 A more specific impulse was to convene kind of a mix of both writers who are current students or recent graduates of some of the country's leading graduate training programs in play writing, along with playwrights who teach and spend part of their professional lives mentoring other writers, and in some cases were one's students themselves. So we're wondering just kind of what conversation might begin if this question was posed about what having that training or doing that work means in one's creative and professional life. And we were thrilled that Debra Stein agreed to be our backup moderator for this discussion. Originally it was at a wrap and he may be on his way and may be joining us, but Debra has valiantly agreed to to step in, so thanks. And I just have a couple of quick announcements about technology before we go any further. This morning's conversation is being live streamed by New Play TV, which is a peer-produced knowledge common started by HowlRound, a center for the theater commons. So welcome to those who may be watching this from around the country or streaming it later on. And if anybody in the audience would like to participate via Twitter, you can use the hashtag New Play, or if you want to follow the ongoing conversation surrounding the festival, you can check us out on Twitter at A.T. Louisville and look for the hashtag you manifest. Also when we reach the moment that the conversation opens up to the audience gathered here, if you have a question or comment I'm supposed to tell you to please use the microphones so that everybody in the room can hear you as well as online. So enough logistics. I want to just take a moment to introduce Debra and get things started. Everybody at Actors is delighted to have her back in the house. She is a veteran of several recent human festivals with the project's heist. Fidgers lost and found and brink. And in addition to having plays produced all over the country and internationally, and a long history with ensemble based collaborative work, Debra is with Suley Holm, the co-artistic director of Stein Holm Projects which is a laboratory for creating new work. And so Debra, it's all yours. And thank you so much to you all for doing this. So thank you to Actors for having us here. And I'm so excited to participate in this panel or to moderate this panel. For so many reasons, both I think of Actors Theatre of Louisville as an artistic home. And also to be sharing the stage with these really wonderful artists and teachers. So I wanted to let everyone introduce themselves. And then I have a couple of questions. Hi, I'm Paula Vogel. I feel like we should we should have our lineage too. I'm Paula Vogel's student, Sarah Rul. I'm Mallory Avedon and I went to Cornish College of the Arts for undergrad. And Mame Hunt, it was one of my teachers and she's in the audience here. And then I went to Brown for graduate school. But Paula was not my teacher there. Hi Augustine, I am currently a second year MFA playwriting student at UC San Diego. And actually my undergrad playwright professor is here as well, Scott Cummings from Boston College. My lineage is that I'm also a student of Paula from Brown. So I want to say, yeah, so it's really, really special to be up here in famous. Yeah, so I wanted to start by throwing a question to all four of you that we could hopefully start a conversation from this one question, which was overnight I was thinking about teaching playwriting as both the teaching of writing and also the teaching of theater. And then teaching theater, I was thinking breaks down into both teaching aspects of theatrical creation, collaboration as well as thinking about the visual and non-language based aspects of theater. And then also the business side of theater that the skills to collaborate is also a business skill. And then also the kinds of networks that we get when we study theater, the artists and future leaders of theaters that then we both grow up with and grow into the theater with and the people that we might need who are mentors who then become collaborators. And so just thinking about that frame, I'm curious, for those of you who teach, how you think of teaching playwriting in this way, how it breaks down for you. And for those of you who are studying it, how being in school has changed or altered or affected the way you think of playwriting as a practice in the world. Okay. As you were saying that I was thinking how wonderful to be at actor theater Louisville that my teaching practices in many ways informed by being 27 years old and receiving some encouragement on a one act, and then being given notes on the oldest profession that it was horrifying and disgusting that I would think of my grandmother and aunts as prostitutes. And I did not have a mentor who would say don't write that letter to John Jory. And that's why this is my third time at actor's theater Louisville doing panels. I mean, I think in a way we are constantly stumbling with a kind of it's a delicate dance with our collaborators. We are in the business of writing our heart and our soul. But then to draw back and be protective of our collaborators and not injure them because we are not recyclable as artists. And I think everybody in this room is bearing the scars. So it's a delicate dance to to sort of, I think I've said this to every artist, you know, I'm going to say some really awful things. If you come and give me the honor of working with me for three years, I can only guarantee that some point at midnight, we're going to be either having coffee or vodka over a table, holding each other's hands and weeping with me saying I'm sorry. You have to forgive me, which kind of takes its toll. On the other hand, it's also recognizing that right when we are in an institution, that institution is necessarily 10 years behind whatever the theater is on that page, because that page is creating a new theater. And the institution is 10 years behind, trying and striving to catch up. So I don't actually think of it as teaching. I mean, I think of it as trying not to do it harm. I think of it as trying to give artists as many introductions to the apparatus as possible, so that they can figure out strategy and how to use that apparatus. Whether it's, you know, University of California, San Diego, or Brown, or Yale, or Austin or Iowa, that's the same strategy. You're basically forming a kind of persona, right, as an artist activist that will then translate to Louisville to a 90 seat theater, right? So that's basically for me. First of all, I'm just so honored to be on this panel with these writers and with Paula, who was my teacher. From the time I was what 20, we met when I was 20. It's about 20 years ago, 19. And I'm very humbled to sit with Paula because she's really a consummate, consummate teacher. And I just started teaching. So it's humbling for me to think, how can I be a teacher? And I have three small children, and two of them are preschool age. And I picked up a book on the teachings of Maria Montessori recently, you guys know her. Kind of an amazing educator who transformed early childhood education. And she was really interested in the concept of the teacherless classroom, where the kids just kind of went quietly, worked with strings, little manipulatives, and so in my teaching right now, I've been thinking about how can I have a teacherless classroom? And, and so I mean, I guess what interests me in the theater, what is a teacherless classroom in the theater? What are the manipulatives in the theater? And I thought, well, it's actors. And not that actors they are the instrument. So this semester at Yale, I've been working with graduate students and we've had actors in who who read the plays, and then the writer runs the room and and runs the discussion with the actors. So I guess I've been interested in lately, how can we, how can we teach writers at the graduate level to be empowered to run a room so that when they graduate, and we'll have years of sort of patients of development, where they're they get a lot of feedback, how can graduate school actually be a training ground, wherein they can, like a whale, sieve out the feedback, and don't whales digest things in a very interesting way where they have So how can they take in what they need and disregard the weather? It's a strange position to be in as a teacher to say, I'm going to teach you to disregard me. That's right. So how do you maintain some semblance of dignity and say I'm sorry. I'm still new to this. You know, Paula's been doing it for a whole life, really. So I've been a lot of people's student. And though I just said I wasn't Paula's student, I feel like I still was because her imprint on Brown is very deep. And Sam Marks, who is here, was still on campus when I was there. And he was a student of Paula's and Sam and Dan LaFranc and Greg Moss sort of gave us a crash course in Paula's boot camp when we were there to continue the lineage. And also I have, for me, finding mentorship anywhere that you can is so important. And so I just was saying to Sarah, I remember the first time I met Sarah, she brought me ice tea, a ladder had fallen on my head. It was very sweet of her. And then I was in graduate school, Lisa DeMore, who was one of my professors set up a meeting for us with Sarah and Melissa James Gibson. And I remember some of the things you said about teaching them, specifically that you have to teach your students how to write their own place, not how to write your place, which I think is sort of what you're saying now. And also, from when I visited Yale with you, I remember you saying I was going to do a reading at a theater and you were like, your job is to make best friends with everyone at the theater for however long. And I think that's, I think that's really important, like, be nice, be kind. It's so important. But these like little lessons you can find anywhere. And then grad school, for me, was time to write that I had been in New York for three years. And I had one play that a bunch of theaters had read and they were like, we like that play, we're not going to produce it. Give us another play. And I was like, but I don't have another play, because I work ADMers a week. And so then I got to go to Brown for two years and write. And when I was first there, I was freaking out and Dan LaFranc was like, you're an artist in residence here for two years, which I just learned is something Paula had told him. And so the, the lineage continues. And then, you know, Laz is a mentor of mine and Mame is here. Mame has never been to Humana before. She's one of the dramaturgs at Sundance and she's here because she's, she knows me and Jeff and Brandon and the, the importance of that community and that mentorship, I feel so supported by so many people and I couldn't do this without that. But you also, I feel like you have to learn how to learn for yourself. You can't just find it in an educational institution. Like I feel like I've learned so much, the business stuff you were talking about, that we had this long press day, my first day off. And I sat next to Wilina and I feel like, oh, now I know how to do this because I just learned from someone who was sitting next to me. But I could never have learned that in school. Like I can't, you can't learn how to give a press conference by talking about giving a press conference. I'm like, okay, I just did that. I guess I know how to do that now. That's what I have to say. Here. Yes. Great. Something that I went to grad school also because I was working like 10 hour days and trying to, and trying to write. And I think grad school has become this kind of, this place that I've kind of learned this discipline of writing. And also I think there's something to this idea. Naomi Zucca had the writing program at UC San Diego and I think she very much has that idea of coming in and teaching but not, not putting her voice onto you in a lovely way. And I was recently freaking out as I'm thinking about how do I write? Because I also like, I also got a Naomi at like midnight and I'm like crying and being like, what am I doing with my life? How do I write this? And she's, and it's I've been freaking out lately how do, how do I do that? How am I going to do that when I graduate? And I think there is, there's something wonderful and she's recently kind of been letting go and kind of just let me go and play. I think this experience has been wonderful. And I think, I think we're like this mentorship. I mean, I was taught a class, of course, to us and I learned a great deal from that and also just kind of I think Gretz was also open up this kind of collaborative kind of nature of what theater is because I think I, you start off and you put your so much heart into it and it's learning that, oh yes, and doing that feedback and learning I think a lot from working with actors and working with our directors and our designers and kind of how does, how does this all work together? Yeah. You've actually have two more layers in terms of this question of the teaching of playwriting but also how does one then teach theater making, which is you started in an ensemble collective and went through the graduate program, participated in a theater company in Minneapolis and you're now producing as well as teaching at NYU and Yale. So in terms of that is a remarkable journey. Do you find that role of being an artistic director or producer either stabilizing or destabilizing what your practice has been as a writer, as a teacher? Wow. Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that, I think I'm able to think of it all as aspects of one large practice and I think that I'm largely able to do that because of studying with you and because of your approach to teaching as an extension of a creative activity and that when you talk about the place that we are all writing as being the place of 10 years from now that there is something of the investigative process of writing and an interrogative process that part of being a creative person is putting something out in the world that was never there before and questioning what is there and I think that that's what Sarah was saying, that that a teacher creates a space in which individual artists can experience that for themselves and I think that in terms of the specific things that I've been doing lately, I think I'm calling myself a producer because I'm taking the range of the production of my own work in a way that is usually called producing but it's because I found those to be aspects of my creative process that if I didn't call myself a producer I wouldn't be allowed or enabled to do but there's many aspects of producing that I'm terrible at and look forward to the day that I can raise money and hire people to work for my company to do those things but in the meantime in the meantime there are aspects of producing that specifically collaborating with designers, with marketing, with writing press releases, which is about a relationship with an audience which to me has always been part of making theater, that making you make theater with an audience in mind so that the idea of being cut out of crafting that relationship was always very confusing to me and so when I'm teaching I try to create a space where not where artists are becoming clones of me but where they can figure out what is it, what does the theater look like that they want to make which is something that in Bogart and Joseph Chicken talk about right what that the theater is a utopian space where you get to create the world you want to live in so that what I hope in teaching is that I can create a space for students to consider that question so that when they leave and work professionally they are they're armed in the ways that all of you articulated to to make that happen in the world which is a segue to the next question I wanted to throw at you guys which is about how teaching or studying in a formal way affected your own writing and what your what your journeys were through that through that process let's start with Jeff um okay um I think it's uh great I went to uh partly I went to grad school because I think for a number of reasons um mainly I an undergrad my professor very much opened we played a lot with kind of imagination we played a lot with kind of figuring out um what why why this why do you want to tell the story what does this play about and I think both that both kind of figure out um what I'm trying to write kind of like the kind of larger questions and also grads uh is what I kind of learned my undergrad and I think my grad grad school right now I'm playing with that and the ideas and I think grad school's um changed very early like Naomi has this kind of we come in with like we play ideas um and even the way I think now about um my approach to coming up with a play ideas changed largely um I think grad school has affected that I think grad school's also affected kind of just like uh the the kind of theater I thought that I wanted to create um and it's in a wonderful way I thought it was going to be like this this kind of very uh uh kind of you know kind of very experimental kind of uh artists and I think um Naomi's opened up something and that has allowed me to kind of be okay with and play with different structures in a wonderful way um yeah and I think yeah also taught when I was at Brown and I and I taught a little bit at Cornish and one of my students is actually here from Cornish which is another lovely thing and I feel like one of the things that I learned at Brown was about my writing through teaching and that's something that Paula instituted at the university that I think is so important to have to teach when you have no idea what you're doing on some level because then you have to articulate what you're doing to young people it's like oh I better figure out what I'm doing which is difficult but also amazing um and I feel like you just use the word artist activist and I think that actually at Brown I learned as much about sort of how to be a person in the theater and the world as I did about actually writing like I had written a lot for a long time and I feel like my voice if you will was pretty like set and then I had time to write at Brown and also Eric and took so my professors primarily were Lisa and Eric and both of them have incredible they're incredible people who live in the world in a very specific way um that I admire a great deal and they are actually creating their utopias in a way like really doing that in a way that makes it seem possible to like make the work you want and have a life that is something that you want to have and a lot of the time theater doesn't feel like that so it's like oh okay there is a way to like do good in the world and make your art that you want to make and that's what I felt like I learned in school there's so much to say about this I mean I think that there's the content of what I learned at Brown and then there's something about the example the example of the person the person that Paula was and I think Paula has just you know incredibly galvanizing effect on people and when I met Paula I wrote poetry a little bit and um and Paula sort of brought me out of out of poetry into writing three dimensionally and um taught me about what that architecture might look like and I'll never forget being in a in a class with you Paula when you read out loud the stage directions from Tennessee Williams um last it was last menagerie right no it's can on a cat on a hot tin roof so Paula read out I said I'll never forget stage directions are um Tennessee Williams love letter to the reader and so it was from Paula that I learned that stage directions didn't have to be schematic blueprints that they were actually literary and texture and readerly and so that I think that's what allowed me to move from writing poetry to writing plays because I learned that there was this sort of third space in the architecture of plays beyond the dialogue and that there was room to to sort of maneuver with the language and I also think it's interesting that everyone's talking about this this sort of almost medical model of teaching with the medical model is learn when do one teach one and so when your doctor's assumed that you'll teach one in order like you'll teach how to do a liver surgery so that you know how to better do it yourself and so that it continues and so I think there's there's that there's that thing of learning learning the content doing it trying it and then and then passing it on as a way of knowing it first and foremost I mean you know I still on a daily basis taught back to my teacher who died my first preview of Long Christmas Ride Home which was another conversation back with him and one of my best friends who was in grad school with me was waiting for me backstage to tell me the birth states was dead and wanted me to know so it's an enormous reach in terms of this discussion and you know every boot camp I do every workshop I am still kind of asking questions that he asked me and and trying to come back at it a different way and if I ever get the time I do want to write that playwriting book where I talk more to bird it's a conversation with bird but the other thing about you know the notion of the teaching first of all I think it's a mistake to ever admit students I think one should admit artists who are going to teach you something that you don't know how to do and so there's a lot of times when I'm reading I'm thinking you're approaching this as a student rather than as an original voice that is very urgent on the page and quite selfishly and just boldly I want to say that the only reason to teach is to learn how to do something I don't know how to do right that we don't know how to do and that by having the collision of these voices every day you're going we're going to examine our own basic assumptions and and particularly be proven wrong I think it's the most thrilling thing in a workshop the other thing I want to say I still have this you know I grew up below the poverty level so the notion that I grew up at a time where I was given a scholarship or I could work three jobs to finish my college degree or that you know I called this guy out of the blue because Yale School of Drama turned me down and I didn't know how to become a playwright so I thought well maybe I'd like to teach and call this guy at Cornell and said I know it's too late will you accept applications and the guy mentioned the phone was born in states and he said well you're late in the application I could give you tuition he read my application I got it to him and he said can you pay your rent and your daily bread and I'm like I paid you five words per minute short and showed up at his doorstep the whole notion that university should have a place and centers for artists to be a serious place of scholarship is paramount and one of the things that's been upsetting to me in the past 20 30 years is that whenever I do go on to blogs and I try not to I hear all of this wow I'm at phase brown Yale Iowa you know Austin UCSD as if playwrights are coming from extremely well-to-do upper class white families that's not true and first of all we shouldn't even be asking what you're making because these programs should be free and when people say when should I go to graduate school I'm saying you know it's the right time when you get a free ride when you get a free ride university should be paying for the exciting opportunity this presents to their students to have you as the emerging thinkers of theater and you are there as a resource for the faculty you know and I so I'm always amazed at the kind of rift between a lot of people and what they think an MFA is versus what it is which is an artist in residency which is something that will teach the faculty people artists will teach the faculty who will inform the 18 year olds in terms of what is possible is the real purpose for the MFA to give the rent and food for three years so that people like you can write like you can write like eight plays or have the eight raw scripts you know in on your computer desktop by the time rather than having to painfully put that together in 10 or 15 years and it is the opera that that is the responsibility of education in this country to give that space for raw scripts that I wrote I graduated brown nine years ago so yes um I wanted to open up to questions to see if there was anyone there are microphones should we hand out our microphones great so yeah so if you want to raise a question ask a question raise your hand and someone will get a mic to you actually have a burden question actually um my name is Susan Russell I teach at a small liberal arts college literature and history and also play writing and I have a wonderful student who just finished her PhD in England and wrote a book about device theater her name is Sarah Segal she's a wonderful player too and um so I got this grant because I thought it was a great idea to try to include some devising in my playwriting class and so somebody was convinced that that was a good idea because they're giving me a little bit of money but now that I got that grant I'm facing this summer and I'm wondering whether this is a crazy idea or if it really seems to be something that is possible and what you think about adding a devising component in a in a beginning playwriting class I think it's terrific which is partially my bias because I do devise work but um yeah I'd actually be happy to talk more at a greater length but I'm curious one of the questions that I didn't get to ask was about the kinds of collaboration that you guys found useful so I don't want to hog this answer but um I do think that um the that artists in the general in the current generation and artists who are just coming out now are um collaborating in ways that are different and new and I think part of that is in the culture that we live in a time of crowd sourcing and horizontalism so there is this aspect the bureaucratic hierarchical aspect of uh of creative process that used to be taken as a given are no longer taken as such so that all kinds of artists that I know playwrights and directors and designers are choosing to collaborate in new ways and to look at a piece they want to make and think about what is the right process to do this and I think that teaching devised work to undergrads is a way to arm artists with just a greater toolbox of ways to go out and make the work they want to make again I'm not going to turn all of my students into devise makers but I want them to know that that opportunity is out there especially because it is a way for you to take the um to to uh to to be a leader in your own process in a way that uh some conventional processes don't allow you to do and I think there's a ton of great companies throughout the country and Europe who are are making devise work who uh had been in tiny tiny little fringe theaters and are now are starting to be raised by the larger institutional theaters so I also think it's just a good investment to make did anyone want to add anything um I lived in New York before grad school and worked in the downtown theater and uh to me devised work is an old thing not a new thing it's just a new name like Shakespeare had a company he wrote for actors joint stock I'm obsessed Carol Churchill wrote amazing plays their theater is collaborative and I think sometimes what happens when you teach devised work is it's taking people out of the process that's why pig ironing to me is so awesome because it's like it is a devised collaborative process but there's still designers directors actors and playwrights all working together I think the collaboration is so important being able to collaborate through an entire process is amazing but do we really have to call it something else my name is Michelle Lansky and I am a uh drometer uh in life and I also am an academic at a small liberal arts college as well as running a new play conference in Philadelphia I teach primarily undergraduates and I'm under not a whole lot of delusion that I'm training the next great generation of actors directors designers but I do believe that I'm raising citizens and I wonder if if you guys might use a little bit about how to infuse the teaching of theater into creating emerging leaders as Paula said or not just for the theater but for the world uh hey Michelle I you know first of all there might be of course there will be I mean if they've got you as a teacher there will be and um but it's the same thing that I think we all think every time we're in the classroom that what we really want to do is we want to make sure that what how thrilling to possibly fertilize the ground for someone to become a board member of a not-for-profit theater that's thrilled to develop the urgency of taking their children to theater to find an advocate who goes to the school board and says we need an after school program this is an enormous investment of time and their future and I think it's incredibly important um here's where I always feel the rub is for me in terms of the undergraduate uh I think uh teaching is one wants to put undergraduates expose them to praxis actually yet then not not only be in love with the reading of plays but to smell the stage dust that we're inhaling right now um that you recognize the second you enter backstage you can smell that stage dust and it feels like heaven how do we get that into the bloodstream that can be very difficult depending on where you're located um and that becomes really where the political rub happens for us as faculty members because you have to convince a university which is a business and wants to operate in a mode of efficiency to literally construct a theater which then means you're basically doing fundraising advocacy and you're adding on about 10 times of a workload for every hour in the classroom it's really true I mean I think those of us all of us who teach theater we're looking at a 10-time investment outside of the classroom if there isn't already a structure there if there's a repertory theater it means trying to become the best friend of the literary manager whoever's in charge of the intern program all of that stuff I don't I mean this preaching to the choir here right um but I really don't think we add it to people until they're actually in the process well and and this doesn't really have to do it with your question so much Michelle but just in terms of Paula and thinking about how you teach I mean when I was 20 I wrote this play passion play that I wrote with Paula well not with her but across the table from her at a coffee shop giving her 10 pages a week and she said oh I'm gonna do a stage reading of it I thought oh god that's terrifying because at the time I really wasn't I wasn't involved in the theater so she snuck it into a little reading festival and then I finished the play that's Alice Twan who was in this festival too so anyway so then Paula snuck it into the festival with the graduate student which Alice was one that's why it's sort of surreal this audience so she snuck it into this festival Trinity rep which was down the hill from brown and that was the moment that was what addicted me I I um I drove there for opening night got in a car accident on the way on Hope Street blacked out you're talking about oh I didn't get a concussion anyway concussions I didn't go to the hospital instead I went to see my play watching my play in three dimensions where I sort of thought oh I can't go back and I did go to the hospital the next day anyway hi um I'm uh in an mfa program right now for acting and my question is about sort of the theater making collaborative aspect that we're talking about this is my first time at the manifesto and one of the reasons I wanted to come so badly is because I'm interested in working on new work and um what I wonder is what is useful for an actor who wants to work on new work to bring to the process of you know making making theater out of it I mean besides bringing it to life you know what's useful what what can I do if I want to be part of making new work as as an actor flexibility non-attachment thinking of yourself as a as a creative artist who brings something to the table rather than a technician or a vessel that I've talked to actors who approach it in different ways and I find that the that actors who think of themselves as creative generative artists bring the most to the process that I find that actors who think of themselves as vessels for a vision uh are are looking for something that's already there but the process of working on a new play is making something that isn't there and I think uh investment and non-attachment is what I mean so like being all the way there all of the time and then letting it all go when everything changes because everything changes and feedback wise what's useful at you know at stage readings or in development what's useful what do you want to hear from actors if anything I mean I want to hear what their instincts where their instincts are I don't want to hear literary advice from them but I do want to hear how they're inside of it or not inside of it yeah I think like what is yeah what is that investment what is the thing that like because because I can intellectually like figure out like you know sometimes beats and like what structurally what needs to happen but it's also that like instinct of what what is moving that person at that actor what is what is that thing that you're holding on to and that you're passionate about in the piece I also think it's really helpful I think we're all faced with a certain difficulty someone once told me when I was starting to write think of writing movies and TV and we all have this in our life cycle of a playwright in the American theater then I had to read Sid Fiedels and I read it and just and I actually took a TV workshop which is really fun because it was taught by a guy who had been at Carnegie Mellon teaching theater and he just you know was giving the terminology but then he start talking about 19th century well-made play terms on an aside to me and I went got it so someone said look if you know how to pitch it you can pitch Russian as a Sid Field movie with the plot points and the reason I bring this up is Stanislavsky because one of the things that's happening I think in a lot of graduate schools is that Stanislavsky is still the mode and I just have to say the only thing that that I sometimes do with artists who are creating this new language is saying you know it might be a good idea for us to take three weeks of the actor training so we hear what language it is and how do we translate Rashomon into Sid Field but the other really best thing that I think that really helps me is that I don't have any words ever to describe a new play that lands you know in my inbox I just don't have the words but I have the advantage of three years of going to coffee and it's actually in the body language of the playwright so I often think like I would understand Woody Allen completely the tempo and everything else is if I had coffee and we talked about anything but scripts. Good morning my name is Scott Cummings I teach in the theater department at Boston College I wanted to pick up on the idea of creating a space a learning space a creative space a safe space and ask you if you'd share with us any specific techniques or practices in that space I'm thinking partly of another playwright who's well known as a teacher Irene Cornass who began her teaching sessions with you know what she called yoga and 15 or 20 minutes of stretching and breathing and during her period of teaching at Intar I think was well known for wanting to make sure that the individual wooden desks were all arranged in a way that the corners touched each other even though students spent most of their time writing privately as it were. Are there specific things that you would be willing to share with us that you do on a day-to-day basis to shape and mold that space? Data or yoga and I would be so embarrassed to ask people to do yoga in my class or to try to teach them to do yoga and I should get over it. Teach a little bit but undergrads but not I don't yeah it's just did I do anything? Eric says about feedback which is the only purpose of feedback is to create warm writing and I feel like if everyone knows that going in that in itself creates a safe space if you like think that everyone is on your side and just wants your play to be itself instead of feeling like everyone is against you which sometimes a playwriting workshop ends up feeling like everyone is against each other. I think similar to what Mallory is talking about I will start every semester even if what people are working on are long are going to be longer pieces I'll start with a couple of weeks of doing very very short pieces already talking about everybody's sharing and everybody reads so everybody's and they're they tend to be pretty weird assignments so that everyone is taking a risk and is outside of their comfort zone and that that everyone shares that and and because everyone knows what risk everyone else is taking everyone loves it and and it's really exciting and then and then it creates this I find that that creates a world a room where everyone is on each other's side and you know that and you also then know that everyone is is capable of and planning to try something they've never done before so it inspires you to do this thing I you know I'm addicted to this thing called the bake off because I think it really breaks through the ice I think it's terrifying maybe the first time we do one but we all write the same play so everyone has to write the same play and you have to do it in 48 hours and so basically I started creating these things where we would read one or two or three plays and then we would either jointly design it or I would just say here it is and for example I'm finally writing my Don Juan Bakeoff after having assigned it for the last 20 years Don Juan Bakeoff read Tiersa de Molina right the stove guest read my one of my favorite plays Don Juan comes home from the wars and then in 48 hours you might must write a play with a ghost a statue sword play a master a servant and a moment of coitus interruptus I have to say the astonishing writers that so many of us love in this world have turned me upside down and then we all come together and there has to we have to bring in food we have to bring in coffee or tea it usually ends after 12 hours of reading with a stiff drink or two but to hear 12 different Don Juan's is so it's like it's a spiritual moment and it completely melts I think the notion of Darwinian survival of the fittest of competition of oh my god each voice is unique and the excitement at the collective toolkit is astonishing that we all do this stuff right 24 hours here's I used to put a theme on my door like Hamlet and it was open to anyone who wanted to do it and I'd say quick you know you've got four days to respond 10 pages but you only get an hour of rehearsal and then let's throw it up what if we used to call that once upon a weekend we called it we kept it going I don't know if you keep it going but we kept it going oh my god this was really fun too I think it was honor Maloy John Russell I think this we're doing this we decided to do something in homage to John Jesserin who used to do this thing in this bar the pyramid club called chatting and avoid moon I think where you'd go to the bar and you'd say as you recall in episode 57 every Monday night they present this a half an hour living it was it was a half an hour TV episode on crack cocaine and he would stand up and he would give a plot summary of all 57 plots in like I don't know a minute and a half and now they go and now episode 58 and the whole collective created the half hour TV series we did that in the cafeteria one year where everybody had to decide who was going to be editor for the plot and they kept it up for 12 but I have to say those half hours for 12 weeks was some of the happiest time I've experienced in life so I mean I think I'm saying what everybody else is saying right it's like what do we want to do and at some point basically writers going to go hey there's 12 of us we found an abandoned house we're taking all of our computers we're going to write something collectively and they came back with 200 pages that they then pared down to 120 astonishing pages they actually literally wrote in a big circle with the computers that was a brown yeah Joel Hinnick this is going to reveal my age I'm going to play a bit of devil's advocate because you all kind of stand for the opposite but my mentor and friend and teacher as an undergraduate was Robert Chaplin who wrote Billy Budd and not very much else and Bob always said if you want to write don't teach and while as I say you're all living examples of the opposite how would you respond to that what was going on at least with Bob I'm not teaching right now and I hope to teach again in the future but I want to be a good teacher and I feel like I don't have the mental energy right now to be a good teacher and to do my own work but I hope to be able to have more stability in the future and go back to it and to me that's what like if you are actually doing your writing it's hard to be a good teacher and vice versa so to me that's what that means I think there's something to what your friend said and I think you know Paula would probably agree that you got more writing done when you were only from teaching however I mean however I think at a point I think you know when you're ready to give back to the community and I think you also learn a lot from doing that very inarticulate I mean yes you have more time with your writing when you're not teaching but not if you have a different kind of job true enough right so teaching is creative I get to be steeped in theater and language all the time I get summers off I get a month in January I get to be surrounded by artists who are showing me things I've never thought of before that didn't happen when I was a waitress that didn't happen when I was an office temp I have to pay the rent and I'd rather do it in a way that is really inspiring that inspires me to do my own work and that I don't know there's like a in the United States today there is a financial reality of being an artist which is that there's very there's there's no state support so that support has to come from somewhere I would also say that yeah I like Mallory's describing I took a number of years off that I I knew when I was at Brown that I wanted to teach and that that that I got to teach while I was at Brown and then I didn't I did it for one year after school and I realized I was never going to write again if I kept doing it so I took six years off and I just started doing it again and it's because Paula brought me to Yale to teach a classical ensemble device playing with the clarites in which I got to take the work I've been doing for 10 years and turn that into a pedagogy so that it was actually that it was it was all the part with the work that I was doing and that that was me that I think that made it possible for me to think of the teaching I was doing as an enriching experience because suddenly I had to I got to pause from the constant making of plays and actually think about how I was doing what I was doing and that that has made me better and hungrier to do more things um once you go down that road much will say well you shouldn't have a family you shouldn't have children you shouldn't take care of your aging parents no really you start going down this road and what it does do is look I meet a lot of people that I just say you know what you have a playwright's personality and not a novelist personality which is you like to have a party why would you be a novelist for seven years in isolation right so I mean a lot of times writers would knock on my door and say you know Professor you're so-and-so told me to see you and I'm like oh come in the office and 15 years later I'm like you know you feel like a playwright to me and this is not without with you know not reading I do think one of the things that happens with us it's a balancing act it's a juggling act if you assume that teaching is actually exposing yourself to completely different aesthetics so that you never write the same play twice it's a good idea to teach the real rub comes when for example you know what and Michelle's question thinking do I have to create an entire apparatus so that my my young writers can breathe in stage dust that's where I think the rub happens I think it happens more with the notion of going to another faculty meeting versus the notion of being in another room of 10 different vibrating voices do you know what I mean and I think it's that faculty meeting where you suddenly are in the time of a beckett play I would agree don't teach we have time for one more question thank you so much hi I'm Alice Twan I head up the writing for performance program at CalArx so my question is about life and the internet generation because now we're training playwrights that have the internet mindscape and I feel like the internet is kind of like the Gutenberg moment you know it's like it's forever changing consciousness and I actually am optimistic about theater because I think that oh the lifeness is going to be important as you know everybody's kind of compartmentalized in their little electronic catfires but it is a different mindscape you know they're they have lots of stimulus there's a lot of breath I think it's a depth situation you don't really have to pursue anything that you're not interested in you can just keep surfing towards the topics that you're interested in so I'm wondering if you have thoughts about teaching this new creature this new species that obviously is human and will always respond to life-ness but what might that be like we have so much more of a kind of a competition for attention my iphone was stolen and now I have a flip phone and I read novels again so tell your students to get rid of their iphone a lot of them most of them are like aerospace interneers and they're kind of taking this as kind of um I don't know a requirement but what I find is and what I find is actually that they love it they actually really love this love like intro play writing and I think partly it is because it's like this moment they actually can take a lot of this kind of a lot of the things that they're finding on the internet or like the other things that they're interested in and kind of take this moment to kind of focus it and I think it's it's also helping them in a way engage engage with their fellow students in a very different way I think it's yeah did any of you read the there was an opinion piece in the new york times about how technology is making us unempathetic I think that teaching theater right now is actually really important and I think that we have less competition sort of liveness is a thing that isn't anywhere else and so people want to I mean rock shows awesome I love going to rock shows sporting events awesome I love going to sporting events theater that's about it and so like here we are talking to each other you go to plays you're with people I think that I mean there's a lot of young people here who are amazing who are apprentices here who are doing this and are the next generation of theater maker like I'm not as young as that I feel I feel a different generation also but they're amazing and they're here and they want to do this I think that there's there is a space and an excitement about theater actually that is that is didn't feel that way to me 10 years ago when I was that age I felt like oh TV movies but now you don't even go to a movie theater with other people like I watch all that media on my computer like by myself or with a friend but theater like theater is alive and look look we're all here in Louisville, Kentucky yeah just one last thing I think it also is making audience I think it's making audiences more forgiving and interested in nonlinear structures so that I think that there's this there's something that's about to happen in the forms of storytelling that I'm really excited to see what that is and trying to teach in a way that will allow that to happen is feels like a really exciting challenge so thank you for that that's true that's it we're done thank you so much