 Hello everybody. I am Sheree Adams and I am in the Steering Committee at Directors Lab West. I am going to describe myself for you. I'm wearing a black shirt, a black and white shirt, a white necklace made of beads. My background describes the speakers of this conversation and has the hashtag Directors Lab West connects. What is Directors Lab West connects? I'm glad you asked. Directors Lab West is a 20-year-old, all-volunteer-run organization that produces an annual eight-day intensive lab. It's full of workshops, panels, masterclasses and more. It's for mid-career directors and choreographers and they come from all over the world. Well, the pandemic put a wrench in that. However, refusing to be thwarted, we chose to mark the lab this year with Directors Lab West connects. Online version of the lab. Needless to say, we've been overwhelmed by your responses. So here we are. Welcome to eight days of conversations crafted for and by theater directors and choreographers, live streamed by our partners at HowlRound to their website and to our Directors Lab West Facebook page. There you can join the chat. Tell us who you are and where you're tuning in from and ask questions for the Q&A following our speakers' conversation. Very special thanks to Alan Witteborg for providing ASL interpretation. He is wearing a gray shirt. He has a beard and he has a pale face. You can also head over to our Facebook page for audio captioning, if you like. I'm very excited to welcome our speakers today, Luis Alfaro and Laurie Woolery. We asked them to talk together today about their work with their communities and how it's changed post-COVID. We are also curious about how teaching has changed during COVID and what changes they have made to the process because of it. Luis Alfaro is an award-winning playwright who divides his life between working in regional theater and community-based art throughout the United States. He recently finished his sixth season tenure as the playwright in residence at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He teaches at University of Southern California and before all this went down he had a pretty good run at the Magic Theater St. Louis Repertory Theater and two seasons in a row at the Public Theater in New York. Speaking of the Public Theater, Laurie Woolery is the Director of Public Works there. If you're not familiar, it is a wonderful program that seeks to engage the people of New York by making them creators and not just spectators. She is also a director playwright, citizen artist. She's the former Associate Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company and the Conservatory Director at South Coast Repertory. Might not know this, but she develops new work with diverse communities ranging from incarcerated women to residents in a Kansas town who were devastated by a tornado. Luis and Laurie, welcome. They will be in conversation for the next 30 minutes and then return with some questions hot off the Facebook chat. I'll see you all soon. Thank you so much, Shirei. My name is Luis Alfato and I am middle-aged queer Latino man who was recently shaven this morning and I gave myself a COVID haircut. So I'm feeling a little messy but a little cleaned up as well. Hi, Laurie. Hi, Luis. I'm ageless. I'm Laurie Woolery. I'm ageless. I am wearing a top, a moth-colored top and I am letting my COVID route show. So I wear glasses and I am happy to be here talking to my friend. I'm so happy to be here with you, Laurie. I thought maybe before we even started I should say that I clocked for myself and for everybody that you and I have known each other for 28 years formally. I was a child. You were a child and I was a child too. You were my very first professional play. I think you taught me. No. Every day, Luis. You were my very first professional play at South Coast Repertory and you were an actor and this was the first professional play I had written 28 years ago. I don't know if people realize it when they ask us to talk together. They realize how close and intimate we are as actual friends for the last two, three decades. So I'm excited about this conversation. Yeah, because they're going to be expecting pros and they're just going to get cheese may right? That's all. These are our late night calls you're all invited into so it's just happening big morning. Oh gossip all the time. I was thinking this morning as we started I've been meditating a lot about this past week watching the presentations and one of the presentations that really took me was the Jessica Hannah and Bogart conversation. Partly I really loved and Bogart's definition of what we needed right now. The three things we needed. The triptych we needed in order to get through this moment which was passion point of view and craft. And even more interesting to me was Jessica Hannah talking about I don't know starting from a place that I don't know. And today we're having a conversation about community you and I. And I don't know is usually the place I start from. Do you relate to that in any way? 10,000 percent always. I think it's the reason why I don't think I know it's the reason why I stay doing this work is to truly step into a space of not knowing and to step into a space of what are we going to create together. And to find out something else about the world and others and myself that I don't know which is pretty thrilling and pretty kind of counterintuitive also to our field. Yeah, I agree. I was thinking about when I was getting ready to do this. I was thinking that one of the things that I've always done when I've gone into new communities is that vulnerable act of saying I am the most ignorant person in this room. Please tell me. Tell me what I should know. And it is the first portal right into not just a community bit to friendships into being vulnerable as artists need to be. And I was thinking about how 30 years later it translates into my teaching that one of the first things I do with students is I don't teach. I don't give information. I don't pass on anything first. The first thing I always say is who are you? Who are your people? And if we can be so bold, what are your dreams? Which is a lot to ask of somebody, right? A stranger especially. But I love the results of what that does to us. And in some ways it is for me not the beginning of a teacher-student relationship but the beginning of an art-making relationship. Yeah, I also love the question in those introductory moments of tell us something we don't know about you by looking at you. And I always tease it out a little bit more saying and even if you have friends in this room they can't know it either. So I'm really just trying to up it so that there's this thing that we used to talk about at Cornerstone and I know that I hold on to it all the time is the insider-outsider perspective. And so I think that's what you're talking about when you're saying like the most ignorant person in the room is like walking and going you are the experts of your community like you know what's happening here I might think I know but I don't know. And so how often do we get to be in a beginner's mind? I had and she continues to be just somebody I think about all the time one of my teachers Denise Taylor who really taught me the phrase beginner's mind. And I didn't quite understand it when I was you know a young artist trying to find out figure out my way through it. But it is something that I hold into not just every community I go to but every class I step into every room I step into I try to do with humility and try to be egoless in that but also in the rehearsal room is going you know how can I you know I've done all the prep that I can do on my own or with my designers but now the actors are going to step in and the and the dramaturge are going to be in conversation and all of us together are going to bring our life experience into the room and how the work resonates for us and that is always such a rich and delicious place to be. So I think what's so great about the classroom was it just you get to practice it all the time and in rehearsal you're lucky to you get to practice it when you get a gig you know and so and then I think in our everyday jobs it's you know regardless of whether it's theater or not is how can we continue to practice those skills you know especially now in COVID it's like all I got is me and that is like me and Zoom but you know it's hard when you're like spending so much of your time in relationship to other people and really wanting to and depending upon that conversation. I love what you're saying because I one of the things I adore about you in the room is that those first moments are really the moments to open up the possibility of a room right the possibility of how much excellence is going to happen in a rehearsal room is really built in pulling back rather than jumping in and taking over you know and I love for me as a play right I'm going to just I think I want to affirm something you said is that I listen very closely in those first few moments because I love writing for actors I think that's one of my gifts and I love adapting my text to the actor's strength right and also the actor's challenges sometimes you hear an actor talking you think I better not use this word or I better like pull back on the essays or whatever it is right sometimes it's technical but sometimes it's also really philosophical right and so I think about how I enter the room and what I'm going to learn in the silence of my empathy right in the in the meditation that I'm doing well I'm also actively listening and I think it's not a surprise to me that you and I both do theater work we are in the academy because we're also mentors and mentees but we also are community builders right so all of those are this I think I'm using a lot of the same skill sets to do the work I think of the classroom as the rehearsal space I always say to the students at the top I'm not going to treat you like a student I'm going to treat you like a colleague in a in a production so let us figure out what that relationship is right yeah absolutely and how we talk to each other because you know you can be passionate about something and you want to be able to express that fully and completely but also being able to understand and read the room about how your passion is received so and I think because so much of my life has been about trying to like let's keep that contained that I want to be able to like let that live in a space that we have collectively set up that is safe so one of the you know one of the big ones for me is just like assuming good will you know when we're in the space is like hearing I mean I just think it's a good life one overall is assume good will you know I just think it's helpful because you can you can load in all your other stuff that you're bringing into your life into it and make assumptions about people which is why this work is humbling to the ego because you have to check yourself and going don't think that you know like you might know but you might know what you might learn something else and you know I teach because I I teach because it's also kind of a selfish act because they teach me so much my students my community have taught me how to be an artist because you know for those some of the people who know me really well know that you know I will say my dirty hidden secret is I don't have pedigree in terms of I did not go to the top institutions I've never taken a directing class in my life you know but I didn't even think I wanted to be a director but community shaped me and I just found myself in rooms and saying yes to the experience of like oh yeah sure we'll say cruise I'll help you do the neighborhood conservatory at south coast wrap you know I'll I'll assist you and then it evolved into all these kids showing up and me being thrust into being a teacher and I remember him saying to me you know I'm like I you know he was he was a great lesson and I will share this story just because we thought 20 kids were gonna show up it was a community center in Santa Ana and we were just hoping 20 kids would show up and 120 kids showed up and I turned to him and I'm like oh my god we're gonna have to turn away a hundred kids and he's like no hold on give me a second and he's like okay this is what we're gonna do we're gonna divide up the room and he started to sing like you take half of them I'll take half of them we'll divide them up I'll have these kids for this hour we'll do have multiple classes going and I'm like I'm not a teacher and he's you know more than they do and then he just started counting off the room and it was the greatest lesson in one pushing me off the high dive but he trusted that I could do it and that I wasn't I wanted to be prepared and sometimes you just have to do it and learn in the moment but he also showed me how not to be so rigid with your rules or your expectations like whoever shows up is who shows up and you know it's loaves and fish you know to get biblical here it's like we can feed everybody and so how do we do that with what we have? Well you teach what you need to learn right in some way you know every year I say to myself okay now I'm going to go back into the field and concentrate a hundred percent of my time as a working artist but in truth I am doing that because teaching is part of learning right teaching that every student brings something to the experience that is a surprise. I have an exercise I just don't want to run away too far away from it because I believe very strongly and Joe Chakins the presence of the actor I think every director every writer every playwright every actor should read this book it's small and short but he has a series of questions of character he calls them when he builds a character and the first question is what is the one thing the people cannot see when they look at you and I do that at the start of every semester right and sometimes it's very something very surface but there's always one student who will turn out to be that shining student who will say something that's very true and very deep and very real about the world that we live in right that helps me shift the classroom from art to a citizen work which is I think one of the things that you and I do a lot of right we are artist citizens and we are engaging in a kind of social discussion in the academy in the theater and in our lives so I'm really moved by this idea that what we're really doing is building up community outside of the space the building right outside of the theater we are really building community of artists who are also citizens and at the same time are trying to figure out how to use that work their gift to build something bigger in our in our culture so I have never felt that they could even if they had a tiny glimmer of a like like oh wouldn't that be cool oh but no is to open up a space you know to create a true invitation for people to step up and step into you know and I can't say that I intuitively knew that going in that these tools that have revealed themselves to me have been revealed to me through being present with community in a shared space as to what do you want what do you need what do you desire what are you looking for you know what do you want from me you know that that for me always shapes a classroom but it also shapes a rehearsal room and a process yeah I agree I agree I'm thinking a little bit about about um you know we we talked previously just uh I was going to surprise you by saying when where's the god in all of this right but in some way you've already kind of mentioned it and I think one of the things that I'm very excited about right now especially in this pandemic time is where is the spirit in all of this right um in some ways I'm being guided by spirituality what does that mean right I'm being guided by something bigger than me in this moment that's allowing me to be a bigger artist than I've ever been bigger artist in the sense that I have to be really really creative about how I do the work and not lose sight of the work that I do right yeah and I wonder if you have thoughts about just because you work with hundreds of community members who are who you bring into a space but also you go visit their spaces a lot is what are you thinking about the the notion of what's happening right now with the loss the sense of displacement there's so much going on and you know it's just especially today with a violent day in our country right purposely so but I'm wondering how we move through these moments and not forget that we are artists right and how do we use the art to um share um like I you know I just shared with my staff this morning is uh for the last several weeks I have felt this always feels like something is standing on my chest you know this pressure and you know I've gone like is it gas is it acid reflux is it loneliness it's despair is it anxiety you know and I think it is um you know it's being in a city that is the epicenter of the virus um the 100 000 souls uh being in a neighborhood uh that is primarily black and walking the streets and seeing how this my neighborhood is affected by what is happening I mean the last couple days there has been such shouting outside my my windows people yelling at each other and um and you know we're all in our little boxes in these little containers and it is going to be a hot summer and you know here in New York just talking to our community partner leaders it's like the funding for all the after school or I mean the summer programming has dried up and so our community partners are trying to find ways of like you know we are going to do programming for our teens and our youth because we've got to make sure that they are not on the street we're like the funding for arts has gone down but the funding for police have gone up like this we see this as potentially being a a powder kick you know and so in this moment like you know I was raised of service like what are you doing for your community you know what are you doing for your family what are you doing for your friends what are you doing for your community so it's so interesting the art never felt like it was um a party I was invited to or a place that I should be spending my time which literally like my family would be like why why are you doing that like that's you know be of service and so I feel like uh community and teaching has and also being a director has you know I do feel like it that's why I call it a citizen artist I do feel like it is of service you know we are we we we can tell the stories of our community and invite our community into being a part of not only telling those stories and witnessing those stories but some some level of participation around it you know and our community partner organizations are struggling and so in this moment of wanting to produce and do things make art um I have found that I've just and the team we've just gone okay we gotta listen to what community needs like what do they need right now how can we serve them and meet them where they need in this moment so that also when we come back that we showed up for them we were truly truly good neighbors and good partners so but again you know what does that look like can only be revealed in conversation you know and by turning to them and saying what is it that you need what can we do to highlight what it is that you need what can we do to provide and the things that have come up have been food hygiene technology and what they're saying creativity but for me I interpret that as spirit because that is where the sacred lives is in the creative and so people are needing to find a way to tap into their spirit in this moment and I just think theater is story is the perfect way to do that but it can't be as we think because we're leaving a lot of people out if we just rely upon technology because for us our elders aren't zooming you know and for a lot of people they don't actually have access they've relied upon the libraries or the cafes or I mean honestly up until the pandemic I didn't have internet in my house you know not for lack of not being able to afford it but it's just like you can get away with not having it but that was a whole lot of whole lot of but when you're talking about where's the god where's the spirit in the work is I think it also goes back to what you're talking about is how do we show up and listen and see what is this opportunity presenting us with you know clearly things have not been working I think I shared with you my big joke is like mother nature is like going okay you all are getting a big time out go to your rooms think about what you've done I'm gonna do a little clean up and then we're gonna let you back out when this is over but it's like how to be awake during this time and you know I can't say that I have the answers I'm forming questions and I'm trying to listen and I'm trying to show up and be present but I do often feel the pressure of what it is to be an artist in the American theater and it's like oh I should be writing that thing that I was going to be writing or I should be creating that thing that I kept saying or I should be reading all those books that I said I was going to wanted to get to what about you yeah I feel like I'm going backwards not backwards in that I'm not accumulating I'm actually going back because back is the really wonderful place to go to your roots your base as an artist right so for me you know I started in poetry for 10 years and then I was in the performance art world and in performance art training we had a really wonderful living theater exercise we used to do called um deliberation in the act of doing nothing you're always doing something what a great thing to sort of like hit on now right in the act of doing nothing you're always doing something and my teacher Scott Gellman used to say to us a move towards the thing that needs you the most move towards the thing that needs you the most so I am in a very I'm in the densest neighborhood of all of Los Angeles County I live in Koreatown of Los Angeles is 66 neighborhoods this is the one that's most crowded 50 percent of the people in my neighborhood are Latino 25 percent are Korean and then a mix but 94 percent of the people in my neighborhood are renters so when I get up at five o'clock in the morning thinking I'm going to do my walk and avoid anybody who might infect me anyway I actually I'm walking straight out into a ton of people in uniforms and working class outfits who are essential workers so in the beginning I thought hmm wow this is really pushing me somewhere I don't want to go or this is pushing me somewhere that I don't understand but I started to understand that during the until very very recently I was an essential worker too I'm cradling 75 students who are all over the world I have a student who's getting up at two o'clock in the morning for her regular class right because she's now in another part of the world and mostly my specialty is uh international students right and so I am realizing that there is a lot of trauma so not all my students as you were saying I have access the way I have access so I don't always see my students because they're sharing space a single room with an entire family yeah so they opt to you know mute out or video out and I'm okay with that right so there you have to be present you have to be here I need you to be here and I need to know that you're here and I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you a lot of questions about being here but it's very very important to recognize that as I'm in the place that I'm living the reality of where I live informs how I need to move through the world as an artist right I'm in a really crowded neighborhood so my first you know a few weeks of of the pandemic was trying to figure out how to just do very basic things without sort of being um without sort of interrupting the neighborhood life that I had right um and I'm so proud of us because as as Sheree comes back on I was thinking that uh we didn't go into multiple languages like well we could so bless bless that poor sign language guy thank god we didn't do that hi I'm back I wanted to let you know fast that wasn't it it seems very fast I could listen to you for hours honestly um so we're getting amazing questions on the live feed and we also had some amazing questions when people signed up originally um with the event right so is it okay if we ask some questions absolutely okay great thank you all right so this one's for Laurie I think it's a fascinating question um what skill other than directing of course helps you be a better director well um I was say I was born into an ensemble because I come from a family of five siblings and I was the fourth of that so you had to learn to play and negotiate you know we were all like this like my poor mom we were all together um but I so I always say that that was like my first place was being just a part of a family ensemble and then I started off as an actor and so and an actor who um had no other desire I wanted to write an app that was like what I was hoping to do but I will say that um as you know being um Latinx and with the last name Woolery and people like not quite sure who I was and was I Latin enough or what was what was I um you know as a a young woman coming up as an actor it was very confusing because I already didn't feel I was invited to the party and then to be affirmed that I was there really wasn't a place for me and if you think you're Latin you're not really Latin but that had never been an issue before I started being an artist like I never questioned whether I was you know Latina enough like I just was I was just who I am and that's my mother's family that's who we spent all our time with Spanish was spoken in my you know with my mother and my theas all the time so I would have to say that it's like that being an actor and not feeling safe in rooms not feeling seen in rooms made me want to I brought that then to my teaching you know where it's like I want to create a space where people can um feel safe and can then take risk which then bled into when you're teaching it's like oh gosh now you have to direct them in something and then oftentimes it was like I was working with you know young people of color it was like okay I'm not going to do the Disney fair so let's create something so I mean I'm totally dating myself but this was at the time before I knew the word devised you know I didn't there was not community engage community based theater it was just like these were my people these were the I was looking in the faces of kids that looked like me or who um you know were kids of color that were just like why should I care why should I want to engage you know what is this about and me trying to say no come on in come into it and that all of all of it is what I bring into a rehearsal room and hopefully what I bring into a leadership space um you know which is where for me the term citizen artist comes in because it brings it all in I you know in the facilitated conversations I have or in the um when you're in a room and you discover you're the only person of color like there's a responsibility to speak up because you know all the other people that are um depending upon you to do it so I would say all of those skills have uh helped me in everything that I've done I could I'm not smart enough to have plotted out a career path you know Bill Roush used to always say what is your one three five year journey I'm like I don't even know what I'm having for lunch like I I'm not plotting it out like I wish I was smarter than that but what I was smart is saying yes and being curious and following that curiosity very interesting question you're both online teaching now correct and is it I mean it must be really hard I've heard it's very very hard is there anything that you do in particular and I know you spoke about this in the beginning but what can teachers out there do that teach theater to engage the online students and to reach communities that don't have the technology is there anything that can be done to help that I'm gonna first talk to you Louise because you've been doing it more and I can explain it from a different end from how we've been doing it I think when it started I one of the first things I was inspired by was the the fact that I was not going to be able to teach let's say acting online I just don't believe that you can do that but I can teach you everything leading up to it we can we can read all the great texts we can do all the character work we can do all the great research and the research includes the exercises of acting right but we can do all of that stuff so something very unique happened to me I was teaching a MFA one actors text analysis and we were reading these in person reading these extraordinary very complicated plays I found that were avant garde plays so we were talking about language and cut up text and the whole thing but when we took it online it was way too hard so you know I'm a playwright and I wrote every student in my class a four to five page long monologue that looked it took a challenge that took a strength and it took some of their biography and put it in the monologue and that is what we did for culminations together we edited that from five pages long to one page but we did that as a dramaturgical analysis exercise right we worked together as colleagues as collaborators in taking that text and doing something with it and I'm super super proud about that because I knew I could not do the thing that I was doing but I could still do theater I could still do the thing leading up to it so that when we come back into the room we didn't lose a year right we actually did something even deeper which is I never get to do those great exercises like I have a just the simplest exercise which is take your character's age and half figure out what the event was in their life that causes them to live their life the way they're living now we rarely get to do that right and in rehearsal you're already at like you know doing blocking showing the blocking for the stumble through for the designers right but here's something that's really meditative that's really important about motivation and about what what a character does in a play that makes logical sense that informs an emotional life I know it sounds a little but what I love about it but what I love about it is for for the class we're getting really deep deep and emotional and intellectual thoughts I'm finding able to marry these in a way that I have enough time to marry them right you turn it into an opportunity oh yeah I mean I didn't I looked at zoom and I was sort of terrified for one day and then you know I I was telling somebody the other day I said you know the whole pandemic has completely switched for me I was thinking what am I most afraid of food insecurity I grew up with that I grew up in the ghetto I grew up in Pico Union I'm I am I worried about like you know isolation I grew up in a gang-infested neighborhood that where we just constantly had to go in when there was violence in my neighborhood so I was thinking I know all of this I know all of this and what do you make with it what do you make with it and what we make is art yeah oh my god it's so beautiful that's the that's the spirit yes that's the guy I mean and can you imagine like friends like Luis Alvaro wrote you a monologue like it's like they don't even know do they they don't even know but you know it was really good about that exercise that I will say that was the most amazing thing I have a student who's from Puerto Rico and he's been really struggling in the U.S. he loves Shakespeare and you know I think he came late to Raul Julia and that documentary right and so it was really interesting but he was struggling he was crying nothing and one day we had a I wrote him this monologue and in the monologue he says I realized something about myself I forgot to bring me off the island I forgot to bring me to the to the states I forgot to bring me into this place Shakespeare is not a language in any of us you know it's not an accent that any of us have so why am I ignoring the thing that I have my own love of poetry and I'm ignoring that and I put all of that into the monologue that was completely instinctual but you know that is his monologue I mean he he fed that he gay he made that right I just put the words in but he was the one who created the spirit in the environment to make that piece of art happen and he was so happy at the end I was so happy because I thought this is what collaboration is yes a gift of beautiful beautiful marriage between actor and writer and director if you could we could all even be in the zoom room around that it is not about the moment to moment of like the scene because that's really hard to recreate but I think it is about everything that leads up to that and great directors I think Laurie one of the great things about Laurie is that you know she she's building into that there's those questions are really important questions that build into how do we make this and I think that's what community work is the possibility of what we're able to make right um so that's that's where I'm working from this is all about the possible so if you can be in the possible and you know really I'm talking kids off ledges right now right because they're like oh just and you're like you know what this is just another space and this is a room in which you and I get to really be with one another in a very very deep way so how do we use this room beautiful yeah I mean one of the things that we're doing is an even kind of more grassroots approach because we were all coming to the culmination of the community classes that we were having but they were not built up for a virtual landscape and not everybody um had the capacity to engage with each other some people are still rehearsing their scenes because we're going to pick up when we come back we're going to pick up and do a big public works palooza and everyone's going to come back and we're going to rehearse and bring all that works that works not going anywhere so people are continuing to cook on that knowing that we will come back and do it but we pick up the phone and we call people and um our um our showing up is in conversation is in that one to one you know as I call it the hand stitching of like how are you how are you doing what do you need what's going on you know and finding out what they need and trying to then direct them and connect them to to that so to me it is the the art of community the art of um truly walking the values that we say that we hold in this time because um you know that that is the bedrock of this work you know and I just think of our larger institutions it's like how do we show up now in this time is going to directly affect what happens when we come out of it because we're not going to be the same god god hoping we are not going to be the same because I think it's an opportunity for us to be deeper yeah very good point um well but we're all very lucky to have you both in our communities uh in closing can I ask you both to share something you've learned or discovered during the quarantine period that you plan on incorporating into your practice as an artist moving forward at post-covid can we use okay I was looking at Laurie oh I can go first I guess I mean please we'll say something brilliant no I won't I won't I'm begging for time freaking crap like I'll just say something like um uh I for me it's it's it's really simple it's like I've I didn't feed myself and I take that word feed in a lot of ways is I think this being Latina being female being a Gemini coming from a large family being first generation the the list piles up service is paramount and service to the point of sacrifice and the more you sacrifice the more you are doing the work so that's the Catholic too that I forgot to leave out so um so I it's like given till you got nothing left and I think something as simple as learning to feed myself every day several times a day not just in food but like I've been cooking and I you know I've been shopping and I've been mindful about that and also trying to what else am I feeding like my head and my heart um because you know I'm not gonna lie it's been it can get really dark and I think the last several weeks I've shared this with Luis have been um very hard I think the first it was like momentum that was moving me through the first seven or eight weeks of this and now what are we the 11th week in I don't even I mean that you know so you know I do daily writing just even it doesn't have to it's the rule is it's doesn't have to be brilliant and it's not supposed to be brilliant it's like clock the day clock who you spoke to you know so I think it's it's about how I I hope that I will continue to feed myself which sometimes will also mean not working 80 hours a week but walking away from your desk and going home at a decent time and calling your friends on the west coast that you haven't spoken to in a very long time because at the end of the day this work takes a lot out of you and I find that I work and then I crash and then I start over again and we have to build up our stamina we have to be warriors in this time and so that's my that's my takeaway it's wonderful okay brilliant man I just I want to maybe jump on that because I want to say that one of the things I believe about art is that it is a three-part process conceptualization production and presentation right and conceptualization seems like the most indulgent part of it so we don't practice it very often right I live in an apartment that has no television I haven't had tv for years I never that's not like some badge of honor it was just that I was always at theater or making theater I was always out every single night I just always was in the theater and then and then this moment happens and you realize it's not it's not I didn't I got Netflix for like one week just to try it because I thought this could be deadly and then I saw Tiger King like one episode and then I was like this this is probably not the right thing for me right now right but what was the right thing was to go back and start a play from a place that it should be started from so it's not a surprise to me I'm doing a piece for the Geffen about a stuttering puppet who lives in a kind of silence of language that totally makes sense that I'm working on that and then I'm doing a piece about you know silent meditation at a at a seminary yeah that's not a surprise either and both of those really required a lot of really deliberate meditative thinking which is not something I could ever bring because like Laurie I agree I was the crash and you know the I go go go go and then I burn and then I start again and I do I do not want to go back to the world that that existed for me which is busy is not better busy is productive but it's not deep and one of the things I've learned in this in these last few months is that um getting deep it requires real thinking and requires real time and requires this thing called prayer which we you know and I'm not speaking about this religiously in organized religious but I need to have the prayerful meditation I need to be really really inside of a character I need to be really thinking about what the manifestation of an action is you know event all of those things that are in playwriting that you kind of just quickly go through right and um but this has really changed it's changed I can see myself being a better artist I'm a better teacher for sure right I'm shocked that I was able to take this many students do such a deep deep powerful exercise I didn't just cradle them and babysat them we might playwriting one students wrote full-length over a hundred pages plays that are the most amazing plays ever they're none of them take place in a porch or in a kitchen or in a living room they're all going to extraordinary places because the moment demanded that and if the moment demands for you to stop please stop because I'm stopping yeah right yeah I just want to say one more thing the Denver Center yesterday just announced you know they weren't doing my play and I thought I was gonna like break down and instead I went thank you thank you wow thank you both so much everything was so inspiring and illuminating and we're so lucky to have you and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts thank you for the opportunity and this invitation and for everyone who showed up totally appreciated thank you I also I want to thank Alan Witteborg who is our ASL interpreter he's amazing doing an amazing job we'd also like to acknowledge our long-standing partners so stage directors and choreographer society Pasadena Playhouse and Boston Court Pasadena have been supporting us for years and years and we look forward to reuniting with them next year we miss them and we look forward to seeing them next year by the way this conversation will be archived and available with closed captions at both howlround.com and directors less directors lab west.com so please tell your friends we hope you'll join us again tomorrow for a conversation between Sabra Williams and Laura Carlin they will be discussing the power of the arts theater and dance in systems impacted communities so that should be very good we hope to see you for that thank you so much for being with us today we hope this conversation sparks more thanks friends bye