 Yeah, for me it was as easy as George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd changed everything, right? It changed the conversation of this land. It changed our focus on all of a sudden, for whatever reasons, we've seen a ton of these kind of murder videos, right, of black people, but for some reason, because we saw it in someone real time, and we saw the light actually squeeze totally out of this man right in front of us, that white people no longer could walk away and say, I don't know, maybe he did this, maybe he did that, because it always turns back to the person who got killed for some reason, what did they do to deserve their murder, you know, it's ridiculous. So it's the George Floyd moment and that moment actually for me was moving on several levels and I think because of the first time that I saw white people en masse lay their bodies on the line for black people. Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us this evening. I'm Kristen Maudy, an adult programs librarian at the Boston Public Library. We are thrilled this evening to be in partnership with Company One and the GBH Forum Network. A special thank you goes out to the Lowell Institute for sponsoring tonight's program. Thank you for joining us tonight. And please join me in welcoming Alana Brownstein, director of new work at Company One. Alana, welcome. Hello. Thank you so much. We are so thrilled to be here tonight. So tonight we have convened a roundtable of nationally recognized generative artists and thought leaders to examine the cultural and political crises of the past 15 months through the lens of the arts, broadly defined, and to consider actions both large and small that may pave a path towards communal healing. As Kristen said, my name is Alana Brownstein, I use she her pronouns. I am Company One theater's director of new work and I am your moderator tonight. I am joining you from the stolen lands of the Neponset Band of the Massachusetts people and the Pawtucket people. The traditional residents of this land are now known as the Massachusetts tribe at Pankapoog, which is also known as Arlington, Massachusetts. I am so honored to introduce our esteemed guests. They are San Francisco's director of cultural affairs, Ralph Remington, St. Louis Rep's artistic director, Hannah S. Sharif, journalist Deep Tran, and MacArthur winning playwright Louis Alfaro. And I'm going to give you just a little bit of information about each one of them and hopefully they won't be too embarrassed by me singing their praises. So before recently joining the Department of Cultural Affairs for the city and county of San Francisco, Ralph Remington has enjoyed a wide-ranging career in art making, arts administration, and government. He is a director, an actor, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and is the former deputy director for arts and culture for the city of Tempe, Arizona. He's the former Western Regional Director and Assistant Executive Director for Actors Equity in LA. The former director of theater and musical theater at the National Endowment for the Arts and is the founding, producing, artistic director of the great Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis. Thank you, Ralph. Hannah S. Sharif is a playwright, a director, a producer, and as of 2019, the artistic director of the Repertory Theater, St. Louis, which is my hometown and my hometown theater, and I am so excited about that. Previously, she was the Associate Artistic Director at Baltimore Center Stage, where she specialized in community engagement, producing multiple world and regional premieres, and helped to guide the theater through a multimillion-dollar building renovation and rebranding effort. She is the former Associate Artistic Director, Director of New Play Development, and Artistic Producer at Hartford Stage, and is the co-founder and artistic director of Nasir Productions. She is the recipient of an Etna New Voices Fellowship and Theater Communication Group's New Generations Fellowship. Hi, Hannah. Deep Tran is an arts journalist and editor in New York. She was previously the Features Editor of Broadway.com and the Senior Editor of American Theater Magazine, where she led the creation and launch of AmericanTheor.org, which is the first official website for that magazine in its history, which is amazing. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, Playbill, CNN, and Timeout New York, among many others. She's a judge for the 2020 Obie Awards, the 2020 Drama Desk Award Voter, and is currently the industry news writer for Backstage. Deep recently helped create and serves as the managing editor of vietfactcheck.org, a bilingual fact-checking website which was founded to combat the fake news and misinformation floating through the Vietnamese-American community. Hello, Deep. Finally, we have Luis Alfaro, a critically acclaimed playwright and associate professor at USC. He has been working in theater, performance, poetry, and journalism since the early 80s. A Chicano born and raised in the Pico Union District of downtown LA, he is a multi-disciplined artist, director, curator, producer, educator, community organizer. Luis is the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, sometimes called the Genius Fellowship, Genius Award. His extensive body of plays and his solo work have been seen in productions throughout the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Europe, and supported by the Andrew S. Mellon Foundation, Luis was the very first playwright in residence in the 90-year history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He received the 2018 Penn America Laura Pell's International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist. He's received the United States Artist Fellowship, supported by the Doris Duke Foundation and the Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, among many other honors. So with this panel, I say welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Hello, everybody. We are going to have a great conversation tonight. And the framework is I want us to kind of dig into the innovations and challenges that we see around us. Like, how did we get here? What are some forward-thinking possibilities? And the broad topic is, what is the role and responsibility of the arts, of artists, of organizations in a time of social and cultural crisis? What is kind of community do we want to wake up to after this pandemic? And what can we do to make that a reality? Throughout our conversation tonight, I'll be sharing some clips of work that Company One Theater has produced over the past year. Just as a way to kind of illustrate some of the stuff we're talking about. And so to get us started, before we jump into the meat of the matter, I would like to share a clip from Idris Goodwin's play Hype Man, A Breakbeat Play, which is a project that Company One Theater developed and premiered. And then over the last year, we transformed it into a film in collaboration with the American Rep, our collaborator in that project. In this clip, you're going to see actors Rachel Cognata, Michael Nolton, and Kadaj Bennett create a song in the moment, celebrating the power of artists to address social crisis. Get on up and just say it, get on up and just say it, yeah. You gotta, you gotta get on up and just say it, say it, say it. Get on up, you gotta say it, get on up, you gotta say it. Get on up, you gotta say it, get on up, you gotta, get on up, you gotta, get on up, you gotta say it, get on up, you gotta, say it, what? Get on up, you gotta, say it, please, get on up, on trip, when you say it, say it. Hey, Pete, roll it back right there, cause it's fire one time, like, get on up. Hello to Hype Man and hello to our panelists. Okay, so let's begin. Thinking about the past 15 months. I would love for y'all to describe your specific vantage point on the arts and the pandemic. What has your particular point of view allowed you to notice about how folks have broadly engaged with the arts and give me big takeaways or surprises? I'm gonna throw this to Ralph. Well, first of all, thank you. I use he, him, his pronouns and coming to you from the stolen lands of the ancestral home of Alone and Ramatish tribes in San Francisco. So glad to be here. I think, first of all, I had COVID twice in this last year. So I had COVID in the first time in February of 2020. And then I had it again in January of 2021. New Year's Day, I was literally in emergency here in San Francisco. And just moved to town. So it's very, very real for me. It's not even abstract. And so I felt it and now I'm fully vaccinated and everything. I probably am Superman because I had it twice and I'm fully vaccine. So I got some strong antibodies going on. But I guess I came to grips with my own mortality in the last year. And kind of was able to reflect on what's important and what isn't important. And all that happening with the last election and so on and so forth. I mean, it's, and coming to grips with that, I thought it's okay if I go. I feel like I'm not, I don't feel like I'm done right now. But I also felt like I had lived every minute of this life as strongly and as forthrightly and as unapologetically as I could. And being my true self throughout all of my years. So I felt like if it's time to go, it's time to go. And so I think it forced all of us to kind of really come to grips with the end and whenever that may be. Now, being in San Francisco and having formerly been in Tempe was amazing to see over the last year all the innovation as far as people doing art, making art from their living rooms and broadcasting around the world. I mean, nobody ever thought that that would happen on a massive scale. And yet it did. We could peek in on anybody anywhere from the greatest world class museums and performing spaces to someone's living room in the smallest town in America. And I think that was really democratized art in a way that we haven't seen before. And so I think that's a gift. That's a gift for all of us. And it would say as a result, able to really expand the impact of communities large and small and particularly of marginalized and disenfranchised populations. Yeah, I think we certainly saw that from our perspective as well. And PS, I'm glad you are better. I'm glad that you are still with us. Hannah, what was it like from your point of view? You know, at the beginning, it was hard to really wrap my mind around what we were facing. You know, in March of 2020, we had a world premiere musical in rehearsal. And I have this very distinct memory that I will probably carry with me for the rest of my life. We were still in the middle of America, right? So there was a bit of a bubble. You were hearing on the news that was happening on both coasts, but it hadn't quite penetrated Middle America yet. And we were in the last day. We shut the theater down on the final day in the rehearsal room of this musical. So all of the designers started to come in, travel into St. Louis for tech. And the day the designers landed, the energy in the room shifted. And it felt really clear from the first moment when they walked in the room, they were like, do you guys not know what's happening in the rest of the world? It was like a bubble burst in a very profound way because we had designers coming in from New York, designers coming in from California and designers who were supposed to be getting on a plane from Germany who called because the same day we shut down was also the day that all the day before all international flights were shut down in the US. And they called and said, we can't get on this plane because we don't know if we'll be able to make it home if we do. And so there's this moment of whatever sense of this is happening outside of ourselves, that this is something happening to other people was burst in that moment. And and then very quickly after that, the whole country went to stay at home orders. And what I realized as we went into stay at home orders, I remember thinking really clearly never has it been more important for us to have a sense of human connection, never has it been more important for us to be able to create bridges for people to hear and understand each other. Then in this moment when all of our stages are dark. And so the present question from those very early days is that the artist is needed more than ever in this moment. How will we find a way through isolation, through stay at home orders, through the pandemic to help elevate our own sense of humanity and the humanity of others? And while we were having that conversation and beginning to dream, I looked across the Internet, I looked across the country, I had calls with friends who are playwrights, directors, actors and everyone just kind of turned back to what is essential. I think there were artists who were creating art, not just because they wanted to cross that bridge, but because they needed it to breathe. And the necessity of understanding ourselves and connecting felt so urgent and visceral. And what I think came from that, I say it left us into the future five years, right, because in some ways, theater has accepted technology to a certain degree, but also held it at a distance and that distance collapse. And this idea of like, what is the boundary? I am enthralled by the question of what theater really is and how we can break all of our preconceived notions of what the form needs to do in order for the stories that need and want to be birthed to come through. And there has been this kind of extraordinary journey. One of our early things was to commission, do microcommissions to playwrights because we also wanted to get money back into the field, whatever way we could. There's been site specific programming. There's been creative placemaking. There have been Zoom plays. There have been plays on top of rooftops. You know, there have been people singing arias from the windows of their apartments. And I find all of that to be incredible art. And my question, I think, as we move forward, as the world starts to reopen, is what pieces of what we learned and explored will become part of our DNA as we reopen? We're never going back to who we were in January 2020. And I think there are some people who might be confused by that. But it's a fact. And I wonder, really, I am I am excited by the prospect of who we can choose to be reborn as and what walls will crumble because of that. And, you know, my fellow panelists here, I think are real great arbiters of what the future holds. Yeah, I that those are really, really compelling questions. And it made me think about your your comment made me think about how it that there are systemic changes that have happened in terms of like the business, the back end business of theater and unions and how unions negotiate the there's been a lot of friction in those spaces that I think I hope is creative friction that propels us forward. Luis, I want to throw to you. What are some thoughts that you have had from your vantage point over the last 15 months? Well, I've been very lucky because I didn't stop working, right? So in some way, I say I'm lucky because artists are really, really inventive people, right? What we do is we figure out how to keep doing it. We figure out how actually we don't need the room. And that was the really, really wonderful lesson here. You know, I had like, for instance, I was doing a project with a company called Chalk Rep, site specific work, and we went completely audio. So he's beautifully audio plays now that are completely layered with all this gorgeous sound that was once about place is now about a kind of, you know, all journey that you're taking. So that was very exciting. I I feel very, very humbled and lucky because I also work in the academy. So I was teaching all the way through. So the two words that pop up for me are trauma and exhaustion, right? So I'm cradling about 65 young people, young artists, and I'm cradling and also walking them through the experience of art. So we're not going to do it the same way. But how are we going to do it? And here is the opportunity to reinvent it, right? Reinvent it so much that we're not even going to write it the same way. We are going to do it completely different. And at the same time, because I'm trying to keep a direct line to what we were doing in the theater, I joined a center theater group, which is our largest regional theater in Los Angeles as a part of an artist collective they started to keep in conversation, right? To keep in conversation with other professional artists to figure out what we're doing. And so we started to create something called the Artary Project, which was just really about how do we stay in touch with our city? And I'm in Koreatown, which is the densest neighborhood in the western United States. So, you know, it is really crowded here. And I'm I'm one of those people can't get sick. So I have to really, really move through this very deliberately. But I find that as I'm moving through it deliberately, I cannot do the thing that I do in a room, but I can do everything leading up to that moment. So by that, I mean, I don't think I've ever examined the way architecture works, as I have now. The architecture of a theater, the way we create plays, the process of production, all of that became fully, fully and wholly alive. And I want to say that because I think it is the way we break down the systematic structure that also holds us back. So as a person of color, this is an extraordinary opportunity. I'm inside the building, but I'm also outside of it mostly so I can see how the structure really works. And now my job is to subvert the subvert the system, right? So I'm in a fifty million dollar theater company, but I'm also in an eight billion dollar university, right? Don't forget that. But I'm really stuck in a tiny little apartment in Koreatown, right? And the politics, that's really where it's happening. That's where all the change is happening. So I never stopped writing. I think I wrote because, you know, I was incredibly lonely. I'm a single gay man living in an apartment in Koreatown. And writing is not the therapy, writing is the lifeline. So all of a sudden, story is essential. Who are we speaking to? Who are we telling that story to? How are we conveying what we need to convey in its most base idea right now? So as a just really clever little thing of when I was working with the students, I had 24 undergrads in a playwriting one class. And I said, so we're not going to write in a living room, a porch or a yard or a backyard. We're going to write outside of time. So 24 science fiction plays, 24 plays that really are dealing with multiple ways of speaking. I have such an international group of students. Nobody's writing just merely in English. So all of a sudden when allowed, people are writing and plays half Korean, half English, people are starting to do all the experiments that were always available to us. But all of a sudden when the spotlight shifts and we're not in the center of that spotlight, we can start to see the world very different. Oh, man, that is so your your analysis of like the power of place is really resonating with me. The idea that place is not just a physical location and not just an imaginary location, but that internal to our psyche location and like this opportunity to really investigate how those things align or collide. I'm really interested in that. Deep, your position as as a journalist gives you a really interesting point of view on what we've been through. What do you want to throw in? Yeah, I feel like everything I wanted to say has already been said, especially by Ralph initially, about how everyone has become more innovative. I will. But I will speak for myself in that I will. I will speak very honestly in that as soon as New York shut down. Oh, and my name is Deep Tran, my pronouns are she hers. I come from the land of the Lenape people, which also known as New York City. And so I was in New York City when everything shut down. And I was working at Broadway.com at the time and I had just started that job. And then a week later, I was told I was being furloughed from the job because Broadway has shut down. There was no more money coming in. And it and this is I'm in this career for 10 years and I had never been unemployed. I had never not been a journalist in my career. And so I had been for the first time, I felt very unmoored. I did not know what to do. Who am I if I don't go to the theater? Who am I if I don't write about this art form? Because for the past 10 years of my life, I worked my 10 to six job. And then at night I go to theater and I saw like around like 150 shows a year. Like that was I lived and breathed theater for 10 years. And this time for me personally had been I didn't know I needed it because I think as theater people like we overwork ourselves because we love this art form so much and the art form demands a lot of theater practitioners. And I think what this time has given to a lot of people is the ability to breathe and to think about what kind of work they want to do, what kind of field they want to go back into and what change can actually look like. And what I have been noticing in the past year have been just this outcrop of advocacy groups created by by actors, by writers, by designers, about like how to truly push for change and not wait for producers or gatekeepers to be the ones doing it because that had not been historically the case. And it's been really buoying on on one hand to witness like people actually speaking truth to power for the first time and people advocating for their own needs and not feeling afraid for their careers, like places like the Broadway Advocacy Coalition or or or Everybody Black or the Broadway Theater Alliance. Like all those organizations are relatively new, but they have a power right now that I don't think would have happened without the pandemic without this like critical mass of people being willing to speak up like Scott Rudin is no longer producing on Broadway because a critical mass of people spoke up and they protested outside of the Broadway Theater. And the other thing that's been really that's been really interesting and has been really inspiring to me personally has been like Ralph and Hannah said like the innovation and the work and the new the using of technology and of new mediums because I've worked in a nonprofit for 10 years. I know how slow nonprofits can be to change and change. And a lot of people in positions of power do not want it to change. It can be a very painful process. And so I think this moment had forced a lot of institutions that had become more complex and their ways to really pursue new ways of working and producing for the sake of survival. And I think I hope that they will continue to take some of the lessons they learned about, you know, expanding past audiences, about expanding accessibility. And so because so that we wouldn't have wasted this past 18 months. You know, if I jump in a little bit, I like it also really crystallized for me. Do we need to see yet any more plays yet one more play from another dead white guy? We need to see another Shakespearean play. Do we need to see another Greek play? Do we need to see all these dead white men being produced again and again? I'm fine. I could go my whole life without seeing another European classical play forever, and I'm good. I hear that. I hear that so deeply. And I'm I'm thinking about a couple threads from from all your comments, I'm hearing particularly in addition to the things about innovation and about the opportunity that this terrible moment provided, I'm thinking, Hannah, you said specifically thinking about artists who create because they need it in order to breathe. And I heard deep. I heard you say that as well. And it brings to mind the work of a photographer named OJ Slaughter, who is if you don't know OJ, they are amazing and I highly recommend you check them out, but we're going to hear from OJ in just a moment. OJ Slaughter joined Company One for a piece of programming we did over this last year called Better Future, which brought together community activists, artists and Company One staff to create conversation about what our communities really need and how do we how do we help them arrive at those needs? So here, OJ is going to reflect on how the art of photography took on a new importance to them during the pandemic. But photography has been a gateway for me to experience joy. I've always juggled anxiety and depression and self-doubt. And when I picked up a camera in 2011, it changed the way I view the world and myself. My own sexual race and gender identity because I'm a human being. My own sexual race and gender identity became so much clearer when I was able to appreciate others at all points and places in their lives. I was able to meet myself where I was at the way at the same way I was able to meet others. Photography allowed me to tip toe into happiness and I felt like happiness was something that I could not obtain for a very long time. But when I started capturing love and joy on camera, I knew it was possible for me to. What I have learned most from making pictures is that joy comes from a place far beyond whatever notions we've been fed. It comes from a smile that lives behind your eyes. It comes from the smell of a good friend. It comes from the small transformations we make to our days in order to do and be better. I wanted to find a way to tell people I love them without words. Capturing people in their most vulnerable moments, whether powerful or painful, has allowed me to process my own emotions and take better care of myself and my community. All the images I'm showing you right now are images that have given me a voice. I think when I thought of history before I picked up a camera, I always thought about monumental events, including involving politics, because I had not really seen images the way I take them, seen as historical artifacts. Of course, protest work puts us in this place in time, but so does fashion, music and candid moments. And I hope that in years and years from now, my work resonates with people who cannot find their joy. I hope my work encourages people to pick up cameras and tell their own stories. The stories belong to the people who experienced them. And just understanding that all that power lies within us is really the main message of my work. What does it look like when we take back control? And what does it look like when we turn our cameras towards the people that look like us versus the people who don't look like us? Yeah, so. So with that as our next sort of launch point, a company one theater, our mission is to create community at the intersection of art and social change. And when we look at something like the role of the arts in a time of crisis, we and I think each of you and many others in our field, we can come at it from a number of different but interconnected ways. So there's the social, cultural experience of the general population of non artists. There's the creative and socioeconomic lives of the artists themselves. There's the challenges faced by arts organizations. And then there's the arts probably defined in dialogue with political movements, as I think we've seen so clearly. I'd love to hear from each of you about a strong moment of meaning from the past year that resonates with one or more of those approaches. So just one, one thing that really sticks with you, a strong moment of meaning. I'm going to throw it a Hannah to start us off. Yeah. And I'm feeling deeply right now. I really appreciate OJ's work and what was just shared. You know, we talked about the global pandemic, but there was another pandemic that the world was dealing with over the course of this last year, which is a race, what I call a racial pandemic. And I am a fourth generation activist. This idea that my job, my true job in calling is to work towards equity and liberation for all people. And I show up in this black female body, them body with an understanding that everything I do, be it my job as a producer, playwright, director, mother, sister, friend, is in service of liberation. And there have been a lot of painful, painful moments in this last year. But I try and think about them in context of history, in context of the history of movements. And what I lean into is the sense that the real movement of liberation is not in the hands of the gatekeepers, but in the hands of the people. So I'm here in St. Louis. I live on the same street as the mayor. And the mayor of St. Louis, it was national news docs, some citizens who were protesting the fact that there were still workhouses in St. Louis where people who had debt were put to work off their debt. And that resulted in a series of protests in our neighborhood. I was also pregnant during this time. And the protesters would show up five o'clock in the morning, four o'clock in the morning, eleven o'clock at night with drums and chants. And it was a beautiful mixed crowd of people. And I think I may have shared this on social media. My child in utero appreciated the drums. So she would start to kick to the beat of the drums. Often before I could even hear the drums, she would know they were coming. And I would hear this chanting following her, no justice, no peace. If we can't get no justice, then you can't get no peace. And, you know, my ten year old would go out with water and snacks for the protesters to the street corner and we would sit on our porch in solidarity with those who were out in the street calling for accountability, calling for justice, calling for the structures and systems to recognize them and not carrying whether the police were standing on the corner, not carrying whether they were playing on the right side of identity politics. And so when I think about a profound moment for me, was this moment of standing at one point on the porch with my mother, who marched in the sixties at one shoulder and my ten year old at the other and my baby in utero kicking all of us chanting in support of the people. And while I am in some ways a gatekeeper as an artistic director of a regional theater, what I understand fundamentally is that I'm in that position in order to break down the systems of inequities and the structures that have held the people's will back and kept us from liberation and that I don't actually I'm not invested in the title or the seat I'm invested in the work and never has that been more profoundly realized or resonated than this year as I have as an artist, as an activist and as a citizen had to figure out how to make sure that I use the privilege that I have in one hand in order to break open the fist of all the other hands, right? And I think that my ability to conceptualize that and to understand it is deeply rooted in my beginnings and my root as an artist. Thank you. I I'm shaking things up on the back end because I'm going to move a clip that I was going to save till later. But I want to I think it would be really powerful to share right now. This is a clip from Hype Man, in which we see one of my favorite moments of the play, Kadaj Bennett, who plays the role of Verb, who is the eponymous Hype Man of the title, he takes his place in his call for action. And I'm going to I'm going to ask our our director to play that now. I want to tell him being a Hype Man, that's that's not cheerleading, that's me celebrating my life. And that that right there is how we all get free. Let's see. I'm out there and I'm at these protests. And we all out there and we stream and we chant and I ate that. That shit feels like it popped to me too. It's about getting free. Racism is a holding cell. Thank you. Yeah, that that clip just really made me think a lot about what you were saying, Hannah. I'd love to throw this over to Deep to to share a moment of something that was potent for you from the arts over this last this last 15 months. Deep, go ahead. Yeah, well, similar to Hannah, it's going to be something that happened in my brain, like when something when something just clicked for me. Well, when the Atlanta massacre massacre happened and stop Asian hate became a national hashtag, it was really it was an interesting experience for me because I had seen the headlines of other racist incidents towards age, violent incidents towards Asians even before the massacre, but it had really penetrated outside of Asian Twitter. And and then this real and then as as things happen within this country, it takes a gigantic, violent event for people, for the wider populace to realize that these stories are these people are valid. These people, their stories need to be told. This is an actual issue. And then the way that it related to theater for me and I wrote a piece about this was I then turned on my journalist brain and then I went. Why? Why does why does this? Why does it take all of this for people to to see that we're not invisible? And I realized that when I feel like representation matters, that phrase has become somewhat diluted and no one really knows what it means anymore. And what and for me, what it does, the stop Asian hate really turned turned into focused it for me because I realize that the reason representation matters is because it one, it helps you, the the marginalized population, the people who are who has who are violated. It makes you feel like you're not invisible because Asians are the least likely group to report a hate crime. And so if these stories are not being told and keeps it shape and makes it shameful to talk about it, like I was talking to David, and he had a hate crime committed against him a few years ago, he almost died and even he felt shame in talking about it. And so representation matters because it keeps it keeps us from feeling shame and representation also matters because it makes the stories more it not market, but it spreads the story more widely so that other people know about it so that they can also see and stand with the community. So they know the problem exists. And so it's twofold. And unfortunately, when I was thinking back on the American theater, that had not been a common occurrence of stories with Asian protagonists who are strong, who have agency. It had been stories of Asian prostitutes and violence and stereotypes. And so in my in my head, I realized, oh, why did that killer say that Asian women were temptation and he had to kill them? Oh, it's probably because he had been seeing so many movies and and madam butterfly and all of these cultural references that portray Asian women as sex objects without agency. That's probably where the stereotype comes from. And that's how it leads to violence. And so when we talk about representation, it's not a we are the world, the world needs to be represented. Representation has an effect on the actual world. It affects how we see other people, how we treat other people and affects how we see ourselves and and like that all just clicked for me within the month of February. Thank you, deep. That's really powerful for me to hear you talk about that. Louise, what do you want to share about a moment of meaning for you? Well, I'm just so moved by all of this conversation, thinking about what Hannah just said, art as a means of social change, right? It's why I got into the arts in the first place. So I work on a very basic level and then I work on a very, very, you know, elevated level and both of those I can hold at the same time. I think all of us do. I'm looking a rough, I'm looking deep, I'm looking at everybody here, right? That's what we do. So on one level, I'm at my university and I finally got the audience to to sit with my university president and say, you know, I'm two percent, two percent people of color faculty at this university. That's embarrassing and it's unacceptable. And I need you to do something about it. I need you to hire a hundred people, a hundred people of color professors in the next hundred days. That's my proposal to you, right? You can do something like that, right? In this moment, but there's that and then you can be at a big theater and say, listen, why are you opening with the British Christmas Carol? And just to get the money back. I mean, what is the ritual for how we're going to enter back after a year of so much thinking and so much training, EDI training? And then your entire staff is done. This is the right way to come back. So there's that, right? But in truth, the best thing I did was to sit in this room like this and to read a million plays from a bunch of young people, really emerging artists to sit on a bunch of panels. And one of the best things I did was I went to 37 different universities. That's a lot of university. I went around the world. I went to Shanghai. I'd get up at three o'clock in the morning, right? I went everywhere because this this medium, this little electronic box opened up the possibility for my travel, right? The travel that I'm not usually able to do. But in the end, the best thing I did in the last 15 months was I had a student who was depressed and suicidal and it was a three hour conversation where I had to listen and be in empathy and compassion and to understand humanity and to understand how the art is the way in and to understanding, right? So this is a young artist who had an arc and was able to climb over, right, to the other side of their own rainbow. This is really, really important. So we can work like this and we can work like this and both of them are equally as important, right, and to not lose that in the work that we do is really, really important. So sometimes people say to me, well, you know, I'm really disappointed you don't have a play this season. I have a play this season. I have a play this season, but it's not ready because I've also made thirty seven plays with young people this year and that's that's essential work. That is leading to the play that I will get next season, right? That's really, really important. And so we don't talk about that enough because, you know, I could Twitter it and I could I do it and I could Facebook it. But also you can do it, you can do it in the silence of this moment. You can do all that work and be just as effective, right? So my political work has come back in and not that I felt like it ever stopped. But now, you know, I'm back to the ACLU and back to all those organizations that we we start off because right in front of my house, where I'm at is where all the marches pass, right? So we can give the water. We can march with everybody. We can do the work and you can go to the mayor's office. And well, we call it the mayor's office. We go to the mayor's mansion and we kind of like, right, make the noise that I think I was talking about guilty. Right. But really, in the end, it is those 24 plays that are as important as my time at CTG, trying to get, you know, the artistic director to do something else. The 24 plays is what's lasting, is what is going to take us into the future. We must not forget that because that is the way we make the work. Now that is the way we make the work. Oh, my gosh. Thank you, Louise. That gives me a lot to chew on. Ralph, I'm going to throw it to you and I want to say also, as soon as what as soon as we finish up with this little moment, we're going to start to incorporate some of the questions that we've received from audiences. So, Ralph, I'm going to ask you for your moment. Yeah, for me, it was it's easy as George Floyd. The murder of George Floyd changed everything, right? It changed the conversation of this land. It changed our focus on all of a sudden, for whatever reason, because we've seen a ton of these kind of murder videos, right, of black people. But for some reason, because we saw it in someone real time and we saw the life actually squeezed totally out of this man right in front of us, that white people no longer could walk away and say, I don't know, maybe he did this, maybe he did that, because it always turns back to the person who got killed for some reason. What did they do to deserve their murder? You know, it's it's ridiculous. But it's it's the George Floyd moment. And that moment actually, for me, was moving on several levels. And I think because of the first time that I saw white people amass lay their bodies on the line for black people. And I haven't seen that in my lifetime and in a massive movement where they're out in the street and actually going toe to toe with the authorities and with the gatekeepers and with the military and and just laying their bodies on the line. Now, that's on one hand. On the other hand, talk about Hype Man. We had the ultimate Hype Man in Trump. Trump was the Hype Man for white terrorism in this country. And he hyped it up to such an extent that anti black terrorism increased more than it's ever had had the future. We saw this rise of Asian hate. So all of that and then, of course, January 6th. So that was all courtesy of the Trump of Trump, the Hype Man for white terrorism. So for me, it all kind of started this whole massive racial reckoning with white supremacy started with the murder of George Floyd and his sacrifice, really. And that and then it on several levels, it hit me because the George Floyd was murdered right down the street from Pillsbury House Theater. So that's my neighborhood. That was my hood. I was walking. That's I've been a couple of millions of times because that's where I would go up to get a pop or whatever. You know, to get some refreshment and couples was right up the street. And to see that in a city that I love, Minneapolis and to see that Minneapolis hasn't even recovered from that. And because how do you recover and the country hasn't recovered from it until we really, really, really deal with the roots of racism and white supremacy in America until we actually have the Cajones to actually do that? We're still going to get stuck. We're going to be in this endless cycle of, you know, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And but it's a beginning. It's a beginning and that neighborhood, that city that I served as a city council member, I found at Pillsbury House Theater there. To me, that had a profound effect on how I look at this whole thing and how I look at my colleagues and my allies and my enemies in this movement. Thank you. Before we jump to an audience question, I want to share two short clips with with us. One is the first one is Francesca da Silvera, a playwright who is part of Company One Theater's Surge Lab and our Flux Lab, which are two different ways we support writers. Fran created a new play with us as part of a program we produced right around the inauguration called Remaking America, a message to the new administration, where we asked playwrights to write short plays through the lens of concerns of our community, public health, housing, etc. And so Fran wanted to write about self-care and mental health. And so she's here speaking about how the pandemic has impacted her own life and work. And we're going to follow that with a short clip from Hype Man. As someone who has lived with anxiety and depression for the majority of my life, I feel like everything I write somehow touches on mental health. For better or worse right now, our idea of normal has just been completely dismantled both because of the pandemic and because of the precarious state of our government. We have to be able to talk about how both of those impact our mental and physical wellness and we have to individually and as a society, figure out how to move forward. But before we can do that, we also have to reckon with our history and our complicity and the ways that all of it just lives in our body and causes us damage. It is not an easy thing for anyone to do, let alone someone who may have a mental or physical health issue. It's something that you have to live with and to try to work out day by day and minute by minute. See, they don't know us because if they did, they wouldn't kill us. Say it. Say if they knew us, they wouldn't kill us. Say if they knew us, they wouldn't kill us. Thanks for those clips. Those speak so deeply to me listening to your conversation about those moments of meaning and the power of representation. If they knew us, if they knew us, it would change how we function. I want to throw to a question that came in from an audience member. The question is, how can we, as artists and those who are affiliated in the arts, how do we care for ourselves so that we can continue the work for justice? I want to throw to deep first if you have if you have something to say about it. If not, that's OK. I don't know if I can speak on the artist side, because I'm not technically an artist and I've never actually made a piece of theater. But I can say, like speaking based on my conversations with artists who have spoken up during this time for better working conditions, a big tenant of self care is just knowing when to step back and realizing that at the end of the day, it is just theater. It isn't I want to say it's not that important, but it should not. It should not come at the detriment of your own mental physical health. And there are so many people advocating for better, more humane working conditions, like no more 10 out of 12s, like, you know, two days off. And so those are things that can be advocated for and and they should be advocated for and and all it takes is just people willing to speak up about it. And not everybody has to answer this question, but I'd love if there's somebody else on our of our panelists who wants to throw in on this. Yeah, Ralph, go for it. I just want to quickly say that deep hit on it because for years I've I've made that practice in theater because I thought I always thought people shouldn't kill themselves over making theater. And so I have Monday through Friday rehearsals, Saturdays and Sundays off. And, you know, we've rehearsed till nine, ten, maybe 11 at night, but Saturday and Sunday off and just a regular work week. And because I think it's important. And for so long, we've operated in this highly dysfunctional way. And I think it has to stop. You bring to mind, Ralph, the the demands of we see White American theater. And I know we can we'll throw a link to that into the chat. But those demands for a more humane, a more human schedule feels so important. I mean, among many other vastly important demands. Luis, what did you want to say? I was I was going to say that I really feel like once you start to set the schedule for yourself and I just, you know, as a professional artist who's working, I love it that I've been able to go back to every commission of a commission theater and say, listen, I'm not going to deliver this this moment. Meditation, conceptualization is a way of working. I am writing, right? But I'm not going to write the same way right now because I can't. I can't do that. So re retraining myself to do the work is really important. I will say, however, as a student of Marie Irene Fornez, you know, I missed I missed what Irene gave me, which was the hour of yoga, the hour of writing and then the hour of meditation or reading, right? And so getting back to that is really, really important. That hour of yoga is writing, that hour of of being in the spirit is writing. So not to forget that every day I write every day I write because that's what I do. I don't write to make the deadline. I write to make the work and the work changes because of that. So, you know, I think one of the, you know, if I could be a little maybe push at it back a little bit is that, you know, one of my fears right now is, you know, I'm working with a lot of artists who I'm like, I just no, no. Yes, you have to say yes, we always have to say yes. But what are we saying yes to, right? What are we saying yes to art? Art, the making of art is also the making of my healing. The making of art is also the making of my community, right? Art is is not work. None of this is work, right? I made it work. I turned it into labor, right? Why did I do that? Why did I do that? And so now as we started off with this place of joy, right? I want to work from that place of joy. I want to work from that place of creation. My work is more political. My work is harder edge. My work is demanding more, right? Look at me. I'm just like, right? My work has changed. But when you start to do it for a very different reason or and I started to do it for a very different reason. So I'm producing more work, but I'm producing it in a very different way, right? I didn't make the season at Denver Center, but Denver didn't have a season. Thank God, right? My last play was with Hannah, right? That was my last play in every play. I had six productions after that. And none of them made it to the stage because of the pandemic. But the pandemic pause is the pandemic possibility. Let us not forget that. The possibility, you know, everybody says, don't call it a pause. I call it a pause because guess what? This changed my possibility. It blossomed, right? Now I get to come back in a very different way. I'm older and I'm wiser and I'm changed. I am changed. The one constant in our industry is change. I am changed. I can do it differently. So when I do my work now in the regional theaters, I'm doing it a very, very different way. So now you can work on policy in a different way, right? I'm looking at Ralph. You can, you know, you can work in the region. I'm looking at Hannah. You can work in the way you get out the message. I'm looking at YouTube, right? All of us are doing it, hopefully, different. And the very essence of it, the work itself is different. I am changed. I'm not the same person I was. I cry a lot more, right? I'm definitely more introspective. And who I never even knew of meditation was God, you know, my version of yoga, I'm in a yoga fatties class, right? So my version of yoga is completely different than everybody else's. But here everything's changed. That's different. That's so powerful. You know, we just brought up We See You White American Theatre and a question came in almost simultaneously about wondering if if anybody on the panel wants to speak a little bit more about how you see the challenges of We See You White American Theatre being addressed in the practices of your work. And there's a sub question here that was submitted that says, how do you suggest that white artists be helpful? And I'm not going to ask you to answer that because that's not your job to answer that question. It's our job to answer that question. And so to my fellow white person who asked the question, I want to say, like, I think what we do is we listen and we take action based on the recommendations that have already been given to us through We See You White American Theatre and many other sources of the demands that that are now being articulated. So I'm wondering if anybody wants to speak to that. I can happen as a leader of a historically white organization. My my organization was, you know, we received the demands in an email the same day I received it. My managing director received it and the president of my board received it. And we immediately convened our leadership team and said, this is a huge documents, 33 pages. We need to be really intentional in our exploration of this. And I think that we spent months, months and months and months, two meetings a week, hours dedicated weekly of the leadership team coming together and coming through the document, not as a checklist, but as a provocation and a jump off point for us to delve deeply into what our dreams for the future of the theater were, what our complicity was in the system of inequity and inequality and racism and sexism and misogyny that has been emblematic of this field for, you know, the entirety of the regional theater movement and beyond, right? The theater is is a system within a racist system. One of my colleagues in the talkie, Garrett often says racism isn't the shark, it's the water. And so in terms of how we are working through it, part of it is we actually had to start with a precursor to the demands. So we started with the leadership team working together with a book that was actually written for youth called This Book is Anti-Racist. And that allowed us to have a shared understanding of shared language and for people to enter this work, separating the idea that talking about racism means that you are that that talking about racism or acknowledging racism means that you're a member of the clan. So that we can when you understand that racism is the water instead of the shark, then you realize that we've all been built and raised in the same water. In terms of how it's showing up, one of the things I think has been most profound about this experience in the conversation is that it is required us to constantly reframe our point of reference. So, for example, when we were in certain parts of the we see you demands, which act for ask for a specific percentage of representation in jobs. And we had colleagues who were white going, well, this thing is asking for 50 percent of the jobs to go to BIPOC people. And then it was like, well, let's just reframe our point of reference. What it's actually saying is that 50 percent of all of the jobs at the theater can still be held only by white people. And that all the other people of the world get to share 50 percent. So you can look at it as this demand is asking to take 50 percent of our space, or you can look at it, wow, this demand is only asking that the rest of the world get half of what we have had control over for the last 70 years. Wow, reframing the point of view and the point of reference. And so instead of it being challenging, challenge when a question that has an undercurrent that is built on the water and built on the emotional impulse that some of that some of these conversations bring up for people, in particular, white people, because people of color grow up talking about race and racism. That's how you survive, right? You're taught to survive by being able to understand and deconstruct it and navigate it. It's actually the white community that has not been having those conversations since birth. And so there's a different level of comfort there. I would say that there's a lot of sensitivity that BIPOC people bring into those conversations and understanding that our colleagues are starting in a different place because of that. And so the encouragement has been to be honest, to be transparent and to be willing to ask each other to reframe the point of reference so that it doesn't begin with something being taken from you. It begins with us building collectively a future that rises to the social, moral, political and artistic integrity that we hold our institutions to. And it allowed us to let people self-select whether or not the values of our organization are the values they want to work within and with love to release those that do not and to have an open arm embrace for those who do. I love that. That's that's an incredibly generous space to create. I think for people to self-determine whether they're in the game or not. Right. It's I think if they don't want to be in the game, Viacadios with love, right, like, but being clear about who's on the team and are we in it together? We have a question in the chat about whether whether we think that real change is happening from these institutions, whether the field is actually changing or whether it's all PR. I don't first of all, I don't know that anybody knows the answer to that, but I do want to ask Deep, sorry to put you on the spot, but as somebody who comes at the world from the position of looking at the cultural critique and thinking about how things are made, Deep, I'd love to know, like, what's your take right now? Do things feel like mostly PR or does it feel like real change? Or do we not know? We don't know until we restart. And I think the conversations are happening. And I think the people who are leading the conversations are the people who should, which are like, which are the people on on the ground, like lower lower level theater workers. And that's and and I think a lot of producers are following that lead and taking the time to listen. I do not know. So the conversations are being had, whether or not it will be more than cosmetic. We will see in six months to a year. You know, we had an interesting experience and I'm really excited about it, you know, and sad, too. But, you know, we we talked, we talked in the university in our school about what was going on and we we just expressed to the students. Vision, mission, values. This is what they are. This is how they work. And then we had a town hall and at the end of the town hall, the students demanded that the dean resigned and the dean listened as strongly to the students and he resigned. And it caused a humongous shift not only in his resignation, but in the work that we did on campus. Right. And so in the same way when I'm at CTG, for instance, that is, that's all I'm doing. Let's just talk about vision, mission, values, right. Here it is. This is what you said you want to do. And here are the tools. Are you doing it? Are you doing it? And that's caused our current artistic director to announce his resignation last week, right. So, yes, it's possible to see that kind of change. But I wonder if the system itself is changing. And so I think Deep is right. You know, that's not going to happen until you're back in the building and you're back in operations and you're watching the system work. But for now, it's interesting to see the shift of what's going on in terms of making space for the system to be reimagined, right. I can't wait. I love that. So we're going to we're heading towards the end of our time together, which is shocking to me because I would love to sit here and have this conversation for another hour. As we head towards the end, I'd like to give you each a chance to provide, if not a closing thought, I prefer when we're talking about closing thoughts, our action steps. Like, what's what's something you're looking forward to, something that you want to do or something that you want to recommend others do as we look into the next coming months, year, etc. Ralph, you want to take it? Sure. I, first of all, thank you to my thank you to you all for inviting us, but also to my fellow panelists tonight. This is this is just a gift, I think, and just to be a lockdown for so long and then to see your beautiful, brilliant faces, people that I love and know over a number of years. It's just so great to be here. And so I think I'll end with that, that I think we should revel in each other and love each other and and take a moment to assume the best in people, not the worst in people, and to allow. And this has been my message lately here in San Francisco is to allow each other a bit of grace, like just don't go in, don't go hard on people, don't go ham on people just because you disagree on some little point. And then you're in ninety nine percent of agreement with them on everything else. But this one little thing you go, you know, hard as hell because you want to make that point and you want to win. Let's extend a little bit more grace to each other and let's love each other. And because the real enemy is not us, it's out there. And we know it is. We've identified it in this conversation. And so we need to get that real enemy, but we have to be together in order to do that. Hannah, you want to take it? Yeah, you know, today was a pivotal day. My board passed the budget to be able to reopen the theater. It's very exciting, which means we get to announce the season. And in terms of a personal action step, my action step is to take the learning and the impulses and the ideation on equity forward and not let it become victim to the budget, not let it become victim to practicality. And and, you know, I this budgeting process was incredibly complicated. And I really appreciate my team who continued to hold my feet to the fire in saying, this is what we dreamt of. And because it's hard, does it mean that we abandon it? How do we reimagine it? And so that is the action that I am holding very closely. And it is, for me, the benchmark of what success for me in this position means. Can I continue to push the reimagination to create a world that is more equitable? Yes, I can and all of us can. No matter how you show up in the space as an individual artist, as an administrator, as someone who is working on citywide regional or national collective energy as a journalist, we all have a role to play in that work. And so I think the best of the American theater is yet to come. Louise. Everything is so powerful, so beautiful. My God, thank you so much. I, you know, in the silence of my midnight, I have a four point plan that only involves emerging artists, because that's the generation we're losing right now, right? That's what this year has done to us. So I've been traveling around a lot of theaters with the mentorship, four point mentorship project idea, you know, and somebody will bite eventually, right? There's some of the bite that needs to do it. But I think what's really, really important is to put it out in the air, because like everything, it will slowly filter down, right? And I think that what I'm all I'm doing right now is just raising money and giving as many awards. And I've sat on a bunch of organizations that even I find suspect. But if I can give young people money, I'm going to give young people a lot of money. And that's all I'm doing. I'm just giving people money, because I think this is really, really important right now. And you know, all I'm saying is this thousand dollars, this five thousand dollars, this two hundred and fifty dollars is to remind you that you must not stop doing the work, the work must continue. And we cannot let this year pass us by. We can't. So we can't have you fall out of the field because we will, we will feel it in 10 years. We will feel your loss. We will feel the lack of your story. I feel like most of you don't want to cry about it. I don't want you. I don't want your story to be lost because we we didn't know how to take care of you. We know how to take care of our young people. We know how to do that. So if it's if we can do it, we just we must. We must not forget this just generation of artists. We can't forget them. Louise, that's so that's so touching for me. And it makes me think so strongly of the lineage of Maria Irene Fornez to you, to those who come after. It's just that that really that's a powerful piece of keeping the field vibrant and alive. Deep, I want to give you our our our last thoughts about. What what are you looking towards? And is there any action step in your future? Yeah, I can recommend things for people to do. I love doing that. One thing someone had a question about what your patrons can do. And I echo Louise when it comes to money, give money to the things that you want to see more of. The consumer is a powerful force. Just give money to the theaters that you love, particularly theaters of color who don't get as much funding as predominantly white institutions. And I have a story that the one of the actors and Diana, the bar of musical about Princess Diana, that's happening, they were talking to me about how they organized all the. It's a predominantly white cast with some with some people of color in chorus roles because it's about Princess Diana and the British monarchy. They all but they all came together and kind of made a mini union where they advocated for their needs to the producers to have like a system in place to report racist incidents to to like have a more body positive environment. So actors are criticized when they gain a few pounds, those kinds of things. And I think when it comes to white artists, a lot of people think, oh, I can't do anything because I'm a white artist. I should I should take the lead from people of color. But I think we are all aware enough now that when we see something that is wrong, when we see a costume or make a derogatory comment towards a performer's body, we know that is wrong. So don't be afraid to bring it up and unionize with other people within your little ecosystem and advocate for change. Because I think people are realizing they have more power than they thought. Like you have the power to make to the show or either go on go on with your cooperation or it will not. And people need to realize that they only need to be afraid to speak up. And also we see why American theater, it is not a checklist. Every theater is its own little mini ecosystem. And you should make adaptations based on the particular needs of the people that you're in the room with. Love it. Love it. Thank you, Deep. Before we end and sort of close out with housekeeping, I want to do two things. One, I want to say an enormous thank you to this group of panelists who are just you've set my heart on fire this evening. It is so great to hear you speak from your centers, from your authentic selves about what you're seeing and what you're experiencing. I also want to thank GBH and BPL and the Lowell Foundation because without those collaborators, we could still have this conversation. But it wouldn't be this dynamic and have the kind of reach that I think we're going to be able to have. And then finally, I'd like us to play our last clip that I want to share from Hype Man, which is a moment when Peep One, played by Rachel Cognata, is talking about the power of dance and music, not only for her survival, but for her future. It was in my mother's dance studio, mostly ballet, modern, a little African. But she hired this hip hop dancer because the demand was there. This guy, total poser. But at the time I was nine. He had dreadlocks, so he was hip hop with two capital ages, as far as I was concerned. I wasn't a good dancer. Or maybe he wasn't a good teacher, but it taught me how to count, keep a beat, move and invent inside of it. It taught me how a beat takes control. That set me on fire. It kept me moving even when I would get burned and I keep coming back. Healed. I got calluses. So when the fire turns up, I stand right in the middle like, yeah. What? I think we have a little housekeeping we got to do with Kristen. Are we here? Thanks, Alana. Great. Hi. Thank you. Thank you to you and to the panelists for that amazing and powerful conversation. We really had a lot to learn and it was great to listen to. Thank you again to Alana, Company One, to our panelists, to the GBH Forum Network and to the Lowell Institute, and thank you all for joining us tonight. Good night.