 How nice of you guys to come this early. Oh my gosh. This is kind of amazing. Is this, oh it is working. That's amazing. Hi everyone, thank you for coming out at 9am. We didn't as you noticed. I have permission from him to A. speak for him and B. mock him for his hungoverness. Hi friends, I'll answer all questions quickly. So welcome, thank you for being here on the last day of this PPF. I have no German agenda whatsoever. My friend Kimberly just returned this book to me. So please read nothing into the Proth. So we've got a little bit of time to talk to some of the playwrights of this year's PPF. I'll start by just sort of saying hi, introducing ourselves and the play with which we are associated and then we'll go from there into more detailed information. I'll start by introducing myself. I'm Aditi Kapil, I'm a playwright living here in LA at the moment. I've had the pleasure of being part of PPF and part of SCR for a couple years now. Actually this theater housed my play Orange a couple years ago which was just some of my favorite feelings about this space. Thank you. So why don't we go from this side that away and hey I might switch it up for other questions and prepare yourself. It's going to be a good morning. And just your name and the play with which you're associated and if you can count it out efficiently in your head maybe how many PPFs you got under your belt might be kind of fun to know. That'll be easy. I'm the lyricist for Pralid to a Kiss and this is my first PPF. Yay! Welcome. Hi, I'm Craig Lucas. I'm the book writer of Pralid and this is my second PPF. I was here in 2004 with a play called The Singing Forest that South Coast didn't produce. It could be a very honest panel. I'm Adam Bach. I was a playwright of the Canadians. I got a commission about nine years ago and I finally did it and it was this my first time. Hi, I'm Kevin Artig. I wrote a play called Sheepdog. I was here last year with a play called Sheepdog. And we'll be joined in a... You did so much better than Queen. It's going to be last of the hour. We're just doing name play with which you're associated and if you can figure it out quickly just how many PPFs you've had under your belt. Oh, I can. It's small. My name is Anna Nogada. I wrote Mask Only and this is my second PPF. Thank you for being here. I'm Aditi. So one of my favorite things about PPF and just like big playwright gatherings like this aside from getting to see my friends is that I also kind of get to... I get this great expanse of work that I get to see very quickly but also I get to dip into what people are thinking about these days like what artists are thinking about and making work about these days and I get the inside stories sometimes I get the, oh, this moment happened and then this play happened and this is why this happened in this moment and this is why this got transformed into this style of play in this moment and so I'm wondering if you guys would be up for talking about the moments that kind of generated these plays for you whether it be personal, whether it be the world right now, whether it be a revisiting of a work that needed to be transformed in a particular way right now we can go in any order you like if someone's feeling that one and wants to jump in or I can just hit Anna. You're a tagger. Show up late. Yeah, I think these guys have actually heard some of this My play Masque Only I think was sort of living in me subconsciously and unconsciously for a very long time I grew up doing musical theater and I went to college to study musical theater exclusively and it kind of gets you into this underground world of fans and quite passionate people it's like closer to like hanging out with gamers than it is to hanging out with like fancy actors just people that are like so adept at knowing all the ins and outs of this quite niche art form that like generates a lot of revenue but then has this whole other sort of like world of high art and so is a world I felt very comfortable kind of like riffing in which is a gift as a playwright I'm not really smart enough to write a play about something I had to research I do much better if it's like in me and I just know how people speak so there's that aspect of it and then within that I in college people have heard this story before but they did a drag show every year it was student run and it was truly extraordinary and it was better than any of the main stages that the actual school had produced it was it's like embarrassing for the program that the drag show was so good and and it would like be passed from guy to guy like a senior would graduate and then like annoying to be like you're in charge of this next year and one year I was this I wasn't in the class where this happened but senior year you have showcase you plan for showcase when you come out to New York and you perform your one song for all the agents and casting directors and it's high stress and the seniors have a showcase class where they're kind of honing their material and trying to find out how they can best essentially sell themselves as a performer to New York City and the drag show happened and it was amazing and what the next day in showcase class a girl had gotten up to perform and she did her song and the teacher said to her you should talk to your friend all names have been changed to protect the innocent but like Jason and have him I saw him perform in the drag show last night and you should have him teach you how to perform like a real woman and she was like record scratch the teacher didn't even realize what was wrong with that comment but then simultaneously like Jason and all the gay men in our class of which there are many are being told there they have to butch it up in like some weird like kind of trying not to be offensive way and it's like nobody fits no one's fitting in and then at the same time like they are the community of this art form so why is that this art form really leaving them out so I wanted to explore that and these questions of masculinity and femininity and those boxes and we talk about we're talking about that a lot now but I wanted to talk about it in the casing of these like weird outcasts so that's that sorry that was quite long that's why I love these stories wonderful so I do like to research my place a lot he's smarter than I am I just am slow and afraid of myself so I'll spend many years avoiding writing about me and finding where I am in the play and researching whether I should matter the world that's usually where I start some kind of ethical question that really is sticking with me like that I can't shake so I would say Sheepdog started with kind of blueprints for a couple characters and the first is there's an officer named Nikia Jones and this was on the heels of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile to fairly infamous police shootings that the videos went viral that was followed by a shooting in Dallas of some officers so it was a really traumatic week and she was an active duty police officer in Cleveland and she went on Facebook and she posted a Facebook live video which was essentially a rant and a plea a very sort of emotional plea from an officer active duty officer a black woman saying just this all has to stop this just needs to stop right now it's not happening it's impossible for me to do my job and she repeated this over and over and this just really came from her subconscious she was saying if you're white and you're racist and you are policing neighborhoods with people of color stop take that uniform off just take it off fast forward Obama invited her to the White House she got fired from her job and so and I sort of think both those things happening speak to our world that she couldn't keep her job and the police department shoved her out but yet she was embraced in one respect so that was one character just as a writer filed that away another was this amazing incredible piece of journalism which was an interview with the officer Darren Wilson who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson it's rare to get access to these officers in shootings a journalist went to his house while he was in hiding and interviewed him and what struck me as a playwright was his lack of words for what he had done and how rare it is to have these officers forced to in words describe their actions and account for their actions and they often can't in the case of Darren Wilson he's an inarticulate every word told story about his background and who he was and where it came from so those characters filed away many mistarts many drafts thrown away had to find my way into the story and figure out what on earth I had to say about police violence that needs to be heard or that I felt needed to be heard it took a long time and I arrived here you know we're really lucky to be playwrights I was just thinking what you guys just said was so interesting and we get to sit and really try and figure out things and it's really cool I love my job I feel really fortunate I think when I started I think I had the title the Canadians and made me laugh just like America people the Canadians are stupid are funny or different but it came from remembering when I first as a gay guy went to Provincetown from Rhode Island I went to Provincetown and I couldn't breathe because the streets were full of gay guys and and then I went on a gay cruise another time and I remembered that feeling but it was quite a bit later I lived in San Francisco and I've gotten used to the feeling of being the majority ever and it made me really think about how I don't think straight people know what happens to a gay kid when you're born into a family there's no one else like you and you have a secret for the first maybe 14 maybe 20 maybe even first 30 years of your life that you can't you feel you're unable to share and what that does to people and that we don't get credit for surviving you know when my father said that to me because he said that to me that thing I said where that must have been hard on you not having one to help you it was the perfect response because I was like it was it was really hard and I think it's shameful and unfair that gay people are considered odd because we have gone through a huge trauma and it's just not fair and to then be told you're bad when you do come out you know imagine that you're alone you're a little kid you're alone I knew I was gay probably when I was about 5 put it aside and really knew when I was 13 and then didn't come out until I was 23 or 24 this was back I'm so excited for the kids that are coming out you know at 7 at 14 because they don't they don't go through the years of watching and hearing people say I remember my dad would come home and say he had to stand up to his hockey team and say stop saying fag I have a kid who's gay but that's just what I grew up with and it's just awful to constantly be told you're no good I wanted to write about that and I wanted to write about how gay people I've had a lot of people older than me who have helped me so that's where that came from I can hardly remember who the person was who wrote this play prelude to a kiss yeah but I do remember that South Coast because of Jerry Patch and David Emerson and Marty Benson and John Glor produced a play that had mine that no one reviewed in New York City and I thought the play was just dead and they did a production of my play Reckless and that was its second production and when I came out to see it it was very well directed and a beautiful production they said would you like to write another play for us and I was astonished I didn't even know there were commissions because I was a musical theater person I started in the chorus of Broadway musicals and didn't really start writing plays until I was in my 30s so they gave me the most enormous gift and I didn't know what I was doing and that's the only thing that has remained constant through my life is that I don't know what I'm doing and some of the things that everyone has talked about so far about what it means to be masculine what it means to be feminine are still seeming to me to be at the center of our awareness it's very exciting to see playwrights from different parts of the American landscape representing their experience here and I'm really excited about that I want to see poor yellow red next to the night and more than half the audience was Asian and I just started weeping I was so happy but the theater is a far cry from Washington and my play was written in the middle of the AIDS epidemic and it is about what it means to suddenly become old and face mortality which was what was happening to me when I wrote the play and now this week the Supreme Court is trying to decide whether or not gay people lesbians transgendered people, bisexuals even have the right to be protected from discrimination it is 60 years this summer since Stonewall and the central character was a socialist back in 1987 when I wrote the play and she is still a socialist back then it was thought to be cute now it is the subject for demonization the new fascists better known as the Republican Party are trying to drive people off the edge of the cliff to protect their privilege and so I'm more scared now and what changed and the reason I wanted to come back and do the musical is that this kooky character who thought the world was about to blow up is now seen to be the Cassandra who predicted what is true which is we're about to blow up the world if we're not very very careful and if we don't take these men with their bullying away from the control panel that's right so when you write musicals you basically spend your whole life looking for what would make a good musical every book I read everything I see every story I read I think would not make a good musical and it just happened that a friend of mine was playing piano for American in Paris and he told me that the book writer was Craig Lucas and he was becoming friendly with Craig Lucas and I immediately said talk to him see if we can write a musical about Prelude to a Kiss which is a play I remembered from my first days in New York I loved that play so I just immediately jumped for it and he set up an interview and Craig said sure try it then I had to figure out alright so now why why do I want to do this I love the play but how is it relevant now and what I realized when I was young what appealed to me was this idea of a young person who's suddenly old and I'm not so young anymore so I kind of saw it from a different perspective and I felt like well we're going to set it now what's going on now and Craig just talked very eloquently about what's going on now but in my mind I just felt like everyone I know is very anxious and very nervous whichever side you're on you've been made to become part of one side and there's an enemy in a way that I don't remember for many years and I thought what is the mitigating circumstance of that and it's well I have a partner who I've been with for many years it's love and I thought this is so odd that in the most stressful times in Iran, in North Korea in Nazi Germany throughout time people are still falling in love having families and how interesting that is to have love in an anxious time so those of you who saw the reading the song that pulled it all together is Love in the Age of Anxiety and love does go on this is this is such a lovely Sam and I didn't know about these answers I'm just hearing them for the first time now it was not a repeat for me but it's such an amazing representation I think across the board of how deeply artists playwrights in particular here think about what they're putting into the world and the responsibility of what we're putting into the world and what a moment requires from us and the dialogue the theater is life always trying to have with the world so I thought it would be interesting in this moment in American theater to kind of flip it a little bit and talk about the I mean the theaters the institutions that are the curators of how this art then makes it out into the world and we've had this huge sea change in the past couple of years in American theater where there's been a lot of changes in leadership including here at south coast which is very exciting and there's a lot of new leaders of theaters in the American theater that are doing a lot of dreaming and visioning right now and there's a lot of boards across the country that have thought hard about what they want their theater to be and thus chosen a particular leader and I would love to take our thinkers our artist thinkers here and take a moment and see if we can like dream and vision a little bit also and kind of put it into the world as to what we think American theater might be wanting to head towards what we think is necessary in our moment in our future as artists the pathways we'd like to see really anything I'm leaving it as open as possible because I feel like I mean we got this fabulous crowd here and then we've got I don't know hi howl around somewhere just take an opportunity to speak into the world something you'd like to see for American theater as the thinkers that you are within it and again I can start from any end you are I'll start when I go see one of my plays I I went to a dinner and I said I'd like to meet the board because I like to know who is helping pay for this because I think it's I guess what I would like to see is a closer connection between the audience and us like actually to know that I don't like plays that tell you what to do like I don't want to write a play that says to you you should be doing this what I want to write is something that then you would go off and say huh I wonder whether he's right that would be a good idea or not you know what I mean and it feels to me like there's been a bit of a capitalization of theater where there's a product that then you say good or bad rather than it's a dialogue between the two and I think something that's changing now is actually there the great thing about bringing more new voices and new people in all aspects and the staff and the actors and the playwrights and the director is suddenly we realize oh there's a chance to actually talk to the with rather than at so that's what I would hope that we recognize that that's why we're doing it is we're trying to talk to you know in a weird way I started very small theaters and I had community my community in Rhode Island the very first I quit because I didn't like theater and then I started again because a couple of friends of mine wanted to do a drag show for a coming out day and so I wrote them a little skit called act up the house of Chanel goes to act up so it was three models three boys dressed as Chanel models who decided to join act up and it was a huge hit so then I did a gay boy nutcracker this is in Rhode Island and I had all amateurs and I had a dike ballet with 30 lesbians who'd never been on stage before doing up the ballet I had a big drag queen doing the sugar plum fairy and they made their own costumes and like the first time 250 people came and by the next four years it was the second biggest thing other than pride and I realized that's why I write plays is for my community like I was putting on people on stage who had never been on stage we were giving the money to a AIDS hospice there was a connectedness that's so deep then after years went to San Francisco down to New York New York is a sense that you pull away from the community like I'm supposed to write an object that you think is good and want to pay for and that's not theater to me it's an element of it we have to make it pay you have to pay for it but the heart of it is that we will talk we will talk not me talk or you complain you know like sorry people we say the wrong thing while we tell the truth by mistake sometimes that's enough out of me it's fantastic I think we're all going to feel free to tell the truth and then you guys can too we'll leave a little I'll say just very quickly I think people should do more musicals and I think that they should do new musicals and I think they should do new musicals which shouldn't have the burden of having to run for 20 years the thing that I think is wrong with New York theater now is that people producers want to produce a show like Phantom of the Opera that can stay in that theater for 20 years and that everyone will hear of no matter where on the planet they are they'll know what it is and they'll come and see it and I think pretty soon all 20 Broadway theaters are going to be filled with a show that will run forever and then there just won't be any room for New York musicals so that's why South Coast Rep and I think the movement is to do musicals all around the country in repertory theaters where people are used to the idea that it doesn't have to be the best musical you ever saw in your life it can still be interesting you see it and you tell your friends about it and then maybe next year you see something else yeah great one of the exciting things happening in theater unlike Washington is that people of color and women and people who don't identify in a binary fashion are being represented on the stages across the country I would like to see more people of color and more of those people running the American theaters because it can be at the mercy of one understanding of what experience is and even for those who like myself have been a beneficiary of it I don't think it's particularly healthy musicals that have been revived successfully on Broadway many many times should not be taking up the stages of not-for-profit theaters I don't mind a revival of anything that goes somewhere in the regions but I hate to see our major stages filled up with work that commercial producers can do just as well and these writers need to be on the major stages and this play needs to be at the Seagerstone that has to happen and make a call I also really feel that what happens when you age in the American theater is that you're either an icon or nothing and there are some great American playwrights who are not produced anymore because the New York drama critics didn't like them my mentors including Maria Irene Fornes were never produced at many not-for-profit theaters and I think that's shameful and bad and they should be seen Neil Bell is still alive he should be produced that's what I think I don't know if I feel like everything really like quite worthy has been said so I don't know if I can add much to the conversation but a word that comes up a lot for me that feels like very far off but it's what I feel like we should all be going towards is just a meritocracy and it happens it doesn't happen often in theater there's a lot of politics why things get produced and why other things don't get produced and well this person did three plays for us in the last five years so we're gonna give them their other play the reason the word meritocracy feels impossible and is complicated is because of the things that have been said what gives something merit Adam what you were saying about how you know I like things often that are messy and aren't perfect and raise questions and start a dialogue and to me that gives it merit right it doesn't have to feel like there's a perfect bow on it for it to say this work is good and it doesn't need to run forever or feel like it should run forever for it to have merit so it requires people having taste which is tricky like can you run something and have a business sort of mind and also have taste for the work and the effort that was put in and really the worthiness of this being put up in front of an audience so I don't think it's easy and I don't have the answers to that but it is the far off goal that there will be an element of this deserved to be seen and therefore it was I want to echo Craig's first thought that I think what we're seeing for me is the most exciting transformation and change in these new leaders and seeing women and people of color and people who fit outside the binary taking control of these artistic art institutions I come from the I say this and I I don't know if I'll ever get produced there but it's a public theater I mean that's where I learned to write intern there I had two year fellowship there that's my family that has always been my support group and a lot of these new leaders I see have come through the public and that's not surprising to me when I think about the public and the public's aesthetic I think it's a marriage of in its ideal form art that marriage of all those that has always been the most exciting theater for me I think if I could make a polite request to these new leaders it would be a plea for empathy I think I think there are enemies and they are real and I think sometimes we need to write about them from my perspective I think sometimes we need to point the finger demonize, get mad, and make art that is in protest but I think in order to build future bridges towards understanding that empathy needs to be remain at the center of our storytelling and I think empathy is slightly a risk of being lost I think being lost in the objectification of the art form I think we could lose lose that it's a very complicated statement as a white male to ask any artist to speak from a place of empathy because sometimes rage is appropriate and I'm not going to dictate at all I think it's just it was my entry point into the theater was from a place of wanting to understand what the other was to me and that other has shifted throughout my life but that endeavor seems to have a career in theater and I think it brings sort of humanistic values and I don't doubt these leaders are going to do it I know they're going to do it it's not to say they're not doing this this is just what I would wish for I have total faith in them I know some of them are amazing and they're going to do it and I would say coupled with that to be very brief is I have made race the focus of a lot of my work and slow going but I think it's absolutely worth the effort for me as a white male to begin to pick apart my privilege and my background and do it in a way that honors my working class background and so my my request is that class is not left out of the equation I think we absolutely need to prioritize race and our thinking and the way we program it's a necessity when you look at the world when we get there let's start thinking about class and the way that class unites us and the way that our working class has been purposefully strategically disassembled I mean I come from a union family and anything I have is courtesy of a union I don't forget that when I sit down to write and I want to see those stories and I don't see those stories as much as I wish and so a curiosity that that eventually goes past what you see into the writer and the person and I think class being an essential equation here in meritocracy and countering elitism in the American theater as a West Coast guy I feel very strongly that it's a lot harder to come from this region and go through New York and end up back here that's a much longer road than other roads but anyway I'll stop there thank you that's great so that's fantastic we're going to open it up in a moment for questions on any topic from any of you but I wanted to shout out our thinkers who aren't at the table right now and who are doing deep, deep, deep work throughout this festival so we all know Kwee, poor and yellow rednecks to be here but also Melissa Ross and Chisa Hutchinson just to sort of put their names out there and shout them out as amazing amazing people who have amazing amazing at the moment here and there's the composer oh yes he's flying back to New York he really rejected us left town so wonderful now that we've had a chance to like dream a little bit and think a little bit up here I'd love to open up the just for questioning for questions, brief comments anything you'd like to expand this conversation into anyone yeah Ron yeah I trust these leaders are gonna, are thinking about this they just, you just have to there's no point in diversifying your seasons if you are speaking to a not diverse audience so there I think it's going to happen and I have no idea how you do it I mean I think most players I know you see an empty seat at your show drives you crazy I mean you're like just sell that thing for $5 and grab someone off the street let's do this thing why that's impossible and then you hear that no we are trying and then nothing changes but I am Oscar Justus has made a concerted effort to make every single show at the public theater affordable to everyone when you do a play in New York even on Broadway there are programs to bring all high school students in and they're the best audience you'll ever play to building on that it's not a quick fix but take children to a theater and there are a lot of programs that bring great school children public funding to bring them in to see the theater help them to develop the habit early and then when they get to be adults they'll see it otherwise kids can grow to be 21 and never see a live show I'll real quick just add to that because I come from I just recently moved to LA from Minneapolis and I worked a lot with the theater and I think that there's a very tested legitimacy to the fact that money is an obstacle it is a legitimate obstacle to going to theater but then you go from there and I think you also discover that there's a feeling when you've not been invited to someplace for a long time that is probably boring and you probably don't want to go you know what I mean a good theater experience is also a priceless entry point into theater so like somewhere in the world of taking the financial out of it and having a good experience in the theater that feels like you and feels like you belong there I think are two things to strongly pursue just to throw that in there's also like I think we forget that there's theaters at every level there's so much theater done all over the country there's a doing in school they're doing it in churches they're doing it like in their backyards they're doing it everybody does theater it's not just other people something has stopped other people from getting to be here so that's just what we have to keep looking at and keep working at and figuring out I think okay so she told us that you can't hear us unless we say it back so the question is what can we as audience members do on our side to help you show us more than wide-angle accent stories bring your friends of color invite them to come with you or bring your kids or like it was interesting there was a there's a bit of a thing going on in Philadelphia right now because they're going to do one of my plays and they season as white people I'm gay so there's some there and the other two are women but there was quite a bit of an outcry that there was a signed letter from 19 people that there were no people but of those signed people they went and checked and none of them had seen the last production by a woman of color and I would be like oh dudes absolutely right but also it's your responsibility to go to the show and take ten people with you and then we can make the theater we want if we really want to make a theater let's make our theater and I think something that gets hard I guess this is why I want more of this is like you're not passive an audience isn't passive an audience is making the show with the people like I had such a blast in my show and the audience was in it and with it and lifting our actors our actors went up because they're like oh these people love us we are going to give them a show but we made it we made it you didn't just sit there it's not your job just to sit there and go like that that's TV and film right a lot of the people to the theater not just complain are people who say I don't like that bad language and I don't know why I'm seeing that trashy whatever so if you have a hunger to see working class stories or stories about less privileged people then you have to let the theaters know because otherwise all they hear from are the reactionaries I love him I love him he's just amazing he's just amazing I feel like we're solving everything you guys does he ever stick it boom so question right there can repeat your question she said as a teacher she knows that a lot of young people don't have any exposure to theater and then she said what are we personally doing to make sure they do so this is a good segue for me to talk about I run a concert series in New York called Broadway Playhouse which is free to New York City school children and they come in and they get an hour and we said today we're going to talk about Rodgers and Hammerstein here's who they are here's a little bit of their background here's one song that you are going to sing along with us here's a little bit of one of their musicals and we try to make it very vivid so that through the rest of their lives whenever they hear Rodgers and Hammerstein or Gershwin or whoever they've seen they know who that person is there's little simple education programs like that to talk about and you can do it in non-musical theater too but to get these great names to the next generation and interest them that's what I do Trinity Rep I worked at and they actually it was actually great because they did a school program I had a bunch of students that would come in early on with Adrian Hall and the kids would get bored and they started throwing things at the stage hahahaha hahahaha it actually changed their aesthetic because what they did was they were one of the early theaters that broke the wall and really worked with the audience, walked through the audience jumped on they actually said oh we've got to keep these kids interested we can't just do Shakespeare they changed how we do Shakespeare because they had to because of the students and actually we should probably think oh if we want students we might need to do more interesting work or we may have to do more of that like grab because kids have a shorter attention span and they're not as well behaved but that's alright hahahaha that's so funny no not always yeah no definitely good luck so for you howl around folks out there that was just a comment from the audience about how kids have amazing experience in theater at times and really connect with the material and I think that's so so true and I've seen that happen and I actually don't think it's a bad thing for us as artists and as theaters to have to live up to the rigor of entertaining our audience no matter what age they are or where they come from do you know what I mean like you can get very a theater maker if you're like oh it's most like my dinner party and it's people who are just like me here at my dinner I think there's something amazingly good for our theater about having to be responsible for entertaining the 12 year old that's sitting over there we're gonna we were that good we can do it you know we're capable yeah absolutely I want to thank you for saying that but I also want to say that there has been a concerted effort since Ronald Reagan to defund all education and particularly to drive the arts out of education no it's not stopping the teachers but we have to do something about the enemies of the quality of our lives so that was a shout out to the teachers who are putting on plays across America in spite of obstacles is what that was all I know is that kids get themselves to concerts yeah so they're not coming to us and there's a I know a bunch of kids that would have loved to see a quiz show I mean because it's amazing hmm it's a slightly different thing so just to repeat what you said which we're supposed to do the kids may love the theater but they go back to parents who don't know the theater I think our goal with this Broadway Playhouse thing is to make it so exciting and fun for them in the hour that they're they go home and say wow we went to this really cool thing today and I think most parents are still really interested in what their parents their kids have to say and I've had certain cases where the parent or the teacher said this kid coming to the theater changed this kids life they were really interested we had one little boy who was really a behavioral problem but he came to the first concert and he realized that he wasn't going to get to the second concert unless he behaved a little bit better so honestly I do think that the parents if you excite them enough the parents will hear and a lot of parents will figure out he seemed to like that play here's a play maybe I'll take them to another play that's the hope anyway we're running low on time so one last question ask for help I'll give you my email we'll put you in touch with other people who read new plays there's nothing more exciting rewarding for an artist a living artist of any age than to be able to give freely what was given to us freely so I'll give you my call so this is thank you a great closer we're getting a negative advice for aspiring young playwrights from all our panelists here I think one to piggyback on what Craig said one thing that's amazing about writers I would say more than any other artists that I can think of is that they actually do support each other there's a real feeling of well I couldn't write that play because you wrote it as opposed to you know I'm also an actor and actors are like get out of the way so and writers really aren't like that the other thing I would say is you know the reason that this is so this is just the most wonderful job and we all feel quite lucky to do it is because of the room of people that is you know reading your play and this is maybe annoying advice because it's certainly not how to get successful in 20 steps but you have to have your plays read out loud you have to have them read out loud often with people that you trust and you have to have them read out loud for an audience and that can happen in an apartment and that's how I started writing and that's what changed my life was having my plays read in just like really gritty sad ways and I would provide alcohol and cheese and that gets most people out of bed and that's going to the first thing is that's going to have people hear your stuff going to give you the emotional catharsis which is really how you like that's the carrot that's like the dragon you're chasing and it's also going to make you a better writer because if you don't know how your words sound coming out of an actor's mouth then you have really no idea if if the play flies so yeah we're pretty much at time so can I get one word no no no one word from the rest of you sorry for existing yeah just say do it just say do it my word is do it yourself do not be passive do not wait for a theater to pick you and get a first class production get your friends like you said like he did with the drag show put it on yourself it doesn't have to be professional initiate the work yourself and then people will see it and they'll join you I just want to say thank you I love coming here because you actually come listen and in New York everyone has 10,000 things to not see every night and I feel so grateful every time I'm here because of the audience yeah amazing thank you so much everyone thank you to our amazing panelists thank you for that conversation enjoy the rest of the day that was good you were only 10 wait yeah I'm going to bed now I have a shower in two thirds I have so many hours so early well you go and see the reading but then we have a little time after wait is there a reading now I have another reading panel panel so fun oh so good to meet you thank you