 of the day has been some of you tweeted in I have a giant crush on Paul and Carl. They're kind of like the rock star of this entire game. Oh my gosh, you're so hilarious. But I kind of wanted to start off with talking about your position at Steppenwolf, which is fairly recent, by the way, right, about 2009. I was wondering if you could talk about what your position there is and what your job and how you're... You bet. Yeah, so, you know, I do a lot of stuff with Steppenwolf. I work with the entire artistic staff in the ensemble on the season planning kinds of things. I commission writers. And I do a lot of dramaturgical work on new plays. A lot of work on Detroit that we just produced and now Sex with Strangers that we're about to open on Sunday. And then I also function as a producer, which is probably one of the biggest jobs that I do. I produce shows in our garage space. So I produce new plays in our garage space. I support... I have a producer I work with, and we produce Chicago companies in the garage space. We produce a partnership with Northwestern in the garage space. So it's like there's nine shows. Yeah, it's big. It's big. And, you know, the thing that the job in my mind has been really... to do is it's really a better job that it kind of allows as Martha's job is, you know, so focused on just the whole of the organization. I do a lot of the kind of day-to-day, you know, sort of tracking of how projects are moving along and that kind of thing. And it's very much... I love this job because I really believe in the idea of bringing producers back into the literature theater seats. And so I feel like this is what that job's really set up to do. And so it's tricky. Great. Great. I want to move into something that we've been talking about in the beginning, which is, of course, new work. Because you produce so much new work in charge of that. The question of why are most regional theaters, or some regional theaters throughout the country afraid of new work? And I was wondering if there is... I mean, is there a truth in that? Or is there a way to ensure that fear? Yeah, I mean, you know, New York is a tricky business because you never know what's going to happen with the replay. And I've been working on this play. A wonderful play called Sex with Strangers with Laura Easton. Again, we're opening on Sunday. And the thing about that play is we are changing it and tweaking it until I left at like 10 o'clock on Tuesday night to come here Wednesday morning. And we had done major changes in that last instant, right? So I think that the result of that is you feel like, gosh, we don't know what the final outcome is going to be and that's risky. I think more people do new work than we sometimes get credit for. But I think the biggest reason fear shy away from it is that they have a preconceived notion of the expanse of their audience's imagination. And what I kind of like to say is, how can we possibly know the limits of the imagination before we've tested them? And what I've learned at Second World and at the Playwright Center and all the theaters that I've, you know, been affiliated with is that actually people surprise us in what they love. And Stefano's been so great. They talk to their audience. And what the Stefano audience says is, you know, if you do it, I want to come and see it. And even if I don't like it, I want to come back and see the next thing. Like, that's how you prime people to trust you. And that happens in a dialogue with the audience on a regular basis. Yes, because when you put a theater into a city, the audience doesn't necessarily know what they want. The theater tells them what they want. Yep. And then that's how you love your audience. But for some reason it just seems that a lot of theaters are just a little bit scared of bringing in anything new for fear of, well, I mean, for fear of not making enough money. Yes. And that's a whole other issue, right? Yes, it is. Which is why we, you know, we talk about, I mean, Zelda Pictureless, Henry says this great thing in an American Theater article from, you know, 2000 and something about, you know, the difference between, you know, commercial and nonprofit theaters is that, you know, we broke her in the product and not in the money. It's ours is about the artistic vision. But, you know, by 2011, the artistic vision and the money, those things start to conflate in ways that can make it really difficult for artistic directors. True, true. And I was actually asking this question to you, Diane Ragsdale, last night, which is the issue of nonprofit theaters in America, whether or not they are still affected and whether or not they will be dying out. And then she gave me some great statistics about how 3,000 new theaters opened in 2007 when I was in the recession. About 47% of those theaters cannot manage their bank account. So I was wondering, do you think that there's still going to be a room for nonprofit theater work in America? Or would that soon become a defunct model? You know, boy, that's such a great question. And I'd much rather listen to Diane Ragsdale's answer to that question than my own. But I guess I feel like, I know, I always think models may change. So, you know, nonprofit could go away. But I think it feels important to me about the nonprofit model and what I believe in, you know, kind of wholeheartedly, which is, and I say this with, you know, an understanding that art has to connect to people and to audiences. But I'm a real believer in art for art's sake. And art is always about, you know, what it's going to mean in terms of dollars. I feel like the best of the nonprofit is make art because it matters just because it matters. And that for me, you know, when I was a kid, I grew up in a small town, didn't have a lot of money, and I read novels, and I didn't see theater when I was a kid, but I read novels. And those novels weren't written with me in mind. They were written because an artist had a vision about a thing and he decided or she decided to write that novel, you know? And thank God, because in Elkhart, where I didn't feel like there's a lot of outlet for my imagination, I lost myself in, you know, stories and books. And I think that art at its best, that's what it does for people, you know? And I think that that has to always be a possibility. And if money is always tied to that, I have to wonder what the impact of just making art for its own sake, what happens to that? We have a question from the Twitter world. Yes. Molly, you want to... Yeah, it says, do you think theaters are less inclined to do a new work if it's already been self-produced? Boy, that's such an excellent question. First of all, I'm a huge fan of self-producing, you know, because I feel like that a play is not a play until it's actually had an audience. And I've learned that more in the last year and a half being out of the playwright center and being in a lot of productions. You don't know what a play is until you have an audience and self-produce it is great. And actually, I think... I want to say no. I mean, I don't think... I think, you know, there's lots of conversations about world premieres and that kind of stuff, but I don't think there's less of that. I think if you self-produce your play and it's good and it's successful and people come see it and they like it, then I think you only increase your chances that A, that play is going to get better. And if that play gets better, more places are going to want to do it. And you know, the workhouse collective in Minneapolis, who I just so dig those guys and they're really self-producing and the outcome of their self-producing is their work is starting to get attention in other places. So I think it's a great impulse and one should indulge it. Great. Great. And thank you for that question. We've been ending most of these interviews with the question of... and I think this is really good for you because you're in a really great place of what do you see in the future for New World America? What do you... What would you like to see in the next five can you use to have it? Well, I think, you know, I guess for me, with new plays, I mean, I love, you know, as many people know, I've been a lot of the artists that I've collaborated have done all sorts of strange kinds of plays and I see a lot of artists like Alyssa DeMore, who can do Detroit on the Stepnel stage but then do this building a forest project that's completely insane in a warehouse and they're building trees and it's so cool and they're generating stuff and so what I like is the idea that, you know, more people believe that they can make art. You know, that they're not hindered by institutions, but that they have visions and they just make them so and Alyssa's been one example of an artist I've worked with a lot who just is like, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to have a big, you know, a big thing happen around the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis and I'd like 200 artists to be involved and it's crazy and you generate it and you see what happens and you don't worry like whether, you know, you make a billion dollars on it so I guess for me, you know, what I want to see is more people feel like art is about them. You know, and I think artists who put self-produced, who put themselves out there, who take risks, who make work, they're going to create a culture where people feel like, actually, arts are, you know, when Obama gives his State of the Union address, arts will be at number one in his list, you know, and that's the future of the art for me and that's kind of what I hope, you know, that's the world I hope we're going to live in. That is the best, most optimistic ending that we've ever had. That's fantastic. Thank you all for watching and thank you so much, Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you guys. Thank you.