 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Garrison, he's introduced all these events so beautifully so far, but I don't really have any dramatist-gilled announcements to make, so I guess that's why I'm not here. Oh, I know. My name is Rick Davis. I'm the co-artistic director of Theater of the First Amendment, which is one of our co-hosts. Actually, months and months in the planning and then these last few days have been just exciting. The presence of so many great minds and so many great talents and so much wonderful conversation has truly been transformative, I hope, certainly for us and I hope for many of you. It's my privilege and challenge and honor and terrifying duty to, they use the word moderate, but I think that's probably the wrong word, to wrangle or to just get out of the way of 16 extraordinary panelists that you see before you. It looks a little bit like a Republican primary debate. So, but we will try to keep the tone civil and it'll be great. Without further ado, I want to start introducing these folks and I want to give one more shout out to Gary because he set the running order of this thing and of the many possible running orders for a group of distinguished artists. Alphabetical order was chosen and it's superb. So, I will introduce the artists one by one and I'll try to do it a Broadway composer, lyricist for such works as Working and sweet smell of success, Craig Carnelia. Author of The Bubbly Black Girl Meets Her Chameleon Skin, Playwright and Musical Theater Writer, Kirsten Shile. Poser Lyricist for the Tony winning the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Playwright Carol Hall. Producer, Dramaturg and Associate Artist with the Sundance Theater Lab, Mame Hunt. Queen Venus in Fur and New Jerusalem, Playwright David Ives. And Lyricist for the Tony Award winning Musical, You're in Town, Playwright Greg Kodas. Executive Director of the National New Play Network, Jason Loweth. Two-time OB Award winner for My Left Breast and Nasty Rumors and Final Remarks, Playwright Susan Miller. Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning Playwright LeBrettist and Lyricist for such plays and musicals as The Color Purple, The Secret Garden and Night Mother, Martian Norma. Artistic Director of DC's Theater J, Ari Roth. The Dramatist's Guild of America, Ralph Savage. An Academy Award winning Composer and Lyricist for such shows as Godspell, Pippin and the current Broadway hit Wicked and the President of the Dramatist's Guild of America, Stephen Schwartz. Artistic Director of DC's Woolly Mammoth Theater, Howard Shawlitz. The Jefferson Award winning Playwright of such plays as Flyovers and The Value of Names, Author and Educator, Jeffrey Sweet. Award winning Composer and Lyricist of such musicals as Big Red Sun and Hello, My Baby, Georgia Stitt. Pulitzer Prize Tony, Dramatist winner for I Am My Own Wife and Bookwriter for the Musical's Gray Gardens and The Little Mermaid, Doug Wright. And that's all the time we have. Thank you very much. The format here is completely unknown to all of us, right? Those are the ground rules. But I'm going to throw out a question or two or as I told Gary earlier, press play. And the intention here is to have a free flowing conversation among the panel in response to my questions or not. And then as time permits and we will make sure that it does permit, engage in another one of the really wonderful Q and A sessions with you all that have been characteristic of this conference. So this is in some ways the 11 o'clock number of this conference. This is the title number because the conference is called Playwrights in Mind, A National Conversation. And this is headed as the national conversation. So here we are having a national conversation. What kind of a national conversation should we envision together? Is it something I just want us all to be thinking about for the next hour or 15 minutes or so. So here's my first sort of softball question. Softball question, yes. Well, the reason I say this, the reason I pause and this is my last joke for the night, I promise. Inspired by David's talk earlier, a few jokes always go down. But I was thinking as I was reading all these wonderful names, you know, you start to get into a rhythm. And now I know what the guy at Yankee Stadium feels like when he announces a batting order. It's that kind of all-star lineup and the applause and the fantastic. Yeah, exactly. So here's the softball question, but I hope it's a stimulating one. If you all were to sort of look at the art, the state of the art of playwriting and play production, and I'm going to use the term living playwright production instead of new play production, because new play production is kind of a subcategory of living playwright production, right? And it has some other edges to it. If you think about taking a snapshot of where we are, just a one, two, three year snapshot, looking a little bit back, maybe looking a little bit ahead. What are the things in any of your worlds, as writers, directors, producers, that have started to go better where you see signs of progress, signs of positive change, signs of new possibilities? And of course, that question has a flip side, which we'll get to later. But let's start with the first part. And anybody, jump in. Oh, David. As an attorney, we're trained never to look at the bright side. I'm happy to say something, maybe that's provocative, I don't know, which is that I actually think we're at a point where theater can learn from Hollywood in some interesting ways. I used to hear 10 years ago playwrights talking about how Hollywood was what they did for money, but then they came back to theater because it's where their heart was. And now increasingly I'm hearing writers talk about the level of satisfaction in their work with Hollywood in relation to teamwork, in relation to writing for actors who they know and whose work they understand, in relation to camaraderie with their fellow writers. And I'm interested in how some of those values, in a way we can actually use in a useful way in the theater. I'm very interested in the question right now of how writers can be embedded in companies of actors, which was the dream of the group theater, which I think as a field, I think is something that we've abandoned. And my most satisfying experiences over the past couple of years are ones where I felt like I was approaching a deeper level of collaboration among playwright director actors who all really knew each other. Good. Howard, I was actually, I'll jump on that because today I was doing a presentation about creating a dramatic or drama web series. And I've also done work at Hollywood Television and Film, but I have found something that I think offers a really great opportunity for playwrights. And I'm also asked, do you think that the web is gonna use Serb Theater or Film or Television? I don't think it's going to use Serb, anything, but I think it's going to be another influence. And one of the series that I have, Anyone to Beat, is what you were talking about. It is like a company. And we are doing it ourselves. And there's great camaraderie. They're actors that we've grown with for three years, which is like the best of television and what I've always dreamed of for the theater. And I'm thinking, and there are more theater artists doing it. This doesn't preclude writing plays. What it does is, while you're waiting for the phone to ring or someone to say yes, you can do this other thing. And I think I've learned a lot from young people who get together and have formed theater companies. Well, this is kind of like that. And I see them as working together. And I'm very encouraged and excited by it. I'll jump up both of you. I'll jump up both of you. Collaboration amongst producers in support of new plays and playwrights is something that clearly the past three years has, past three, four years has been a big deal that I've witnessed through the National New Play Network, our offices are housed at Willie Mammoth. So Howard and I talked about collaboration a lot. But NNPN and through its continued life of new plays fund to support at 25 productions in a hundred rolling world premieres over the past four or five years, figuring out ways that producers and institutions can assume risk together as a way of minimizing its individual potential impact on any of them is really important for the field and certainly what we've seen. To pick up on something that you were talking about, I'm taking it just a little bit further. We lost Lanford Wilson a few months ago, but it was reminding me that his career really started because he had a group of actors to write for it. In fact, he wrote his first big hit, Huddell Baltimore under an injunction from Marshall Mason saying, look, all these people who put sweat equity into our theater, you'd have to write parts for them because they painted the walls. And Lanford responded by writing a play for that company. And of course, more recently, we have Tracy Letts who wrote for a company and had his big breakthrough hit with August Osage County. I wish there were more opportunities for writers to write for companies of actors. We know that Shakespeare wrote for companies of actors. We know that Mowyer did. I think there's something great about writers being embedded with acting companies instead of us just sort of showing up, new in the city, being put in the studio or apartments and just being a guest for three weeks. I think it's a lot more fun to be part of a community to write for a company. And I'd love to see more of that. I also would just add the most heartening thing I can see is that for the last two days you've been hearing from a lot of us. And I think we've told you that playwriting is in many ways no longer a tenable profession. It's the purview of hobbyists that we tend to write for a rarefied elite that can only afford our extravagant ticket prices. That if you're a woman, your chances of getting produced are significantly less than if you're a man. And there are presumably still about 300 of you sitting out there who still have the right plays. Our only hope for the continuance of the profession really but I think it's a profound one because we all face those obstacles and we still confront the blank page and I think that's significant. That sounds like a summative kind of comment. But does anyone want to jump on it? No, all right well I have a few more but then you know I want to give the conversation its own head as well, terrific. So on the first night of this conference Molly Smith in her very inspiring keynote address talked a lot about some of these issues actually. Talked a lot about artists, playwrights as a member of a community, both an institutional community in her case obviously are in a stage and also slightly more abstract terms, the playwright is a member of a larger community be that an educational institution, be that a town, a city, a village, a region, what have you. Sort of following up on some of your remarks just a few moments ago, can you think about, visualize or report experiences of ways in which you have had either as producers or as playwrights fruitful sort of community building experiences, how you have insinuated yourself into a community or been invited into a community and help shape it or give it a new meaning. Ones that I think I'm in the only theater that has a resident ensemble of writers that's been going as long as it has which is victory gardens and there have been about a dozen of us. So that's been very sustained. It's going to be an open question whether that will continue to be in place there but it's certainly been a big part of my life is to have that community of writers. Others, we can define community as broadly as you want. I want to speak to the playwright as producer and two of the most high profile hirings of the season at Baltimore Center State and at Chicago's Victory Gardens you had playwrights assuming the role of artistic director and I think it's significant. I myself am a playwright, producer and I think our engagement with an audience comes from the playwright's impulse to be in conversation with our audience. I think that's the natural role that a writer has. You throw down a proposition and it gets debated. It gets well argued. And the purpose is to open up the minds of the audience and invite further conversation. I think these two hires and there will be more coming point the way to the empowering of the writer to help chart the course of the future of the American theater not only through the plays they write by themselves but through the plays they help shepherd along. Teacher, Julia, I mean I know I teach at Julia. For 18 years and people are quite often asked us what is the reason that you and Christopher why have you been so successful? Why have your students won so many prizes? Why do they run so many TV shows? Why do their plays get done? And the answer has nothing to do with what Christopher and I have to say in the classroom for the most part. It has to do with the fact that we grow them in a community of actors. That they come up to the drama department at the Juilliard School and the actors are all there all the time circling around them so the playwrights like it and reminisce with them and have fights with them and watch them all the time. And it very much is that that's how they grow up is watching actors. And they then move out into the world with them. I mean Adam Raptop, I don't know how many people. And that's really a model I think that universities should look at instead of, you know there's another university in New York that for example has musical theater department is in another whole building from where the MFA and playwrighting is. And the actors are on the locked floor as far as I am to tell you. That's not a way that you can train writers. Writers have to learn exactly how much actors can view so that they know what not to write. And I think that that model of raising writers with actors at the same time is a really good one as opposed to academic arenas where that's a fear that actors could get contaminated by new writers. And it's terrific for the actors obviously as well to be constantly confronting new material. And if I take your point correctly, it's that sort of culture that's established that Julliard then moves out into the world, into the profession and keeps self-replicating. Very encouraging. Just at my name theater club this week, a play opened that had a Julliard writer written at who has written it and a Julliard writer actor in it. I mean both of them. So in a sense it does work that way. I mean interestingly enough when they're in California as they are now on some 10 television series, which I applaud. I mean I'm glad that we knew all along that those weren't, we didn't have all pure playwrights in the room. And I think that's a thing that's fine. There's good storytelling and there's good dramaturgy and there's good, you know, it's all good. But the fact that the actors are there, that's what makes the thing live. That's like the old days at Upper Theater of Louisville when it was all just hot all the time. So it's good. Anybody else have a thought about community either shaping or being shaped by? I'd like to say that I like to expand the word community to the global community. And I think as Susan was talking about taking back your power and finding ways that you can create situations for yourself while you're waiting for something else, that internet has provided this huge community of support for young writers, especially who have no other outlet for getting their work seen. And I recently traveled abroad and was amazed at how much access those people, I was in Australia, how much those students knew of my work because of the videos of me performing in concert and other people singing my songs and that sort of thing were on the internet. And now given that I spent the whole afternoon talking about copyright infringement, this is a loaded answer to that question. It was for free. Yes, specifically the videos that I put up and that's what I'm championing in that case. But there is a, I have been able, this also speaks to your first question about how things are improving. I have been able to reach a much broader audience because of the internet and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and those sorts of things than I would have if I were just singing while I'm trying to find venues for places where I could sing and play my songs. Just to add to that, our show has over almost nine million views worldwide in two and a half seasons. And as I said, it feels like we are all working together and it is what Marsha's talking about, not divided up. And the reason I, to get back to community, the reason I was sort of ready to say yes to this is also because of the day that I woke up and knew that I was going to perform a play I had written. And it suddenly broke down all kinds of barriers. I think as playwrights we're often passive in that way that actors are not in terms of getting work for ourselves. But what I wanted to say was when I took that play all around the country, I was alone, anybody to go out with afterwards. And so I used to resent my parents for being those kind of people who talk to anyone. I finally got it. Oh yeah, I was everywhere. But I found out a lot about and instilled myself into those communities I was in. Also because I was interviewed for, we've all had this experience I think, but interviewed for newspapers, which are now, a lot of them are shut down. But I think you learn by getting involved as you were saying, as a producer or as a performer or as quick putting your stuff out there so that it does reach a global audience. I definitely feel, I hate to say this, but I do feel more a part of the web community now than I do the theater community only because it is enough to me in the theater community as to whether I get a play done and whether I can put myself out into the community. But this, I've taken charge of. Now I wish and I hope there's a way we can start doing that again in the theater. How does anybody's, we haven't heard from the left wing here. Stage left. Yes, yes. But so I like to make sure everybody gets a chance to weigh in on a subject of interest. We'll hit on one eventually here. But I'm very interested in the, and how a community feeds back to you as artists. How do you know whether you're on Broadway or on the internet or in a regional theater? How do you hear those voices? And are they telling you anything useful? Are they calling you to do work that matters to them? Do you hear that? Do you care about that? Or is, what's the nature of that transaction, the feedback from the community? Taking the left wing. You know, I think just the idea of community, not necessarily a geographic community like part of a town but we're sort of, I don't know. I mean, for me going into theater was all about joining a community that existed. Not a geographic one but sort of like people of the same tribe where, you know, all of a sudden you discover that there are other people like you that like goofing off and think that's really important. So, I mean, in my experience, I mean, my most, my sharpest memories of community have to do with things like working in storefront theater in Chicago where it is, it was, and I imagine it still is like what you described in the web where you band together into a group of however many people you declare yourself a theater company, you rent a storefront and you declare that a play as legitimate as anything on Broadway and so, so there. And I guess there are a few guarantees, very few guarantees doing theater. There's no guarantee of production or money or a claim or any of that but one thing I think that you can guarantee yourself is if you, wherever you are, if you seek out other people, theater people who understand the importance and the magic of what it is to band together and put something up and sort of cast that spell on the audience, that is guaranteed I think. So, that's sort of something to bank on and yeah. So, that's sort of, that's the big payoff I think. I guess talking about community, a piece that I wrote which is called The Lovely Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, she meets it and then she sheds it. No. It was actually about feeling an outsider in one's community. So, I kind of approached it from a different way but what I found out in the doing of it was that a lot of people felt what I felt and that included, I was specifically dealing with the African-American community and I found out that a lot of people in the African-American community felt as I felt and not only that, people outside the community knew just what I was talking about. So, I'm not really quite sure that I actually went in this trying to, I guess I was trying to find out how to fit in the community, but it wasn't an impulse to talk about the community. Couple of follow-up real quick on how did those, how did that information come back to you? How did you get that response? I did the piece before it was done at Playwrights Horizons as a musical. I did it as a performance piece in a place called Dixon Place. And, all right, fantastic place for people to do all sorts of kinds of performances. And this Asian man came up to me and said, that is my story. And then I realized I had really figured out something about community and about being an outsider. Anybody else on the feedback, Lou? Well, I hate to say nice things about the internet because it's so burdensome in some of the ways. But I know something that has changed from me recently that occurs to me based on your question, which is that when I first started out, the only way you really got response or felt response other than anecdotally somebody stopped coming up to you on the street or occasionally someone writing a letter was through critics and through a box office. Neither of which feels very good. But now I get emails from all over the world from people who say I heard such and such a song and just kind of what you were saying, Kirsten, and it really spoke to me or it had this effect on me or this thing changed my life or et cetera. And it came as a shock to me actually when this first started happening a few years ago that people were actually listening. I suddenly thought, oh my God, people are actually, they're actually listening to what I'm saying and they're hearing these words and responding to them. I guess I better be careful and try and you know, I can't get away with stuff because people are actually hearing it. But that kind of direct realization that there was an audience that I was speaking to that was not critics and was not about how many tickets were sold. I have to say that that's been incredibly heartening in an extremely disheartening profession. That's true. I was just gonna say, Rick, I think theater institutions, or I hate that word institutions, but theaters, I think can do a lot to kind of create this more complex feedback with them. I think there's been a tendency. I mean, those of us who are artistic directors, we're dealing with feedback every single day. We're on the front lines. If we put up a play, the playwright might be gone back to New York or Chicago or whatever, but we're dealing with that feedback every single day. But really briefly, we have a new function at Woolly Mammoth. It's a senior staff function called connectivity, and which is all about kind of creating that loop between the work and the community. And it really depends on playwrights who are willing to be part of that cycle and have a thick skin about it. But it also, the key concept of connectivity is audience design. So thinking about, one of the first questions we ask a writer when we work with them is who is your ideal audience? Tell us who you think you're talking to, and then it's our job to try to go out and get them in there, but then you also have to be willing to be part of that conversation. And the other thing that's, I think, important about that is the conversation is not, did you like the play or not? That's the least interesting question about any play. And those of us who run institutions shouldn't be putting that question out. The question is, what did you take from the play? How do you interpret it? What meaning do you assign to the play? And the writer needs to be willing to be part of to essentially position themselves as a public intellectual and then they can really help in that, in that kind of feedback loop. It's exciting when it happens. I mean, that's engagement. And I think one of the big positive things that I learned just doing that, doing my left breast, was about engagement. It was also what you said about, oh my God, most people, they have stories. Not the only one that's the story and that they participated in the play with me, basically, and came up to me afterwards. And in that same way, I think what the internet has done is doing for all of us is the realization that we can actually and must actually communicate with our fans or our audiences or building those audiences and talking with them. And you're absolutely right about playwrights. We have to learn more about all aspects of it. Be willing to be part of the conversation. Be willing to be part of a production. You know, just stepping out of our comfort zone, I think. I think there's a discussion that needs to be had about the community of people who face the blank page. You know, that's a community that needs to talk to itself as well, and that's what this conference is about. But it's the community of writers. You learn so much from each other. And not only craft, I mean, part of what a guild is in the traditional medieval sense is the passing of wisdom and the creating of a community. And that goes back, you know, to the shaman in the cave dancing about the next hunt to the internet. There's still someone who's creating that story and often that story is being created in total isolation. And the feeling of isolation can be very disparate. You think you're the only one who's ever had to build that, you know, that cursor is blinking at you and demanding to be fed, you know, and nothing can happen until you fill it. You fill that page. So the pressure is on you and you're alone in that room. And it's important, I think, for writers to come together and realize they're not alone. There are people that face the exact same problem they are facing at that moment. Here's how I dealt with this problem in this play. And that's a conversation to be had, but also simply the comradeship of knowing where to gather in this, you know, I think that's facilitating that conversation is the most important thing I'm involved with. The reason I haven't said anything is I don't have any experience writing, you know, being a part of a theater community, a specific theater community. And also because I'm embarrassed that I'm not very good technologically. And I don't even want to be better. And so, you know, when I hear George talk about how well she's doing with that, you know, I feel a little envious. But I'm trying to come inspired. And I think I must go home and learn to tweet on Twitter. Is anyone tweeting right now? Confess. All right, good, right there. I believe I understood you to ask us to describe the terrain that we find ourselves in. And so I just wanted to harken back to my terrain. When I was a child, I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and there was a remarkable theater there called the Margo Jones Theater. And anyone who knows theater history knows that Margo Jones made history by coming down to Dallas, which did not have any theater at all there, and started a repertory theater with a company. And one of the things she did was to premiere all of Tennessee Williamson's works. So the reason that I'm somewhere between the best little whorehouse in Texas and schizophrenic woman is because my mama thought it was kind of a good idea for us to go off on school nights and see the new Tennessee Williams plays at Margo Jones Theater. And so I grew up on them even though I was very young and they were inappropriate for me to be seen. That's the part between whorehouse and schizophrenic woman. So here was the thing. I then left Texas and I came to New York and I had my life and I traveled around. And in that time, I realized that not every city had a theater that didn't use plays all the time. And I was kind of amazed by that. I thought everyone had that. And I can't really appreciate it in retrospect. Now this last year when we were working on the Wii being very gross, my composer and Dwayne Poole, my book writer, when we were working on changing, adapting the Truman Capote story, the Christmas memory, into a musical, we were invited to go to two places. One of them was in Dayton, Ohio. It's a theater with a real tech name. The Human Race Theater. I think that's kind of a real tech name myself. So maybe you like it, I'm sorry for you. But I have to tell you, these people in Dayton, Ohio, where by the way, Stephen Schwartz has been very helpful to them and has helped them a lot, I think, in getting this program together. They are so proud of doing new plays. They are so proud of doing new musicals. They asked us out, it wasn't very fancy. They opened up a rehearsal room and said, that's it. And we said, well, is there a stage manager? No, that's just it. Go in and do whatever you want to do. Start writing, finish writing, start in the middle, have a reading. And we had 10 days there that were very helpful to us. And after that we were invited out to the theater works in Palo Alto. And that was a little more polished and it was wonderful and we ended up having a month-long run. I'm not just meaning to be modest to talk about myself, but what I was struck by was Dallas isn't the only place that has that anymore. Now there's the Human Race Theater in Dayton and there's Palo Alto and there's all of y'all's theaters. And the difference in the terrain that I see is that new works, for all the problems, new works, that's a phrase that's considered a good thing. When I first came to New York, that was not necessarily considered a good thing. So I just thought I'd mention that and bring in a little positive touch to all our desperation that we've experienced in downtown. For you. On the subject of community, I think that one of the things that we all find about the profession of working in the theater that is by very definition community is the relationship of all the close chairs that are facing that direction. And then there's a stage. And what happens amongst those of us who are sitting in those chairs with what's happening on the stage and just two experiences I've had in the theater in the last week, those of us on council are Tony voters so we see so much theater this time of year. But I saw Motherfuck up in the half last week and it was just extraordinary, great piece of theater. And lots of response from the audience, just great response toward the stage. A lot of leaning forward, a lot of laughter, a lot of people just being wrapped by what's happening on the stage. And then at the end, a sense that we, the audience had both appreciated something and experienced something together. Nothing that we acknowledged with each other but a sense as you rarely get in the theater where you have been through something with the audience because it was such an enthralling, intense piece of theater. The other couldn't have been more different because it was this morning watching Steve Schwartz do his talk about writing for music theater and somebody in the audience asked if we could do a sing-along of all things. And Stephen being Stephen said, of course. And we came up with, I'm sure you could all think of what it would be, it would be day by day. And we were at 11 a.m., we're actually just up at that point doing a sing-along of day by day. And it felt really good. All of the day by day by day. They were alive, an audience and something happening on the stage. There's a famous animal trainer who's getting a special Tony this year, named Bill Berlone. And a year in a book and in his book, he explains early, I think it's in the first chapter with the preface about why people love watching animals on stage. His reason was that you know by very definition that yes, you can train the animal, but only so much and anything might happen. I think at its best, that's always true of theater. It's why those of us who love this medium are so uncomfortable with anything that trends toward beating that life out of it. And that we love when the actors are animals. We love when the work is bloody instead of careful. Not just from the actors, but from the director, from the writer, from the composer, from the designers. When the thing couldn't have happened anywhere but on a live stage. That shared experience, the shared experience of knowing what these animals will do. What you will do, what any of us will feel when this will end, how it will go. That wouldn't happen in any other medium and it wouldn't happen. I agree with Stephen about the internet and Stephen and I are the most backward people on earth. As far as using the internet, I'm even worse. I just got an email address this year. And I keep it up very selectively because I don't want to use it. The point I'm making though is as much as it does link you to the world. I think it's a way that people have of not being in the world and it allows them to actually be global in a little box and I think this is bloody. I like this even though I'm shy. I like it with this. Great. I want to respond to you and just say that I feel like the reason I'm at this table is because of the internet piracy and copyright thing that Craig and I are in that same committee. And that started with an email and that was my way into this community for which I'm very honored to be part. And so I think there's a combination of the best of both is what makes this experience a whole experience. It's true. I mean theater is making something happen. And yeah, I don't think any of us here would trade the opportunity to make something happen just the way you described. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to make that opportunity and in a way that little black box, dad's garage, I would give anything to do that. And I have found another way to do that, which is the web and putting on something that I feel as proud of as I do my work in any medium. That's what counts. I don't think we need to exclude other things. You don't have to go on the end. You don't have to write an email. I'm sorry to have trashed it. It's actually something I don't understand. Well, you know what? That's another discussion and I don't want to take it up here but a lot of people don't understand the place I write. So, I mean someone, it doesn't mean they're for everyone. They shouldn't be for everyone. Nothing should be for everyone. We should all have these individual distinct voices and places I'm just saying to all these people, you want to find a place to write. If you could do it on the stage, there's nothing that compares. But if you could do it for millions of people on a little screen, a big screen, out back on the street, that's theater. Okay, not mistaken, I haven't spoken yet and I know by direct experience at the next flare, okay? And you can pass. If you had a magic wand or, and if there was something you could change about the state of living playwright production or the life of the playwright in the American theater, what would you do? Namer, David. I'm stealing this from, I don't remember, Romulus Linney, I think. I would give every playwright a home in a theater. So, you can do it. It's just an extraordinary experience to have playwrights in the building every day. It's an amazing thing and I think you guys get a lot out of it and I know I've worked in tiny theaters and big theaters and interns or mentees or whoever you wanna talk about. They're thrilled when the playwright is in the building. And as a sidecar to that, playwrights are the most powerful person in the theater. Everybody wants to know what you think. And why you wrote it and who you are and will you come and all of those things. And I think because you get beaten down so much in so many obscene ways that you forget how powerful you are. And so I just wanted to show you. But it would be a home. I actually, I have a, I just have a small technical group about the theater if I could wave a wand besides making some place that I wrote disappear. And the plays of some other playwrights disappear. And certain directors I've worked with disappear. And this kid I went to grammar school with disappear. Outside of that, I think that I have a, my worry about the theater actually is, will sound small, but it's actually about casting. I feel as if casting is killing the theater because it's almost impossible now to get an actor to commit for four weeks of rehearsal and let's say four weeks of a, or eight weeks of a performance schedule in New York simply because of commercials, television programs, movies, the internet. Things like that. So it is getting so hard to find actors that you are always these days going up to the very line trying to find the people that you meet. And as they say in Shakespeare and Love, it's a mystery somehow it always does happen. You always do find the person. It's always the right person. No, I'd make some of those people disappear too. But actually it's just, it's casting. Casting is the madness of theater. It's the one area that has become nail biting and unpleasant and mega agents are killing us by, for example, actors who have almost no credits in the theater now will not audition anymore. They need to be given an offer. And I find this appalling. And so that's really my gripe. That's my magic wand. Fixed casting, please. I'm gonna toss out one other gripe and this really, this comes out of a personal experience although I'm not gonna name any names. I see frequently that there are administrators in the theater, there is an administrator in the theater who's getting a salary, a yearly salary that is larger than the total budget of royalties paid to all the playwrights in that season. And I think there's something kind of corrupt about that. I get really, Ty, if we're so bloody necessary, why are the playwrights almost always on the short end of the economic stick? You know? Yeah, this goes to my magic wand. Which is, there's a quote by former Guild President Robert Anderson which may be apocryphal, but I like to think that it's not. Which is, he said, you can make a killing in the theater, but not a living. And if I would wave that magic wand, it would be to allow artists, writers to make a living. So that they don't have to take jobs elsewhere so that they can focus on this craft and they don't have to desert it to put braces on their kid's teeth, right? David's magic wand was a little more murderous actually on the killing side, but we'll forget it. I have one more sort of question that I'd like to throw out and you guys have been fantastic by the way. And then we're gonna open the floor for commentary. This question is, has sort of an A and a B part and you can answer either one or neither. The theme of collaboration has been a big one for the last few days. It's come up tonight, even glancingly, both in positive and negative terms. And the theme of education has come up both tonight and throughout the conference. Some people have spoken very movingly about the transformative effects of their education and training or the deformative effects of their education and training. And so just to kind of throw both topics out at once, I'd like to know if anybody has sort of a telegram that they would like to send to the educational institutions of the world, the dealing theater, or other subjects by the way, because theater of course is not typically about theater, it's usually about the world and we have something to do with that too. And or a telegram you'd like to send to a mythical collaborator to get him or her on board with you as a collaborative artist. So that's a lot of stuff to think about, but write those telegrams and whoever's got an answer, you know, on the education. I've got a telegram, I do teach. And it would be, don't be so afraid of the professionals, you know. It just seems like there has been this big chasm that conforms itself to this ridiculous sentence, those who can do, those who can't teach. And straddling both sides of it the way I do, it's preposterous and we are destroying each other and we're destroying the students as well. So I would just send a telegram that says, we can love each other. I'm never this bad, by the way. And your telegram would say, we can love each other, stop. Yes, we can love each other, stop. Anybody else? Education or collaboration or anything else? When you talk about telegram, I think about international communication and one of the most exciting events of the last decade is the proliferation of the availability of scripts by playwrights from other countries. 10 years ago, you'd have to wait for an air mail submission. Now, as playwrights the world over have realized they're just a click away, they've been doing the $500 translation fee. They've been asking theaters to pay all of $1,000 to get a work translated and we've been willing to do that and the rate of submission has increased exponentially. That's not competition for playwrights of the drama skill, those are only more opportunities for playwrights in the drama skill to be involved in the translating of work that is being done overseas. The telegram I would send would be to the Arab world and the Arab Spring and all the confusion coming out of it and why don't we get to see some of those plays being written right now that we could share and it would reveal so much more than what we're seeing on CNN. We get the heart, we get the soul of what's happening across the world and finally understand something. Back up the telegram map that main, and my telegram is don't be afraid but it's not to the writers. It's to all the people who nurture, produce, direct and populate the casts of those plays. I say to theaters, don't be afraid. Even though I know it's an economic reality, don't be afraid to cast someone who doesn't have so many people that you can't get the script to like David said. Don't be afraid of material that isn't completely accessible the moment you look at. Just don't be afraid to take a chance on somebody new whose play wasn't a hit last year. Just go for broke, we do. And both to collaborators and to educators would be open to the possibility that first in terms of education, I cited a story earlier today that I got my undergraduate degrees in music theory and composition but I went to a liberal arts school and we had such a crimes we had to take history and philosophy and German and all these things. And I remember saying to my composition professor, why do I have to study all these things? And he said if you were going to be a writer, you have to have something to write about. You have to have a point of view about the world so that you have something to write about. And so as writers we have to be open to the possibility and that is one interpretation of that phrase but also as collaborators I think we get stuck in this is how I see it, this is how it has to be and the other collaborators saying that won't work, this is how it has to be. And with the same sort of open to possibility, I find that break sometimes the only way to get past that conflict is to just say, okay, let's just imagine for a moment that you might be right, what would that mean? And that's usually where the break could happen. So I think it goes through both situations. Any other telegraphers? I would send a telegram to New Playmakers in New York from New Playmakers outside of New York and also back and forth to say hi. No, but calling for greater collaboration between New Playmakers in New York and in working at regional theater and greater transparency between New Playmakers in those two places, in those many places because if we've heard anything about community there are more communities around the country at least in my traveling that I've found that are making playwrights, trying to put playwrights at the center of the communities, the center of civic life and certainly the center of institutions, which has just been thrilling to see. So I would call for that. Let me just toss out a small anecdote about what has changed though. Number of years ago I was writing a book called Something Wonderful Right Away which is an oral history of Second City and I was trying to market it to the typical publishers of theater books in New York and I was talking to an editor and he said, now let me get this straight, you're writing about a theater in Chicago and I said, oh yeah, I said, oh, for heaven's sakes nothing important happens in theater in Chicago. And eventually obviously it got published and it's been in print and has done very well. Nobody would dream of saying that anymore. Once upon a time everything that we thought was of value in the American theater started within the Broadway economy and then it was distributed to the rest of the country. Now New York is frequently the last stop and I think that's, that is a healthy change. I think that the fact that stuff is springing up all over the place and ends up on Broadway rather than having to start on one island is the big news of the last 35, 40 years. The river basically has reversed its course and I think that's very important. My telegram would go to theater goers from out of New York, coming to New York to see shows and to be adventurous. I notice them going into Red Lobster. And there's a connection between that restaurant and perhaps a show they would choose. And I once was a trying, I was trying to impress a woman that I was dating in my early 40s so I went to church with her once. And this last time I was in a church but I heard something good. The minister said, why would you choose comfort when God offers you ecstasy? And that's to me the choice between the Red Lobster show or the one that maybe would offer you ecstasy. And they seem to choose Red Lobster a lot, those Red Lobster shows. And I wish they would venture out and surprise themselves and us. I'd like to say something in regards to education and I can't phrase it as a telegram but one thing that I constantly worry about is that the plays we write are no longer at the center of the public square. It seemed like there's a time when Arthur Miller would write about a social issue and it would suddenly pop up in the New York Times and we were a big part of popular culture and we helped to dictate the public debate about current social issues. And I don't think that happens with our plays in the theater anymore. But I do think it happens when those same plays find themselves in educational and academic communities. And as a quick example, my dear friend Moises Kaufman wrote The Laramie Project, modest success off Broadway in New York, went on for three years running to be the most produced play at American universities. After that, for three or four more years, it actually hit the high school market. And I think when you look at the trajectory, certainly of gay and lesbian politics in this country and you see the generational shift, honest to God, I sincerely believe half those kids did that play in high school. So our worry that we are no longer in a position to incite public debate or address social concern or modify ways of thinking. I think we still can, but it's not necessarily on our stages, it's those same plays operating in the classroom. And that's a connection. And that's the definition of a national conversation and a perfect way to close this part of the proceedings and open up, first of all, open up the house lights a little bit, if you will. And we have about 15 minutes or so for questions and engagement from the audience. And you, ma'am, we're first. Up, up. I'd like to introduce you both. At the first International Women's Playwrights Contrast in 1988, we had hundreds of women every couple of years meeting around the world. We had a Rocky woman at Playwrights and an Iranian woman on the same stage. And in every single one of these conferences, a number of women have been increases for what they write. And we've been trying to buoy up everybody's spirits to tell people, you know, these are opportunities. It's very difficult in this to be in a marriage and private. And it is, of course, for a drama business, but I think they're keeping that in mind. And they're out there, anyway. I did a little piece about a woman who was visiting about to die. Crime she didn't commit. And torture. And a number of these women, by the way, have been tortured in our playwrights. And afterwards, one of the Cyprian playwrights came up to me and she said, my feet, I still have trouble walking. And I knew what she meant. But it takes it to another realm. And we're so privileged to be able to do what we do. And so many people said, I'm so happy to be doing what I'm doing. And we have to take that elsewhere and bring the world to life again. Great, thank you, thank you. Yes, I've been asked to ask, oh, you're very good, stand and project. And if you can't hear in the back, let me know in all the rephrases. The House of 90 was a very popular show in TV. And it made theater, it brought theater into the homes. Is there any effort for it to recreate something like the House of 90 for modern artists? You know, I think you're not going to find much of that on American TV. Paradoxically, there's an enormous amount, I've been sharing this with friends, there's an enormous amount on British radio. Every day on Radio 4, there's a new 45 minute play with their leading actors and writers. Every weekend they do a major reduction. We should be ashamed of ourselves because our radio and television aren't supporting the way that British radio does. British radio covers American culture better than we do. There is a current trend in filming live theater and broadcasting into movie theaters. The National, I think, has a program. And there's some of that going on here. The company is going to be on screens this Wednesday. There you go. It does remain to be seen. I mean, theater is a live experience. And whether that experience can be replicated adequately in a film version, I don't think has been demonstrated at least to me. But it is an outlet for people who don't have access certainly to a lot of live theater. Can't afford that. And it's a way of these works being given and a market for the artists as well. Other questions? Yes, in the back. Rosa, Roland? Yeah, hi. One of the recurring themes that I've noticed over the past few days has been that we're all engaged in the creation of an art form for which the audiences are dwindling year after year after year. I'm wondering if the people up here have any advice for us if there are any things that we can be doing to try to reverse that trend? We had a conversation last night at dinner with someone who is not a playwright but is a very intelligent gentleman involved in marketing and branding, et cetera. And he took a very interesting position. He said that he felt that that was actually changing. And that we have an extraordinary opportunity in the future because, as has been cited here a lot, people are so increasingly isolated at their computers and at their crack barriers and at their iPads and et cetera, that there's that the experience of community that exists only really in live theater has started to seem cool again and attractive. And you start to see, he was talking about things like glee and the fact that that's celebrating live theater and certain other things that are sort of cool and upcoming. And so I actually challenged the assertion that it's a shrinking audience and an art form that's becoming less relevant and that trend is only going to go in that direction. I'm not at all sure that's the case. And I think that we can... It's sort of what somebody was saying about owning our own power that there is something about the experience of live theater and a live event that is becoming so rare these days that it's in terms of our lives that the interaction with people in live form is dwindling and therefore the experience of live theater becomes more precious and more attractive. So I think... I sort of challenged this assertion a bit and maybe that's naive or polyannish at me. But when I heard that said, it did make a lot of sense. So I think what we do about it is to write things that are engaging live and do create an event, a live event between the audience and the play and see what happens. I'm going to vet those numbers, though, also don't include what is perhaps the largest expanding genre of theater that's going on in America, which is improvisational theater. Thousands of troops across the country, professional, high school, college, whatever. It's... and certainly nobody's going to make a living in doing it, but there are people all over the country that are crowding into small rooms to watch groups make up stories spontaneously on their suggestions in front of them. And I know that that's not in these numbers. It's a different kind of theater. None of us is going to make a living from it, but it is legitimately a kind of theater. I think what we may see is that the subscription model and those subscription audiences, which has been the driving economic engine of a lot of the regional theater movement is going to collapse. And when it does, creative marketing directors are going to find new ways of reaching new audiences, and it may, in the long run, be liberating for the whole field. And we may feel we're back on the front lines of where that movement was originally, which is each play is a new thing, and we need to reach out to new audiences in new creative ways. That may be a great trend in the future. I think the low-tech nature of theater... I'm sorry. The low-tech nature of theater is what's going to be its salvation. You can't download it. You can't scan it. You can't videotape it. You can't, but then it becomes something else. Theater is, as Stephen was saying, a live experience, and it's that experience that people have always been hungry for and will always be hungry for. Certainly theater going as a cultural phenomenon used to be something that was habitual. When I was a kid, my parents, middle-class people from Brooklyn, we always went into the theater. We got half-price tickets, and we sat upstairs, and we saw, you know, these people's work, and it made me care about that. I find, perhaps, the succeeding generations it's less part of their everyday life, but I think what's growing is, off Broadway, the $20 show, the people putting on the Mickey and Judy, putting on their own show, but they're speaking to their own generation in their own language, and they're talking about things that are concerned to them, and I don't know if those numbers reflect how much those theaters are bursting, and how much of that is going on, not just in New York, but everywhere, and the explosion of French festivals all over the place. I think, though, that the increasing number of alternate media for storytelling creates for us in the theater the challenge of doing what only the theater does best. You know, we have to do the thing that you have to be there in order to see it. You have to be in the theater in order to get the effect of Bernadette theater singing to you. You can't, you know, whatever that is that we do that is the most theatrical, the most, you know, we have to do the thing that nobody else can do. The TV can't do, the web can't do, that film can't do, that nobody can do. And if we stick to that, we'll be okay, as Ralph said, you can't duplicate that thing that you had to be there in order to see it. And that, I think, is our great hope. That's what we teach all the time, which is we have to push further and further into the land of where only we know how to do this. I mean, the great success of Spider-Man would be a really interesting, despite all of the pooh-blah about it, the fact that you sit there and these things are flying over your head. Yes, you can see that in Las Vegas, but, you know, that's that kind of thinking on a big scale. Similar, similarly, the Beau Williman production of Balm and Gilead last week that was put up and disappeared in 24 hours. Everybody that wasn't there, apparently, is just an idiot and I'll be in that list. But, you know, whatever the edges are of the writing world in the theater, that's where we have to be. Well, you know, Warhorses may be a better example than Spider-Man because Spider-Man really occurred about publicity. Warhorses happen. It's a story that doesn't seem to be of intrinsic, you know, if you describe what that story is about, you wouldn't think like, gee, everybody in the world is going to kill to see that. But it's done in such a way you can only do what they're doing in Warhorses in live theater. You can't do that story on film and have the same effect. You can't do it on television. You can't do it live streaming. But you sit in that theater seeing something that can only be done in the theater and people are killing to get it because of that. I was thinking about what you were saying before about wanting and being hungry to go to the theater because of what theater is and it's live and you are communicating and you're not under headsets. But I was also thinking that the Red Rooster place are not going to make you feel that way or whatever. Red Lobster place. But what Marsha said, I mean, first of all, that's been my cry ever since I started writing plays. It's like this is only one thing and that's what it is for the theater. But I was thinking about is it the free theater that I was fortunate enough to get tickets to last time they were in New York doing the pinter in Warhorses. Okay, that was something where the audience really did connect not just with that but with one another. I mean, we were in that and that kind of thing more of that kind of thing because it was theatrical and it was addressing something that we need to know about. We need to make that kind of work and we need to tell our story better that that's what we do because the truth is it is much easier every day to not go out and not in an easier house. I don't think we can ignore that but that's true people are not going to the theater more and more because it's so easy to call up whatever you want on the crap theory or the iPad so we have to be out there telling that story that what you are getting in this theater tonight you will only ever get that night here and that is something special and important. We are almost out of time I regret to say and Maim Hunt is gesticulating in such a way that tells me what a good remark to make. I'll be very brief. Stop writing realism. Well Yeah, I got to go to the center cluster Once we go to the Niagara Island we may as well fly the array Yeah It's going to be a big can of bubbles because we're not There's that traffic everywhere today Well, of course my dog Matt thought, oh let's get out from the Key Bridge and see how it goes That was right Yeah Yeah, I thought Key Bridge is really close It's not going to 24 feet But uh Yeah, that's terrible I didn't know which way would have been better though Because is that that or the 14th Street Bridge apparently there's some back way to Rockville Plain that I didn't know Where were you trying to go? I'm sorry Actually, you're probably right that probably was I mean, actually could you now just take me to the To the To the To the To the To the To the To the To the To the