 Good morning. It's early for those of us who have been through a weekend and lots of frolicking with cocktails. So I'm just going to have the playwrights introduce themselves and their plays first. If you could do that. My name is Rajeev Joseph, and my play, Mr. Wolf, had its reading yesterday. My play was Future Thinking. My name is Adam Rapp, and I wrote The Purple Lights of Joppa, Illinois. I'm Rachel Vons. And I'm going to ask you guys why. What was the seed of these plays? Why you wrote them? Was there an image, a person, a story that kind of inspired you to write these plays? Do you want to start? I'll start. There was a horror movie called The Orphanage, which is a kind of supernatural movie about this woman who loses her son. And it's a really spooky, creepy movie. But there's just a one little tiny scene in it where she and her husband, who are slowly becoming estranged as a result of the stress of losing their son who just disappeared, that they're in a kind of support group for parents who have lost their children, who have children who have been abducted or have just gone missing. And it was just this tiny little one-off scene, but there was something about that scene that made me start thinking about the parents of abducted children and how the stress of that might tear a relationship apart and who are these other people in this group and how the sharing a terrible kind of experience is something that can also bond people together. I am pregnant. And that's all I have to say. So I don't have to answer anything. And so I've been thinking about children and parents. And I think that's one of the reasons why, or at least I hope, in my play, you end up sort of feeling for both sides of that coin, the parent-child coin. I was just really thinking about what we want from our children and what we feel we deserve and what we are owed from them and vice versa. And also, I was a child actor, so there's that. My parents were fabulous, but we knew. Are they in the audience? They're not. They're really wonderful and they were nothing like the parents in that play, but I knew a lot of kids like that. So I was interested in that. I had been writing a lot of kind of bigger plays and I wanted to write something small and intimate. And I was actually, when I spoke to Mark Masterson about this commission, I was going to write this bigger, another bigger play that was set in like 1928 and then also in 2008 in the same space. And it was complicated, and I'm still going to write that play, but I kept getting haunted by this idea of this father-daughter-lost-time relationship. And it's more personal than that. My father suffers from mental illness and we don't have a relationship. So in some ways, writing the play was like a wish to have a conversation. And then it became a lot of other things, but that was sort of the door I walked through when I started writing it. For me, I think because I've been thinking a lot about ambition lately and my ambition and the consequences of it, I increasingly more and more get to spend less time with my family. So I don't know, I've just been thinking a lot about the pole home and when I get there and the time that we spend together and how I always feel like I want to leave. Not always, but you know, I've been thinking a lot about that. I also was on a writer's retreat at this lake house and so that sort of the image of that and the sounds of that place also sort of spurred the play. Interesting. Wow, we could be here for hours. So some of you write for television and film? How, and there's always a concern, why come back to theater? Why come back to write these plays? I can answer that right now. I was actually producing my episode this week and last week of the show that I write for on television and it's really, which is called Extent. It's going to be on CBS this summer starring Halle Berry and I think it's going to be great. And it's wonderful. It's really fun to write for television but so I was doing that and then coming here for the weekend to rehearse. And the experience is so different and with all respect to my television show which I'm very excited about, this experience is so much more rich and creative and collaborative because there's no time in TV and it's like you just have 30 seconds to rehearse it and it has to happen and often you can't get the scene in front of you. You just have to sort of put it together in editing and it's just a totally different ball game and to be in a room with actors for six hours and a director in conversation about work is like, it's amazing. And my husband was like, you're so much like lighter and great this week. You seem so happy. Do you want to answer that? Adam, do you feel? Well, I've made three films. I directed them and I've worked on a couple of television shows and I also have a show that I'm on that shoots in New York right now called Flesh and Bone that's going to be on stars. And I think the thing that I love so much is that you get in a room with actors when you're in the theater and it's just you and them and then sometimes the dramaturg will be there and sometimes the artistic director comes in and watches a run through and gives you notes and there's not this whole apparatus or machine that is a studio, executives with job descriptions who feel like they have to talk all the time. And it's just you making work. It's like a very homemade, almost a folk kind of activity. It's like and it's a live event that's witnessed by people alive in a room with you. And so in a lot of ways the stakes are just higher. It's a greater high wire act and I think there's a greater cleansing because of it and I think people appreciate the risk of that and I think our culture right now is really hungry for real stuff happening because we're so connected to our phones and our iPads and we're in this mode like this all the time and so I think the theater is becoming this really interesting place where you can actually go see something happening right there. And so I'm finding that I'm craving that more right now and also there's much more politics because there's much more money involved in TV and film and there's so little money involved in theater that I think it's all about the human experience and so every time I do TV and film I cannot wait to get in a room with actors again. It's as simple as that. Raji, do you feel? I don't think I could articulate it as well as these two just did. I would just second everything they just said. And do you feel like is there a higher calling to being a playwright than being any kind of other writer? Would you say that your responsibility as a playwright is different than writing for any other medium? I think it's dangerous to get into a higher calling. I'm using that in quotes. I think it's interesting that you say that because you know, Teresa Rebeck she and I have talked about this a lot. She was my mentor when I first started writing and she was still friends and she was here this week and I think we all agree that we love theater and we love being playwrights and everything that Adam and Eliza just said is all true. But the pitfall for me in terms of thinking about it as a higher form or a higher calling is that then you get into things like when I'm not doing that am I selling out and I think selling out is a self-destructive notion because we all want to make a living and we all want to find different ways to express ourselves creatively and you can do that through television and movies and stuff. And so you shouldn't feel, I think it puts too much of a pressure on theater to think of it as this holy form because it is, but so is TV. And they're just different, as you said, politics involved in it. And I think that's an, I can see why you one would think that in part because of the cleansing power of it that Adam talked about. But I guess I personally think it's a dangerous little pitfall. Well and television when it's great offers you something that both film and theater can't which is an ongoing story that can last years and years. So you can take a character from one place to a very distant place and you can kill them and the story can keep going. I mean, and you can't kill people in the theater. Always a good thing, you can. That's a playwriting rule. But to me, I mean I just write, for me personally it feels like it feeds my soul in a different way. But also part of that is that it's not my television show. I've never worked on my own, I haven't had my own created by me television show. You're working on someone else's vision and I've been really lucky to work with people who I really love and think are incredible who have great vision, but you're supporting that work. And so it feels like a higher calling while you're working on your own thing. But that's narcissism. What about you, Rachel? What about you at this point in your career in terms of writing plays? I mean I don't write for TV. I know, but you... Do I think it's a... Do you feel like the stories you tell in theater are different than you might tell in some other medium? Sure. I mean, with television, again there is this different kind of engine underneath it. You're watching something that has to carry across whatever, twelve episodes. So that you're watching something that is very carefully pieced, a piece of the story. And when I'm writing a play, it's very much, well, this has to fit. Everything has to fit in this one. So it's just a different... a muscle, it's a different muscle. And are you... When do you guys think about the audience? Five seconds before the show starts. And I go... What happened to me on Friday was I go, I never realized how much I swear in my plays until I'm sitting with 400 people going like, ooh. So then, that's what I think about it. What about you, Adam? Do you think about the audience as you're writing a play? Yeah, I do, because there's plays where there's a really strong fourth wall where the actors aren't supposed to know the audience is there and then there are plays where they're interacting with the audiences if the audience is abstractly representing something in the world of the play. So yeah, I think about that a lot. I think about... I think one of the things, not to jump back to the last question, but it involves audiences, I think that theater is so much about tension and how much tension can you sustain and make an audience forget that they're there. And the art of TV writing is an art of entertainment. You want them to stay in their living room and maybe not get a snack. Whereas in the theater, you just want them to forget where they parked their car and maybe dive into the world of the play. There's also something that is interesting, I think, because now that I've been writing for TV a little bit, when you write for TV you're basically giving up your copyright as an artist. They're buying your copyright. So you're writing for a corporation and when we're writing plays, we still own our copyright. When we write fiction, we still own our copyright. So it is about our soul in that way. So I agree with that so much about... But with premium cable now there are no commercial interruptions so you're not dealing with Doritos and Pantyhose and those kinds of things every 12 minutes. So as a craftsperson who writes, we're all dramatists you can actually write drama. You can do 52 minutes of something without interruptions so you can create that world of tension that we all strive to do in the theater. So it is changing and the landscape of writing for TV is changing and that's why you're seeing, I think, so many talented playwrights and novelists and other kinds of writers, journalists who are writing for TV now and I think there is some really beautiful work being done and then, of course, there's still a lot of Doritos commercials and things like that that are still kind of holding down the lower levels of it but I think it's all about tension and I think that's our training in the theater and if we can do that on TV and make people sit in the chair and not go to the bathroom, then we've achieved something. Well, some people might be scared by that for the field. What do you guys think? That we will lose these writers to television and they won't come back? No. I don't think so. And I think, particularly because of what Adam just said, the way that TV is changing in terms of not just premium cable but the way it's being digested through devices rather than like a TV guide the storytelling is becoming it's not this all across the board but there's these shows that you can write for that I have. I wrote for Nurse Jackie on Showtime which has ten episodes in two years and it didn't have any effect at all on my playwriting output. I was still able to work on my plays I was still able to go to things like PPF or what have you festivals and be a part of the theater community and I think that there's so many playwrights here this week who have worked in television and I don't think it has adversely affected their participation in the world of theater and it doesn't have to I think that when it used to be like it was network TV only then you have to move to L.A. and give yourself over to these 27 episodes in a season and it's soul crushing and it's in the service of a corporation it's not like that so much anymore you have other choices. I moved to L.A. four and a half years ago and sort of really didn't write plays for a while because it was all consuming to learn how to write TV I mean I got a job on a show called Rubicon that was on AMC without having ever written an episode of television I mean they read my play and so I had never written for television it was so hard to learn how to write a scene in a page that wasn't like a play scene you know like you can write a scene for the theater in a page that's like weird and like whatever to let the director figure it out to write a scene that contains all of the things that a 20 page scene would have to contain it was really hard and so then for me going back to theater was also hard because I'd write a two page scene and be like well that's a great scene maybe this play should have 700 scenes or whatever but but I was also really young when I came here and so it took me a little while this is the first play I've written in a while but now that I've done it it's like this whole weekend I'm going to write every day I'm just going to write for theater so I hope I do that do you feel like these plays that we saw this weekend speak to this era in 2014 do you think they speak to where we are at this moment and in what ways would you if you think about your plays as being part of a movement of theater where do these plays fit in this 2014 I think these plays were really well programmed to work together I really felt like they were all kind of in conversation with one another I don't really know how to express why I feel that way but I some people were like there's a lot of dead babies in these plays and I was like not in mine and they were like bone cancer two year old sorry but I think that they there was just a really interesting parent child thing going on this weekend and surrogate parents and people who I don't know I found Rajeev's play so I don't know you didn't get to see my play but I really I felt like in my play you have a man who is meeting the object of his affection and his desire and she's like an oracle for him and I feel like that's happening in your play and she then kind of transforms him into a parent for her in some way and then like a sexual object for a moment and I don't know it just was really it was really and I felt like that was true when I was watching your guys' plays too it was a really interesting it just felt like it was really well done by the SCR yeah what do you guys think I think a lot of these plays I know mine is a lot about questioning what home is and people leaving where they're from and I think a lot of these plays were dealing with people questioning their decisions getting to a place and then suddenly turning back and thinking oh maybe I have been on the wrong path this whole time and I think that was a theme that was carrying over a lot very American theme I felt like there was a lot of longing in these plays yeah and a need to connect I saw two plays yesterday I saw both of your plays which were wonderful and I think you know thinking about the way you're questioning it now it's like in both there's a man who is desperately trying to connect a girl or a woman and that drives so much of it and in both cases kind of it hooks the audience into this journey and I don't know it's true it's like the awesome thing about a festival like this is that you're overwhelmed with stories you know there's like three plays, readings or productions in a day and in the end it's also like they kind of fit together which is a cool way of absorbing you know stories well I've been thinking a lot about how many ways there are to get story now I mean there are a thousand ways you can access to a story through the radio, through the internet through the movies how do we keep people coming into the theater for these stories do you guys worry about that or is that not something as playwrights that you spend a lot of time thinking about about how what audiences you're going to bring into your plays or how you're going to get them in for your stories when there's so many things competing for people's attention now it's a big question it's interesting though because I think what's happening is because of devices and because of digital media and because of the analog world sort of falling away to the digital world and all that I feel like theater or the live experience whether it's circus performance or theater or going to see somebody sing at a cafe it's becoming exoticized in a weird way and I feel like what's going to happen at some point I hope this happens to keep the theater alive is that another youth culture will be like put your iPads down and let's go see an Arthur Miller play or an Eli Clark play I really would say you like that it'll be radical and a lot of plays will be happening in a ramshackle garage and it'll become part of an underground movement and then suddenly live performance which has survived for a billion years will come back in a really exciting way and that's what you hope for I've been around for a long time I've written over 35 plays I've written 11 novels and I can tell you you see these waves you do see waves of young people coming back in New York City and hopefully in other parts of the country the thing that happened a few years ago that was really interesting is in New York the opera of all places suddenly had this wave of young people who were getting like $15-$20 tickets and going to the opera which is a really static event like you go to the opera and you see two people on stage in this large proscenium space and they're singing in a very static way even in a foreign language that we can't understand but kids were craving that and all these kids were showing up at Lincoln Center and like two or three hundred at a time and going and I'm like we need to figure out how to get them to the theater we need to figure out how to make that exciting again for them so they're not thinking that it's all corsets and people holding spears because that's how theater education tells us that and I think we should that's the hope that you know for the possibility of touching somebody beyond the fire code anyone else want to comment on that? well I really think about when I'm writing a play like is this a play for the theater or is this a play for a screen and I think that that at least for me that question makes me not worry so much about if I'm writing a play that I feel like belongs on a stage needs the experience of a live audience then I hope that that live audience will feel that need too and I think that my writing is sort of cinematic anyway it's usually structured pretty linearly and I like plotting and you know but I but I try to at least to have it be something that you will want to experience live and then I'm just like listen then it's on you do you look like you're thinking over that I found what Adam said really inspiring and I think it's it's a wonderful that would be wonderful if that happened but I think it's like I think people are always saying that theater is dying and that's like it's just what it is and it never dies and so it's and I think part of that is because like you say the storytelling is unique unto itself but nothing can take its place there can be other forms of entertainment that take up people's time and energies but nothing can take its place and I just I personally feel like it's just a natural thing to to be drawn towards you know and I'm I wasn't a theater person growing up I didn't go to the theater very often I hadn't really seen musicals but I hadn't really seen a straight play until I was about 28 you know and I was I went to grad school to do screenwriting and I was at NYU and we got a lot of tickets to plays and we saw them and we got to meet playwrights and all of a sudden it started to open up and it just opened up naturally it was just like oh well this is great you know and it's alive and well you know there and here and so it's clearly an art form that is that keeps on picking I can't say but it's it's the cat of art forms yeah it's like a virus it'll never go away actually how old were all of you when the first time you saw a play that you remember the first play that we were talking about this at dinner last night actually the first play that you remember being oh that's something I talked about this last week but my sister was in the Pirates of Penzance in sixth grade and I was in second grade and I don't know why but it made an enormous impression on me partly because I was seeing my sister someone I knew and my plays are nothing like the Pirates of Penzance they're like the farthest thing from it but that was the first moment where I was like oh I just want to be in this weird room with these weird people running around and the rest of us in the dark it was a big moment how about you Adam well my little brother is an actor and he was doing musicals at a very young age which I hated because I was always hearing you're a good man Charlie Brown or Oliver and you know some of those are beautiful musicals but I just it was just because it was in my bedroom I was singing them all the time it was like eating too much pasta or something and so I think when I first finally saw that like a straight play could be an incredible thing I was just writing fiction I was early in college and I came home and I was probably 20 and he was in Jungware's Landscape of the Body which I think is I told the story the other night at a donor event but it's a true story and he was in this beautiful play maybe my favorite play by Jungware which is this haunting story of a mother son, a single mother raising her son in the West Village during a very violent time in New York City in the 70's when a lot of people are getting murdered and a lot of people are disappearing and her sister I think is murdered and he gets involved with this group of kids that are going around and knocking people on the head with wrenches and stealing things from their apartments and he was playing a 14 year old kid and at one point this is kind of a side step to the story but at one point my brother's character's head is cut off and one of his friends is pushing the head around in a shopping cart and it hit a bump on the stage and it was at the Goodman Theater in Chicago which had this huge orchestra pit and his head jumped out of the shopping cart and rolled down the stage and fell into the orchestra pit and literally I was thinking about that accident that live accident and also the play that just shook me and I was like wow this is was just witnessed by all these people and is my brother's head in the orchestra pit and all that all that alchemy was so powerful to me that I was like I want to try this you know the secret garden when I was six and then and then almost right after that I was cast as the lead in an off-broadway musical and which was what? which was called Opal it was at the Lambs Theater in New York and I had never sung before I mean I was six I had never sung before I had like three solos and I was on stage for two hours straight I was the only kid in the show and it was just and I grew up in the theater because of that I mean I did Les Mis after that and the experience of just like a being on the stage really just cracked open a world for me and I also did I did Les Mis in New York and I also did it on the tour and the tour for me was like I mean I was eight and it was like and we are these like traveling group of weirdos who like sing for people we don't know and it just it was really magical but then it wasn't really until high school when I had at that point kind of stopped acting professionally and did and but was like acting in high school plays and did and played Stella in Street Cartoon Desire and it was the first time I'd ever like in high school and it was the first time I'd ever really acted because you know child acting is so much about being like knowing how to remember your lines and acting natural I mean it's really about and that's still my acting style if you were ever to see me act it's like I can play me or like variations on me but I'm really good at that but it was the first time I was like you know not anything like the person and I was really trying to get inside of it and I was like this is this is like this is an incredible experience that's transformative and and I remember that the girl and I the girl who was playing Blanche and I went up on our lines like and wrote a scene in Street Cartoon Desire and like just did a 20 minute improv and it was like amazing I mean it was probably terrible but it was so it was so I don't know it was so scary it was like nauseating and dizzying and terrifying and exhilarating all at once it's like opening a play for sure and then after that I'm going to write a lot of plays about AIDS for like which I feel like it's something that happens when you're 18 I'm going to write something about something I know nothing about but is really important but I was hooked by them I was like I just have to feel that terrifying feeling again preferably not as the actor and Reggie what was that play that you saw there was a few I mean the one that I always kind of go back to it was a play called Our Lady of 121st Street by Stephen Adley-Gergis it was directed by Philip Steymour Hoffman and was at the Union Square Theatre and I saw it once got a free ticket from NYU and I went back and saw it two more times and actually Melissa who's reading is after this was actually in that play she was a cast member of that play and I didn't know that till last night we were having drinks I was like what three times and it was that play and during the same season I think it was Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage was at the Roundabout Theatre and that also had a deep impact on me and they were both just stories that I hadn't expected to see and was deeply moved by them and continued to think about those plays a lot and that drew me in and it was also my classes at NYU I continued to like screenplay writing and movies but the playwriting classes were so much more interesting to me and I had the idea for this idea from my play Bengal Tiger when I was in grad school and I was like this Tiger of the Zoo but he talks like a man and if I had pitched that in a screenwriting class it would have just gone over like what are you talking about like how is that going to be on screen but in a playwriting class no matter what you pitched to a class people were like it sounds amazing and he was like yeah just do it it's crazy it's theater it's fun that was great well I want to open it up to the audience because I feel like there's probably some questions out there and yeah great all of you saw all of your works and Rachel I saw your play and again we're almost creating some quality work and why is that regime your works you're going from the readings to the full production all of you have faced creative obstacles when it came to writing these works if this is possible to describe to answer what was probably the most daunting challenge that you had to face while writing your play and if possible how did you overcome it everyone hear that so what was the most daunting challenge you had with writing your plays and if so how did you overcome it sorry I'll start so I have a day job still part-time although I think when I was writing this play I was working 30 hours a week so it was almost not part-time so the biggest thing is making time for me I find that I'm most useful in the morning so I had to just really force myself to get up and sit down for two hours every morning and work on it but it's so easy to get swept up in your responsibilities I also work out of my apartment so you know it's difficult to get something done and really focus when your cat is like sitting on your arm and you know I like oh man there's that pile of laundry and I'm hungry and I'm stacking all the time and so you know there's just the constant need to really find a way to focus that's a struggle that I'm always facing but it was about making time for me for this play yeah I think mine was really because it came from such a personal place that I had to kind of figure out how to enter the play without making it be some sort of biography you know so I had to figure out what the lens was in a way and I sort of decided to instead of making the main character I mean my age visiting his father I made it a girl who was 13 just to sort of make myself be more objective about what her wiring was and what the play would be able to do so I would get away from it get out of its way a little bit that the personal nature of the play often made it difficult and also the fact that I hadn't written a play in a while was hard I feel like I have really I mean South it was a South Coast commission and if it weren't a commission I don't know that it would be done and I took a long time also I know that it was overdue one of the things that's so great about their commissions here is that they don't they want the play to be good so they're not you know they're not like it's due come on because you can't I mean unlike I mean deadlines are good I guess but for me deadlines in TV have really been great like it's like okay I have to finish it by Monday so I'm gonna do it but in theater it's like you can't you sort of can't push it so making time was hard and then also realizing that it needed to breathe and I don't know it was also hard also morning sickness daunting for me I think it was the for me personally like in a play like no matter how serious the material might be I think there has to be an element of humor and that's the thing I continue to struggle with when Mr. Wolfe is that the material is so dark and potentially kind of depressing slash you know I don't want this kind of heavy handed experience and so it was the challenge the first ever first reading I had of it was about two and a half years ago at the Lark in New York City and it was a much truncated version of the story but I had a reading for about a hundred people and at the end of it it was just like the audience was like ugh like why did I have to sit through that and not even because it was badly written but just because why do I want to wade into this world of despair and it concerns me still because it's a really rough subject material but I think that there's to me that the struggle is trying to find you know not to say like comic relief or lightness in it but trying to find the peculiarity of it that can give it some spikes where it's not just wading through this depressive material there's so much humanity in that play I mean there are definitely moments of humor but I think that the humanity and the ways you know it's so interesting and I talked to a bunch of people about it afterwards you don't know you identify with more than one person in that play and like for me I identified with both of those women and it's an impossible situation and I don't know I think that's it's hard, you don't always do that I'm so happy another question there yes a question but I hope it can open up to others I'm interested in the playwright and how the playwright thinks as your writing because you created a horse in your play how is that going to be portrayed on the stage how is the director going to handle that just put it there and say that's it, that's your problem did everyone hear that question it was about how do you what do you think about when you're writing it particularly Rajiv the horse in terms of design elements there's a way of saying yeah it's your problem what that really means is that I think this goes for me like when I write plays I'm very unspecific usually about the way a room might look the way the set should look the way the costumes should look maybe I'll have one little comment about they're wearing this or the desk is here but I've found that designers and directors that I've worked with are brilliant and they live to create fascinating images on the stage in a way that I don't I'm concerned with the story of the actors but like I like to work with people who are really creative and we'll take that and be like we're going to make something wildly theatrical happen here and here's my five ideas and let's play with them and that to me is the excitement of working in the theater is that kind of collaboration and so I know that I want that moment to be very theatrical very frightening and cool and well out of the scope of the rest of the play you know like it's we've been in a living room for the past 40 pages and now we're you know there's this beast and so that's interesting to me and I love the challenge of it you know and and there's I think there's like this playwriting festival that's called like the like writing the impossible play like you know something where like write the thing that you just think couldn't happen and someone wrote like a plane crashes you know and they did it and like there's a way of figuring out any kind of problem in terms of like the limitations of a stage and that's part of the excitement of theater I think stats that's a good question statistics I mean I never sit around being like I'm a female playwright I just don't I don't really look at I mean I'm aware of the stats and they are depressing but I just think of myself as a writer and I just try to keep writing I think that's the best advice I could give is just work work hard make yourself work and be rigorous and put up work to I mean I've done a lot we probably both have we both were in young blood that's true so yeah it's just you have to sometimes be scrappy and put your things out there by yourself or with your friends and that's so rewarding too yeah I mean my advice always to any writer is to keep writing and I got that one of my professors in college was Donald Margulis and he was an incredible teacher and I wrote a play for him I wrote my first play that's the play that still is sent to television shows as like my sample and it's a pretty good play I think and I and I was really impressed with myself it was like the first good play I had written and I was like Donald who might play you know and he was like it's really good now write another you know I was like stop congratulating yourself you know and you learn from you learn from that I mean I don't know specifically in terms of like being a woman in the theater to me and I know I mean I know that that gap exists and it certainly isn't something to be trivialized but I have felt that in the theater at least being a woman has been much less of a detriment to me than in other aspects of the entertainment world so I think that you know write your best work and then write another and make it too I think you know making opportunities for yourself is a is an important part of that so just for anyone who didn't hear that question what is the value of being in an environment like this as writers around other playwrights to me this is the best part of being a playwright or you know this and you know and doing it when it's not lonely when it's not and I do like writing alone in my room but like I think I like this even more than going into rehearsals for a play because there's a stress that is different like I love these events there's a few of them this is maybe the best one you know like that all these people from all over the country can come here and hang out and we see plays we see like three plays in a day you talk about it you go drinking you know and there's just there's connections that are made friendships that are made you learn from other people you learn from the work you see and it's and there is no like to me there's not so much stress I mean I was nervous yesterday before my you know it's it's it's a warm audience and it's and it's you know I came here two years ago and met like 20 people that I still am friends with now and I met people this weekend and it's just it's great fun it's like to me it's like the icing on the cake is something like this Adam do you have any I think in my first time I went to something like this was 1996 at the National Playwrights Conference and I was like 26 or something and I was really no idea what it was to be a playwright and they put you in the center of the experience and you get a dramaturg and a cast and a director and they every week they work on one other play and it's basically a summer camp of making theater and you meet all these New York actors and you meet all these really important writers and I was there my first year with Lee Blessing and Thomas Gibbons and a number of amazing people and at the end of the summer I just remember being like oh I have to come back here and I wrote another play literally to try to get back into that literally to try to get back into that place because we also like had so much fun and we played Wiffle Ball and got drunk and skinny dipped you know so there was tons of reasons to but I realized that it was these things kind of are like this enormous shot of B-12 you know for you you hang out with your community you make friends I met Rajiv this weekend and there Eliza as well all of us yeah I mean you meet people it's the first time I had a great conversation with Theresa Rebeck last night you know it's it's really really cool and then you know we rush back to our little caves and we write and then we get lonely and then if I'm lucky because I direct my work so I get to be with actors in a room a lot and that sort of solves my loneliness disease but these things are so important and it got to be the point where like when I didn't get in the second or third time I hated the place you know because I was like how do I and it just became all about trying to get back into the O'Neill so I think these things are really important and that they should be should continue for another long period of time oh it's just nice to feel less alone I mean I feel like sometimes I'm sitting dealing with my play and I am worried about I don't know like for instance there's a character in my play who's a war vet and that was a scary thing for me to write and it's nice to you know talk to other writers who are having a similar moment of fear and you realize oh I'm not the only person dealing with this thing that I'm afraid to write that's important that moment in your play is electric I love that his when he comes on the stage it's like so dangerous and scary and fun and funny and scary thank you yeah I mean I don't know if a play is good until I can be with other people too you know I just it's there's so much for me there's like so much fear and doubt in the writing process and you know it's an exercise every day and trying to like shut shut that up and so it's just nice to be to hear it and to be with people and really I mean I got to work with one of my best friends as my director and we haven't worked together since we put up our very first play as young women in New York who nobody was giving an opportunity to use and we made our own and Lila my director it's just like it was just so it's just so nice to be in a room with her and like it's all the directors and the actors and the other writers it's just it's wonderful we're going to end on the word wonderful and thank you guys so much