 I'll be right here. I have. Looking live down in the back please. For this morning's playwrights panel, Sophocas Drep is one of the fortunate beneficiaries of a grant from the Mellon Foundation, which has enabled us to hire Julie Viet to be on our staff for three years of state-of-the-art writers and presidents, which she's going to be doing a variety of duties and responsibilities in that capacity, a lot of them having to do with audience engagement. So on her first public official duties is to moderate this morning's panel with most of the playwrights whose work is being represented at the festival this morning. Our relationship with Julie goes back a number of years. Mine goes back to when I was working at the Taper with Pierre Carlos Tolenti, and Julie was a member of our writer's workshop there. And then we have produced My Wondering Boy here. It did the Sega Stone Festival. Was that part of the festival? It was, yeah. It's part of an earlier festival. And then we get her to play the happy ones in the yard just to get her a couple of years ago. And now she's here on our staff making many valuable contributions, I'm sure, beginning this morning, Julie. Oh, great. Yeah. Well, I just want to welcome you all. I just want you to also know that we're being live streamed. That is the word on HowlRound, which is being broadcast at Emerson. So there are people probably watching live who are up and awake. And it will be available later on their website. So just to let you all know about that, I'm really happy to be here. I have these five playwrights of the seven, the seven playwrights three days. And I would love it if you would all introduce yourselves and the play that you wrote that is yours in the festival. Hi, my name is Greg Moss. I wrote Reunion. I'm Zoe Kazan. I wrote Trudy and Max and Love. I'm Michael Hollinger. I wrote Hope and Gravity, but I'm happy to answer questions on behalf of Bo Willamon, even though I don't know him. Ha ha ha. What was it like to work with George Coon? Ha ha ha. My name is Noah Hidal. I wrote Smith-Balms. And I'm Carla Chang. And I wrote Fast Company. Well, I'm really excited to have everyone sitting here. And you get to see their faces, because I feel like sometimes as a playwright at these festivals, unless you see their name tag, you don't often get to see or hear why they were at the play and what was the inspiration for the plays that you see. So I'm going to ask each of them to just talk about what inspired these plays. Was it an image, an idea, an experience? So who wants to start? Play ball. Ha ha ha. Great. All right. So reunion was begun. Often the way I begin plays is that I have an idea of character and voice, but I also start from an idea of structure. I'm interested in genre. So I was interested in this idea. There's a sort of tradition in American theater writing of these sort of male plays of Shepard and Manet from across the pond, Pinter. So it's interesting that as a genre, how men interact in these sort of claustrophobic situations. So I was kind of adapting that form, but also thinking what can I do to contribute or subvert that form, too. So I think it's always a matter of setting certain structural limitations and then plugging in my personal material into it. And as a theme, I'm constantly interested in the way men interact, the way men front with each other, the way men show love for each other. So I think that was, for me, the seed and not I was trying to crack. And also, my father gave me a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which a group of 80-year-olds are given this potion, which makes them young again for about two hours. And they end up making exactly the same mistakes they made when they were kids. That's something about that repetition, that compulsion to repeat bad behavior seemed interesting to me, too. That was interesting. I didn't have that one. I also get there, too. I've read a few things. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose grandfather was one of the people who, like, was in the preschool. And he put the W in his name, so people wouldn't know that he was related to that person. Didn't know that, did you, Garth? I did. I have learned something from him. Anyone else? No one's next. Oh, thank you. I have two friends I had there. Now I don't. That was funny. No, funny guys. And so I wrote a fetus scene. I wrote a scene in a womb, so they would have somewhere funny to be. And there are a lot of fart jokes, and they peeped at each other and stuff like that. And then it became something very different. So it started out as a reason to have two friends have somewhere to be funny. And then it became something, for me, exploration of whether it's good to live or not. And so, from fart jokes to there. You started with that scene. Yeah, I did. One for 20 minutes. Yeah, a little more anyway, because that place, about where you got to at the end of that was where it got interesting. How'd you get from fart jokes to that? That's where I live, you know. I don't know. That wasn't a question. No, it wasn't a question. Put it into your face. Open. Ask another, ask some more specific questions. Well, you know, when you're dealing with age and exceptional age and birth and death and the nature of family and the nature of what it means to be a sibling and a child and a parent and follow personal, personal imperatives versus parent imperatives and responsibility for family, those are vast. Yeah, no. Farts, you know. No, for me, it's a straight line. Farts, I want you to say. Like, no, Bob, that's creation. I don't want to say that. I don't want to say that. What inspired you, Michael Mulligan? Yeah, yeah, right. That was what it seemed like a great fight. This is like a reality show. That's what it's like to be a child and a child. I've always been intrigued by and delighted by anthology plays. So, you know, the all-in-the-timings and the all-most mains. But also frustrated with them. I mean, I like the variety that they offer. I like the notion that you enter a different world each time the lights come up. But I also always had an irritation about them because your experience is very different from your experience of a full-length play, which ideally gives you a deepening experience of characters and predicaments and a deepening sense of thematic concerns. And so that you feel weight at the end of an evening of a good full-length play that you don't feel at the end of an evening of short things. So I started thinking, part of it was a cynical beginning, really, it was like, gosh, I've done all these 10-minute plays and wonder if I could recycle them. And that would be easy. I could save a lot of work that way. So I began writing short plays to connect them and they began to emerge non-chronologically connected by these elevator stories. And as I began to hear them allow readings and revise them, I kept pulling out more and more of the previously existing material and writing new pieces because I recognized that the values of the full-length play, the deepening values and the increasing weight of the play was much more satisfying to an audience, even an individual scene that really nailed it something if it didn't feel like it contributed deeply to the narrative and this sense of accrual, then it had to go. So that's been, you know, the irony and the joke on me is that it's been way harder in some ways than a full-length play because I've had to, you know, tear out, put back in, tear out, put back in, tear out, put back in. But I also recognize that that was the big game. That's what I was interested in and I'm not, and you don't see it very often. So it's exciting as a formal device to try to see is it possible for a play to be both a wave and a particle to feel like its increments are individually satisfying like a 10-minute play, but that also built together so it feels like a full experience. That's the best answer I've ever heard. Push it, push it, push it, push it, push it, push it, push it. That's incredible. Harlock? This is the easiest job ever. Why, you know, and I've sort of said, you know, my mom was a really tough lady. She didn't leave me in Long Beach or anything and tell me to get home, but... It's okay, we can talk about it. I wanted to really, like I write my plays to answer things for myself, things that I don't understand about the world and one thing I didn't understand is why she was so tough. So I was like, what was she trying to teach me and what did I learn over the course of that? So it was that and like some Chinese-American families, we are all gamblers, literally. We would defame all of your unions in Vegas. We'd do potlucks where everybody knows how to play, you know, whether it's Mahjong or Poker or Blackjack. Like I learned how to count playing Blackjack, so. I just thought that that's how the world was. I didn't know that. Do you split eights? I do split eights, yeah. Yeah, so I wanted to sort of be in a familiar world and do a family story that is fun because family stories are usually not fun. They're crammed, so yeah. Wow, good answer as well. Sorry to say that. Yeah, but can I answer one more question first? Yeah. But okay, so why did you make them half sibling, not full sibling? Because I'm also interested in the idea of not having blood obligation, that you choose each other, that you could walk away, but what if you choose to be with them? So that's kind of why we did that. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah, I had like a, I had like a, I similarly to Michael had like a formal interest which developed into a thematic interest which was that my first two plays were like much more like traditional in their structure, like two acts in one location and like Aristotelian unity. And I was just really tired of like getting people on and off stage. I just got so bored with it. And found myself like writing all this interstitial material just to like get to the next moment that I really wanted to write. Cause like what if I just wrote the parts that I want to write and just didn't write all the parts that are boring to me? So that is where the first like part of it came from. And like I have a real aversion not to be like a snob, but I do. I have a real aversion to plays like my own where you move location a lot. I feel like why not just write like a TV show? So I really, I didn't want to write a play in which we moved location a lot and where you had short scenes and unless I was going to frame it within some thing that felt like it has to be in the theater. And for me that was, and I know this wasn't totally clear in my reading but there's no set for my play. Like it's just a black box theater. And I wanted it to look like a rehearsal room. Like there are like tape rehearsal tables with props on them and wigs or hats or whatever people want. And that like everything you see is what you get. And that there are like rehearsal folding chairs and you know, and that those make up the furniture of the place. And that, you know, I was also thinking about how like the logic of an affair is sort of like the logic of being in the theater space where once you enter, all the rules are different than in your normal life. And you're allowed to like fall in love with people that you aren't allowed to fall in love with in the outside world. And once you leave, it's over. And all you have is the memory of it. So that's sort of where the like big thought came from. And then the specific thought came from feeling like that being a young person and feeling like I've just been lied to about the nature of adult love my entire life. And that it's like so much more complicated than anybody ever told me. And that I just wanted to write about that and sort of write about that in a way that didn't judge the characters or take a moral stand because I feel like that's not how people actually are. That's just how people are when they're judging other people. And were you concerned that by just setting it in a black box that all the theaters who would be considering it and say, we have all this set design money, what are we gonna do with it? Yeah, yeah. I was hoping they would just give it to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. More money to have a tree grow and no idle stage. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that. So please give and give Jen a stage. Tree grow and idle stage. My next question actually about how much, like where are you all in your plays? You know that. These plays? Yeah, that we saw here. I mean that you both spoke to particularly, this was wanting to deal with your mother and talking about love. And where do you feel like you all are exercised or expressed or where do you live in these plays? And I think you both kind of spoke to that, but I'm also wondering if you feel that you hide yourself in your plays before you expose yourself in your plays? Hide. Hide. Oh, that's the point of hiding. I don't know. Michael? Well, Noah starts out working with an idea. What was it like to work with George Clooney? I actually think that all playwrights start from essentially one pole. That there are, I mean, because I'm a teacher and I've taught students for many, many years that there's an essential movement. There's Tennessee Williams writing Glass Menagerie and saying I had an experience and I need to, and the movement is from experience to fiction. And that's one kind of challenge. And the Tom Stockards and Noah Hidles of the world and Michael Hollinger's and others begin with. Bo Willman. Bo Willman. I can't speak for Bo, but. There are other writers who say that thing over there is really cool. Let me see what that is. And the process of doing that forces the opposite journey, which is say, how do I bring it to me? And it's the same as actors. Actor, there are external to internal actors and internal to external actors. Well, speak to that. Yeah, I mean, depending on the parts, relative proximity to you. Yeah, what about you Gregory? I think sort of piggybacking on what Michael said. I feel like if you set up these formal or theoretical challenges, then it allows me to like open my heart into the play. You know what I mean? Like I feel safe once I have a little bit of distance from it. So I definitely feel it's self-revolatory, but once I have created the place for that stuff to go and make sense, you know? Yeah, I feel like they're not literally me speaking, but I am empathic with all the characters throughout the play. That's the word I think, the empathy word is, there is at some point an identification with everybody and sometimes the character that's closest to me is the 72-year-old woman, 72-year-old African-American woman, and it's a great secret to have to say, oh, I took a piece of my heart and I put it mostly in her and nobody will expect to find it there. And they'll look for like the middle-aged writing professor. You just told it every week. Now we're gonna know your secret stuff. That's why you say hi, and then that's too much to know. Wait, can I ask a question that's the one that's closest to you, is that the hardest to write or the easiest to write? I find hardest because writing the person that's closest to you is so easy to fall into the trap of this person's worldview is right, and then there's all these interesting, quirky, obsessive people around them, and we've all had lots of plays like that, right, where we go playwright character everybody else, and so yeah, I found it bizarrely that the most successful characters in the plays are ones where I go like, I don't know where you're talking from, but I'm gonna take dictation now, and I have no right to know how your life experiences comes out like this, but that's the great mystery, right, where you go, I don't know how that's happening, but I'm not gonna question it too much in case it stops. Right, right. Anyone else have anything to add? Well, I guess I also wanna ask, so what is different about writing now in 2013 than any other time? What makes this time special? For the theater? Yeah, as a playwright, what themes, what, as opposed to say two years ago, or four years ago, or eight years ago, for 20 for some of us are older, what makes this different? I think some of it is what Zoe was talking about with her plays, is there is such, we're such an image-based, media-saturated society that what theater can do is strip that down, actually, and engage the audience's imagination and collaborate with them. That's not a thematic thing, but I think it's something that is sorely missing in the culture that theater does that nothing else really does in the same way, and the sense of doing that in a community, in the community of an audience is kind of amazing, I think. I mean, I don't really know about writing, I'm gonna speak as an audience member, which is that I think that like movies used to be a communal experience that everyone had, and recently people just watched them on their computers at home, and that's really sad to me as somebody who loves movies, but you can't do that with theater, you can't import it into your laptop and take it home, and that the thing of witnessing something as a group and having a group experience that is larger than yourself is something that I think is essential to being human, and that it would be devastating to lose for cultural reasons, but also for reasons of believing that other people are human, too. And that that is something that even when I'm like, oh, I like hated that play so much, like I had that experience in a group, and then that, we shared that. Yeah, I mean, I actually think it's painful in some ways to go to the theater, like I think that it's like, I think I can count on my fingers the times when I've gone over the course of my life that I can remember seeing a play and having a totally transcendent experience, and that is why I go to the theater all the time, is because you had like five good hits, and that I was talking to Mark Masterson about this thing, weirdly though, things I also remember really well are the things that I hated or that felt like total failures to me that I can still remember those things, and that the stuff in the middle is the stuff that I kind of forgot, the stuff that was really good or I had a fine time, and that that is also, I think that being forced to sit there and you can't check your phone and you can't like play spider solitaire online while you watch TV, and like you have to like, you have to concentrate and you're forced to pay attention, that, or fall asleep, but that's good. Yeah, believers still go to church even though they've only had a religious experience a few times. Right, right. Yeah, and people keep having sex even though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gone there. Yeah. So, is that the next question? Yeah. Well, did anyone else want to answer, speak to that? What, I mean, politically does it change environmentally what's going on? I mean, could these plays that we saw here be performed at another time, say, do you feel like they speak to where we are now? Well, I mean, it's a good question. Back in time, not forward in time. Back in time. Now yours is gonna be really good in 2089. I was born to be posthumous. Like what would a dramaturg find about your, this era of... Of us, this playwright? Yeah. Well, I mean, sadly our generation has been taught to do less with, or more with less, the opposite. You know, I think it's a specific challenge for us. Actors, there's no spear carriers anymore. And not, like, I think if Streetcar Name Desire was written today, it'd be four characters. It'd be a mix, you know. And that's just an economic reality of our generation. And either you can accept that or say, fuck it. Ooh, can I say that? Good morning, Emerson Cowley. Sorry, can I ask you a question? Yeah. Yeah, piggy. Like, Michael, I know that for this reading, we had, like, doubling of characters. In, like, an ideal world without any strictures, would you have those all be created by different people? It's interesting. I've written another play called Red Herring that has 18 roles in it, played by six actors. Right, but that's a good thing that people started with. Right, so the, and I've seen it, I've seen it done as six in professional theaters and seen it done as 18 in universities and things. And I've seen a reading of Hope and Gravity with 10 actors, as one person per role. And both of them felt utterly valid to me. The one with the larger cast incarnation feels like, wow, there's an entire world. All these people are individual. And the one with the doubling says, wow, these actors are astonishing. They are transformative. And so the doubling version is just more theatrical and more self-conscious. Right. And the other is a little more textured and broad. But I liked them both. Right, but I'm sorry, I'm not articulating my question well enough. Like, many playwrights out of necessity, like I and my play, like, are forced to think in another theatrical way in order to justify having one actor play multiple parts. But, like, do you feel that it is, like, to the play we saw, to Hope and Gravity, do you feel like it's intrinsic to the play or do you feel like it's something that was imposed by the necessity to think that it's theatrical? That's a great question. And it's almost impossible for me to think clearly on it, but certainly I would not have undertaken a 10-actor play blithely. Right. I think it's in place of 10 to 12 characters and I don't undertake them blithely. So almost certainly the doubling convention was derived from the notion, all right, how can this be a good rather than a dead end or rather than an impediment to it being produced? Right. I also think that, like, I don't know if you guys feel this way, but, like, being an actor myself that, like, I want to give every actor enough to do. And that, like, that's, like, a wonderful thing about giving them multiple parts is that you're like, okay, well, like, I wonder if I would feel the obligation to make that character more important to the play if I didn't give that actor something else to do. Well, there's something astonishing about a curtain call where you've seen something, you're like something of the angels in America, you get to the end of it and you go, my God, eight actors? How is that possible? It is wondrous. Right. And everybody earns their paycheck in a good time. Yeah. Yeah. I'll open it up to questions for the audience, for the playwrights, because we could sit up here all day together, but I wanted to see if anyone had any questions they wanted to bring up that came from this weekend, that they're burning in their minds. The hands, man. Who to call out. What have you learned about your plays through this weekend's process? Great question. So for anyone that didn't hear that is, what have you learned through this weekend's process about your plays? I learned that I'm done with it. My, no, no, no, in a way that's necessary. My, I wasn't part of the reading series and I haven't been to see my play since opening night and I came back and it belonged to the actors and I saw it and it looked like a neat play, but it really didn't feel part of me anymore. So that's what I learned, that I'm done, let's see. Just for people that are watching us on the web, Noah's was a full production, we do two full productions and then five readings. It's kind of a series. Noah's was a production and the rest here were readings. So that would be a good question for others. Did you all make a lot of changes to your plays? During this process? I made a lot of changes, actually here. I saw a lot of different colors in your play. Okay, so these colors, each color is for a different set of rewrites. So that's the work that we did this, so I mean, we did that but I also just learned where, you know, hearing it with the audience where I still need to cut what can go away. So that was super useful. That's great, that's very impressive. You should just frame that. It's gonna be good in a posthumous way. I tried not to change anything because in so short of rehearsal time I don't wanna give the actors a moving target but I definitely have a lot of homework that I'm taking away with me. I think it's hard to give a simple answer to that because I think I have to process what occurred in the performance first. But it was definitely informative. I think an audience is really the best teacher for these things. Yeah. I am like an all too willing rewriter. Like I think it comes from being an actor. Like I just like taken out immediately and I don't process it most of the time. And I think I've like damaged my first two plays by not being like enough of an advocate for my original impulse. So I went into this very like careful, like very cautious and feeling like I needed to like be the most stubborn person in the entire world and not be such a freaking people pleaser. So I like tried to shut up a lot more and not try to like fix actor problems by making changes. I rewrote like three pages probably over the course of the last four days. And I probably feel like I have like three more pages to rewrite. I don't. Which ones? I like 42. Yeah. 98 to 101. I like it. Weirdly the three pages I rewrote before. I think I need to do a tiny bit more work. 98 to 101 is always hard. Always hard. Yes. And I made adjustments to make Max's case stronger in their breakup argument. And now I think I need to work a tiny bit more for her because before she had a much stronger argument than him. And I learned that the humor in my play is not so idiosyncratic. I was not expecting people to laugh and then people laughed a lot. And I was like, oh, I just get nervous sometimes that like the thing that's funny to me in my head is like not funny to anybody else. Yes, I'm not alone. I've seen a lot of readings of this play unusually for me and in all different incarnations with different actors and different pieces in it. So I have a kind of spreadsheet in my head which is very perplexing of where it worked, when it worked, how it worked, who read it. And so there's a high watermark of the success of each individual scene and of the play as a whole. So that's mapping against my experience of any individual reading. For me, the values that I looked at most closely and still I'm looking at closely are how do the changes tip the play toward one of two values? It's comic devices which are rather powerful at times and it's inclination to fall, to reveal human brokenness, to fall into the belly. And the play is asking, as my friend Aaron who directed this, knows a phrase that we've now both share is ha ha ouch. The dramatic rhythm of that. So as I continue to work on it and this includes this version discovering a little too much ha ha, not enough ouch, oops, too much ouch, not enough ha ha. And I think I'm gonna be swapping out some of these pieces and replacing them with others again in the next incarnation. Michael, you just talked about the fact that you've seen many readings that you've probably got to with different actors. But for some of you, I don't know for some of you whether this is the first or the 15th reading that you've seen of this, but some of your reactions to the power of the acting and in the initial actors sitting here, but just seeing your words embodied by the actors, what that feels like and maybe how that's affecting what you feel about your play. May I piggyback on your questions, Laili? Piggy. What's she gonna say, no? Ha ha ha ha. No. It is a perfect question. It is a perfect question. It's something I'm extremely interested in. It was a question for those who maybe didn't hear about the actors and the casting in their plays. She was saying how wonderful it was and how they responded to the, seeing the actors perform their plays. Like, I am very curious in like how, if it is a good thing and if it is, how one does it to actor proof of play. And that is the way that I would like to piggyback on that question to my fellow playwrights. I don't think you can. Because I think sometimes you get like an amazing stroke of casting and that person is exactly what you pictured in your head or better. But a lot of the time, you're like, even if you have a really great actor, you're hitting a thing where you're like, they don't have that essential quality. And it's not their fault because they're a person and they're bringing all of their humanity to this and they're really good at it, what they're doing. But they're never gonna bring that thing. And like, I've had the experience. Are you talking about Chris Messina? Perfect. Yes, terrible. He's terrible. Terrible. Shit. I'm never going to be good in that part ever. But no, I've had the experience and I've had the experience of an actor being in something and being like, I'm making this work for you, but I have a suspicion that there's a giant hole in your play that I'm covering by doing this over here. Was it Angels in America? Yes, that one. That was the giant hole. You know what I'm saying though, that like, as a playwright too, you've like, sometimes you lean on an actor. Like, what, how, what, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's different from play to play. I feel like with this particular piece, I was trying to write something that was open enough that an actor who was a game and inventive could put their stamp on it. I wanted to write something that was three sort of big types that an actor could inhabit and make their own. I think there is always a dance with actors in terms of conveying the line I heard in my head and the literal music and rhythm of that and the way they're giving it. But I think it's also just, this is part of the, it's the vicissitudes of this art form. You have to deal with other human beings and let them do what they do. So I don't have a pat answer except for that there's a dance that goes on in the rehearsal room and you try to make it work for everybody, you know. I mean, I always get Jackie Chung when I can because she will magic moments. And yeah, I mean, is it, because it's a collaborative art form, is it an okay thing that we help each other sometimes? I think so, I just mean like, how do you make the play sturdy enough that you don't have to lean? Like that you don't need that perfect actor. Like that, that's sort of what I mean. Is it possible? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. That's why I asked, I mean, do you guys, how do you guys address that? How do you feel about that? I don't think, I've never found that as possible, but I... I think the one thing that I feel is true is that great roles are also really hard. It's like composers don't write easy to sing arias. They write really freaking hard arias that singers have to rise to the challenge of. And when they do, we're astonished because it's like watching Cirque du Soleil. And the hardest roles, the roles that the actors gnash their teeth about and go, hi, how am I supposed to do this? Are the ones that they rise to the challenge of and astonish us with. So I don't know how to put that as an imperative. I've just discovered that to be true. And oftentimes in the casting process, we'll go, yeah, they're not quite right. You know, she's four foot eight and the character is supposed to be six foot, but we'll make it work. And then suddenly, you have a performance where you go like, wow, that little firecracker has such scale, and suddenly it's very impactful. Whereas maybe if you had somebody who was an exact fit, that the striving towards the role would not have been so great. That's a great answer. Yeah, no shit. I love that. I love the idea that writing something challenging is the imperative. Make your collaborators work hard. This play, Red Herring is very, has to be solved, its design has to be solved by really, really smart director and designer. And they start the process, always going like, yeah, it's jealous, I'm working, okay. And they get to the end of the process if they've solved it, being brilliant. And like winning awards as they've solved it. Because it's hard, but it forces them to be hard. Just like the Queen of the Night aria, it forces a singer to sing. You want me to do it right now? Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Beau Williman. We have time for one more question in the back there. It's a secret. Take Michael's class, apparently. I want to take your class. You're a good teacher. Are you a good teacher? No, not a shit. Zoe? No comment from the play right here. I understand the question. Very good secret. And then, I mean, I don't know. If you bury the good secret. I think there's, I mean, I don't, I'll give you the answer that I can understand. I think characters use an abundance of language to hide things, and then they use silence to hide things. So sometimes overselling the story, overselling the lie is a way to indicate, it tells the audience and is a way to withhold something, actually. To talk too much can be that, I think. So that's one sort of very technical answer. I think there are a lot of play, I don't know, just like from what I see, I feel like there are a lot of plays being written right now where like the dramaturgical trick of the play is that there's some piece of information that we don't know for most of the play and that the audience's job, like the dramatic event is the unveiling of that thing. So I think there are a lot of ways to skin a cat and that there are a lot of people writing in that way now, so audiences are getting savvier about it, so writers have to work harder. Well, can't, did you have a quick, no, go for it. We have one for, squeeze one more in here. Well, I really love myself when my son was a writer. I don't think any of us love ourselves. Total stopo. It's a prerequisite of the job to not have to yourself. So that was, the final question was, how do you know when you've written a good play? To the challenge of answering? Oh, the challenge of answering. I'm going to answer this just by telling you like one anecdote, which is that my last play, I was like three weeks in a rehearsal and called my parents and I was like, I don't know how anyone writes like an okay play. Like it is so hard just to like write an okay play. Like I don't, like good play, great play, play that people will want to do in two years. I don't, I can't even begin to understand how you make like, I have no clue. And my dad who has been writing for like 40 years was like, yeah, no, no one knows. I'll try. It's a really strange thing that we do for a living. We, the other people watch something that we love and you have to love something to watch people watch it. And so at some point, how do you know that it's good? It doesn't, it's something that you love and you can't apologize for anything that you love. And so I feel that everyone here loves what they put on stage. And so at some point you have to disassociate from other people's reactions and be in love with that thing. And it doesn't matter. I mean, it's like when you bring a girlfriend home to mom and dad, you know, you're having dinner and then that person goes to the bathroom and you say, so what did you think? And that, no, and that validation makes you feel good or bad, but at the same time, it doesn't matter. Like you love that thing with all your heart and people saying good, bad and different. Like it's immaterial at some point. And so that's how you know you did something good when you feel in love. That is an excellent note to end. I agree. Okay. That was good. And just sharing your thoughts and hearts today. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.