 stipend to cover the cost of their travel, collaboration expenses, research expenses, and commits to fully producing at least one play by each of these writers during their residency. I don't have to tell you, my friends, but that is extraordinary. So, I just could not be any more proud than to welcome to the stage the artistic director of Arena Stage, Molly Smith. Thank you so much, Gary, for that charming introduction. Gary, where's your accent? It's a pleasure to have an opportunity to speak with you tonight. If I sound a little froggy, it's because I'm just getting over a cold, or maybe I sound a little sexier than I usually do. I'm one of the other, but what a pleasure to talk to the dramatist guild. Because of all the wonderful work you do, we in the theater have a wonderful life. I have always loved writers. From the time I was a little girl, pouring over Laura Engel Wilder's little house on the prairie with a flashlight under my covers, reading until early in the morning, until now with my kindle. Reading plays novels and biographies. As a kid, I was obsessed with reading because I loved the adventure of it, the stories, the imagination. In the first grade at St. Paul's Grade School, each week some lucky child received a reading crown to wear home for being the best readers. Now, our families were aware that this special reading crown meant we were the best at reading that week and received something extra, like chocolate ice cream, my absolute favorite. I liked it when I got to wear the crown home, and that was often enough, but not often enough for me. One day I sat at home and secretly made my own reading crown, made out of cardboard and tin foil, and it was weeks, maybe months, before my mother figured it out. And then when I was a transfer student coming from Alaska, the University of Alaska, to Washington D.C. and Catholic U, I decided I needed to read as many places I could. So I went to the local library and began reading with the letter A. Maybe I've loved writers so much because I'm a shadow writer. The theater gave me the impetus to love writers even more, on the page, wrestling in the rehearsal halls, listening deeply together with an audience, creating worlds together. Where would we be in the theater without you? You're our seminal creators. First there's the word, then there's the image, and the interpretation of the word. I like to spend time with you. I like to listen to you speak. I like to listen to the way you form sentences. I like to be surprised by you. I like it when you imagine new worlds. I like it when you take me places emotionally. I didn't know I wanted to go. I like it when you tell me stories I haven't heard before. At arena stage, we like writers very much too. When I came to arena in 1998, we changed arena into a theater that focuses on American plays and American voices. When Zelda started the theater and was one of the pioneers of the resident theater movement almost 60 years ago, her focus was on the classics and on the acting company. When Doug Wager ran the theater for seven years, his focus was on the acting company, the classics, and he began focusing on living writers. When I came 13 years ago, slowly, slowly, and sometimes quickly, we have changed the focus to being a writer's theater. A few years we found that many were receiving full productions. Blue, Tom Walker, Pope County, The Oculus North, Shakespeare and Hollywood, cutting up and passion play a cycle. We're all first read downstairs in arena's old bathroom. Passion follows passion, and when I follow mine, I wanted audiences to get used to hearing new voices and living writers because this had not been a theater that thrived on new work like my theater, Perseverance Theater in Alaska did. But even in Alaska, that passion for new work had to be kindled in the audience. Wendy Goldberg, former artistic associate at Arena and now head of the O'Neill Festival, shared my passion for writers and we launched the downstairs program. This program ended up being useful to some writers, but not all writers, so we changed it. We followed our noses. That program still exists today as a reading program, often for plays that we plan to produce at a moment when a writer needs to hear their work with actors in a small audience. Later, Mark Bly, former senior dramaturg, and I moved into having a writer's council with some of our favorite writers from Sarah Rule to Wendy Wasserstein to Charles Randolph Wright. I wanted a real council to find out what the challenges and needs of the writers were. Now, we were already well into the development from an architectural perspective of a new center. And part of the center was a new theater conceived as a small theater to birth first, second, and third productions of new work, and to cradle risk, which is now created and is called the Kogod cradle. I believe that most new plays need more than one production to come to their full production, their full potential. These writers from the council were helpful in shining the light on everything from commissions, the need for an artistic home, and we listened to them. But we were also far away from each other physically and it was difficult to gather people for these conversations. But these discussions informed our thinking as we moved on. During these years, we were commissioning writers, doing workshops, and producing at least a few new plays per season. Some members of the staff liked it. Some felt we should only produce the tried and true because new plays didn't make money. Two steps forward, three steps back. Enter David Dower, who is now the associate artistic director of Arena. He's been at Arena for five years, but we really began talking about this mission of American plays and American voices over six years ago when we were serving together on the TCG board. When he came to Arena, we began really delving into an artistic strategy to get us where we wanted to go. And David, who I know many of you will meet later on, if you haven't had a chance, he's a brilliant man. He's been instrumental in making our theater soar through our shared creation of an artistic strategy to deepen and broaden this mission. Boy, my voice really sounds good. It's really low. It's so low that I don't have any higher ranges. It's strange. So if you get a chance, I know that this is your first national conference, which is fantastic. Get over and see the new center. We just opened it in October of 2010. It's called Arena Stage at the Meade Center for American Theater. It's embedded in the name. This new center represents the physical manifestation of a simple dream. The creation of a national center for the production, presentation, development, and study of American theater. We've not only rethought the space, but it's been 12 years in the making. And you'll feel it as soon as you hit it. Because you get inside of the spaces, there's an electrical charge that runs through all of the theaters in the rehearsal halls. But we also divided our work into four pillars. So Arena Stage is no longer a theater. We're now a center. And therein lies the difference. We're celebrating the theatrical bounty of the nation for a pillar approach to programming with a rigorous focus on production, presentation, development, and study. We at Arena have a particular focus on American artists. And frankly, I got tired of everybody always looking over their shoulders at what the Brits were doing instead of looking in our own backyard. At Arena, we're focusing on the past, present, and future of American writers. As a matter of fact, we have a multi-pronged way of looking in our audiences. We really have four audiences at Arena Stage. There's a classic Arena audience. Arena is 60 years old this year. It's one of the first of the now-for-profit Resident Theater movement. That classic audience, and believe me, we still have some people that came to the first place at Arena Stage. They're still with us. And they love American giants, like Albie, Williams, O'Neill. We have an event-driven audience which loves the big American musicals, which is our art form, anything celebrity-driven. We have our African-American audience, and that is about a third of our audience, people of color, and we work very hard to make that happen. It's by making sure that we're producing diverse work on a yearly basis, at least two plays or musicals that have to do with the African-American experience. And this is an audience that loves plays and musicals for their own experience. And we have new plays, which I'm sad to say, but you all know, they are our smallest audience of all. But even though they're our smallest audience of all, they're hungry for new plays. And of course, all of these audiences that I'm talking about cross over into other plays, but it gives you an idea of the complexity of programming for many audiences. We have about 300,000 people that come to visit Arena every year, come to see productions. Now, we're working on growing this small and vocal group of new play lovers by programs like Theater 101, which was modeled after the Second World Theater Program for growing audience for new plays. Where a group of at least 50 audience members become fans by following a production from casting all the way through opening night and beyond, because they stay in contact with the actors beyond that. We launched this with Marcus Gardley's premier Every Tongue Confess, which opened the Kogot cradle, and planned to do Theater 101 probably at least twice a year. David Dower's passion for New York, new work from creating Z-Space in San Francisco and running it for 20 years to his love for writers, matched mine, and in some important areas superseded it. We recently launched the American Voices New Play Institute. David traveled the country for two years talking to writers about their needs for the Mellon Foundation. So much of what you will find in the Institute comes from those remarkable conversations with playwrights. The New Play Institute hosted over 100 representatives of new works from around the country in January at Arena. And at the convening, the participants discussed the rich and vital activity that already exists in the new play sector began to explore the gaps, the challenges that face the field and strategized means of continued and closer collaboration to advance the new work infrastructure. Keeping with our tech-savvy world, many of the proceedings were documented by blogging, social media, and videos that were posted online. I'd just like to have a quick show of hands. How many of you logged on at all and heard any of this? Okay, so probably about 30. Okay, well we can do better than that. Next time we do it, log on, it would be great to have you because truly, the next step is you. It's you. This is a moment of great energy and intention in the evolution of the new work infrastructure nationwide. Momentum is building for significant change in the capacity of the American theater to encourage and support a dignified life for playwrights. Much of the conversation that is shaping this moment has been conducted within the context and from the perspective of the institutions that play in the field of playwrights. Even at a ring stage with the work at our institute, it can be hard to create an environment for discussion and problem solving that is fully and from the ground upward made in the context of the reality by the writers themselves. And by coming together now with the dramatist's guilt, you're setting the context. You're creating the form. You're choosing the agenda and deciding who you want to hear from and about what. It's imperative that we get this fast into the conversation and the mix. Embed the ideas that will come out of this huge, wonderful gathering of playwrights into the still wet cement of the foundation for change we're all trying to build. There is power and abundance in this moment and I'm excited to see what contribution this gathering of playwrights can make to our ability to capture that power and to talk the potential of this abundance. Another wonderful moment of abundance is the new play map. How many of you have logged on and looked at the new play map? Okay, great. Some of you have. This is a map that's online. It's community generated. It's a real time map of the national new work infrastructure which means your plays. The first version of the map was launched in January and feedback was solicited. These two will be launched this month and I hope you look in on our website to make sure you and your plays are visible there. For the first time, the new play sector can see itself country-wide and it's fascinating to watch the geographic journey that a play takes as it's written in New York, workshopped in California, premiered in Atlanta with a second production in Seattle and you can see it all on the new play map because the truth is we all help support the plays. There are theater companies all over the country that are helping to make that happen. There are writers all over the country that are making that happen. There are universities all over the country that are making that happen. So if you log on, you'll see this is a moment of great abundance even though sometimes it feels like it's totally scarcity. One of the most exciting elements and this is something that Gary mentioned of the Institute is the play art residencies is to allow playwrights to write. Radical, I know. Radical. But as you know so well, playwrights need the time to write developmental processes that are tailored to your own working habits and preferences. I call it follow the artists. A community of other writers and theater makers in a producing organization. We actually have more than Gary mentioned. Beginning this season, the Institute is hosting five resident playwrights. Tori Hall, Lisa Crome, Charles Randolph Wright, and Karen Zacharias. Over three years. In addition, the Institute is hosting Project Residence Lynn Nottage and David Henry Wayne who have each been commissioned to write a play for arena stage. Each of the writers that I mentioned, each of the five writers have a distinctive voice and have brought in a menu of projects they're working on from musicals to adaptations of novels to playwrights of past material. This next season we'll be producing Karen and Amy's plays, the book club play, and you, Nero, that have each had two productions and are ready for the final jump into what I believe will be that important third production. Arena is providing the resident writers with the resources to write and develop their new or unfinished plays. They each have a full-time salary, healthcare benefits, office space. And when the program was announced last June, it was front-page news in the Washington Post. Not just front-page and style section. Front-page news in the Washington Post and it received a claim from artists around the nation. Now, while we were pleased with press coverage, I considered a tragedy that paying a playwright a fair wage and providing them with basic healthcare is considered news. You are the backbone of our industry. You deserve to have stable support for your work. Our managing director, Edgar Dobey has been an instrumental partner in making this work. You need all the pieces together to make it work. In addition to the salary and health benefits in office space, Arena's rented a four-bedroom townhouse near the Mead Center in Southwest for the resident writers. The house is spacious, private, and fully furnished. It provides modern conveniences like wireless internet or printer, as well as a quiet environment for writing and reflection. And this house is open to our resident playwrights and available free of charge. It, again, is a physical representation of Arena's commitment to playwrights. The Mallin Foundation has been absolutely visionary in funding this initiative. All right, Carl will be joining us next month to lead the New Play Institute. She is a champion of new play development and is probably familiar to most of you as a leader in the field. She spent 11 years with the Playwright Center and has overseen new play development at Steppenwolf since 2009. And we are excited for that level of passion and expertise she will bring to the program. It's very exciting news. During the January convening, I want to take you back for a moment, Todd London, Todd London, whose eloquent call to arms in outrageous fortune has helped move the field spectacularly. And at that convening, he talked about possibilities and bright spots. What are the bright spots that he was seeing around the country? Because I think there are many ways that playwrights and organizations can join to work together. So here's some of the bright spots that he mentioned. The Epic Theater in New York has committed $5,000 a year for each of their five female playwrights. These funds are to be used to cover childcare costs. The Z Space in the Bay Area has created a set of no-cost readings which are designed to allow playwrights and directors to put their work in front of area artistic directors. After he realized he would be out of town for the first few days of rehearsals of a new play, Lou Trell, the artistic director of the now sadly lost Florida stage, personally drove to Fort Lauderdale to pick up a visiting playwright and her three-year-old daughter. He got them settled into artist housing and went to both the playwright as an artist and the playwright as a person. The board of the National Alliance of Musical Theater announced it will earmark the surplus from the previous fiscal year for playwrights. Each playwright chosen for the upcoming Festival of Musicals were received five times the amount previously allotted for their stipends. And these ideas go on and on and on. Again, bright spots that are happening right now, real time, around the country. We talk about a potential bright spot, potential possibilities. But only if we grab onto them can we get these. There are 1,900 theaters in America. You're from all around America. There are more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. What would happen if each theater and university sponsored a writer for a year? This could mean free rehearsal space. It could mean access to actors. The possibilities are endless. I just named a few of them. Support could be tailored to each artist's needs and each organization's ability to provide. Zelda Fitzhandler, Margo Jones, and Nina Vance started the Resident Theater Movement almost 60 years ago and now we've grown to 1,900. It was a revolution. This would be another revolution. As Elizabeth Strepp of Extreme Action says, revolutions happen 2x2. Passion follows passion. So that's kind of a cool idea. What I'm saying to you is this is a playwright's call to arms. It doesn't just need to be the organizations that are making this happen. I hope you're running through your mind now about you as a writer in your own community who you know at the level of the university, community, college, theaters. Have conversations about how this relationship might work and what your needs are. I think you'd be surprised at the response that many organizations would have to your request. And you know what? Even if they're not able to do it for you, they may be able to shoot you off to somebody else. And when that organization opens itself up to you, open yourself up to it through loyalty. It's an old-fashioned word, but in the theater, we don't use it often enough. Relationships between artists and organizations are co-created. Organizations are just a bunch of people, right? Too often, loyalty only lasts as long as the most immediate project. And I think we in the theater are less humane because of it. I don't mean that this is the first theater to read your newest play, or that you choose them to produce your world premiere. But relationships are created by small and large acts over time. I can't help but wonder what would have happened to the Florida stage if all the writers who got their start there and all the actors who worked there had joined together to help the theater in its time of need. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the importance of the theater to the world. And for decades, we've described ourselves as an instrument of civilization. And in the last decades as an economic engine for different communities. I've been thinking about empathy. Since Darwin, we've looked at the evolution of the human species through the animal world, the physical life. But the next revolution will be to examine how we change through behavioral evolution. The theater is uniquely able to elicit and grow empathy through the relationship between the actor and the audience through the words of the playwright. When I experienced Mama Nadi and Lynn Nadiage's brilliant run I can't turn my back to what's happening in the Congo. Her performance opens up my ability to empathize with people on the other side of the world. When I experienced Ned Weeks in Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart and see what an incredible fighter he was, my heart goes out to him. It's only in the theater do we watch the Ned Weeks of the world sacrifice themselves night after night in front of an audience. If the theater is able to open up our audiences to deeper empathy to human beings, that's a huge mission in our world today. It's through you our writers that we begin this process. This summer when I go back to our cabin in Alaska I'll put my headlight on. When the sun disappears in the early morning I'll turn on my Kindle and I'll spend hours listening to the bears eating sedgegrass outside our window and reading plays that open up new worlds. Thank you for the creation of New Worlds. Which is for everyone who won't get a chance to sit across from you on the couch and say thank you for all you've done for us over the years. It is with profound thanks that we are here to join us. Thank you so, so much.