 You may have to go. Hi. I'm here. I'm hearing it out of that speaker, but it's not very loud. Welcome, welcome. My name is Andrea Stalowitz. I'm the Toronto Skilled Rep for Oregon. I'm also a playwright and it is my pleasure to introduce Emily Mann, who as you guys know from your program notes, is the artistic director of the MacArthur Theatre Center and has been for 21 seasons? Yes. 21 seasons. The Carter Theatre Center is a Tony award winning for regional theatre, won an award for regional theatre for the Tonys, and also it's just an amazing advocate for artists for playwrights, actors, directors. Emily herself is a playwright, obi award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-winning, many many many other awards, and also as herself a director. So she wears many many hats, which is exciting and pretty unique in the American theatre. So I have a couple questions that I'm going to ask Emily and then I'll open the floor to you guys because I'm sure you all have questions. So the first thing I'd like to talk about is, well let me first say that for my generation of theatre artists, it's your theatrical theatre, it's sort of your generation and you. And something that I, we have more to talk about. Because you're one of the first women to really pioneer directing on main stages. I think you were the first woman to go through? Yes. And really sort of pioneering a path that women hadn't prior to that been able to take. And so I looked to your generation and I think wow that's an amazing role that's been set out for us. Thank you. And so I guess one of my questions was, who are and who are your theatrical heroes? That's an interesting question. First of all I want to thank you for that. There are very few young women, certainly the women in their 20s that are coming just to intern and assist me, who knew that there was a time when women didn't direct professionally and did not have these opportunities. So it's so nice to hear that you do know because it was some hard times making it happen. I didn't have the wonderful experience that so many younger people have now. I think the new work for the 21st century is mentor. I'm mentoring a lot of people. I didn't ever have a mentor. I never had someone who took me on and championed me and helped me along. I think it's a wonderful thing to do and I think I'm doing it with so many talented people because I want to give them what I didn't have. So when you ask me who my heroes were, it depends on which hat I'm wearing. If I'm wearing my artistic director hat, I would say Zelda the Chandler at the United States, one of the great, great pioneers. I would say Joseph Pat for all of his Mishigas, he was so fabulous and so dedicated and believed in new work and believed in risky work and believed in telling the stories that matter in this world, no matter what the cost. He also took on some of the worst critics of our day and he just, you know, Charlene Woodard was just here and she was talking about a friend of ours who's a real warrior and she was doing all of these things. Well, Joe Pap was a real warrior too and I loved that about him and I loved he did what he believed in with a huge vision. And I guess Lloyd Richards, because Lloyd championed the work of African-American artists, first director to director Ryan Hensbury on Broadway and he himself I think was the first African-American director, if I'm correct, on Broadway. Maybe I'm one of the earliest though, not the first. And then when he ran at the Yale School of Drama, all the work he did with August Wilson and then not only people of color but also he championed the work of women and all really talented young voices. So I just, I love that about him. If it comes to playwrights, the list is kind of too long. I mean it's almost the list of the people who are coming to this conference. Except for I supposed to be have a meeting next door in an hour or two and every all being I were going to be together talking about our relationship both as writers and me as a director of his work and he felt this morning so he couldn't come. But Edward is one of my heroes. He also taught me that when you're a playwright you have the power to make your work in your own vision. And I think so often playwrights don't know the power they have. He told me when he was first going to the first rehearsal of Who's the Finder Virginia Wolf in New York, his then producer Richard Barr said you just remember everyone in this room is here because of you because you wrote this play. And he said it suddenly gave him breath and confidence. All these people are here because they believe in what you put on that page. The producers are here, the money was raised, the actors have said yes and the designers have said yes, that's why. And so you have to keep fast, hold fast to your vision. And so when I've worked with him, one of the things he taught me is everything down to the last prop and detail he wants to approve. Now it can drive you absolutely nuts and it is obvious that you have to listen to him. But he's also usually right. And I just thought that's a good thing to be saying to a group of fellow writers that we have to believe in ourselves and the drama skill gives you the tools to do so and all you have to do is fulfill the rights that are given to you in the minimum basic agreement of the drama skill. You get to have casting approval, you get to have design approval. So I would say, I could go, oh, I could go on. Maybe I should stop. Any directors? One director that you could. Kazan. You know, he's so out of fashion with all of you know, conceptual artists and auto directors and everything else. What I love about Kazan is he believed in writers and he believed in finding and he believed in actors. And that was if when he was doing his best work on some level he was invisible and you can always tell if it's directed by him because the actors are doing the performances of their lives and the plays work. I mean he made William's cut. He made Miller work. I mean he, Kazan. Tell me a story, if you would, from your childhood or not, that explains who you are as an artist and why you do what you do. If it's too personal we can move to a special place. What a cool question. I'm sort of, you asked me all these key things that I never asked myself, I feel like. I want to do their own thing. Well you may or may not know the people in this house that have done a lot of work in what I call theater testimony or documentary theater and that's taking the lives of real people and often the words of real people are making theater out of them so that I'm basically a channel to get their work out with the actors who take those words out to you and to you, the audience. And I can tell you how it happened. That was question three. So this is terrific. Okay. It's not exactly my childhood but the older I get the more I feel like I was a child in college. There I was at 20 something and my father was an American historian at the University of Chicago and I remember coming home from a Christmas vacation sort of idly thinking, you know, how can I basically avoid writing this awful paper for school and I was sitting in his desk and he had these stacks of vanilla folders and vanilla folders and I opened one and it looked like I was looking at a play but what it was was the first interview in a series in the American Jewish Committee on survivors of the Holocaust. My father had been asked to be head of that but he felt that it should not be these these interviews should not be conducted by professional historians but rather from relatives or best friends so that these interviews would go very, very deep. And so this one, you know, it went stage direction. I'm sitting in my mother's kitchen on the Upper West Side, the year on the date and the time and it's cold and all of this and you can certainly see these women in her head and she talked about, you know, what the ages of each and her mother turned out was a one of the principal ballerinas for the Czech National Opera and the daughter said I've never been able to ask you this but I know that you're the only survivor in our family that all your sisters and brothers died, your parents died and I want to know how you survived and she said she would tell her because of this setup that she remembers being on the Bucks where everyone was like skeletons and a lot of people she knew weren't gonna make it through the night and she would think in her mind she said of a moment of perfect beauty and she would picture it in her mind there's her, you know, a two-two and beautiful shaft of light with this gorgeous man touching her chest, you know, at the small of her back as she perfected this turn and she said that's what kept her alive and I just thought it was one of the most beautiful interviews or conversations between a mother and a daughter I'd ever seen in my life and so I asked my father if I could use this as the basis of, you know, as the one I play, I mean I would edit it and put it on stage and he said no and I said oh really why is it because actually it belongs to the young woman who made that interview and asked going into the archives and he went out that day and bought me a tape recorder and said you do your own and that was the beginning for me at the moment. Adapting text, so you adapt text as a playwright and you also adapt text as a director, right? So I'm just curious, well that, not right? I'm not sure where the line is on this one. Okay great, so you're thinking of creating plays like theater testimony plays where you're taking text and you're literally reusing other text and then there's times as a director where you're sort of redoing a checkoff play or maybe not just even reimagining it directorily but also changing the text and so I was wondering if you could just talk about what about that process is exciting to you. Well isn't it because I guess at times I think of myself as a theater maker and I don't say oh now I'm directing and now I'm writing especially if I'm doing something like that but I do think for example having our say is an adaptation of the book of having our say but it's a, if you looked at the book of having our say you probably wouldn't have made the play I made as writers and then as the director on that I just felt I would figure out how they were cooking, you know so I put up both hats when I was writing but know what the difference is between writing and directing when you're doing an adaptation like that. It's a whole vision. But I could have just written it and handed it over to a director who could have directed it whereas a director couldn't have taken that book and done the play I did. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So is there anything that jazzes you about that? Re-transforming a story? Oh I think that first story I told you about that Czech woman. I mean it's very hard if you meet extraordinary people in your life and I just seem to do that over and over again. I would love to give to an audience the incredible experience I had meeting someone extraordinary. So, or if I've heard this incredible story that actually happened I would like to share that story and how can I make that an exciting event as an audience member. So I'm using all neurons or firing of you know the theatrical part of my brain to see how to make that happen. But it's because usually my plays that I write or adapt or whatever you want to call it something about that story has changed my life. Whether it's the person has changed my life or the story they've told me about other people have changed my life but for example the Delaney sisters changed my life. Meeting the three people in still life, those people changed my life. And I wanted you to have the experience I had because it was so illuminating. I'm curious, in Greensboro or Requiem were you able to, and I should have done some research here, so here where I'm not Terry Gross, you don't have to do research, but I'm just curious there must be just a huge reaction in the communities where these plays are done and could you talk a little bit about maybe some of the effect that creating a theater testimony has or maybe healing or bringing that process to the community. Well that's interesting when you bring up Greensboro Requiem asking this question. Actually anyone here does documentary work and brings it to the communities or the people that it's about I'm sure you know what I'm talking about but it is transformative. With Greensboro Requiem it was about the 1979 massacre in Greensboro of a multi-racial group of anti-cuclux Klan demonstrators. The Klan came armed and shot them, five were killed, countless others were wounded and they destroyed a whole housing project. And it was a clear case of first degree murder but the Klan was acquitted. And this is 1979, you know you thought it was 1935 but it wasn't. And so I met those survivors and learned a great deal from them. I also met a lot of people in the community. When we first did it at the Princeton, at the MacArthur Theater of Princeton a lot of the folks from Greensboro they hired two buses and they came up in drums and it was just so beautiful to watch them watch this play. But two other things happened that come when you tell other people's stories as truthfully as you can and they're impactful. One was in that bus load coming up from North Carolina was the woman who had been mayor of Greensboro and she realized she'd never known the real story before because the newspapers had made it sound as if it was a shootout between two extreme groups of crazy people. That was one thing. She then went back and because Desmond Tutu was one of her idols and she knew him when he was teaching here in Washington one year he said, why don't you make Greensboro the site of the First Truth and Reconciliation Commission in America? And you know what? They did it. And so the mayor actually and the survivors credit the play for being the impetus for this. It was extraordinary. I also had a town meeting when the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, did the play and there was a big event for people in the town and a member of the plan did come as well as many of the community leaders and people who had been deeply hurt and wounded by this event. And they talked about it and it was covered on local television that perhaps the questions of race had not been properly addressed in the town that everyone wanted to believe because this is where the civil rights that they were really the cradle of the civil rights movement. This is where everyone sat in, you know, at the drug store had allowed them not to look at what was really going on since the Greensboro police were implicated in collusion with the plan to allow this to happen. So it was very rewarding work. Can you talk a little bit about the kind of theater that excites you when you go to the theater? Just sort of what jazzes you? When you see stuff on stage? That's a really good question. I feel that more than anything, I'm most excited to have what Apple Figaro is a dear friend of mine and he one time said that his idea of entertainment was the interplay between heart and head. So it's not that I don't love wildly funny content list stuff that just makes me laugh my head off and makes me want to dance in my seat. I love all that, but when I think about a place that just blow my mind and I need to see and I crave seeing at least once or twice a year I would say I'm with Apple in that. If it's too much just the heart and it turns sentimental or creepily on me I'm not so interested. If it's just the head, I'm not so interested. But the interplay is I think where I live and what I love to see. Great. So just turning towards how you mentor young theater artists you went to Harvard undergraduate and then did you go to graduate school or was it the Guthrie training program? It was the Bush Fellowship which was the Guthrie Theater and the University of Minnesota Fellowship. Great. So I was wondering if you could comment about what do you think the importance of graduate school is for today's artists? It's a big question I know for people that might be here. So big. I am so conflicted on this. Part of what we do at McCarter's, I think I told you when we first started talking was that we have a very, very intense internship program and so after 21 years I've had two, a year in directing and also artistic direction. We have the literary group and then we mentor a whole group of young playwrights. Now I would say when you come out of our year you probably know what you want to get from graduate school and some people realize what they need to be doing is just working and they can save themselves, you know, six figures and really get it working in the profession. Until Yale and a few other places gave up their horribly high price tag and now have gotten school for griefer people. I would say the best thing about graduate school from the students I know and have been mentoring over the years is that you begin to find that group that you'll probably spend the rest of your life working with. I mean it's a really good place to meet your peers. That they always say is number one, not the teaching, but that. And number two, that your work gets done. So if you're a playwright at the best programs, you'll hear your work frequently, you'll have a production a year sometimes or every other year. That can also be fantastic and you know, so there's pros and cons. I don't feel I went to graduate school. The University of Minnesota at that time, I mean I was lucky that I got this fellowship so it was free for me and I actually got a stipend so I don't have any bills to pay at the end. I was a teaching assistant for my director and I was also in his class and that was very odd and finally he just said, oh, you know, why don't you just go over to the Guthrie? Which I did and so they gave me, while I was still in graduate school, they gave me my first professional gig as, you know, doing a one act at the first year of Guthrie too. And I learned by doing. I watched the great writers who came to the theater and watched how they worked. I watched the great directors. I was in the room. I was stage managing. I was a gopher. I mean I'm really old school paying your dues and then every year I would try to apprentice myself to either a master director or a playwright and just shadow them. It wasn't called mentoring then and it wasn't called internships then but it was called apprenticeship. And that's really I think how I learned and I also stayed out of New York a long time so that I could fail because I think you have to be able to fail. You have to take big risks and have a lot of shows that don't work so you find out what does. I think failure is really important and you also find out if you've got the strength to stay in the theater because they're going to kill you at least half the time and you have to know how to pick yourself back up and go to the next thing. So I'm very ambivalent about graduate school. If you know why you're going and what you want and you can afford it, that's one thing and you'll know what you want to get out of it. If you feel you can do it by doing and watching, observing and doing your own work, I think either works depending on your personality and situation. Great. I'm going to ask one more question and then I'm going to let you guys ask some. And this is a hard one, but could you change one thing about the American theater? What would it be? I'm so angry. It can be a long thing. I'm going to say one word that just sounds so... It's hard for artists to talk about critics but I think the American theater has been held hostage to the one voice of the New York Times that allows people's work to be entered into the national and international repertoire and allows the careers of playwrights, directors, and actors and designers to thrive or be stopped. Now, there are those people who have made... They realize that this one guy or these two guys don't get me and so I'm going to build my body of work in another place. I'm one of those people. They don't get me. I don't get them. And I have built a life in the theater where I can thrive. And I go in every once in a while and I do my Broadway stuff and I do my... But I love working in my own theater and the theater of my colleagues around the country. If I could change anything in the American theater I would say these are two very bright men who could write well. They're too much alike in my opinion, these guys in the Times. I would like to see a really exciting, critical mass so that people who disagree with each other so that putting on a play is an event and people take it seriously and they debate with each other. It's not thumbs up, thumbs down. It's grappling with the work on a deep and sophisticated level. If I could change one thing, it would be that. And as I say, I don't blame the guys but no one should have that kind of power. It's a form of cultural fascism that should be stopped. I can't go ahead. Okay, well... You've done more musicals in recent years than perhaps... And is that true? And if so, do you have any particular criteria about the sorts of musicals that interest you? Is cast size a factor? Can you speak to that issue? Sure. Yes, we have sort of had a run in the last three years of work and they're new. This year, Sleeping Beauty waits with Groove Lillie and before it was with Weidman, Shire, and Mulvey, Tick Flight. Basically, how we choose the seasons has to do with both balance and the budget, but mostly with passion. That is, who is at a point in their work where they need us. That's one. Or that there's a director looking at a... Or another artist looking at an established work of art that they feel now is important to do and they have a burning passion and need to do it. So we don't just ever pick titles. It's an artist-driven theater and the choices are artist-driven. With Sleeping Beauty waits, the creators were ready. Well, not quite ready. I shouldn't say that. The last lab that we had where we had said previously... We took them on board four years ago and each year we would come in and we would do developmental work depending again on budget and time. And then this last, the season before last, I said, you know, I want to give them a deadline and tell them we're producing it and I'm going to give them a series of markers that they have to make. And it just helped them finish. It just helped them get there. And I just saw a potential in the piece. It was serendipity in some ways. And with Weidman and Malby and Shire, there's a relationship there that we have and this was a piece that had just frustrated them and I heard a reading of it and I thought there's a gorgeous stuff in it and I thought they had to solve their book and so it felt right to do it because they also kept everything they were building. So I can't say, well, we have a policy about doing more musicals. It's just that that group had it together just like Crystal Reng's commission is ready and so we're doing it next season. You know, it's all about how the artists are coming to us in the West state. I'm a playwright that has directed some, so I kind of understand that linkage. Early in my career I spent four years as the assistant to an artistic director. I'm a lot harder pressed for that linkage from playwright to artistic director because AD has so much long-term strategic thinking and so much more life of the institution thinking it's such a bigger picture. How did you find the guts to make that leap? It was, you know, at first it was a mother of invention. I just absolutely knew if I didn't run my own theater I wouldn't get to put on the play that I believed in. Either as a playwright or a director but certainly as a woman in the field who's, um, I don't like to talk about it and I know why because we were told that we were shrill and we were difficult and we were impossible. But I'm going to be shrill, but difficult. Women have not found parity in the theater and certainly women have something they want to say that matters and might get people a little uncomfortable. And so I wanted to have a safe haven because I'm in a place where there's the, you know when I got there, Shirley Tillman was not president of Princeton University. I never thought I'd see the day there was a president of Princeton University but I did. And that community seemed to like a smart woman who wanted to challenge them intellectually, emotionally and politically. And I was in the right place, I thought. I love, I just feel like I have the best job in the American theater. I'm so lucky because I have a great audience and they want to be challenged. Right there in the black, sure. Yeah, it's you. I actually didn't feel it. I just realized what you actually asked me. The artistic director playwright, because I'm a writer, I'm a very hands-on artistic director with the writers. Because often they come to the theater because they want me to be there to collaborate with. Kill her. Kill her. Yeah. The news is that it's not, in fact, the New York Times anymore and that a lot of shows, if they're good shows there's a lot of other places where the reviews could be positive. The New York Times just isn't counted anymore. That much especially, especially given the proliferation of online sites that are really taking the lead in many ways now. And I think, Aziz, could you say that those two gentlemen have no power anymore? No, I wouldn't say that. But certainly they have nowhere near the stranglehold they had even a few years ago. And I think that's the good news. Up to a point that's true. I know exactly what you're saying. However, if you're looking at certain venues, that is, if you look at Broadway and you have a show out of town, if you get a bad review out of town from the New York Times, it's unlikely you will come into New York. Or you'll have to go to London or you have to go to LA or you have to go to Chicago, whatever it is. You are dead for that move. Because of the producers who feel they can't fight the times. If you were already in the city and you're opening, what seems to be the new word of mouth is, a great review is no longer a guarantee from the Times that you will run. It's still pretty hard to beat if it's bad. But if you have the opposite coming from John Laher or from Terry T. Chatter or a couple of other places, Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker, sometimes you can beat it, but not often long enough. A lot of it has to do with the producers putting too much stock in the Times. I'm not sure it's the audiences as much. But I can tell you from running a not-for-profit theater dedicated to new work, when the Times is even tepid or is anything but an out-and-out rave, we're stymied in terms of the next step. And just for playwrights, you can make a living on our plays, going into different places. If you're done in New York with a bad review of the New York Times, it's not going to move. And that means all that money you're not going to get. And it isn't just now with these guys. I know in the 80s, August Wilson and I talked about this. I had a play in my code execution of Justice all over the country before it landed on Broadway and where it was very successful all over the country and then it was killed on Broadway. I'm just so glad that New York was my last stop. Not my first stop. I know that McCarty doesn't accept unsolicited scripts, but you said that it's a haven for young artists where you develop. So how does that come about? Is that just coming out of school? How do you find those young artists? That's a really good question. Did you all hear it? How do we find the young artists? It's partially a problem of personnel. You know, we get so many scripts to read, so that's why we have that policy. It's not just, we don't take unsolicited management. You don't have to have an agent. If you don't have an agent, then someone from the industry who we deeply respect has to say, will you please read this script and then we will. How we get to young people is it's, again, sometimes it's, you know, you can't underestimate luck in anyone's life or certainly anyone's career. For example, we found Tarella McCready when he was still a first-year student at Yale because the woman who was working for us at the time as an associate producer knew him from Chicago. And she finds that, you know, I think it's time for you two to meet. And I think he's finally written a play that you might love. And boy, was she right. And that was the beginning of the Brothers sister plays. And then we eventually, you know, premiered the trilogy and he was playwright of Residence with us. And, you know, he, Kamadi Porter was on staff and she said, I know you'll love him and she was right. So how do you know how these things happen? Everyone knows that we're out there looking. So people say, you know, I just saw this amazing thing downtown. You should read this Young Man's or Young Woman's Play. And we do. So I don't know. There's, you know, there's, it's not a, you know, a ladder. I wish it were, we were, we could be better organized, but we have an amazing literary staff including the interns. And what we do with the young people in the literary office is we make them go out and see the work in storefronts and the work downtown and off, off and wherever they, you know, they, they, they keep their ears to the, to the ground so they can hear who's, what's happening with their crowd, you know, with their friends. Who are they most excited about? And that's, you know, we do everything we can to make it happen. The inspirational tech story and the sort of writing that you do. I'm curious to know if you think it's possible to, or if you've ever had the experience of enjoying a play that's comprised of unlikable characters doing unlikable things? Yeah. Most of the great plays written in the world are unlikable people doing unlikable things. I happen to like edifice rats, yeah. Richard III. You know, it's so interesting you ask the question. Do you have anything behind that question? Or do you want me to just I feel like this question could help me. Okay. Great. If you're doing talk backs I always think it's important that the play right take control of it. That is, you probably all know about this where I'm at, right? But you get to ask the audience questions so that it will help you with your work. And they are not there to tell you how to write your play or rewrite your play. You all know this I'm sure. But I do think the great plays in world literature are often about people, good people and not so good people doing terrible things. It just is one of the great themes of all storytelling. So this thing about having likable characters, I mean this comes from often American television development people. And that's because they write a lot of things to sell. It's to make money and sell commercials and all of that. That's not what the theater is about or shouldn't be what the theater is about. If you want to do a commercial piece of work, that is it's going to make you money and the producers money sometimes the best way to do that is to make people see something that's really easy to see and makes them happy and it's good people doing good, I don't know what play that is good people doing good things to each other. But I certainly would not let anyone tell you that should not be the subject of your play. It's really interesting when you do work about people who do terrible things and are awful people. I had one of the most chilling experiences of my life with the Klansman who said he would be interviewed by me and let the caravan of the other Klansman to go and kill these people and why he felt important and he wanted his story out there and it was really like having dinner with the devil I mean it was so, so scary to look into those eyes and he was so proud of what he did, there was absolutely no remorse and he said you know, I like plays I said do you think this is going to be a movie too he said yeah so a lot of people like to talk about themselves and often people live with themselves having done horrible things because they've justified it in their own ways and he did and that's what made an interesting theater for me to make a play about why these guys got away with it for so long he died, never having spent a year, a day in jail why he got away with it and I don't know if I'm going to say wasn't it on TV? I mean they had the shoot out like they still got away with it you look at that just video clip and there is no way they could possibly get away with it and it's right there in black and white and they did and they did everything carefully to the people who got through it and knowing what the outcome was I learned so much about human nature I mean that's why doing documentary work could be so rewarding it's so rigorous you know you think well that couldn't be or that could but then you find out well that is what happened how did that happen and then you really have to go do you know you have time for one last short question who's got a short one short, okay how do you get women into the theater but what about a senior I'm 77 I've only been in this for 10 years and I'm winning things but I'm emerging and I'm afraid I'm going to leave the earth emerging I'm going to play on my chest where where do I send I just finished my I have this at the theater I grew up being the youngest person in the room and now I'm the oldest person in the room in this room I'm not okay I believe you but we actually do I mean I say young voices and young writers actually I misspeaking and I correct the staff all the time about talking about emerging writers not necessarily young writers some people find their voices in their 40s George Bernard Shaw didn't want to play to lose 48 some people find it later in the 60s 70s it happens in poetry it happens in novels it happens with playwrights too well if you well all I can do is is encourage you