 Paging Liz Angleman, Liz Angleman. The operating room needs you. Dr. Angleman, I'm right here. I'm leaving, she doesn't need me. I'm Liz Angleman. I was president of this organization 11 conferences and 10 years ago for the 20th anniversary and it's great to be here for the 30th. Before I start sharing some past president remandesances of gifts that LMDA have given me, I just want to take a moment and ask if you're first timer to the conference, if you could just stand up. Cause this goes out to you. So this is for you, for everyone else, could you also just take a moment and close your eyes and if you can just remember your first LMDA conference and just take a moment and remember something about that conference that was lovely and pleasurable and if it wasn't at that first conference, just remember another lovely pleasurable moment at LMDA. And just hold that with you. I've had my first moment for 24 years. Keep this one for a while. So I just want to start by saying that I had my, my first conference was 24 conferences 23 years ago, which is more than half my life ago. So a long history with this annual conference and my, again, my presidency was 10 years ago, 11 conferences ago in Austin, Texas, which is now where I live and I think there was something about planning a conference in Austin and getting a vibe of a city that I was intrigued by led to my living there now and I have LMDA to thank for that inquiry and investigation of a new home. And of course this is a constant home for me. And I just wanted to say when I first went to my 1992 conference in Seattle, I just graduated undergraduate and I asked my parents if I could, for a graduation present, go to an LMDA conference. Best gift I ever got. And I don't remember much about that conference. I don't remember other early career dramaturgs there. We weren't called early career dramaturgs then, but I just remember sitting in one of the sessions and seeing people who I'd only read about in a room together, Mark Bly and Catanio and others and just thinking like, oh my gosh, like they're real and alive and they're nice. And afterwards at the conference bar, I just thought my God, this whole profession can fit in a bar and they're talking to each other and having a great time. So I just wanna just put out the gift of like non hierarchical collegiality. It's a mouthful, but that was a big gift. And that made me come back and skip forward about 10 conferences, nine years later I was actually living in Seattle. Being there again had made me make another home. And I was contemplating a job change and a location change. And so I saw it at Mark Bly at a conference and I asked him some, he actually asked me as a true dramaturg would, some questions and offered some opinions. And I just wanna throw out another gift, lifelong mentorship. Rewind a little bit when I first got to Seattle, I was reached out to you by Jeff Pohl and he invited me to be a regional vice president of the Pacific Northwest. And I said, thanks, but I'm not really sure what LMD is doing for me right now, what I'm feeling about it. He said, great, so you're gonna help plan a conference. So I just wanna put out there, lifelong leadership. Flash forward, I was planning another conference in Austin and I was going to plan the next one in Minneapolis and I did a poll to Julie Dubna. I said, I wanna make sure that other early career dramaturgs don't have to use their graduation gifts to get to conferences. I like to start away, we can get some ECD travel money and develop ECDs at the conference. You're interested in that, would you do it? She had that same moment of I don't know, I said, well then you're doing it. And I just wanna put out another thing is when you have interest and opportunity and you match it with somebody's strengths and passions, that's a gift event of LMDA. And then I just wanna put a gift out there, which is teamwork and just to thank people like Shelly Orr and DJ Hopkins and people who are my executive committee when I was president and it was such a joy planning that 29th anniversary with Shelly. I don't know if she's in here, but thank you. Just to look back at where we came from and look forward where we're going with you was a pleasure. And it's hard to remember too that there was a before Diane Carroll, but there was. There were several. Diane Carroll has been such an amazing administrator here for LMDA for so many years and there were several before her and I just wanted to shout out to Louise McKay, who another gift of Jeff Pearls into this organization who really helped build the infrastructure that we're standing on now and put together the technology grant that we got with the NEA, which has really kind of set us up for several years running now. I'm babbling, but I want to say two more things. And one is that after I was the board chair or because you can only have so much fun for so long, we were thinking about who can follow and we just, there was no one that we could think of other than Cindy Sarrell who would be as passionate and ceaseless in her advocacy for this organization. And I just want to give a shout out for Cindy who has done more for LMDA in a day than most of us ever do in a lifetime. And then lastly, I just want to say kind of running through my experience with LMDA, running through the DNA of my experience at LMDA is a lifetime of personal and professional collaboration with Brian Quirt. It's been a true pleasure in any hat we've worn, any role we've played, any title we've had to invent projects to work on together. And I just want to say that he continues to remind me that again, it's not just the idea that you have but it's how to make it happen and to make it happen. That's important and he inspires me constantly. So I just want to again say mentorship, leadership, collaboration, courage, heart, mind, Tim Mann, lion, scarecrow. These guys have really been helping me on my journey to home at LMDA and I just want to hope that I can be any of those to any of you in the next 24 conferences in 30 years. Thank you. So I'm going to get off this perch and give it over to Brian Moore. Thank you, Liz. Good morning. How are y'all doing? Great. Thank you all for being here. My name is Brian Moore. I'm the Associate Professor and Director of the Theater Program at Concordia University in Nebraska. I am also the Vice President for University Relations here for LMDA and the Conference Planner and incoming focus group rep for the dramaturgy focus group at the Association for Theater and Higher Education. It's been a great opportunity to be able to work both capacities at LMDA and at ATHE in order to continue that collaboration as well as to try to kind of forge the memberships in the union between those two areas. So it's exciting to see members of LMDA going to ATHE and vice versa and to be able to continue a dialogue of how we can support each other in the work that we're trying to do, at least for me at the university level, but also branching out into the other areas of LMDA and the spirit of LMDA. And one of the things that I love doing, especially here and for this organization is to be one of the organizers for our annual Hot Topics session. So I am excited to share round two or part of the University Caucus or U-Caucus Hot Topics. The idea of Hot Topics is to spark dialogue. It's to share thoughts, ideas, questions, projects, anything that is on the minds of our members and to give them a opportunity, a platform to share those ideas with each other in order to find critics, allies, supporters, and like-and-different-minded people to continue the dialogue beyond this point. So think of this as kind of an icebreaker to what can potentially become a great thing once we are done with this session. And we have a great group of individuals and topics for this morning into the afternoon. So I hope you do enjoy them. The rules of Hot Topics are you get five minutes and we try to be pretty strict about the five minutes. And as I said, it's just kind of the spark and they are prepared to present their five minutes and to talk about what they're feeling, what's on their mind, what they're doing. And then we will give them kind of basically keep time, let them know when their five minutes are up, and then we move on to the next topic. So after we hear from all the presentations, we will open it up to the audience. Liz, I asked Liz to help respond just to make a few small connections, observations from each of these presentations. And there are some really neat links, which I'm excited to see and share. But then to open it up for Q&A, questions that you may have about their topics and then conclude with maybe any Hot Topics that you would like to share in the world of theater. I will invite you to also feel free to share your Hot Topics if you don't want to bring them up allowed to share them through Twitter, through the hashtag LMDA15. It would be great to look through those later on and to see what people are thinking about. It's also just really excited to be live streamed through HowlRound to give that exposure to this format. And we're looking forward to sharing it with you in that way as well. So thank you, HowlRound, for doing this as well. So without further ado, we're going to begin with Diane Brewer. This is my favorite bio ever. Diane Brewer teaches dramaturgs and directs at the University of Evansville. A lot of being. Short and sweet. And she's awesome. Okay, so pot of class last semester using the Kilroy's plays and in these five minutes, I hope to provide a simple framework for what is surely a much more complex discussion that I hope that we can have afterwards and during the rest of the conference and in our lives. So I've kind of broken down my thinking into three segments. First, I want to talk about producing the class, then the experience of the class and then thinking about the future for this class or maybe other classes like it. So the basics of how it happened, the Kilroy's list got published. I wanted to read the plays. I knew that I could read the plays by contacting the agents and asking for PDFs of the plays because that's how I read new plays. But I wanted to read the plays with my students and I knew that that would be much more complicated. So I called Beth Blickers and I said, okay, Beth, help me explore the why nots. Why can't I do this? And she was really, really helpful in getting me to kind of organize my thoughts so that I could write an email to the agents who represented the first 14 plays on the list, 14 weeks in the semester. I wanted to read one play each week. So I emailed these agents with the intention of establishing trust, being very clear about the fact that I wanted to make sure that the playwrights were paid for the use of their work and then very simply I wanted access to the plays. I wanted them to send me PDFs that I could make available for the students. I heard back from all but one agents and I ended up with 16 plays. I mean it took a little bit to do a little trust, establishing work. There were a lot of logistical complications connected to getting the playwrights paid but ultimately it all worked out and we started the semester. And logistically what I did was I used black word, I made the plays available to the students in the class. Only the students in the class had access to the plays through blackboard. I also made it very, very, very clear to the students that their access to these plays was connected to the honor code and very clear about what the rules are, not redistributing, not even giving them to their friends, not performing them in acting class. I mean we had that conversation. I have a reputation for taking the honor code very seriously so that was actually a really easy part of the process. Then for the rest of the class, we just read the plays and I told the students that I would be reading the plays freshly along with them. We read the plays and then we talked about the plays. These are some of the questions that emerged during the conversation. Who are these playwrights? What are their plays about? Are we seeing new conventions? How can we talk about the generational tension that emerges during the season selection process? Should the list exist? Is playwriting gendered? And how is reading unpublished plays different from reading published plays? And that ties into then my next thinking about the future. I was somewhat surprised, not too surprised, but how important it was in the process of the class that the plays the students were reading were unpublished. They were reading manuscripts because that changed the dynamic of the discussion in sometimes surprising ways. So that has gotten me thinking about, well when I wanna do this again or if someone else wants to do this because I think, frankly, everyone should do this. Why not? How do we make sure that people have access to unpublished plays? How do we make sure that students have access to unpublished plays? Now, New Play Exchange is a great platform for that. And I know that the killer eyes have been very vocal about their efforts to get the playwrights from the list to put their plays on the New Play Exchange. So it seems like it's a kind of no-brainer. I went through and I counted how many plays are actually there. It's actually 16 at this point. So I don't know, I don't feel like that's the solution at this point because I don't know, it has to be stable and all of that. And then the next thing that I wanna think about and this is really maybe more long-term, but how do we address classes like this when exposure is not enough? What can we do to help teachers gain confidence in their ability to guide students through this process? Those are the things I would love to talk about more. Thanks. Next up is Mark Lord. Mark Lord is a professor of the arts and Teresa Helburn, chair of drama at Bryn Mawr College. He's also the dramaturge for Headlong Dance Theater and one of the co-founders of the Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia where he teaches performance dramaturgy. He studied at Swarthmore College and at the Yale School of Drama. He's a director known for psych-specific productions as well as original adaptations at Bryn Mawr and throughout Philadelphia and he is the contributing editor to Yale's theater. So this is called How to Complain, a Structural and Practical Model for Dramaturges and Other Revolutionaries. And it's kind of on its way from being a classroom exercise to help the directors and dramaturgs that I teach feel a sense of agency and in particular to give the directing students that I'm about to teach a sense of responsibility for having a sense of direction, not just to the scenes that I'm gonna assign them and that they'll choose for themselves but to have a responsibility for a sense of direction for our field and for their own healthy places within it. So I'm gonna start in a familiar place which is the words of Stanislavski. He refers at a couple points in his writing to spheres of concentration. And over the years as I've taught acting, I've kind of broken that out or sort of built it out into three spheres for student actors to think about. The first is the space kind of like within the character's own mind, right? Where Hamlet can go into himself. The second sphere is all of the spaces that are in the world, right? The space between me and all of you is a very large sphere of concentration. If I just turned and talked to Kat, I have a very tiny and intimate but strange in front of all of you sphere. And the third sphere is the sphere that takes in everything, right? Depending on the play text, depending on the world of the play, the cosmos might be a really circumscribed thing with a bunch of recognizable characters lurking overhead. Or it could be in a Beckett play just something that you imagine as a big rusty metal sky that has nothing above it. So there are those three spheres and we'll come back to that later. The second assertion that I wanna make is that to complain is to seek to know the world and to seek to know the world better. And this makes complaining in the sense that I mean it a little bit different than bitching or yanking, which is just a sense of excusing ourselves for inaction. And just kind of going to sail on a sea of unbreakable sadness. And I actually wanna get to a place where we're complaining to think and improve. And I think that this is a really basic part of who we are. I imagine our ancient ancestors coming upon things in the field and thinking perhaps first, can I meet with this? And discovering no. And then perhaps second, taking up the question, well then, can I eat it? And then to take up the question, well aside from the answer no to the first two questions, what are the other ways in which this thing annoys me? Irritability is biologists say one of the signs of life. Right? So I want my students, I want all of you to complain, to be irritated, and to not like try to shunt aside or ignore the pains and the irks, the slings and arrows that the universe, that our political system, that our own inner lives whip on us, but instead to embrace those things. And I have in my head a sense of singing songs of complaint. I think that the word complaint is derived from a medieval French word that I'm spacing out on, but it's kind of akin to beweil, or to bemoan. And if you think about two different cultural icons, an aria of complaint, or to sing the blues of complaint is to seek to know the source and the description of one's own discomfort in a deep, thoughtful, felt and precise way. Right? That's the song of complaint that I want my students and you and me to be able to sing. And then come back to this idea of spheres of concentration and think rather than the acting spheres of concentration about the own spheres or realms in which we live, right? There's the personal on one side, there's the professional on the other side, and they move from the deep inside myself place to the cosmic place. And they pass through my closest collaborators, my community, my audience, my entire city, my culture, the planet. Those are all contexts in which I live. And the kind of how to complain, and I've got to wrap up, is sing your song into each of those spheres. And in some spheres, there'll be no resonance at all. In other spheres, there will be intense resonance, but it may be different than what it is that you imagined. If I'm complaining about my email, there may be a way that that's connected to a big cosmic complaint that I have. That may also be something about my own personal idiosyncrasies deep within my being that I need to adjust, right? So that's like a little template for how to complain. I got examples and I'd love to talk to you about them if you're curious. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Next up, we have Dan Smith. Dan is the assistant professor of theater studies at Michigan State University. He holds an MFA in dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD from Northwestern University. Dan worked extensively as a dramaturge in Chicago, most frequently with caffeine theater. He is particularly interested in translation for the stage and has published translations of plays by Marivo and Gottsey. Thanks. I wanted to mention my friend Joanne Diaz wrote a dissertation on complaint poetry of the Renaissance, so you should check that out. I also wanted to mention that I'm delighted that we're sitting under the watchful eyes of Euripides and Sophocles above us, so I don't know if anyone has made no of that yet, but. So what I wanted to talk about today is a class I'll be teaching next spring in literary management, which I have never taught before. And the reason that I'm teaching this class, there are two reasons. One is that the university has started an arts and cultural management minor, and the theater department has been asked to develop courses to serve as electives in this minor. So I thought, how can I contribute to this? Oh, literary management, I've done some of that. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is I work with the Wurton Center on campus to read plays for their Young Playwrights Festival, which is an event that they do every year. We have about 50 to 60 plays written by high school students, 10 minute plays, and my job is to organize a student reading committee. I recruit six to 10 student readers, and we read through the plays. We have to come up with a list of the top 12 semifinalists and then the top six finalists. And what happens typically is that I send out an email and the students respond via email with their comments, and then we get back the first week in January for the spring semester, and I try to arrange a meeting time with them, and I send out a doodle poll, and three of them respond to the doodle, and none of them have a time that they can meet. And so what ends up happening is we don't actually get to meet and talk about why, say, Paige really liked a mid-semester's daydream, and Elijah did not. And so I would like to formalize a way to have a conversation with them about these plays. And so I'm interested in using that as kind of the first six weeks of the class is going through this literary management process with them of this Young Playwrights Festival. What has typically happened is then when we, so the top 12 playwrights get a chance to revise, and I mentor them through a revising process, and then I collaborate with the head of the education at the Warden Center, who's a lovely man named Bert Goldstein who has a particular fondness for sad girl plays as we heard yesterday from the family, so McNulty. So anyway, so yeah, so I'm kind of hoping to get a better structure in place and to get a more consistent sense of the reading, of training these students as readers. And so I've got a sense of what I'm gonna do for the first six weeks of the class, and I'd love your ideas about what I'll be doing for the rest of the class. I also wanted to say that I have, I think, you know, I'm thinking, oh, I've never taught literary management before. I then realized that I do incorporate assignments that are related to literary management in other classes. So I tend to have my first year students in the play analysis class design, sorry, prepare a season selection, right, for a theater company, I give them a mission statement, and they create a four play season for a company. I usually use Steep Theater in Chicago, which has a pretty, their mission statement is interesting. It used to be we bring out the truth in the stories we tell through ensemble work, which is a very generic sounding mission statement, and then they've recently gone to this idea of every man theater, but they have a 60 seat house, and the students always want to produce a wicked and made a 60 seat house, and so anyway, that's a very, you know, so I haven't gotten through all of the logistics of that with them. And then in my theater history class, I tend to have them pitch a Greek tragedy to our department season selection committee. So I'm thinking about these things and how I've used these assignments before, but then to sort of develop that into a full length class. And I welcome your feedback, you know, if you wanna say don't teach literary management, that's fine, but I'm going to anyway. But yeah, so those are my ideas to start off, and I'd love to have a discussion. Thank you, Dan. Next is Sarah Freeman. Sarah is associate professor of theater at the University of Puget Sound. She co-edited international dramaturgy translation and transformations in the theater of Timberlake Wordenbarker, and public theaters and public theater publics, theaters and theater publics, and has published chapters and articles in various theaters and books and journals. She won the Gerald K. N. Ward from the American Society for Theater Research in 2007 for an article on Joint Stock Theater Company published in Theater Survey. She currently edits theater history studies. As a director, she most recently staged Spring Awakening, the musical, and Sarah rolls in the next room at Puget Sound. This fall, she directs Guillaume de Castro's The Force of Habit in a new English translation by dramaturge Kathleen Jeffs. Sarah. Okay, so mine is called What We're Talking About When We're Talking About New Writing. And I come to this hot topics presentation from two directions. The first direction is that my current book project is about Les Waters and Annie Smart staging new plays over the last 35 years. It's focused on shows by four of the writers they've collaborated with repeatedly as a director and a designer. The second direction is that in the past two years I've been part of the process to officially settle LMDA's archive in the Holdings of Collins Library at the University of Puget Sound. So in the UK where Waters and Smart began their careers, it is now typical to talk about a new writing sector of the theater industry focused on new play production, which extends from the most alternative and fringe spaces to the national theater. And there's some good writing on this. Jacqueline Bolton has a really good article in studies in theater and performance, and her own dissertation is on dramaturgy in the UK. She's part of that wave represented by our Catalan, too, writing about that in the UK. And then our very own Harriet Powers and Bob Hedley also have an American theater article thinking about that new play sector in the UK now from 2012. But that area was not precisely so sectorized when Waters and Smart were working with Red Ladder and Joint Stock and the Royal Court and the National at the beginning of their career in the UK. Then in the US the context is different and related, but in order to think about the conditions that they've worked in here since 1995, I thought I'd take advantage of the archive in my own backyard and look at LMDA's approaches to the topics of new play production or the encouragement of new writing. And of course the way you approach an archive in part determines what you find. I went to the materials interested in whether our organization's newsletters and conference programming indicate that there are distinct phases or waves of conversation about new play development or whether the organization talks about those topics so consistently as to seem like we're constantly talking about the need for and challenges of new plays. I also wanted to explore what ideas and themes most consistently arise when we talk about new writing for the theater. And I wondered if the archive could help me see if there's been significant change in the conversation, especially regarding the apologetic acknowledgement of development hell and the exhausted sense of impasse I saw in dramaturgical discussions of new play processes in the late 1990s when I first joined LMDA. Part of what fascinates me about the careers of Waters and Smart is the alacrity with which they move on in and with new writing and the ways that the organizations with which they often work do seem to me to be innovating, revising, risking and finding ways to both do more and do less around new play development so that the plays get staged. So as happens with archive work, I partially answered my questions and in some ways I couldn't answer them at all. By the time I looked at three folders of material, I was deep into information about LMDA's second annual conference in Minneapolis in 1987 on the theme dramaturgy and the development of the new American play. Just like when I wrote, when I set out to write a chapter on gay sweatshop for Methuin and I became obsessed with reconstructing their 1985 10th anniversary festival, I got a little obsessed with reconstructing the 1987 conference. So that's where I stayed primarily. We brought as one of the documents that Maddie brought for display this beautiful flyer which has the flyer and then when you open it up on the inside there was the registration and then the schedule all in one inside and then I made a handout that's on some of the tables that shows as noted in Mark Bly's own handwriting. This is the final schedule, final program schedule with his handwriting and then behind it are two pages out of the proposal or description of the conference for a proposal that went to some granting foundations. So when I put this on Mark Bly's table I said this will be a blast from your past and he went. So I find the goals outlined on that proposal particularly moving on page five. In addition to looking at that, that the schedules and that proposal I looked at all the materials submitted to funding bodies as well as the personal correspondence that detailed the ups and downs of seeking and waiting for that funding. And let me just note that the cycle of spending out of your own pocket and waiting for grants to reimburse you never ends. The conference received in the end support from Dayton Hudson's Foundation and the Jerome Foundation as well as in kind support from the University of Minnesota where the event took place. I also looked at handwritten notes taken during some of the panels and I looked at the feedback forms that people sent in or filled out as they finished going to the conference. And as you can see from that conference schedule Robert Marks, the director of the NEA Theater Program delivered the keynote speech at that conference and the conference was co-sponsored by the Playwright Center which was in the middle of its Playlabs performances at the same time. So the schedule moves back and forth between Playlabs readings and panels. And the frustration of those overlapping panels and play readings provoked a fair amount of discussion in the responses for the conference. That tension between actually reading and responding to new plays and panels analyzing the methods and reflecting on the work that goes into reading and responding to new plays seemed central to me in LMDA's negotiation of new writing. The 1987 conference indicates that within two years of its founding, LMDA put front and center, the question has dramaturgy made a difference in generating the most favorable conditions for new plays to appear and flourish? The conversation is ongoing but the notion of waves still speaks to me. Annual conferences have themes focused on new writing in 1987, 1993 and 2000. So every six or seven years and then I'm not as strong, I didn't get as far in the archive as the 21st century. So apologies to the things that came after 2001. There were interstitial events closely tied to that rotation. So in 1987 there was a panel here at Columbia about the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of texts that came to be called the performatorgy panel because of a Richard Schechner speech at it. In 1994, there was a panel in New York with the dramatist's guild about commissioning. In 1999, there was a joint meeting between the dramaturgy focus group and the playwriting focus group of ATHE. And in 2002, there was a Canadian event focused on workshop processes. I still need to do the full history of the script exchange so I didn't even get to that in the archive either. That definitely matters to the thinking. So as you can see, I'm still in the midst of my research and this has been a snapshot report. My sense is that there are definitely times when other issues take focus and the drive is generated to talk about other things but we seem to be on a sort of six year, seven year lifecycle where the question of new writing is gonna come back as maybe the strongest focus. And I have to wrap up. So I will say that I do tentatively think that in the records and the programming that the reflection on new writing and new works creation has become more experimental and varied since the start of the 21st century, especially as notions around text and workshop and collaborative creation have become more fluid. The conversation isn't always about the development of the new American play anymore but it is insistently about text, trust, repertoire, writers, the stage moment, event and story and that's what we're talking about when we're talking about new writing. Thank you Sarah. I feel the urge to sit at your feet Christian as I introduce you, I don't know. It's just like so, like great. I wanted to say Christian Parker, a Columbia MFA grad, most recently stepped down as Associate Artistic Director of the Atlantic Theater Company after nearly 13 years in order to pursue more of his own work as a director, dramaturg and consultants. Most recently he directed Leslie Evasian's new play out of the city for the Mary Mac Repertory Theater in Massachusetts and served as dramaturg for the Atlantic's world premiere of the musical found by Hunter Bell, Lee Overtree and Eli Boen. Christian has produced, directed and dramaturged over 50 premieres of new American and British plays on, off and off, off Broadway, including serving as dramaturg for the original production of David Auburn's proof at Manhattan Theater Club and on Broadway. He speaks Russian and was part of the National Autistic Advisory Board for the CITD New Russian Plays Initiative and actually probably saved my life and gave me almonds on the subway. In Moscow, he is an idea. He is a proud founding member of the new itinerant theater company, New Neighborhood. He is currently the chair of the graduate theater program at Columbia University. We're so happy about that. Where he also has the MFA concentration in dramaturgy. He is a Tony nominator. I give you Christian Parker. I should say that actually before I ever, with the first person I ever met in the field of dramaturgy was Liz Engelman who I spoke to when I came as a prospective student to Columbia in 1994, something like that, five? I don't know when it was. I had more than 95, whatever it was. But she was the one who coaxed me into the field accidentally and so she's to blame. So the title of what I was gonna talk about today is do or do not, there is no try. How to quit calling yourself a dramaturg and be one. I came up with this sort of idea. It sort of came to me before I quite knew exactly where I was gonna go with it. But I was listening to Mark's presentation and I thought, oh god, that's exactly, that was actually part of the impulse. When I was in graduate school, I complained a lot. And one of the reasons I complained a lot was because I had a professor when I was getting my MFA who was insistent that we, not just me, but we were never gonna get jobs as dramaturgs. We were never gonna get jobs as literary managers. We should quit thinking about it that way and that we needed to really think more broadly about what we were doing and why we were doing it and we should probably just try to do something else anyway. And I resisted this so fervently and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I actually didn't know that I wanted to be a production dramaturg or a literary manager. But in fact, I didn't really think I did necessarily. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to lead. But I resisted this so hard and I resented her and it bugged me so much. But what I was also experiencing around me was that all of the rest of my training, for the most part, was predicated on the assumption that I would be those things. And so it was a real cognitive dissonance which was why it caused me to complain and it really drove me nuts. And so in my own role, leading this program, leading the dramaturgic program and now being chair of the MFA program here and beginning a process really for the first time in its history of trying to really integrate the disciplines, the thing that I'm most thinking about is well, why must we continue teaching dramaturgies specifically predicated on what I think are, in my experience, outmoded assumptions about the way the profession works and where it's headed? So that actually, as I look back, that particular professor was really thinking quite ahead of her time. She was the one who was right. I mean, I learned a lot from the other stuff, certainly, but actually, she was not wrong. I did end up going into literary management initially and did a lot of production dramaturgies, but she was still right. And so, anyway, so where this has led me is to think really specifically about how, as someone who is training deeply indebted graduate students for a profession, for the broadest range of professional opportunities that they can find, how can I trick them, not trick them, how can I trick them into staying in school? How can I and my colleagues kind of embrace the discomfort of the not knowing where you're headed in how we build our curriculum and not predicate our curriculum on and the way we teach on assumptions about how it's been and what the role must be. How can we stop being shackled by long standing, what I think are the long standing assumptions in the, about dramaturgs with the capital D, being responsive fundamentally, semi-artistic, support staff for other artists with actual vision, and how can I start to frame the study of dramaturgical skills as the key to unlock any number of professional doors that I can't even think of for my students? How can we break down some of these old assumptions about even the personality required to sort of practice dramaturgy? So that's sort of what I'm at sort of in floating that question out there actually for the group in terms of what your thoughts are and what that might look like and what that means. I mean, I've put certain things in practice here in our curriculum that I think try to address that, but which to me involves certain areas of focus, leadership, practice in other disciplines, which to me is really, really important. Making yourself vulnerable, what does that mean for someone who's studying this subject? Producing work, being a generative artist, whatever that means to you, and doing your own homework, not the work, the homework for other artists. I also believe that one way to sort of combat this notion of constantly having to discuss over and over again, not only what is a dramaturg, but how do we get to the table? How do we get invited to the party? Is to just change the party, to start a different party, and actually try to actually imagine, I'm trying to actually imagine, and I haven't figured this all out yet, but I'm trying to actually imagine how through the teaching of dramaturgy at the graduate level or even even at the undergraduate level, can we actually embrace the change that's happened in the profession, which has made some of the older, sort of the old jobs as they were associated with dramaturgical skills and dramaturgical study obsolete. How can we actually embrace that? How can we actually look to infuse the rest of our field with better dramaturgical skills so that we don't have to worry about whether those old jobs exist. We have somehow positioned ourselves in a new place and actually enhanced the field through essentially teaching our own skillset to our collaborators. How can we do that now, given the structures that exist, given the interest that young artists have in creating new producing structures? How do we make dramaturgy indispensable while letting the title dramaturg be dispensable? How do we inspire in our colleagues a rigor about dramaturgy and by showing it ourselves without worrying about whether we have one of those traditional titles? So planned obsolescence in a way. I don't really know what that means, but these are the things that I'm thinking about. So I'm interested to know what your thoughts are on that. Our final group of presenters, I'm just throwing off because there are three instead of two and I apologize, I don't have information about the third. But these are members of the Dramaturgy Open Office Hours Project or hashtag Open Dramaturgy. We have Jeremy Stoller, who's freelance dramaturg based in New York, serving as a resident dramaturg for Terra Nova Collective and the Jewish Place Project. And he's literary manager of the, he is dramaturging the New York premiere of Ken Urban's Sense of an Ending at 59E59 in August. We also have Catherine Maria Rodriguez, who is bilingual friend of Lance, dramaturg and advocate, co-host of this project and co-organizes hashtag Wiccatergy, a national editor of Wikipedia's American Theater Coverage. She's recently worked at Center Stage, Steppenwolf Board of Lands and El Circulo Teatro in Mexico and Catholic University with her studies from Carnegie Mellon and about to enter Yale's MFA Dramaturg program. And I am sorry I do not know, so you can introduce yourself, I'm sorry. My name's Amy Freeman, I'm a freelance dramaturg from Philadelphia. I'm the RVP for Philly Metro Area and I host the Dramaturgy Open Office Hours there. Great and I am giving them a little bit extra time as a collective group to talk about their project. So not with us today are Sarah Slate, who runs the project in Chicago and Sarah Keats, who runs the project in Seattle. Maybe I'll start by talking a little bit about why I began the project and then Catherine and Amy, who are the ones who are responsible for the expansion can talk about that. So I was a few months into being a freelance dramaturg in New York. I was meeting a lot of playwrights and was just surprised to find how many of them who had been in New York for years, I was the first dramaturg they had met. They said, oh, what exactly do you do? I don't know what a dramaturg is or I don't like dramaturgs and I'd ask why and they'd say, well, I never worked with one, I don't really know. So I began to think about why that might be. There seemed to be a lot of factors probably outside my control, but I wondered about what I specifically could do to make dramaturgs more accessible. It seemed like people felt they were inaccessible or they were a luxury or it wasn't something they were aware of or they just didn't know anyone who was practicing it. So what could I do? I was like, what is the most accessible I could make not only myself, but my colleagues so that I could find more collaborators so that they could find more collaborators so that we become a part of the practice of new play development or production in general. And so I spoke to some other dramaturgs who helped me dramaturg through my idea to sit in a public space for a few hours every week joined by another dramaturg and anyone who wanted to show up to ask us a question about play structure, about the canon, about submitting their work to literary managers, could do so. It cost us no money to run. They paid nothing to do it in and out and by offering our services for free in a very small way, hopefully to show that they had value. And then I called it, I put project at the end to suggest that it was a question as opposed to which relieved me of any attendance goals or hard outcomes. And so not only did I sit there for a few hours every week, but we blog about it, we now tweet about it, we sort of explore what comes up for us. I ran that for eight weeks in New York before it eventually expanded to other cities. I had guest dramaturgs from all over the city join me as diverse as possible from institutions and freelance, age-wise, gender-wise, culturally, I tried to have as many different people show up as possible so that writers or other artists who didn't know dramaturgs could show up any week and meet some new collaborators, find out we were friendly, intelligent, approachable. A lot of the questions were actually about industry or business. How do I write a personal statement? How do I choose 10 pages for a query? Who do I send my play to? How do I self-produce even more so than it was about specific structural questions? And what I found surprisingly, we'd have about maybe six people show up each week and people would stick around after they asked their questions to listen to other people's questions and the connections were as much about between the artists and the dramaturgs as it was about between the artists and each other and they often left connecting with each other afterwards. So I ran that for eight weeks in New York and then... And then LMDA in Boston happened. And I had kind of followed the project online. I saw it on Facebook first and was curious about it and thought, oh, this is kind of cool. And then met Jeremy at LMDA in Boston last year and we talked a little bit. And then I think on Facebook you had posted that you weren't sure that the project was gonna continue. Is that right? Yeah. And so being a little crazy, I said, what a week, bandit! And I'd love to do it in Baltimore and D.C. And he was like, oh, okay. And then you had a conversation with Amy, I think, right? And talked about bringing it to Philly. And in the spirit of the commons, which these conversations are curated in that we just populate the guest list, but it's open to anybody in person or online. We kind of didn't really plan talking points and just kind of wanted to, I guess, have a back and forth and then open it up to you. And we also have people here who have attended as guests and then have shown up as just participants. So Kirsten, Linda, Lisa Wild is somewhere. Yeah, feel free, please, speak up and share your experiences too. Amy, is there anything you wanna say before? Yeah, I'd just like to point out that it was interesting how, although it's the same project in each of the cities, each of the city had its own distinct flair and its own distinct experience. And I think that's something that long-term, if there is a long-term, would be really interesting as to kind of dramaturg each region, who's showing up, what are they talking about, is there a pattern to that, right? And then online, I mean, we've gotten contributions from abroad, but I think something that's really important and what we first connected all of us over is the spirit of open access, which is what really excites me about projects like this, what you're doing and thinking about leadership and who's at the table, what that invitation is, and Wiccatergy again, is we're all here at LMDA, whether in spirit, physically, on HowlRound, or on Twitter, because we wanna be a part of the conversation and we wanna push it forward. And that is important to us. If the criticism, one of them, is about dramaturgy is going to be, we're the gatekeepers and we say no and we're inaccessible and the pipeline, d-d-d. I think it's really powerful for theater artists just to put themselves out there and say, here we are, talk to us and we want to get to know you. And we have seen powerful things come out of that. Writers meeting the literary manager that's curating a writer's group and that person becoming a part of it. And I have to also say thank you, you, to LMDA because, as Jeremy noted, it's volunteer. But I was commuting back and forth from Baltimore and DC and then also, I think it's really powerful that dramaturgs were volunteering their time. It's also really important, personally I think, to compensate our artists. So I applied for and got at the LMDA dramaturg-driven grant so I was able to compensate with small token, small stipend and acknowledgement and a coffee for each of our guest dramaturgs this spring. Anything else? Yeah, I mean, I haven't gotten to talk to either of these ladies about what this past semester of open office hours looked like. So I'd love to hear, I'd love to talk a little bit about who was showing up in New York and specific outcomes I noted and then hear from them just quickly. So we get a lot of, you know, I wasn't sure who would show up to the project. Who in New York is without the network of artists yet that they would show up to meet strangers? It's a lot of early career artists who haven't yet found their network. It's a lot of people who are also entering theater from another field who have had another job and have either retired or are moving into theater and then occasionally people who are already in my network. Attendance has stayed pretty steady as awareness has grown but what I've noted is that the awareness that's happening about the project and about dramaturgs in general seems to be happening outside of who's actually in the room that I think the goal of increasing accessibility is unrelated actually to the attendance that I know people are spreading the word about the project, people are aware of it who I've never met. Hopefully that's increasing accessibility regardless of whether or not they're actually choosing to attend in person. The other conversation I'm also happy to say that I think we have started to progress is the one with the dramatist guild about the role of dramaturgs. I had reached out to them about publicizing the project. I'd gone sort of a terse email response. I ended up blogging about that in one of the weeks. That blog was responded to in the dramatist guild publication in an article I can say was error filled and I think poorly argued but I believe that that article was the impetus for the event in Utah that was a dramatist guild L&DA co-hosted event. Martine, I don't know if she's in here could maybe corroborate that that inspired that. So the fact that that conversation is progressing I think we had a little bit to do with and so I'm happy about that. We had in Baltimore the local DG rep reached out and is curious about it and is wanting to make it kind of a group event in the same way that we had an LMDA mini meetup at one of the sessions in the fall. So I think it's really important and whether people show up or not the gesture, the spirit of being there and being available is so important. So we consider it a success whether 50 people show up, which has never happened or zero show up and there's always the conversation online and for me since you asked about this spring semester it's been much more active online on Twitter. I think that's just the nature of summer people wanna have vacation and semesters winding down and people are going out of town and all that kind of stuff. But I think it's gaining traction and it's getting more on people's radars and part of this too, you noticed it was one now there are three, actually five because two people aren't here but we're also really curious about who of you and out there online are wanting to bring it to your city. Right, so office hours and happy hour everywhere, yay. In Philly this spring we also did not have the best attendance which might have been the timing or it might have been our location and talked away on the third floor of a theater that was kind of off the beaten path but it really gave me a chance to kind of bond with my dramaturg who was there with me so it was kind of a chance to check in with another dramaturg every week and find out what she, it was always a woman was doing with her projects and just a chance to really like touch base and kind of strengthen the dramaturgy community in Philly. Early career dramaturgs if you look in for a way to expand your network, here you go. I mean, it's just really all it is in terms of setup is picking the dates which we kind of do because they happen simultaneously at least in the Northeast where we're all in the same time zone. Seeing who's out there and it doesn't have to be just dramaturgs. We've talked about inviting designers, directors who think really dramaturgically the panel this morning about designers and dramaturgs they would be great guests, the criticism panel. Let's have a critic, right? Let's have that conversation. I mean, I think, yes, it's about populating and having a conversation around dramaturgy and inviting guests so that it's not just that one voice over and over again that there's multiple perspectives and voices and conversation but I think as we think about expanding as we're having this conversation about what is dramaturgy, right? That question that's always there that we can also think about that in terms of who's coming and who are we reaching out to? So, ECDs, I totally encourage you. This is a way you can, what was the panel name, take charge? All right. Thank you. Thank you. What a great panel of hot topics. This was wonderful. And I just am excited in this capacity of thinking from the standpoint of the U Caucus and where do we go from here? Both through the rest of this weekend but also for future conferences. Ideas are kind of mulling and it has been mulling over the last couple of days in terms of future sessions, about bringing up new sessions on best practices and how are we teaching dramaturgy these days, how in sessions that have already existed in terms of designers, in terms of critics, in terms of possible future sessions about writing and such and how we can engage with each other and to connect to each other as well. So I'm really quite thrilled to hear what you all are doing and to see how they're working together and dialoguing or speaking out on what we've heard so far this year but what we are even talking about what to do from here on out. So I just wanted to say thank you for all that. I was inspiring and just to throw out some phrases that resonated with me and then maybe if any of you wanna respond to these or others with questions that you have. And just starting from that source of what Mark said about seeking to know the source of your discomfort and feeling like some of these projects have come out of what that irritation might have been or resentment might have been and what that stirred, what that curiosity was and look what we have up here. So I'm so glad you're all tapping into that discomfort and getting to know the world better, as Mark put it. So just things that popped out, agency, leadership, being at the table, pushing the conversation forward. What if we, what if we, why not, why can I? There is no try. Be one, be irritated, complain, sing your aria, embrace change, generate, do your own homework, follow your curiosity. If you wanna read plays with students, get the plays. Teach what you haven't taught before and none of these are what Christian was saying dramaturgy doesn't need to be which is responsive or semi-artistic or supportive. There's a great guy on Woodby Island where I used to live and he would always say if you wanna change the culture, throw a better party. So I'm so glad you guys wanna throw one and can't wait to see you at it. So we're gonna turn this over for questions. Yes, we're gonna see. If you all have any questions about what's going on, anything about what they're speaking out on, probably got about 20 to 25 minutes and then we will kind of leave the last few minutes to find out if there are any hot topics that are floating around out there. And remember, you can throw your hot topics on Twitter as well using the hashtag LMDA15, so. Hello, hello. I am on sabbatical in the spring and the project that I am working on is, I guess it's dramaturgy or whatever. I'm going to the Republican and Democratic nominating committees and starting gen one, I guess, depending on how the candidates suss themselves out, I'll be following one of them from each side. So my question for the group and something that I'm trying to piece together myself is, what are the things that you guys think I should be doing while I'm heading down that path? What would you like to be hearing from or what are the questions that you have for a little dramaturge running through the political system and I'll be applying for a Bly grant to pay for bail. That's really what. So if I'm actually really, I'm trying to shape the project. So help me reverse engineer from Philadelphia and Cleveland. What are the things that you want to answer about both the theatricality of the political system and then the nuts and bolts of it? Mark, I just wanted to say about irritability, that someone said that from irritation, the oyster makes the pearl, which I always thought was a great thing. Christian, you were talking about how we get put down and we're supportive and no one sees our creativity. I think there is a thing that dramaturges are, it can feel like an invisible art, but I totally advocate people making very strong records of what they do and having those available for other people to see. Like with Mark Bly's book, production notebooks, you read it and you see exactly what the dramaturge did. And so for everyone, like in my own practice, I record everything I do, I document it in every way I can. So when someone wants to know what I do, I just say, I'll send you the file which shows you what I did for these three plays and it's very obvious. And then I don't have to tell them, I just say, that's what I do. I also say, I'm workshopping this, come and watch me work. That's see me do it. Like those are two of the most obvious ways to make what you do visible. Thank you. Hi, just a quick question for the open office hours. Do you want to expand internationally? Like to Canada? Yeah, okay, let's chat later. Okay, cool. Ditto for Kansas City. This is also for open office dramaturgy project but for the group at large, because this is a recurrent trend I'm noticing. It would be great to hear more about ways that you're taking a dramaturgical mindset and bringing it to venues outside of traditional settings. Well, I'll just say that when we had an exhibit in the library when we opened the archive this February and we did a little reading from the introduction of Moira Bafini's collected plays. She has a little section of her introduction where she talks about why she loves theater and one of the things she says is anywhere we put on a play is a theater, right? And the head of librarian when we were doing that said, oh, maybe we should start doing some readings in the library. I was like, yes, maybe we should. The library is a theater, right? Anywhere you put on the play is the theater. And so I guess that's what I want to say is do the open office hours. Also do the plays, right? In those spaces. Yeah. With the writers, yeah, bring the writers to the open office. Our project, love it. What is that, like, where two or more are gathered? I am there, I'm getting a little biblical. But yeah, just I think gathering outside of spaces. And I should mention too that in Baltimore and D.C. it was in partnership and partly in support, supported by Center Stage. So Jeremy this time around has also been kind of exploring, like, hopping around different sites. So bringing dramaturgy outside of the theater, to coffee shops, to universities, to, yeah, libraries, all over. And it's been really interesting to encounter. There was one time, I think it was with you, Linda, right? Where we were at a bar and we were just having a nice little conversation and this woman walked by, dressed really nicely, walked by and then stopped and backtracked and did a double take and she said, are you a table full of dramaturgs? And we said yes. And she said, what? Get out of town. What are you doing here? And we said, where are the office hours? Come join us. And she said, well, I'm a patron at Arena Stage. And Linda was the literary manager. So it was really interesting to encounter somebody that you would normally encounter outside of the workplace and just, you know, how that conversation shifted. And I think it's really interesting, the comment that was made earlier about the unpublished nature of the manuscript making a difference. The offsite nature, I think, of the conversation also makes a difference. So I, I don't, that didn't really respond to your question or most, but kind of maybe. Dan, I just wanted to throw out there in terms of how to teach literary manager, literary management and a lot of the young people that are coming up that are interning for me and things like that, they just don't have the confidence in how to have a conversation, to ask the right questions, to encourage, to provoke in good ways, to let uncomfortableness sit or not knowing for a while sit, right? And so to, I'm wondering if there might be room to model conversations so that they can start witnessing those and observing them, what works, what doesn't in those conversations, missed opportunities. And then also practice having those themselves. And then another thing that I thought might be useful is how to pitch a play. So to advocate for a play and how to get behind it and very succinctly and powerfully and actively be able to advocate for a play, you know, with other directors and artistic directors and things like that. So to practice that. Thanks Megan, yeah, I think, you know, I think Skype will be a powerful tool for this course if anyone wants to volunteer to Skype and maybe I can even find some money for that. Ha ha ha. In response to Christian's question about how we can stop waiting for an invitation to the party and start our own better party, I had one thought that there must be people doing what we do for theater and playwrights for film and TV and screenwriters. And maybe we should invite them. And radio and online video. Yeah, we're, I mean, one of the things that we're working on within this program anyway, as a closer relationship with the film department, there's a joint effort between theater and film and TV writing actually, which is most largely connected to the screenwriting and playwriting programs but my longer term interest is to get the drama talks involved in that. It is true that people, dramaturgs are people with a dramaturgical sensibility do work in those fields, I think, but also most often as generative artists and they're not necessarily hiring dramaturgs to work in those fields simply as responsive artists either. So I think the question is how do we train dramaturgie students to also be people who are gonna pitch their pilot and write their pilot. I know that sort of the separation, the historic, the frequent separation of identities between writer and dramaturg I think need to be blurred back together that people, a lot of dramaturgs and certainly when I was studying dramaturgie I was often, the frequent accusation was like, oh, you're just a frustrated playwright. That's why you became a dramaturg, which was not the case for me. I have no interest in being a playwright at all and I'm not good at it. But many of our students are interested in that. So why shouldn't they be both? And why shouldn't they develop an interest in TV writing if they have it so that they could go be a showrunner and pay off their student loans much more quickly? You know, yeah. Oh, so I was, both what Diane said and what Dan said resonated with me. I was teaching my undergraduate dramaturgs this year and I partnered with Company One in Boston and they, first of all, skyped the Artistic Director Sean LaCount into our class to talk to them about what they were looking for and then they all read plays that had legitimately been sent to Company One and learned how to respond to them and the fact that they were actually being listened to gave this huge sense of agency to the class and this greater understanding of what dramaturgie was and because Company One is such a young, vibrant company that really wanted their input, it was a great match. So as an idea for literary management. Hi, this is maybe for Steve but also something Christian maybe you and I can talk about. There's a new book coming out, Lenora Brown, her second book, which is called New Play Development, How to Facilitate Creativity for Dramaturgs, Playwrights and Everyone Else. And it talks a lot about what she calls active, active dramaturgie. So that might be, I think it's coming out in a month or so. So that might be something that would be good for you. Just a note for Diane and actually also a question. I want to really commend you for mentioning that you paid the writers for the use of their scripts when you probably could have gone away with a nice educational use exemption and as someone who works exclusively with young writers, how much that probably meant to them. Before my question, one thing you might want to think about is someone who distributes scripts. All my scripts have a watermark across every single page saying where it came from and who it's for. So if it gets into someone else, to make it really clear to anyone who reads my scripts that this is for you, kind of like when you get screeners from the film industry, it has your name at the bottom of them, makes it really clear like if you see this and you're not part of this group, you got it illegally. So some of you might want to consider, might make the agents feel a little bit better too. But I want to know how much did you pay them? Can you talk about how much you paid them and did you get any feedback from Playwrights about what that meant to them? I didn't get any specific feedback from Playwrights about getting paid. Did you ask how I made that happen or? How much? How much did I pay? Okay, let me see if I can remember. So I charged the students $56 to take the class. That was based on the assumption that they would be getting 14 plays and they would be paying $4 for 14 plays. We ended up getting more plays. So we just ended up dividing the money amongst the Playwrights. It was complicated because I had to have W2 forms for everybody. I had to get our administrative assistant to communicate with the business office and oh my goodness, oh my goodness. There was one really embarrassing moment when an agent received a check for a Playwright that was made out to Playwright in parentheses care of such and such an agency. So ha, whoops. You know, I mean, so there were some of those administrative complications, but yeah, I actually asked the students, I had them take a survey at the end of the class and I asked them if they thought that they should pay Playwrights to be able to use their manuscripts and the majority of them said yes. And actually, I felt like that in itself was a little bit of a victory. There were 14 students in the class. It was a range of students from people who were interested in dramaturgy, people interested in playwriting, performers, technical directors, designers, stage managers. It was, so it wasn't just specifically dramaturgy. We got about five minutes left. We can take a few more questions or if anyone has any other hot topics that are going on, let's see how many we can squeeze in within these last five or so minutes. Thank you. Hi, my name's Ben Coleman. I'm gonna actually, on the topic of payment and things, I have a question that I guess is mostly for Christian and Dan, though I think it applies to a lot of, I think it's just a general question about the sustainability of working in this field and working in literary management and dramaturgy because I think we're all probably a little bit deranged to take this on as a profession and a career, but we obviously all do it out of intense passion and love for it. But it's oftentimes a line of work that requires an advanced degree or that people ask for an advanced degree and oftentimes hours and hours and months on end of interning for free for jobs that are scarce and jobs that are underpaying. And I've been told before, why pay you X amount of dollars when we can pay somebody else half that salary who has their exact same credentials. And so I wonder how we go about existing in this world and then also this is a second part of this question which I think is a little bit more tricky and dovetails I think with some of the diversity questions that we were talking about yesterday. And this is probably also coming from somewhere on the younger end of the spectrum, but it seems to me that in order to be able to afford to do these internships, take on these low paying jobs and everything like that, a lot of the people who are filling these positions are people who have some sort of other income stream or other like ways of getting money. And is that a way that we are keeping the institution, this problematized institution where we're saying it's all like, you know, for black, blanketing here but saying like old white men, that kind of thing, you know, where we feel like we're, are we only letting people in who are coming from a sort of privileged background to work in, because they're the only people who can afford to like to work for this kind of money. Here it is, I have so many thoughts about that. I think one thing that, the first thing that I wanna say though is that by way of your first question about like, how do we do this and oh my God, it's so bleak. I mean, that's actually why I'm asking all these questions. It's not, I actually don't wanna be the guy who's positioning myself like the professor I referred to who made me feel so frustrated. Cause I don't think it's dire. I think there's every reason in the world to be studying dramaturgy. I think the number of storytelling platforms in the culture that actually can, that are, that might provide a living for people who understand story and have stories they wanna tell and know how to collaborate and know how to generate work are just growing. I mean, there's more and more opportunities to apply dramaturgical skills in the culture, I think. And I think there's more and more value placed on people who understand how to do that. In the, what I'm talking about is these traditional the institutional theater as it exists or as it's evolved through, you know, in this country in the not-for-profit movement and the fact that it's rigid structure has created a situation where it is so hard to sustain the organizations that there are these jobs which are largely middle management that don't necessarily compensate people particularly well and don't offer a lot of room for growth. I think that's where I'm trying to crack open the conversation about why study this subject and why I actually don't, I try as much as I can actually not to fall back into the habit of calling my students dramaturgs. I call them dramaturgy students and to me it's an important semantic difference because I don't necessarily see them tracking into those jobs. It's not that they can't, they can get them and they want them and they get them and they can afford to do them. Great, I'm all for it. It's not that I'm trying to steal people away from sort of the traditional modes. It's just that I want them to be thinking more broadly about it and to be thinking about how other storytelling platforms or art forms actually might offer them the same kind of creative satisfaction that the theater does because the theater, the establishment, the theater establishment is obviously slower to change or as slow to change almost as academia is frankly. So rather than wait for the institutions to change or to find yourself suddenly flush with cash and able to afford a job that has a glass ceiling, do something else and pursue or find your way back into the theater through a back door. So that doesn't really answer like how do I do this? But that's what I just want to sort of put it out there that I'm not trying to just paint in a bleak picture of what the world is. I actually think it's a really good time to be studying this. I'm what I'm trying to do is try to figure out what I need to be teaching or what my colleagues need to be teaching and what adjuncts like Morgan that I need to be having on board to kind of help advance this conversation about how we're gonna apply these skills and how we're gonna stop within a dramaturgy program populated with other disciplines or within a theater program populated with other disciplines, trying to batter them into understanding what a dramaturgy is and just do it. Just perform acts of like, just be the thing and just produce the work, create the creative teams, have the idea, book the space, get the director to show up on time and stop waiting for them to ask you to come to the party. So that anyway, that's all I have to say. Yeah, I'm struck by what your professor had said to you as well about the field of dramaturgy and leading management because that's the same thing people are saying about PhDs right now, right? The PhD is a degree that is not just training you to be a college professor, but all we're doing is training you to be a college professor. And so I think that humanities have been in crisis since at least the 1970s and the theater has been dying since at least 1640. So if we're gonna be continuing, but yet we persevere, right? Yet we have a job as a college professor. You know, so I mean it is something that can happen. I don't know again, right? I don't know, I mean I came out of college with $17,000 in student loan debt, which, and then I stayed in graduate school and deferred those loans for a really long time. And I don't know how possible that is for students coming out with more debt than that now, right? I think that the limits have been raised and whatnot and I think that's a really problematic situation. So I don't have a solution for that, but yeah. I just wanna say in terms of internships, I absolutely agree. There are theater companies out there that do offer like housing and stipends, they're rare, they do exist. And I met one of them, Center Stage is just incredible for that. And I have, you know, my cohort is from Mississippi and California and Portland, like all over. So they are really great. And, you know, there's an incredible amount of hands-on in that building and some brilliant minds. Gavin Witt, for example. And then, you know, OSF has fair. I mean, these programs exist and I don't know all of them, otherwise I would totally name drop. But they're there. But also, you know, create your own work and LMDA has grants too. Dramaturg, Driven Grant, there's that one grant, forgot the name about like, you know, projects that don't have dramaturgs that could use one. Wait, what is it? The residency, look at that. Keep the dialogue going, just not right now. We're out of time. I want to say if you would like to be a presenter on a future hot topics, please keep an eye out on the call in the beginning of the spring for future conferences. If you are interested in receiving, looking at resources from past and present from your fellow dramaturgs, check out the website, lnda.org, especially as a member, you have exclusive access to volumes of the LMDA source book, of bibliography, of the guide of colleges and universities which we're planning to update within the next year or so if I'm now with the website up and strong. And otherwise, come talk to these people. Let them know if you want to help them or support them or argue with them and keep the dialogue going. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you to all of our presenters. Fabulous conversation, thank you. 20 seconds, if these are yours, come find me. If you are a board member, the board meeting now is in the meeting off of the faculty room. 90 minutes ago, some crazy woman got up here and said we were moving the afternoon events into the faculty room. I don't know what she was thinking, we're not. Everything is exactly as it is in the schedule. Thanks for being here, enjoy lunch. See you at 2.30.