 Hi everybody, today is such a special day. Oh my goodness, this is gonna be so much fun. We are talking with the amazing David Ball. Hi, David. Now you embarrassed David Ball. It's the embarrassed David Ball. Hey, how are you? I love it. That's my entire point in life is to embarrass me. If you're in a playwright and you don't want to embarrass people, you need a different job. That's exactly right. I'm so honored and glad that you would be here. Your book is like the greatest little book of theater that every single person that I admire and work with, we all eventually are like, quote you and then pull out our book and go, why, here's my book, here's my book, here's my book. And so I randomly decided after doing a couple of classes on this medium to do a little book club version and yours was the first book, the only book that really was the first to my mind. And people just really responded and loved it and said, I have that book. I read that book. I love that book. I still use that book. So it felt really wonderful. And then randomly the short version is you, someone had told you that we were being fans of your book. Somebody sent me the link and I thought, geez, she's pretty good at this. I'm good at quoting you. Well, you seem to be pretty good at writing plays as well. I do a little bit of that. Oh, yeah. That's a dabbling. Dabbling. But it's always been such an amazing source to me, this book, because it has, it's so practical. And so delightfully, intelligently blunt about things that often in the theater we kind of were very generous and cushy and it's all that. And yours was just like, here's the way it is. Here's what you do. Definitely don't do this. Try more of this. And I love it. There are multiple ways to do things, but that's the fundamentals. The fundamentals. And I think that's what's so helpful about it. So first of all, for those of you out there who haven't read this really, and here you should go grab it. It's also like so beautifully short that when I talk about it, it's like you could read one page and think about it for like a week and then go read the next page and think about it for a week. So it's just, it's really rich and beautiful. Now, what I'd love to do is to start with a little bit of an introduction from you. How do you come to be you? How do you come? We'll talk about kind of where the book came from but how does your interest in theater, where was that born and how did you get to be you? I used to tell people that I wanted to be an accountant and my parents forced me to go into theater but that was pretty, it was a pretty blatant lie. I was en route to, I guess it's almost the same thing. I was en route to medical school like all good Jewish boys in the 1960s should have been. Not the girls, no, that was rare, not then, although some, but that was my plan and I had come out of engineering school and it was now in a pre-med sort of thing. And I ran into a guy a year ahead of me one day who had just gotten into a really good medical school and I said, Bill, what's your secret? And he said, extracurricular activities, you do extracurricular activities, you'll get into medical school, which right there terrified me about the entire medical profession for the rest of my life. But nonetheless, I said, well, what the hell do you mean? He said, well, like there's having tryouts for a play tonight, why don't you go try out for the play? That's an extracurricular, I said, that's an extracurricular activities. Yeah, that's a thing. So I went and tried out and I somehow got in this play but that's also the first, I've done a little bit in high school, but not really, but that was the first exposure to it. And also that same night, I met the woman I eventually was married to for 10 years and we're still very good friends. And it just, if I hadn't talked to that guy that particular moment on that particular day, I probably would have ended up as a very unhappy doctor by now. So that's what started it. And I don't know what kept it going. I drifted off into being too much of an English major and getting an English degree, a master's degree. Thought, no, I did Peace Corps, I did all the things you're supposed to do in the 60s and then decided, well, hell, what could be more useless than an English major than perhaps getting a major in theater? So I don't have to get a PhD in theater. And it was also a very, I was what you called a Vietnam PhD, which meant if you stayed in school, that you probably would not get drafted to go to Vietnam. So that's what I did. I found out at the time that one of the two decent places we had a PhD in theater, and that's what I did by which time I was bit to death by the bug. Wow. So in your PhD, what did you focus on in your PhD? Was backwards and forwards part of that or? No, not really. Oh, no, that came a little bit, came a good bit later. It was, I guess technically it was theater literature, but you did everything that an MFA would have done in acting or directing or a playwriting or whatever. It was just sort of, they threw everything at you, which of course is a great way to learn about the theater. It was light on design. I wish I had had a lot more on the side of tech theater. I'm one of the few people I know. Yeah, well, I'm one of the few people I know with a long career in professional theater who has never been on a crew. I never did crew. And you know, I'm always just, somebody's gonna fall on my head. And so I somehow never did it. I don't know how I escaped that, but I did. It was when I got, I had a fellowship that took me through my last year of grad school and then to the Guthrie Theater for a year where I clung on for seven or eight or nine years when it was a long time that I stayed with it. And so I was learning that that was sort of the golden years of that theater under Michael Lange. And so if Lange and we're doing a Shakespeare play, you spent three or four weeks, what people call table work, two or three weeks doing table and nobody moved. He didn't let you get, he didn't let an actor stand up until they were dying to stand up, but you had to know what you were saying. You had to know the play. And a large part of my job was to deal with things like interpretation. And I got sick to death of reading people's interpretations of plays because they're all wrong. I mean, they starting from the wrong basis, they're starting from, this is the theme, therefore that's what each scene should mean. Instead of, here's how this thing is structured. This is what the playwright had in mind. And then you can get to your themes or whatever. So that's where I got that awareness. But where the book started was, I was in my second year after the Guthrie teaching at Carnegie Mellon in the theater department there. And the head of the part, forgive the ride or the balcony or in the background, unless my phone, but I don't have to answer. The head of the department, an amazing man named Mel Shapiro calls me into his office one day. Ball, he goes, meaning me. What's the matter with these damn kids around here? We had a department of a couple of hundred kids under rising grass. I said, I don't know, they seem healthy. He said, no, I mean, they don't know how to read a damn play. He said, they're reading the play without any idea of what the hell it's about. They don't know, you can't direct them, you can't talk to them. Who teaches them this crap? Do you teach them this crap? And I said, no, I don't think so. He said, well, he said, from now on, and from then on, what we did every year, we did two weeks. The first two weeks of school was nothing but text analysis, plays. And I would run this all the faculty taught them how to teach it. And that's what everybody did for the first two weeks and it worked like dynamite. But in preparing to do that, I outlined things. And then I'm sitting at a faculty meeting at all school next to a physicist who looks at my notes. He says, oh, you're writing a book. I said, no, it's just prep for something I'm doing next fall. He said, no, no, no, that's a book. Hence the book. While he's a physicist, he wants, physicists know what they're talking about. Look, I tend to collect physicists as friends and they always give the best notes in the theater. Well, I wanted to be a physicist in engineering school. I went to the dean and said, I don't want to be an engineer. He said, well, you have to be an engineer. What do you want? I said, I want to be a physicist. David, there are no B minus physicists. You can, no, not a B minus physicists. No, pick something else. I said, medicine. He said, yeah, medicine. Lots of B minus doctors. Sure, that's terrifying. Once again, undermining my entire confidence in the medical profession. Oh my gosh, I love it. You know, I wanted to go into physics too. I thought that I could do both. I could do, well, maybe I'll do playwriting and physics. And then of course, quickly realized the physics professors were like, no, you don't do anything but physics. We have a writer here in Durham. I wish I could remember her name off the top of my head. It was a really, really good writer. So I'll try to get your name or something. But who's an MIT grad who did sciences and it really has helped her writing. It is what she writes about in many of her works. But also you gain in that area of thinking exactly what backwards and forward is about, which is a linear way of solving problems and a linear way of presenting information. So it makes you a better T that sciences doesn't have to be physics rather than this holistic thing that you hope a good artist has. So when you combine the two, I think you've got a pretty powerful kind of artist. I think that's exactly right. Can you talk for a second about the title? Kind of how, what that means? Well, the method of analysis, which always seemed obvious. I mean, when you sit down to teach something, you start asking yourself, how the hell do I do it? Which is also a really good exercise as you well know by now. And I realized that what I did was I would look at the end of Hamlet, for example, and say, why is he stabbing the king right at this moment? Why didn't he do it 30 seconds earlier? Or 30 seconds later? Or six scenes earlier? And I realized you have to do it. I just automatically did it. I mean, when we did Shakespeare at the Guthrie, we did a lot more than just Shakespeare. I didn't do it with any play, but I started doing it with Shakespeare. Why does this happen at the end? Why not just solve all this? Is it just some playwright stretching this out so we can get people in to watch it for us? So that seemed an obvious way, but then I started asking myself how to do it. Of course, that is how you get a student to see that maybe to be or not to be is not really a soliloquy. Yes, oh God, that part is so great of your book. I love it so much. Maybe Edmund, the bad brother and the legit brother and King Lear, maybe he doesn't really change. Maybe he's the same person. Maybe there's a very peculiar scene in King Lear. There's that scene where Shakespeare is supposedly dividing up the kingdom, even though we know from the beginning he's already decided how to divide it. So that's also bad reading. It's not a contest. The king has already made the divisions and you must analyze the scene in that regard, in which case it becomes a simple scene. But at the end of the scene is something very powerful happens and people always miss it. Edmund, the mal, that's the way you distinguish it, Edgar, the good one, Edmund, the mal and malicious one. The bad one is there at the very beginning of the scene. And Shakespeare had no stage directions. So the editors never bothered to put in exit Edmund, but he does not exit. It wasn't just that they forgot that he doesn't, there's no reason to think he's exited. So he stands back and he watches this whole scene of legitimacy comes with land, with possession. So as that scene disperses, he steps forward and gives a speech about, okay, then I will have your land. Now just go glance it that way and you'll see the power. Why does he come forward and I'm not a genius? All I did was say, why is he saying this now? Why didn't he say it sooner? He's making this incredible, an epic decision for his life. He's already laid some of it, but why is he doing this now? And it's because he's now seen absolute proof that the one with the possessions, the one with the land is the one with the power and the one without it as legitimate as Cordelia was in terms of lineage, she's now illegitimate. So gods stand up for bastards. And now that scene, I mean, can you imagine the power of that scene? The whole thing disperses and there's Edmund left standing there alone. What an amazing moment that you totally miss by looking at it going forward or by assuming he exits because he's not talking. Well, and it's the exact same with to be or not to be that if you think that that's Hamlet alone musing, pondering suicide, that is a very different, frankly, boring scene. Well, he was saying that. He just said a little while ago if God had not fixed his hand against Sel slaughter or whatever the hell that line is. So he's gone from knowing God won't let him kill himself to contemplating suicide in a page and a half. That's a pretty humongous change that happens for no reason. So again, I'm not arguing for my interpretation. I'm arguing for a methodology. Why does it happen here and now? You can take Wojtek, which was a play discovered in somebody's attic in a, every theater student knows this story, I guess, but it was discovered in separate scenes. Nobody really knows the sequence of the scenes. Well, that's why you can have totally different play out of Wojtek, depending on the sequence you put the scene in, because the reason somebody's doing something has to be something that happened previously. I can't be doing something now for something that's gonna happen for scenes from now. And that just seemed, well, anyway, that's how it got backwards. And I didn't know what to call the device people use to create the tension to make me eager to see or hear or experience as well as what's coming next. But I knew it had to be there. This ain't poetry. I can't put wasteland, I can put a wasteland down and come back in an hour or never. And that's fine. You leave the theater, you missed, you're gone. Something, because it's a live event has to make you keep wanting it. And so they named it forward. And somewhere along the line, I thought, well, we got backwards, we got forwards, that's cool. Perfect. Yeah. But it is, it's so wonderful because so I obviously think of this book in terms of lessons for playwrights. And I know it's written for a broad, a broad kind of swap. It's really written for analysis. Yeah, it's written for analysis, but any analysis tells you how to do something. Exactly. And I think what makes it so clear is both of those ideas. And I even took it so far as, it was kind of reading your book and then thinking about when I know I'm ready to write a play and it's when I know a version of the ending. The people who've watched this know, I talk about it all the time, but knowing some version of where we're going, which is the backwards start at the end. Once you get a sense of what that end is, that why, why is this ending here? And then you can reverse engineer the play so that we earn that moment. And it really feels like, of course this happens here. But it was in part your book that helped me get the, a way to articulate the why of that. Why? Well, look what happens when you don't do that. What is the most common object in any playwright's home? And the answer is two or three beginning scenes that they're really, really good, but you don't know where to go with them. Exactly. You write into some, you suddenly think that that pick you're gonna write is really got about eight minutes worth in it because you didn't go to the end. And then you ask yourself, how do we get to the end? And how do we get to that preceding moment and back all the way to the beginning? Back, back, back, exactly. That's that like the 20 or 30 page freeze that happens when you go, well, I got some good characters and you found some snappy dialogue and they care about some kind of thing. And then you're like, oh, I don't know what to do. The answer is because you haven't made a decision about where you're going. And so you end up with Blather. So you end up with just going around or you kind of, they fight generally or, so I love that because it, that just the conceptual framework that you offer, I think is really helpful, especially to young playwrights who like, we know how to create somebody who's interesting. They can be weird, they can be wild, whatever. We can make an interesting person, but having that want and the sense of what is this forward action, your forwards, that push that character to go after that want. And some of my favorite lines in your book and favorite ideas are this idea that people talk when they want something, which seems so simple and obvious. And yet so many plays are full of talking about like when I was four, I had a dream and you're like, what? Why are you telling me this? And so many actors act lines like that. Yeah. And you're into this little reverie for absolutely no reason. Instead of thinking, why am I saying these words out loud? What am I trying to get from people around me or the audience or whatever? Activity, action, you're wanting, questing, everything is about somebody doing something for a reason instead of like, let's just take a break and chat. In my playwriting and screenwriting teaching days, a student would say, and you know, it's a hard business to be in because you've always got students writing better than you. That's an ego blow. It takes a while to learn to love that, that they're doing better than you. I would say, well, I don't know why this is it. Well, because that's what the play is about. And I'll say when then you have to make it part of the play. Play means there's an action going on, not that the greasy palm of the playwright is going to come in here and tell you his sob story or his lesson or whatever. That's such a great point, right? Cause you have, this is also what I tend to say and to be or not to be as an example of monologues are very easy to write and very hard to justify. And if to be or not to be weren't an active trick and game and an action that Hamlet is playing to the people he knows who are listening to him, then it would be, that's lovely. What a lovely speech, sure. Well, you could still motivate it. You could still motivate it. You could still do his thinking through a problem. You could still do all that. I'm talking out loud because it helps me get to where I need to get. Just as much less interesting, to me, but interesting or not, my only, that that's a matter of taste. The important thing is, as far as we can tell from the play itself, it's not meant, it was never meant. Look, Susan, who's sitting over there wondering why I'm talking about theater after all these years, long ago suggested and pointed out that every scene in Hamlet, somebody spying on somebody in one way or another. The ghost is spying all the way through. Spying is the primary dominant thing people do. And people, she has suggested, and she says it was my idea, it was not, it was hers, that we do a production of Hamlet that is shot on nothing but security cameras in the castle. Because it's all, that's what it all is. Very modern play suddenly. Why would that one speech be the exception? You may want to interpret it a different way, but at least know what the structure is so that you know what was intended. Now, you may have a better idea than what was intended. I don't even, intended is a bad word. What did the playwright have in mind when he was writing about the thing? And you don't have to listen to that, especially with a dead playwright or if you're a Hollywood writer, they don't have to listen to you at all. But at least to know, why did you write it that way? Well, you know, once I know what you do, I can then sit down and say, well, maybe this, maybe that, and you might say yes, you might say no, or you might be dead. So I can go do it my own way. You can do it your way. I mean, but for playwrights that tells us, have a reason, everything in the play has to be there for a reason so that if you are sitting next to David Ball and David Ball says, yeah, but why, why is this here? You go, well, here's my answer. And it's also fine, I've been in rooms with very smart dramaturgs and directors where they ask me and I go, I don't know. That's a great question. Let me think. And then that thinking usually turns into a whole subplot or a whole deepening of the character or a way to push the action forward faster. So the questions are great and great directors out there, if you're watching, that's a great thing to be able to go through and analyze using this technique. It helps the writer certainly have a new play. It's not what does it mean? That's not the answer to why it's here. The answer is how does it fit the mechanism of forwarding the play, moving the thing forward? How is it said because somebody wants something and there's something in their way and they're saying what they're saying to get over the thing in their way? I don't remember if this is in the book or not when it was teaching acting. It was motivation equals the obstacle and the action. Your motivation against an obstacle leads to an action. Take away the obstacle and there's no action. There's no reason to open your mouth and talk. Take away what you want. Then who cares if there's an obstacle, there's no reason to talk. Even if it's something like, please turn on the light. It has to be I want the light on and there's something in the way. I'm not at the light switch. I don't feel like doing it. That's enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I also love this concept that you've built in about the trigger and heap, the dominoes and another way of clarifying this movement, this urgency, this like, it is a runaway train, this play. It's a very useful other book to write because it is sort of where I got that idea from. I want to say William Goldman, but I'm not certain. Has written a book. I don't even know what's imprinted as well worth getting called Shakespeare's Game. And it is, well, it's looking at Shakespeare as the structure of a game. And that, I don't remember exactly, it's been decades since I've read it, but that was where I got the notion of a scene is there to create another scene. Not necessarily the very next scene, but another scene. Otherwise the scene ends the play. And is there a law that says that? No, is it solve our need to keep the audience interested? Yes, that's why it occurred to me that Shakespeare's little couplets at the end of scenes were not to sum up what the scene was about. It was to get us the plays the thing in which I'll catch the conscience of the king. That's not to sum up what he's been saying, it's to say, you're gonna see something really fun, hang around, don't drift off. Yes, exactly. Exactly, the ghost, the example in backwards and forwards that there's 30 some forwards of the ghost threatening to speak, being asked to speak. You didn't give a damn about the ghost on page one who cares what some ghost is gonna say. By the time you get to scene five wherever it is, five, four, five scenes of delay or whatever the hell it is, it's a long time. I guess it's not that long, but it's a long time before the ghost, so everybody is listening. To trivia, what would have been trivia at the beginning on trivia, but much less important. And because they're listening so carefully, they don't miss the all important point that people are always getting wrong, leave her to heaven. These scenes where Hamlet is brutalizing his mother in the bedroom, now you may wanna do that. There's no law saying don't, but that was not what Shakespeare wrote. He didn't write that, they exchanged words. They exchanged pleas. But where he's on top of our beating on her and all of a sudden it becomes an inevitable nightmare or something, you can impose that if you want, but at least know you're imposing it. That's not what is really there. Or all the themes people impose. Hamlet's a homosexual, Hamlet's gay, Hamlet loves his mother. This is about the man who couldn't make up his mind. Even Olivier put that at the beginning of this movie. Hamlet had no problem making up his mind. He had obstacles that kept him from acting. That's all. And he was dealing with the obstacles and when he couldn't, he drifted off. I mean, what I think all of this comes back to is one of your most clear pieces of advice that I share of yours, I pass on it, is this idea of being interesting. And it is of foremost importance to keep the audience's interest and keep that throughout the whole thing. Don't let it drop. It's exactly what you're talking about these couples saying, just wait, just wait. But the trick is to be interesting, have interesting characters, interesting plots and all, be interesting while within the framework of action. That's why it's W-R-I-G-H-T. That's the craft part. Be wildly interesting. You can do that with tap dancing or strip teases or however you wanna do it. And the best place, one of the best places to learn how to do this is to watch jump, watch the old soap operas, watch the horror movies. Cause all they are is technique. That's all it is. Everything else is stripped bare. So you can see it when I used to teach that stuff when I was at Duke and everybody looked at David Wall is teaching the zombie shit in his classes because you can see the techniques there very clearly. I'm not saying that's good art. It's good craft because people will, who are watching that to start with who would turn on something called zombies, hard rock zombies or whatever, he script I wrote, truly paid for my house long, long time ago. But people who are watching that, it's not the zombies that hooked them in. It's the craft, it's the structure, it's the promise. So what's next coming soon? Sure, sure. And if you really wanna learn to take these and backwards and forwards, look at junk, look at popular stuff, look at easy stuff. Don't look at Shakespeare to learn how to write plays. You will be too distracted by all the other stuff that he knew how to hook into that action. Oh, that's actually fabulous advice. And it can be really intimidating. If you go, yeah, just read Hamlet and do that. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, you wanna read poetry, you wanna write poetry, go read Homer. Yeah, in Greek. Just some light stuff, right in Greek. I mean, and so talk about that for a little bit, this idea of that craft. If you could kind of essentialize this craft, what do you mean when you're talking about that? Well, craft is the things that are in the book mainly. You have a, you are crafting people within situations. That's what you're doing. You're starting with a situation, whether it's there in the play or it's implied that's called stasis in the book. It's the way things normally would be and things might go on that way forever. But then something happens. The ghost shows up. Or you may interpret one of the great lines in Shakespeare. People always miss the damn thing. They just do as a little joke. Hamlet, after he's run into the ghost and all that sort of thing. I know it was before Hamlet talks of the ghost, but it's after the ghost, Horatio is showing up and they're talking about the ghost or talking about, Hamlet's talking about his father to Horatio. And Hamlet says, I can see him in my mind's eye. And then Horatio says, what is really one of the most frightening lines in dramatic literature was my Lord, I think I saw him yesterday night. Now, can you imagine if your best friend said that to you about a parent who had died? He'd be like, what? And that, that is the intrusion. Hamlet stasis is mourning for his father, angry at his mother, upset with the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And something just slices that right in half, kills it. It's that one line. So you could say the stasis is up until the ghost talks or it could be the reason Hamlet swings, I'm gonna go see it, I'm gonna go find that damn thing now is because of that intrusion. So that is structural, that is craft. You could reverse thing Hamlet, never have that conversation. Hamlet could have run into the ghost in the back, in the back latrine, but that's not part of the craft of holding that audience. The play starts with a beautiful piece of crack. Who's there? Who's saying that? A freaking guard who's supposed to guard the place, who's scared, who's that? And the other one is too scared to say, who's that? Oh, Bernardo. I mean, there's a, that explosion, that's craft. That's not clever things to say, that's not theme, that's not art, it's craft. And so you are crafting situations, primarily situations, your characters are your characters. And I for one, do not believe in a good play that a character ever really changes, the character situation changes. So he finds a different way to get what he or she wants, like Edmund. Cause if you look at Edmund at the end of the play, remember what I said about the beginning of the play, at the end of the play, look at, I'm gonna tell you, go look at what Edmund says at the end of the play and what he does. So he will be considered on a par with Edgar. And that will explain why Edmund hasn't changed one bit. All he's doing is trying to be equal to his brother. I want your lands and then I will be as good as you. At the end he wants something else, but only cause it'll make me as good as you, Edgar. And if you look at it that way, your characters, but even if you belong to the school, this is the change and that's okay. Lots of plays, I guess they do because the playwright thinks they should change, that's fine. But once you've established that, character is not gonna change or show us anything different unless the situation changes or you're a bad playwright, just giving your character different things to say to reveal parts of his character, then just give us a little thesis on who this person is. But the revelation of character has to come through action or it doesn't work. I don't wanna say it doesn't belong on the stage, it's just better be pretty goddamn good for anybody to listen to it. Look at the plays of T.S. Eliot, they don't work. Nobody does him anymore. And the reason they don't is because he was a brilliant poet who didn't understand dramatic action. And that's not to put him down. I mean, he was a brilliant poet. And the plays aren't bad, but you know, you got a poet who's at the pinnacle of the 20th century's accomplishments in poetry and who's negligible when it comes to playwriting, except for maybe he almost made it with one play because the material itself is so dramatic. But even there, a play is actions that are shaped by situations that are in the present tense. And that's what you might wanna write down there. A play is characters within changing situations in the present tense. That's why exposition can be difficult, but the book talks about some ways to do that. Yeah, oh, you were so great about exposition. That is one of those things that is so critical because it is hard to do well, very easy to do poorly or in a clunky, obvious kind of. Well, yeah, you are my brother, as you know. Yeah. And that's one way you can get away with that, but there's much more. And do like the newsreel at the beginning. Yes, yes. Well, that's why Shakespeare had an advantage we don't have at the very beginning of King Lear. We don't know anything about King Lear. So when the first three lines reveal that the kingdom has already been, the king has already decided that we miss it. Yeah. It's not of any importance that we have no idea the context, Shakespeare's audience knew the story. Yeah. Shakespeare's audience said, wait a minute, he's hasn't divided the kingdom yet, I guess in this play he has. And they get it like that because of what they already know. So we have a harder job there. One great director. Ah, I wish I could remember. I think it's a Romanian director, but I'm not sure. Takes those first, the very first line about the king and his way he's divided up the kingdom favored this daughter more than that daughter or whatever the line is, it's something like that. That's where you know, you're supposed to know now it's all been divided up, but we don't get it because we don't have the exposition behind it, but we need to make it clear. So he has the character he's talking to on the other side at the other preceding and the character said, what? And the first character repeats the line and they move slowly together and the line is repeated four or five times. Well, you know, the deafest guy in the theater is going to get it. We get it already. That's great. That's actually wonderful. I would never have thought of that, but it comes out of the problem of if you read the play properly, you don't stage this as a contest. I mean, every English teacher in the world says in this scene, he's deciding how to divide up the kingdom. No, he is not. He decided already. So now given that, what's this scene about? It's a totally different thing. And we can go into that, what it's totally about, but we're not here to analyze the lyric. We should do that another time though. You need to analyze your own work. What I mean by craft is you are not the analyst. This little pink thing is my water bottle top. I'm doing something really strange. You're not the analyst. The opposite of analysis is craft. Somewhere in between all that may lie art. There's an art in analysis. There's an art in craft and that's the artist part of it. Nobody has the right to call themselves an artist. That's for us to call you when we decide you're good enough to do that. You are a crafts person and that's what's beautiful about this. If you're forcing, good writers, if you're forcing yourself to write every day for a couple of hours, even if nothing is coming, you force yourself to sit at that keyboard and sit there and not do anything else, you'll start writing eventually, just because it's so boring just sitting there. It's a good way to get over writer's block, but you are crafting, you are building. That's why I got furious one year when Yale of all places misspelled playwriting. What the hell are those people teaching? Well, and there was a wonderful interview that I'll post in the comments with you that spells that out. And I've always loved that. It was actually a kind of brain-breaking revelation when I was younger. I can't remember where I read it or who told me, but the idea that playwright is not spelled like right. It's spelled right like a builder, like a craftsman, like a... And it doesn't keep you from being an artist. Architects are good one. The great architects are artists. But they sure as hell better know how the craft of keeping a building up. You don't just design something and walk away and say, okay, build it. Either you or somebody's got to say, here's how we can build this thing. Architects, I don't know the crap. Poets unless it's the very free form of 20th century poetry that almost nobody reads. And there's a reason they don't read it because they've taken the story out. If you ask yourself when poetry went from being the most popular of art forms to falling apart is when it lost its narrative. So we can't afford to do that in the theater. Poetry, you can publish a nice little book of your non-narrative poetry. You can't do that in theater or it won't last. And the movements that try it can be very in group popular for a while. But I'll bet almost nobody watching this can name more than one 1960s playwright of the experimental playwrights group. And yet they were wildly popular at the time. And I'm not, I don't care if it'll play last or not but they were wildly popular for reasons that had nothing to do with watching a good play. The plays were saying people politically agreed with. You can put an absolute junk on the stage now about politics and get cheers from people even though as a play it's junk. And if that's what you wanna write there's nothing wrong with writing that. I'm just talking about writing plays. So you look at the craft of what you're doing and then one of the lovely things about that is it allows you to fix it. It allows you to move things and then know what you have to take into account. Okay, I'm gonna put this scene first because it flows better that way. But now do I have forwards going from this scene to that? Is there a trigger heap effect going for it? Does the audience know what it needs to know to understand this scene here instead of there? There are, those are craft answers. And if you have a checklist of your craft you won't miss any of those. The only piece of craft that I missed that I really wish I had put in there is have you talked about save the cat? Do you know about save the cat? I have heard of that, yes. I suggest that there's a ton of stuff that's out there. Get the book, save the cat. I don't care what you're writing. This is even useful for real life. But the concept, save the cat. What I do now is I work with trial lawyers and strategizing how to present your cases. And we use a lot of these concepts in openings and closing and save the cat is dynamite. It can get people liking or disliking a person in one line. It's Stephen King does this all the time in his book. But you read two lines about somebody and you even hate that bully from then on or you love that person from then on. That's what this does. Save the cat, if you wanna make somebody, if you wanna make the audience like him even though he's gonna do a bunch of crappy things for a while, save the cat. If you wanna make the audience dislike him, if you wanna make the audience dislike him, you kick the puppy, which is the opposite. Now, you don't bring in a kitty, you don't bring. But those things will now become lesion and you'll see lots of references to cats now and plays as sort of a little nod to it. Just like whenever you hear somebody making fun of a line like, you are my brother as you know, guess where that came from this one? Yeah. But yeah, save the cat is the one thing I would have put this as important as anything else in that book. Well, and it's interesting, there's a lot of those. It's somebody who speaks really harshly to a child, somebody who- Any way you do it at all. Belize his wife. I mean, just a second of it. It's anybody who does something bad that they don't have to do. Yeah. It's somebody who does something bad for the pleasure of doing it. That beating your wife is for the pleasure, whatever twist that it twisted person that is. But it can be a minor little thing. It can be a really minor little thing. You're walking along the beach and you quote accidentally kicks in and somebody in the skinny guy's face or you knock down a child's castle or you do anything. That's kick the puppy. Save the cat. And these can be very sophisticated things. Yeah. Things that you didn't need. You didn't even get anything out of it other than the perverse pleasure or the perverse of doing it. Or you didn't even get anything out of it except the desire to help. And those things, those are the, what you do is you can talk all you want about character. You can't talk about character. It'll play convincingly. I mean, there's nonsense about you. Find out who your character is. Listen to what other characters say about your character is blithering nonsense. I mean, how do the other, you can't describe that your next door neighbor's character very well and they're all gonna disagree. And if you've got a play where everybody agrees that that's Hamlet's character who the hell wants to watch that play? Yeah. That's such a great point. That's such a great point. Because honestly, the way you talk about somebody else tells more about who you are than the character is. Why? Because talking about somebody else is an action. It's an action. Character is revealed solely through, don't tell me, don't talk to me, do. What is the line, don't tell me you love me, do it. Yeah, quit bragging and do it. Don't, And that's, I talk about this a lot when I'm teaching writing as well. This idea of course Aristotle is just saying it's a character is defined by what they do. Not what they say or say about themselves or say about anything. It's all who you are. And it's not that way. Well, go ahead. If I believe what you say, and so if you say I'm the kind of person who does X, Y, Z if I believe it is because I've seen your actions previous to that that gave you credibility. Yeah. Not because you say it. Yeah, exactly. And ideally you wouldn't have to say it. So when I think about it and to your point about this character is not having to change it's really for me character needs to be revealed through action. At the end when I see Hamlet stabbing the king when the entire journey of that play has been Hamlet trying to get revenge on somebody who killed the king. He is now becoming a person who is killing a king. But look at what we learned. This revealed action. Look at what we learned along the way. We learn that he's not the kind of person who flies into a rage and does anything impulsively. Right. Why? Because he's not sure that the ghost is real. Is it could be the devil. Yeah. Could be the devil. We have to confirm that first. Now I know a lot of people such as the American public anytime they hear anybody did something wrong, they're already to convict Michael Jackson, convict this person, convict that person, convict that the two guys who just killed that poor black man in Georgia. Yes, we're all furious about that but we don't yet know everybody. We're all jumping Hamlet doesn't do that. That is a mark of character in Hamlet that nobody ever talks about. That he's careful with what he does. He's not afraid. Oh, he's melancholy so we can't act. You can't find me a character in dramatic literature who does more wild actions than Hamlet. And yet he's too melancholy. He's too sad to do anything. Crap. He fights his way to the ghost. Yeah. He runs after them. Everybody who tries to keep it and he's in violent action the whole damn time. Yeah. Appropriate action. The only time he loses it is over Cordelia, over Ophelia. When he jumps into the grave and then he fights with the laertes. But I mean, we only learn that through watching what does a character do in a given situation? What does Hamlet do when a ghost tells him, I'm your father and your uncle killed me? What does he do? He waits to find out the truth. That's why he does the play within the play. That's the only reason he does it if he believed the ghost he didn't need the play within the play. He doesn't judge of laertes. He doesn't like laertes. He hates them for what he did with his mother. The late dairies do with his mother but he doesn't make any conclusions about laertes being a murderer or not until he creates what Hamlet has done. He's at the perfect playwright. He creates a situation in which laertes, if he's a murderer, his actions will reveal his character. He sees the play about somebody killing somebody in the same way and his response was run out of the room. Apollonius, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. In other words, the whole secret is what you said a few moments ago. The craft is to develop a series of situations, scenes or whatever, that one leads somehow into the end in sewing one is to create situations in which a character is driven into action. And the better the play, the more of character is revealed as you do that. You don't have to reveal any character. You still can have a zombie movie. There's not a whole lot of character in zombie movies. And yet people sit there, why? Because the action is driving the character forward. Now, if you analyze what kind of person is driven forward by this situation, you learn something. Right now, I learned something about you because here is a very successful, highly regarded playwright who's literally trying to train people to be better than you. Now that tells me something about you. It really does. You might say, I know how to do it and screw you. And I'll tell you, there are a lot of people who feel exactly that way. I work with lawyers now. Most lawyers that I know are eager to share their skill with their competitors. That tells me something about it. A lot of lawyers say, no, David, I paid you to tell me this stuff and I'm not sharing it with anybody. It tells me something about that person. Whatever the situational constraints or requirements or whatever the situation is, is much more, I mean, we know this psychologically, people choose what to do based on situation, not on who they are. The same situation, I mean, the same person can be in a similar situation. You walk by a beggar on the street and you give them money or you don't give them money or somebody's injured and you stop to help, you don't stop to help. You say, I would always stop to help because I'm a good person. No, you would only stop to help in that situation. There's lots of situations where that same person could be lying there and you may want to be a good Samaritan, but you don't for other reasons. It's dangerous to stop there or whatever. What you do is determined by the situation. Now, everybody has multiple choices in a given situation and that's what reveals character. It's really very simple if you think about it that way. So if you decide you want such and such a kind of a character, your first job is in what kinds of situations would that character be revealed? Write up a bunch of little vignettes that would reveal the generosity, the meanness, the timidity, whatever the characteristics are, the wisdom, the brilliance, the misogyny, the rebelliousness, whatever things you want that character to be as an exercise for yourself, don't have to be in the play, they could be. Like you come up with some good scenes this way, but even before you start to write, take each of the characters that you're concerned with. I mean, the guy who comes out and holds the lantern in the battle's hand does not have to, but everybody else, all the characters that you want to make anything of decide first who are they. You may not even know yourself completely for a while. Start writing little vignettes. If you can't do it and, if you can't do five for computer screen, it's gonna say a little index card, but nobody knows what those are anymore. But if you can't do that in 100 and 150 words, then you don't yet have a character and you're not imagining situations. So don't try to write your damn play. You'll tell yourself or the audience. And the other thing is, in vignettes, I also think about that in terms of the other characters in the play. The reason why they're there is to push that character to a point of self-reveal. And it's a mutual thing. It's always mutual. That's why a good actor knows. A good actor absolutely knows. They're not doing what I'm doing now. I'm talking about me and my stuff. That's not what a good actor does. It's not what an interesting character in a play does. Every scene an actor plays is about the other character. From my point of view, playing whatever I'm playing, it's about why, because you're the one I want something from where I wouldn't be talking to you. Yeah. And writers, that's such a great piece of clear advice of going, if you're thinking about the characters in the play in that scene, at least, being about one, actively trying to get something from the other through their words, language, perhaps gesture, perhaps slap or kiss or whatever you want. Pay attention to. You pay attention to them. Pay attention. Yeah. And that there is some that kind of the trigger and heap of it, meaning the whole scene is one trigger and heap so that the next scene can happen. The idea that this dominoes, that metaphor is just so clear, that to try, especially with writers who are starting out and feel like plays are thoughtful, slow things and you're like, no, no, no, no, no. No, you've seen too much bad Shakespeare. Shakespeare should tell us, if you do read and watch great productions, that it is fast, it's constant. Things are always changing. The ground is shifting underneath the characters constantly. Leaping over lava flows is what it has to feel like emotionally. Now, not every play is as sword, you know. Well, but it doesn't need to be frenetic. It doesn't need to be frenetic. And Pinter, nobody need move for three, in endgame, nobody moves. Literally. And it still has. But it's got all of that. It's why it works. We've had a very interesting example. When the nighttime comedians, by the way, if you use Zoom, don't make the mistake that I just made. I have my screen set up. So when I looked at you to my left, it looked like I was looking to my right, which does somebody watching look like I was looking away from you. So what I've done when I noticed that is readjust my screen so that you're dead center. So when I look at you, I'm looking at the camera. Oh, that's a lever. That's good. Well, we're about to teach this to lawyers because they're having to do a lot more Zoom work right now. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and every little thing. Yeah. Well, it's, if, you know, yeah, it makes a big difference. If you look at the nighttime comedians, all of them, the nighttime shows, we suddenly are deprived of an audience. Oh gosh, I know. It's so weird. I had enormous trouble adjusting to it. Their shows were terrible and some of them still are. Most of them started to catch on to how to do it. Why? Because when the audience is there alive, their other person in the scene is the audience. Their objective, their motivation is to get a laugh from those people. And so you did the whole joke and you sort of end with a, ha ha, how do you like that in one way or another? There was nothing to get. And so there was this deadly, go look at the early, they'll find them on YouTube from say three or four weeks ago of the early things that Colbert and the others are doing. And these are some of the best comedians in the business. But their other character, and this is standup, talk about monologues. This is standup stuff. Your other character is the audience. I want to make them laugh, but they're sitting there quiet. So I'm going to tell them this joke. And what do you do? I'm watching them. I'm paying no attention to me at all. Characters on stage do not pay attention to themselves. They say, oh my God, my headaches. But you look to see if that had an effect on your mother. So now you can get ice cream or whatever the hell you're trying to get. But if you keep that in mind when you're writing, if you can sit down and say to yourself, what could I say to the actor about why your attention is on the other person? What do you want? That's motivation. What do I want from that person? And if I want something from them, that's where my attention is. And what I'm saying is another really important point. What I'm saying is calculated to get what I want from specifically you. This audience or this person or that person, if I try to get something from my mother, it's different from my trying to get something from my buddy with whom I rob cards, even though it might be the same thing. And there's one other thing I should say that I wish I'd put into backwards and forwards that people really leave out. I can't wait. This is really weird because I have not talked about theater to anybody in a long time. There's a really good ex-actor and screenwriter that I work with a lot when we help to teach lawyers. So we get on the same topics, but in terms of plays, it's voice. Don't have all your characters talk alike. We think Shakespeare does because that's a strange language. So we can't see the distinction between the voice that Horatio uses and the voice that Hamlet uses, but they are distinctly different. Every character is not gonna talk the same, just like actors should, but don't know. Don't sound like the person who just finished talking. Well, Lord, there's something happening over there. Oh my goodness, what should we do? I don't know, let's go tell the king and you can shut your eyes and you've got no damn idea who's talking. Same thing when you're writing. Yes. The same thing with writing. If your word patterns, your choices of words, your lengths of sentences, your tone, all that stuff, unless you're writing two identical characters who both want the same thing against the same obstacle in the same situation at the same moment, they ain't gonna talk the same. And that's one of the differences. It's why we listen to Pinter. It's why we listen to Beckett. And you don't even know why, because your brain is not logically different, but you do know it's real. It is fake when everybody talks the same. So that's voice. That's voice. Write it on the last page of backwards and forwards to remember a voice and to remember, save the cat. Save the cat voice. Keep the audience interested through forward. Well, that's part of the book. I'm suggesting other things that are in the book. I mean, people keep saying, David, the publish isn't a time for a new addition because they would love a new addition. No, I don't want to do a new addition. It's a fundamental book. That doesn't change with the times. The only thing that changes is I get other ideas that are still fundamental. Yes. Yes. Inserts. Yes. I don't want to make people buy a whole damn book, which is probably full of their notes and all that. It is true. My nose. Different highlighters. But just to get two new pages of stuff. Well, voice is one. And all that is is not everyone. Everyone does not talk the same. Everyone has a slightly different vocal pattern. An easy way to do that is once you've decided what your character to be like, find a person you know and write every line as if you're hearing them. And one of the differences between good playwrights and bad playwrights is good playwrights, bad playwrights have a tin ear. They can't hear those differences. So if you think you are like that, start listening. How do you get out of having a tin ear? Start listening to what's going on around you. Where do you do the best playwriting when you're out in public listening to other people thinking about other things? And the same thing with Save the Cat. Yeah. That's your other idea. One more thing about the voice is, again, if you think about characters talking only when they want something, people have different tactics and they have different strengths. And so they're gonna have used that language in a different way. There's the person who just goes, uh-huh. The tactic is the action. The tactic is the action. Your action is, and that's a great way to put it, the action is a tactic to get what you want in the face of that obstacle. It's a tactic. And it can be very minor. I can just be trying to hide, come on in. How do you reduce that? Well, because I want you to come in and feel comfortable. Yeah. As opposed to, you know, how you may as well come in. It's a little different. Sit down. And if you can't explain that, don't have the damn line. Don't just say, well, I'm working up to it. Don't subject enough. We used to have audiences. Shakespeare didn't. Shakespeare did his plays in two or two and a half hours because they all talk very fast because everybody was very accustomed to that language, which is why you can do modern plays in naturalistic language very quickly. Because we do listen. But we used to have a much longer ability to sit there and be bored. It's not that our attention span is different. We just are not as good as being bored. We don't tolerate boredom as much. A child will sit there, you know, for three and a half hours watching two Harry Potter movies in a row. So it's not that people, it's because it's interesting. So if you don't have that sense of everything that's said, every line is a tactic. If you don't have it, then you need an incredibly good reason in terms of why does somebody wanna listen to it? Not why do I want you to listen to it? Why does the lady in the third row wanna listen to it? Nobody gives a damn about what you want as a playwright. It's about what the audience wants. Awesome, I love that. The greasy palm of the playwright is now intruded. That's an interesting thing to think about in terms of theme. And the way that you keep saying like, you don't write from a theme. I'm writing on the theme of this and that. It's like, no, write a thing that is authentic and real and moves and is interesting and people lead forward and see what that is. It's almost after you do that, you think. Yeah, but if you wanna start with theme, your first question is, what kinds of situations would there be in which I have characters doing and saying things that an audience will take for my theme? I have a thing against plays that teach lessons. Learning schtücke, the Germans call them. I mean, I don't like using art as a way to teach. People can learn from good art, but when you start to teach a lesson, instead of try to reach us on various levels that our art tries to reach, it's gonna be boring. You can dress a professor up like a very entertaining monkey, but it's still a professor. And you want the, not entertain is the wrong word, but the theatricality. So if you have something you wanna teach, racism is bad, misogyny is bad, whatever. What are the situations in which I can show is, don't just stamp your damn silly little foot and keep saying racism is bad, racism is bad. If I disagree, you're not gonna have any effect. If I agree, if you don't get to me through the content of scenes and a developing content, there's a play floating around, I won't name it, that Susan and I went to see a while ago. And it's about when the bosses are bad to the workers, it's not good. Every single scene was a worker in the throes of being treated badly by the bosses on one form or another. It went no place. At the end, the end was the same as the beginning. There was no reason to watch the damn thing unless you really liked an actor in or something like that. But the play itself did not hold for that very reason. A lesson like misogyny is a terrible thing that takes as much time to say as I just took to say it. The only way theater, it's not more effective just because you put it in the character's mouth on stage. It is more effective because you've shown us that it is a true statement. You've shown us a scene in which the consequences of, or a play in which the consequences of misogyny are bad in a way that affects not Sally on the stage, but in a way that you brought it to me so I can empathize with it. That's how you teach. It goes back to character. Yeah, it does. It goes back to what it is. And character goes back to situation. In other words, one of the things you try to do with a play has to do with empathy, which is easy to do on stage. Go look at what was a brilliant movie in retrospect was Night of the Living Dead. If you empathize with characters you knew nothing about. Yeah, right. Somebody's getting their neck chomped out. And part of you is cheering, yeah, yeah, yeah, Garin, oh my God, that poor person. That's empathy. That's empathy. You're flinching yourself. The difference between empathy and sympathy is important. Sympathy is I feel sorry for you. Empathy is I feel the same thing you're feeling. A world of difference. And if you want to teach, get my empathy on the side of the thing you want to teach. And a hack good writer can do it either way. Can show you misogyny's good and they deserve it, those women. Or misogyny is awful and no human being deserves it. That's the beauty of theater. You can do it either way. I used to read new plays at the Guthrie because we had established a little theater that was gonna do them. This is 30 years ago. I don't know what they're doing now. 40 years ago. And one day I got one of the best written plays that we're getting out of staff of readers we would get, I don't know, five or 10 plays a day. Wow. Easily five a day. And I had some really good readers and I could trust them not to send away good stuff in so far as a person can do that. It's gonna be tons of mistakes. And a play worked its way up to me and I read it and it was a sensationally written craft wise, empathize with it. But it was the most racist God damn thing I'd ever read in my life. Oh no. To the point where by the end of the play I'm saying kill that black person. I mean, now we're more about to do a play like that. But it shows you the power we have in the theater. Look at the films that were made for Hitler during World War II. They were incredibly effective. They would have been as effective on you as they were on the Germans back then. And that's the power you have if you wanna teach. If you stop thinking of the play as a teaching tool and more as a bringing you into that world, let you teach yourself, we teach lawyers this all the time, never tell an audience what to think or feel. Give them stuff that leads them to think and feel what you want them to think and feel. That should be on that back flap of backwards and forwards maybe. That's a good one. Although that's not an analysis thing. So probably that belongs in a play right. But the minute you find yourself, I gotta make the audience see that it's bad to do such and such. You know, you read the news and you get furious. Of course you wanna write a play in response to that. But don't tell me what to think or feel about it. If I already think of her feel it, I'll be okay with it, but who needs that play? It's the people who don't think and feel that way and you are not gonna change the way they feel unless you get them into the situation so they can feel it to themselves. Humanity, yeah. Yeah, that's what it's about. I'll shut up. This is crazy that we've been talking for an hour already and I am so low to end it. But I wanna lob one last question at you about something that you're hopeful about in the coming, I don't know, week, month, 10 years. What are you looking forward to at the moment? Personally or well, I guess everything is personal. Yeah, sure. If the world doesn't end because of global warming, which I'm fairly convinced it will. If democracy is not really in its last days in this country, which I'm 40% of the way thinking it's inevitable. And after November, maybe 100% of the way, I don't mean to be political folks, I'm just being self-protective. If that asteroid that they're not telling us about doesn't slam into Durham, North Carolina, away from all those is, I guess my most immediate thing is that what people will be when they come out of this coronavirus thing, most, not all, most to all of them, many of them, this is a challenge to their manhood or whatever. This is where we had that thing where the guy with an anti-tank missile was marching downtown against the guy, an anti-tank or whatever that thing was on his back. So there's, and there are a lot of people who really resent being told they have this now. But for the majority of people who are dealing with this relatively reasonably, I'm hoping when they come out of it, they realize we have all just cooperated with each other to keep each other safe. It's the way we all felt after 9-11. We need to be, we need each other. I can't be safe unless you can be safe. I'm sort of hoping that will happen. I'm becoming less optimistic, because of what the political overlay is doing to it. I hope that playwrights continue what has been a very slow, long, slow move to come to a better and better understanding of why what they're doing in theater is not what you try to do in a movie. That the two are not the same art form. And look at movies. The farther they've gone from their origins, when they started, there were nothing but a play with a camera set up in front of them. And now they're not anything like that. The statistics are there on multiple locations. They are doing things artistically that you would never be able to do on stage. Well, we can do tons of things on stage too that you can't do, just like those comedians I've talked about. You can't do what they do without the audience there. Now they're having to do something different and totally. So what I'm hopeful about is that that will continue. And I hope people, I've always hoped this and it was probably lacking in me. That what drives them in all this is really that they are, it's the old Stanislavski thing that they are a part of the art. It's not, they are in the art, Stanislavski would have said. There's an art in me that has to get expressed. It's not that I'm an artist. It's not that I wanna tell my friends I'm a playwright. It's not that I love them. It's not that I love the theater life. And that's the way I can be part of it. Those are great motivations and they'll work but that there becomes an important reason why nothing else you can do in life would make you happy. Now, unlike actors, playwrights are lucky. You can do anything else in life and still write your plays but then when you write your plays you're doing something you really need to do and to understand the best plays don't get done. 99% of the time the best plays molder away and go away forever and that's just a sad fact just like a lot of the best actors in the world will never get a professional role in their lives. You have to take that for granted upfront. Now, if you're gonna make it the chances are you're very good but being very good along with working really, really very hard doesn't guarantee a damn thing. I used to tell the kids we all did it's Carnegie. You know, this is an undergraduate program and we kept it that way on purpose. I think they've changed. Because I'm 17 years old and my parents really don't want me to do this and I would say to if there's anything else in the world that may make you happy go do it because it's too hard to rely for your income, your self-esteem, your ability to express yourself. So if you are a playwright have other things in your life that you can do to at least live on because otherwise the best you will do is write junk that you think you can sell in which case Hollywood is the place for you and not the stage. And even in Hollywood, everybody you know has got a script that's been optioned. I mean, first of all, one in a thousand writers ever gets an option and then probably one in a thousand options ever gets moved to the screen. I don't really know what the statistics are but they're at least that bad. So it has to be something that is driving you to do this. If there'd be no hole in your life if you wrote poetry instead of plays and write plays something has to drive you to want to communicate with it's your own internal ethos that makes you want to communicate with living people in a live situation. And if you've got that then by all means don't quit because your first play produced may be the best thing anyone's ever written but it may not happen for decades. And it may happen because you failed so many times it doesn't mean you failed as an artist it means you failed to get some of the luck. Pick a playwright and I'll show you the point of luck where they started to make it. You know that, I know that if we're all honest with ourselves we know if we'd been in a slightly different place it wouldn't have happened with the same place. Now once you get something of a name fine then you've got a door in. On that note, what a toy. That's the future and the other future is I hope to get, we get to do this stuff in other ways from time to time maybe this way. Let's do it. Go on a tour, we'll go on a road tour. I have to say however as a warning, no I do not want to read anyone's play. The reason for that is one of the reasons I stopped doing it is because I just got, I mean how many plays can you read in life before you just rebel? I am at, I actually will admit that I'm terrible at reading plays. I love seeing them, I will go to readings, I want to hear them but reading them I have to really be in the right space to do so I'm with you. I spent my most time in theater as a director and I finally got to the point, I was really directing two, three, four, five plays a year in all kinds of situations and I really got to the point where one more person walked in front of me and acted, I would shoot them. Just don't do it near me. So it took me a long time to even want to go back to watch plays. So yeah, you can get burned out of that sort of thing. And once that fire is gone, why do it? So take care of yourself. I'll shut up, take care of yourself. Take care of your plays. All of you out there, thank you so much for watching. And I'm glad to hear from people. Glad to answer questions. Might give you my email if you want. I will if you want. It's jury watch, one word J-U-R-Y-W-A-T-C-H. I'm glad to hear from you. I'm glad to answer questions. But if you ask me to read a play, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna have to beg off once in a while I will for a producer or something like that, but very rarely. It's kicking and screaming. Of course. Well, thank you. Generous. Thank you for doing this. Just know how massively impactful your work has been to so much, so many of us who love and care about this craft and believe in it. Well, as a person who loves teaching, there's no higher praise for a person who loves teaching than that. So thank you, thank you for doing this. And thank you for your work, by the way. There's quite an artist here sitting in front of me looking back at me on the screen and that is a joy to talk to. Thanks. Well, let's do this again over beverages and maybe in person once all of this wraps up. So, all right. Thanks so much, David. And thanks, everybody. Take care and you all take care.