 Hello. You know, like, I heard the same thing. I'm excited to be an audience member. It was amazing. It was so exciting. It was really exciting! Oh, it is, is it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was terrific. Yeah. I love it. Hi everyone, do you want to take your seats? Hello everybody, we have many more people signed up for this so I suspect people will just keep trickling in and we'll just keep charging up. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm Howard Schellowitz, I'm the Artistic Director of the Willi Neyman Theatre Company here in Washington, D.C. and I'll introduce my fellow panelists in a moment. But if you're anything like me, your blood runs a bit faster when you think about the premiere of Stravinsky's The Right of Spring in 1913 which nearly caused a riot in the theater because of its propulsive musical rhythms and the barbarity of Majidsky's choreography. Or maybe you get a thrill of excitement when you think about reactions that first greeted the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg or the photography of Robert Manfield. The comedy of routines of Dick Gregory or nowadays Leslie Jones. Let's close that. Or, thank you, close that please. Or some of the plays of Jean-Claude Van Isle or Miora Baraka because of their shocking violence or the early works of Susan Laurie Parks because of their strange sifting through layers of history or even the musical hair because of its use of nudity on Broadway. These works of art live within what I like to call the zone of provocation. That range of art which runs the risk of offending some people for the sake of stretching the boundaries of expression stirring up debate on urgent topics or speaking truth to power. These are not the only goals of art but historically they have been among the more important goals of art and they have often been identified with its breakthrough moments. Our goal for the next 90 minutes is to talk about the zone of provocation in the American theater today. We'll hear from some of the creators and producers of three fairly recent projects that arouse significant controversy. We'll try to understand their intentions of their decision making how they manage the public dialogue around these projects and what conclusions they drew for the future. In our short 90 minutes there will also be time for some of you to share additional examples I hope so I encourage you to think of them and finally I hope we can leave some time to talk more broadly about whether the zone of provocation is shrinking or expanding currently and whether there is anything we could or should do about it. I gave a speech on this topic at Ohio State a couple of years ago and maybe just a couple of points can help us frame our discussion. My thesis and it was hardly original was that the zone of provocation is under attack both in the United States and around the world from forces that come from both the right and the left side of the political spectrum. From the right this attack most often takes the form of trying to reduce funding for the arts in general or for specific organizations forcing arts leaders from their jobs or imposing censorship either overly or indirectly. From the left this attack generally takes the form of seeking to impose standards of political correctness by labeling institutions or works of art as unrepresentative or inauthentic or insensitive to particular groups and thereby trying to dissuade others from attending or supporting them. As we witness today the continuing polarization of our nation and our world, the rise of anti-immigrant nationalism and simultaneously the spread of phenomena such as trigger warnings on college campuses, there is every reason to believe that this is not a hard prediction that both of these forces from the left and right will continue to grow in the near future and that artists and art institutions may have an even trickier time navigating within the zone of provocation should they choose to do so. I am especially interested in how the fear of backlash from either the right or the left operates within the minds of writers or artistic directors as they make decisions about what place to create or to introduce. And while we don't have any overt censorship in the United States what kind of internal censorship happens because of our concerns about what board members, funders, subscribers or audiences may think. If we retreat from the zone of provocation I wonder if we run the risk of narrowing the footprint of theater within the larger discourse of our nation. Or conversely, do we need to avoid the zone of provocation so we can protect the footprint of theater within our society two very different ways of thinking about the question. So these are some thorny issues I'd like to think about during our discussion today and I encourage you to be as honest and candid as possible so that we can really learn from one another's experiences and ideas. So now, I want to introduce the members of our panel. To my left is Lindsay Halbaugh, who is the associate producer at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles where she recently produced Sheila Callaghan's Women Laughing Alone with Salad, which we'll discuss. To my far left, Jack Ruler is the artistic director of the Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis and Nataki Gera, to his right, was the director of that theater's production of Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins play Neighbors and some of you, I think, also saw Nataki's production of Brandon's play Octo Rude, which is running right now at Bully Manor. Nataki's also on the theater faculty at Cal Arts where she's associate director of the Center for New Performance. And to my right, Ari Roth is currently the artistic director of the Mosaic Theater here in Washington, D.C. but he was formerly the artistic director of Theater J where he produced the world premiere of The Admission by the very noted Israeli playwright, Moti Lerner, who we're so happy you could join us today from Israel. And I would point out that no less than seven of Moti's plays have been produced by Ari, either at Theater J or at Mosaic. All of them provocative. So let's welcome all of these people. So we've chosen these three projects because they represent three very different kinds of provocation and any one of them might raise objections from the right, the left, or both. Probably both. And all of them certainly represent rather specific challenges to any theater which chooses to produce them. So let's start with you, Lindsay. Can you give us a taste of Sheila Callaghan's playing women laughing along with salad and tell us a little bit about the challenges you faced in deciding to produce it at CTG? Yes, thank you, Howard. So I just wanted to give you a little context about the play for those of you who don't know it. Sheila Callaghan is somebody that we know very well and moved to Los Angeles and attended our Writers Workshop. So this is a group of nine writers that we invite every year to write random plays in our workshop. And she began writing women laughing along salad in that workshop. So we were there for the very first pages of it. She was inspired to write this play which is that typical being when you see a woman laughing, sterically eating a salad on her fork. She's so thin and attractive that she eats salad. And this marketing tool that is used in works to market to women that you eat salad or you eat healthy or you go to yoga, you will be thin and attractive and everyone will want to be you or want you. So there's a whole block dedicated to this. So she's inspired by this meme. And basically the meme came to life. These women came to life out of these memes. And what was interesting about the play is it was done to the point of view of a man and the women in his life. So it really addressed body image, beauty and gender roles. And then in Act Two, some of the women end up playing men and the men play women. So it has almost a very carol Churchill kind of feeling to it in the second act. Extremely vulgar offensive language and extremely vulgar offensive sex acts on stage, masturbating, orgies. So you know, a fun play to read. We got into our office and so I remember reading it and being shocked in a good way where I was like, I have not heard women speak like this on stage before. And so those voices, so her own, so to say. And so I was leaving the play and there was a man in my office and I was like, you guys have your own show, leave this play. And we all read it and we thought, can we actually produce this at center theater room? This is a large organization with a very large subscriber base and donor base and board members. And we went to shock them and offend them a little too much. And eventually it came down to what we thought the play was and why we were going to produce it which was that Sheila was pointing out these sort of marketing tactics and what it meant to be a woman or a man and the way that you're marketed too. And that they are obscene and offensive. That sometimes these ads, the way we're marketed to are obscene. So therefore, why not use obscene and vulgar language to shock or wake the audience up and make them think, oh I can't believe they're saying this and if you really look at those ads, you go, I can't believe they're marketing to us this way. So anyways, I thought we'd read a little tiny excerpt from the show. I'm not a farmer and I hope you are. I'm going to try this. Howard's going to be the part of Guy and I'm going to be the part of Meredith. And this is in a bar. We're in a bar and imagine that I am a pervy voluptuous beautiful woman. Is she skinny? Yeah. Like how skinny? Like so skinny people worry about her. Is she so skinny I could shove her entire body up my ass about any move? You want to shove my date up your ass? Yes I do, okay? Because I'm tired of pretending to be something I'm not. Civilized. Don't make me civilized. Person whose name I don't know yet. I don't want to be your girlfriend. I don't want to fuck your girlfriend while you watch. I want to make her come harder and louder than you ever could. I want you to fear me. I want you to fear you, fear me. I want to lead with my mass. I want the gravity of my circumference to suck you and everyone you love into me. And I want you to stick there against my body like a suction cup. It gets worse. It gets worse. So as we decided to do this play, which was I think a big sort of risk, it felt like a big risk for us, but something that we felt really, it was important for us to do. And so there were preparations and I think that we took place at Santa Vita Group. We definitely made sure in our marketing and our email communication with our subscribers what the show was based upon, who Sheila was as a writer, and that this would be a provocative play. And we often will sometimes give our plays ratings, you know, like what kind of, how old should you be? That's your trigger warning. Yeah. Like in the season team, you know. So well we try, you know, and the funny thing is if you can do all that and you're not guarantee that you're anyone's going to read it. You know, you can send those emails, you can try to put that in your marketing copy and all the, sometimes what we hear is, oh I saw the ad and it looked like a funny play and it was, it's so insulted and shocked. But we tried, you know, we tried to do our very best to prepare the audience. But I think more importantly after comparing them is then the follow-up, what happens afterwards. So something that we've been doing, and I think very successfully so far is having top acts after every show. We have what we call our audience engagement and concierge program. Is that for every play? Every play. We're doing it at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. We have three theatres. At the Kirk Douglas Theatre, we're doing it at every performance. Unless it's like a David Manor play and you can't do that. And then at the table, we're starting to do it as well. So we have a highly trained staff, I think one of our top ministers here he helps lead this program for us. And we have highly trained staff that not only are there at the beginning of the play to have conversations with the audience and they carry their iPads and they also send out reports of the night of conversations that they've had. But then several of them are trained to lead these top acts at the end of every show. So we do it in our lobby, we have a bar, we try to make it very conversational and less about an expert leading a talkbap and work out a conversation amongst the audience. So we allow people who are really perhaps offended or they don't know what they just saw or they want to talk about, they can have a space to talk about it. But also particularly, that's what we do for every play. But on this play, our director is Neil Keller who's an associate artistic director. And I think it was very helpful to have a staff member direct the play because he was so present and available for anything that might have come up all throughout the run. And so he wrote this really beautiful response that could be used for anyone who wrote complaints and we got quite a view. And he wrote this really beautiful response as an artist, why he was drawn to direct this play and why we felt it was important to stage this play. We understood and we heard that people wouldn't be insulted by the vulgarity that they were seeing on stage, but there was a reason why. And so we were able to use his words and reach out to anyone who sent us those sort of letters. Did you, I thought you said you brought a couple of others along? I did. Do you want to see, is there one you can show? I have one here that I thought you might enjoy. So we do audience surveys at the end of every show. I'm sure many of you do that as well. And it's pretty extensive. I just wanted to point out, I have 70 pages here that I just, not that you're not going to, but just so I could refresh myself. And it was very interesting to see the comments about the play. And just keep in mind that on the surveys, for us at least, that primarily the people who respond are subscribers over white women. That a large majority, I think it was 67%, were white women who were subscribers. So we always have to take that into account when we're looking at that kind of feedback. Our single ticket buyers, there's less information in there from those people who chose to come see the play. And one of the questions on the survey is, why do you come to the theater? What makes you want to even come? Now the highest answer is I'm a subscriber. The second highest answer is to see something new. And so I always think that's really interesting, that to see something new, but they're so offended and insulted by a blowjob on stage. Okay, so this says, blah, blah, blah, I love you, Travis, by saying that I invited my daughter-in-law to what I thought would be, to what I thought would be a ladies' fun night out. To face somewhat edgy feminist work, instead what we experienced was immediate and continual bombardment of over-the-top explicit, bordering pornographic, sexual language, graphic and vulgar physical enactments of sexual acts, all which did not lend itself to art. We chose to leave the intermission as a result of what essentially was an assault that showed no sense of story at all. Much to my dismay, it was traumatizing for my poor, open-minded daughter-in-law. Many others walked out before intermission and we assumed, based on the audience reaction to intermission as well, maybe things get more linear in the second half, but we doubt that. It seems that at least 80 to 90% of this play is written and performed for nothing less than shot value. A really gifted writer does not need to constantly and incessantly use the terms, come fuck blowjob sucking dick, swallowing wood. And it's all I'm trying to say about the shot lens, graphic, verbal, or visible to pictures of sexual intercourse to make the written essence of a truly great play connected to the audience. I'm not sure what to make of this, but I need to voice my disappointment in your choice of selection. Wow. That's great. We have a wall of pain and inability. I'll do you. I'll do you. Just really quickly to wind up and see. So what, you know, what conclusions did you come to? So you went through quite a bit of pushback and I'm sure people who love the play and people who really hate the play, but where, how do you think it influenced you as a theater in the future? I will say, we were really proud we did it. We felt like it was very risky, we were all very nervous about the entire pre-production and production. And despite the pushback we got from our audience, it solidified our commitment to being artists first and not placating a subscriber base. And part of our mission at the, especially at the conducts but across, you know, CTG is pushing those boundaries and bringing new work to the stages. And what that means is that we're going to piss people off sometimes and it's okay, Michael and G are artistic director and we'll all can say, you know, if somebody is so offended that they lead, that they decide to cancel their subscription, that's okay because what if a couple of those single ticket buyers came and said, I just saw something and I can't believe what I saw and I have to come back. And those are the subscribers that we're hoping to gain or just repeat audience. So it's just a shift in thinking about who, what your allegiance is to you. Is it to your subscriber base or is it to the art? Is it to yourself as artists and what you believe in? And it's a tricky thing in a large institution because that is a fine balance. We can't just piss everybody off all the time. We have a count, we count on those subscribers. So it is a title. And I think you said it may affect sort of the balance of tonality next season. Yes. When you go overboard one season you might balance the next. Yeah, so I didn't mention. So last season we did a couple plays that hurt really out there for our audiences and I think we pushed them more than we had ever pushed them before. So we did solid. We did a show called Kansas City Choir Boy. I don't know if any of you know that. It's a Courtney Love piece. I don't know what to describe it, but it was very, I think really outside the box were audience and then The Object Lesson by Joseph Bell where we really transformed the theater. It was just less of a narrative and more of an experience. And so when we were looking at season planning for this coming season there was a play that I was really passionate about that fit in with this women laughing salad theme and we just decided that we had put our audience through a lot and that we worked on a program that and not because it wasn't necessarily because we were scared of losing audience when we just felt like, okay, let's balance it a little bit more. And we're still doing some really beautiful risky work but that play might have pushed them a little too much. Yeah. I know these questions are balanced in relation to giving offence or befuddlement for some people are really with us. Well, great. Thank you so much. So we're just going to get these three stories and then open it up to you all to talk. So Jack and Nataki, let me turn to you to talk a little bit about Neighbors by Brandon Jacobs Jenkins which I think many of you know is Brandon's kind of breakout play in a way it's only ahead of the productions to date. Do you want to just tell us that story or what the kind of struggles were and deciding to do it and you did Nataki as the director putting your stand up. First I guess we should describe it. Was that all? Yeah. First I guess we should describe it. So Neighbors is about an African-American man who's married to a white woman and they have a mixed race daughter and they are from San Francisco and they moved to the northeast to teach it in one of those northeastern schools like Dartmouth maybe. And he's a professor of the Greeks. I can't remember now it's been a long time since I started the classics, thank you. But I can't remember he was I can't remember his phonies yet actually very specific. And so he's an adjunct professor at this university and he's trying to move up and a family of blackface minstrels moves into the house next door and then pen the bony and ensues. That's probably the most concise way of describing it. Yeah I think I would add I in my sense that this minstrel family really represents every fear of these sub-conscious Definitely well okay so no the minstrel family actually represents every fear of all of our sub-conscious it represents the milieu of blackface minstrels in an American entertainment so that's Mammy and Sambo and Jim Crow and Zip Koon and Topsy for all the characters Mammy was the mother their father had Jim Crow senior had just passed away and left the insurance company for the family to buy a house in any neighborhood they wanted to so they chose to move to the south side next door to this professor and then the children are Topsy's the daughter Sambo's the oldest son and Jim Crow Junior is the youngest son he really doesn't want to be a part of this family and the way that he's being asked to he's being asked to step into the shoes of his father age manager or do something else do something a little bit behind the scenes and they're really pushing him forward to do this and they come in full blackface in all the regalia of those particular caricatures and there's a big question about whether or not the lead character actually sees those characters as blackface minstrels because they are black people moving into the house next door whether or not they're actually just a family of entertainers that move into the house next door so it has to do with a certain amount of self-hatred a lack of self-reflection is designed to move away from something in order to fit into the status quo an inability to be settled with who you are and how you represent yourself and it was written because Brendan said that a really good friend of his had disclosed to him that he was married to a white woman he is still married to that woman a beautiful couple I know of personally and they had never really had a conversation about race in the entire time that they'd been married and probably still they haven't and this particular person didn't feel it was important to have that conversation and Brendan thought I wonder what that's like So do you have a little excerpt from stage directions so I don't know if you've ever read a Brandon Jacobs Jenkins play if you've read it the stage directions are very precise so because it's a long it's called an interlude because it's a long interlude I'm going to describe the beginning and then I'll read the rest of it so Sam Mow the oldest son has been asked to mow the lawn he goes to get this lawn mower of course because he's Sam Mow he can't really quite do it right so the lawn mower gets away from him and he has to chase it around the stage he comes back he's being chased by that lawn mower until it stops and then it chases after him grabs his skirt off which reveals this very large penis so I'll read from there so Sam Mow stands in the middle of the stage completely naked holding his privance he blushes to the audience he sees someone in the audience he waves moving one of his hands and his enormous firehouse hose esk ballast unravels from his groin and offstage Sam Mow blushes again tries to pull it back but is stuck on something and Sam Mow works hard to pull his penis back and whatever the object is stuck on and whatever the object is stuck on when he finally gets back on stage he realizes that it's rode to a watermelon Sam Mow 3 he goes up to the watermelon tries to untie his penis from around the mouth frustrated he pouts for a bit then he gets an idea and then proceeds to chew through the shaft of his penis with half a penis and a watermelon he is a success he poses he pats himself on the back preeds then he licks his lips looks around to make sure no one is looking at him he looks at the watermelon he looks at his half a firehouse penis which is now I guess the size of a semi normal penis and he gets an idea he pokes a hole in the watermelon and then he inserts his penis into the watermelon and proceeds to make wild, passionate, savage love with the watermelon I think I'm going to stop you there yes, just two more he ejaculates he pulls out he exhausts it he's exhausted then he drinks it with the the semen dripping from his face and the watermelon juice he wipes his mouth so I'm going to confess something but I won't do that I was just going to confess that when I read this because it was a sensation and a kind of workshop production in the public theater and then I want to ask Jack what it took for him to decide to do it at neighbors especially as the plane had launched the radical hospitality regime there but what I want to confess is that I really the only time that I could ever remember sitting down in the play right in my office and was when I first met Brandon and saying to someone I love this play I can't do it in Washington DC it really was a play that for me set the limit in a way that often runs exactly in some ways it's just that one step more comfortable even at William there are limits I mean I think our jobs as artistic directors of nonprofit theaters is to lead audiences to see that which they don't yet know they want to see and we're sometimes that are worse when we ask the audience what do you want to see what can you handle and respond to that that's really the domain of the commercial theater and sometimes and sometimes we actually can gauge the success of a play by how many people deeper in that way in case of this so as Howard suggested that in the 16 months that preceded the opening of neighbors mixed blood board and staff had undergone a great introspection and reinvention and launched this thing called radical hospitality in which we had the theater experience and let everybody come without charge and we made a lot of presuppositions or suggestions to ourselves about what that might mean one of which was that by doing that we would go you know that our programming would become capital and we would do easy stuff that everybody could digest and we wanted to show that that wasn't quite the case and so we really we started that season of it was the fall of 2011 with radical hospitality and neighbors and I had gone to I had read the play I had gotten the play from Brandon's agent I really liked it and then had a small theater in Kentucky we'll talk about it at the Matrix Theater in LA there was a production mountain I went to see that and my concerns about the play quite honestly how did you feel watching that play that this was a play we had doing we got the rights and then the rain and I was thrilled that the talk was going to direct it and we to some of the actors in town I sent the script saying we'd love to have you come in and audition and at that time at the Guthrie small theater the 200 seat theater Pillsbury House Theater was doing one of the brother size plays and I'd given it to one or two actors in that show and the word spread mixed blood doing the show to stay away and there was a boycott of local actors to audition for this show at the time we did it but I was actually more heartened by that and the talk was a fantastic partner so we had to budget for a few more out of town actors and that's what we did but we moved forward and produced that show one of the things in casting that we did the role of Mammy we decided to cast with a man anyway as you can tell it had some difficult props design issues and so but I think so as this night came to be that we were opening and so all the press about the opening of the season really was very much about the opening of radical hospitality and mixed blood reinventing itself and come and see this and very little about the play that we were opening this play by Brandon Jacob Jenkins and you know a young playwright and actually there was sort of good buzz and some of the people that were in it we had some great actors in it even the local ones they showed us to do it and so and at that day at the time we hoped you know the people starting to line up for radical hospitality audience was packed and was filled with city leaders and people from our entire board was there and staff and family members of the cast and we did this show and there's certainly when we got to the scene that Nataki just read there was a certain exodus from the theater but this play that you actually had to see the whole thing to be able to experience what it's about and a lot of that happened in the last 15 minutes of the show and so Adi who's here tonight was there and so the actor playing Mammy at two hours and 15 minutes into a two-hour and 30-minute show had a heart attack on stage and literally it was dead on stage for about 20 minutes there was paramedics in the audience and doctors and the good news is that when the paramedic revived and all we were hoping for was that all the EMTs were white because they saw this guy in this outfit and make up on that stage they might not have administered care but so nobody in the audience that night that actor's wife was there Adi took care of her but everybody did what they did right and the actor is back performing as an actor and director someone we've known for years but all these people didn't get to see how the play ended and so as a result of that for the neck and so they all left and we just said come back and see the second act so you can see how the play ends because that's the rest of the run was a five week run we replaced that actor as Mammy enough people left every night early to allow those that came for the second act to be able to see how it ended and why we were doing what we were doing and what sort of an act of heresy this was but again every night for every show and Jameel Jude if you've gotten to meet him here it was his first night with Mixed Blood as a producer and residence and as house manager so on the first day he's house manager and tries to the audience an actor on stage drops dead and he had to manager but he also led these fantastic jobs of leaving these free forms these post-show conversations for the every night of the run which really you couldn't tell that people were in the same room for the same show and the two and a half hours that preceded these conversations sometimes the conversations after two and a half hour play were still going on for another half an hour there was a divide along race there was a divide along generation there was people from the north and south saw different plays and people you know normally we still do this every night we have a post-show conversation maybe 25 to 40 people will stay depending on the show and that it was half the audience would say they had a lot to unpack emotionally after the show artistically but it was actually I didn't feel like I was in the zone of provocation when we did it I guess I've been told I was since then anyway I think that I'll give it an attack and talk about the actual artistry of it well I think part of the reason why I mean I when I first read this play with the guy Joe Stern in Los Angeles who produced it at the matrix when he first handed it to me he wasn't sure if he was going to do it I had to convince him to do it and part of it was because Brandon was sort of writing that line of conversation in my own art that I it was like the first time I read a play right I've read a play by a play right where they were actually speaking into questions that I have I mean directly like as if I had written it myself image for image value for value question for question these things that so the controversy of the play for me harkens from the controversy of my existence in spaces like this that somehow my being a tangible human being in any kind of space is a controversy and so this level of provocation for me of this age is just an extension of the level of provocation that already exists in spaces like these in any space that I'm in it's so interesting to hear how close to that perils what Lindsay said about Sheila's setting she was responding to the provocation that's in the world around her why shouldn't the play have that same level level of response right exactly and the other thing is that I'm the kind of director who's interested in doing projects that feel impossible so when I read it I thought there's no way we can do this let's do it let's go ahead and see what happens if we do it and you know I came from a long line of African-American my family African-Americans who for whom it's very important that we represent ourselves in a certain way so that the status quo can accept us and in a lot of ways I was raised to believe that I represent the entire race of black people in the world and so the weight of that has always been heavy on me and because of the weight of that and what that actually meant like am I do I represent everybody in every aspect of my life like when I'm doing my own thing in my own bathroom or when I'm hanging out with friends or when I'm having a conversation with a group of other artists in front of a group of other artists like how often am I being sad of the weight of this and so in a lot of ways I feel like the play is Brandon's way of saying yeah me too like I wonder how what is the weight of that and the last thing is about the interludes because that's the big thing you know like the play is really about a family that really needs to have a conversation and about another family that's really trying to work through the transition post grief of their leader the leader of their family passing like if you just look at the play that's what it is the interludes are the play's way of asking how far do we go we laugh the first things we laugh like you can't get the water the lawn mower to work and you know he's kind of a bubbly idiot we're laughing and then how far does it go like isn't this funny is this still funny am I funny when it looks like this how deep can I make it for you before you start to question again the controversy of my existence in spaces like this well I'm going to stop you there because this is so profound but thank you guys each of these is a rich story that we can spend a whole panel on but let me turn over to my right if you can just digest these one at a time let me turn over to my right to Ari and Moti and ask you to to sort of do the same and tell us just a little bit about the admission a tiny bit about the play but also the decision the decision to what you were after Moti in in writing the play because you are one playwright per se on the panel and then what the decision to produce it was for you I thank you very much Moti so I was born in this and since my early childhood there was always wars around every five years six or seven years there was another war and I grew up with hearing the narratives of these wars and the more I grew the more I realized that these narratives are false narratives and the stories I hear about the wars about what is happening to us in the wars what is happening to the other side in these wars this is all very very far away from the reality of the wars and there was a strong impulse once I realized it once I expressed it all myself in the wars that I participated I felt that it is really necessary it's crucial it's an extension to share the truth of the wars that I know and that I experienced and it seems that Israel society had such a need to justify itself to justify its wars that there was a certain audience for the truth about these wars because the sense of justice in these wars was so so fundamental in the struggle in the struggle to survive and so I was looking for an example one play that I maybe some of you saw the production in the center state in the area of Isaac in 2006 was again about the reality of war what does it mean to be a part of the war from our side from the side of the Israeli there was a continent war there was no purpose and there was no traumatized by it and there was unable to continue his life afterwards the play and the admission deals with an event that took place in 1948 when the Israeli regiment conquered the Palestinian village and at the end of the day about 100, 150 Palestinians were killed, civilians that story was suppressed Israelis didn't know about it Israelis refused to know about it there was no Palestinian voice in Israel that told the story so I think that it is my responsibility to tell the story because I think that the suppression of these stories in another words the forced narrative that we create about our wars is an obstacle to reconciliation and if we continue telling ourselves the lies that we've been told all our lives and if we continue with these lies we won't come to any understanding with the Palestinians around us the principle of truth and reconciliation that was so effective in South Africa we must adopt it in order to create some kind of a reconciliation with the Palestinians I would like to read a little segment from the play the play focuses on a character who was the commander of the regiment who conquered that village and what exactly he liked about what happened he said nothing is happened just conquered the village and that's it he's supported by his son who finds evidence to the fact that they were mass killing in that village and at the end of the play just the last thing on the play he finally agrees what happens yes I shot too much yes in rage in revenge in madness yes we stole the streets yes I got swept away by our soldiers I couldn't control them yes I couldn't stop yes we hit some who were calm yes I hit them too yes ones who were just throwing stones maybe even some women or no men who just peeked from the windows yes some who were running away but even so it wasn't bad it was not a massacre and two days later there was another battle we killed there too we got killed there too and then there was another one and another one after that again we killed and again we got killed but never slaughtered yes never slaughtered and the admissions of course is a manipulative operation you know this is what we did without calling the deed in without giving the title of a slaughter of a massacre of a war crime which is very very difficult for Israeli to admit now the the beach can we talk a little bit and just talk a little bit just with that in our minds of what that what that challenge was which was a bad line how how Israeli will never be able to admit the fact that they are committing war crimes never acknowledge that we're in a room full of provocation practitioners and it's it's an honor to be in a room with so many wonderful people to share this deus with them and also to recognize we're in Washington DC where this play took place and the play culminated in my termination as an artistic record of 18 years at Theater J a program of the Washington DC Jewish Community Center I want to recognize mosaic staff members who are here today I want to recognize uh Adam Imerbar the artistic member of Theater J now and appreciate his presence here and to say that uh before we talk about provocation we should talk about the prerequisite or the the predicate to provocation I believe from an artistic point of view which is the establishment of trust provocation without trust can lead you to many different kinds of harassments or inflections of terror uh verbally culturally actually um theaters are trusts uh that's uh dictated in their missions I want to tell you the mission of what Theater J was or is now but just to understand that provocation doesn't exist in the vacuum um though a playwright with a professional debut coming out with his provocations um that is a particular kind of boldness because it doesn't lead with a mission statement theaters do theaters say this is who we are and why we are gathered together and um to that purpose uh there are also some understandings about this very important charge we have of speaking truth to power or speaking satire to power we understand that we're rarely uh hurling invective at the vulnerable the satire rarely punches down it punches up and when it punches down you sometimes get a charlie avadoe situation where you are inflicting your provocation on those who feel tremendously threatened in the case of the jewish community you have an interesting dialectic you have power that feels threatened in israel you have power that feels that it's at the brink of an existential crisis and therein lies the controversy but those who live in israel and those who support israel have to recognize that for all the security it still craves it has a tremendous amount of security relative to those who are the who are living under occupation and the need to create a reconciliation between the two demands is exactly as motiz says a truth telling a regulating with the past the most difficult kind of political negotiation so motiz played the omission didn't come out of nowhere it came from establishing years of trust with our audience and within our community about the kinds of dialogues we were going to have on our stage intercultural encounters between jews and non-jews about our relative health and how we overcome the ghosts of experience that divide us the omission was not the first israeli play it was not the first israeli palestinian encounter that we had it was one and a long line it built on return to haifa a palestinian develop adapted by an israeli theater company the comery that positioned palestinian and israeli birth mother and nurturing mother who raised the same son and a son who had to decide who he belonged to motiz play was prepared for in our community by a series of readings and then workshops which made it an infinitely better play as he continued to build the play both in israel first under the title dinner with dad and later in workshops both in israel and in theater j the bad thing about it is it created a lot of interest and attention from many other onlookers beginning with the stakeholders within our jewish community center the embassy of israel that had paid for multi-learner to come on many other occasions the united states that had paid for the palestinian develop to be staged by the comery theater on our state people knew what was coming people knew the historians debate that centered around the controversy of tantura people were paying attention to this upcoming world premiere and so we girded ourselves for what was to happen because of our track record and work about the conflict we had also helped ignite the existence of a rump group as i called them uncharitably a jewish tea party organization a little citizens the gelanti group called citizens opposed to propaganda masquerading as art kapma you can look it up their website is still running kapma.net and they had this play in their sites as they had multi in their sites and me in their sites and they migrated from a fax machine and stationary with five people signed on to an e-blast courtesy of the right wing think tank up to some ten thousand names and addresses of every jewish federation board member and addresses of every jccc so they got to terrorizing by email those who otherwise were very proud of their little jewish theater that became a much bigger jewish theater over the years and they put a tremendous amount of maligning information both about the play the treatment our intentions out to create a kind of atmosphere of executive in the room and then we committed to produce the play there was a boycott campaign organized by kapma to get donors to withhold money from the jewish federation because of their support of the jccc which enabled theater j to program and there was a running count of how much money was beat with held for the federation campaign from five thousand do your principals have a price tag was the question I was asking at staff meeting you are principals have a price tag at five thousand dollars the show went on at twenty thousand dollars we were still committed when there was reported to be a withholding of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars we said oh wait a second let's stop and think about this that withholding never materialized it wasn't a real a quarter million dollars but it was out there for a moment and jccc decided that they were not going to be able to produce the full production but the jccc to its credit wanted to honor all the contracts of all the actors who were signed of all the israeli five israeli artists who were already committed on board so we were going to honor the contracts not to the thirty four performance run we were negotiating from our artists we agreed to a sixteen performance workshop presentation the ensuing publicity around this compromise ensured that all thirty six hundred seats to that sixteen performance run were sold out we were after rave reviews from the show we were told that we couldn't possibly extend of course but I enlisted an outside producer and a shalom of bus boys and poets to present the show for twenty two additional performances of studio theater which were equally popular six months five months later the voices from a changing release festival which was fourteen years running was canceled by the jccc and I felt to protest that in the press internally and I was fired a month later for insubordination and mosaic it was born the next day voices from a changing release festival continued as well just to move this forward maybe to ask you one question do you want to add on this how did that affect you thinking as you think about mosaic or the future in any way I think those questions of context and trust are really really important as we continue to ask urgent questions provocation is a word that to me is just a descriptive of something that's more important which speaks to mission and speaks to the urgency of what you have to say and mosaic would do well to understand its deep mission and its deep reason for existing before it goes about provocation for provocation say as a mosaic as a theater that's running in northeast DC not northwest as a theater that's open and it's represented by a large cohort of African American board members that is being relevant to an African American community as well as a fusion community of Jews and non-Jews from all corners of the city we are going down the road of continued provocation but we have to build the trust first and foremost well look as I said these are three phenomenal stories can we give a hand to all of them we still have a good half hour left we'll come back to all of this but I just want to turn it over to you all for just one second I'm just really interested for just a few minutes if there's examples that any of you brought into the room or from your own experience where you really struggled with the decision to produce or not to produce a play to write or not to write a play and sort of what the content of that struggle was and what you might have learned in it but in really short there's these three examples which we've sort of selected to stand for every example I think that provocation exists on a lot of levels very specific to different communities in different contexts etc does anybody have anybody to share just confess your time do you want me to take a picture let's give you a microphone my name is Patrick Dooley I'm the artistic director of a group in Berkeley called the Shotgun Players and we're actually in the midst of an initial run we're at our 25th anniversary season this year and we chose to do a play to help the Skinner with the Village Bike which I think it's called The Village Bike by Penelope Skinner and I've been following this play and it's run at the Royal Court and to New York with great interest and she was a playwright that I've been following for a few years and we chose to do this play again it's a really piece it did not remember that same controversy in its earlier runs but we we did the show it really tackles a lot of things gender stereotypes and pornography just you know it goes and then the female protagonist in the play you know makes some difficult decisions and not working out so well for her so we did the show we worked on it actually for a few months in advance to kind of just get ourselves wrapping ourselves around it and then had a really exciting preview process we're having incredible talk backs people really sure inspired to see the show had our and then had the critic for the San Francisco Chronicle come to see the show and for the first time in 25 years we got what you guys may not know about this the lowest rating which is an empty chair now I've never even seen any play get this and any it ever happened this is a brand new credit to the Chronicle on the front page two pages of review two color photos like do not see this play run away from this play not a single mix of a single actor in the show anything else basically just a rant about why this play should not be done or seen now I mean unfortunately we live in a city where there is really one big paper it's the Chronicle there are several critics but none of them matter next to this one so it was a you know we sold one ticket the day after that we sold a half price ticket yes now I mean never mind the fact that like audiences who have come to this show are writing protest letters to the Chronicle which they never printed and letters to the organization but we have just started a rally like a week and a half after this of other positive reviews coming out to turn it around the other interesting thing about this season and this is why this is relevant I'll wrap up really quickly we do the season in rep which means we do one show then we do the second show and keep doing the first show the third show keep doing so we're going to do a true season in rep so by the end of the year we're doing five shows five different shows five days five different shows I'm looking at this empty chair for the next seven fucking months like how do we do this and at one point there was a question like do we talk like well we show that really tanks like do we just hide we just bury that show we just do four shows but here's the thing we fucking love this show and we really believe in this play we've all done this plays and we just want to have die a nice quiet death but that was not this play and we were starting to get this audience just like saying no we want to do this show we're so glad you did the show women's thing I'm so grateful to hear this story told even though it's ugly and even the playwright like I'm terrified like oh god she's going to be so upset but she sent people to see the show and she I just got this thing from her yesterday like send me some questions I'll answer them and just in responding to this thing and we're trying to figure out how do we in the face of having the largest paper in Northern California say do not go see this play how do we find a way to keep it going through word of mouth and we're starting to figure that answer out but it's you know it's already had a devastating financial impact on the organization I mean it's just you know you're selling ticks for 20 bucks a piece it's hard to make up but you know it was a bullet like 20 grand and just you know 10 days of losses so anyway there it is devastating so artistic director of civic ensemble in New York and we were doing a production we just finished it this past spring we did a production of Eugene O'Neill's All Guys Chilling Got Wings and yeah I see people turn around what the fuck why was he doing that if you go on if you go on Wikipedia you see like four productions of it like in the world seemingly right and we did a small production of it in New York City like kind of way off Broadway and you know it did decently but we did a co-production with Cornell this past spring and when we were when they had asked me to direct something there and I brought up you know All Guys Chilling Got Wings I said but listen what we're going to do is that we're going to split the audience one side white and one side black and then everybody else got to kind of choose where they could sit yeah so we now we did this in the city but what was interesting is that there was what was fascinating was is that when you have institutional buy-in and you talked about trust we were able to figure out all the steps so that wasn't the adjective came later like kind of once it came up and I'll try to get to that very quickly but the institution Cornell was like so what do we do with this well the the population of Cornell was like 30% Asian or Asian American how do we deal with that and so we made certain there were certain differences like we said that one side would be white and one side would be people of color and instead of just saying like white and black right and then so anyway we go through it we engage students in terms of getting the word out and talking about the production we had students actually leading the post-show conversations so we're really trying to do everything very and a very engaged way right and all audiences know we do shit like this all the time that we're kind of like down by hill and it is on a hill and we get to the performance the production opening night there are basically kind of two papers in town it's Ithaca so you're not kind of too worried about it but it'd be great to get a good review the two so the opening night one of the critics decides to sit he's white he decides to sit on the person of color side right in the center there's no privilege there but anyway he sits right in the center and gets up and walks out in the middle of the second act so I and I go and I'm kind of I'm freaking out a little bit because I'm like you know somebody was like maybe he has a bad prostate you don't know what's going on right so but then finally he writes a review and I knew he was going to do this shit so he writes a review and talks about leaving the show and says the show was great I just couldn't take it I could not he couldn't handle it ticket sales went up is the thing but I think the criticism the big thing that I'm interested in is how critics play a role in this as like gatekeepers and as morality police you know and try to push what an audience is ready for in terms of the form but in like your theory jacket that it's both content and form where the provocation and that I'm super interested in the boycott of the black actors and that kind of censorship which I think is probably behind the fellas bike story too I imagine is like don't see this play because it's not right it's showing things in proper way there's discomfort within the field of tackling certain kinds of projects and how we as artists kind of talk about it so it's the censorship from the left and the right at the same time that's interesting. Can you talk about it? I agree with Ari that the only filter I feel like we have is mission and how we play with content and form is the joy of being an artistic director and actually getting to have taste that you can share I know when we did an octaroon this year I said to Nataki you know this play isn't that subversive we should be just fine with this and she was just like you have drank your own too late too long but I mean I mean I don't know if I get the question but I think I think like how you face censorship from within your own African-American community actor thinking it's right like how do you push back or don't these conversations are hard to have I mean that's why you have them secretly not in front of the dominant society you have them secretly because they're hard to have because you're sort of forced into closure and so it's not I mean when we did it in LA I had an actor come in in blackface and we went through the whole for the audition and we went through the whole audition and I he was visibly upset I mean really really angry at me and so I we went through the whole thing and I said do you have the question I said I don't want to know what you're going to do about this and I was you know sat for a while and talked a little bit about it and you know I understood and I said what I want to know is how you're getting back into your car that's what I want to know because I understand I have a mission as well so I have a responsibility to what I'm doing how are you getting back into your car how are you going to do that because you don't have the protection of this sanctuary when you walk out there like that I think that's actually one of my key we can open this up to a larger conversation now or any more examples would be exciting too one of my key questions about about theater in general is how do we protect that sense of the same space where people are looking at the thing on the stage as a work of art not advocacy platform but as something which is a Rorschach test that they're asked to respond to whether the provocation is aesthetic or political or civic or racial whatever the provocation is because of course we don't have everyone in our audience doesn't understand that I think you know and every theater is different but I think that's what I feel like we kind of have a collective responsibility to protect and really do this thing together and we can live with it but I just don't know that's just not where I think our society is at above art in general so I'm just curious how you all reflect on that yeah I'm not in the area of the Shemin Artistic Associated Freedom Theater in the West Bank, Palestine and also Connecticut Reptory Theater and I'm not sure that the trust relationship can be controlled there's always it's not a closed system you know what I'm saying obviously the trust within the audience and the theater is critical to the head that you can't control who's going to insert themselves into that relationship beyond the Tea Party group as you described it was not a part of your system but they inserted themselves into it so you can't always tell the quick example I'd like to bring is actually a wonderful play called Cambodian Odyssey by John Lipsky which we did at the Merrimack Repertory Theater 20 years ago about Hank Norm which many of you may remember is the actor who won the Academy Award for Killing Fields but whose personal story was exactly the same as Dith Pran, the character who played and there was a scene that was in his novel or his biography in the play in which a group of Cambodians come across in Khmer Rouge at the end of the Revolution and killed it with signs that said Khmer Rouge enemy forever well Lowell, Massachusetts as it happened was like the second largest Cambodian refugee population which is why we didn't play and the consultant for the play was from the community the community found out about the scene and were outraged and wanted the scene cut and John the playwright actually fell they're right, it destroys the capacity or attacks the capacity for reconciliation within the community but the rest of us felt very strongly it should stay because it was Hank Norm's story it was his story, it was his wife who was killed, it was his child who was killed, it was he who survived but the Cambodian community was like that's just karma why is he special about that, in fact that's what they said and so there was a huge struggle within the artistic community of this play about whether to listen to the community that was asserting itself for their own political purposes or not and actually we decided to keep the scenes to some extent against John's preferences so it's a complex problem that looks at both sides of community input sometimes the artist has to stand up to the community I'm all on this side I'll move to this side just hearing all the stories and thinking about a positive of all of this we tend to think of theater as a medium that can't reach people as easily as others but theater that's engendered in people actually sort of is an indication of power of voice just thinking about the test of provocation is that you exactly know it sucks that people are so scared of their representation for all sorts of cultural reasons that anything that could be perceived as negative is incredibly terrifying reminds me, and I'm clear it wasn't there in the original God of vengeance production in Broadway that had the first lesbian kiss on Broadway history it got shut down because years ago the Jewish community didn't want that to be their representation even though it was from their culture but the idea that we can still reach people on that fundamental level and that people are so scared of how people will be perceived by our media in some ways is empowering about the voice that we still have because I intended this to be an inspiring panel there's a lot of power I just wanted to interject partly reminding the only show I've ever walked out of was at Woolie it was at Southwest Africa I think there's some we have about 100% it wasn't because it was hard to say like or not like some of that is because I was so angry I wanted to kill white people and I'm not a violent person I couldn't be in the room any longer with that rage that it awoke in me which actually then kind of in retrospect what it did was remind me of how angry I am all of the time and how so much of my life as an African American a certain generation in particular has been about dampening that down making it go away find other ways to express yourself so that I don't feel like I'm silenced but that I'm not I've never been empowered either in any other way other than working creatively to speak about things that I'm angry about and the second part of that was oh, I loved this show Brandon's show because I felt like for the first time there it all is on stage and it was funny and it was potent and it was angry and all and told this wonderful story and the fact that it ends up with those two black women standing on stage talking about this shit because that was a poem that wrote one point at the end of it is I'm creating this character Bula the maid and that Bula's last line is because her motto was sick of this shit and she walks out but there it was Brandon is particularly effective at using humor to disarm our defenses about the offensive things then and he puts in front of us and of course humor is just a great tool that way Jackie's play, a brilliant play but it's just kind of bringing you right into it and it's too late to reduce it something about issues and that particular play and these responses are very personal I mean different people respond differently so my name is Shea and I'm an actor and a writer and I perform on big stages and small, I've got three to small, 30 meter, etc but I'm also a curator and I'm charged to sort of incubate the projects and also sort of be the steward behind projects that provoke projects that are just finding their voice and some things really resonate for me one is the trust what is the trust contract that you're building and what happens in the absence of that particularly around community response and how a community can feel like they're not brought along I'm also curious about the sacred space that's created not just in the room but again in the community and also the ripple effect because you think once that play lands you know the immediacy of it is gone what happens after that and who's in the responsibility and so as a curator I want to just bring up two situations one was so a small organization that I work with intermedia artists 118 seats invested in an artist over 60 who wanted to put a story on stage the story was angry black women and well intentionally white girl and she wrote this piece and she wanted to just sort it up on stage and we really realized that we needed to do she was going to originally the project had six months and we added eight months on to that in order to grow the understanding around why this piece is happening on stage and what are we actually trying to do and realize that it was a bigger responsibility to own that story and the show sold out two and a half months in advance three shows were added and her next piece is called Old People's Pussy but it really and it's a really interesting ticket sales went up you know we're curious about that and how we define success so that when things get away from us that was successful community might have gotten mad if you didn't come how do we get our community right on I think that point about building the trust while you're building the piece almost like those are two parallel tracks is very interesting when I we premiered one women Latin women's cell just a little bit before CTG did it and woolly and I lost sleep over that I really thought people would think it might just be smart and I think I felt okay when I knew I would be okay I had a very early reading of the play we invited a whole bunch of board members we said let's get out in front of this and let's invite some of our closest instant holders especially women because the piece was sort of pitched at women in the audience to listen to this right away and immediately I just knew I felt you know when you immediately take that step of not holding the decision as a secret and not asking other people necessarily they think I'll never do that it's not in my DNA to do that but then saying this is what we're committed to help me understand what we've got here and seeing how robust the conversation was the first time we just did a reading of the play I just felt oh this is going to be okay this really is a genuine conversation you just brought up something I've been thinking about listening to all of you guys when we did our production of salad we had already seen which was really helpful to us we had decided to do it I don't know that we knew at the time we really decided to do it we were like oh thank god we were so excited to be able to go see it and I'm just wondering as we all talk about this something that I thought a lot about since the style of clothes what if anything could we have done better or differently with our audience and our staff and our board to prepare them we thought we had our bases covered and I don't know that we fully did and just to spark that conversation off if anyone has any thoughts on that I will say one thing that I thought of was our staff I think sometimes the artistic staff will make a decision and will hold that decision right here and because we all feel like we know what that decision is