 Thank you for coming back. I hope you enjoyed the lunch and the fantastic reading of Frankenstein directed by Joni Schultz there at the end. We have a smaller group this time, I assume because some of our people are going to see unreliable in the theater. So, to our holler on people, hello, welcome. We have a sort of a split activity right now. Some of our participants are in the theater watching unreliable and some are here to listen to the panel. So, I'm going to pass this along to my now exiting director of new works, Lisa Rothe. I guess I can tread water for a little bit longer. I'm so happy to have you all here as our guest. I have to say my mind was a little bit blown by the last panel. I just love listening to people that I have admired and respected for years talk about the art form. It brings me a fresh breath. So, without further ado, Lisa Rothe. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, great. So, what I've been told to is that even though we do have a little bit of a smaller group here, an intimate and lovely group. I'm very happy to have you all here, that we do need to use our microphones for the live stream. Okay? So, you don't have to use your diaphragms as much. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you all so much for being here. So, this second panel, so the first panel was new works, why and how, and this is just kind of getting a little deeper. This is a little deeper conversation. I'm looking at my program here. What exactly did I say? Deepening the conversation. Okay, there we go. Excellent. So, I just would like to, you can open up your programs too and follow along. If you'd like, we've got the panelists here. And so, I'm going to start down at the end here with Joni Schultz, who duress directed the last reading of Frankenstein by Carl Hattley and the production of Frankenstein, which will be happening in the spring for the next festival, New Works Festival. So, we are thrilled to have you here. And so, Joni, in addition to the things that are also in her program, so she says she's an arts leader and a director of theater and opera. Do you still call Chicago home? Yeah. Yeah, she still calls Chicago home. Great. So, she lived there for 21 years and came to age as a theater artist. And in 2017 and 2018, Joni served as the artistic director of Water Tower Theater in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. So, we're really thrilled to have you here. Joni is also the director of Frida. So, for those of you who have seen it or haven't seen it yet, she's done a wonderful job with Vanessa Severo. We'll be talking to you a little bit about that. And after the Frida matinee tomorrow afternoon, Jose Rivera will have a conversation with Joni and with Vanessa after that conversation before. We'll whisk you off to the airport. Okay. So, thank you, Joni, for being here. Next, we have, I'm going to say your name, right? Now that you made me aware of how I said your name, Eileen. Eileen Konant. Yes. Okay, great. So, and I took the sum of it from a bio also to online just to add a little bit to your bio here. Eileen is a Japanese American director who's based in London. You've been there for the past 15 years. Yes. She has a passion for daring new works of theater that engage audiences with untold and untold stories in a visual, visceral way. Eileen also works freelance as a movement director, a fight director, and a dramaturg. And she's the artistic director of theater, and you've got to say this word for me. Temwa. Theater Temwa, based in London. And they've produced projects in the UK, the USA, Mexico, Rwanda, India, Israel, and Lebanon. And Eileen is the director of unreliable, Deepika Guha's play, which opened last night and there's a matinee happening right now. So after that matinee, this later this right after this panel at about 330, we're going to have a conversation with Deepika and Eileen and have a conversation with Kelly Miller. So thank you also for being here. So and next to Eileen's right we have Jose Rivera, who, Jose is a wonderful playwright and screenwriter who's a recipient of two Obey awards for playwriting for Marisol and references to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot. It's one of my favorite titles, which were both produced by the Public Theater in New York. His plays have been produced across the country and around the world. Jose's screenplay for the Motorcycle Diaries was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Award, Oscar, Oscar in 2005. And the screenplay based on Jack Kerowax on the road premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. And I'm just going to also say this too is that we spent two weeks together in Romania working on a translation of one of his plays, Cloud Tectonics. We can talk about that later. Great. And then next but not least, Jeff Mianza, who is the Associate Artistic Director at the Guthrie Theater. So as part of the senior management team in the Guthrie, Jeffrey oversees casting, education, community engagement, season planning, literary and the Dowling studio space. And prior to this he was at Playmakers Repertory Theater in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for eight years as the first director of education and outreach and then the Associate Artistic Director. Jeffrey is also an actor and a director and an educator and is a member of Playmaker's acting company. He was seen on stage in productions including Into the Woods, Assassins, Angels in America, and Nicholas Nicolby. And you were awesome and assassins. Oh, thanks. Yeah, nice. Great. So I want to start with the really, this is a different combination of artists and collaborators than we had this morning. But I actually would really like to start out from your perspective, from your own perspective physicians about new work, about new work, why and how and how you do that. And you all have a relationship to that. And I'd just love to hear from your different perspectives if you can about new work. So whoever would like to start. Go for it. All right, I'll start. I think it's an interesting, it's an interesting challenge for an organization like the Guthrie which was, you founded in 1963 as a classics theater, that it was rooted in doing the work of those western canonical classical texts. And over the years, the theater has moved through different patterns of developing new work. And in particular in the mid 2000s, there was a really robust new works program that was that existed at the theater. And then of course, in the economic downturn, that had to go away was one of Joe Dowling's biggest regrets is that they had to cut that programming. And now with new leadership under Joseph Hodge, we're talking a lot about how does a how does a classical theater of the size intersect with new work? What is its responsibility? And also in a landscape where there are so many theaters that that have entered into the space of developing new work. And in Minneapolis itself, we have an organization called the Playwright Center, which is a fantastic, in essence service organization to the field. There are, I don't even know how many playwrights that are that are affiliate artists with with the Playwright Center. So, you know, we think a lot about how not trying to be duplicative. And yet what is our space? And so a lot of what we've been focusing on recently is Todd London talks about in one of his books, the idea of when one looks back at the late 20th century and early 21st century, that folks will see the the the body of theatrical work that are these beautifully rendered quartets and quintets. But who's writing the symphonies? And so what we're trying to explore right now is is there is there a way that the Guthrie can can add to the large candidate of American work that is on at scale at symphonic size? And and what are the ways in which we can resource that? How does that even function? Does it mean we you know do we guarantee production? And as folks were talking about earlier, not just one production, but what happens if we partner with two other like size theaters and we then have, as Nan talked about, Rolling World premieres. We're such an inacency of that conversation. But it's a really exciting one to think about. And in the meantime, we're also premiering work, like we have Lynn Nottage's new play coming out, premiering this summer. So it's not like we've been out of the game, but we're trying to figure out what is the most, how can the Guthrie be meaningfully involved and in service to the field? Because we don't again want to replicate or continue to do what everyone else is doing because people are doing it exceedingly well. So so what is our role in that? I think as a question, as an individual artist, I think there's nothing I like more than new work. I actually, you know, my my boss handles the classics and I'm like, we're going to have this. And so I like to, to enter into the spaces and find those voices. I'm not like I'm discovering them, but for myself, learning about artists who are taking the form and breaking it apart and asking questions that are immediate and important to today. Because I think that, you know, we talk about relevance, but I also think about like, you know, what is the role of the large cultural institution, which historically was a very transactional relationship, which has come into your plays and then get out and we'll let you know when we're ready for you to come back. And so much of the work I do at the Guthrie is about no stay and engage and let's have a lot, let's have a big conversation. What does it mean that we have three theater spaces? What if we're all all three spaces are exploring an idea? And what does it mean for a patron to then move through all three spaces and engage in that conversation? And then what does it mean for us to partner with community organizations who are aligned with the ideas in these plays? So anyway, these are the things that that that I get really excited about. And I think that while one can do that with new work, one of the so next season, a very exciting idea is looking at Ibsen's Adults House. We're doing Heather Raffo's Noura and we're talking to some other partners in town about adaptation and what does it mean to look at that play now? And then what have these playwrights done to riff on an idea from, you know, two centuries ago? So these are things we're thinking about. Can you can you just for those of you don't know, can you just explain Heather Raffo and Noura? Yes, that's okay. Sure, sure. So I think the first that came was Lucas Noth's Adults House part two, which premiered at South Coast Rep, I believe, and that was his he got quite interested in in Adults House, Ibsen's Adults House, and the idea that they weren't they weren't able to have within the context of the original text, they weren't able to have a conversation as adults, because Noura, Noura, Noura was a bit of a child in the through Torvald's eyes. And so he he created a sequel, which is 20 years later, I believe, and she comes back to the house. And so they can finally have it out after she left the family. Meanwhile, Heather created a piece that is in response to kind of both plays, but takes takes on the themes of Adults House from an Iraqi American refugee perspective, which is truly beautiful and haunting. And I'm super excited it premiered at Shakespeare Theater, Women's Voices Festival, boom. And yes, and had a recent production, a very successful production in New York, and we're excited to bring it to the Twin Cities. Oh, you had a reading here? Fabu. What's that? Oh, it started here. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, fabulous. Great. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, can I tell one itsy bitsy little story? Just really quick. No, no, no. So I was at the Lark Play Development Center. And one day, I got an email from someone named Jose Rivera, saying that he was moving from Los Angeles to New York and was looking for a community and had had a writers group in Los Angeles and was moving. And I was like, Jose Rivera, is that like the Jose Rivera? Anyway, so we kind of all as a team talked about that. We were like, oh, my God, we need to invite. Yes, bring Jose Rivera to the Lark. So anyway, that was my introduction to you. You might have sent it to Susie Faye first, who then sent it to me. I'm not exactly sure. But I vaguely remember. Okay, anyway, I love the Lark. Lark has been a great organization. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, what can I say, new plays are my entire life. I love the theater. I've always loved live performance. You know, to paraphrase Che Guevara, he said, you know, all revolutions are based on love. And I've always loved the written word. I've loved English. I've loved great stories. I'm not a trained playwright. I learned my my craft really from listening to my mother and my grandparents tell stories on the kitchen table. My dad was a high school graduate. My mom had a third grade education. So we had like one book in the house was the Bible. But I fell in love with stories. And from that time on, it's been a drug in my system. I love great stories. I so thoroughly enjoyed Frankenstein, because that was such a great story. And, you know, I, I do have a career. I do have an agent and a lawyer and all that stuff. But I don't think much about the career side of being a playwright, to be honest. I assume wonderful people like these will maybe do my play, maybe not. I don't really care because I will write another play. I will tell another story eventually. So yeah, I mean, that that's really it. I mean, I saw a play when I was in sixth grade, my first time. And I just was hooked from that point on. I love actors. I think they're amazing people who are asked to do impossible things. I've had great director collaborators who really understand my work better than I did at the time. I don't think about audiences to be quite honest. I don't write for a particular audience. People ask me, like, who would you write the play for? And like, I wrote it for me. You know, I saw 300 of me's in the audience and I wrote a play for them. And I wrote, you know, earlier on, I wrote plays for my children because I, you know, I wanted, I became a serious playwright after the birth of my daughter because for the first time in my life, I thought of the future as a playwright. And I thought, oh, I'm going to have a sassy 16-year-old reading my play, better be good. And really, it's the first time I actually thought about the future as a playwright. You know, I thought I would, you know, I had a friend who used to say to me, he says, don't worry, Jose, there's always posthumous recognition. And so I kind of lived that way for a long time until the birth of my daughter and my son. And I thought, no, I'm going to be alive to enjoy the fruits of my labor and to hopefully have my kids tell me, hey, that's pretty good, you know. Yeah, I mean, playwright, theater is absolutely essential now, almost more than ever. I mean, we, you know, we heard this great reading of Frankenstein, and I kept thinking about Frankenstein in our lives these days and the kind of challenges that we live under as political animals in this country. And, you know, who do we turn to when you can't trust certain sources of information, you can't trust certain officials in government, you can't even trust what used to be called law enforcement in this country. You know, who do you trust in a time of great peril and an evil walking around? You trust your artists, you know, you trust the artists who may not be able to articulate fully the truth of the moment, but they can articulate how this moment will transcend and become something new in the future. And that's what we want. We want our artists to have one foot in the present and one foot in the future and to be able to discuss what is happening now to the next generation or the generation after that. And so I think of playwriting in myself as being part of this continuum that, you know, began around the campfires around, you know, in Neanderthal, Germany and continued to the stages in front of the Parthenon and all the way up till now, that we are part of a continuum of voices that have been trying to tell the truth since, you know, human beings could speak. So anyway, I've survived in this business for a long time, but mostly because I write film and television, but I don't do theater for money. I only do it because I love my collaborators and I love the written word. And, you know, when I first started out in the 70s, you know, this kind of like infrastructure for the development and the nurturing of new voices was not quite there. And I saw it evolving as the decades went by. And so a lot of the lessons I learned as a young writer, I just had to teach myself. I had to be my own dramaturg and my own literary manager and things like that. But it's really wonderful to see the emergence of a structure of human beings and institutions that are designed to, you know, continue the conversation and to further the poetry of the written word and to keep telling the truth. Thank you. The question is why new theater? Yeah. It's just, you know, being an advocate for development and for new plays and for new work. Yeah. I mean, I, and why and why and to what end? You had my bio and I said I'm a Japanese American theater director. And I think that is relevant. And I think it's relevant because my mother's first generation, she came over when she was 19. And I think if anybody, is anybody here grown up in like a dual heritage household? Yeah. So when you grow up in this context, you basically, you have an inherent understanding that there are entire frameworks within your culture that are totally arbitrary and totally subjectively built within your culture that don't fit other cultures. You just have that as a baseline. And I don't think it's like you're like a fish, but you're aware of water. And, and I think that that feeds in, I think everybody does new writing in a completely different way. And it's really fascinating to talk with Jose and to think about writers like yourself and Deepika who are like these channels for information. I'm a devising director and I develop new work with playwrights. So I'm like the opposite. I'm like trying to get everybody else. It's like with a Ouija board of theater making, right? You're sat there going, I don't know what the thing is, but it's, it doesn't sit in you and it doesn't sit in me. It sits somewhere in the space in between. And what we're going to do is we're going to come into a room with a question and somehow we're going to find our way there to this place that nobody had any idea we were going to go to. And I feel like that's, that's what's exciting to me about new work is because every single new collaboration for me begins with a new group of people and it's going to create something unique to that moment that never could have existed without each one of those individual people. And that's, that's kind of my approach to making new work. And I think, I think always driven by that feeling that there's something that I got like one of the most affecting moments for me was when I had been sent to, I had gotten, we'd gotten grant money to go and do a project in Rwanda. And one of the things that we were asked to do was to have a really clear kind of like a contingency plan for if we were working with young genocide survivors, we were going to be doing some really heavy stuff. We were given, we were given money and frameworks to go over there with Western psychologists as a contingency plan to be in the room to counsel people in case somebody was retraumatized, right? And we went, this is absurd. When people start crying, what happens is all their friends get together and then they sing and dance together and then they have a conversation. Nobody needs a white person to come in and take them down into a room to talk one-on-one about very bad. Like they said that. They were like, why would you want me to talk about bad things in a dark room with one person instead of dancing in the sun with my friends? Spot on. Right? So I think that that has been at the heart, that kind of question of like what are the assumptions that we carry into the situation as creatures of America, as creatures of the 21st century of people of this time and place. Like think about how many thousands of years humans have been processing trauma if we want to use that as a trope and how many decades we've been sitting one-on-one and associating it with stuff that happened to my mother, right? Like we haven't done that. What we've done is we've told stories. That's what we've done for thousands and thousands of years. So I'm really interested in new work because I think that it's responsive. It responds to what's in the moment, but it also answers questions about the past. I think that it's a way that we can keep constantly connected to all of time in a way by being fully present and really investigating what's here now. I grew up in a really small town in Colorado and I was always a director. I was always like directing my stuffed animals and making plays with my friends at recess. And because it was a small town, we didn't have much as far as theater went. And I was always reading whatever I could. I read a lot of Tennessee Williams, whatever classic playwrights got thrown at me. I read and I read and I read. And actually, when I was in high school, I had a drama teacher who gave me a copy of a new play called Marisol by Jose Rivera that actually really changed my life. I'm not just saying that because Jose is on this panel. It really did make me see that I was like, plays can do this. And it articulated to me at the time a kind of anxiety I was feeling about the world in a really beautiful poetic way. And I just devoured it. And then that led me to find more new plays. And what really interested me was the way in which contemporary playwrights were articulating what I saw in the world and what I was feeling in the world right now. And I think a classic play can do that. But I think every production you have is doing a present tense new play in a way. If you're really living in the moment and your artists are really fully investigating a piece, that that is also a new play in a sort of way. But it became a real interest to me when I went to Chicago and started directing to find playwrights and to start working on new work. And it became something I have been really passionate about as a director. And I just love sitting with a writer and showing them what they've written and how it actually works on stage and pulling the hard questions out of them and being a good collaborator and being there for them. And that's been a big part of the sort of life that I've led as a creative artist. And then a couple years ago I became artistic director of a theater in Dallas called Water Tower. And we started a new play festival. And that was some of the most exciting work that I think that we did. And we did a world premiere of a Regina Taylor play called Bread, which Regina's from Dallas area. And it was phenomenal to see she wrote this play about an African American family in South Dallas. And our theater was this very white theater on the north side of Dallas. And I said to Regina, I was like, I don't know if we can do this play. But the conversation that play created and how much it impacted the entire community. We had new people come in our doors. And we also had a lot of people say, oh, these are our neighbors. And I've never talked to them before. And now I'm hearing their experiences. And that really became a huge moment to me. It's like, wow, this is really what new work can do. We can encounter people that we wouldn't talk to or that we might not ever see because of our geographical differences, and especially in a city like that where everybody drives and they kind of stick to their neighborhoods. It was really cool to bring two places so close together, like, into the same room. So that's, you know, I just think that there's so much hard stuff going on in the world today. And that playwrights have an ability to bring us together to talk about those things and to live through them like they did in the Greek times, really. You know, it's what civilization is built on. And I'm really glad that we're still doing it. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to jump off of that just a little bit, just talking about why it's important to advocate for. And it's not really new voices because the voices have been there. It's just whether or not they're being heard, right? So voices being heard and stories that we haven't heard and why it's important to advocate for a plurality of voices and a plurality of diverse voices. And I'm wondering if that's sparking anything and you can talk about that at all. Well, I just, I do think that we have the ability, you know, we live, again, we live in such a crazy world, right? We're being entertained all the time. It's hard to not be entertained. You have to kind of work against it sometimes. And theater does give us this opportunity to shut everything off, turn off our screens, be in a room with other live human beings and get a little quiet and look at things that we might not usually look at, right? And so I do think that it's an opportunity to shed light on people and places and stories that we don't look at every day. That, you know, it's just so much noise. And I think the quiet of the theater is so important for that. Anybody, has everybody seen that wonderful TED Talk, the danger of a single story? I think it's a chevi. Look it up. It is absolutely amazing. And basically it goes, look, if you've got one narrative for how, you know, little Japanese girls act, that's going to be really, really different than somebody who gets 15 narratives to choose from about how little blonde girls are. And so that's one of the reasons. But I think that what's interesting about that, and specifically to our moment, is because we're getting this moment where we now have new voices, what's happening is a lot of the people who are putting forth their story for the first time, and it's just their story. You know what I mean? It's just them. They carry the weight of being the single story for their entire demographic, however, you know, that gets defined by society. And so it's really important that we keep pushing so that we move past this moment, which I don't want to say it's a moment of tokenism, but it is certainly a moment where I feel like people who are presenting a new story are forced to still be the single voice of that story, which puts way too much undue pressure on, you know, like I look at my actor like Amro, who's been asked to be the only Middle Eastern male character often, and most of the play, he has to be so, what's the word, vigilant all the time, because he's so hyper aware of how he's like, he's never going to get to play a baddie. I mean, he'll be asked to a lot, but he's never going to be able to do that, because that's not one of the many narratives that is offered to him. Can you just explain who Amro is? Oh yeah, so Amro plays the kind of Guantanamo-esque prisoner, the Muslim character in Unreliable. So he comes in and he's often, he kind of is always playing Jordanian, Iranian, Afghani, and he, yeah, so he carries that, I think, as the bearer of that single narrative often. I think, you know, what happens too, and I can only speak about the Latin culture for a moment, is that the narrative becomes co-opted, and quickly becomes a cliche. So when I was growing up in the 70s, and I was a young actor in college, a professor said to me, you know, you're going to be very hard to cast. And she said, you know, really the only play that you'll be able to do is Short Eyes by Miguel Pinheiro. And, you know, at the time that was probably true. So I've seen, at least in the theater, the culture evolved from a theater of, and a mass entertainment of, you know, drug addicts and prostitutes and muggers, and it evolved from that to drug kingpins, and very slick guys from Cuba, and then evolved into magic realism, which became its own cliche, you know, and it's just sort of like, you know, my friends and I, we just sort of roll our eyes and just keep on going, because within all of that, there are truthful stories to tell, but it's just so funny that sometimes the culture seems to be one step ahead in trying to sort of keep you back, you know, by defining you before you get to define yourself. And so that can be really disheartening, I have to say. Play like a drug kingpin? No. Well, I was almost in Breaking Bad. Another story for another time. But, you know, it's funny, because, you know, I also write film. So when I first came to LA, I was pitched gang stories constantly. So I was like, hey, we want you to write this, you know, Salvadorian gang film. I'm like, you know, I really don't relate to that. I grew up on Long Island. And then it became really, really want you to write this film about girl gangs. I'm like, I just don't think so. And then we want you to write a film about deaf gangs. You know, there was a deaf gang in New York. And I'm like, I just, I don't write gangs. I just felt what I do. I don't even smoke cigarettes. So I'd love to just hear about we, we can talk about some of the challenges of the telling these kinds of stories. And I'm, I'm wondering about what what you are most excited about in theater today? Like what is happening? Or if there are things also that you're aware of that maybe the greater community is not aware of, or just things that really turning you on these days? Let's say that one of the things that I've been noticing is a fearlessness in, in new writing that is, you know, I have a friend, Rayle Maracajas, who's a director, and she talks about how she's like, I don't want I do not want to see any play. If it is not, how does she say it? I'm going to talk. I hope she's not watching. She's like, I, if I'm going to the theater, it has to be better than Netflix, because I'm so comfortable at home sitting on my couch. I do not need to go up in there and see some people complaining about their lives on their couch and drinking coffee. Like if the whole point of, for me, of what theater does is that it is theater. It is not film. It is not television. It has, it has its own sort of magic ability to tell stories and transcend the pedestrian in a way that, that nothing else really can. And I, I, and I love the fact, I mean just of course the medium itself where we're sitting in a room and breathing air and, and you know the radical act of turning off your cell phone and, and, and actually being present with one another. But I think all the plays that I've been reading recently are ones that are just saying screw the old form. I have something new to say. I have, I have, I have a, I think it's also, you know, of course informed by, by other media, but, but I'm most excited about the, the fact that it's, that I've, I've, for the, I don't even know the last time I read a play that was, you know, a group of people in their living room having an argument. Like that, that is, is largely gone. And I'm so happy that it is, because I've, I've, you know, we're done, we're done traffic in that, trafficking in that. And I think it's, it's fucks, fucks, pardon me, folks, folks, beep that, sorry, folks like Jose and others who, who really cracked that, I really wouldn't have called you the f-word, that, that have cracked open the possibility for all the young playwrights who are writing now. And, and I, because I had a similar experience with Marisol in college, where I was just like, you can do that. And, and so then it made me a seeker of these other folks who were writing about the thing that only can happen on stage. I think like, you know, Angels in America was a similar moment for me where I was just like, he did what? The angel came from where? And, and, and that's all I, you know, those are the things that, that's why I want to go to the theater. Like, I want to be transcended and into a sort of a, a liminal magical space, because otherwise I'll sit at home and watch the runaways on Hulu or something. I like the runaways. Just a quick little story about Marisol. So the play was being done in the Bronx, where it's set, and I was in the theater with the director at intermission, just hanging out in the lobby, minding our own business. A very older, much older man came out of the audience, and he came up to us, didn't know who we were. And he says, just a proposal of nothing goes, I can't believe I missed the Big Bang Theory for this shit. And he left. It's hard to compete. But, you know, I love what you said earlier about symphonic plays. I think that, I get most excited about those kinds of plays, too. I mean, when I saw An Octo Rune, for instance, at BAM, not at BAM, sorry, Theater for a New Audience. You know, I said, this is symphony. This is an opera, and it's like, it's big in every way. It's audacious, and the language is big, and the themes are big, and I get most excited when I think of new plays that really go after the big stuff, you know, the nature of death, what is God, you know, can we love, how do we know how to love, why are we here, those kinds of like mega themes. When I encounter those in a new theater, I get very excited. I think, however, the two people in the living room in the Upper West Side New York, talking about their neurotic mother play is not dead. There's plenty of those still out there. But, you know, I just think, I just try to remind myself that theater is related to religion, and theater is related to myth-making, and that, you know, when we are able to, you know, speak of a moment of transcendence for our characters as they raise consciousness and enter a new realm of thinking and being, I think that is exciting. That's exciting theater. Yeah, I've also been really interested in, when we talk about people telling their stories, who didn't get to tell their stories before, that actors are being asked to bring themselves to the theater more than they used to be. Like, I think that back in the day, actors were asked to be blank slates and to show up so they can play anything. And now that actors are asked to bring more of their actual identities with them, I've also become more and more interested in plays in which the people on stage are telling their truth. And that's been a really interesting phenomenon. I mean, there's some of that in Frida. There's like bits and pieces of it there. But also, you know, just kind of the kind of work that like Ping Chang does with, oh, I forget what it's called, but where people tell their own stories, I think that's been moving me a lot lately, just going to hear people. And I'm really interested in the kind of work that Eileen does about, you know, where people, it doesn't start from a playwright, with all due respect to playwrights, but that it starts with people in a room trying to make something theatrical happen. And I think I'm really interested in how we can support that work more in the U.S. as well. I was going to say, I think I have, my therapist says I have a problem with boundaries. I think I just really like people being close. And so for me, I really think that for me, that the theater that is the most powerful for me is when I feel like I'm part of something real that's happening and that makes a difference. And that somehow the audience is making a difference, the performers in the performance are making a difference to the audience. And there are a couple of examples of this that really stick out. Like there's this one show called Dressed, which is touring the U.K. right now. And I was lucky enough to see it in some of its very early iterations. And it's not a group of actors. It's actually for, there's a dancer, a singer, a dressmaker, and an actor. And the dressmaker was assaulted, I think three or four years ago, and then spent a year building a wardrobe to replace the clothes that had been taken off of her. And this piece is fundamentally a celebration of female friendship. It's four women coming together to create something, to hold and support this experience that their friend went through. And as an audience member, you really get the sense that you are part of a healing ritual. That this play, it's making and it's performance and it's touring is all part of something healing that's happening for these four women and therefore by proxy for everybody in the audience as well. And that kind of theater, that's what theater can do that TV or that no kind of recorded medium can do because the audience is integral to it. And this, like this talk back after the fact that we can go and see a show and then talk about it afterwards. It's that kind of dissolving of the boundary that gets me most excited. And how do you, when you're in a collective, then decide what it is that the piece is going to be about? That mysterious, it's not like we close our eyes and go into a room. It's usually you have somebody who acts a little bit like a playwright. I think good, I mean, many playwrights, everybody's channeling, right? So many playwrights are having conversations and then channeling that into their work. I think that with a devising room, it's often, so depending on the training, I work with a lot of Locock physical theater actors. So maybe we'll be adapting a story or adapting a theme, but we'll be working from images. And what ends up happening, what has ended up happening, is that the dialogue ends up being a little bit choppy. And then you go, oh, wait, actually we have to get a playwright in the room to be part of the devising process. So devising is a very loose word and can be done in a multiplicity of ways. And this is going to be a very specific question for you, Jose. And I just want to reference back, because I just want to talk about just a little bit. I want to do a shout out to the international world and to the world of translation. And you're also, you're a bilingual also. But Jose and I spent a couple of weeks in Romania, specifically Transylvania, translating his play into Romanian and to Hungarian. And I'm just wondering about that experience, because you've had other experiences like this, of other translation. And translation also as development of a play. Now, Cloud Tectonics was pretty much kind of done, as it were when it's being translated. But this is just a very specific thing, because I'm so interested in it. And using translation as a means of play development. Yeah, yeah. What was so interesting about that particular experience in Romania is that the play was translated into two languages. And Hungarian, is it called? Hungarian, Romanian. And Romanian. And it was a fascinating experience, but I felt I had to read the actors to know if the moments were landing in the way that I had intended, because I had no clue as to the quality of the language that they were speaking. I mean, I trusted the translations were good. But it was really about feeling the actors' energy and understanding that, oh yes, the emotional moments that I crafted in the play still live and are still there over and above language itself. So that was really a fun experience. I mean, I had a not great experience in Paris. A play of mine was translated into French. And I sat there going, hmm, my character, my play is a three character play. I see four names in the program. And the play begins with this older man that I didn't write. And it was Cloutik Tonics. And it's the older version of Aniba looking back on his experience having met Celestine and falling in love. And so it became a memory play, though the great irony in the play is that Aniba has no memory. So the play that I wrote, which was about not having a memory, became a French memory play. So, you know, it happens. I could go down the rabbit hole with every single one of you and continue these conversations. I just think that's really funny, because I've heard other playwrights talk about this, specifically about Paris. The text is a very flexible thing in their hands. That actually does happen. That actually happened to Theresa Rebeck in Romania as well, where because also the playwrights, and it's kind of an up and coming and, you know, line of work here as a playwright, but that playwrights don't get billing. It's the directors. So it's so much of the directors who are doing the work. But there is this wonderful community of playwrights who are really trying to be like, and this is my work and I want my name on it. So it's just a different conversation that's happening. Anyway, I would really love to open it up to some of you to ask if you have any questions you would like to ask any of our panelists. There is a whole grouping of organizations starting to get together now that are doing nothing but development work and not producing organizations. And their intent is not to produce organizations, produce a work, but to help the playwright and discover and create and then hand it over to organizations like Casey Rebeck in festivals like this. And, you know, for the first time last year, we all gathered up and we're gathering up again to try to create a new model to present to you to help not do two things offset your costs, which is important, and allow the ability for an organization to work with a playwright in a group in a way that isn't controlled by the cost factor. So that's starting to occur, the conversations are occurring now. Can you tell us your name and where you're from, your organization? My name is Manuel Saadeteh and there's my wife Anne Saadeteh and we're the founders of the National Winter Playwrights Retreat, which we're exploring to take to Puerto Rico next winter as well, too. And so that's the first part. The second part has to do with your comment about culture and how culture is defining it. And our viewpoint has always been that we define the culture and the culture follows the waves and the words that we put out there. And it's one of the specific reasons why when we started the retreat, you know, we made a decision, we want to bring playwrights initially versus actors or directors. We'll start with playwrights because they were the definers of the words that the people speak on stage. They become the definers of a culture that we want to change. So it isn't about, so the way to change us having to be behind the culture is we have to create and be in front of the culture. That's all I've got to say right now. No, I'll just say, just to point out something that I haven't participated in, but a few years back, and I'm not sure if they're still doing this, but the Mellon Foundation had a playwright residency program that posited the idea of what would it be like to have a full-time playwright in residence with large cultural institutions. And I think some of the work, which you have here, right, is, of course, I'm so sorry. And I think some of the work that came out of that was quite revolutionary in terms of this idea that we engage with these artists only when we're licensing their plays or helping to develop them. But what is the impact? I mean, I hope that, I'm sure they will, but I hope Mellon talks about all of the work that's accomplished around the country because it's, you know, one imagines that it would be very particular to each of those institutions that engaged in that endeavor. But I hope also that it starts to lean toward organizations thinking about why can't we create a staff position that is, whether or not it's funded by an outside entity. That's, I mean, we can't do plays without playwrights. What happens if they are fully engaged in our institution and not only we're giving them space, time, and money to write their own work, but that they're then impacting how our audiences engage with the process of writing plays, but also all of the work that we put on stage. So I've always been very excited about it. So I'd love to talk to y'all here, too, about what your experience has been. Does anyone else have a question that they'd like to ask? Yes. Do you want to grab that microphone? Thank you. My question is for Eileen. So devising and directing, devised theater is becoming more known or more popular, I'm not quite sure. What was it like working with Deepika? Were you helping shape the words? Was the script already there? And then how much was devised? I'm curious. This is, I mean, unreliable is written by Deepika Guha. She's definitely the playwright. And it's interesting though, because there is a conversation about what it means to be the director of a new work and a premiering new work, because there's a heck of a lot of dramaturgical conversation and work that's collaborative that does go into the shaping of a play. And even to be perfectly honest, depending on what kind of room you run, even the actors in the play will be like, actually, my character at this moment. So there is, again, that's what I mean when I say, I don't think that devising is miles off from something that's already happening. I think that as a devising director, I'm often the one who has to be the hub for all the conversations. And I think that in a more traditional model, it's the playwright who does that. But that playwrights are very, I mean, they're porous, open, listening people and they're receiving feedback and shifting in response to what's happening in the room all the time from my experience. So with unreliable, it was, it was collaborative to the extent that we talk about, you know, what's the rhythm of this section, what's, you know, but it's difficult, does the writing. She's the genius. Yeah, I mean, the thing is that, you know, a playwright creates a world, not just a play. So we create the rules of the physics of the world. We create the rules of the psychology of that world. We decide the language and the poetry and all that stuff. And, you know, that I've never done collaborative. I mean, I've worked with people, but I have never collaborated to create a show with someone else. I just don't know if I could, to be honest with you. I'm very headstrong and not that what I'd say or do is the most right, but it is the most consistent with my vision. So I think the idea of, you know, really allowing the flourishing of a playwright's vision is really important. And I think for that reason, I, you know, tend to work with wonderful people, but in terms of like, what are the words, you know, it's like, I think they're mine. Right. You also direct some of your work. I have to write more, more recently. Yeah. Yeah, which I really, really enjoy. What is that experience like? Well, it's funny. There's such a strong prejudice in the business against playwrights directing their own work, you know, and I run into it all the time. And I just don't understand it, especially because in film, it's more the norm, you know. But, you know, I, the times that I've directed my work, nobody was harder on me dramaturgically than myself. And I became hypersensitive to the way the words were spoken by my actors and reading the looks on their faces. And, you know, just trying to understand like, what's happening below the surface and between the lines. And so, I actually, I think I've become a better playwright because I have directed, made me understand the physical limits of theater at times. And, you know, I've said to many, many students, write something impossible in your play. And I stick to that. But then when I've like, tried to like, execute something impossible as a director, I'm like, oh, god damn writer. And you're really helping us out, Jose, thanks for writing the impossible. You're figuring it out. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like the, the melting angel wings in Mother's Soul. Every director I know says, how the hell do you do that? We have time for one more question. If we have anyone in the audience, yes. How do you give notes to the actor slash director who's the same person? Okay, actor, writer. Vanessa Severo, who wrote and is performing Frida in Frida. We have a little game called the Playwrights on an Airplane and it's gone. And now I'm just talking to the actor. Or now I would like to talk to the playwright, please. We actually like, I figured out that we actually like defining that and I've started doing that with Kyle just in our one rehearsal so far on Frida's Sign. I'm like, the playwright's not here right now. Let's, let's just the actor. I think defining those things can be really helpful because when I ask a question about the text, it's then not, I'm interrogating your playwriting. It's, I'm trying to pick it apart with you as an actor and, and it can feel threatening if it, I'm talking to the playwright, but if I'm talking to the actor in that way, then it's a different thing. It's like we're trying to mine it out. So I do think some clarity around that. And I have found like it was, it's a very intense process because it's just me and that person and they are everything. And it's a huge responsibility to reflect back accurately what's happening on stage because they can't see it. They have to be dropped into it or else I can't see it. So it's, it's really, it's a, it's a huge task I think and, and it's a great honor to be asked to be part of a process like that because really they have to put a lot of trust into the director and what they're, what the director is seeing and hearing. I also think there's something about, like I've, I've worked with one in particular with somebody who is doing a musical comedy about his own childhood abuse. And that piece took for, is still in the process. So it's been four years in the making. And I think that they're just in the same way that you go, I need to talk to the actor, I need to talk to the, to the, to the, to the playwright or the person. You also need to go, I am now being your friend. I'm now being your director. I'm now kind of being your therapist. Like you have to know what, when it's the appropriate time to do which piece as well. Thank you. Thank you all so much for your generosity and your artistry and your advocacy. It really takes a village to get this stuff up and happening, right? It takes a lot of people. So thank you from your various perspectives. I just want to say for those of you also who weren't here earlier and to repeat again, to our generous supporters, the Origin KC New Works Festival, which is made possible by the Copac and Family Fund, H&R Block and the National Endowment for the Arts. And this project is supported in part by the City of Kansas City, Missouri Neighborhood Tourist Development Fund, and KC Rep is underwritten in part by the Missouri Arts Council. The next event that we have is we're going to take a little bit of a half an hour break, maybe 35 minutes, and the conversation will be happening on the stage, the Copacan stage. So for those of you, because we've all been on this floor, you can go through these doors up here or you can go down these, the staircase and make your way into the theater as soon as the house manager lets you when the show is over and the conversation will be taking place on the stage. As then and then after that there will be a little coffee refill for about 15 minutes, so be sure to come up and get your coffee before the next event, which in this room will be back here at 415 for Legacy Land. And so we'll have a reading and then after that we'll have a conversation with Martine, who will be speaking to Stacey Rose and to Logan, the director. So please come back here for that. And then also, Sofrida is also opening tonight at 8 o'clock in the Copacan stage and following that will be a post-show party. You are all welcome to that. All of our events are free. If you have been happy and excited about this program and also about the future of Casey Origins, Origins Casey, there's those little dip jars outside. You can just stick your credit card in. It's better than gambling. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much to our team. Appreciate it.