 Welcome back. 75 more minutes to go. We're almost there. That's right. Okay, so the last session we are looking at, we've gone from personal aspirations. We've done blue sky, anything possible. Money is no object. Now we're back in the real world. Money is in fact probably part of an object. There are only so many things that we can do. You don't have the perfect board. You don't have maybe all the buy-in from all of your staff to do everything that you would want to do. What can you do? Right? So that's what we want to be talking about over the next 60 minutes or so, and then we're going to spend the last 15 minutes from 3.45 to 4.00 doing a little exercise together, and then we will send you on your way. And the way we thought we would structure from now till quarter of 4. Is we each have a few ideas coming out of things we've been hearing that we think have practical applications. And we want to throw them out there and talk about them very briefly. And then basically anyone who has an idea that they can throw out there in 30 seconds. We're just, and we're writing them down. These are all being transcribed. This kind of becomes our list moving forward of things that we can do. And our stuff is based on what do we keep hearing as recurring themes. It all relates to this conversation about these three groups, but it suggests the places the work may want to go now. So something I heard over and over and over again was about space. So there's a whole conversation and piece of work that I think we maybe want to think about doing in terms of our buildings. But what that means is I think we've got to have a real conversation, and this is something all of us can do in our own places when we go home. We have to have a real conversation. It sounds really easy to say we need to make our theaters more open and welcoming to our communities. I love the PTA idea, and I'm scared to death. What happens if I schedule a PTA meeting in my theater at 5 o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon, and it's after opening so everything's fine and then an actor gets sick and I actually have to do a put in rehearsal at 5 o'clock on Wednesday afternoon. There are reasons that this is a challenge, but I think we can all go back and think about what are the things that keep us, maybe, keep us from opening up our buildings in a different kind of way. You know, we have to talk to architects, we have to talk to design people. No, we have to talk about what are the practical things that are getting in the way of us opening the doors of our theaters, our offices, or whatever more frequently. Do we want to respond to that in the room? Hi, I'm Brian. A lot of us work in, I'm not saying I do, for those of you watching on livestream, work in a culture of no, so the knee-jerk reaction to ideas is immediately no because what we do is we're like, oh shit, if we do that then we have to do X, Y, and Z, X, Y, and Z really hard, we have to staff, we have to do this, we might have a put in. Everything is sort of like a culture of no, and I feel like the message that I have is to fight that. Adam was saying earlier about we need to empower ourselves to ask for what we need. Oh, and I'm saying we should do spaces. Yeah, and what I'm saying is in organizations there is this culture of no because they're all the negative responses that why we shouldn't. We, the idea makers, need to fight this culture of no and not allow no to be the first response. But we have to acknowledge that some of the no's are there for a reason. Right, but no is the final answer, not the first answer. Well, and maybe it's not no, it's okay, but, and how we go forward. And we're thoughts on space. Yes, oh, yes. As somebody who runs an organization with, you know, extremely limited resources, I would encourage everybody who, even those of you who work in really large institutions, to think about the five dollar solution. I don't think that all of these things need to like be like, we need to reconvene with the architects and blah, blah, blah. Sometimes it's like play some music, you know, you know, dim a light over there or put a gel on it or something. Or like, you know, I mean, there can be very small ways to create a touch of hospitality and they don't all have to be, you know, giant expensive gestures. Yeah, yeah. Space thought. My theater company was in residence at the factory theater and the factory theater closed. So this is less a space thought than a thought about bringing people, audiences, no matter what their economic level into whatever space my company is performing in. So I decided not to say this during the pie in the sky part of the conversation. I do want to change our ticketing structure to be free up to $25. So if you're paying a dollar, you're still a donor to my company. That's my next experiment. Okay. We've heard a lot and we've been talking a lot about more on space. Yeah, before we leave this topic. Go ahead. To the culture of no one I understand that. And I think where it's coming from is, you know, automatically saying no when there's an idea that's proposed and I am someone who's proposed quite a few ideas and they've gone nowhere and we're all way over tax. Not only are we underpaid, but how many of us are exhausted perpetually? How many of us partly we say no because we don't know how to say no enough maybe. And, you know, how many of us playwrights say yes to more readings or productions that are all in a row which doesn't allow us or each individual project to breathe. And so I guess, yes we should say yes more, but we should also understand where the no is coming from and I think have real compassion for each other as artists and administrators because we're all kind of in the same boat even if we're using different sides of our brain. And I'm wondering if like where it's leading me this whole idea of space and knowing all that is how can we prioritize taking care of each other and ourselves because that is one of the first things to go out of the window when there are many, many grant deadlines and many, many rewrite deadlines, etc., etc. Cool. Any more on this topic before we go? Okay, so from the very beginning we had a lot of talk around what it means to have a talk back versus a talk with and I don't know that any of us knows exactly what that means. Maybe some of us are doing it. Maybe some of us haven't tried it. But I think we could all begin, right? And I think if you're a playwright you could go in and ask and say, I really don't want to do the regular talk back. Could we do something that is more like talking with the audience, right? So I think all of us could do that no matter what our role is to begin to model that. And someone said yesterday as we were doing one of the panels, like, you know how we really don't know how to do this because we're doing a talk back thing right now. So like what does that mean even within our organizations to really begin to learn how to talk with each other instead of having these sort of top down talk backs? That's my, yes. Will I stretch that far? No, where's the microphone? I can't, I couldn't let Maria run all the way across the room and not use it. So when I was at September Wolf we created a little manual for moderators. We had a post-show program where somebody got up in front of the audience. After every performance of every play and had a conversation, we hadn't had any kind of, any real conversation about what the goals of those conversations were and best practices and strategies about achieving them. So I, when I took over the program, I did that. I did some thinking and we created a little handbook for facilitators that I've since added to and had some, with the assistance of Deb Piver at center theater group. And that's something that I have that I would be happy to share with people if you email me. So, real tools. Thank you. Great. Hand, other side of the room. I don't really have any big ideas on that one but I did just want to thank the playwrights who are here, especially Laura, who have been so eloquent about the way we can approach writers about participating in conversations with our audiences and encouraging us to approach artists without fear to participate and communicate and engage with us as well as our audiences. So that's all I had to say. I think that finding a way to create a structure in which it isn't talking heads to group of people listening, fighting to maybe get in a way to speak but in a way that allows the opportunity for everyone to at least turn to each other and speak, get into a small group of like three and four and speak so that there is some sort of concrete way in which people are able to feel validated and heard that may then involve a structure like we saw brilliantly with Dog and Pony one time where they had different structures of length of time of answers. So if you have a very short answer, we can answer it all as a group. If you have a longer answer, we're going to break up into four groups and each, you can just go to whatever question that you have that you want answered and we can have a little mini conversation like that. So there's people that are doing really effective models of that type of conversation that would be super great to share out. Right next to you. This is a talk with idea for within an institution or organization. One thing we do is a staff retreat where the entire, now again we're smaller staff but you can do this in pockets too. The entire staff will get together and read aloud with each other the plays that are being programmed or that are in contention for being programmed and initiate a conversation led by dramaturgy around what are the challenges, what are the anxieties, what are the opportunities that these plays present for each department so that everybody gets a chance to say their piece and when the decision is made it's informed by all of that. Over here. I just came back from being in Berlin and I saw two plays at the Schaubbuna where they actually had their talk backs, two thirds through the play which was really, really fascinating because it would be right at the climactic moment and they would encourage the audience and there were some lively debates about what they really thought should happen before the actual conclusion of the play came. It was really fascinating. Jackie, you had something. Oh yes, so this is one of the dialogue, post-show dialogues that I really appreciate. So when I write a play I'm very clear about the kind of conversations that I want to have with my audiences and I do that in my blogs by interviewing the artists that are involved and asking them questions and so one of my favorite things in these post-show conversations is bringing experts in the field onto the panel and that I'm leading the conversation so I'm actually asking them questions, digging in because it becomes a great dramaturgy session for me and it allows the ideas of the play to lead the conversation and so that's one of the things I want to throw out there as an idea. It's been really productive for me. Great. One over here. Well, I will say I've had traditional talk backs that were incredibly successful for certain plays is kind of what seems to me to be the important thing. So it seems like if we can curate or design an experience for interacting with the audience based on what that particular play needs then we can perhaps be more successful with this rather than saying this is what our theater does for every single play. Right, exactly. This is a little diversion. I was inspired by what Liz said and I think that funders especially are interested in how we can, especially for playwrights, help them help us make a better living, like make a living. I think that part of it is just that I have actually met like upper level theater staff people who do not know how playwrights are paid. Raise your hands if you know how playwrights are paid. So a lot more people here than I thought but still like a good 50% who don't. So we get paid percent against royalties, 46% against royalties. At smaller theaters that's 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, something like that. We are the only artists who make theater whose fee is directly tied to how many tickets are sold. However we have no say over how they're sold, to whom they're sold, how much they're sold for. We have no control over any of it. The least I have made off of any play is $256. That's six weeks of performances. The most I have ever made is 11,000. The more typical figure is like 3,000, something like that. Like royalties like 400, 700, something like that. So if we could come up with different financial structures that would say playwright, you get a fee, not in advance, but you get a fee plus royalties. You get like a guaranteed higher fee that's more in like the 8,000, 10,000, 12,000, 15,000. I think Yale Rep is doing this now. Do you actually get a director's fee, twice a designer's fee, something like that? So you are actually guaranteed a larger percent of the budget than the actors or the director. Or I'm just saying, I'm just saying. Maybe on to the next. Okay. We talked a lot about being in community. There's been a lot of conversation about being much more in community. But we haven't talked as much about what's the invitation to the community. In other words, we've talked a lot about being in community once people get to the door. We talked about reaching out, they're at the door, how do we get all these people in our theater. But we need, I think, to do some work on how do we get the community. Where's the invitation? Where is our invitation and what's the rationale for the invitation? Because if it's simply host a meeting, there's got to be, so to have some, so that it comes from an authentic place within your organization. I love the idea about doing the play somewhere else. So how do we, when you pick, do we have to go out? How do we meet the community? Do we go out into the community? Do we perform out there? Do we go out? Anyway, it's fine to talk about being in community, but we really have to think about how do we invite people in. So thoughts about invitation. There, there, there. I think we start by defining our own communities beyond just the theater community. So, you know, Andrew takes a martial arts class once a week. And that's a really important, you know, when we talk about like being willing to say no to things, it's important that Andrew goes to his martial arts class as much as it is that he takes time at our theater to write a work or to come in and have a staff meeting, because that means that he exists beyond just being a theater artist, but also as a real, as a resident of San Francisco, as somebody who is engaging with the world beyond making plays. And then those people become people, Andrew has so many friends, and it's amazing that he keeps up, you know, these friendships with people way beyond, and that as, you know, we all do that, we invite his martial arts class to come into the theater, and we invite, you know, we talked, you talked about, you know, going on joining a temple or like having just, I think existing in a world that isn't only about our work is a really basic, but like super important way of engaging, of making community real. It's like be a real, let's be real people. And then this isn't going to be so hard. I think we, I know we can all do that. We're going to do that. Over here. Since I'm sitting next to the mic. At Playwrights Foundation, one of the things we've started doing is talking to the playwrights before they come for our annual festival and asking them who they want in their, to show the play to. Who do they want to have hear the play and respond to the play? So we did that last summer for each of the playwrights and we had some, some really great success and some not so great success with that being new at it. So that was a way that Playwrights Foundation served each of our writers and we'd like to continue that. Moving down. Who's next? Han, Han. Sorry. Sorry. So this, this idea of, of going out and being like a real person and a real citizen I think is so important. So I was trying to buy tickets for a basketball game the other day and I have like no idea how to do it. And I have no, I have like, I have like never, I don't really know where TD Garden is and I've lived here for like over a year and I'm just like, I'm afraid of the whole sports thing but I'm going, I mean, because a bunch of gay people are going. But anyways, that's not the point. The point is that like we are looking at our spaces and being like how can they be more inviting but like how can we really know because how often are we going to spaces that aren't like somebody else's theater, right? Like how often are we really going out of our comfort zone? And so something like that's super tangible like on the ground and that I'm trying to work on and that people in my organization are really trying to work on is that like as we identify community partners, as we identify organizations that may work in completely different sectors that are working with our constituencies or working in a similar values proposition, like we have to go to their events. Like we have to be out at other people's things that are completely not theater related and see their dialogue around race equity happening in Hyde Park or we have to just, we have to go out more and we have to be present in their events if we can even begin to formulate an invitation for them to come to ours. Over here. I think one thing that we've been working on a lot is being intentional about audience design and knowing who we want to have in the seats based on the type of conversation that we want to have, but I think that is a super interesting notion to take is who is it that we want to be experiencing this work and how do we go about getting it and as anyone who has maybe not done traditional, I'm just using the example of Latino theater, if you are a traditionally mainstream regional theater that for example does a play about Latino theater, that doesn't mean the Latinos are coming. So what is your personal investment in getting folks in the audience and how do you go to community centers and how do you reach out to people and how do you make partners so that you can get to those people, those ringleaders to then bring the folks that you want to have in the audience. Can I just, to piggyback, just to say how do you sustain that engagement beyond that one show instead of, you know, doing a play about a particular community once every 24 months like it's a comet or something and only reaching out to that community at that point? Yes. I want to follow up on that because I was back to the pie in the sky ideas. I mean, we have our community connections programs and for every show we've picked partners and worked with partners and many partners continue from show to show despite if there was a topical interest or not in the next show because of that welcoming factor and I feel like we agree when we're working with a partner that you will have a representative at our theater alongside one of our representatives and together we will welcome your constituents and that's how we get meaningful practice. But what was by pie in the sky again, it's not that pie in the sky but there's some community connections partners that we haven't been able to maintain just because it's a lot of work to maintain those relationships in a meaningful way over periods of years and some are really proactive and we're really proactive with them so finding again collaboration with partners outside of our discipline is a phenomenal thing but you have to have resources to maintain those relationships. Over to you. I think having worked with a lot of community partners I think the last project that we did we did with the refugee community and I think the most successful thing for me was going in with a list of things I thought we could do together but not starting with that list with asking them okay we're going to do this play that's about your community what do you want out of it? What are your goals? What do you want to see? Do you want political action? They came up well we want to have this petition because there's this thing in front of the legislature and we need people to know about it so how can we work together to make that known and I said well what I need is someone to put together a really concise page about what the issues are because you're more knowledgeable about that and between talking between all of us we came up with what we could do together and the group self-organized talk backs after every show one of them just took it on and said I'll do it I'll make sure someone's there every night cool great awesome so it's been really successful in having their buy in an upfront way from the beginning of thinking of the project to the readings and then through the whole production process and afterwards as we continue to be asked to be on host committees for benefit events and attend their events I just want to echo the understanding the challenges of the communities you're working with in attending your production so like is it show specific to a community that you know the single mother that's working two jobs and doesn't have time to go to the theater or is it you know how can we bridge those gaps and make it more available for everyone that's interesting okay alright so maybe on to another possible next do we've been talking a lot about the third act has been something we've discussed over the last couple of days we've heard of Lisa's party every night in her theater and it seems like it's it is something we could be doing you just were talking about there was a talk back every night you know organized by this other group that you were working with what could you do every single time that you have a performance that extends the conversation and becomes a welcoming place for the audience to actually discuss and have a talk with at least themselves and if not other artists in the room could that happen every single time you do a production Lisa has a party but we've started doing just kind of children's theater show meet and greets with the audience on stage after every show it's simple it's effective the actors say for 10 to 15 minutes the audience come down and talks to them and the actor welcomes them at the end of the show to come we're going to hang out here on stage for a little while come and talk to us if you like and everybody stays takes pictures talks to the actors and then goes home feeling like they had a personal connection with the art on stage very quick and very cheap again my watch words keep the bar open maybe put a little bit of food out have your lobby active like any something to suggest that you're allowed to invited to we'd like you to stay here whether it's talking to us or talking to each other but it's like it's not over get out Jeremy since we don't do full productions but we do two performances for each of the workshops that we have going on in the season we do drinks and food and stuff for everyone all the time and all the tickets are free so we're kind of a different thing in that way but I would just say that we start by asking the playwright what they want hey what would you like some playwrights will say I would like to ask the audience a couple of questions about my play can I do that so that we're also not stopping that process if that's something they'd like just ask they'll tell you and then also I think keeping the bar open is great what usually ends up happening is playwrights most often will say can we just all hang out actors, directors the right whoever wants to be out there just hangs out with the audience and mingle and we hear feedback from all of the collaborating artists that are developing the work during that week that they love it too because there's zero wall that everything is porous and we're only ever starting and this is again it's a new it's a play development center but we start every one of those you know sort of sharing moments by saying this is an open rehearsal very different than everyone else because it's not a producing theater but for us it is it's an open rehearsal and we're really excited that you're here and we're excited to learn everything together so I think it's thinking about we and then the act three for us is about saying to the playwright what do you not what do you need but what do you want great right next to you no I work for OSF which is also totally weird but one of the things with us we're a destination theater and so one of the things that I found really exciting and I've been trying to live up to is the idea of being an ambassador because the way it works is you know people are coming and they're coming to Ashland for four or five days at a time to see seven or eight plays and maybe some of them go rafting and do naturey things but if I'm in the grocery store if I'm at the Starbucks or if somebody asks me for directions on the street I can guess that the person sitting next to me is coming to my theater and it's a little hard for me because you'll be surprised but I'm a little shy and but of being open to like just starting a conversation with someone who's seen one of the shows whether it be one of the shows from my program or one of the Shakespeare's and just sort of owning that ambassador ship I wish that I had done more of that at the other theaters I worked at which were sort of more regular regional theater kind of theaters of just sort of being open and available to have that conversation especially because I always say architecturally like we don't have that lobby we have a big open space but during the summer it's like wicked hot you don't want to be out there and so where are you going to find the people and where are the people going to find each other outside of their hotel rooms and just sort of it's fun to be a part of it this is an observation I've noticed that when I've gone to see plays in rural settings one of the things that makes it really exciting for the audiences is particularly if the actor is the playwright the director are in town for two or three or four weeks the people who live in the community bump into them at the supermarket or in the coffee shop or when I went to Shepherd's town recently I sat at a table next to a bunch of the stage hands for breakfast one morning and just gloriously eavesdropped on all of the production gossip which was really great and I have some dirt now but so that works really that's kind of easy to create in a rural environment you sort of have to because everybody's in the same boat so how can theaters in so I asked this as an open question how can theaters in bigger places how can they sort of capture some of that how can they make connections between the artists in their daily lives and the audience members in their daily lives in the same community there's some hands over here so this is really simple easy, cheap, free something we've tried to do with the brick when we have events and this kind of goes with the museum the security guards sort of reframing that if you're a staff member when we've had events at the brick I try to tell everyone you're the host of this party if you see someone off in the corner by themselves go get them talk to them be like hey what's up hey I work here oh my god you came and saw the show and just start that conversation and then bring them you're a host so you take them you bring them to someone else you get them talking then you leave rescue the next person and then in literally 30 minutes everyone is doing that themselves they're like oh and then this and everyone is becoming friends it's so much fun it's free but it does take conscious effort on the part of you and other people in the theater your actors whoever you want to involve in this but if you say you're a host host this party with us and if you have like 10 or 15 hosts who are going to people saying hello introducing themselves it creates this amazing energy of warmth and everyone will be happy and it's just sad because I go to parties and sometimes nobody's doing that and everyone talks to their their own little group of people and their horrible parties and the best parties are always the ones where you met new people you talked to new people you had a great time but it does require people being hosts so be a host interesting Brian you had something my theater participated in the intrinsic value survey a few years ago and one of the things that we learned was that our audience members really liked to spend that time I mean we live in Los Angeles so it's a car culture and everybody's driving really far to get to the theater and our audiences enjoyed that time in the car ruminating on the play and a lot of them responded that they spent a couple days thinking about it so something I want to do and if anybody is doing this I'd love to talk to you about it but sort of extend this idea of act three beyond the theater and maybe follow up I get emails after I go to a play with like a thank you for coming take the survey kind of thing or buy tickets to the next show and I'm thinking about why not follow up not with promotion of the next thing but maybe with like dramaturgical notes to help promote conversation and thought about the play so they're engaging with the material for a couple more days and therefore developing a tighter relationship with the work and perhaps us that's great okay next point next point and this isn't really a point or it's kind of a point I was going to say when I prepped this list before the last session that we talked a lot about generosity the idea of being more generous is something that a lot of folks aspire to and I'm not sure that we know what that means and my sense was that we talk a lot about sometimes no because we're tired and as being more generous another thing that we have to do that takes time so how are we more generous and then when Christian was talking totally understanding what he was saying and agreeing with it I suddenly thought wait a minute we've talked a lot about generosity and we're also talking about increasing more ownership and generosity and ownership and how do those it seems like there are two threads here which is we've talked about letting the playwrights take stronger voices and have more ownership over how you deal with the audiences and you're totally right you're the only people in the whole investment engagement where it matters how many people buy tickets so you've got to take more ownership over that and you've got to own it and the staff so there's all of that but we also want to be more generous and so the challenge is how do we do I think both things are important and maybe they're not in conflict with each other but it strikes me as one of those things that is less something we can do right away but more something we need to be aware of I don't know so I don't know if anyone has any thoughts about that over here I guess Adam does go ahead one thing I think generosity also extends between companies so like one thing we're trying to do with the new play alliance is we're making an app that's basically a rewards app that rewards people for going to new plays no matter whose company they're at so the idea is that you're going to win a free ticket to the one you didn't go to but maybe you go see eight shows at different companies but they're all new plays and then you win one more but that means everybody has to be generous in terms of oh we're not just doing our new show but go see one at Speak Easy or The Huntington or whatever and I think we can collaborate that way so during lunch the playwrights met and so Tori I'd really like you to be generous what we want is we want one of these just for you guys yeah just for us guys we want one because then we could figure out what we need we're not doing to help you guys and also to we could use one of these we do it at New Dramatists but it's only with the New Dramatists playwrights is that cohort yeah that's all but it would be great to do sort of a national one or like one from different places small big be great and I just want to throw out the yes the idea that what you just posited as oppositional are in fact the same ownership and generosity when a playwright says give me more ownership what we're saying is use this as a resource let me be a collaborator when I come into the theater I don't want to just collaborate with my director I want to collaborate with the entire freaking thing I want to be a theater maker not just somebody makes little marks on paper that you take away from me and that is generous that is not grabby that is just the opposite let me help you only playwrights are talking this is the revolution yeah I think the key to generosity is generosity without equity doesn't make sense it's super easy to be generous when you have a lot of resources it's harder when you're really struggling to make ends meet and part of the difficulty is we come into these spaces and we don't always feel comfortable acknowledging those power dynamics that are at play like we're all here like all our ideas are equal but some of us have a lot more resources than others and that's just difficult but it requires some bravery from all of us I think on calling that out and I think that what I would really love to see is this idea of ethical design moving up into this audience conversation because the word audience member versus community member versus the person's name that's an ethical distinction that you're making if you're calling someone an audience member or a community member or calling them by their name and I think it's an ethical decision when you situate the playwright as exterior, as a third leg rather than fully integrated into one of the leg there are ethical decisions in every single aspect of what we do and yet we don't often talk about any of the ethical ramifications of what we do and my expectation is at a time in our culture when companies like Zappos or Patagonia are getting a competitive edge by thinking about ethics in every single step of what they do theaters will be much stronger if we put those ethical decisions at the forefront and then we talk about them in a really inclusive way so people can call bullshit when we're claiming to be ethical but we're really not over here Lisa yeah you know I really do also want to contribute to what you've all said here because you know full disclosure I don't have to try to make a living as a playwright I'm a tenured professor at a college playwright in residence I made that choice 13 years ago after 9-11 to move here and not be a playwright freelance and adjuncting at NYU anymore so that's given me a lot of freedom and I'm very aware of it I'm very aware of what it's offered me and it's also given me the opportunity to relaunch my company and do any darn play I want to do including my own but for the playwrights here and all over the country who are trying to work and when you really listen to the numbers as to what they're making out of any given show you know on a play they've probably been writing for two years at least sometimes one, two to three, four years they're making far less than you know workers child workers in China you know if you go hour by hour and you know granted we've made that choice to be artists and in this country that is already a very marginalizing choice but I do think that it needs to be spoken well just speaking really personally for a minute and I don't mean this in an advertising way but don't listen Michael because you're in charge of this part but anybody here who wants as many copies of outrageous fortune as you need to give to your board members or whoever else to help educate them because when people read it after they call and say well this can't be right and you take them through it then it was a pretty good so anyway some of that stuff is out there so anyway there was here just on the on the notion of generosity one of the things that's most valuable that we can be generous with is our time and is our attention and being a good listener to staff members and audience members also I just want to date for the record that these parties that we have are not expensive I mean it's not a big financial investment it's time it's time and energy that we're investing not cash in order to have these parties and if you think that's crazy wait till you hear the other thing we do around generosity is for every single production they run five to seven weeks each we create a gift and every audience member is given this gift so the gift is it's a small gesture of hospitality intended to be given from one human being to another it's given after the show whatever it is is tied into the theme of the play they're encouraged to take it with them and my intention is for that object to deepen and lengthen their relationship with the work so whatever it may be and sometimes it's interactive it's a piece of origami paper for Rajiv Joseph's animal out of paper animals out of paper for example it my hope is that a week later they're like oh right I'm going to make that heart with those instructions designed especially for me with that origami paper and then they're thinking about the work they're thinking about the play and how it impacted them and it engages them once they even left the party it's a generous thing and it doesn't cost that much money it has to be very innovative and creative with those gifts clearly because it's not a big budget line item but I feel that it deepens their engagement two more we've had two leases and Amy has her hand up and yeah go ahead so this is kind of a pie in the sky but also practical maybe I would love to see it be flipped that playwrights don't bring us plays we become in conversation before the play is ever written about what we need to write what matters to the community and what we might have a mutual interest to each other that might be written and have the theater commit to produce that project when it's an idea stage before it's written so they were all on the same page and I have ownership and the community has ownership at the beginning and forget about sending me finished scripts I want to be in from the beginning and I want to commit from the beginning and I want it to matter to everybody involved and I think that that's something we can actually do okay Amy you need a mic I just want to echo the revolution the playwright revolution I support the playwright revolution and I also just think I want to reiterate even though there has been the most amazing book and study written about the plight of the American playwright I think it's worth saying again in this room when we're talking about generosity that that does not very often extend to playwrights it just doesn't and that's why it's playwrights, theaters and audiences really we should just be saying theaters and audiences but because playwrights are outside that in our culture we have to say that now so I just I know we have a lot of solutioning and solutions that we've all been working on but I think I just wanted to underline that it's still very much in play okay one more and then we're going to move to our final thing one of the coolest ideas that I've been hearing are all evening ideas that are happening when the audience is in the space and how do we get the administrative staff in the lobby in the theater with the people we actually are all talking about connecting with and it just makes me wonder if the 9 to 5 model is just like wrong for the administrative theater staff like why isn't our work day just 12 to 8 or 12 to 10 so you could maybe like go to the grocery store and like take a shower in the morning and then you would be more willing and less fatigued at the idea at staying at your theater late so one more okay I'm just thinking about generosity and resource and in addition to the potential experiences that playwrights may design and create for an individual theater it always occurs to me that the playwrights as well as other artists directors and actors are because they are because they work in such a variety of venues they are actually incredible field resources they know is probably more about the field than most of us who work in administrative jobs within the theaters and so it's just another sort of generosity in ways that we can use them as resources to the field I mean as if you know putting them on our board of directors are their ways that that is also helps you know change some of that stratification and engagement and then by extension audiences for a variety of the work that's created for the state. Okay now we are moving into the final 15 minutes are we 15 minutes is if you have more good ideas more revolutions either related to what we were talking about are completely unrelated we're going to give you 30 seconds to talk about that and then we'll get through as many of those 30 second or less idea bursts and then we'll move into our final exercise any ideas now I just scared it out of you okay 15 you get 30 seconds to say something really cool. Okay 30 seconds I think there's so much awesome work happening all over the country and I would love pie in the sky to have some sort of like indie theater exchange where like a play like can be in New York and then it can come up here to Boston and then and we'd all like trade so like your plays here and my place here and then we'll trade spaces and we'll trade plays and like we could do that you know maybe east coast west coast like we could have like three or four of those but like it would be great to like have these new plays you know we you work so hard on them and then they you go and then they're over and I would love more more more life um so I just want to discourage a simplistic linking between community and content um due to the number of times I've been to see a play that's advertised as Asian content and ended up thinking this is a play aimed at white people it decodes the Asian experience for white people which is fine white people you need your theater too but just just maybe think a little deeper about who the play is connected to rather than just necessarily the people who are in stage I would like to see like a buy one get one ticketing policy we were talking about this earlier but in a pay it forward kind of model where if your ticket price is $120 I the theater will give you this ticket for $50 if you buy a second one for someone who can't afford it move the microphone this is a very small idea that I had sitting here if your theater is producing let's just say my play there could be which are all invited to do that what if the audience members that are interested in my work in particular we like this play we want to stay in touch with this what if they what if I get their email addresses what if I create an email list that I blast out to and then I say oh this is a another theater in your city or another or this is my friend this other Adam Bach is doing a play in your city and you if you like my work you know sorry yeah you'll be much so much happier seeing Adams but you know or and and if the theater can facilitate help getting that list to me then I can end up using that to help support the theater if they do my play again I've then got the power of that audience in my hands or you know spreading it around her yeah all right my 32nd idea so playwrights are going to have their own convening I want to have a convening with the audiences gas so like what if we had like many convenings like all over the country with all these different theaters let's go party with your audience and find out what they are let's have like two-day things where the audience the community can be the same thing because they are in the same room and let's get talking with them I had this idea in our breakout earlier but I have a couple world premieres in Chicago this spring and so when I get home I keep thinking of like how can I make good on my promise how can I put my money where my mouth is and like do something for the theater and I was like well I you know I don't know if for the theater but for the community so I think I'm just going to like email all the playwrights I know who have world premieres in Chicago this spring so that we can sort of meet up and say how can we help each other how can we help the theaters can we do host nights for each other can we do a bingo card for new plays can we make pins and you like collecting pins can we do like a reward system how can we actually as playwrights be enhancing each other's production experiences so I had an idea inspired by the sports comment and also by the audience who's spending an hour driving home and it's something I would love to see as an audience member is I'm addicted to podcasts and I would love to listen to the pregame discussion instead of getting to the theater and then reading it in ten minutes while I have a little bit of time probably someone already does this but I would listen on my way there to a half an hour discussion and then I could you know listen to a different discussion from your website and stream it on my walk or ride or drive home and people who can't get to see the play would maybe listen to it and be inspired to see the player if they missed it they'd get that discussion so using that podcast technology I think would be just deepening the engagement and if someone already does that I'd love you and I want to listen to it in addition to fostering a spirit of generosity I would say fostering a spirit of curiosity and individual curiosity in every single person in an organization from the box office to volunteer ushers to house managers to whoever it is so that every single person has their own curiosity and personal investment in whatever the work is they can speak about it they can have face to face interactions with the audience so that no matter who is representing the work everybody is working to continue this dialogue with whoever is in the audience this is just as a I guess the only journalist in the room or like the one who makes this full time living is a journalist I would love to see something be created by people within this community that exists online that allows us to talk about the theater the way really cool websites talk about TV so that we can create a space not just for ourselves but for audiences to come and be relaxed like we're at a bar but talking deeply and with humor about the theater so that we can remind people that it's okay to be a fan of theater and have like irreverent conversations about it that don't sacrifice in any way the intelligence or passion behind the work just to piggyback on what Mark and Liz said I think that there are some artists playwrights in particular who are doing exactly what Liz suggested but they're doing it through social media through Twitter in particular Christopher Diaz or Lin-Manuel Miranda who make their sort of Twitter experiences into a kind of performance in itself but at the same time are engaging actively with huge audiences so my question is can theaters in addition to curating the experience of coming to the theater and seeing all these wonderful different plays can they devote a little bit of time to helping curate a social media experience for their audiences so that their audiences know sort of who to follow and what to experience and help connect to Mark's aspirational online presence for discussion of fabulous new plays just one thing for theaters that want to work with playwrights who better understand their audiences and that's you know be sure to I think theaters have a chance to invite playwrights to know their audiences so when you're doing all this audience development work and stuff give your identified playwrights that you want to work with free tickets for a season two seasons and have them come listen to your post-show discussion so that they know who your audience are already I mean the Huntington kind of does this with their Huntington playwriting fellows is they keep giving us tickets even though we're not fellows anymore and we keep coming and we keep getting to know their audiences and then they might work with us some day but it doesn't cost you much as a theater but the writers you want to work with know can learn who your audiences are and can write more effectively for you I would just love to see somebody pilot this in-house child care idea what if you called the theater to book a ticket and the audience service person asks you will you be needing child care that night and you pay whatever little extra that takes and then you look at how many have registered for the evening and get whoever you know intern or people who are usually ushering to take on that role and then the kids like can run around the rehearsal hall that would be cool I'll go since I have a microphone in my hand something obviously we've been talking for a really long time not necessarily here this weekend but in general about diversity issues with actors and playwrights and whatnot and something that I think we don't talk a lot about is the lack of diversity in designers because you don't see them so you don't really know and there are just as many problems in that department and I wish we had a strong focus on that you have the microphone next yeah I just want to add on that the child care concept I'd really really rather people be producing and making more work that families can come to together and I'm not talking about children's theater specifically I'm talking about attending the theater with your family and I know at the ART we have seen we've done some productions that have been geared towards families we didn't do that intentionally but the experience in the space and the way those families continue to engage with the theater and we're talking about age ranges from when I bring my own children who are under 5 and then all the way up through teenagers and beyond that is how people socialize everything we're talking about like why do people go to the theater to have this experience with people that they love whether that's friends or family made family etc so please I have the microphone hip-hop I think hip-hop has been the most popular form of music in America for over a decade now or it's been inspiring music and how many theaters have been doing hip-hop theater it's a really effective way of storytelling so I think it's something that we can embrace and see what happens with new audiences that we can bring out hi there so I just wanted to respond about the designer question the designers of color the production management forum they have launched a diversity inclusion and equity initiative which is we're about to post on the TCG diversity inclusion blog salon that Gus and I work with Dave Fina's great vision to curate so you're going to learn more about the amazing work that they're doing to do just that bring attention and awareness to the needs of designers of color I just wanted to share that information all of you were also welcome to contact me about being on the blog because my favorite thing is the outlet of voices of the individual artists in our American theater okay we've got maybe two more and then we need to move on to the next thing well this could be a topic of conversation at the upcoming playwrights revolution forum awesome but you know I can't wait to tell the board in the coming revolution surely some theaters will be spared probably some here some really amazing theaters here who make life so much better for playwrights right and I feel like if we could start talking about what it is specifically that makes those theaters such an amazing place to be a playwright at and then kind of be like here's what it looks like and maybe there's even like you know there's an award ceremony every year where it's like great news theaters you've won the it doesn't suck to work at you for a playwright award you know it's like real pressure can actually do a lot almost on that thought one more one more great idea I guess my argument would be we are a really awesome group of people I'll say I'll enjoy spending time with all of you and we're all working in engagement and audiences and playwrights and making connections and if you look around this room a lot of us look the same and I think if we are working in our theaters around engagement with audiences it is our responsibility to make sure those rooms that we are talking to at our theaters and with our communities do not look like this room sorry and that also that your discussion leaders have to I'm super aware of how wide I am and that I am not the right voice to lead every discussion alright moving on to the final final exercise which Tori will explain to you so I just want to say that I think San Francisco is equally if not more revolutionary than New York so we could anyway I'm just kidding you're all going to get a card and on the front of the card which is the unlined sign unlined side put your name and your address this is your snail mail address and on the lined side of the card we have two prompts for you the first prompt is oh thank you the first prompt is what's your biggest takeaway from the last day and a half and the second prompt is if there's any one thing you're going to do you're thinking of doing differently maybe there's nothing, maybe there's three or four things out of this jot that down and write yourself the answer to those two prompts and then we're going to collect them and we're going to do two things with them they'll actually be a kind of they'll help us glean some data for an executive summary of the final report about what we're the and then we're going to mail them back to you in about a month and you can see so yep the prompts again are first is name and address on the front and then the second is a note to yourself this is a letter to yourself or a paragraph to yourself what's your biggest takeaway from the last day and a half and with respect to the convening in the top what's the biggest takeaway and is there one, are there any couple things you are going to do differently when you go back from once you came and what should they do with them when they're done Jamie what do they do with them when they're done should we just put them on the table do we have a box, do we want to yeah just put them over here I'll put it in my own words and we'll see if this lands so first of all you address the note to yourself on the side that has no lines at all the blank side on the side that does have lines where it is more easily to write sort of in a legible manner write two things first your biggest takeaway your personal biggest takeaway from the last day and a half number two what you are going to do differently to forward this work when you get back and then we will that's all you have to do and then deposit it on the table then what we're going to do is collect all of that we will record that so that we have a sense of what are the things that people took away from the day and a half and what are the things that people are saying they're actually going to do differently to forward this work at home so we want to collect all of that so that we know and then we're going to mail these postcards back to you so you can remember we don't know they're not going to be unhappy if you share it with your organization we just don't know the way you can make it open to the public at this point sure and I think it really is actually in a good way we'll get back to some of those things that writers wrote and just before we sent them out to the world I just want to check with the playwrights I just want to talk to them and make sure that they don't have a problem with it so I think we can do that I think it's just a little bit of housekeeping yeah are you finding things we're going to do when we get home pass your cards down in this direction toward me oh he's getting a box before people slowly start filtering away we do just want to say thank you one more time first to all of you for being here this has really been an amazing time we were hoping it would be engaged we were hoping this would be a think tank we were hoping we would land in a different place and where we started and I think all of those things happened and they happened because you were here and because you were so incredibly engaged so thank you we definitely want to thank Hal around and Polly Carl and Jamie and David Dower and Hal around so we can thank you all the Hal around folks and Vijay and everyone at Hal around and and we should of course thank the Duke Foundation for doing this Ben has been a great supporter of this and there are some individuals also who have helped support this and I have to just say that I wrote to some folks in New York and I know we often are cynical about the commercial theater but actually there are several of the folks who do a lot of producing of new plays supported this project because they wanted to see it happen so thank you to everyone who has supported it and been generous in all sorts of ways so thank you it's already been done it's been broadcast coast to coast that's that Hal around thank you all so leave us your cards yeah your cards and letters coming