 Briani, I think the bread basket moved. The bread basket is giving me hell here. Well, when you're in Sicily, adjust your bread basket, I think becomes the new model. I'm trying, but the bread basket keeps trying to cut me off. Alright, good afternoon everyone. My name is Jeremy Cohen. I'm the artistic director here at the Playwright Center. And on behalf of our staff, of people involved in that conversation, to kind of start exploring and hearing where we're at and seeing, you know, kind of what work we can get done in the conversation. I just want to give a particular shout out as part of the festival this year too. Trista Baldwin, Christina Ham and Matt Smart were three core writers with us here at the Playwright Center and whose plays have been developed over the last 10 days. We've been thrilled to have them here. And I think very much those plays are emblematic of this topic. We want to kind of dig into a little bit today for the next hour, which is that of epic theater. And sort of defining what that even means, it gets one of those really sort of objective kind of reductive words that are particularly useful. So kind of getting much more specific about what that looks like and how we really, I think the conversation is probably a lot about how we sustain the vitality of our theater field both here and abroad. So I want to start by introducing the panel that we've pulled together, and then we'll spend a bit more time talking with this topic. Beginning to my left is Carlisle Brown. Carlisle is a writer, performer, and the artistic director of Carlisle Brown and Company, which has produced his plays, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, The Masks of a Fellow, The Fool of America, Talking Masks, and Therapy and Resistance. His other plays include The African Company Presents, Richard III, one of my favorite plays ever. The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Collared Minstrel Show, The Negro of Peter the Great, Pure Confidence, A Big Blue Nail, and American Family, among others, which was premiered here last year. He's received commissions from Arena Stage, Houston Grand Opera, The Children's Theater Company, Alabama Shakes, Actors' Theater of Louisville, and the Goodman Theater. He's the recipient of Playwriting Fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, McKnight, Jerome, Minnesota State Arts Board, TCG, and Pew, and is the recipient of numerous awards. Please help me welcome Carlisle Brown. Carlisle's also a core writer with us here at the Playwright Center, as is Aditi Brennan-Capell. Aditi is a playwright, actress, and director of Bulgarian and Indian descent, having been raised in Sweden and currently residing in Minneapolis. So you know you gotta love those plays. Her plays include Love Person, which is a four-part love story in Sanskrit, ASL, and English. Agnes Under the Big Top, which has been produced critical, playing both here in the Twin Cities and around the country. Aditi's new hit-displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy, which consists of the Chronicles of Kalki, Shiv, and Brahmini, a one-hijra standup comedy show, is currently premiering at Mixed Blood Theater here in the Twin Cities. The final performance of all three plays, the final marathon is this afternoon following the panel starting at two o'clock. Join us here, or I'm so sorry you guys can't join us from overseas, but you're missing it. It's fantastic. Aditi's currently working on Commissions for a Yale Rep, South Coast Rep, and La Jolla Playhouse. Please help me welcome Aditi. Zach Berkman. Zach is a playwright, a director, a dramaturg, and a producer. He joined People's Light and Theater as the Associate Artistic Director in September of 2011, and has become recently the producing director in 2013. Previously he was the co-founder and Executive Director of Artistic Programming with Epic Theater Ensemble, which is an award-winning theater company that's artist-run in New York City. During his 10 years of leadership there, Epic gained a distinguished reputation for developing new work and cultivating diverse new audiences. His own plays include Beauty on the Vine, A Breath Short of Breathing, and The Harassment of Iris Malloy. Beauty on the Vine was produced in New York and Chicago and published recently. Please help me welcome the fabulous Zach Berkman. Joining us overseas on our upstage right from the UK, Suzanne Bell. Suzanne is the new writing associate and dramaturg at the Royal Exchange Theater in Manchester. She oversees the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, Britain's biggest writing competition. She's recently worked as a dramaturg on new plays by Chris Thorpe, Roy Malarkey, Chloe Moss, Ronan Monroe, and Simon Stevens. She was the first literary manager to be appointed to the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, where she worked on critically acclaimed and prize-winning productions by playwrights including the incredible Jonathan Harvey, Frank Cato Boyce, and Lizzie Nunnery. She was the dramaturg on Unprotected, a winner of the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. She supported the development of new working companies including Franek Assembly and Slung Low and has run writer... Okay, so that's all. So that's it. That's all I'm going to do. That's it. It cut off. The rest of your bio cut off on my piece of paper. Please help me welcome Suzanne Bell. There was more. I had to stop myself. I was so enthusiastic. I had to stop my enthusiasm for your bio. And finally, joining us from Sicily, Bryony's plays include Her Aking Heart and A Wedding Story. Her play Frozen, commissioned by Birmingham Repertory Theatre, won the TMA Best Play Award, the Eileen Anderson Central Television Award, and was then produced on Broadway where it was nominated for four Tony Awards. She also wrote Last Easter, produced at the door, and created successful adaptations of both Uncle Bania and Christmas Carol as the associate artist for The Rep. Her Franek Assembly piece, Stockholm, won the Wolf Wedding Award for Best Play of 2008 and her recent work includes beautiful burnout for the National Theatre of Scotland and Franek Assembly, which received a fringe first at Edinburgh. Her play Thursday opens in March at the Adelaide Festival. Please help me welcome the incredible and the fabulous Bryony Lavery to our panel. So you know Minneapolis. We're all coming over for dinner in Sicily tonight. We're all hopping on a plane after the panel. The pasta sauce is on. It's ready. So, all right, so Epic Theatre, once I was in college with Zach Workman in a theatre history class that I failed out of twice and Zach did, which is why he's a much better panelist than I am. One of the first things that I learned about, so I thought I'd better go back to basic, was the idea of Epic Theatre being kind of not developed but being continued about 90 years ago by, of course, Berthold Brecht. And I was kind of reading some stuff recently as I was preparing for this, and this was the part of it that jumped out at me, which actually I think jumped out at me a few years ago when I was doing so well in college. And of Epic Theatre he said this, to make transactions on stage intelligible, the environment in which the characters live have to be brought to bear in a big and in a significant way. When something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up. He went on to say, what is natural must have the force of what is startling. This is the only way to expose the laws of cause and effect. It's all about a great change. The audience says, yes, I have felt like that too. Just like me it'll never change. The sufferings of this man uphold me because they're inescapable. That's great art. It all seems the most obvious thing in the world. I weep when they weep. I laugh when they laugh. The Epic Theatre spectator says I'd never have thought it. That's not the way. That's extraordinary. It's hardly believable. It's got to stop. The sufferings of this man uphold me because they're unnecessary. That's great art. Nothing obvious in it. I laugh when they weep. I weep when they laugh. So as we consider topics for the panel this year we spent a great deal of time thinking about what challenges not only our playwrights in the field but of course at the playwright center because none of our writers as much as we love them writing and developing plays here no playwright is actually writing a play to be done at the playwright center. It's not what we do all of the writers are writing plays to be done on stages here and around the country and around the world. So for us we always have to think about our producing partners at theaters who are challenging themselves in these same kind of ways because of course they're the greatest allies that we have and partners and colluders and collaborators as we work with writers to think about where their work goes. One of the things we discussed recently is how the over 10,000 playwrights currently writing in the US are vying for approximately 250 slots a year on a good year. We continue to ring our hands of course at basic survival issues like equitable scale, health insurance, ownership and communication and expectation always a challenge. Artistically we probably spend the most time hearing from our cores and fellows in particular about the shrinking landscape of theaters willing to produce plays of epic size and depth both in terms of the actual scale of a play cast size design the worlds of a play will it be set in Antarctica or Iceland out on the fjords or not. But also in terms of topics they're exploring within the piece. There's obviously a general sense that with funding shrinking with audiences less interested in paying for tickets that by producing plays that either exist solely in the 20th century canon or produced last year in New York or London with somehow receiving a favorable review or prize stamp of approval that of course that means that more audiences will come. And yet single ticket numbers will then skyrocket and order will be restored to all of our theaters. Rather than deciding what stories are entirely critical to put on stage the dramatic, the comedic, the stylistically challenging, the musical, the movement based theaters, the devised work, the essential stories. We've become fear based and responsive in our season curation oftentimes rather than visionary and challenging allowing only a modicum of risk into the palette of our theaters and our audiences. I want to share a couple of stories real briefly. One in particular which is that within and these are both I would say within the last 30 days. So I tried to think of like not once I heard a thing but here's a conversation I had in the last 30 days to just get really current about some things that are happening at least in the states. One in particular was I was having a conversation with an artistic director about a couple of our writers and they said that's all great. That's really good for you. But unfortunately at our theater we're really only interested in producing plays by writers who have had no less than 15 to 20 years of their plays being produced. And I said I'm sorry could you repeat that not out of mocking but actually saying it's important to me. I want to understand what does that mean to you? How does that translate when you have that conversation on your staff when you're planning your season what does that mean to you? And what the person said was that they were sure that within 15 or 20 years that was enough time for audiences to hear them that they would buy tickets to those plays whether or not they were actually their best work or not. And therefore it was a much lower risk. And so I sat with this 15 to 20 year number as if audiences sort of we assumed that they're sitting around at home like I will go to this I won't go to this like they're doing math which they don't do as it turns out. And trying to decide which plays they were attending based on the exact number of years. Yes I will go at 16 years no I won't go at 13. I guess I just didn't know if something were you outraged is that what happened or did a Blackbird fly through I couldn't say outraged. Yes it's interesting isn't it so I want to say about this too there's a number of other examples in the last 30 days but I would just say that there's obviously no good guys and bad guys in this conversation there's not mean people sitting around wishing ill in spite on people there's a lot of people thinking about how to keep their theaters going and having great art in it just like there are an incredible amount of playwrights who write great work and by the way not every piece of theater that's written new is perfect and great or perfect and great in every theater we know all about it. Is it different in the UK is every piece of theater perfect and great in the UK? Yes. Yeah. Undoubtedly. It's not just because you sound smarter than us with that incredible dialect it's actually great. Every British playwright writes great Shakespeare masterpieces. Excellent we're going to learn from you. So I think there's a lot of conversation that we're having which is then how do we take what is vital and remind our audiences which is in fact why we're doing these plays right how do we take what is vital which is going to be very different from theater to theater and put those stories in combination on our stage so that rather than saying oh hey at X theater we just like a play we're going to do it which is also fine too rather challenging ourselves as producing theaters are saying it to say what is the bigger story that we're trying to tell at our theater and not sort of saying which is one of the examples I'm not sharing right now I have X people in my audience how do I only speak to them but of course how do I kind of balance that out with the conversation with I wish I had less white people I wish I had more young people all of those kind of conversations and yet the programming in fact doesn't reflect anything in its heart or scope that could open the doors further so I think there's a lot of kind of conversation about how do we put vital work on our stage so I think that's sort of part of our topic so I guess this I'm going to ask an attentionally subjective question given the five of you here for a while we can start with you a little bit but I'd love to hear from all of you about this what kind of theater and storytelling do you find to be most critical to have on our stages today I ask you as a writer but also as an artistic director well there was an example you had from the past couple of months which I was interested in addressing you know when you gave us some of these advanced questions which was you said that an artistic director said to a young African American writer that he loved his play but couldn't do it because it didn't reflect the interest of his white audience and we know that's not new but you know that's disturbing in a lot of ways and one is how does he know that and the other is why is that and why is he complacent about it I mean you know as an artist writing an institution how does he view the nature of the social contract because you know I mean even if he does which has been the case if he does that young black writer although I'm not that young black writer anymore when one has artistic conversations you never know whether you're talking about drama to your money and and I think the way that that person sort of relates to you know we say that there are no good guys or bad guys I think it relates to you know the example you gave from Brett in terms of the Lepic Theater is you know Alberto who is a bastard Matt and I is a murderer and mother courage maybe she doesn't really have that much courage but Brett shows us that they only exist because of an environment a context the only reason you can have an Alberto Ubi is because there's a world that allows him to exist and so you know well you know do artistic directors really have a social contract with the world because that example is I mean that's not the world we see right here in this theater I mean just sitting right here it's just not that world so the question is what world are they looking at and is this sort of like intellectual colonialism I mean kind of what's going on I mean there is something deeper yeah definitely there really is and I think they're positive things and if I could take the time to kind of give an example of an experience I had at Alabama Shakespeare Festival Kent Thompson was the artistic director it's in Montgomery Alabama and of course there's a diverse range of you know black people who can afford to go to theater but there's and he's trying to invite them in you know in this building that has this facade which is historically tells black people do not enter but you know he tries to bring them into the theater and they do black shows and the black people they only go to black shows so he produced a play of mine and hopefully to try to solve that problem and I'll try to be brief with this the play was called the Negro Peter the Great which is based on an unfinished novella by Pushkin about his maternal great grandfather who was the godson of Peter the Great so it's one black guy it's like a fellow in a black work he's born in Abyssinia he grew up in France yeah he's like he's a global person and he you know and he comes to Russia like and you know he's getting more epic by the minute and you know tries to belong you know but it was like you know Minnesota 20 years ago when it was just all blonde here and sort of blue eye so anyway it was the company the play had 19 characters played by 15 actors but Alabama Shakespeare Festival could handle it because it housed a graduate acting program from the University of Alabama so they had lots of warm bodies good actors but warm bodies to do big stale shows I mean it was sort of economically reasonable and they had a company they had actors on salary so it helped things financially it was put in the smaller theater because it would be a play just because Carlisle Brown is on the marquee and they also didn't really have a good idea who pushed me so you know we put it in a smaller theater and you know we put together a production budget which is not ambitious because we don't know if the white people will come all of the black people will come and so and then we have a workshop and one of the characters was on the show during the workshop persuaded me to eliminate one of the characters and when I went to rehearsal the first day in rehearsal the actors were always talking about their back stories and you know they had really imagined the world of each of their characters and one character said well what about your character and he said oh that's a pretty common Russian name that's kind of an inane thing to say and then we realized as we talked around the table was that he wasn't clear about who he was in the play because the character that I cut was his sister and without the sister the thing that really sort of drives the plot is you know Peter the Great is an autocratic liberal and he's going to take care of Ibrahim you know I'm going to make your life better whether you like it or not you know I know all you people call it you've met folks like this so but the problem was that it didn't look like a family so right then I ran into Kent's office and I said we got to put it back you know we have to put it back and then Kent said some really like strange dramaturgical things and then I said well what's going on right now in the in the smaller theater which was like a big thrust you know you could have a minimal set and that's good for the budget right you know it's imperial rushes so we have to demonstrate that so right you know and that happens to be the costumes and when I said to Kent what's going on he said to me Carlisle those costumes are really expensive and so um and so this character needed two costumes we had an actor who could do the double so we kind of compromised and we cut it from the first act and because these costumes were crushed so so when I'm saying that they're real problems and he was sort of kind of trying to do it but even when there's a willingness to make epic plays you know it's difficult and when there is no willingness or awareness of a social contract then um yeah and I would just say too that the conversation that I mentioned to you guys also was one of three conversations I've had in the last six weeks with three writers of color all of different bases all with artistic directors all saying the same thing so that was sort of just one of the, Brian how about for you what are you seeing and what are you feeling as you're writing towards right now that you find to be really critical to have on stage right now it's quite hard to say I think it's mostly it's about a very very serious story that people connect with I don't think it matters the number, the size of the cast or the size of the the topic has to be huge I think that's the only way I can describe it What does huge mean to you when you say that you see it in your face, in your heart what does that mean to you um it's you know a play is epic um when wherever it is feels slightly bigger than it should that um if you think about Hamlet for example it's set in a castle but the castle has a much more epic quality and it's almost Jungian in that it's more than a castle it's something terrifying the same with the tempest I'm using all shapes to be here but the storm is more than a storm yes that's what I mean by that unless we be careful with anything I think that we talk about that is to say this epic theatre which is my fear about ever coining something because it becomes subjective it doesn't really end up meaning anything and it also becomes fetishized as if to say that the only kind of ballad theatre is a theatre of size and scope which is actually of course not true at all but so I think what I'm trying to do is with you guys to try to help us define the urgency about theatre which could be urgent comedy but and yet how do we help define it so that how do we help continue to write towards it or hearing you talk about how you're writing towards it or why people are producing it or not producing it I think that kind of critical instinct how about for you I'll kind of piggyback on both of these ideas I think the social contract is hugely important I feel like what's so essential is that we keep making an active conversation happen in theatre between the audiences between the theatre that we are making is that is what an artist does in a healthy society and making an inactive conversation that sort of said it's dangerous to me it's dangerous for the big I love big idea theatre I think big idea theatre can be contained in a one person show it's not I'm going to prove it too I think it's about the soul of the thing and how you get at that is like you know your own deal as an artist but I do think it's important for us as artists to tangle with the big ideas and to be kind of fearless about that because otherwise we're not upholding our end of the social contract necessarily and that too is very dangerous what's the biggest scariest biggest oh my god can the theatre contain this idea of mine challenge that you've faced as a writer I'm really lucky in that the first play I wrote as I was writing it seemed to me unproducible and then people produced it and that was like all of a sudden I learned this lesson my very first time out that theatres are actually I think more fearless than we sometimes give them credit for that said I think the I always have to have a conversation with myself at the beginning of any project where if it's not something that I think is incredibly important and valuable to put into the world and put into a dialogue with the world around me I probably shouldn't waste three years on it because it will take me that long the trilogy that is currently running was scary for several reasons it was scary for personal reasons it was scary because I was tangling with mythic things deeply personal immigrant experience things ideas that I wasn't done evolving for myself as a human and that I evolved by the way of writing the plays that I then you know took all my clothes off and went in front of humans and you know presented to them for them to then engage in a dialogue with me about so I think they're all scary to be honest but I feel like that kind of is part of the job and I think I think tangling with the big ideas is just hugely important and I think being okay with the epic failures is probably also hugely important not okay you're never okay with them but you know being accepting of them Zach you're both a playwright and also a producer having worked at a number of different kinds of theaters and producing organizations with all sorts of different missions and stuff like that can you talk a little bit about how do you feel living in the middle of both like are they the same for you or are they different? I mean it's funny because in this kind of evolving definition of epic having named the theater after it I sort of feel a sense of responsibility in some way and yet it came nothing from Brecht the funny thing is Epic never did Brecht not in any capacity the origins of our name which I cringed at throughout my entire time working there because I always thought it was so highly pretentious was an Edward Bond quote that I'm going to completely butcher but essentially he said an epic theater is when the political intersect in poetry and our job throughout the time that I've been there and I think it continues to be is to support work whether it's in the public schools or on the stages or in community that has those three elements to it whether personal and political intersect and that there is metaphor and that there is poetry and that there is a lot of language and text so being indoctrinated and immersed in that concept of epic that I do hold on to and retain as a feeling of urgency when you ask me what kind of work do I feel like I need to write if I'm writing it or I need to produce if I'm producing it it is something that in my mind has a conspiracy to it that there's a conspiracy between the artists and the audience there's a conspiracy between the theater and its funders and the audience and the artists and that it all together that it is not an individual act of an artist trying to make a statement that the theater is supposed to support it is a public dialogue that we're all agreeing to and the funny thing about Brecht and this is why I asked Adidas if Brecht ever get rich when he went to Los Angeles did he like you know my notions of these things are that they take place in basements they don't take place in penthouses and the expectation of theaters that have been now ingrained for 50 years or what have you and have grown into institutions multi-million dollar institutions to be the ones generating the revolution I think is there's no basis in history for that so those institutions respond and adapt to the revolution that's coming out of the conspiracies in the basements so what I'm looking for you know in my funny perch is you know who's wanting to start those conspiracies and is it something that I can help nurture towards me and I'm in a different place now in a midsize institution than I was in a fledgling you know small Broadway company we felt like we were in the basement the 10 years I was there I'm not in the basement now that's where the schizophrenia is more coming from none of that really answers it all Suzanne how about for you because we work both with a number of different writers on different kinds of projects but I think obviously maybe you can talk a little bit about the project that you're working on with Brian currently and maybe help that kind of response to that nature of work one of the things I've worked previously in Liverpool when I was working there we didn't have a small space we only had a big big spaces 400 feet and 750 feet the 750 feet that I work in now at the Royal Exchange and we produce work that is demanding it's of 20 to 25,000 people to come and see it and we want to put on new work when I was in Liverpool we put on new work we put on new work and we always talked about what does it mean to fill that space what does it mean to write particularly we also talked about what does total theatre mean what does event theatre mean which is quite a kind of fashionable phrase in the UK at the moment, event theatre and why now, why here, why theatre why are you writing theatre when you are sort of competing with so many other ways in which an audience might be entertained whether it's live or you know cinema or box sets you're competing with so many different ways in which you might tell a story and so it's really thrown down the gauntlet to playwrights to demand that they demand a lot of the imagination of an audience in a live way, why does this story have to be told in a live way and how does it surprise your audience and what emotional journey are you taking your audience on what impact do you want to have moment to moment and what is the collaborative challenge that you bring a piece of work to life through which you bring a piece of work to life with a director with a designer and we certainly find that the writers who rise to that challenge are the ones that audiences flock, it creates the work that audiences flock to see that tell big stories tell emotionally truthful stories whether or not those stories are rooted in our region or not so when I was in Liverpool we produced the European premiere of Yellow Man by Dale O'Lan Smith sold out completely because it spoke emotionally truthfully to an audience and I think we need playwrights to demand the live interaction with an audience that audiences are active not passive, I really loved what Adidi said, that audiences aren't passive in a theatre, they're urgent and they're front footed and they want their imaginations to be pushed it's something that we're really passionate about we created what we call the front wood hub which the notion of which is a partnership between six of the largest regional theatres in the UK across the North to work with playwrights, experienced playwrights who have experience of working in the Gayle venue to provoke and challenge them to write work with the scope and ambition to fill some of the largest spaces in the UK and reach wide and diverse audiences to speak to 25,000 critical imaginations and we really feel incredibly fortunate and honoured that Bryony Lavery came on board as the inaugural associate playwright for the hub because she brings such a huge range of experience, she's worked in so many different ways creating work, exciting work for audiences theatrically and so we gave that challenge, that aim to the playwrights that we were working with and let them define the way they want to work we said this is the ambition, what do you need to fulfil that ambition so that we can produce your work and from that they created a manifesto which we could respond to hopefully with the aim of blowing their minds I mean that was kind of... well you know it's not about writing how are you engaging your audience's imagination how are you surprising your audience and in many different ways in stories told why do you have to tell your story on stage why do you have to take your audience through a live emotional story and why just keep asking why, why now, why here, why theatre and it continues to be incredibly exciting to work with them Did that answer your question? Absolutely, can you jump off on that I mean you've been set up so I hope it's not too much of a task but I think what Suzanne was talking about is how do we identify artists to be at the centre of these conversations or at the forefront of the conversation about the creation of that work rather than the other way around which is more the paradigm, do you find in your own writing obviously you've written some pretty searing portrayals of characters in the last couple of decades do you find that in your writing there are certain themes or certain approaches that kind of get you from that gut level into your work Yes but you never know what they're going to be what Suzanne has been talking about, I've just been spending three or four weeks with these six playwrights and we've done everything that's scared us utterly, our biggest scare was having a choreographer take us out of our comfort zone and make us do dance, I have to say we were just broken with it we had a professor of sculpture we went and walked on all the big stages and had a look at what the space tells us and it's it's all about utterly tearing yourself that nobody is going to see it because you've gone for such a scene and then you discover that people are joining you in whatever terrifying areas you've stepped into and found the story of just to answer the question, I'm having a hard time completely hearing everything Can you hear me okay now? Yes I can I think a question too is then you were saying why, why, why Suzanne and I think it's such an important question, I think one of the things I know here in the Twin Cities that I've come to really value is that actors become writers and writers become directors and directors become educators and educators become writers so really seeing that people are looking for what is my most vital critical way to tell the story, Bryony for you Carlisle for you, Aditi for you, you've also all been actors and performers and I think about as we were talking about with Denai Guerrera and with Katori Hall and a number of other writers who say the same thing over and over finding wealth is a different variation of it but I wasn't finding the roles or I wasn't finding the vehicle into doing it that was strong enough for me so writing into it became that thing where I could tell those stories that I either wasn't seeing on stage or wasn't being offered on stage but could get that urgency and really drive those stories out, I didn't want to wait for someone else to do it anymore so I'm curious I actually became a writer because I was such a really really really bad actor that's epic right there but it led that I discovered wonderful directors and actors who could work and of course it's such a collaborative act that the more collaborative you are I think the more epic the work gets and I think that's what's brilliant about epic theatre is the challenge to collaborate, to create work the challenge that a playwright might throw to a director or to an actor to designers, to a movement director and that's the play that we recently did at the Royal Exchange a new play by a 24 year old in a 750 theatre called Cannibals and the challenge to the designer was there was a fantastic stage direction at one point the man walks on stage, he eats his hand, he eats his other hand he eats his arm, he eats his leg, he eats himself a challenge to the audience, the final 20 minutes of the play which was set in Manchester, were entirely in Russia audiences loved it, they totally got it and they loved the fact that it wasn't anything that they recognised was it because when something is incredibly specific and urgent in that way that the universal colour reveals itself, did you feel that was happening in that moment, or those different moments? In this sort of emotional truth and the human story and the human journey that's universal and the specificity of that connects with people I think that's what I believe, it's emotional truth that connects with an audience and that's what audiences want they come to go, I feel that let's feel it together and try and find a way through the world together that's what I believe So when that takes a moment to get some questions from you guys, we also have people potentially that are tweeting in, I'm just about at all of this, I don't know if they are or not, not so much, but let's take questions from you guys we're really alone and I'm curious about questions and Hannah will come around with a microphone just because it's helpful for people that are, it's being live streamed to people that are watching at home and I think for these guys too what are the challenges that you're seeing out there as writers or as producers or whatever or what are the successes, where do you feel like it's really working right now that we should be thinking about? or questions about other stuff that we're kind of talking about today or we can just keep talking Hi, I'm Trista Hi, I'm Trista I'm not a playwright This isn't 100% formed so bear with me but I'm thinking a lot about what you were saying, Suzanne about emotion and definition of epic and I'm seeing certain stylistic things happen more in a bold way here but what I am not seeing is emotional truth or not, I don't mean to be a bitch but I feel like that I'm seeing that there's such a tempered quality that's happening right now in American theater with emotion it feels like the more people feel the less it gets produced or you know there can be sort of bold stylistic choices or the subject matter should be really interesting and should hurt us a little but somehow it doesn't hurt and so I'm just observing that somehow our theater never quite digs far enough so that's my restlessness right now That's a good restlessness, thoughts on that? I want to try to think of regions, theaters different things of having, what's that? of having some sort of continuity and it's fascinating because I walked into her space this is almost your kid and I kind of agree with you, I think I really do agree strongly with you that I'm not experiencing a lot of new work that achieves a sort of vulnerability and transformative vulnerability on stage that makes me go out of head and feel something different I don't know if that's a case of any of the fright flight kind of activity that goes on in the American theater, I don't know if that's a case of artistic directors being scared of vulnerable work because I actually feel like I'm reading a lot of vulnerable work there's something again in which that's not always translating into how that happens in production and how an audience is prepared to have that kind of empathetic openness we don't as human beings anymore want to be around people who are falling apart we have a really hard time with that and that fear of being responsible for someone else's emotions is part of our the problem of our time and I think Eric Booth, you guys know who Eric Booth is he at one point said something about epic theater but the theater in general is like if you want someone to put down a gun you have to give them something that is worthy and replacement of that to assert their power and I sort of feel like now in a way if you want someone to put down their computer or put down their personal device you have to give them something that is sort of demanding of their need that it replaces them and there's an urgency to that but I pray for the emotion that people want to have because you see it you see it on television and we're okay with that distance but something about the theater is triggering that in the same way it seems like the theater is a natural place to have emotion empathy, suspension, disbelief you don't have to train anybody to do that you put a kid or a dog on stage it doesn't really take very much to trigger that to make that happen in a play really requires process because it really depends on the level of empathetic imagination that the broker who reads the play looks into right I mean in the difference between you know real empathy and emotion and sentimentality you know is a totally kind of difference but I mean if you put it before an audience it's hardwired for that that's why we come to theater because you know we need it that's why you know I mean you know good at WC fields and want to be on stage with no kids because they're taking all the attention my question though is I think we're talking about a conversation about fear and how much fear we're willing to sit within a theater and therefore people who are curating seasons are you willing to sit in a fearful place with your audience or invite them in Well whose fear are we talking about? Well I don't know I mean I think that's actually I think there's a lot of fear I think there's the fear that they won't come I think there's the fear that they'll feel something so much that will they want to come back because of course we're that we move dangerously closer to that so they've got to come back they've got to come back they've got to come back which of course they've got to come back we need to sustain our theaters but at what cost I mean I think that's the cost benefit social contract part of it that you were talking about as well so where do we sit as a country and I'm curious in the UK where do we sit with how willing we are to sit next to that really uncomfortable place we talk about the Royal Exchange about artistic risk and we do have to find ways to balance the books as you said we can't completely bankrupt the theater but what is surprising is what audiences will respond to and do want to find ways to connect with stories so it's not necessarily in the kind of conservative safe theater the classical theater that necessarily people would assume it is actually it's about kind of finding other ways to tell stories to people that connect with a lot of different people so if you look at the work of a company like Francis Family or Slung Low they find very imaginative memorable and vital way to tell stories to audiences that reach across different kinds of audiences and are ambitious and imaginative and theatrical and I'll say I mean God Slung Low makes you walk around outside cities for three hours and climb hills and their cases you know kind of they take you out of the kind of sort of environment of the theater and if you look at something like Black Watch or Beautiful Burnout for only Beautiful Burnout with Francis Family it demands such a beautiful range of imaginative collaboration with an audience and I think sometimes I don't know do we short change our audiences and think oh they only like conservative work when actually they want ambitious truthful work just this weekend just contradict that whole thing I mean you know there was work that was disturbing and dangerous and emotional and imaginative and everybody in here loved it I loved it I mean you know it was great I mean a season like that would be fantastic I mean I can't afford a subscription but if it was a theater I would sign me some money to subscribe to it you know I mean it's just not true and I mean the idea is heinous to think that like you know if people don't want to go to the theater to have emotion if they don't want to be disturbed if they don't want to discover something out of themselves if they don't want to see different people then they should bloody stay home and watch television and you know certainly the writers I know are not writing for people like that I mean if you are that self-centered and narcissistic you could save yourself some money the $100 or $60 or whatever you pay for a theater ticket and stay home and look in the mirror I mean the idea that we have to kind of cave to that stuff is deadening to artists and some way I mean some way we have to be because we have to do what we do and conversely also playing into that as presenters producers as artists is deadening to audiences like if you go to theater and you discover that you might as well have sat at home and watched TV then why would you go back to the theater there's no reason it's more expensive to go to the theater than to stay at home so we have to demand more of our audiences to make sure that it's worth the ticket price for them and we took the hub playwrights around all the theaters and we had at every theater we asked audience members to tell us what we liked and what we didn't like and they started off saying we like something we know and then we'd ask them to describe their most exciting thing and they would say something that was completely different from what I know and you just have to kind of trust that audiences can be challenged and love it yeah I meant there's another question out here was there more about this about sort of I'm curious for other people who are at theaters who are struggling with the same challenges about do you not struggle at all is it easy to put stories on stage do you not want those stories or do you want them all the time and what are you hearing from audiences so at company one in Boston our entire season is this I mean what we've discovered is that you know we play primarily to younger audiences to more diverse audiences not just ethnically diverse but economically diverse audiences and we brought our prices way down last year so they're 20 bucks to get in and it's made our ability to do epic theater even easier for us I mean not it's never easy right as a producer it's never easy but because we're trying to build vocabulary with our audiences so that it's not risky for them to spend like $60 to go see something they don't know about it's easier for them if they spend $20 or $6 that pay what you can and they can see this new play we just opened by Kirsten Greenwich called Splendor which is 10 characters that spans 45 years of a single town and like every single character is important and she was doing a really experimental form with it we open with that we're doing we are proud to present a presentation we're doing the flick we're doing a live animation show later in the season so all of these things have a kind of epic quality about them and you know I don't know how it's going to turn out right you never know in advance of the season how people are going to come I mean but it looks good so far and I think that in some ways the building of the relationship with an audience so that they can trust you to put on something that is stylistically or emotionally humongous and not have to pay a lot of money for it means more people will come more frequently I hope I think we're seeing that but you know I think that goes back to your point Suzanne you use the phrase artistic risk but I think that's one of those phrases that like epic theater that we have to be really careful of because we can say that and it means one thing to a marketing director who's actually trying to sustain that theater it means a different thing to an associate artistic director it means a different thing to declare it was in residence with you I mean it means really different things I think I think I think that the relationship with an audience is really important when I first joined the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse both theaters have been dark for a number of years and had gone bankrupt and had lost their audiences and when we started producing work we had to rebuild that audience and from 2003 when we started producing work again to 2008 when Liverpool was European culture we built an audience to understand and enjoy and embrace new work to understand the role of the writer at the heart of the work that we were doing and that relationship is absolutely vital particularly when you are outside of London and you are having a very strong dialogue with a community however large that community is or however diverse that community is it is a relationship that we take very seriously because in Manchester and Liverpool you know our subsidy is from that community partly it's from the local government as well as central government and so it's vital that we nurture that relationship and surprise that relationship and surprise those audiences and those are the times that my heart leaps because I think well yes you think you want something that you recognize but then let's give you something you think you recognize and then surprise you and see what happens Hi I'm Christian Parker from the Atlantic Theatre Company and I was going to say in Boston too but it's not I was just thinking about the Red Sox, it's in New York City I have two thoughts about institutions actually springing from Brian's observation or interaction with the audience who believed that they wanted something familiar but actually when asked what they really liked or remembered it was always something new and interesting that I've experienced before and I think there are two things that are major issues that are facing established larger institutional theaters that I struggle with a lot being on the inside of one which is first of all we don't do a good job of talking about the work that we're presenting to the audience in advance because her observation to me suggests that actually what people crave is some point of contact or some knowledge or some insight into the work that they may see before they get to the point of buying a ticket and when I look around at how theaters with their meager budgets are marketing work they're marketing to insiders, they're marketing to people who are already predisposed to come to that particular organization, they're marketing new plays to people who are already liking new plays, they're marketing a contemporary writer's work even in the bios that they publish in press releases based on other plays that you would only have ever heard of if you already went to see that person's work, we're not talking about the work that exists in a way that sounds exciting to people who might not know your organization and it's just that I think the institutions have to do a better job of actually sticking to their guns about the vision that they do have if they have one and find new ways to talk about it ahead of time and to make a compelling case for why they're producing the work that they're doing so that audiences will take an interest and then feel invited to the party rather than expected to show up at a party that they may not know how to behave at it's a costume party that they didn't know the other observation that I have about institutions is that I think, and this is a much larger problem that we're going to have no solutions for it at all, but is that we have developed such rigid producing models that there's no nimbleness in our programming in so far as incorporating artistic risk in such a way that might mean you produce less work in a given year we're still so married to the subscription model even though that in and of itself is dwindling that we haven't set ourselves up in a position to do a play with 20 characters and therefore not do another, you know, just slimmier season down that the self-perpetuation of the institutions that their current budget size with their current infrastructure with their current staff is such an implicit priority even if it's not a conscious priority that we haven't, we can't dynamically interact with our audiences and produce a range of work we're married to six plays a year or five plays a year or ten plays a year rather than being able to produce the work that we feel most passionate about even if that amounts to two plays a year, you know, if we just don't have it we can't do it with these larger organizations and I think it's a problem and I think that, you know, like taking one's mission statement and making sure it really means something to you and marrying that with whatever our definitions of artistic risk are and again being wary of fetishizing risk and getting really, you know, sort of general about like, I mean, I think people say artistic risk and that means there's just sex and violence and swearing on stage and actually I think that what we're getting at in the conversation today that I really respond to is that Trista really kicked us off on is how comfortable or uncomfortable are we at sitting at what level of emotion or, and it could be trauma as much as it is joy that we're as I think the fear, part of the fear is I'm afraid to sit with your total joy and ecstasy as much as I am your sort of internal crush, you know, it's internet and yet we're talking about theater. We're not talking about sort of film or something or it's a YouTube clip. I mean it's like we're talking about that thing where they stood in arenas and had a lot of emotion very frequently for thousands of people. I would eradicate actually the term artistic risk because I think it's actually, it's now been so co-opted within the funding communities and the marketing communities that it now, that's part of why the funding communities are so obsessed with project support instead of general operating support. And because all I hear is how is this going to stretch your organization, how is this going to create risk, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow in a climate in which that's existing is risk taking. And I really respond to what Christian was saying because I think the notions of epic and the definitions of epic when you're in institutions that cannot be in themselves epic when they cannot take on those attributes of expanse and poetry and radicalism to then try to produce radical work it almost feels antithetical. It's like how do very conservative parents raise a child to be very progressive. They don't. The child gets away, they go to Oberlin and they find themselves away from that parent. So I think that that's part of the, you know, there's wish fulfillment going on but I think when you're in a situation whether it's a subscriber model, whether it's the idea of an eight week production framework of four weeks of rehearsal and four weeks of a run you are undermining the ability of doing the most important, fascinating, meaningful work that you can do. When you're doing something that's plucking playwrights out of different places and plucking audiences and those people are not part of the same world with one another and they're not talking to one another you are innately undermining the dialogue that is supposed to be created between artist and audience. So there is something antithetical in a way even about being here at the playwright center of some places that have been around for 30 years and talking about creating radical things. It's kind of hard to do. On the other hand, the idea of the radical emotional experience that can be done in any setting and should be continued by anyone that is around. So there's, I feel really torn about the nature of the conversation. Since I still have the mic can I say one more thing? I'll give it to somebody else because I was thinking you brought up the funding community and I think there's something, as I see it too, that there are a couple of things that are really having a deleterious impact I think on the proliferation of risky or really ambitious epic playwriting. One of which is that the foundation community to some extent has prioritized world premiere funding and emerging artist funding so much in the past couple of decades that it has prevented really exciting work that has been produced whether by emerging writers or more established writers from getting subsequent productions. That's changing a little bit with certain things like National New Play Network and all that but it's a problem I think. The other thing that is true about the funding community is that because of this, I think it takes a long time. It's just linked to the same idea I guess but it takes some writers develop their voices over time in my experience and sometimes get more and more ambitious as they go but if they're not able to be kept in the theater world by the support that the funding community can offer them, they're not necessarily going to get to the point where they're writing their most ambitious and most epic work because they're going to leave it for something else. They're going to leave theater for something else and by so privileging the earliest work of young artists I think we're missing the boat on supporting writers who are further along in their careers sometimes. Can I just ask Bryony we asked Bryony to be our associate playwright because she has over 40 years of experience of writing for theater 257 years of experience of writing for theater and haven't sustained that and haven't disappeared into TV and film and that was one of the reasons we really wanted Bryony to be our inaugural associate playwright because the writers that we are working with are being chased by TV and film and want to remain in theater and want to write for theater but they have bills to pay and rent to pay and Bryony is that person who's done that and is that mentor and is able to show them that and so can I ask Bryony to respond? Yes, you have to make sure that you have to prepare yourself to be sometimes very, very poor. Can you hear? Yeah, you're good. Okay. I realized quite early on in England you start off in medieval times you were a jester in the court and you had to entertain and if you didn't and they didn't like you they cut your head off and I think you have to decide if you're going to be a writer in theater that you might be very poor you know you might be very unpopular for time but what you will get is the most thrilling spaces to work and make stuff. Was that the answer? You have to understand I have been up to 18 hours solid so if anything sounds wrong that's why. We need to kind of move towards wrapping it up. Last comments or thoughts sir? Okay great, so this is totally uninspiring but I was joking with a friend of mine recently Mara Isaacs who used to be at the MacArthur theater for almost 20 years and she was talking about the moment where she arrived in New Jersey to work at MacArthur 20 years prior and she was saying what I remember about the slogan when I moved to New Jersey was that they had put out just after she arrived was this New Jersey arts colon better than you'd expect and it's so sad in a way and I love New Jersey bless their hearts with all their marriage quality but I think I'm a little terrified I think that's my nightmare right is that I wake up and there's bumper stickers about the American theater or right abroad that we say sort of the theater field well it's better than you'd expect and I think that has so much to do with the conversation that we're all talking about today in these things which is about you know put away the word epic put away the word risk for a second and just how do you live into that deeper place and how do we learn to move fear aside as producers as writers as theater makers and live into the place where we say we can do our most vital work and we have to believe that the people will come we just have to believe it you just have to have that kind of spirituality about it because if you are approaching it with that level of authenticity I think that then you trust you are part of a larger conversation and not one that's just part of a sort of you know zero sum commodity driven cycle it's scary and I think you said it best Brian you're just like you better ready to be ready to be poor and disappointed some of the time but a lot of the time you're going to meet amazing colleagues like this room and this these screens are full of right now and like so many of our great colleagues in the field there'll be a lot of wealth in many other kinds of ways as well so thank you all so much please help me in thanking our panel for today thank you guys so much for being here it's been a great conversation today take it out into the world and if you're not doing anything this afternoon you should head over to Mixblood and see the last performances of a who feels incredible trilogy or over to Pillsbury House to see a core writer Marcus Gardley's play the road weaves the well runs dry or just go and drink some coffee and battle about art thank you guys for being here it's been a great festival thanks so much