 I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Oh, yeah. She said it's not easy. It's great that I'm alive. She's coming for me. I... whatever. She did not send him there. But I guess when we chatted... Oh, no, I know. I knew that. No, I don't want to. No, I don't want to. I think we're going to end for all of them. It's very holy. Oh, yeah. He said don't want us to break it. Don't help me. And I called them. And they're like, are you going to care? I don't know. Do you like human behavior? Well, we're going to play a game. Yes, we're not really good at it. We're not really good at it. Thank you. And I think we're going to stop. Other words like... I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Okay, sorry. Thank you. No, I'm sorry. We don't see it. I don't see it. And I think it's okay. I don't think it's okay. I think it's okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm the artistic director of WAM theater and side-by-side with Akiba, Schaefer, and Rachel, otherwise known as the B.L.S. Steering, all heartedly welcome you to the Berkshire Leadership Summit to attend the Women's Leadership Conference in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater where the results of the Wellesley Center for Women's Study on Women's Leadership in Resident Theatres were released. One of the authors is with us here today. While listening to the results of the study, I was inspired to stand at a microphone and pledge to join the national conversation and take a supportive action towards shifting consciousness for gender parity in the theater by having WAM theater host a summit in the fall of 2017. Little did I know it would actually happen. As an impulsive doer, which I imagine some of you in the audience also are, I tend to open my mouth first and then plan later. But when I say something out loud, that means I have to do it. And luckily for me, three brave people came up to me during that conference and said that they wanted to be part of this adventure. So over the past year, Akiba Abaka, Rachel Fink, and Shaefer Mazo and I have shared our passion for this issue and forged a working relationship across coasts, countless phone calls and emails to organize this pilot summit. We brought Julia Dixon on board about six months ago as our event producer and the whole WAM team, especially Leah Russell-Self and Gwendolyn Tunnycliffe, have come enthusiastically along for the ride that got us here today. Huge thanks. Yes, you can give them a round of applause. Huge thanks, must go to Shakespeare & Company for renting us this building for this summit and for being so helpful as we prepared for this weekend. I'd also like to give a shout out to the whole last wife, cast and team and director who is one of your fellow cohorts, Kelly, who's sitting over there. I'd like to thank the scenic designer, Juliana Von Halbrick, who is, you know, available for hire, who is letting us do this summit on her gorgeous set. Thanks also to our summit sponsors from those who gave $10 on GoFundMe to those who gave $1,000 or more to make this event happen. Thanks also to everybody who is live streaming this through HowlRound and to HowlRound for making that possible. We encourage everyone in the room and everyone live streaming to use the BLS omit, women leading, and I think we've got them on a slide, and at WAM Theater, hashtags and tags over the course of the summit and over the course of the live streams. Let's get some conversation going online. So we all said from the beginning that if we could get 75 leaders in a room and make sure that they had coffee, then this summit would be a success. But our true goal with over 100 people in the room is to create an event of intention, intersection, diversity, and action. We truly hope that your time with us over the next two days provides a great opportunity for personal growth and community building with each other as you walk your path to executive leadership. Enjoy the next two days and thank you for all you have done to make it possible to join us for this pilot summit. And now to officially launch, Akiba is going to share our joint committee personal statement. Good morning. Good morning. At our first bicoastal phone meeting on December 9th of 2016, the four of us stated our goals for why we were taking on planning this summit. I saw this as an opportunity to protest. I wanted to encourage embracing multiple styles of leadership and provide resources for advancement. I'm tired of gender not being a priority. And I desperately want to create opportunity. Organizing the Berkshire Leadership Summit has been a grassroots community work from its inception to its execution. And along the way we have come to recognize that this type of organizing is a truly powerful model. After weekly and sometimes bi-weekly or daily phone meetings and countless emails, the four of us have realized how challenging it is to embody brave spaces in action. How hard it is to truly own our intentions and our impact. Our coming together today demonstrates how we are challenging traditional hierarchies. We have found in the planning of this summit that success and progress require us to bring our full selves into the space. The personal, the polemic, the privilege, and sometimes even the trauma. And that we have to live within the possibility and the discomfort of it all. At touchstone moments in our planning and producing, we have each been challenged by the urgency of pulling an international summit together within a year of the release of the full Wealthy Fentish for Women ACT report. Coupled with the day-to-day rigor of individual jobs, sustaining our livelihoods, and nurturing our personal and professional development, we each face moments of erasure, let down, disappointment, and stress. What is remarkable is how we have pulled through in service of our individual and collective why. Earlier, we each stated parts of our personal why. The value of these intentions were brought forth recently in a moment that tested us as a team. It required that we face ourselves, that we listen deeply, that we lean upon others in the group as our advocates, that we acknowledge and check our privilege, that we apologize and acknowledge each other's hurt, and that we be brave and boundless in our need to be seen, heard, and respected in the way that represents our most authentic selves. We reminded ourselves about our common ground and our joint passion around this work, and that we are products of a problematic system in society. We have realized how important it is to not just hug it out, but to be real about the complexity of movement building and collaboration. While it is at times very difficult, we draw inspiration from Oprah's words. You can't be brave with your life and work and never disappoint others. The guidelines we create for this summer, which you can find in your program and elsewhere, were created using a brave spaces framework instead of traditional so-called safe spaces. We all have experience and knowledge we are bringing with us. We want to create a space where knowledge flows in many directions so that we learn from and with each other. We encourage everyone to be active participants in this knowledge sharing and to contribute to the conversations on our lobby boards, at our Q&A, and in your cohort working groups. We are incredibly moved at how everyone is already making this happen together. People are carpooling with people. You don't know, the Facebook page is just people are sharing rooms, waiting for people at airports. Even our keynote speaker waited for attendees last night so that they could all get here. We recognize that this is a conversation that's greater than the people in the room, and we know that there are voices that are not in this room. So over the past few weeks, the steering committee has had multiple conversations about all the critical issues we haven't been able to include in the summit. There's so much going on in the forefront of the news and our social media feeds that fill our minds, our souls, and our hearts, and are also very urgent to discuss. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that this summit is happening at the same time as the Women's March Convention in Detroit. We wish we could cover every urgent issue over the next 48 hours, but we simply couldn't. It is me. The purpose of this summit has always been to focus on the four areas identified in the workplace study as the main barriers for women to leadership positions, fundraising, producing, relationship building, and awareness building. We have done our best to do as deep a dive into those as we can over the time we have together. We look forward to other opportunities to discuss all of these other urgent issues that affect gender parity. Also, as you may have, as you know, we have created smaller cohort working groups for the purpose of creating a personal manifesto during your time at the summit. You will have two opportunities over Saturday and Sunday lunch to meet together in person and do the work of creating your personal manifestos, which will be presented during the closing plenary session on Sunday, the pinnacle conversation, a clarion call for advancement. Your two lunchtime tasks are explained in your program. So once you have your box lunch, please find your cohort working group and enjoy your tasks together. Identified by your smiley faces on your name tag. Yes, very important. Our group understanding is also in the program. We hope that you will refer to it often and explore using it. We have as a steering committee and it can tell it's serving as well. As we kick off this important and impressive summit, we also want to acknowledge efforts to incorporate processes of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This process has been used from reviewing and selecting of applications to selecting speakers, workshop leaders, and panelists. It's our desire to represent a through line in this summit that's bound to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion that we can embody true intersectionality. You will notice these themes appear throughout the course of these next few days. In line with that, I want to talk about gender allyship and the place of this summit and broader discussions of diversity and inclusion work, including more sophisticated and honest conversations about gender equity. Before I came to Lenox, I spent a couple of days in Boston and visited my alma mater, Wellesley. I'm going to cry, y'all. Kicking it off, it's going to be a weekend of crying. I have a clinic. I have a clinic. I came to Lenox. I spent a couple of days in Boston and visited my alma mater, Wellesley, and I'm really glad that I did, because as I walked around the campus, which is breathtaking, something very powerful came to me about our work at hand and its potential. Last summer, the women's leadership convening in San Francisco was important for us to acknowledge and articulate that there is no single experience of womanhood, that many people are working for the rights of women and girls, but we each have our own lenses, experiences, and identities that we bring to this work. And as we come together to address gender gaps and theater leadership and take direct action to see women rise to the highest positions, it is also important for us to acknowledge that this is one step in ongoing efforts for equity and inclusion, even in the realm of gender. The fight for women, let me do it again. The fight for women's rights, the feminist fight is my fight, no matter what I look like, no matter what pronouns I use, is everyone's fight. And I want to talk about the power and potential of women's movements to affect radical change and take substantial steps to breaking systems that rank the value of one person over or under another. I am almost, I'm almost certainly not the vision of a Wellesley alum that the founders of the college, when they decided to ensure education and opportunity for women and girls 140 years ago. But their vision, grounded in that struggle, and all of the work for women's rights that has come after, is the very reason I am able to strive for authenticity and be my true self. I hope, I hope we are strong, thoughtful, brave, and humble enough in this work to create opportunities beyond the visions we can imagine today. Let's do this. Okay, everybody need a tissue? We were like, you got to finish a soft shaper. You'll make everyone cry. All right, I think we're gonna, we're gonna move our, move our Brown plan. I'd like to give a special shout out to everybody on the advisory committee that you'll see listed in your playbill. They've all been incredibly helpful over the course of the year. You'll meet some of them today. Laura Penn, Martha Richards is here, Elena Chang is here, Carrie Perloff is part of the original commissioning of this study. So we're so grateful to all of them for being part of it. Mandy Greenfield, so please have a little moment of gratitude for them in your playbill or say thank you to the ones that are actually here in person. So we're incredibly excited to kick off this pilot Berkshire Summit with a keynote speech from Michelle Hensley. A month ago Akiba sent us all an email with the subject heading, we might have found our keynote speaker and a link to Michelle's speech at this year's Ivy Awards in Minneapolis where she was honored for lifetime achievement. Michelle used her acceptance speech to make a powerful plea for equity and gender diversity in the leadership of American theater. It did indeed seem the perfect fit. Akiba reached out and luckily for us Michelle accepted our invitation. Michelle Hensley is the founder and artistic director of 10,000 Things Theater in Minneapolis where she has directed and produced over 25 years of award-winning drama brought directly to non-traditional audiences in prisons, shelters, and housing projects as well as the general public. A McKnight Theater fellow, Michelle was named the Star Tribune's best artistic director in 2012, received the Francesca Primus Prize for outstanding contribution to American theater by a female artist in 2015 published her book, All the Lights On, and just last month received that Ivy Award for lifetime achievement. In December 10,000 Things Theater will host a national gathering of over a dozen theaters who are now practicing its touring model, including New York City's Public Theater, San Diego's Old Globe, Baltimore's Center Stage, and Delaware and New Orleans Shakespeare festivals. We couldn't be more delighted to welcome to our stage to kick off the Berkshire Leadership Summit, Michelle Hensley. To be here, I feel like you are my tribe. I'll just start out and give you a quick overview of what 10,000 Things does now, but where I really want to get to is how and why it all started and what the journey has been since then. Can everybody hear me okay? Okay, great. So 10,000 Things, we do three productions a year. We do Shakespeare. We do tragedy. We do musicals, and we do contemporary plays, but each production we take to four or five correctional facilities that could be men's, women's, or juvenile. We do 10 to 12 performances at low income centers, so that could be homeless shelters, chemical dependency treatment centers, housing projects, adult education and immigrant centers, and we take three or four shows out to rural Minnesota, to small towns, and Indian reservations, and we do four weekends of each show for the paying general public. So each show gets each play gets stretched around every kind of audience that you can imagine. I work with the best actors in the Twin Cities, people who you will see, oh no, this is right, this is a different slide, and I have to say like some of my favorite shows are those at the low income centers where we set aside seats for people from the general public too, so you can get like a corporate CEO sitting next to a homeless person watching the play as equals, and how often does that happen in our society, and they're learning from each other's responses, and you're kind of finding their shared humanity. So anyway, I get to work with the best actors in the Twin Cities, people who you'll see at the Guthrie or the Jungle or Panumra, and I have to say that from the very beginning when I started this 30 years ago, it was intuitive to me because my audiences were so diverse that my casting reflect that. I want people in my audiences, many who have never seen theater before, to be able to see themselves on stage in the story and in ways that they maybe never have before. So this is Mary and the Librarian and Music Man, this is Stella and Blanche in Streetcar, and this is Titania on the left and bottom and Oberon, because it's also hugely important to me and always has been to do gender imaginative casting, because oftentimes we'll perform for completely female audiences in a prison or a treatment center, and I want those women to be able to see themselves in ways they never have, and I want the men to be able to see themselves and women in ways they never have. So here's our all male Richard III, and here is our all female Henry IV part one. And I have to say that so the other important thing to understand about 10,000 things is that we don't use a stage, because that would really limit the number of places we perform. So we just need a big room and we make a circle or a square of chairs about 15 feet across and the actors perform right in the middle with all the lights in the room on, which means that the actors and the audience can see each other and it provides so much opportunity for lively interaction between them, and for actors in 10,000 things there truly is no place to hide. The principle of 10,000 things set design is yeah, but do you want to carry it? I and the actors have to load and unload the fan and carry stuff down hallways and up stairways and elevators, so we really try to figure out how to tell each story with as little stuff as possible. So here's Don Quixote and Man of La Mancha, and this is more in Little Shop of Horrors, and yes that's Audrey, the man eating plant, just sticks his hand through a loop in a flower pot and it talks to him and we see something about Seymour's split personality, and yeah Jim figured out a way to eat himself with and this is the finale from Afra Ben's Emperor of the Moon in which the heavens are supposed to descend upon the earth and so we just rented a couple bubble machines and built them for the day full of shoulder bubbles. So and then the last part of it is that we always use live sound because that's really our lighting without any other lighting and it really ups the urgency and energy of every show. So what I really want to talk to you about though is how it all started because I had no idea this was going to be where it ended up and so as a young woman way back in the 80s I was trying to figure out how I would be a director and there really were very few female directors and certainly not any that I knew of leading theaters and when I looked at most of the theater institutions around me I really quickly sensed that I wasn't going to fit in because there were all those ladders and hierarchies of power and the men in charge were always throwing out these bizarre little tests to make you prove that you were tough enough or commandeering enough and I really didn't want to play those games and so I guess I sensed that I was going to have to make my own space where I could be myself and I was I couldn't have said this at the time but unconsciously I think I was making a space where I could work as an artist with my values intact and so since I didn't rush into that institutional world I had time to think and ask a lot of questions and two things were very clear to me. I didn't want to spend my life as an artist only making art for wealthy people and I really didn't want to leave anyone out and who came to my mind at the time was my grandfather who was a farmer in rural Iowa and I'd never seen him without his seed corn hat and his engineer overalls and I really couldn't imagine him feeling very comfortable in any of the theaters I had been to and I also really wanted to find an audience that cared about the stories that we were telling to whom these stories might really matter to their lives and that was not an LA theater audience I was an LA at the time and you know people were just there out of a sense of duty and obligation because they had a friend in the cast or they were casting directors and they would all rather be home watching TV and everybody and I think some of us do this too right like you get really judgy when you go to a play and you're like oh well that interpretation isn't as good as others I've seen and that's a design that's really quite work for me and I just wanted to find an audience that cared so um so um at the time you know like you do after grad school you and your friends want to put on a play and I really loved the good person of Sichuan by Bertolt Brad and um it seemed to me that people without very much money would really understand that story of the woman the prostitute who gets a bag of gold from the gods and um her struggles to want to help out all her tour friends but but care of herself as well um and we knew we would never get people without much money to come into a theater and as you know the price of a ticket is really the least of it so we decided instead of expecting them to come to us we would go to them so we found this little homeless shelter in Santa Monica and uh we started to rehearse we designed a set that you could like hang on a clothesline uh and put it in the lobby and we were really scared because it's like a two and a half hour long play there are 35 characters we just had seven actors and then on top of that we were all thinking like who are we to tell people that live their lives in poverty every day anything about that but um like you do you just do it anyway and um I always tell you we're finally like about 30 people that congregated around really skeptically um but I like to tell people that audience of 30 was really the biggest of my life because once they got that we were not there to preach to them that we were not trying to tell them like how to get off drugs or how to be better people that we were just trying to tell the story as best we could they did what I can only describe is that they opened up their hearts to us and they just they like started shouting out advice to the actor oh honey you watch out for him he's bad he just wants your money and there's nothing more than an audience member care so much about your character that they'll shout stuff out and it was just this amazing exchange and um I remember at the end there had been this um janitor who was kind of standing in the back whenever he could watching in between his work and he came up to me and he looked to me in the eye and he said thank you for treating us like we have brains in our heads and I took back to heart and that has always been a hallmark of 10 000 things work ever since then that we will never condescend to our audiences who know better than most everyone else that life doesn't have any easy answers um and so I wanted to keep doing uh and so I taught myself all the stuff they never teach you in directing graduate school taught myself how to write grants and what a budget was and I figured out how to make us a non-profit and I saw that you had an board of directors of at least three people that met once a year so I had three friends over for lunch once a year that I was at and I I just want to stress that you and I did not know what I was doing and I was stumbling and bumbling all the time I didn't have a business plan or like a big vision but um and then I had a child and um I decided that I LA was going to be a hard place to raise a child I wanted to find a place where as an independent artist I could afford a house and use the public schools and where there would be a vibrant theater community and support for the arts and that turned out to be the twin cities for me that turned out to be um a really great home and so you know for the past 30 years I've just been on this journey to take the big stories of theater that wrestle with these fundamental questions that human beings never really seem to be able to get a good grasp on to people who have probably not seen much theater before and making some amazing discoveries as a result and there's so many stories I could tell you and you can read the book if you want but I thought I'd share one uh just so you get a sense of the kind of stuff that we've been able to learn from our audiences um and so I want to tell you about the first time we did Shakespeare and again this was like six or seven shows in and I had never directed Shakespeare before and it was very intimidating but I was reading Measure for Measure and you know it takes place in palaces and brothels and prisons and courtrooms and it's about justice and being judged by others and often being judged very unfairly and that's something in our audiences really know a lot about and I thought if I could just make it clear I think they would really like this story and and so just as a side note it doesn't clarity has nothing to do with changing the language it has to do with how you act it um and also I want to say that as a woman director who does direct quite a few classics we're always wrestling with the misogyny in the plays right and Measure for Measure has horrible misogyny in it in many ways but one cool thing and but I actually kind of love wrestling with it I think it's kind of fun and one cool thing I discovered is if you make the Duke a woman uh then everything kind of starts to shift and I remember this one homeless guy came up to us once after having seen Measure for Measure and he said this is you know this is kind of like that tv show undercover boss that is the best summation ever for Measure so I had a woman hiding to see what her you know male underlings do in her absence and suddenly becomes a very interesting way but anyway the first time we did it we were performing at the Dorothy Day Center for the homeless and um again we were totally scared and I just have to say still almost every time we do a 10,000 things to her there's always a moment where I go oh my god I must be out of my mind but um we had a very uh experienced uh she experienced actor playing Lord Angelo and it was his first 10,000 things show and so there's this scene where you know the young nun Isabella comes and she pleads with Lord Angelo to spare her brother's life and she leaves and he starts lusting after her and he's left alone on stage and he has a soliloquy and his soliloquy goes what's this what's this the temptress or the tempted who sins most and there was this homeless woman sitting right next to where he was standing and she looked at him and she went I think it's your fault shithead there's a whole audience just after them this homeless guy in the back goes you're standing the back he goes ah just go ahead and fuck her the whole audience erupted and the kind playing Lord Angelo said his bowels just dropped to the floor so oh my god I've totally lost this audience what am I gonna do and then he realized he just had to say the next line which is not she not she to his eye and it was a perfect response to what the audience had just said and that's where we had our Shakespeare right we went oh right Shakespeare did not write for audiences who are going to be polite he wrote expecting the audience to shout stuff out and that's when we knew that really Shakespeare would be a great guy for 10,000 things because our audiences are not polite and quiet they're honest and they let us know what they're thinking and so that it comes to life in this really beautiful way um and so actors so many of the actors who work with 10,000 things over all these years what I want to stress is that the reason we do this is kind of selfish it's because it makes us better artists the audiences demand of us clarity and urgency and liveliness and I can tell you I know I'm a much better director than I would have been just directing for conventional audiences I think I can say that and I think most of the actors who've worked with us over the years would say the same thing but again I just have to tell you that it was all making it up as we went along because nobody else I didn't know anybody else doing this kind of thing I mean I remember going to do conferences and be like but but I I kept hold of that one desire to bring the best professional theater to people who don't have access and that kind of guided me to and us to kind of shape an organization around the necessities that you have to have when you do that and around our values as as human beings and so one of the the main thing when you do this kind of theater is you have to have good actors you know you don't need sad or lights or costumes but you've got to have the best actors and so and also because the actors I work with are pretty much always my friends it has always been a hallmark and a priority of organizations to pay actors fairly and and that does not happen in this world we live in a world where the only people who pretty much make full-time salary and benefits are administrators and that's always seemed really unfair to me so that has always been the number one priority in our organizational spending and I'm happy to say now like ten thousand things our budget is about seven hundred fifty eight hundred thousand dollars a year but we are among the very highest paying theater companies in the Twin Cities I think on an hourly rate our actors make as much as they do at the Guthrie it's not as many hours it's only six shows a week but sometimes they're kind of glad of that too and my goal is when I leave ten thousand things next at the end of this season that we'll be paying our very highest actors $952 a week which is the full-time equivalent of fifty thousand a year and like what actor gets because we don't need buildings or sets or lights that's really been able to be a priority of ten thousand things um for the first ten years of ten thousand things it was just me doing everything um and you know we're like we all do work in temp jobs teaching ESL I remember my 35th birthday I had a temp job in an agency that like did created ball bearings for trucks or something and they showed me to the filing room and I just didn't mind that I'm like down on the desk and started crying I was like what am I doing but um a few years later I was finally able to start getting a paycheck but so the staff again because we don't have a building that I never really wanted that um I've gradually been able to add staff pretty much all women one gay man we all have families children so everyone's happy to work out of their homes on their own free time and communicate by email and we have a staff lunch at my house once or twice a month so that's been very organic um and um our rehearsal schedules too like I had a child I wanted to spend time with her so at ten thousand things we rehearse ten to three Monday to Friday and I'll tell you what you can get it done in that amount of time and having two days off in the row is so productive right so many things simmer and bubble in the back of your mind and so many of the experienced actors I work with are so grateful to have that kind of rehearsal schedule because they have families too um and again uh you know casting long before diversity equity inclusion were words that's you know the casting how we do it has imagination in that has always been fundamental to ten thousand things of value and because actors are so important in our organization I wanted to incorporate them into our organizational life um this kind of divide between artistic and managing I don't understand that and I guess because I taught myself all this stuff I've been able to see how the two can weave together and blend together so we have this artist score of 16 very diverse and very opinionated artists who we pay as consultants to brainstorm ideas for their organization to come to board meetings to come to staff meetings there is no sweat equity at ten thousand things actors always get paid and because they are integrated into our organizational life it's just so much more lively and energetic that way so those are ways that I've been able to shape the organization around cognition and art and our values as human beings so okay um in the 30 35 years since I you know was a young woman trying to figure out what to do and now we look around I have to say when it comes when you look at mid-sized to large theaters I don't know if things have really changed that much in terms of women in leadership it's still a very hard road um as as someone said when I when I got this lifetime achievement ward a couple weeks ago I kind of since I was going to get it and they decided I didn't want to be like those people that got an Oscar and they get up and they just kind of stumble and bumble and list a bunch of names like I wanted to use my three minutes to say something and that's what bubbled up at that moment was that um you know in the Twin Cities over the past four five years we've had some actually really good transitions of artistic leadership I think we've had four and they've all either been women or men of color to take over but I knew that we had five we have five or six coming up in the next few years organizations that are now all currently run by white men so I just threw out a challenge to the Twin Cities and I said most of those positions need to be filled by women and the majority of them need to be filled by women of color and I and um I said because when you put a woman in charge and I there's a big caveat here it's not a hundred percent um we have to really deal with the fact that 51% of white women voted for Donald Trump and especially as white women we need to reach out and figure out what is going on with the internalized misogyny but what I will say is in theater I believe when you put a woman in charge chances are pretty good that you are going to get someone who thinks very differently about hierarchy and power about wealth and distribution of resources about relationships with artists about rehearsal schedules and possibilities for family life and for sure you're going to get someone who thinks very differently about casting and the kinds of roles women can and should be playing and the kinds of stories that we should be telling about gender um and so the thing that I didn't get to say that I wish I had said but there was the time was that it's not just enough to hire a woman I feel like I I have not worked with institutions but I because I I just couldn't I had to make my own at the time but I feel like um from talking to my friends who are trying to um it's not just enough to hire a woman you have to make space yes and you have to support her to make these changes that our institutions so crucially and so that is the call I would put out to all the boards and people who are doing the hiring make space welcome the change because your institutions need it and support the woman as she leaves who gets to decide what stories get told matters because who gets to decide how those stories are being told matters and I throw out this challenge to you being very clear about just who you are actually telling those stories to and who you would like to be telling those stories to and what you are going to do to make that change happen matters most of all yes thank you we would love to field some questions I think if you're happy to kind of facilitate that then all the lights on yeah um Shannon knows how to do that thank you um so we'll turn the lights on and then we'll turn it over to you and there's one already over there great great so we can start with you yeah um so I'm fired by your speech thank you I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about mentorship and about your approach to treating um the next generation of women yeah well um for me I've just always welcomed young women directors and basically it tends to be mostly women sometimes some guys ask but um just to come into the rehearsal room sit with us you can go on tour with us I mean I think the best way for me to teach what I have to do is by by taking people around and letting them watch all the different audiences interact but I mean it's just it's like of course part of my life blood to open up the room and and make it available to women who are interested um I didn't have a mentor well I hadn't been to her in college I was so lucky to have a woman directing teacher which I tell you in the early late 70s no so that was awesome but I never really had anyone and so it feels right and good to be able to but I also will say that like um well no so that's all I'll say that's great yeah I just have a quick question about the actors that you use yeah um do you ever do you work with equity actors oh yeah they're all I mean I would say 80% equity actors as what contact would that be well we use an SPT six but we pay like way above you know whatever the minimum is um so they can just do six shows but no I mean I think I figured out really quickly that to make this work I needed to hire equity actors and it's I love actors equity I'm so glad it's there to give at least actors you know benefits and pension that we as an individual yeah yeah advice for building relationships with these with the places that you perform yeah so I mean it's something that you know when I started the company it really was just like hi we're gonna do play for you okay all right sure whatever you want so the one of the things is that so for so many of the places we perform the populations are so transient you know it's a whole different crew in prison or in a homeless shelter when you go every time although sadly we do have you know our subscriber base in prisons that keep coming back again and again we don't really want them to um but we have now I mean there are a lot of companies now obviously that are really you know picking a community and working in depth with them and finding out about them bringing them into the productions um and so we we've just the past few years gotten some funding to start to do that um we uh to do like workshops before the play and after the play but for me starting it I have to say that I as I was starting it what I was dealing with all around me was condescension and people going oh you do plays in prisons those must be stupid like seeds you know and so I just wanted to show them that a these audiences were totally capable of understanding Shakespeare or Greek tragedy if it's well done they don't have to have a workshop or a post discussion you know it's great when you can but it isn't necessary so that was kind of how I because I started it I was just battling people's condescension towards my audiences and now I feel like we can breathe and do more fun stuff with them too yeah hey um good morning um I just wanted to um so back to your mentorship question when I was a fellow at arena stage um how round yes how round I reached out to you and I was like I'm doing the tour of cities and I want to come visit you and I just saw you on the internet and instead of like meeting me at a cafe or theater she met me at her house and so that was easier that way but I think that it represents like your whole being in spirit and it's just so amazing to see that you had an idea and you birthed it and you're also passing it on um so my second thing would you ever advocate for um someone that has been in your audiences so majority of your audience has audiences have been people like that have been imprisoned or formerly imprisoned would you advocate for a person in that standing to take over the theater and would there be a pathway to leadership yeah for for that type well um certainly bringing their voices into the thing into what we do is great and really welcome I will say that it's really hard to direct like this like it actually takes tons of skills and one of the reasons I've always worked with professional actors is because I want this stuff to be so good that it just blows people away and there is something to be said for skills and craft but for sure people who um want to learn about theater and you know the doors are open for that but I I actually think because we're having our we are having our search right now this is my last season I'll be doing it 30 years and next June I will be 60 and I'm actually not um on the transition committee I felt that that was really important to step back and let the organization take over leadership so we have a committee of artists staff and board members who are doing the search um so I just know about it indirectly but I will say that of our and again this was not the of them at all but of our seven semifinalists they are all women and half of them are women of colors so what we do is is the professional thing but you know that may be something that the new leadership wants to go into more and more for sure yeah yeah um back when you first started the company what is the biggest challenge you had to face and how did you overcome I think it was that thing of condescension actually um and and just and really what what it is it is like once people come they kind of it's it's the audiences what I what I wanted people to understand is the audiences make the work better and so actually one of the things I used to get that to happen was critics and really like getting them to come to prison and watch the show and kind of see kind of be blown away and that's what's also been really important to me to make sure that we also perform for the paying general public um because I want to make sure that what we do speaks to them too and so that there's no width of condescension involved and then of course they become donors and all that stuff so I think that was oddly the thing that I had to fight most the other thing was of course my own lack of confidence and not having anybody else and all the time going oh my god what am I doing this so weird but um you know over time just um being able to become more and more confident and go oh I guess I am a director oh okay I guess I can do Shakespeare you know just letting that build but it took time it really did overcome that a good question yeah I'm curious you talked about how your staff structure evolved and having the artists involved in decision making what happened with your board to go from three friends in your kitchen to a $700,000 yeah that's a great thing so I did kind of figure out finally that like oh a board could do more for you than just come over for lunch we actually have some great um funding in the Twin Cities for organizational development and so I was actually able to bring on kind of like get a grant to hire like a matchmaker for the board and he would introduce me to people and take them to see shows and so what the way we define our board now is people who have access to wealth but wealth is not just money wealth might be people who have connections to communities that we want to serve it could be all different kinds of ways of defining wealth and certainly people who have money are part of that wealth and really important to being able to you know get up to $750,000 but it I really to have a diverse board we wanted to expand our definition of what wealth is and um that that's just kind of filament to how the company and does your board operate on any kind of a different does it operate in the traditional way or is it how that works it's a good question because I've been I you know it's a founder led organization so I I just it's kind I feel like putting together a board is kind of like a passive show you want people that really work well together who are really enthusiastic fun to be with and I think they have kind of let me do pretty much whatever I want which is nice I don't know how it will be I mean I'm really encouraging them to keep that attitude for whoever is the next um artistic director because I think there's something to be said for trusting artists with the artistic vision and that's actually been important like they don't get to be involved in any of the artistic decision making it's there there to support and help us build our wealth whatever that might be great um let's go over here so yeah um I'm curious have you done any work conditioning playwrights to write specific work yes I have such a great question um so the interesting thing when you look for contemporary plays to do for audiences is that you discover that a lot of playwrights I think unconsciously at least write for a upper middle class and white audience um and those stories for our audiences are either too small you know they're about like my marriage isn't going well my creator is not going where I want or they're actually plays about contemporary poverty and and which is good because wealthy people need to start understanding something about living in poverty but our audiences know that they don't want it we don't do plays about contemporary poverty because you know a they know more about it than we do and b they live it every day and it's really not fun and you really don't want to spend more time there than if you want so what um I did with uh p carl who is now head howl around and who was on our board is at the time when she was he was head of the playwright center sorry it was she back then um was put out a national challenge to playwrights to say what story would you tell if you knew everyone was going to be in your audience so in addition to wealthy white people there would be homeless people immigrants inmates indian native americans on a reservation and it what it does is it makes playwrights think bigger in a funny way kind of like shakespeare did because his audience contained people of all classes so um and so we were so lucky for the past uh five years we have had a melon playwright in residence who is awesome her name is kira ovanski and she understands kind of this fairy tale world oddly that we need to create where all of us can meet together on a level playing field and she's really gotten to she goes to all our shows she's really gotten to know all our audiences and so that's been really wonderful and um I hope whoever um takes over the theater will be able to really um push this idea of like who are you writing for really you know and just to make playwrights aware of unconsciously at least what they might who they might be writing for now yes um I have two questions the first is when you're paying audiences uh seeing the shows is that in a non-traditional theater absolutely exactly the same way they see it and they actually love it um we perform generally at this place in Minneapolis called open book which is like a loft literary center where people do their readings writers do their reading so we just make a big circle of chairs all the lights are on and they love being so close to like actors that usually have to like strain to see it the Guthrie and you're kind of surrounded by the action and the urgency and the immediacy so yeah just the same for everybody and speaking of actors do you remember in the beginning how did you create actor buy-in when you were telling the actors you're auditioning for this experience it's not going to be what you're used to remember what you did it's interesting I think that you know the people who are in theater not just for their own self-grant and grand-isement are just like yeah that sounds great and so I kind of get rid of it and they're great actors I mean that's the thing they're their generosity and their humanity and their openness to being playful it's those are the people you want to work with so it's a nice self-selecting process yes I was wondering if you could talk a little about your revenue breakdown I imagine it's mostly contributed and how you go about fundraising so um I will say when I first again this idea of not having any business plan when I first started 10,000 things I was just like okay we'll write a grant so it's never charging you know like you're not going to charge up you just need to do a play right and then one day it occurred we we always do one show for the general public and then I was like oh people seem to like this maybe we could sell tickets do you know like oh and now maybe I could write them a letter and ask them for donations so now we're at the point where it's sort of like a quarter of each so a quarter ticket sales a quarter individual donations maybe even a little bigger on individual donations a quarter from the government because Minnesota has awesome arts funding we as some of you may know the voters put in an amendment about five or six years ago to the constitution that dedicated a small percentage of a sales tax to arts in the arm and we just had this wealth of new funding for the arts and then like the quarter is from kind of so that's kind of how it breaks down yeah so you've been doing this for 30 years yeah and it feels like some of the larger regionals are sort of just noticing and sort of just seeing the value of this work and your incredible book and your lifetime achievement and being here in your summit and I wonder if you have any sort of red flags or nervousness about some of the larger theaters where this isn't core to their mission kind of just now getting on board totally totally and it's something that when I first the first partnership we had was with the public and I think that was a very authentic one I mean Oscar basically came to me and said you know I know that our Shakespeare free Shakespeare in the park is one of the most inaccessible theater events in New York City and it seems like you guys actually know more about what we should be doing than we do and so that was a very authentic partnership and I think the mobile unit is really great in how they do it but um yeah I mean the thing that's good about large theaters that they have the resources to pay actors well which is really really important um but lately I've been really supportive of small companies springing up to do it we just had one that started in rural Pennsylvania called True North and um Cripple Creek down in New Orleans while they partnered with New Orleans Shakespeare um there's a little one in New York City called the light fantastic and there's something so what I when we have our conference in December what I'm really interested in is how has in those large institutions how has this work changed the institution started to change how you think about audience and how you do theater and what your priorities are and um so that will be really interesting to see and there's something really cool if you're a company and you just do this kind of work like that's all you do and um so that's really interesting too and so we'll see I think it's all unknown and very interesting my good question um yes do you feel that the size you're at now is the size the company needs to be or do you feel like it needs to continue to grow in terms of yeah making money and when did you start earning an actual yeah I think that was such a great question I think I was 40 when I finally was able to start getting a monthly paycheck it was amazing um and I will also say like again this thing about being a woman um at the time I had my board was I think all women and they were like I was like oh no but I shouldn't get that because we need to pay the actress more and they're like no this is not about you this is about the organization living beyond you and the only way that's gonna happen is if you get a salary and we have the infrastructure to support that but right like that's my training was like oh no I don't you know like so that had to go um and then uh and then wait well you had another the size question oh yeah so I feel like once we're able to pay our actors that $952 a week kind of thing I think everyone at 10,000 things feels like this is a good size um we all we only do three productions a year and we like that we like kind of having summers be a little looser especially when you live in Minnesota and there's only three nice ones and there's so we decided when we thought about growing we decided the way we wanted to grow um was just getting theaters around the country to adopt the model in their communities and that didn't really take any money on our part um so it just feels like a healthy size everyone on staff gets $50,000 a year or full time equivalent which is like livable in the Twin Cities it's actually livable so I mean it feels about the right size for us and where we want to be um you had a question yeah oh yeah so this is a possible two-parter uh so my first question is in regards to programming and the tour so whenever you are programming your season choosing your works do you once you have that solidified do you choose oh how do I word this do you um choose where you're going to tour based on uh what the play the topics of the plays are the things are or do you have like a set route that you typically stick to maybe add your subjective yeah I think the idea is in each show we choose we I try to imagine all our different audiences and how they might engage with it sometimes it skews a little bit like we're like okay we're not doing this one for low income seniors or we're not doing this one for teenagers you know so we kind of adjust it a little bit that way sometimes a theme might seem particularly compelling to a certain population so we more of those but it's just really important that it whatever play we choose in some way helps us figure out our common humanity um to all of those different audiences if that makes sense yeah great yeah um so I do have a second question yeah it wasn't really my first one yeah curious now um is which tribes do you work with in the oh well we um have performed at the white earth that the white earth furthervation and then there's a the urban reservation in Minneapolis has the largest urban reservation um in the country actually so we perform in urban Indian centers um but it's that community is is very um I we have to work really hard to build relationships yeah I would say that that is a population where we love connecting with them and we're really we're pouring a lot of resources now into really building the relationship of trust with them um so that's still kind of a work in progress but it's really important to us because it's a it's a great audience to perform for when we've also been up to the leech lake reservation um white earth and oh the fundulac reservation our places that we've been to okay thank you yeah absolutely yes this speaks to my question are there places where you wanted to take 10,000 things that you haven't been able to yeah that's such a good question so there's one heart in that we haven't really been able to crack and that is um white working class audiences oddly um because they're really really busy do you know what I mean like they work these jobs they have families and so anytime like we've tried to connect with union halls and stuff and they're just like people don't have time to sit around and watch a play they have to go so that's one we're still really working on and to me after this last election it's actually one of the most important ones that we want to connect with but that's going to take some work to make that happen and just figuring out it's all about figuring out where what time of day what time of uh what day of the week they'll be you know like people will you cannot put up posters and expect people to come you kind of got to go there when people are already kind of hanging out and just catching by surprise and go hi we're doing a play and then they end up really liking it but um people who have not seen theater before in general really don't want to see it yeah you know like they don't think it has anything to do with them and so you have to break down those barriers but I also say that I think our actors feel like breaking down barriers that non-traditional audiences put up is often much easier when breaking down the barriers that traditional audiences put up you know that judgy thing I was talking about and they like it takes 30 minutes to get through to them to let them let down their guard and we can usually break through non-traditional audiences in about 10 minutes or so um let's see okay yes so I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who's a female director with a son who tends to try to hide the fact that she has a son so she can get hired and she works in um typical kind of regional houses and we're having a conversation about you know organizational culture and family friendly practices and I was telling her about your rehearsal schedule because I was reading about it and she said well it's not really possible to get a show done at a regional house with that with her schedule so my question for you is what do you say to that yeah is it possible to make changes in larger institutional settings like you have in your a company and is that like translatable into the larger well I don't know but I would yeah I don't know but I would think so um I will say like Jonathan Mascone brought us into cal shakes to show you know get the touring and he was like Monday through Friday 10 to 3 that's awesome so it has to do with the reception of the leadership and if leadership is in place that values family life and also understands how the creative process works it's not about you know using every single hour that people have available to make them be creative and make them work it doesn't actually art doesn't really work that way so again I think leadership and supportive leadership and getting you know leaders who really want to spend time with their families I feel like it would be the best thing for that change to happen but I know it's very entrenched and I suppose it has to do with the union I don't know but yeah I've got to keep trying it's good yeah yes so in terms of building trust and breaking down barriers for the partners that you're working with what would you say are the important things for you as the representative of the theater organization coming into early conversations to uphold in those early well I mean I think that you have to always be humble you have to always respect that you are going into someone else's space um and really work with them to find the best time and space to do it um I will say that oftentimes um when you first propose it people are like okay yes um and then once they see what happens with their clients when they participate in the play it shifts um but it's always tricky at first but I think just being humble and respectful and you know one of the things are we always say at 10,000 things is life is more important than theater um because like if you're performing so when we perform in homeless shelters it's like people sit and they'll watch for like 30 minutes and then they'll get up and go to pick up their kids or they've got to get a you know a bed for the night or a meal and at first those first years you're like oh no they don't like it it's terrible but then we just realize no they can sit down and enjoy it for as long as they can and then life calls them and I remember once we were performing in a women's prison and in the middle of a scene suddenly all the women stood up and started hugging each other and then we realized it was time for one woman to get out to get out of jail so we just stopped the play so I said goodbye to her and then she left and then we kept to it so that's that's important to really acknowledge that you're just doing a play that's all it is and I think it's important for everybody in theater to really remember that yes oh one more question okay um yes I have a question about uh diversity of class of which class yes have you in your time especially when you're working with the classics been able to hire artists who come from different classes and have the level of jobs and experience that artists who may have had the privilege to attend institution yeah um and how have you been able to deal with that well I mean for sure I think that when you diversify your casting it opens it up and I think that there are a lot of theater training schools now that are are much more aware of bringing students of different economic and life backgrounds but yeah we do we have some actors because to me the most important I mean having like we almost never work with kids just out of the BFA program right because many of them just don't have the like experience like when you are doing Richard the third for a bunch of guys that have actually killed people in the maximum security prison you actually have to have some sense of what you're talking about I'm not saying you have to kill people you can't just pretend to be old and so what I always not about giving your students a nice experience it is about respecting the intelligence the life experience and the imaginations of the audience who is so often condescended to and matching that with professionals who also have the life experience and skill to match that and honor what they would like to launch this summer let's give Michelle another round to everybody who tuned in via howl round we hope you'll join us again this afternoon at four o'clock for the plenary session leadership shifts from the Wellesley report to executive search so we're going to say goodbye to our howl round people