 Welcome, everyone. Thanks for waiting. We're very excited about this particular panel. We think they have some wonderful insights for you. As always, if there are other panels you're interested in seeing throughout the year, feel free to email me. If you could put your phones on silent, on vibrate, that would be great. If you need to tweet or do any of that, you can do that. Roland will help you out with hashtags and all those important things. Everybody online, if you want to send us a question, it's hashtag new play. I'm getting the nod from Seth, so game me. Anyway, it's my pleasure to introduce to you a wonderful all-round great guy and our director of membership, Roland Tack. I'm speaking into a microphone, although I'm not being amplified in this room, but for our Twitter friends and our live stream friends, right? We want them to hear me. So I'm going to ask that we all sort of share the mics and keep, you know, okay. So we have an amazing panel and I took the time to print out the bios, so I'm not going to waste time giving you their bios. They are all incredibly accomplished, wonderfully talented playwrights, and they all happen to have experience leading companies, and I'm going to just introduce them by name. All the way at the end is J. Holtem. Then we have Susan Bernfield. Then we have James Khamtois and August Chulenberg. Okay. Now, if you are watching us on live stream, the hashtag is new play. Is that right, Seth? Okay. Okay. So I just wanted to, first of all, this is like a topic that's near and dear to me. I mean, I just feel like this is so important for... I feel like we live... We were just talking about this before we started. We live in a world that's increasingly compartmentalized and specialized. I mean, you know, it's like you have an elbow doctor, a pinky doctor, an earlobe doctor, and the same is happening in the theater, I think, and I think it's actually probably dangerous, and I think it's really important for people to wear several hats for the vitality of theater to continue. So that's my agenda. I'm putting it on the table. Okay. So I just want to start out by asking a very basic question, and we'll go down the line. Maybe Gus can start. If you can think back to... Gus is the artistic director of Flux Theater Ensemble. Okay. So if you think back to the first production that you did. Okay. I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about... I feel like the theater company versus production is a bit of a chicken and egg question, and I wonder if you could kind of unpack that for us as it relates to Flux. Sure. The Genesis of Flux. It happened because I had an opportunity as a playwright, and it was a unique opportunity where theater gave me a space and gave me some money and said, but you're going to be basically producing it. You're going to be in charge of the execution of it. I'd never done that before. I'd only been produced. So I was excited by that possibility, and I brought on some people to help me do that. And we did that twice, and the second time it went spectacularly badly. But in a way, you know, in that beautiful, crucible way, where everyone pitches in and joins together, and then you've created that beautiful chemistry that any ensemble needs to have. You know, we all fell in love with each other because of those trials and tribulations we had been through. So it was out of those first two opportunities that I had as a playwright that the group of people that became Flux Theatre Ensemble came together. And then we started doing work, and through the work we did, we began to develop what our identity actually was, what our mission was, what our core values were, what our aesthetic values were, our various programming, and that is still, you know, something that's very much in process. Can I ask you just who was the first person besides you that you attached to this endeavor? Okay. Well, that's interesting. I mean, you know, so the first two shows we didn't, we didn't think of ourselves as Flux. We had, we just called ourselves the Seven against Thieves. And we also were drawing around with some much, much worse theater company names. And in fact, for our naming party, we strew the bar where we announced our actual name with 40 fake names, including the National Theater of Durandurand, which I still think, I still think we should have gone with that. But to more accurately answer your question, I had, I had reached out to an act, a friend of mine to direct this play of mine, Riding the Bull, which was the first play that was done in the group that became Flux. And I asked him to direct it, and he's like, well, if I directed it, I would just be telling the lead actor all the things that I should be doing since I should play this role. So, but he suggested a mutual friend of ours named Kelly O'Donnell. And Kelly did come on as the director. So she was probably the one I can say was the first additional person to come on in what eventually became Flux. And now we are, there are 10 of us who are identified as creative partners. That's the language we use now. And we'll, we'll get to that structure thing later. But James, I assume with Nosedive that the first person for you was Peter. Is that right? Yes. People there and I formed, I guess, you know, formed is, you know, by default, Nosedive Productions back in, you know, late 1999, early 2000. Basically, I came to New York wanting to get my play staged. And it didn't look like I was asking a lot of people in the city how one goes about to do that. And I didn't really get a whole lot of straight answers. And it was seeming that, you know, they were telling me how to, you know, form a 501C3 organization that took about, you know, would take about a year or so to get done. And, you know, and there was a few avenues in which people said, well, if you, you know, you know, make friends with some of these companies, maybe in a year down the road, they'll may do a reading of your play. And I'm like, I don't know. You know, I was 22. I was, I'm not waiting for a year or two to maybe get a reading done. I wanted, you know, I was, I was, you know, amped up and energized and new to the city. I wanted to get my stuff staged now. And sure enough, a friend of mine from high school who had moved to the city independently, Bovee was having the similar problem from the director side. He wanted to, you know, be a director in the city, but realized no one hires a kid right out of college to direct their stuff. So we started talking about our mutual goals. And he asked to read some of my plays. And I think fortunately for me, as well as him, he actually liked them. So so we started talking about staging one of them. And the play was called the first play was called monkeys. And it was a play I'd written when I was 20 years old. And we asked a few mutual friends in the city just, Well, how do we do this? How does one go about just getting, you know, getting a group of actors to say, make pretend lines and in front of people and charge the money. And they basically some of these friends gave us, you know, held our hands and sort of walked us through sort of the nuts and bolts of how to put on a show. And I mean, this was back in 99 2000. So like we you have to sort of remember that the there were actually there was actually more the more spaces available and they were cheaper. So the place that we actually rented was this this club in the Lower East Side that doesn't exist anymore. It was called the surf reality House of Urban Savages. And and they charged 80 bucks a night to, you know, to, yeah, no, they don't they don't have prices like that anymore. Yeah. So it was really cheap and relatively easy to stage a bare bones budget show. And I think our first play, Pete and I, we made it for stage for I think 2400. And we just decided we'd split the cost 5050. And I think, you know, it was we got in box office, you know, we charged $10 a ticket, we got about 2100. So we're like, Well, that's pretty good. So like that's what $300 loss, but split each way that's $150 and each way. And at the time, I mean, we spent more of that we I would spend more on a night of drinking. So that was perfectly fine to spend. We so we thought, Oh, I'll totally spend $150 $200 on putting on so it was Yeah, the original it wasn't really designed as a company. It was just Pete and I wanted to do a couple of these shows. And we came up the name Nosedive just came up where it was it was a fictional production company. I invented in high school, it was just doodle on notebooks in which basically the logo at the time was just this big smiling face with a thumbs down. And and just because I we didn't really want to have we didn't really have one of all the things we thought we had to discuss. The idea of like, you know, coming up with a name was the least of our weird that was not something we were interested. So we just do someone did one of our friends who, you know, was guiding us said you guys need to come up with a name for your postcard. And so I just well, Nosedive productions and Pete was like, Yeah, that's fine. I don't have an idea either. So yeah. Cool. Thank you. And Susan Bernfield is producing artistic director of New Georges, which I think is a great name. Actually, it's a name that I immediately like knew what it meant. So I think that's interesting. But also you started in 1992 or 91 or something. So the the landscape in New York was a little different than maybe even more. I don't know how was it? Yeah, I mean, I think so it certainly was for me. And I started out as an actor. I wasn't a playwright role and said I could come anyway. So it was very, very different from me because I was very naive. I mean, in a lot of ways, I felt like there are so many resources now that didn't exist then in terms of what the landscape is in terms of knowing who people were in terms of knowing how to have access to people. And so I started I went to a circle in the square theater school and with a few friends, I founded a theater company like so many people do. And we did one season and it sort of fell apart. But we did get our 501c3 for some reason. So I had this sort of leftover 501c3 and we did make money on our shows. So I did have this small bank account of money. And and it was that was before New Georges before New Georges. I know it's such a long story. So but then so I so then I met these other people and I was like, Well, I already have this theater company, let's make a new one. So the way I came up with the name New Georges, I love this talking about the name is I literally and this should have been clear that I was the one who's going to stick with it for 21 years. I literally took a yellow pad and I just wrote down all these goofy names that I thought of and then we went out for a drink and people pick one and New Georges with you know, it's for George Sand and George Elliott. But at that time there was like Edie Burkell and the New Bohemians. And there was I think a theater group called the New Rude Mechanicals. And so I this new thing I think I came up with like 50 new something as I'm new Georges is the one that stuck. So I was an actor in the first show that we did. I acted in and it wasn't the new play. It was vinegar Tom. The new theater company was about focusing somehow on women because it started in 1991 in the wake of the Anita Hill everything. So it was a very, very exciting time. You know, I was in WAC women's action coalition and and we really we were not looking for a play to do me and these two other women who I was founding the new company with and and I knew the play vinegar Tom by Carol Churchill. And so that's the play that we did. And that was very successful for us because Mel Gassa somehow thought it was the New York Premier, which I think it was not. And so he reviewed it. And and then, you know, we couldn't find any other plays to be in quite literally. And I didn't know any playwrights. I, you know, I was, I, you know, I'd written one as a kid and I was like, no, I like acting. You get a lot of attention for acting. And I should have known that something was up because I was very interested in peacemaking. But I don't think that which is something I did in drama school and then also with the first theater company that I had and we didn't have anything else to do. We made a piece and there was just something about that, you know, I liked that kind of control and I felt sort of smart about structure somehow. But I never really put that together. I didn't know. I had no, and this is, I think, where the landscape has really changed. And I think that the access to plays and playwrights is very different. I played, to me, a playwright was an older dead person still just like it had been in high school. I mean, I had no idea. And and so we had to go out and find a play. And we just, we went to new dramatists and we looked around and we looked in a lot of other places and then we realized, well, maybe there are people, and we couldn't find, you know, for three women to be in a play. It's just really hard. So we thought, well, there must be people our age who are like us and who are interested in the same things we are who write plays. And it turned out there were. Which was a great thing. And so really the second production we did, which was a group of five one act by women, which was kind of trying to be our introduction to plays and playwrights into new plays in the new play world, was probably more important to us in a lot of ways than that first production. And it was hard. It was hard to find people. I had a friend who worked at MTC and he introduced me to their two Van Leer fellows, one of whom was Kia Corthron, who was like the first player that I met. And then someone else had contacts at EST and we met a few other people, but it was like, where are we going to find these plays, we thought. And now, you know, I find that to be hilarious. There's so much. There's such a different kind of access, I think. And along the way, you know, we had a writers group and I started out and I thought, well, and I read some plays and I think, well, I could do this. You know, I'm interested in character and I've always been a writer deep down of other things. I care a lot about our blurbs. Our blurbs are great. And so I started writing solo performances and performing them and eventually writing plays in 1996. We produced the first, well, one of two plays of mine that we produced. And again, sort of took it from there, really going on parallel roads, I think, as we supported other people's work. So primarily the complications and wonderfulness of my life is about really being incredibly supportive of a huge community of artists, playwrights, directors and actors and designers, and at the same time nurturing other people's work and being very much a production dramaturge in a lot of instances and also having this, trying to have this other track of being a playwright, which I know we all kind of go through in our ways as well. And there's something else I can say about that one. So the moral of that story is beware of creating a theater company because it will morph you into something else. You will become a costume designer or something else. Or something you're much better at. Jay, I don't know where to begin with you because you have so many different, all right, can we talk about New Black Fest? Yeah, I figure with everything. Let's start there. Let's start there. When was it founded? Just tell us a little bit about it. So New Black Fest was founded what year is this, 2010? OK. Something like that. It was founded in 2010. It came out of a gathering that the arena stage hosted when what is now at Emerson College was then run by was then at arena stage run by David Dower and Polly Carl, they hosted a series of these convenings of groups of playwrights and they hosted up one specifically for writers of color for black playwrights. And I was there actually in my capacity as a blogger and not a direct participant. So I was live blogging and blogging about the events. And it was a discussion, as you can imagine, would come out of a group of black playwrights, some frustrations, some victories, some failures, and a very strong sense of we have the strong community and all the strong work and what are we going to do about it? And sort of the opposite of everyone else up here, I was the first person who signed on. Keith Joseph Atkins stood up at the end of it and said, I want to start a festival for black playwrights. And I said, well, I know how to do that. So and I'm interested in that. So I joined with him and with Jocelyn Prince who also was coming to us from the public. The three of us founded New Black Fest, primarily to showcase the work of new black writers, new voices and new perspectives on sort of the black experience. And we came to New Black Fest in that we kicked around a couple of different ideas. And this was before Orange is the new black. But it was very much we want to be the new black. And what is the new black and how do we investigate what that is? And so we started, yeah, I guess we had our first festival that fall. It all moves pretty quickly in getting it up on its feet and doing our first festival. And since then, we're getting they're getting ready for New Black Fest 2013 and have expanded into commissioning and all of that just to tap into this sort of wealth of voices and plays and writers who were not getting exposure or not getting the chance to hear even their own words in public and not a chance to connect to an audience. And so we were sort of in that politically minded from the beginning of we're we're trying to address this issue in the playwriting community from the start. Interesting. So I mean so we have New George's and New Black Fest with that very clear sort of mission about the playwright, you know, who is the who is the writer? I'm curious. It seems to me that Nosedive I think I have a good idea of what Nosedive of what your mission was. But maybe can you sort of encapsulate it for us? Oh, I mean, very simply when we started, it was really Nosedive was plays written by me and directed by Pete. I mean, it really was as simple as that, you know, eventually as we grew on, we started bringing in some other writers to to work on, you know, for for one ax and especially for other shorter plays. And we started doing an anthology series called The Blood Brothers Present, which was a collection of original horror plays. And we bring in other writers and directors on board for that. And we'd also collaborate a lot with the Van Park Cowboys theater company that they would do a thing out in Bushwick called the Saturday Night Saloon, which was a bunch of serialized plays that they would do once a month for four months out of the year. And just by basically just scheduling, you know, Pete wasn't able to direct all the episodes. So we'd actually decided, well, while we'd rather than just have it be like a substitute, we'd actually just get more directors on board. So that expanded. But yeah, from the original, it was really just, you know, plays by us was the origin for Nosedive. But then it sort of, it seemed like there was a real, my experience of going to your shows is that there's that I felt like there was this community of people and there was a sort of identifiable kind of style. If you will, I don't know. Oh, I mean, I, yeah, I don't know how if I don't know if I'm the best to articulate what that style is or what what makes a Nosedive show. But it's one of those I guess it's like pornography. You know it when you see it. And I and now actually that would be a good segue to I just want you to quickly because Nosedive is actually folding or did you fold? Or can you tell us a little bit about what's going on? Yes, I was 10 years. How long? 13 years, actually. Yeah. So I recently made the decision to step down as Cartistic Director of Nosedive. And I said to Pete, you know, it's it's his call. If he wants to keep on producing with the with the name, I was not going to, you know, try to take the brand or the company name or anything like that. So if he wanted to continue producing under the name, he was he was welcome to do so. And he decided not to. He just thought the idea of getting a new could we've been, you know, producing together for 13 years? And I think we staged a total of, I think, upwards of 30 plays in that time. And the idea for him of just getting a new resident playwrights or co-AD just sounded. Excuse me, sounded like not really the way to go. So we opted to pretty much shut a fold of the company very recently. I think we just had our goodbye gala just that Gus actually wrote for. I'm just curious. If you if you don't mind, like, can you just talk a little bit about, like, what sort of factors went into your decision about this? Because, you know, it does take I mean, Gus is living proof. It takes, well, all of you really, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of focus and time away from your writing to run a company, right? I mean, is that what? That was one of the reasons for it. And I think just like, it was not an acrimonious split or a bad breakup or anything. I think it was just the time it had come to move on after 13 years. I think one of the things I was realizing is that it was getting to a point where I was actually using my theater company to hide from the theater scene rather than be integrated from it. And and one of the things is I was also realizing I wasn't submitting my shows to other other companies or to other playhouses. And because the one perk and downside of having your own theater company that I've noticed is that you know your stuff is always going to be staged. So as a result, you don't really do much to really get it out in the world beyond, you know, your own your own company. So I sort of found myself just getting to the point where it was it was time to start, you know, for me to just start getting my work out there beyond not just beyond our audience, but just beyond the New York theater scene. And that also is combined with, you know, my interest level, my interest going towards, you know, writing writing for film and writing web series and things that are not exactly theater related. So that's that also contributed to it. So Gus, can you talk a little bit about at Flux? You have a lot of different a lot of different, what I would call really innovative, interesting ways of expanding the community that that that coalesces around the company. And I just think it would be really helpful and interesting for people to hear about maybe two of them. Okay, yeah, no, we do. Flux develops usually around 50 to 60 new plays a year and that development is either a very light touch or it's pretty substantive. Tasked with only talking about two of the programmatic ways that we do that. I will say the well, we'll see, we'll see how interesting, we'll see how interesting I am. The first one is simply called Flux Sundays. And every Sunday when we're not in production, we gather now primarily in our new kind of home at Chatsen Memorial Church for three hours to lightly stage new plays on their feet, scenes from new plays on their feet. This is the preferred way that it works. So we break into like five or six groups depending on how many scenes we have and the directors and actors do their best to breathe life into, you know, eight to 15 page samples, eight to 15 pages of plays, which is really exciting because it's not the sort of round table paradigm where people read something cold, don't really know what they're doing and then have opinions about what they didn't know that they were doing. Do you know what I mean? And in some ways it's much more about building a community as it, well, it's equally about building a community as it is developing plays. So over the course of, you know, a year, we'll have around a hundred artists who will come in and out of that process. Some are there every single Sunday. Some are rare birds who fly in from time to time. And then some I invite for years and years and never quite make it to a flex Sunday, but that's okay. That's okay. The important thing is the door is always open, you know, part of it is trying to get out of the scarcity mindset that we operate in as theater makers a lot. Like, oh, we can only do, you know, this because everything is scarce and everything's a crisis. And a lot of what I've learned about helping to lead an ensemble is when you let go of the right kind of control, things happen the way they should and flex Sunday is a real example of that. When we really like a play, an awful lot, we do what's called a food soul. So this is the second program I'm gonna talk about, which is an extreme staged reading surrounded by a potluck event. And again, this is about building community as well as developing the plays. You know, a lot of times when you go to a full reading, people go there to judge it. That's what they think they're supposed to do. They think they're supposed to like show up and be like, how can I help the playwright fix this, you know? And it's like you're tended to be sitting in kind of a boring, non-exciting room watching a play that doesn't have a ton of staging. So what we do is we push ourselves to stage way more than we should in the time that equity allots us to do that. But what's surprising is when you have a body of artists who are used to staging plays week in, week out on their feet, it happens a lot faster than you think it can because actors are used to working that way. They're used to trusting each other, making big choices and just going with it. And more often than not, that kind of four dimensional experience brings out the play far more than any other kind of stage reading format can. And then when you surround that with food, you know, people feel like they're contributing. People are bringing food and so they're a part of the event. They're not just passive spectators and when you break bread with people, it just completely changes the dynamic of what that play is there to do and what those people are there to do. So those are like the two programs that we have. And if you want to hear about more, talk to me about it. There are more, but I won't let you talk about them. Susan, can you just talk a little bit about your residency program? It's relatively new, but I have a feeling, but correct me if I'm wrong, that some of these people are people who have been relating to New Georgia's for a while. Is that true? That is true. Most of the people who work with us have been working with us for a while because it's very much the way we work where we are a community of artists. We have a huge group of affiliated artists, about 175 or 180 at this point. I usually lose track. Some are people we've known since the very beginning. Some are people we have just met. And the reason for that is that we try to be kind of a microcosm of the world, because you know you're going out into the world of theater and most of what is made is made based on relationships, and your job is to create these relationships with collaborators, with theater companies. And so we're trying to sort of give an extra kind of leg up to what those relationships might be, especially between playwrights and directors in collaboration. So all of our programming kind of is about this community of artists. And when we get submissions, for example, we don't really read to say, we're gonna do this play. We never do that. We're really to say, well, we really have an affinity with you and your work. And we meet people to find that out. And we really do have a very strong aesthetic interest as a downtown theater company. And we do this sort of heightened, highly collaborative, highly theatrical work. So there is a very specific thing that we do. So all of which is to preface the fact that this year, we used to have, we have a workspace called The Room. It's at the spaces at 520 Space that Art in New York runs. And it's basically, Oh, sorry. I'll have a little talk later. I'll go slower. I'll go slower. It's a New Yorker. New Yorker. Now, we are, the hub of our activities is a space called The Room. And it's basically a room. And that, and because we also believe that play should be happening in 3D, although 4D is kind of more accurate. I'm just getting this, we're gonna not have this program anymore and just do everything that flexes. That just sounded so great. There's more food. So we try to do, we had two different play development programs every year and everything came out of our community. So they are people who we've known for a while and who we're in relationship with. That's who we call for submissions from. So that everything we do is part of a conversation, a long-term conversation and a continuum between the company and the artist and often the company, that artist and that artist artists because everyone has collaborators. And sometimes we match new collaborators together and sometimes they're long-term collaborations, which is always very exciting to us, especially when we get them started. So we had two different play, we had this thing called mini workshops, which was a pretty basic. We tried to encourage everyone to do it on their feet, but some people still like to sit or stand at music stands, work on the play for three to five days, have one presentation, if you want to have a presentation, kind of a playwright's program. And then we had a program called This Is Your Week, which was a director-based program or director and collaborators or more of a devised work, generative artists, whoever you may be, kind of program, which we said you can have a week in the room to work on whatever you want and then you can show it or not show it. So we had those two programs, but I was feeling like we worked on these plays and then we said, see ya, nice knowing ya, we'll send you those affiliated artist emails and then let us know when something happens. And that just didn't feel like enough for me in terms of engagement with the artist and more importantly in terms of the artist's engagement with the company and how much, how involved they felt and how involved they really were. So we scrapped those two programs this year in favor of this. Well, we're sort of doing the same things that we've added this residency component. And what that means is that we're inviting the artists who we selected for the program by a panel process, not just me, which was so great. Because it was sort of, the obligation was sort of off of me. To come to meetings once a month and talk to each other about things that didn't necessarily have to do with their projects but might peripherally. And to just ask more questions and be more involved and potentially to come up with a different plan for developing their project over the course of the year. So we have one person who's working once a month for three hours and we have several people who are using three, having three different one week workshops in the space. It's very much about what people need. And what we found was that the pieces that were, that people proposed were significantly more collaborative and more highly theatrical than the pieces that we got when we asked for a play development program and a highly theatrical generative artist program. That suddenly we realized that some of our artists were already working together on the coolest possible pieces we could imagine. And so we have seven projects and 11 artists because some of them are collaborating on the same project. They're all bringing in their own collaborators. One involves puppets. One is toy or object theater. One has a band at every show but it has to be a different band. They're just, one's a musical about the old West. I mean, they're just really incredible projects that fulfill our mission I think and our aesthetic more than any of the other things we've done. And also we get to spend more time with these people who we already knew we loved but now we get to love a little bit more for the year. And I feel like because there is the potential for the program to keep going further that we'll have that opportunity with many more people to come. So we hope that it doesn't feel like we rejected, I hate rejecting people, more people because we are a community. So that's our new program. We named it after my mom who passed away last year so it's called the Audrey Residences. Thank you. And she sounds like an amazing woman. Well, no, she does. Anyway, we'll do another panel on that. Jay, I wanna hear a little bit about Youngblood. Can you just tell us, you were briefly co-artistic director. I'm not sure how, just explain. Sure, for anyone who doesn't know, Youngblood is a playwrights collective that is part of the Ensemble Studio Theater. It's going into its 20th year this year, apparently, which is crazy. I was a member of it shortly after I moved to New York starting in 97 and then from 2003, 2005, I was first co-artistic director and then, as we're talking about playwrights in charge of things, that was a title that sort of chafed for me solely, not solely, for a lot of reasons. I mean, because being in that position and having that title didn't seem like it jibed with being a writer and being sort of the writer's advocate. My co-artistic director at the time was RJ Tolan who remains doing that. The second year I took the title Literary Director which was a distinction without a difference but it felt better. And so that is an interesting group especially in this because it's gone through a number sort of different incarnations and organizational life within it. When I joined it, it was primarily a writer's group. We met every Wednesday. It was all playwrights except for Chris Smith who was the artistic director but that pretty much just meant he led the playwriting exercises and led the feedback at these meetings. And when I joined, the group was making its way to producing. And that was a very sort of fraught conversation. I joined in like the second wave, the first wave involved people like John Beluso and Christopher Shin and Lucy Thurber. They had all been there for about a year or two before I joined in and David Zelnick. And they were firmly committed to not producing. Well, they weren't. There was an ongoing conversation amongst the group about whether we should start producing because once you start producing, everything changes. Once you move from just being the group that met on Wednesdays, we would do a little writing exercise, we'd read each other's plays. A couple of times a year EST would give us, basically donate the space to the group and say do a readings festival or do some short plays in October fest. And it was all Lucy Goosey and it was all very, very low key. But Chris was right that once we started producing, then we were talking about production costs and raising more money and raising our profile and inviting the times to see the work and putting that much more pressure on the playwrights as well as asking more from the playwrights. It was a collective. So there was, while Chris was artistic director, a lot of the other sort of duties of making a theater company would spill down to the other members. And that was the conversation we were having right when I joined. And ultimately a conversation that ended with us producing our first thicker than water evening of one act plays in 99. And from then on it became an annual fighting that expanded slowly into the juggernaut that is young blood now. Thank you. I just was thinking about something as you were talking about EST. Hidden already in the conversation are something that I think is important to point out which is that there are relationships for these small groups of people, these small fledgling companies, they often depend on the kindness of larger, more established institutions. There's Art New York, there's EST, there's Judson Church, I mean that history. Can, does somebody wanna pick that theme up and talk about how you knock on the door of something bigger and older? I can talk on it less so. Young Blood is a weird case because it started as a program of EST. It was a brainwave that came out of Kirk Dempster's mind and has taken a life of its own and sort of functions as a mini theater company within a larger body. But when Keith and Jocelyn and I were starting New Black Fest, that was done almost entirely on the kindness of strangers. That was done entirely with the good races of groups like Brick out in Brooklyn which donated their home to us for our first festival. And the public where Jocelyn was working at the time which provided immeasurable support. Okay, so Jocelyn had a day job at the public. Okay, so mental note, right? Yes. I mean seriously, I mean I'm just, how many of my scripts have I Xeroxed on the dramatist guild machine? I'm sorry but it's true, you know. Exactly. But it's also, I found, and this was certainly the time that we were doing it. It was weird to say, it was four years ago. It was a different time. But there was a lot of sort of energy and conversation in like the new play sector then. And what was going on in new plays and there was a lot of sort of shifting in the thinking about how to generate new plays and what to do about diversity. And so there was all that heat and organizations were very interested in helping. And I found that mostly organizations are interested in helping and interested in some ways in, what's that word? Outsourcing. Certain things that they don't necessarily do as well in-house. And saying, oh you're here, we're looking for diversity. You guys are people who know diversity and are looking for a place to be. Why don't we mesh? And this helps us fulfill our mission. We help you fulfill your mission. Everyone's happy. And that's generally been my experience. I mean certainly you run into some issues and some people who are maybe not so generous. And the complication of not being your space. But having your own space is its own headache. Who wants to be a landlord? Early on, when we were talking about New Black Fest and we were thinking about sort of the future, I had a meeting with, your name escapes me, Erica, who runs the new theater room. And the first thing she said, the first things that were her mouth were, don't become a landlord. When you have your own space, you're a landlord. And you're dealing with the building's people and the HVAC people and the plumbing. And all of those are headaches that belong to you. You're making me think about Todd London's book, Outrageous Fortune, right? I mean it feels like a theme of the book is like, be careful what you wish for. You have a home, you have a mortgage, you know? I mean actually, what about flux? Does flux, what's your relationship to Jetson Church? Can you talk about that? Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, no, I mean Jetson Memorial Church is an amazing church for those who are not aware of this church, it's right off Washington Square Park near around the NYU area. And they have a long history of the Jetsons Poets Theater which is one of the three cradles of the Off-Off Broadway movement along with Cafe Chino and La Mama. And so, you know, in these very early years they were, and if I left out a cradle, forgive me, I heard a sound there. In the mythology, and those are the three that I'm most familiar with. So, you know, in recent years they began looking back at that legacy they had in the 60s of being a real cradle for a particular kind of art making that wasn't necessarily finding a home anywhere else. And that was connected to their incredibly progressive vision. To give you an example of the kind of dialogue that we have with Jetson, Flux was doing one of our other programmatic play things called Four Play, where we ask a bunch of playwrights to write short plays based on the themes of our full production, which several playwrights here have contributed to. And it was based on the themes of the Old Testament, which was connected to our full production. And we wanted to do some of those at Jetson, and Jetson said, that's cool, as long as you're not proselytizing, you know? So, it's pretty amazing we're at a church, it's like, don't proselytize, you know? So, they're all about works, you know, they're all about works and advancing their mission through that. So, we developed a relationship with them and began doing a lot of our Flux Sundays there, most of our food souls there, and we have produced a full length play there as well. It's one of those things where they have so much going on there all the time that they can't often accommodate all the things we're doing because we're always doing too much. But it's one of those really beautiful relationships where you know when they say no to you, it's because like the most amazing thing in the world is happening in the space that day, so you never get mad, you know? But I do think that when you don't have your own space, you absolutely need to figure out the relationships that will allow you to do things more easily. We have been, Flux has been through a number of storage space incarnations, rehearsal space incarnations, shop space incarnations, and we've just now begun a relationship with three other theater companies where we're sharing a rehearsal, storage, and shop space. And when you have that kind of infrastructure, oh man, it is so much easier because without that infrastructure, if you don't know where you're building your show, good luck depending upon the kindness of strangers, because you can, but sometimes they're not able to extend that kindness. So how do you work out, oh sorry, how do you work out the scheduling? I mean, are there any conflicts in terms of sharing this space? I mean, do you, how far ahead do you have to map it out? Get into some of the nuts and bolts. Nuts and bolts. Yeah, well, you know, it's all Google Docs, right? Everything is Google Docs. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but like that is my life. And when I like meet a collaborator who doesn't use Google Docs, I'm like, oh, oh. Well, you'll have, we'll have to remedy that, won't we? You know? So it's actually not that hard when you have Google Docs. This is a, I mean, you know. It's true, but this is a relatively new relationship for us, but it's one with some companies that we have longstanding partnerships with. So I assume that we will figure out the particular Google Doc etiquette for this relationship. Okay, awesome. Thank you. And James, I assume that you were all of your productions straight rentals or how did you deal with space? Yeah, for the most part, most of them were straight rentals with a couple of exceptions were co-productions through mini festivals. The Brick Theater, well actually the Brick out in Williamsburg is we did a couple shows there and through their summer festivals and that was a co-production where we applied to participate and the deal with that was that it was free rental. I mean, it was, we got the space for free and it was a 50-50 box office split and we were also, we did one show that was part of the Fringe Festival and but beyond that, most of our productions were straight up rentals where we just paid a flat rate and collected all of the box office and we did, since we actually had some pretty decent relationships with some landlords and company managers, horse trade in particular, down in the East Village, you know, we were given some leniency and sometimes some discounts and things like that but for the most part, yeah, we were just, we did straight up just direct rental agreements. Do you, I feel like venue is like often overlooked like as an important factor to consider in producing new work and reaching the right audience sort of like, have any of you had an experience where you put a great show into the wrong venue? Absolutely. I mean, I'll try to keep it as limited as possible because it was just such a heartbreaking and depressing experience, but, you know, we picked a space for, you know, on paper, it seemed like it was the right reasons, it was in a really great location. I won't say the name because it wasn't, you know, the fault of the space or anything. It was in a great location and the price was right and it had 99 seats so we thought, hey, we could really, if we pack this place, we can really make our money back and then some on it but because it was part of, we didn't get an exclusive rental, you know, we couldn't do anything really spectacular with the set because we were in the eight o'clock show and there was a 10 o'clock show so we have to strike everything and be able to pack everything away. You really can't do anything with, also just a standard lighting plot. We couldn't because there were multiple companies performing that night, you couldn't really do anything spectacular with the sound or the lights or the set and that really just, we ended up paying for that in the end and. How was your also, your box office, was your, did you, did your audience, did you find your audience within that venue? We did but I think because of some of the, as a result of some of the aesthetic choices or inability to make a lot of aesthetic choices, I think word of mouth, this is me speculating but word of mouth became a little lukewarm. We got a lot of reviews that were of the, it's all right, it's all right variety and which I think made our attendance level be all right, which I think could have been a lot better. Does anybody else have a venue, yeah? Last year we produced the Irondale Center in Brooklyn and we were very curious to see how that would go. We felt like most of our audience lives in Brooklyn already and people really love that space and it was a space that was really right for the show, absolutely right for the show when we installed this huge and unfortunately the hurricane came in the middle of it and that was a bigger problem but because of that, I mean for the show it was a bigger problem but because of that we didn't get a chance to experiment in the way that we wanted to so actually that was a lesson unlearned about whether that space was gonna work for us or not. Did you? No, no, okay, all right, all right. I think it's time to open it up to the audience for questions, any questions from the audience? Yes? And I'll repeat the questions so that people who, oh and by the way, hashtag new play, right? And we're the dramatists guild, right? Okay, anything else I need to say Seth? You've got it, all right, yeah. I'm interested, I have been at the helm in a couple of different ways but usually separated from my performing and I'm also a union actor. So my question is how do you handle that and who has the responsibility and the liability in your group of people? Oh, okay, great question. So you're asking a little bit about unions but also about structure and I think that's a really great, important question. I'd love everybody to touch on this. Some people have already alluded to the fact that they are 501C3s. I'm just curious, you know, sort of, if you could just each talk about the structure of your company, is there a board of directors? What's the management structure like? You wanna go down the line? Sure. Yeah, I'll try to go quickly. Yeah, so Flex is in the process of getting our 501C3 now which we were very hesitant to do for years because in one of the other hats I wear, I worked in a service organization and I'm on the board of another service organization dealing with larger theaters who've been around for a while and there's a lot about the board construct that's scary and I've seen a lot of examples where boards have kind of taken over a company from something that began as an ensemble and because an ensemble really does function as a check and balance system, we were very, very hesitant to take on the board structure but burnout is powerful and without a certain degree of resources, you are gonna burn yourself out so we decided to go down the route of getting a 501C3 not so that we could become a much larger resourced ensemble but so that we could be in the position if burnout continued to grow that we could resource ourselves just a little bit better so that we could prevent that from happening so it's a very delicate dance that we are going through and it's the exact same dance with union contracts. We have extraordinary artists that are a part of our circle that work with us because they love us but they can't work with us all the time because we don't pay them enough. So again, it's a balance of how do we not lose our soul in trying to keep our stomachs fed and so I think that that's a dance that every theater company goes through but especially one that's an ensemble where no one is interchangeable. Nobody is a position with us and the fabric of the ensemble changes completely with each new addition of a person so sustaining that is different than sustaining a traditional hierarchical theater company I think and so everything with union, everything with sport structure, all of that is a little bit different. Yeah, as Nose Dive continued on, it started out with me and Pete being the two producers where we'd split things 50-50. Eventually that grew just over time to our producing team just became larger and larger into cheese, how many, I don't know, six or seven. I may be getting that number wrong but it was a group of us who we would just be the unofficial producers and people could sort of create or their own level of involvement or lack thereof just depending on their energy level as Gus was saying because we're not really paying people that much so they can participate as much as they want in the producing level. We also, after a few years, became a part of, we were under the umbrella of Fractured Atlas so we used their umbrella to be 501C3, oh we were 501C3, we used their 501C3 status to be not-for-profit and it was a few years after that we had ended up becoming our own 501C3 company and then we had a board which was, I think, half the number of the regular producers. We just did the bare minimum of what the number said, the paperwork said. Just, again, for us it was really never a big thing of like, who's got the official titles, where? It was Pete and I sort of made the main creative decisions as to what the next shows were gonna be and then depending on what that was we had the rest of the group sort of helping us flesh that out and create that. And in terms of, and we also delegated, we just, we had sort of, each person had different strengths and abilities and aptitudes. I, in general, was the guy in charge of publicity. Pete really handled most of the equity paperwork and other members actually just would, would work on different aspects of production. So it ended up working out for the most part, even though it was a fairly, we had a fairly loosey-goosey, unofficial way of setting things up but weirdly it worked out. I think just because we all knew each other well and it was a relatively small group. So, yeah. One cautionary note to those of you who are forming boards, you know, it's like, I think there are always, there are two, there are people on boards who can bring you a lot of money and then there are people on boards who can do a lot of work and put a lot of sweat equity into the company and then there are those people who do neither and those are the people who you need to get off of your board. Anyway, do you wanna talk a little bit about? Sure, the New Yorker once wrote us a listing that our play was done by the Women's Collective in New George's and I was like, no, top-down hierarchy. Yeah. Yeah. Just because we're women. No, it's just that I was the crazy one who kept going for years and years and years. It was only me with people sort of coming in and out and I feel like there was, you know, there's a work ethic. When you're people who do these things, you're insane. You know, you're pushing boulders up hills and you're doing all the equity paperwork at the same time as you're trying to cast a play. I mean, it just all has to get done and so you do it. I was really fortunate about 10 years in or a little less than 10 years in. I met a young director named Sarah Cameron Sunda who came on staff with me and she was the first person that we really ever hired to be sort of a producer, sort of a managing director. Then she was an associate director. Now her title is deputy artistic director. It's been through all these things because she's an artist as well and her artistic career has also been going forward and we kind of wanna continue to, you know, acknowledge that. And then three years ago we made, it was basically just as we always had a volunteer literary manager and then three years ago almost we made this huge, huge, huge leap that was totally necessary because of burnout and we hired a managing director who actually knows how to do a budget and, you know, it was just me sending in the funders and that has been, you know, wonderful and complicated at the same time because she's in the office all the time. We're having a conversation, which is usually about money or funding or something that is not, you know, why went into this. So it does create a very different kind and she's totally gets the work part and totally respects when I recoil from that but at the same time it's very, it becomes just a much more complicated thing but I know that we wouldn't still be here if she wasn't doing that and taking over all those things. It didn't really make my work less necessarily. It made it different because there's so much more focus on that but at the same time it's quite wonderful. One of the great reasons is because she deals with our board. I, the reason, one of the reasons that I was pushing that boulder in my self is that I actually am very shy and I'm not a good asker. I hate to ask people to do things. I couldn't delegate well and people came over to do things and just wanted to have lunch and they didn't actually do them. I couldn't be mad at them. So, you know, I also was that way with the board and also very early on, spoke with some arts consultants through Art New York who were like, don't let your board get ahead of you. It's your culture. If the board is there to support you, don't give them so much responsibility that even what Gus was talking about, you lose your own self of what the company, your sense of what the company is. And I always followed that advice perhaps too much. So the board, the board was always a little bit on the periphery helpful and bucking us up but not necessarily as helpful as we needed them to be especially as we grew. And now we have a wonderful board. They're totally great but they do not stick their fingers in places where they don't belong. I think it's a really good balance and they're delightful, respectful and do give us money or find it which is a huge difference and amazing and all because Jay and he's able to our managing director does a lot of that work. Jay, does New Black Fest have a board? I assume yes. No, no. And last I heard it did not. I stepped away a couple years back but for our first two, two and a half years we didn't have a board. We had an advisory board of people who we liked and were resourceful. People like Lynn Nottage and other people who supported us early on but it was really just at first a three person and then a two person and now pretty much just a one person band. Like Nosedive, we used the umbrella of Fractured Atlas and we've partnered with other organizations as well but when we started it again it was part of that sort of foment of the new play sector and new ways of organizing and the post 13P wave and we all felt pretty strongly about we don't need all of that stuff. A lot of that stuff gets in the way and the buck stopped with Keith and Jocelyn and I and then Keith and I on everything. It helped that we made the decision that Keith and I are both writers that we would not be producing or developing any of our own work through the new black, through the new back class or through the festival that we would focus those energies entirely on other people to make it easier to make those calls and to do that supportive stuff. But it was, yeah, it was us. I did the financials and ran the box office and the first year served as essentially sort of the associate producer or producer of the festival and that's how we made it work. Another question, yes. In light of the cautionary tale that you mentioned in Todd London's book and even I think in today's time throughout theater for the new audience that they built this new building and they've got this much bigger overhead. I'm wondering where you would like to see your companies go in five or 10 years. Do you have a plan in mind? You mentioned don't get a building. You don't wanna be a landlord. Is that something you want? I mean, or are you just sort of making it up as you go along? Okay, I'm gonna just sort of repeat and encapsulate sort of for people watching. So in light of the burdens of taking on real estate, what do you see as the five to 10 year plan for your companies? I think that I now have a five or 10 year plan but I'm a very good reassessor and then I couldn't be doing this and wouldn't be interested in still doing this. I wasn't constantly looking at our mission, our programs, our residency program is a good example of that. How can we do this better? How can it be more interesting how is the way that we articulate what our company does? How can that change based on the work that we've done in just the past few years? And we have evolved considerably and so I do find that that is very natural but at the same time and organic, the way it happens, not necessarily obviously according to a plan but I feel like because our main value really is flexibility and we wanna see opportunities and be able to take them and that's the hardest thing about when you don't have any money, you have less flexibility and so I feel like having the freedom to continually re-articulate and change things is so exciting to me and it's never, and every change or leap that we've ever made, whether we had a plan for it or not has always been a good one so I feel like I'm just one of this plan, judgment plan and you know what I mean, I feel like it balances out to me at this point. Gus, flux does a retreat every year. I imagine that that factors into your planning, right? Yeah, it sure does, so for a week every summer we go out to the Little Pond Arts Retreat which is this beautiful converted farm in rural Pennsylvania and for the first two and a half days the creative partners gather and we do hardcore, strategic planning, vision work, mission work, all that jazz and then the rest of the week we just invite the artists we love and we develop way more plays than we should and then we party way later than we should and everyone is so exhausted. It's like the least restful retreat you could possibly imagine. And also like the most beautiful week of the year. It's one of those things where you're like, oh right, this is what we're doing, you know, this is what this is about, these people and this work. And that's almost as valuable as the strategic planning that comes out of it. We have come out of every retreat with a strategic plan and every year we come back and we're like, look at all the things we did not do on our strategic plan. So we did this retreat which I think was really smart was we said let's create really, a really detailed six month plan for three goals that we have. You know, one is artistic and one is audience based and one is kind of taking a look at our core group of artists and audience which we call friends of flux or fof in the worst acronym ever. And so we have very specific goals and very specific action plans for those three things for six months. And I gotta tell you, it's made a huge difference. Like, you know, not worrying about this three year plan but just trying to execute on this really manageable thing. We also did add a bunch of new creative partners so that we have also aided our execution. But I will say that I think that's where we are. What I hope is that this next retreat, now having been able to execute on that we'll be able to scale it up a little, you know, and maybe every year scale it up a little more because I do think for us, you know, it would be advantageous for us to have some three year, five year strategic plans but we just haven't built the internal capacity yet to execute on those. So I think it's like, you know, but we, I think we'll get there. Another question, yes? Yeah, I think you all of you have been around for a few years but in the current atmosphere of this hyper-specialization, how do you feel that it's affecting your companies and how do you feel it's affecting new theater companies that I just came across? Okay, so how is the current climate, is that what you said? Of hyper-specialization affecting your companies or in general theater in general? Especially new, well- New work. New work, because you've got everybody sort of specializing in one area. Right. And being looked down upon if you sort of wear more- Right, what does it do to theater when playwrights feel that moving scenery is beneath them? Yeah, I think that in the age of Kickstarter actually that is not happening at all. I think it's the most exciting time in the 22 years I've been there for people just putting on their own damn plays and finding a place to do it and the work being really, really exciting and the collaboration being incredibly exciting, people understanding collaboration, people understanding making their own work, people understanding producing, people who don't understand desperate to learn about producing and being able to find communities that will support them so that their plays can happen, I don't know. So you're saying it's changing? I think it's changing for the better, frankly. I mean, I think that people who are coming out of programs may feel very specialized, but they quickly learn that if they want anything to happen, then they do do it. Do you have it? No, okay. Discreet. You want it? I was just gonna say, I mean, I totally agree with that. I mean, I feel it's interesting, I feel that there are overlapping theater communities in this world and there is certainly a world where people are coming out of work programs and they only know what their particular discipline is and there's a little bit less of the young generalists of sort of my youth in theater and I imagine all of ours are people who just sort of did everything, but all I see right now are new playwright collectives and new groups of writers and directors and artists banding together to form something new and to develop it in a new way. And I don't know, I feel that's the exciting part of this sort of outcrop, outcrop. What if there's a word there that I'm gonna say. That's an important question to me but in a slightly different framing which is a larger cultural question of our knowledge of where things come from and where they go. I feel like as a culture, we have very little understanding of where the things that we touch come from and where they go when we're done with them and that is very true, has been very true about the theater field. Everyone is like locked into their little agenda and complains about all the things that aren't going for them but there has not been for a long time a rigorous exploration as to well, why are the structures that way? And I think that the movement that y'all are talking about is true and what I hope is it will take that next step and push out our culture to think that way. Because when you're in the position of working with an ensemble company and other companies as well where you're responsible for every single aspect of everything, you know what's gonna happen to your set at the end of it. You can't wash yourself of that knowledge so if you're adding to the incredible waste that is happening in this country and in this world, you're not privileged to avoid that knowledge. So that means that you have the capacity to take responsibility for it. So that is my great hope is that it's not just a theater thing but a larger cultural thing. Amen. Other than monetary considerations, do any of your companies produce musicals other than money? Do you see any specific problems with doing musicals with the companies that you have? Yeah, I know New Georgia's does musicals is not afraid of music. Do you see specific issues? What? We've had plays with music. Yeah. Okay. Do I say issues? I mean, yeah, I guess so. I mean, no, I love plays with music. I'm extremely happy. I love to have musicians who want to come and do things for no money. Usually, I mean, you'd want it out of time monetarily but when we've been able to have musicians, it makes me very excited. I'll say that. No, I wish I could produce musicals but the problem you raise and don't want to talk about is the biggest problem. And also just know what we do in a lot of ways and we can find different ways to support it and because we do a highly theatrical play, often there's another way. There's a band in it or we do one play with an orchestra because it was scored speaking and you know, whatever. But have an answer. Yeah. I was actually hoping if you could speak a little bit about the best thing and the worst thing about Fractured Atlas. Appreciate it. Okay, controversy. Okay. The best thing and the worst thing about Fractured Atlas, I think specifically what you're talking about is the fiscal sponsorship program at Fractured Atlas. Okay. I mean, I'll wait in and the best thing in my experience with Fractured Atlas is that it exists and that it's there so you don't have to go through the expense and the time and the work of getting a 501C3 and building a board and doing all those things yourself. It becomes a place they are incredibly resourceful or is a great resource for a young company. In our time there, they connected us with other people. It's an easy place for people to donate money to. They offer all sorts of seminars and all of that stuff. And the downside is pretty much what you would expect. You are not in control of your financial life. And you are at the Vigories to a certain degree of another organization, of another staff that is completely out of your control. At some point when we signed on, I was the original financial person out of, I don't know, some stupid idea. And then when I left, there was some sort of breakdown in communication between us and Fractured Atlas, which meant that the paperwork didn't get to the right person and my name just sort of hung around there as a zombie for like two years. Just for lack of, for want of a nail really. And it's that sort of thing of like, it's not like it's your own company where you can walk down and talk to your managing director. You can't. But it's great. I think it's terrific and by all means, go forth and use it. James, did you? Yeah, no, pretty much the same thing. I mean, the downside is you're basically, you are for all intents and purposes, subsidiary of a giant company that you may or may not know management. So there is that and they do take a bite out of your donations and I mean, but that's the price you pay pretty much. The upside is it's very simple to participate in. You pay your dues and you sign up and you pay your annual fee and you get tax deductible donations. Whereas they keep, what is it, 5%? Something like that. And they do have resources for members to take advantage of classes and other resource sharing things like that. So yeah, no, it was a big help, but it just get, for us it got to a point where we were really sort of outgrowing it. And you can't, my understanding is you can't really apply for a lot of grants through it because you really have to be 501C3 to really take advantage of a lot more grant programs. So that's just one of those things where you'll probably get to a point where you'll outgrow it, but it's easy just to move forward. So yeah. I'll also say something. I do, I just really wanna come out as a huge supporter of Fractured Atlas and I think the people are the strongest aspect of it. They have some brilliantly smart people there. It's a lot bigger than just fiscal sponsorship. I believe they've just rolled out a ticketing platform called Artfully, maybe even today or yesterday. And so our hope is that when we leave Fractured Atlas we won't leave Fractured Atlas because like those brains in there are really worth investigating beyond just the fiscal sponsorship. And also the performance space resource that they have is pretty amazing too. Somebody, yes? Who hasn't asked yet? When do you write? Yes. When do you write is the question. And also earning money for yourself. Okay, so I'll sort of paraphrase, when do you write and how do you earn money? And I'll add a third thing, sort of, how do you schedule your week? I'll say that for me I've always had a day job and I write whenever. I have a very sporadic writing schedule and it's shockingly unprofessional. I'll end up writing a full-length play in this 90-minute play in five days and then it'll go like a solid two months without writing so much as a text. It's really like all the rules that you hear about like how you're supposed to write, like I do none of that and it's really appalling. I was, for years, I took advantage of my energy in my 20s of just being able to write when I had downtime at work and I also was just lucky enough to have work at jobs where the people that I worked with or worked for were either interested in what I was doing on the side, this whole producing plays and writing thing or just vaguely kind of curious in the way like you'd be curious about a talking dog. So they'd just be like, huh, that's sort of interesting, let's see where he goes with this. So for me it was always just, I ended up having a lot of energy to be able to write when I had downtime and my day jobs for the most part, for the longest time, didn't really require a lot of emotional commitment. I left it at the office when I went home. That's definitely changed now when my age began with a twit and then went into beginning with a th, and now it's approaching of, and that's becoming a definitely, the balance is becoming a little bit more of a challenge, so yeah. I used to write a lot on vacation so all my first plays had beaches in them. They sort of stopped that. I don't know, you know, the writing somehow, I don't really know how, about two years ago my colleagues were so nice and they said, I said, you maybe I should take a creative day and they were like, yes you should, lately that's been sort of a creative morning, but that's my own fault and my problem is really compartmentalizing more and allowing myself to do that. Somehow I guess I have enough vacation a weekend or I don't know when, or I'm just fast, or I've learned to be fast, so I do write, the thing that I don't end up doing is putting my work out there and writing agents, writing theaters, sending in places, not letting, and then years will go by and I'll be like, whoa, wait, whoa, that review was two years ago, and that is the thing that's significantly more, and then you just have this body of work because you found the time to write but no one's doing the body of work since I don't really produce myself, so that's sort of more complicated, but I have no idea, I mean, it's a hilarious question, I also have two very neglected children, I mean, it's a disaster. Yeah? I didn't get an answer from the three of you about the musicals. Sorry. One from Shulin, thank you. Sorry. I mean, I kind of like musicals, I'm, you know, they're okay, I guess. I've always just preferred, you know, the straight plays over musicals, but I mean, they're okay. Pete and I always joke about the idea of us doing a musical just because people who know me would think that would be such an anomaly, and it would just be like, they'd find it that just such a funny thing to see the postcard of saying like, you know, a new musical by James Khamtois, and that by sheer alone, the novelty would draw people in, but I just never, we never, you know, I never got the idea, I'm, you know, not that musical, so it just never happened, you know? Yeah, I think it'll happen for Flux. We're in the middle of what we call our Big Artistic Risk Project, AKA BARP, another horrible acronym that's what we're all about. And one of the things we identified is like taking on projects that, you know, are stretching us in some way, and so I do expect that while that might not be a play with a lot of music, you know, we might take a page from the extraordinarily well thought out risky play development that New Georgia's does that often results in plays with a lot of music that might as well just be called musicals unless you have an antipathy to the word musicals, right? But like, it's not on our agenda for that to happen, nor do we have a specific project in mind. That New Black Fest that we did musicals, we'll do whatever strikes our fancy. Like the only thing that comes up is the monetary. It's nothing more artistic. I love musicals. Big Family American Musical Theater is one of the few things that America brought into the world. So we should, by all means, celebrate. Can we answer the when we write set question two? Oh yeah, yeah. We're moving on. Because I've got funny anecdotes about that. I've got at least three or four or five items. How about three and a half? Yeah, yeah. So it's crazy, because you have absolutely no time. You've got a full-time job and a full-time theater company and a family life and whatever. So what I do is it's like you create people who are waiting for pages, right? So with Flux, every Sunday we're developing pages. I expect that I have to have pages every Sunday, right? And so now I'm a part of two other writers groups that are expecting pages every Monday. And they're every other week. So now I've got new pages I got every Monday. So then recently I decided to make this idiot bet with Adam Simcovitz that we can each write a full-length play a month. And it's all about, no, but this is so great. Because it's all about stupid, arbitrary, non-real, pressures that you put on yourself so that you prioritize writing over the things that are probably more important like your family. You know what I mean? But it works. So like in this, I didn't do it in a month, but I did finish. I've started a play in September and I finished it, you know? And I've already started on my next one for October. So it's like, I think it's just all about that. Crazy, arbitrary deadlines and people that will shame you if you don't meet them. I do sleep too. I do sleep. But it's also, you learn how to write more quickly. And I think when you have a feedback cycle of artists who are constantly reading your work and putting it on their feet, you do learn to write better. You know, you get closer to write the first time. I think. And I'm a better thinker. But I feel like these worlds, they, you know, I feel like I, from being a playwright, I'm a better producer. And from being a producer, I'm a better playwright because I think very structurally. I think about, my play is more interesting because I'm thinking of design elements because I see it more than I hear it now. And it's just both things kind of balance each other in a way I think is really interesting. And every time. For me, with the writing, I'm a very dedicated morning writer. When I do, sometimes it fits and starts, I prefer to write in the morning. I can't write after a day's work. And one of the reasons why I wound up stepping away from New Black Fest was that at the time, I was sort of in the middle of exactly that pincer of having a day job that I'd been at a couple of years. So my responsibility and more importantly, my boss's expectations of how I would be spending my day had risen to a certain point. And the needs of putting together this festival were making demands that the little bits of time during the day, if I needed to finish a scene, if there was a deadline, if there was something that I could do, I didn't have those anymore. And I had to find a way to protect that time for myself. We have time for one more question. I was just wondering, you all sound so organized. No, you do, I mean, you know. And you sound like you have such a nice bunch of people around you that give you new material. How do you find people who are not in that circle and allow them to put, people present you work? How do you expand the circle? Is that what you're saying? How do you take yet other playwrights since you all sound like you've got groups around you? How do you add more playwrights to your circle? Yeah, how does somebody submit? Does somebody get into these circles? Oh, how do I get into this circle? It doesn't sound like it's a nest. It sounds very appealing and inviting, and I want in, so tell me. It sounds also finished. We accept unsolicited submissions. Did you hear that? They do submissions. New Georges accepts unsolicited submissions. But again, we're reading for affinity, and also let's just clarify that New Georges prefers, they project not plays, I think, in a circle. I mean, you read plays, but it's about kind of, yeah. Well, it's about eventually getting it. Yeah, okay. Anybody else want to crash the door open? I'm not there no more at New Black Fest, but I know that we worked sort of the network of people that we knew, and it isn't that there's a closed circuit, it was just like whoever, Keith would go out and meet someone, or someone would send us a play, or a director would say, here's something I want to work on, and we would read it and decide that, yeah, that fits our aesthetic, that fits our feel, this seems like the right thing to do. But again, it was a three-person shop, and then a two-person shop with not a lot of sort of organizational needs or demands around us. We could pretty much just do whatever we felt like doing, which is nice. No. I can't answer. You wanna? Yeah, we do accept unsolicited submissions, and we do have a literary committee that reads them, and two people have to read them. But I'll be honest, it's not a successful committee, in that I don't feel, well, no, I mean, I don't feel like we've been able to move a lot of the plays that we've read in that capacity into any kind of meaningful relationship, and I don't know if that's just the quality of the plays, or the quality of our literary committee, or what, you know? So I'd say that the far more realistic way of becoming a part of Flux is to just insert yourself into it in a way that we can't get rid of you. And honestly, that is really how it works. Someone will show up to events, will keep introducing themselves, they'll come to one of our play development things, and we'll work with them. They'll keep asking, hey, can I come back? Can I come back? Can I come back? And beyond kindness and compassion, like you wanna have talent, but when you're building a creative home, you really, really need people with some fire in the belly who are gonna show up, and it's gonna be of value and important to them. So that kind of process is organic and mysterious, and I've struggled with that because at times it's felt not transparent, but lately it has felt more authentic to me because that's what seems to be working. Do you know? So that's a wonderful place to end, thank you, because I really feel like, you know, for us as writers, one of the hardest things to do is to pick ourselves up, get out of the apartment, and actually go see other people's work. And this is the first step, we're all in this room together, we're not in our apartments, although you guys are, I'm sorry. No, no, but anyway, so go out, see the world, and conquer the world. Thank you very much.