 So I'm happy to welcome everyone who is tuning in as well. But for those of you who are here in person, you should have found on your seat a clipboard and on that there's a little blue sheet with some very simple questions. If you could fill that out, that information is really useful to us as we describe who's interested in attending our programs. So if you fill that out, you can put it back on the clipboard and leave it under your seat. It's really valuable in helping us make a case for why new play development is important. There's also a little envelope. As the organization devoted to the playwright's process, the large number is 98% of our income from individuals and institutions that make it possible for us to keep all of our programming completely free for audiences to attend. So if you're in a position to make a contribution, whether it be $5 or a lot, lot more, all goes to providing transformative support to extraordinary playwrights. So you could just put that in the envelope. Don't put that under your seat, but there's a little burn house out by the door where you came in and you can slip the envelope right in there. We'd like to send some special thanks to some of the funders who made playwrights possible, including the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the National Endowment of the Arts with additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Axe Housing Foundation. I'd also like to acknowledge the large literary wing, which is a voluntary group of readers who each year evaluate all the plays we received for our open access program. This year they read 948 plays towards selecting this slate of seven. So we are really proud of this process and of the fact that we invite anyone anywhere to submit their work in progress for consideration. If you have a play you'd like to submit, all the info is on the website. So tonight's program should run under 90 minutes, and at a certain point we have to take questions from audience and our Twitter audience. Hashtag, hashtag theater talk, theater with an R.E., so we'll see how that goes. And if you're here in person and you want to follow along on Twitter, I suppose you can do that and you can leave your phone on, but if everyone can make sure your phones are silent, that would be really great. And once we've met the writers, we're going to open up a few bottles of wine in the lobby. In case you want to join us for a drink, you can do. Thank you again for coming to the Lark. I'm going to turn it over now to our Meet the Writers host. We're really, really thrilled to have her here. She's a literary director at the Signature Theatre, and she was a member of the Playwrights Week Final Selection Committee that chose these seven plays. Our good friend, the brilliant, Christine of Azulista. That was going to be an hour long. Now I know that was so quick and succinct and so proud. Thank you everyone for being here tonight. This is super exciting for me and for everyone at the Lark of course that is involved in this process. As someone with a job like mine, I'm often asked to read plays and choose plays for various awards or commissions or readings and stuff like that. Over the years I've really whittled it down to this one. This is a process and a week of Playwrights that I really believe in and adore and love. Part of that is the exhaustive thorough process that these readers go through. These plays are read several times. They are fought for. They are loved for voraciously. That's something that I really admire about how the Lark puts this group of plays together. I've done this for a couple of years now. Something that is really remarkable about what happens is that even though there were 948 plays and we whittled them down to seven, there always seems to be this incredible synergy and like-mindedness to the group that comes out and emerges from that process. This is a group of seven very different people from different backgrounds and different points in their careers. Somehow they're all writing plays that are about how memories make us who we are, how our experiences make us who we are, and how we're a collection of the relationships that we carry with us. There's also something about these seven plays that I love that is very unafraid of how ugly people are and how disgusting people can be. Every one of these plays, that is a play. So I think that that's really exciting that somehow through this really random, organic process this really beautiful synergy comes out in these people. And they've all met today for the first time. We just had a beautiful dinner at five o'clock in the room next door. So they're just getting to know each other and getting to know what this process is and who the young Lark staff are. And we're really excited to embark upon this week and to get to know each other better and to hear from all of you and to hear from each other. So thank you guys all for being here, and thank you all for showing us off. So what's going to happen is I'm going to go through all seven of them and I'm going to ask them a couple sort of getting to know you questions, getting to know your play questions, and they're going to be short excerpts from their words for you. So you're actually going to get to hear the playwrights read the plays. Rare and exciting, and I think it's delightful. So I'm very excited to let people judge this week. We're going to go in the order of their readings this week. So you'll get a sense of how this week is going to play out by looking at this row of beautiful people next to me. So let's start with the gorgeous Lauren. Hey, hello. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for being here with us. Your play is called The Tiger Among Us. And when is your reading? My reading is Wednesday at 3 p.m., so two days. Right. And you've already been rehearsing. Yeah, we have about ten hours of rehearsal throughout the entire process and we're about maybe seven hours in. So I have one more rehearsal. Oh, and by the way, I will be monitoring my cell phone for timekeeping purposes throughout this event. So do not think that I'm like texting or tweeting. I'm really monitoring it. So Lauren, one of my favorite lines of dialogue ever is from this play. It is, white people spend money on the dumbest shit. That is a great line. I totally get it. I know what you're saying. But my question for you is, what do you spend your money on? These things. Okay, yeah. Or rather, if you had money, how would you spend it on? That is what I would do. Oh, I think my husband and I were talking about this last night because he's like very anti-gift or very anti-thing. Like it's our anniversary tonight and he was like, don't buy me anything. And like your gift to me can be like that I don't have to buy you anything. And we're actually moving next week. So we're both like, oh, we hate how much stuff we have. So I think like experiences are a great way to spend your money. I read this article on how to elongate things. I read this article on how to elongate time and experience time in a more full way. And they talk about how if you want to feel like you've had a long day, do something different. So instead of like walking to work the same way, you go a different path because your brain will map, will kind of map the different way and it'll feel like you've like gained extra time. And so the way that I think it would be cool to approach life is that you spend your money on like new experiences because it will make it feel like you've actually had a longer life. Yeah. Howard, what are you getting him for your anniversary? I think we're actually getting him for his anniversary. Yeah, I was dying to know. Yeah. Just to spot the afternoon. That's great. And then to move on to the play. So even though this play is incredibly universal and large actually in scope, we were all really inspired by the very specific community of people that you're writing about and by perhaps a news story that inspired you to write the play. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of the play and about the particular community you're writing about? Yeah. So this play The Tiger Among Us is about the Hmong American community that lives actually in Minnesota. Minnesota for whatever reason has the second largest Hmong population in the United States. And a lot of these people came from Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. They were refugees. And they came to Minnesota because you had a lot of friendly Lutherans who were happy to have them. And I kind of, I think it was like six years ago, found myself spending a month-long retreat in like outside Minnesota during hunting season. And I think just being in that landscape, in like this tiny town really like was the setting for this play years later. And while I was in Minnesota, I got to kind of know a lot of Hmong American artists living there and really got interested in this like vibrant community that is like very supportive of one another and just inexplicably in Minnesota. Oh, and the article that you're referring to is, I forget what exact year it was, but maybe about ten years ago there was a shooting in Wisconsin that background is that in the Hmong community, they love hunting. Regular Midwesters also really enjoy hunting. And throughout the years there's been a lot of tensions between the Hmong and white hunters out there. And this was an incident where a Hmong hunter was hunting on private land that was not his. And some white, six white hunters confronted him about this and shot and killed all six of them. And this kind of set off, this was really interesting for me because it was the incident that I heard a lot about, but there were also incidents of white hunters killing Hmong hunters. Like there just seems to be this like cycle of violence that is going on and has been going on for years that I really find tragic and fascinating and that was kind of like the genesis for this piece. So why don't you set up your excerpts for us? So you'd have to pretend that I am an Asian American man in his 20s. His name is Pau and he is talking to a class of middle school students. Okay, so my name's Pau. You can call me Mr. P. That's cool if you want. Ms. G is out moving her car, but she said I should probably get started. Okay, so Hmong. Everyone, they want to know what Hmong is. Everyone around here, they like, what the fuck? Excuse my mom. But they like, fuck, it's cold up in here and we're all freezing our asses off and there are these tropical Asians showing up. I thought we were all blind up in here. So I can tell you what Hmong is, but it's like real secret, like I'm going to kill you secret. No shit. Okay, so Hmong. We come from a bunch of different countries. We ain't got no, like, Hmong country because I guess nobody likes us, which I get, I don't like me either, story of my life. And we're from all over and we're in fucking China and then fucking Chinese, no offense, no big Chinese. Fucking Chinese. So we go down to Laos and fucking Laos or Laotians. They're also like, fuck you, and they try to kill us but they can't because we're tropical survivors with the tigers and lions and flesh-eating monkeys. We hunt those dudes for breakfast. We eat tiger for breakfast. Tony the tiger cat. Because we're CIA motherfuckers. You ever heard of this shit? About how the American government recruited Hmong guys to fight the Viet Cong for them. Because I guess Asian on Asian violence is cheaper. And we eat steak for the protein. We bite the shit out of them head first and swallow the whole thing up. They're like noodles to us. It's staying wrong. That's our Thanksgiving dinner. People are like, oh yeah, turkey. And we're like, oh yeah, steak. Nah, I'm just playing, we don't really eat steak. We have big families and we eat a lot. I figure that's like everyone else but... It was a beautiful long Italian last day. So I feel like he is a kindred spirit. This play is The Lucky Ladies. When is your play happening? It is happening Wednesday night at 7. Wonderful, wonderful. So doing some internet stalking of you, you said that you're interested in investigating pop culture and reality TV and this is a questioning that you keep coming back to in court. Can you please tell us a really embarrassing story or two? About pop culture obsessions from your past, perhaps when you were a kid or a junior high. Or if you feel like there's nothing embarrassing about you, what are your favorite contemporary TV shows? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't really believe in guilty pleasures. I think I just, you know, I'm not ashamed. So I wrote a play a lot a year ago about Justin Bieber. And so that started as a purely scientific research. But by the end I kind of found what people liked about Justin Bieber. So I was touched. I can't help you. But okay, and you said TV shows, guilty pleasure TV shows. I mean, you know, the Bachelor is kind of tops, right? And anything on TV, which is just trash, but the life of glorious trash. So your play contains some really fantastic, maybe disgusting, visceral stage directions that I love, that I'm really obsessed with. Or rather descriptions of what we see on stage and we're not going to give a lot of stuff away about the play in this event, I hope. That at least for me got me thinking about the sort of possibilities of this stage and what we can do theatrically, what we can do live in front of live people. Can you talk about what excites you about getting real or getting graphic on stage? I mean, I think as a theatre maker you have to take advantage of what makes theatre unique as a medium in our world of TV and film and all of the media we have surrounding us. And theatre always comes down to that it is live, it is someone, actually, they are in the room with you actually being present. So I feel like it's about, in a certain way, taking advantage of that. And then also kind of then, yeah, not shying away from the extremes there and not being afraid to kind of play in the murky, muddy kind of humanity. And again, it's all about this live experience that might as well really dig deep into the humanness that makes us what we are on stage and kind of share that with an audience and with the performers on stage. So, yeah, that's kind of where I come from. Okay. Why don't you set up your... So this character's name is Dina and she is a 34-year-old contestant on a reality TV game show. Thank you for being a friend Travel down the road and back again Your heart is true, you're a pal and a confidant And if you threw a card at me You invited everyone you knew You would see the biggest gift would be from me And the card attached would say Thank you for being a friend You know, you ever think... You ever think we're like those old hats on Golden Girls? Like young, beautiful versions of those old hats on Golden Girls? Like, bitch is obviously the little one but like, little, witchy, tiny, zombie, near-death, already dead one And Cindy's like Betty White Duh, little dumb, stupid, brain-dead Betty White doesn't know where she is half the time Betty White And you're like that slutty Southern one that like, trampy, kind of sleazy one that like, sex-starved one with the accent And I'm the Arthur, obviously because I'm a badass and I don't take any shit from anybody and I just look at all you basic bitches and like, scowl but in a pretty one I just look and scowl and judge you because you are all so silly You ever think about that? My reading is Thursday night at 7 p.m. So, I found this really long detail quite funny, but I love you on the interwebs and it sort of went through how you made a series of choices in your life so how you chose theater over football how you chose acting over being a male escort and then about how you chose writing over acting which is a great choice I think and then about how you ended up in LA to work in film and TV As theater people constantly faced with the lore of LA and living in a sunny place tell us, if you could switch one thing about LA with one thing about New York City what would you switch and why? The people You know what? It took me a long time to be like LA You just never get any honest conversation and it's really hard to meet people and have legitimate conversation In New York you can go inside a bar and have great conversation about arts and politics and religion and get real opinions and in LA people are scared because they're wondering who you are who you could be and could you employ them and like I go to restaurants and I just hate the people and it's really hard because I love that the quality of life is better It's cliche to say it's superficial but it's superficial It's just upper layer and so like I have no friends there How long have you been there? How long have you been here? You have a family there That's part of the reason I met one other guy and we were at a this little playground gymnasium for kids and this guy walks up to me and he's like hey check out that nanny she's not even watching a kid I was like well let's watch the kid then I started talking and all of a sudden I was like you're not from here So yeah, that was my first friend So I have to write it when I get back So one of the things that I loved about your play was how beautifully you nail what it's like to be in a family of either all brothers or all sisters I'm one of four girls in my family so I felt like there was a lot to relate to in your play when it comes to that Can you tell me what is unique about the relationship between brothers and how you came up with this trio of guys who are very different and yet are obviously such a part of one other Well it's someone autobiographical and some I should say the positioning or the hierarchy I'm the oldest so I have 300 brothers and since I was the first this will actually clear it up I was the vaginal birth and the other three were C-sections So like if anybody knows that's the difference in some ways because I was the chosen one who could fight through the tunnel and my mom was like no, get about I just want to die So it seems like a lot of guilt I can't look at it So that's how the relationship kind of stopped in some ways because I've always been that and then of course because I was the oldest I was really mean to my brothers I lost my father really young so I became the man of the house so I would beat them all up And I felt that I actually apologized to them like four years ago I didn't want them to be really angry at me but they were like no, you helped this me men I was like no, but do you understand like I wronged you I did some psychological damage you are mean to your children and they're like no you did the best you could I was like no, this isn't the you're supposed to cry and drink you're supposed to punch me so I run and play that's how I got it out set up your excerpt so this is the opening of the play the oldest brother has been traveling after the mother committed suicide the oldest brother left and has been traveling to work at natural disasters he felt like if he could help people he could explain his life but he decides to come back after a five year absence I apologize to his mother and apologize to his brothers for who he was so this is the opening scene one night December 24th a Cheech and Chong Christmas plays on the radio a smile light comes up on the dashboard Eric ducks down in the passenger seat and digs through a grocery bag he pulls out a package of Kubasa sausage and begins to unwrap it I close my eyes and I try to remember what you were like and all I see is anger my hand raised ready for a swipe you were one tough lady didn't take shit from no one I know it wasn't easy having to raise three boys practically on your own but that doesn't explain why you were absent I play back my childhood memories my victories, my defeats, my awards and I can't find a single one where you were oh oh you must have been there in the background waving a pom-pom holding a sign wearing the skull color saying looking back I can't see your face in any of them it's like you weren't there at all oh oh I do remember the rice with ground beef that was good spicy I loved it when you made rice with ground, with ground shit no, huh come on, no, oh man I can't believe this of course this would happen to me why, come on okay, relax you can figure this out, you're nervous so it's probably constricted, relax there you go okay, relax a reach for it shit, I can't you can figure this out, I can go home like this, maybe I can push it out at a rest stop or on the John siren, it's a police car no Andrew walks up, he talks on the window you alright? yeah can you lower your window? sure Eric is that you? hey won't you get back you're a cop? yeah won't you become a cop? started the academy three weeks after you left what are you doing back? tomorrow's Christmas I know what tomorrow is, don't fucking start I'm not starting anything I'm just surprised, you're the last person I thought I'd see out here yeah well, I thought it was time to see her next to Mando is Diana Grisanti her play of paint what is your play? it is Friday at 3 p.m awesome, please be there so in your bio, I'm going after you for all your bios, this is what you get you tell us that you get your best ideas when you're in rehearsal but also when you're walking briskly and when you're driving long distances can you tell us what are some of the amazing ideas you've had along the midst of those activities let's see, well my partner is also a playwright Steve Golds, he's great he is great he's watching on Halloween and we really like to drive far we take baseball road trips and we went to Pittsburgh to watch a baseball game this year, so that was fun so we wrote this crazy serialized play last year in 12 installments so every month we had to write a new 15 minute play so it was like one month from first draft to production and so we had an overarching idea, we had ideas for how it was all going to play out but I would say we took one road trip up to Cleveland to see Rich Girl by Tori Stewart another awesome playwright, hi Tori, you're out there and and there was a music box in the play and we didn't really know why it was there we knew there was a music box on stage but on that trip to Cleveland we figured out what the game was so your fabulous play loops and twists time in this really fantastic way that keeps us guessing and investing in your main character throughout it and in your application you've even included a wonderful graph of how the play is structured, something I had never seen quite enjoyed it you are and she's really into math yeah I'm not like amazing at math but I could do like middle school math which I tutors did you sort of set out to be formally daring when you wrote the play or did your story sort of demand it like why did you choose to tell your story in this movie I actually feel like it's not formally daring because it's like comfort to me to have a structure to hang on to so I think more daring would be like no structure allowed just like characters talk and then I'm like no there has to be like a blueprint so I don't know it doesn't feel daring to me but maybe it is did structure come first or narrative come first I think narrative came first narrative came first for sure I had this like idea about the call center tell us about your play and about the excerpt you're about to well my play takes place over several nights of insomnia and so the main character Ada buys this like self-help document off the internet and so she meets the doctor, Dr. Carol who is not she's more she's a specter so this is between Ada and Dr. Carol and Dr. Carol is trying to convince Ada to make a change so Dr. Carol will be over here I would advise you to leave I haven't showered leave your job Ada make a radical change oh no I can't do that I call it a life vacation it's a term I coined in my first document vacationing life I can't afford to vacation my life once your mind is clear your path will reveal itself but I don't have any skills you went to divinity school that's not funny was I being funny were you I don't understand your sense of humor you have a higher calling Ada I don't we all do but it's really hard to find work right now when I moved here I applied to 187 places retail, restaurant, tutoring, babysitting pet sitting, data entry, warehouse I said I could lift 50 pounds I have no idea if I could lift 50 pounds how much is that like a 10 year old or a large dog you applied to these jobs yes 187 of them that's where you went wrong never apply for a job Ada apply yourself it's really hard to find work right now don't work live the life you love and get paid for it I'm not sure how to do that which is why we're taking this journey together I want to share some of myself with you 15 years ago I was living high on the hog corporate job, high six figures with gorgeous men wearing expensive suits but was I happy do you think I was happy I'm guessing no so I left that job and that salary and those many many sex partners and look at me now I used to have wrinkles on my forehead where those wrinkles go Ada where they go those wrinkles stay right where they belong I'm a sphincter of corporate America I made the change Ada so can you thank you Diana Diana is the lovely Walter Scott from Boston from lovely Boston and his play is Chop, what is your name? my reading is on Friday at 7 so I hear that you once dislocated your shoulder can you tell me about that can you tell me that story? I can and I was sitting with some friends watching a movie while sitting on a bed there was a captain's bed in my defense so I had drawers underneath and I made some smart ass remark and my friend playfully pushed me off the edge of the bed and I thought I was on the edge of the bed and I had a very clear moment where I thought I can either catch myself or I can carry this joke through to its logical conclusion and pretend to fall off the bed and then discovered that gravity doesn't actually care if you're pretending or not because about half way down I just started falling instead of pretending to fall and caught myself like this which was actually fine for about 30 seconds and it wasn't until I stood up and all my friends were asking if I was okay and to prove that I was okay I did this that how's it doing today? it's a little clicky sometimes but I think we're through the woods for the first part so your play has a sort of science fiction sheen to it we'll say and in my reading I would say that science fiction though it's fantastic and outlandish and both great things like spaceships it actually tells us a lot about what it means to be human and about what our employables are what is your relationship with or experience of science fiction? deep thorough when we were in all boys middle school where we all were cooks and ties and I had aviator glasses and a cowlick and braces and so was not the alpha male but I took they had a in sixth grade they had a reading class and which was just part of the assignment was every week you had to read a book and the professor whose name was Dr. Peebles which is my favorite professor name in the world and he looked like a Dr. Peebles and over 50 years of teaching middle school boys assembled this library in the back of the room that was all pulp science fiction fantasy novels so it was Asimov and Bruce Colville and Douglas Adams and just this whole sort of cornucopia of speculative fiction and fantasy novels and so that became a sort of weekly reading and that was it's sort of stereotypical to say but that was sort of the escape and that was fun and it does you know I think something about sci-fi and fantasy sort of lets you get out of your own experience and out to look back onto it and reflect on it and think about it and sort of unpack it in a safe space that also has lasers so it always played a really big role for me and then in about eighth grade the Star Wars special editions came out and so I was like gone forever at that point it was sold at that point and have you written plays and have you done science fiction before? I write a lot of genre plays this is my first sort of hard sci-fi play I wrote one where a girl gets possessed by the internet but that was more of a sci-fi comedy and then I've written a sort of high romance washbuckling farce I like bouncing around to tropes and story styles because again I feel like it sort of works that you can tell a story within where you can unpack the themes of the story in a different setting in a surprising setting Can you set up your accent for us? Sure, so chalk it's a mother and a daughter so I wrote it for myself it is set after an apocalyptic event the mother is inside of a chalk circle that's drawn on the ground and her daughter has come back and has been trying to get the mother to talk but has not been entering the circle she's been standing outside of it so I guess the daughter will be here and the mom will be here and we'll go from there don't tell me to shut up I came back for you no you didn't yes I did no you didn't yes I fucking did and I brought food too I brought it back for you for both of us but you're not back what the hell are you talking about it's me with lots of food and it'd be great if you thanked me just once maybe for it bring it here what? bring some food here for me I thought you weren't hungry of course I'm hungry I've been stuck in this circle for two weeks alone so give me something don't throw it give it to me hand to hand walk it over throwing is not leaving like manners are a little outdated mom hand it over right here now no I didn't think so I don't have to prove anything yes you do you should be coming to me too bad then stick your hand out stick your hand in I can't do that why not because I want you to no and you know why because you're being a bitch is why I think why do I have to do all the work because you're not who am I you're one of them and you took her and you're using her and you're not her I know my own daughter and I want you to tough shit I wrote the fabulous play girl on class my reading is Saturday at 3 in your bio which I also love your frustrations with living in Utah are quite palpable can you tell me if you were in charge of Utah if you were the president of Utah how would you change it there are many lovely things about Utah okay so like I should start with that because I do feel like people probably are watching me on that camera so I want to start with the good there are lots of lovely things about Utah I teach a university there my students are amazing and my colleagues are amazing and they are really lovely genuine people maybe the opposite of that they are so genuine that sometimes it hurts let's see okay well if I was the president of Utah you could buy wine in the grocery store if I was the president of Utah there would be something to do on Sundays if I was the president of Utah it would not snow so damn much I guess I'm the god of Utah now that's right yeah I think Utah is a changing and developing state so some things they got to work out but definitely wine in the grocery store would be my number one thing so there are these wonderfully open scenes in the play in which you ask the actors and director to create and stage their own memories which become very significant parts of the narrative why did you think it was so important for you to be open to your collaborators' processes and why did you choose to structure them I think it goes back to what was already said about what theater can do that's different and better than all other art forms which for me one of those things is collaboration every show is different it's ephemeral, it changes and I some people really resist that and worry about that and write lots of stage directions but I've decided to lean into that so I was really interested in what would happen so there they're not staging their own memories they're really specific memories that are there but they're just kind of described a little bit and then I leave it up to them however they want to interpret the memory if it's their multimedia or improvisation or dance or I don't know circus dog tricks I don't know how dog tricks work but I really was curious what would happen if I made it so that every production would be its own unique thing and that they would be collaborating with me in a really active way and that was really exciting to me can you tell us more about your play about the excerpt both of my play takes place in this weird store filled with glowing glass jars that's open 24 hours a day and the woman who's hired to work there is never allowed to leave but if she stays for a year and a half and works there or I guess if she stays for a year she gets a million dollars as long as she never leaves this scene is the delivery man who accidentally wanders into that store and he is in this weird space that's not quite I guess it's kind of like limbo and he meets a guy named Tom and neither of them know what they're doing so we're starting with Tom this conversation will be easier with music it's easy to make that happen here but you know he snaps his fingers music plays he likes to cigarette I've been here before you're not the first guy I'm very confused that's because of the jar put down the jar Edgar does it's best that you never visit truly again but I you don't how do you know I've been here before you love her too and the last thing I want is truly why are you here then what do you want you're carrying my jar I want my jar back give it back and don't touch it again I'm sorry he pushes over the jar with his foot careful what's in it that's none of your business actually I don't know I just know it's mine oh why are you yelling at me then it's important I know that we could open it you can't just open it there are a lot of rules about this jar of whatever yes truly knows what's in it how does truly know that's her job you should ask her who are you have we ever met no but I feel like we have business together me too is there something you need delivered I don't think so that's my line of business delivering things what things all kinds of things almost what do you do I'm a writer a good one maybe once I haven't written anything in a very very long time oh in fact I should say I'm a drinker that's what I do now mostly can you be a professional drinker I'm giving it a go although I still put words on the page and hope they add more to letters than letters soaked in gin do they nope but a little more gin my brain clicks over and I don't care you snap your fingers here you get music I haven't figured out yet how to snap my fingers and get every most biz last but certainly not least is Encel Chang's play is No More Sad Things when is your reading it's on Saturday at 7 p.m. is a reception so so I I know that you and I are like and we are both great lovers of musicals that's sort of my background as well a lot of my work is in musicals you write them and direct them and translate that into Korean so I would love to know what are some of the toughest translation hurdles you face I noticed that you translated Evil Dead the musical into Korean I'd love to know sort of how you if there are any funny stories from making those those musicals alive or terribly sad well it's a I once got when my company with me got sued by a man of La Mancha because they thought our jokes weren't funny oh no it's funny in Korean it wasn't but we had to make I don't know Spanish fictional nights sound funny in Korean I think that the hardest but most fun was Spending Bee Spending Bee I imagine I mean they aren't the beds so if you don't know the show Spending Bee is basically a musical about these kids who come and spell words or it is in English and the joke comes from the definitions of the words and like how to use it in a sentence in English stuff like that my company got the rights out reading the play because it was you know hits on Broadway and they got it and they were like oh no we can't do this so they were going to chuck it I was like no I'll pick it and do a workshop of it the whole thing and I I met Rachel later on in the workbook and confessed to her what I did but we had to change all the jokes and the words no one's going to laugh if you're going to try and spell the Gooblius in Korean so 15 years we do have in Korean or so it's just funny to ask to spell like that sentence in Korean is funny so yeah I think that was the most fun rewarding Gooblius so your play is partially set in Maui and I've been there recently so I was very struck by how present that setting felt and how detailed and how true it felt in that place and it's a really specific place and a very sort of wild and unique place why did you think now we would make a great setting for this story and what time have you spent there and what your experiences have been it's actually happened the other way around I was having a week because I went to play white often dude and I was doing a white so I went to her she fed me and we were like hey tomorrow morning let's go to Maui you can do that if you live in Hawaii and I actually sat in our Kata Pali beach where the play set and so much boys jumping off the cliff that was really fun I should do that but I was just scared it just sponsored my brain also my play set in my heart and I decided the next play I was going to write I'm going to set it in Maui and it's going to be called no more sad things don't care what it's about that's what it's going to be and it's going to be exciting kind of your excerpt for us it's not much really so yeah it's about this woman who's on a plane going to Maui and there's a guidebook that's just into these different types of characters but I'm going to be both a guidebook and Jesse is the woman on a plane hate planes hate, hate, hate planes I'm sensing it's 25A squashed up between a view of the Pacific sea and it's a very huge marine and it hails in nine different spinal surgeries he's about to show me the scar that runs from my ear to the shoulder blade blade to T12 T12 to bladder that to the tailbone kind of looks like a skinny dragon so I pretend to fall asleep which he takes as a cue to fall asleep to on my shoulder I'm 32 so all for this to be cute you know but I'm stuck here barely breathing because of the fear of cracking something that is for a man's body and I can just hear my mom ha, think you can leave me here and be free that's where you end up wedged in there like a thumb in an asshole that's unfair she never said that she never said anything more than five word sentences in the past couple months she's depressed she's but none more sad things my mom, well that's her soul is the most angelic, beautiful, clueless person in the world faithful to the church she got cancer somewhere in the knees had to get the blood chopped off and the knees still thinks the worst thing about being legless is that she can't kneel down to cry so when I announced that I'm headed for the bullet in my eyes of the west side all she said was be safe okay I said I'd bring back a grandchild for her would she mind boy or girl or something in between she said oh oh how about those magazines and other things covered in chocolate I don't know why I'm not there he serves me right, abandoning your legless mom's go catch a bra I'm thinking yeah this right here is the rest of the trip my smallness waged between the world grew large and there's no way I'll ever budge from my small stupid seat and then I start to feel like it count the dates and realize yay that's great do my right bring me marine do my left stay put and soon we both be sitting in a pool of blood they want to practically climb out of my gorge and I might break him or wake him or and you know we look so peaceful so what's it going to do this is what I do find the tampon slide hand in defense all of which are expertly concealed by clothes and blankets then slowly silently with the focus of mr. me all this in the confines of 25a y'all taking care of personal needs in public spaces that is a tough one I can do this I can go to the fucking movie do you guys have any questions for each other I don't know I'm curious to know a process of such a non-word is there something you do to get going with the writing I mean for a while for me it used to be the pinball on my card I don't know that's sort of like zoning in on my own self switching the brain off do you have some ritual like that the pressure of a deadline I mean it sounds silly but even like giving like giving myself deadlines or getting better getting other people to give me deadlines so I know that for me I really like finding a theme song for the play or more like a soundtrack in general just something that I can not listen to while I write but kind of like before or around the act of writing it's getting the right theme my wife's a writer as well and she talks about feeling like you have to sort of sneak up on what you're writing you always sort of get it out of your peripheral vision and to do that I do a lot of walking around writing the train and using the music and when I'm actually writing I'll write a couple pages so I sort of walk circles around my house and I have a lot of little toys on my desk that I just sort of like it's very cat-like any other questions? I have a question for the group that I've already asked if the essence of your playwright through play was a meal what meal would that be what meal would that be in case I was in here that's a great question of this play? yes stumped alright I think I have something really creepy nursery rhyme about the pie with all the black birds in it that you're like oh it's pie it's not pie it's birds even banana you can barely eat have you ever really not been hungry because I'm always hungry at one time when I was like truly not hungry it was like scary like I couldn't finish this banana so yeah yeah I'm finished classic classic we're all going really appetizing mine is a can of cold baked beans you know I'm really wanting to do a yummy play I would say something hot and sizzly stewy that you can boil I answered if you're from Texas you would know this it's a library with cheese I think mine because it's set in Minnesota in November there's something that they have there called the juicy loop seat which is like cheese inside a hamburger they put hamburger meat they put hamburger meat around it and then you just kind of bite into this like mullabba center of cheese and if like bourbon stew gets all over it's like but it's too warm any other clearance a thorough question or shall we open it up I have one okay if you all are president of the American theater or if you live at US American theater uh president of the American theater what would you do produce a microwave produce my play I think I would decree that every two square miles of space in any city needed at least one theater space and one rehearsal space available bringing out a way to bring more money into the regional theater that would allow them to take more risks with new dangers I think I would propose an initiative to like redefining what American theater is like I think these could get stuck in this old construct of what American theater is but I mean this is a great example of what theater today is but I don't think it's reflective okay let's take some questions either the Twitterverse or our fabulous in-house audience raise hands and ask your question and I'll repeat it it's hard to hear an inquisitive thought yes right there how are you approaching these 10 hours of rehearsal is it just kind of making a reading happen or you have a small goal or a big goal what are your goals for the 10 hours it's a great question we got practice on this this is something that we just talked about since it's a post apocalyptic play I realized I should decide what the apocalypse was like and what the rules of the world are so the play was written as sort of a patchwork of a few different events and figuring out now that they're all stitched together where the questions are about the rules of the world and how things work now and what means what and what's important for the audience to know is something that I'm listening for and working with the actors and the director to suss out and sort of tighten them just kind of smoothing down the rough edges I think because my play is like a ghost story and there's like these multiple layers of like past and present like what I'm really trying to figure out is like the rules of the world and how everything operates and I think what's great about this process of the mark is that they acknowledge that your play is going to be in many different places and that we're not presenting these plays like we are done, please produce them although that can be good too we are allowed to kind of present where we are at this point in time and so I think that takes a lot of pressure off of making the 10 hours of like putting up like a polished reading so much as like a check-in Yeah, I mean I think with 10 hours you can either do one or two things on the big scheme is either use the 10 hours to like sort of sculpt it if the play is there it's sort of like take out neatness words or like insert funny jokes or you could like blow it up and do something completely not the play that you wanted to do and and like see what happens because you have the resources and you have the people who will read them and then you can read back and I think that's the best way to get understanding of what you've just done to the play is to like just have people do them have the actors inviting them to try them out and I don't know, we had this whole conversation during Xenna, but what our goals are it seems like a lot of us are going to try things and dig deep up that's pretty exciting There's a lot of room for risk Yeah, I mean There's just a lot of room for risk which is fun Who would you adopt when you had a friend who was dying of a grand disease it doesn't even have to be a grand disease but you had no other patients who had that disease to study and the dilemma you faced was do you reject yourself with the disease or do you go on to something else to study it The question is if you were a doctor and your friend was dying of a rare disease would you infect yourself with that disease in order to help your friend be cured Is it your friend or a patient? How good of him? Do I have interns? Well it wouldn't hold up with FDA testing If I inject myself how does that help my friend? Are you studying the effects on you when you come out alive and find out a way to treat it? What if you don't come out alive? Do you say you come out alive? I would say you come out alive You can only put your guarantees you can use them to come out alive That was a very hard one Thanks, but it sounds like a bullet All the way in the background What draft is your play at this time? What draft is your play at this time? Your play How do you count drafts? How do you count drafts? I tend to write the whole thing in my head and then put it on paper It's kind of draft 2 but also draft 16 depending on how you look at it I tend to go I'll do a draft from a character's perspective and then go back into the other characters I don't wind up with a lot of numbered ones but I would say it's maybe 4-ish I've done a few rewrites of it and I have sat around a table and talked about it a few times but this is the most condensed one that's been done on it Yeah, I can't even begin to say I feel like it's always the document about being in movement until someone needs it someone outside of it you know, you're a couple more things Yeah, I still put numbers on it I just do like for my go or the one where they have sex or the numbers don't really help Is this Jennifer? Jenny Yeah I have a lot of play-reading I had actually drawn 3-in-1 3-in-1 and this particular play-write didn't tell us in the beginning but then we just find out that she wrote the play with no stage direction and no names or characters just no punctuation just for so much I wouldn't say translation so it was really even one more level so I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you said about being collaborative and to extend studies in your place and what kind of variations you can think of out of leaving that door open Sure I do have punctuation There's that I have seen the memories done as hip-hop dance that worked in some places for me and didn't work in other places I think I think I hesitate to answer the question just because it's really exciting to sort of know that I can't dream up all of the weird things that could be done I mean I guess you could do them with like shadow puppets puppets are always awesome animation so I think the great thing is not knowing right? no I mean it's everything so the memories now I really feel like I should have wrote a memory but they're just sort of a description of memories they're actually other people's memories I stole them with people's permission on Facebook and I was like what is a memory that you would either really want to keep forever or you would never want to remember again and so people gave them to me and so they're in the play and they're just sort of described like their colors and their images and they're the meanings of them but there isn't action or dialogue or character so you're saying just parts of the play okay so it's like what it is yeah yeah so there's I think like 18 scenes instead of the memories or something so the memories are open yeah in your bio you say that you also are directing how does that influence your writing and also to the rest of the panel if you have directed or active has that how does it also influence your writing how does directing influence your writing I started off as a writer in Korea then I came to school to be able to direct you at first and I think as a writer I probably wasn't being in the office when I started it took a while for me to just sort of let it go and now I think I'm beginning to actually let that influence my work and more letting myself legalize the things that I'm writing and like see it first because that's not a crime feel make sure that I'm talking about other people's expectations but I think I mean actually acknowledge that and open that up to actually it's fine if you're staging it as you're writing it it just makes it more detailed and more that's how I understand it so I think as much as you can I mean if you're a designer and a writer though you have to let your strengths influence what you're making so and also I was in the the other director which somehow makes my plays musical I think is the way the song ended it's not right there did anyone else want to tackle the director question? I mean I direct too and I think maybe that's part of the reason that I don't feel like I'm stretching this in is because I know that when you direct you want to honor the playwright's vision it can be I'm not as exciting so leaving things open for interpretation I guess it's like a compromise leaving things open for interpretation but not leaving it to where you never want to do this director he's like Romeo and Juliet in space so it's a compromise position yeah I think you're writing a script you're not writing a script for the audience you're not writing a script for the people you're going to be putting the play together with and so I've done acting and directing and I feel like they doing those things although I like writing so much better taught me how to talk to directors and actors and write in a way that hopefully we'll get those artists excited about the challenges in the play and sort of help build that collaboration we'll turn to one more question yeah can you explain more about what you meant by you need to be in motion do you have to do that so I can be in motion how does being in motion help Dan um sometimes it's a huge challenge for me as a writer is that I am an extrovert and I really like being around people and so like being alone and writing is actually like awful and I hate it so so I think road trips are like unique in that I am often alone but I'm going somewhere to like hang out with people and sometimes I'm in the car with one other person um so these moments between between like it's like a moment before the treat of getting to hang out and so then like it's like a time for myself and I can sort of think about all sorts of ideas and that's true about like walking for school or running or exercise or whatever but I can that's like a good moment to be alone because I'm like productive and alone and I'm not just like sad thank you guys so much for staying and doing this and thank you all