 It's been changing a lot because Kevin's been trying to put different twists on, you know, like different locations, not necessarily theatres setting on. I heard it with him. I mean, from what I can tell in the last couple of years, it feels like it's maybe getting a little harder. Yeah. Good afternoon, everybody. I mean, I look at the picture. We've got kind of an open mic forum today. And just to give you a little bit of an idea before we get into our general announcement of what this is about. Essentially, in the past few years, we've had you guys share information with us, links, publications, groups, theatre companies, anything like that, that you had success or love with. And yeah, and then you can just kind of jot them down as you need them. But also, this is still going from a column realm, so you'd be able to check in their archives if there's anything that you missed. And go back through and take it that way. But if you do have, you know, no paper, you might want to take it out and listen. So yeah, so think about that for a little bit and let that stew, and then we've got a few more announcements. And then we'll call you guys up. We'll have just an open mic and we'll just form a line up this way here. And then just say your piece and then, obviously, then we'll continue on. But here's Kevin with someone else down. Welcome to Friday, you guys. It's going really fast. I wanted to talk just a little bit. We're going to send out a survey right after the conference is over. It's an email survey. It doesn't take too long to fill out, but it's immensely helpful for us to get feedback. There's a number of different areas of the conference that it helps us adjust things. We've taken it every year. We've been able to change the conference and make it better, make it stronger on how we do it. We always get great ideas from you. So we really appreciate it if you can fill that out and send it back. And it's always helpful too. There's a place in the survey, but if you, whatever experience you've had, if you feel strongly about it, one way or the other, if you can send an email about that, we're able to use a lot of those emails to help generate more interest and support from the Omaha community and the people who fund this. And it's been very, very effective for them to hear from you about how this week may have affected your work, your lives, et cetera. So that's a huge favor if you have the time and energy to afterwards that it would be great. Oh, no, I don't, but I can, do you want to grab one? I might do it. To do the surveys, in front of you guys on the tables, there is one that is kind of necessary for us. It's from the communities in Nebraska who wants to know your reaction to this program so we can continue to provide high quality offerings and actually require this specific feedback from you guys. So just as people are giving their steal up here, you can just fill that out and leave it on the table and we'll come around and collect those. Yeah, there's some information at the bottom you can fill it out. So, a couple of other things, just general announcements. We're starting to get some stuff in for the play slam. A couple of things about that too is just keep in mind the shorter the pieces, the more people are involved. And if there are duplicates, if you guys put in two things, we're just going to do one. Just for fairness and for time so everybody gets a voice. So if you put two things in there, I'll just do the first one that you put in. But again, even 10 minutes can take a lot of time away from people. So even like five pages is probably ideal for that type of thing. Let's see, also, let's see. Andrea wanted to talk a little bit about tonight's event here. Smalls all over, but I can tell. So don't shake my hand. I have questions about the fringe tonight. So this is a little description and also a formal invitation to please come to the fringe tonight. It will be a conglomeration of performances by various people who have attended the conference over past years, as well as local companies, actors, people. It will be all over the campus. It will wander, you will hike, you will see lots of awesome sort of crazy things. You might love them, you might hate them, but they will all be short enough to move past as soon as they're done. And it's going to bring the house down. So you should come. Thank you. And I feel like there was something more I should tell. But if you have questions, ask, but it's going to be fun. It's going to be loose. It's fly by the seat of your pants. It's been pulled together sort of long distance a couple months ago, but really most of it has happened this week. So just come with a spirit of fun. Where should we start? You should start down, probably downstairs outside this building. That's where the bus will bring you if you're coming on the bus and then everyone else should kind of gather there. And it will be made apparent where to go from there. Can I also say my one thing, my open my thing really quickly? Yeah. Okay. Really my new favorite website. And some of you probably know this is Capsule K-A-P-S-U-L. And it's a really awesome way to work with collaborators long distance and share photos and videos and text and all sorts of things so that if you're just looking for visual and reference material that you can all put in one place, you can create these castles. And it's awesome. And I love it. And so check it out. K-A-P-S-U-L.com Great. Let's see. One more thing that I missed is general announcement wise. The departure schedules and drivers are available downstairs at the registration desk. So if you need to be reminded or find that out at all, it's down there. Let me see. And then, yeah, I think that's it for general announcements. I've got a couple of things just to point out too. You might have noticed downstairs there were some scripts. Jason Aaron Goldberg who was here last year does some micro-publishing under Original Works. And do you know? What's that? Look, Original Works Publishing. Original Works Online. Yeah, Original Works Publishing. Yeah, it's online. And then also there's a flyer down there too for local theater, the Shelter Belt. They do original work. There's a couple of vignette shows that they do each year. All of them for good 10-minute plays. One about Halloween Shelter Skelter is the name of that one. And that's been a tradition in town for a long time. And then they also do kind of a pseudo love story from Shelter Belt of Love. Originally it was kind of more romantic stories, but they've broken that into just, you know, general heartwarming pieces basically. And that is Shelter Belt.org. And again, there's a flyer downstairs as well with support for the information you guys can take. So we can start just lining up. There's no hands are necessary. So if anybody has some goodness to share, come on down. I should say that Original Works Publishing is actually published a number of playwrights that they found here at the conference when Jason was here at the conference. And a number of playwrights who were here before he got here that he just found. And we have a couple of those publications down on the table below. But he's constantly looking for new playwrights to publish whose works fit within what he's trying to do every day, every Monday. I think he does free play Monday, which you can go on and get a hold of a free script from him, something that he's worked on. So he's a very active, vibrant guy, trying to get this independent publishing for playwrights going. So that's a great resource. One thing I guess if you want to try and keep moving quickly so everybody can get resources in. If you have something, you want to kind of just form a line, you know, when it goes down to two or three people, the next person can come up and just hang out so that you're ready to get right back up to the mic with the next person. I'm not even sure, Aaron, are we how-rounding? We are. Okay. Welcome to the National Audience Senate. So David, are you? I do. You've got one? All right. This is just a, how many drama skill members do we have here? Raise your hand. Just a few. Okay. Well, the drama skill is having its second national conference, August 22nd through 25th in Chicago. If you're not a member of the Guild, you should join the Guild. I'm the Missouri Field Representative. Hello. And at this year's conference in Chicago, August 22nd, you can ask me more about it. And I'll give you more. The following things the artists are invited, Gretchen Crier, Rebecca Gillman, they're invited and they're coming. Gretchen Crier, Rebecca Gillman, David Ives, Lisa Crom, Martha Lady, Terrence McNally, Marsha Norman, Theresa Rebeck, Steven Schwartz, Jeff Sweet, John Wyand, and George Seawolf, and many, many, many others. So if you're not a member of the Guild, come join us. It's a really exuberant experience. And if you want more information about that, I'd be happy to share it. I'm David Crespi. And my email is crespi.edu and Missouri.edu. David, I think the price goes up tomorrow, doesn't it? And yes it does. The price goes up very soon. Who said that? Where are you? There you are. I think it goes up tomorrow. It goes up tomorrow for the conference. Join today. Join today. Join your Guild that's out fighting for you. And it's also, it's going to be the only place where you'll get a major resource directory that the Dramatist Source Book is going to be stopping soon. And yes, and the Dramatist Guild's Playwright Resource Guide will be the only current guide and will be updated constantly. And it'll be available online. What is the guide? It's the Artist Resource Guide. So if you're not a member of the Guild, now's the time to join. Okay. All right. Bye. We're talking about small publishing. I also wanted to mention a really great small performance text publishing company called Fifty Third State. I think they've now been subsumed by TCG, which actually makes it easier. It was just two women running it. And so it would take a while for you to get the plays. But they publish a lot of performance text that might not be published otherwise because of being problematic in different ways. And it's Fifty Third, it's 53rdstate.org. And I don't know about whether they're taking submissions or how that's working yet at this point. But if you want to read some new sort of non-traditional work, that's a great place to find, great place to find it. They publish some of my plays and also Eric End and Miguel Gutierrez, who's a really great choreographer who uses text in non-traditional ways. And Erin Courtney and Corinne Keithley, she started it out just self-publishing on lulu.com, which is another really great resource. If you want to self-publish, it's really easy and inexpensive to do that now. And the other one, there's three more. McDowell Colony, everybody please apply to the McDowell Colony. They also have started, I think they're starting a new thing for device theater. So if you're interested in device theater or you make device theater, it's a wonderful artist retreat for all the different artistic disciplines in Peterborough, New Hampshire. And it's because of the way their funding works, it's easiest to get in for the first time. So you may not, even if you're feeling, oh, I'm not qualified, you should still apply because you're actually very likely to get in the first time. And you get artist retreats that last anywhere from a week to eight weeks to choose how long you want to be there. And you get your own studio that's in the woods and no one is allowed to disturb you unless you invite them to. And somebody, the meals are prepared for you. You eat breakfast and dinner in a common area. But then during the day, a little elf brings you an actual picnic basket from the Peterborough basket company filled with your luncheon. And they leave you on your doorstep and run away. You just go out and get it whenever you feel like it. Nobody bothers you. And you actually get an enormous amount of work done there. And it's a great experience if you feel like you want to re-establish the work that you do as being at the center of your life. So I always call it, I need to re-McDowellize and put what I'm doing at the center instead of at the edge where it gets pushed you sometimes. And the other one is, there's two other ones. And I consider them to be sister organizations. One is in New York and one is in Minneapolis. And New York is the new dramatists. And in Minneapolis is the Playwright Center. They are organizations that support playwrights and that don't ask really anything in return. The Playwright Center has all different ways to be involved. They have a core writers group. They have different fellowships, commissions, residencies there. And it's up playwrightcenter.org I think is the website. It's either that or pwc.org. It's probably playwrightcenter.org. Anyway, you can Google it and find it. And you can just see the different grants and all that kind of stuff that they have on there. They're also connected with the Jerome Foundation in a number of ways. And they're very, very supportive. And it's in a church, an old church in Minneapolis, as is New Dramatists. It's also in an old church in New York City. And they have residencies that are seven years long. Their application process is very competitive, but it's now all online. You have to do all this printing out of scripts and making this package and everything had to be bound in a certain way. It was a total nightmare, but it's actually a lot easier to apply now. It also means that there's a lot of people applying, but it took me 10 years to get in. But man, once I did, everything changed really quickly. So I just made it my business habit to apply. I think the deadline is September 15th every year. And everyone should be applying every year. And I finally got in three years ago, and I'm able to see who's applying. So I want to see all your names on the list this year. On September 15th, I'm going to hunt you down. Because it's really the greatest thing that could happen to a player of absolutely seven years of total support. You know, I didn't even think to say, we've been saying all week that we're doing the national broadcast in partnership with HowlRoundTV. Just in case anybody doesn't know, HowlRound is an incredible platform for the theater community in this country. There's amazing writing going on. It's kind of a somewhat open portal. Anybody can send in essays, thoughts about things that are really affecting them in their work in theater in the country. And it's curated from the staff there. So it's not a guarantee that your writing is necessarily going to get them. But a lot, every day there's at least one new piece of writing up there. And I've read some really beautiful, progressive, very insightful essays there. It's not to see some people shaking their heads. So it's just a great, great organization. Their work is really wonderful. If you go to HowlRoundTV, VJ is documenting things from across the country conversations in their all archives so you can listen to them at your leisure. So an excellent, excellent group to check out. You can sign up to just get their daily email so you can see what the writing is of the day and really quickly kind of see if it's a topic that you want to go into or not. So anyway, HowlRoundTV. This is a resource for women writers. It's called Hedgebrook Writers Retreat. It's on Woodpey Island in Washington. And their motto really is all about supporting women offering change. And so they are like the McDowell Colony. They give you time and space and it's up to you, you know, how long I think you can go up to eight weeks, I think. And they too, they have amazing chefs who cook you incredible food and support you. And you come together for dinner every night. And the last time I was there, Gloria Stein was in residence. So having dinner, you don't know who the invited guest is going to be there always is one. And they don't teach or do anything. They're just there being writers. But you get to share time and space with all kinds of interesting humans. And yeah, apply to them. They're good. Hedgebrook.org. H-E-V-G-E-V-R-O-O-K.org. I have four from the San Francisco area. So there are a couple organizations. There are a couple theaters that I work with a lot. The first one is Cutting Ball Theater. And annually they have a new place, a new place festival that's called Risk Is This. So go online to cuttingball.com and you can find, you can learn about the theater, but they do, they do experimental work and they envision classics. So they have a regular season, but they also have Risk Is This festival. David Jacoby, you're going to play in the next season, Risk Is This. The second organization I work with a lot is the Bay Area Playwrights Foundation. You can find them at playwrightsfoundation.org. And they, one of the things they do is they host an annual, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, which is, it's different, but it's, again, a new play development organization. And the people there are very accessible and just call them up or email them. That would be a new ruler. And there, it's a two-year-long development lab. It's a great way to meet people from all over the nation as we're doing here, to meet new directors, new actors, you know, playwrights. Let's see, the third one is, there are two artist residency programs in the Bay Area. One is the Gerasi Foundation, D-J-E-R-A-S-I. And just Google Gerasi, and you'll find out. I don't, I think that's not the official name. There's a longer name, but it is Gerasi Foundation, supported by Carl Gerasi and, you know, his peer donors. And that is, I think he can stay anywhere from, I think it's a monthly residency, but it's, again, like McDowell, like Hedgebrook. It's everything, you stay there, all your meals are provided, it's beautiful. And, excuse me, in that residency program, there are all kinds of artists there. There are sculptors, the visual artists, there are dancers, there are filmmakers, composers, writers, novelists, all different kinds. And then there's also the, it's called the Headlands Center for the Arts, which is in Marin County, so across the Golden Age, which is really beautiful. You can Google them and find out about their residency programs. And that's Headlands, H-E-A-D-L-A-N-D-S, Center for the Arts. This is for the teachers out here, especially teachers of undergrad. I'm at UCSD on a graduate program, and every year we have the Wagner New Play Festival, where we do full productions of the MFA's work. But one, it's about 10 days, but one of those days we take time to dedicate one reading to an undergraduate student from anywhere in the country, who has written a play on the African-American experience. It's called the Floyd Japanese Playwriting Competition. And this year, I mean, we happily had a winner, but we didn't have a lot of applications. So I guess we'd like to get the word out there. You get $1,000, you get flown in, and the Wagner Festival, we have a lot of literary managers, agents and directors from around the country that we invite as guests. So these undergraduates, very early on in their writing stage, can have a really great reading and then have a discussion and have meals with a lot of prominent artists. So it takes place in April, and they're flown to San Diego. It's a really great experience. Once again, it's called the Dr. Floyd Japanese Playwriting Competition, and more people definitely need to apply for this. I have two resources. One of them is called the Playwright Inge, which I, some of you may have heard several of us talking about. I know Crystal from there. I found out that Kyle is not there. Are there any of the Alps on the Mary Inge? Okay. So the Playwright Inge is a Yahoo group. It's a, there are two challenges. It's a research sharing, but also there are two challenges each year during March and in September to do script submissions, one a day for the entire month. And everybody sort of reports in as they're doing it and sort of egg each other on. And it's an amazing way to get in a lot of script submissions. And so you also, and then throughout the year people also sort of post other opportunities that happen or inform you of places that might not be so great. And also report in about anything that they might have had from the Playwright Inge. So you can just go to Yahoo and search the Yahoo groups for a Playwright Inge. The other one, I'm actually a board member of the International Center for Women's Playwright. And that is at womenplaywright.org. It is not just for women, but it does support women's playwrights. They have a listserv that is very, very active and very supportive. It gives advice and it has very, sometimes heated conversations, but also it just generally, at any time that you have a production happening in one city, it is very possible that somebody might host you or might do a meet-up so that you can meet other people who are in the city. So it's a very, very supportive group. We also, I am the co-chair of a new award through that organization called the 5050 applause awards, which highlights theater companies throughout the entire world that have produced women's playwrights in at least 50% of a given season. We actually just closed the nominations for that right before our left, which is rather challenging. But we're going to be sort of going through the process and announcing recipients in September. And then we'll have, hopefully, another one next year. But the research part was very interesting and so if you do happen to know of theater companies that did that for this past year, note that theater companies that are particularly dedicated to women's work are not eligible. But if you do know of theater companies that have produced women playwrights in more than 50% of their season, this past one was 2012 to 2013, you can feel free to email me. Only ICWP members are able to nominate. But I'm happy to start putting people on a list for next year. Great, it looks like there's a ton that's going on out there. Let's see, continuing theme, Magdalena for Women in the Arts. It's a collective that's woman-centric. It's based in Europe, but it's really global. They include writing, but also performance directing. They have a... They're footed strongly in the Olden Theater Project in Denmark, which is a... Gritofskin and kind of anti-text, but brilliant anthropologically. Magdalena for Women in the Arts. The MAP Fund, which you must all know about, it's one of the finest, large sources of funding for new work that's out there, and their deadlines are generally in September. La Mama Umbria, they have a directing and acting and a playwriting workshop that they conduct every summer. I'm heading up the one this summer. You have to pay to get yourself over there, isn't it? It ain't free, but it's nice that food is in credit. And Cataphysics is an organization that Magdalena and I have both worked in, and they run a fantastic series of workshops. They're... I think they're still under the umbrella of the Flea Theater in New York. And lastly, again, if you're on the West Coast, she's based in the Bay Area, but she really gets around. If you want a really kind of vitalizing, light practice and writing workshop, check out Sharon Bridgeport, and she has a workshop. She calls the River Sea Workshop. And she has her own website, Bridgeport with no E, V-R-I-D-G-F-O-R-T-H, a teacher I'd recommend. It's Mark Costello who's going to talk about the shared drive. Seriously, though, the sign-up sheet is downstairs. We can be a resource for one another. Anybody who puts plays up, I know I'm first going to try and respond as many as possible. I'm a new play dramaturge, so I enjoy doing that sort of work. So sign up for it. I'll put you in the shared drive. We can share work together, so we can start being a group resource. Thank you, Mark. I wanted to mention one resource that's a little bit tangential for playwrights. It comes to playwrights in a sort of a bleak angle, but it's called the Edgerton Foundation for New American Plays. And they're sort of a secret society. I don't think they have a website, but if you Google Edgerton, E-T-G-E-R-T-O-N Foundation, you'll see a lot of references. They work closely with PCG. And the way it works is kind of strange. They give grants to theaters that are doing world premieres of new play. So if you have a play that's getting produced and your theater doesn't know about this, the foundation basically is there to supply at least one full extra week of rehearsal for the play with a full artistic company, including a writer. So it's a kind of a weird thing for writers. We argued why the money isn't going directly to the writers, but that's the way they want to do it. And it is based on the theater submitting the plays, and they're chosen on a blind reading. Edgerton. Hello, my name is Doug Patterson. I teach theater at UNO, and I haven't been able to attend a lot of the conference because of a lot of other commitments. But I am directing the piece that follows next of Kelly Smith's Empire's Eternal Boy, and I hope some of you can stay around to see it. There's a wonderful conference that started here in Omaha about 20 years ago called Pedagogy and Theatres of the Impressed. It's based on the educational theories of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian, Augusto Boal, the Theatres of the Impressed, a Brazilian. The basic premise that they follow, which is really simplified and works very well, is that the best relationship of human beings to each other is in dialogue, that theater sort of works in dialogue. And there's an assumption of equality on all sides, that we are basically human beings in dialogue working to create the future together. And if this is our best relationship, the worst is monologue. And one side is in charge. So Freire's approach to education is to engage young people in all learners, in dialogue rather than monologue. Freire's approach is to engage the audience in real, genuine dialogue. Pedagogy and Theatres of the Impressed conference began about 20 years ago. The 19th conference will be, anybody who's in the south Ohio area, will be at a university called Miami University at Oxford, Ohio at the end of June, last part of June, goes to the 27th to the 29th. And if anybody's in that area would like to go to it, stop on by. It's a great event. The next year, the 20th conference will be back here in Omaha. We've had seven here before, where we started. And it'll be, UNO is building the first community engagement center in the United States to link up the university and the community in very concrete ways. And that building will be opening around May of 2014. And the conference, the PTO conference will be the first event in that building. So if people are from on top, think about coming back, or staying around for like another month, yeah. Or people here in Omaha might want to just think about going to that conference as well as to this one. Now, thanks very much. It's all been very exciting here. Kevin, you're on. I just wanted to let you know that the Ingram New Works Lab, the Tennessee Rep, is now taking application. Every year they bring in four playwrights and residents. And the play you'll see here in just a few minutes actually was developed there in 2011-12. They typically work for about nine months. The only requirement is that you actually have to be in Nashville for a monthly meeting. So if you're able to make that trip, it's certainly worth your while. Every January, you're there for a week intensive with their visiting fellow. That's been ranging from this year with Streets of Rebeck. They've had David Albridge, Shandley, Stephen Deets, and others along those lines. So obviously I found it a very worthwhile program. So it's worth a look. You can go to TennesseeRep.org and take a look at it. And I hope you guys have fun. So hey, my name's Jack. I'm in New York at a small off-off Broadway theater company called Nylon Fusion Collective a lot. They just did a play of mine in March. And every few months they do a 10-minute play festival that's usually centered thematically around whatever random holiday is that month. So they do it before the July. They do it for Halloween. They do one for Valentine's Day. So they're always looking for 10-minute plays. They don't have to be specifically about those holidays. The themes are pretty general. There's anything that is remotely related to the idea of independence. We're always looking for plays. The festivals themselves are very fun and laid back for any of you who are in New York. The plays usually got a couple of rehearsals. They usually do it on a Sunday and Monday night or Monday and Tuesday night. But there's an open bar. Lots of sangria. They usually do a couple plays. You drink. You socialize for half an hour. You do a couple more plays. If any of you are in New York and want to come or if any of you have a 10-minute play that you want to see get up, it's a really just great fun opportunity to get it up. And the other thing is that they do also do new full-length plays. Like I said, they just do one of mine a couple times a year. And I've been really wrestling with them over the last couple of years to force them and push them to do more new unknown upcoming playwrights as opposed to well-known playwrights and the better, stronger full-length plays get submitted. The easier it makes it for me to convince them to do new upcoming playwrights. And so just from some of the readings I've seen this week, these are really great strong plays. If anybody wants to send those to Nylon, it just makes that much easier to make that argument that we should be doing new playwrights. And I also happen to be one of the people who reads plays there and decides what we do. It's just nylonfusioncollective.org. I believe it's the website. And if I'm wrong, just google Nylon Fusion Collective and it'll come up. Do you have a line? Yes, if you want to bribe me when you send the script, I'll take bribe. I just thought of two other things. One is that this is just a little bit off topic, but that survey that we're going to send out to you guys later we've got a couple, we're going to have a series of questions on there. Now, as you all know, we're 100% blind submission process. We're in conversations right now about how that process is working if we want to modify it in terms of women and racial minorities. And so there's going to be a series of questions on that survey and a space to write in thoughts and stuff. We're really interested to hear what you think and feel and what you've discovered in your own lives and work with regards to that. The second comes back to the resources thing, which is that a lot of people do use our Facebook page and the connections here to support. There's been numerous numerous people working on other people's productions who have been here hiring designers who have been here actors working with directors playwrights directing other people and there's little kind of bases in every city, New York City has probably got the largest base but LA has got a base, I mean San Francisco is getting a base Seattle is just getting started with Minneapolis but people even we've gotten emails saying last year somebody wrote me and said I moved to LA, I didn't know anybody so the first thing I did was went out on the Great Plains Facebook and said hey I'm moving to LA and got hooked up with an apartment and all these groups and stuff so you can really lean in there's seven years worth of playwrights that have come before you guys that are spread out and they all love to connect so that's been really fruitful so you can lean on that and it's a great way to work through that and then Mark's setting up that resource too I discovered this micro-granting organization called The Awesome Foundation I applied and I didn't get it so I don't know if yeah, but one of the reasons I wanted to suggest it is that the application process was really easy and they seem to respond just based on looking at the website to multidisciplinary found spaces things like that that are a little bit off the beat and I was wondering maybe my production was a little too traditional because they just had some beautiful really interesting creative projects but it's an easy application process I think I don't know if there's a regular granting schedule but they have different branches across the country that you can kind of focus on if your piece is an Omaha-based piece then maybe there's an Omaha office that you can send it directly to there's a Los Angeles office which is what I did but it's a thousand bucks and it could take you I think like a half an hour to fill out the form awesomefoundation.org the resources thank you guys very much you