. Different kind of trouble. What he had was things that we don't have so much access to religion faith deep family ties loving support that's the kind of things people got people through when they got through. Now we have a pandemic of COVID, but we also have an equally severe pandemic of inner troubles mental online troubles money troubles career troubles. And there's always been that too, certainly 1945 there was today we know so much or we think we do. And that leads to equally bad trouble in mind. A lot of that trouble is in each of your hands hold, hold and hold out your cell phone and you'll see a lot of trouble coming out of that cell phone. So I'm acknowledging just that to say it's a big subject but one that we're sitting here together today to deal with. My next point is that I actually feel very confident and optimistic that this will end. This is not a giant meteor heading towards the earth. For God's sake this is a virus. We have made and produced hundreds of vaccines in the United States and I have to believe that we will be able to do this in 2020 for this catastrophe. 80 years ago, 1942, the retrofitted Ford Motor Plant in Willow Run, Michigan was taking a B 24 liberator bomber off the mile long assembly line at the rate of one plane every 64 minutes. And there weren't a lot of men on that line. They were in Europe. I got the numbers this morning after I woke up. And by the end of the war, three years after that, they had built 86,865 airplanes, 57,851 airplane engines, 4,291 military gliders, thousands of engine superchargers and generators as well as 277,896 tanks armored cars and jeeps. I have to believe in 2020, we can make a vaccine. Next thought. So to our convening this morning, my personal advice as your guest is to suggest that we do what we can do between now, a very bad time for all of us. And then, when the vaccine appears, and things are rethought and restarted a new in a better way. We worry about what when that's going to be and how it's going to be but as somebody from a generation above mine used to say, worry is interest paid on trouble that hasn't happened yet. I'm going to focus on what I can do between now and then, and I really believe there will be a then I strongly believe that. So what should we do. I am going to try to do to get ready to do what artists do best which is to make art. I plan to be supporting art, cleaning up things that need doing documenting injecting new models and ideas. That means making and supporting things that only artists can make, not influencers or profiteers who exploit the work of people who can do things that they can't dream of doing. What kind of things, what kind of things do I mean compose the Goldberg variations play the Goldberg variations. And I think it's most sounds of it to our last many years. As my old friend, Taj Mahal used to say, when my hell you Jackson saying she doesn't come down to the people she opens a door and the people come up to her. We have what people want. We know how to create it. And we know how to bring people into a theater to complete the circle and experience it together. We know how to collaborate to make this happen. And we know the electric effect it's had on people for thousands of years felt it when you saw Brian Denning he may be resting peace this month in death of salesman or the first time I saw Delroy Lindo and Joe, Joe turners coming down who the hell is that guy. And what an incredible play the first time I ever saw Arianne Manushkin's if it's an eye and Alice or the first or the second time I saw Hamilton. Wow. What divine creatures made this is Hamilton going to work on the screen will soon find out. My guess is yes, and no. I don't understand any time to a record of Mahal me hell you Jackson also both are good but not as good as the original as being live in person. So what should we not do between now and the vaccine. We should not give up our in person collaborative knowledge and power and artistry to non artists without gifts of any kind. Those who are always among us, thinking to profit from our currently idled community. I found it how the art world has been destroyed over the last 20 years. It's completely the domain now of investment bankers looking for a place to park money. There are no independent galleries left art connoisseurs fly to glamorous art fair locations no artists can afford to attend. Most of the art is made in China or by poorly paid assistance. Anyone can be an artist we've learned if a hedge funder is willing to validate you. If you're going into the theater as the start of a path to make money to stay here for a bit in order to pass through to a studio job or directed commercial, just wait it out until the cure comes and be on your way. So what do I suggest that you do now. And let's be hopeful, January. I think you should inform yourselves about theater artists in times that were equally challenging, and there have been many of them. I think you should read Harold Clermann's book the fervent years about the Great Depression, and the people who started the group theater who spent most of their time trying to find something to eat for the first two years. I think you should read our toes, the theater and it's double that you should read yours at the top skis towards a poor theater. I think you should read about Halle Flanagan and the federal theater project and how theater was completely reconceived in this country, mostly in rural areas in the 1930s, not exactly a prosperous time in our history. Michelle Santanese the rediscovery of style a man who started in what we would now call a tectonic theater way in a small rural community in France, and went on to run the old Vic and start Julia are completely brilliant way of starting to make theater from scratch, where collaboration is at its, at its heart. And for God's sake, speaking of hardship and triumph, read a biography of Moliere. Next point, if you somehow under the impression that the Pasadena playhouse or Lincoln Center Theater is hiding an answer to our current crisis in their basement, or has a coffer there filled with money. I think again, they have a far harder task before them before us than any individual artists. Next point, getting to the end here, the challenges that you can do between now and 2021 January let's hope. Stop giving your money and talent to people who don't understand it and who seek to profit from it. Speaking on one of their systems right now, zoom. Make and control your own art. Find your real people. It's your job to find your audience. We are a tribe. We live outside of society to some degree. We are Hamlet's players. We invite us in because they need what we have. We will be remembered because we were in the salon they refuse a who like the painters we love so much, who even remembers who was in the official exhibit. I honestly think that there's a person in America who wants to stay home alone inside next spring. Give them something to come out for. This is 1603. The plague is in London. The theaters are closed. The companies are in the countryside. Look back at what was created in that year. There's some great thoughts. Annie be early today emailed and said, she'd been thinking since early this morning and had a lot to say. But beautifully and eloquently stated, and inspiring. So thank you for that. I'm just going to bounce off of you with a few thoughts inspired by your thoughts. First and foremost is, and I certainly speak from my own personal deeply personal experience when I say, say this. This is not the first nor the last great challenge that the arts and theater in particular will have. There have been challenges past speaking as one whose theater had to close had to take a pause had to take an intermission for many, many months during the decades that I was there. So as one who sat in isolation in a in a dark theater with only the ghost slide on in the theater over those the course of those many months, I know that those kind of challenges can be met, can be conquered with passion and enthusiasm and smarts and all of the things that we use on a daily basis when we go into rehearsal rooms. So for anyone who is despairing at the moment that it's it's all over. I just as one who has experienced it before I can tell you it is not all over. And that we, we are resilient tribe, we artists and we find ways to keep going. Look, look at what we're doing right now, rather than accepting that there's going to be no directors lab West this year, a group of people a group of artists got together and said well let's let's just find another way to do it. And in fact, I dare say that this other way of doing it is exposed. Sheldon you're frozen. Did I disappear there for a moment. All right. Just just saying that we find ways to keep going and perhaps in some cases we find better ways what we do have to hold on to is that all of this technology is never going to be better than being in the room together. So, as much as we add this to our arsenal of of skills and weaponry for the future. We want to come back to to what we do in the room together that may be on a smaller basis for a while, and in some places and I suggest it will be I predicted will be I just read earlier today about one of the major theaters in America that's cut their budget by a third, cut a $20 million budget by $7 million. That's going to mean smaller season. It's going to mean probably smaller shows, but the art will be there, and the challenge will be to take what we have and make the best theater with what we have. That is always the challenge no matter where the decimal point is or how much is in the coffers. I've been doing a lot of reading, like, like and me suggested I've been reading how Prince's book, and just amazed by, you know, for all of his commercial success. How Prince thinks like we all did when we were in school, you know what what's what's the metaphor for this show. What's the metaphor for this show that may become hugely successful. He never thought about it becoming hugely successful at the beginning of the process. He thought about what could he say to society. What was it valuable for people to hear from this particular piece of material. So yes I encourage that kind of reading right now. But most of all I encourage this kind of connection, which we're having with this very activity, which, which keeps us alive as artists, and which has been at the heart of the director's labs now all over the world, over the last decades and decades of activity this is so valuable so so use this instrument talk to each other. You know, I am. I'm amazed at how much is available on the internet, you know, how many great things there are available to us during this time that we can take as inspiration as learning and as as nudges to be ready for when we can walk into rehearsal rooms again. Yeah, that's an excellent point I should have thought of that this morning because many theaters are in Europe and here are streaming things, things from decades ago, as well as more current things. And there's all kinds of performances you can see all kinds of interesting pieces directed I mean, you'll never have that chance again that's an excellent thing to be doing, because something that you see will just completely turn you on. And Prince is a great example I didn't even think about him, because not only was it early on but even when he was really, you know, one is whatever 700 Tony or something he was always at 85 years old, making up some kind of fabulous, very difficult thing and renting CSC or something to do. I mean, I can't even remember the name of the shows but he never stopped doing whatever he wanted to do. And sometimes it was very big and very splashy and sometimes it was very. Exactly the opposite and your point about the playoffs I remember talking to you through all through that, which reminds me of something else obviously I should have said. I came to Lincoln Center many years ago and I came two years, year and a half after the theater had been closed for eight years. I forgot that too. The theater was considered a failed space. It was going to be turned into a parking lot. And, and around it there was a very successful ballet run by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirsten and an opera and a philharmonic and, you know, et cetera, and the theater have been dark. And it was the it was Mayor John Lindsay who said this is a national disgrace we have got this theater. And now everyone is like oh Lincoln Center Theater and so successful it was considered an absolute dark failed project. So, so if that can come back. And that took some very smart thinking on the part of largely are another person who recently passed away our executive producer Bernard Gerstin. Gregory Mosier or he were at the helm with a great, great board of theater people from another era, they brought the theater back. It's, it was seven years of, of darkness. I don't even think they had to go slide on. And now it's back, you know, close but it was back. Yeah, and I hope it's clear that we're telling these dark stories, not not because we want to share dark stories but as, as a point of inspiration to say who would have ever imagined that Lincoln Center Theater ever had a dark time like that. Because what has happened in the decades since then. It's just a way of saying, you know, you can take that darkness, refine the spark, get the lights back on again and keep going and do something different that turns out to be what you want to do. Or, you know, Harold Klurman and Lee Strasburg and Clifford Odette's, you know, in the middle of the depressions, literally starving until someone gave a farmhouse that they could go to upstate and they, you know, took some actors from the Yiddish Theater of Stella Adler and that's how the group, I mean, they were starving, you know, I mean, the life of Bolier is an incredible life. I mean, performing for the king one day and then out of Paris, completely broke on the road really like showing up at the court of the King of Denmark, you know, we'll perform anything for you, you know, that's the life of the theater that's what it is. It's a gift that we have a friendship and a collaboration and of art, and I think we, we have to honor that art and not let that be taken from us, we have to, we know how to collaborate we know how to be in a room together. We know how to make that happen, and we need to protect that. Yeah, and I just like to go beyond us, beyond us making the art. You just use the word hunger, I think. I think audiences are going to be hungry. People are going to want to gather again. And again, as wonderful as this technology is, this is not going to satisfy the hunger for the real in the room together experience. So that's the other thing to depend on and in fact that that is the thing that saving capacity in a playhouse and save Lincoln Center. People, lovers of theater are out there, who are going to want to the work that you do. So, get ready, be ready to tell this, those stories. Don't let your creative muscles atrophy, because that hunger is going to be there. Strongly, I think people are going to want to feel safe. They're going to have some trepidation about it for a while. But, but once they start to eat again and find out that it's okay they're going to want to do more and more of that. And that's, and then just to sort of finish this and then Ernie can kick in with some questions. I mean, that was also a point always of Bernie Gerstens was that we're not the only theater people were making. The circle is completed with the audience. And a lot of times when you start, you think it's about, it's only about us. You forget the other three quarters, which are the people who come and I often say to the director's lab, you know, think about your aunt or your uncle, you know, or, or your college roommates, you know, they should be there. What are they going to think of this. It's not totally self, of course, as an artist you are self concerned, especially playwrights, they have to be. But, but if it's, if it's speaking, you know, as, as, as they say when Ilya Kazan finally, they made it to New York and he got up on stage and called out strike and the entire audience of dirt poor Jewish immigrants stood up and said strike. They, they, they were communicating, you know, you find that your people, you've got to find the people for the shows, and you've got to send the word and open the door and they'll come up to you. And with my hell you Jackson Ernie any questions you want to ask us from the. Yeah, thank you thank you both it was really, really wonderful. A couple questions that come up. The first one I think is the top because you mentioned the labs at the very beginning and is what is your vision for the labs I'm thinking probably they mean future vision. Just quickly the, the. I had, well, I had something I mean obviously I had something to do with creating the lab but the lab really was created over a period of two years by a whole series of conversations of people. Who were just peers, friends of ours, people ranging from, you know, crystal rang to Lois Smith, the actress, Nevella Nelson, Lori Anderson, Joanne acolytus garland right anybody we could drag goon up to the theater. We, we said what should we do and we were thinking mostly we would do something with play writing because on, we started the lab and Andre came he wanted to bring more people into the building and he was from playwrights arises and they work with playwrights. And we could not figure out how to do it with playwrights and so then we thought well what could we do with directors and so the idea came from all of these people, it wasn't something that one person thought up. And my, my contribution to it was to listen to what everyone was saying and then gather a bunch of people in that first lab and I think already you were in that first lab. And then just begin to see what was working and what wasn't. I didn't know what it was either. And the first lab, which was too large, it was like 100 people. Somebody came to me in the end of the was longer I think it was four weeks somebody came to me at the end of the first week and said, I, I just have been voted president of the lab. And I, I don't think we have a president. So, I, so then I knew we weren't going to have a president in the lab. I had a terrible time talking, the general manager department into paying $270 to fly somebody in from Toronto to work with Joanna Colitis. Because, you know, a lot of times we have had fantastic guests who just work and people watch them. And everyone was tired and who is this guy from, they gave me a hard time in the lab and turned out to be Michael and duchy and the next year the English person came out and then everybody was very happy with it. He looked like a genius suddenly. Anybody interested in interesting theater should look up Michael and duchy's stage adaptations. There's something going through slaughter about the whole jazz scene in New Orleans I mean there's some really fabulous stuff is his childhood and his parents and salon I mean, there's just so much stuff out there and, and, and over the years all I have had to do was to kind of curate what people wanted to do. We have a we have a great listserv I'd listen to what people are talking about and try and make something. So just to cut to the end of this question were, we were going to be celebrating 25 years this summer. Now we're locked in our apartments. But my plan was and I think I'll do this next year. What is to do that again. Because many things have changed in 25 years, not only our hair color. And I, I don't think it's working in the same way. And I think a lot of that has to do with money, and a lot of that has to do with politics and a lot of that has to do with people who are very certain about things as opposed to, for many decades the luxury of saying, I don't know I want to get out from you. What is that tradition that you're doing in southern India, you know, I mean there was always as you remember this thing of like, tell me who are you, what can we, and there's been more and more of I know I want I, you know, so I'm trying to get everybody together and sort of see, maybe we continue or maybe we do something that isn't with directors, I don't know, I'm just going to sort of take the temperature and see next year. I think I've segwayed very nicely into the, there's a, there have been a couple references and this goes to what you spoke about earlier, Sheldon as well. A couple references to a Carmen Salas article about taking the pause. And the questions 10 towards maybe there's something with that we can do that's more useful to our present communities and society. And then this pause or maybe just taking some, you know, taking to task the, the, our structure and how it works or doesn't work. Right. Well, no, I think that's really interesting. When this started and you started hearing horror stories about theater shutting down and all of that I, I remember thinking honestly, boy, I'm so glad I'm not an artistic director right now, you know, I hate to be running a theater right now. But over the weeks, I've suddenly started to think of it differently, and started to think well, what a great time to be an artistic director. And if you can take this time, this pause to really rethink those models that have restricted theaters that theaters have thought of as burdens for years and years and years, the schedule, the subscription models, the, the kinds of seasons you put together. If you can, if you can re take this time to rethink all of that and really restart the engine, then this might have been useful. The theaters make the theaters which have been challenged even before this pandemic may may to use what is becoming a cliche now may come out of it better as a result of not being stuck to the old way of doing things. You know, I think back to those who started the regional theater movement, Zelda pitch and nine events, Gilmore Brown and Pasadena, they didn't have any models. You know, we, we follow, we follow the model of those theaters that were started in the 60s and 70s. They just said, I want to make a theater for my community. And I don't want it to be like Broadway theater. I want it to be something that reflects my community. And they just went out and did it. To a certain degree, I think we have to think that way again, right now, and not say, I'm following that model well, but what kind of theater do I want to build right now. Well, first of all, sign me up. And secondly, you know, again, you know, this is when you think of this pause between let's say now and, and whenever jam saying January when we're all going to be back in rooms together. I mean, you just mentioned nine events you just mentioned Zelda. I think that I was making that little list of bookstreet. What about head throw it. I was great friends with Adrian Hall, the founder of Trinity Reppin, and later the Dallas Theater Center and Adrian's model of the Trinity rep. The way that he made the theater with his, and his side is great designer Eugene Lee, the designer of Saturday Night Live. His model was the troop of Mrs. Hallam. Mrs. Hallam was a kind of third rate Sarah Bernhardt, don't quote me on that, who came from England, sort of like the, you know, and in Huckleberry Finn, the players who come through, you know, the Prince and whatever. She and a scraggly troop of roaming actors came to New York in whatever 17 something, and started performing and he took his initial repertory from Mrs. Hallam's troop. And they were literally, let's just come into the show with our trunks and put on a put on a play. And he went to the governor of Rhode Island and talked him because Adrian was quite a talker into sending every high school student in Rhode Island. Okay, it's a small state to trendy rep three times a year for the years that they were in high school, so that every citizen of Rhode Island had seen, by the time they were 18, 12 plays, which will, which will give you a taste for the theater. And he would say, and if they if those kids, and it wasn't just kids, it was everybody. And if they're not responding, they're not responding to my adaptation of Billy, but I'm just going to put Billy, but on that rope and swing him right. And that'll get their attention. I mean, his inspiration was was so sourced back to the origins of theater and incredibly successful. You know, is a interesting trend that's happening in these questions. They all start out with how, how can how can how can. But, you know, and then some of them are like, like questions that are like have yes, without a doubt the current, you know, can it reveal new definitions of what progress means, I would say, Well, certainly yes. But in the in these questions there's also a, how can we make more art more accessible, how do we make a make knowledge and art more accessible if there's a there's a trend in these questions about it's not it seems to go beyond accessibility but using this time to reach out as opposed to reaching in. Well, I think, I think accessibility is really, you know, just the modern word that we're using the last decade to say we want a lot of people to participate in the theater experience. I mean, there's only a few of us making it and then there's all of them who are feeling a part of it and watching it, etc. And that's the essence of things. And the way that you do that is, is you, you, you live with them, you know them you make the work in a way that they can see it without having to drive hours and pay expensive babysitters and parking lots you, you, you, you exactly imagine how the theater works. That's why hedgerow is such a good example of that. And, and, and when you connect a roadside theater when you connect to a theater to an audience, in a way that they're able to access your work. They will be there for you. The models are not necessarily the, the, the ones that we know as Sheldon said, it's a time to, to rethink and reinvent and make it different and make it better. And it's not the first time it's like the 700th time this has happened since the theater began, you know, thousands of years ago. I'd also say, you know, we, we sometimes assume that connecting to the audience is only through the work. Connecting to the audience is through the work also. When you read the stories of nine of ads and Zelda and Adrian and those people who started those early theaters. Yes, they were great artists and they did great work, but they spent hours and hours going out into the community and connecting on a personal level. Yes. I think, I think we can be guilty as artistic leaders. I have been guilty we can be guilty of sitting in our palaces of art and saying if we make it, they will come. Well, that's not really true. You know, it is our job to make it and to make it well and to make it good and to make it worth getting in your car and going to see it. But it's also our responsibility to go to the community to be of the community and for the community, not just to assume that what we're making is going to be appealing. I'm going to answer all these how questions the way I think and would answer them is sort of she usually looks at us and say, I don't know, how are you going to do that. And so I'm going to move on to where we're dubbing our James Lipton question. The question you asked at the very end and closing because we have about that much time. Would you briefly share something you have learned or discovered during this quarantine period that you plan to incorporate into your practice as an artist. Maybe Sheldon first on that. Yeah, it's, it's, it's something that actually is not new for me something that I have believed for a long time, but it certainly has been amplified by this current period of time and that is in the creation of art, the value of stillness. And the value of being still and allowing yourself to receive what the universe has to give you, you know, we, we are so driven to action, you know, and in fact we, we talk about action in rehearsal, what's the action of the scene, what's the physical action of what we're doing. But stillness is also a great gift, and the time, the resources to actually dream about the future about how theaters can operate about how we can make theater about why we make theater. Giving yourself the, the time to be silent to be still to hear, hear both inner and outer voices that can give you the answers to your own how, not my answer to your how but your answer to your how is, is something that I hope people, all of us will carry going forward into our work from now on. Yeah, go from the sublime to the ridiculous. That was very. I mean, I think all, I know you're recording this I think all those books that I mentioned in my discourse at the beginning, talk about just what Sheldon's talked about, and they give their own answers to that in vastly different ways. So if you're looking how to do that, go there as well. What am I doing is really not not sublime. I, I'm a dramaturg, and I have, I early in my career worked a little for Joe Pap who used to always say, you can't just do something you have to do it and then you have to tell everyone that you did it. It doesn't count. I never quite understood that then now I totally understand it. And right now I am facing a very challenging task for me, where I'm trying to enlist people in this, which is that I'm trying to document. I've just written a book about dramaturgy called the art of dramaturgy it's coming out in a year. And I've realized when I go on the web and I go to Wikipedia. There's nothing about dramaturgy you have no one has any idea what it is no one knows anything about the history, nobody knows anything about the books that have been written about it no one knows that there was a huge movement of drama tricks who created all kinds of plays with directors and actors in the 70s. So I am, I need to figure out how to get on Wikipedia, the whole movement, he's, I have no idea how to do that. So that's what I am trying to figure out how to do. I find somebody who knows how to do that. And I want to do it by January. That's my meager goal after you're saving the world children. You don't have time to yourself to do that. Well, I need help. I can't figure it out. Thank you for having us. I want to let the audience know there are many more questions here and most of them like our how questions and some are deeply philosophical something you can't go into in 40 minutes. We're going to be forwarding those to Ann and Sheldon that they choose to respond but we will do is we will post those answers. Let's say three to four weeks from now on the director's lab West website. What a stub is on Wikipedia. Yes, I'll answer of course. And I want to really, really thank and Tonya for not only being here, but also for being with us 25, 20 years, 25 years with directors of Sheldon, of course, initially, thank you for bringing us into the playhouse and being an ongoing supporter of the director's lab West and just it's been amazingly entertaining to watch you come in and Sheldon both at the same time. It's really wonderful. I want to thank just White House for the sale interpretation. Also mentioned that we've got ongoing support by the stage directors and choreographer society, the foundation Boston court Pasadena and we look forward to next year, having something in person and live so that would be great. And we also want to thank how around for their technical abilities and making this even happen, along with our own mighty eight person team that we've been putting together. We hope that you all join us tomorrow, which would be for Ann Boeckart and Jessica Hannah in creative practice and shifting landscapes. And we talk a lot about number of things that and and Sheldon just chat, tapped on, for example, later on in the week, on the national panel about how different countries are dealing with this we have a number of alumni as does and that are scattered throughout the entire globe. And that is I think going to be one of the most fascinating conversations but encourage you to go to directors lab West website, our Facebook page, look up all the different offerings that we're having this week. And we want to thank you all, including both of you for being here just thank you very much. And, and the entire audience of more than 200 people from what I'm told. So, thank you and this is a great launch for a great eight day week. Thank you. Thank you.