 Thursday. Yeah, it's Thursday, it's Thursday, yeah. Yeah, it's half the time here. And I've just got a couple. We're having the Play Slam. The basket is down there. And yeah, just put your copies in there. It might be helpful also if you had copies for all your readers. So Saturday, I don't need to make a bunch of copies for all your, all your readers. They can help you down there. And it's kind of better one at a time. People are making those copies rather than eight at a time. So keep that in mind. Again, it's kind of first come first served. It's going to be Saturday over in the mule barn. Yeah. Does anybody have any questions about it? Yeah, pretty straightforward. Look at the work that is newborn. And I think that's everything in my will. So take it easy. Okay. I have no weather report. I just have the weather plan for the day. We, as everybody knows, take me to the river will be happening at Creighton as the lead center for performing arts element. You should all be good. Your boss and everything. It'll get to there. What I need is the people at the fourth. Here's the plan for today. We are actually had to move dinner indoors. So the people who are staying at the fort, everybody, your dinner will take place downstairs tonight in the bistro. Scheduled for six o'clock, not 530. And we'll have bands. If it's pouring rain, we will have bands that just start running that loop at starting at about 545 to get you down here. We also now have a bus that will get you to Creighton. It will be leaving from the bistro. So you need to know to be ready when you come over to dinner, the bus will leave from here for the night performance. And you'll probably be closer to 7, 7, 10 right around there because the performance starts at 7. So spread the word for those at the fort that you don't see here. I'll try to get the word out. But just know that's the weather plan for today. And usually right around this time in the week, every year, I just put a little reminder in because it's a long week and everybody's been putting a lot of effort in. Take a breather and everybody needs to try to reenergize for those last couple of days. There's some incredible plays that are going to be coming up in these next couple of days. We all need to give our help and efforts and focus to those playwrights. And if we can do that, then we'll finish out really strong and wonderfully here. It's been great so far. One other thing, Mark Cuskello came up with a great idea. He's going to put a sign up sheet down by the registration desk for playwrights who have plays here now. If you want to get on to a special Google private group and share your plays with the other playwrights who have been play lab and main stage playwrights here, he'll set that up for you so that you guys, if you weren't able to go see a reading, you'll be able to still read those folks' works. And even respond or talk back and forth with each other. Is that right Mark? Yeah, I'm going to put that sheet out like now. So if you're going to get something, I can get that thing set up and we can start. Thanks very much Mark. The movement workshop tomorrow. It's not in the description, but for those who are taking it, would you please bring a small chunk of text that could be in a dialogue form or a paragraph found text from any sources? Is that okay? I want to say happy birthday to Austin and to Eliza. The audience is with us now and we're going to turn it over to Eliza Bent. No applause? I'm just kidding. This is a topic dreamed up by the GPTC staff. I just had a very spicy vindaloo party. Is the T and C, the function and malfunction of theater in a capitalist consumer society. So as we've done in the last couple of days, I'm going to briefly introduce the fabulous playwrights on the panel. They are Constance or Connie Condon. Connie is the honored playwright this year. She has been called one of the best playwrights in our country and our language that our language has ever produced by a playwright Tony Kushner. Her tales of the last four micons and other plays is a wonderful publication. Many of us got to see that play last year. Pardon me, the vindaloo really. Connie, why don't you say a few words about yourself? I teach at Amherst College, which is a great gig. I playwright in residence, which means I don't have to go to any ten-year meetings. You're going to be seeing my play tonight called Take Me to the River. I'm just really happy to be here and be with some of my new friends and some of my extremely old friends, like Mr. Wilm and Mr. N there and there are others of you out there. Okay, great. Thanks Connie. Connie also is an alumna of New Dramatists and a member of the Dramatist Guild of America and Penn. Then we have Kate Snodgrass. Kate is the artistic director of the Elliott Norton and award-winning Boston Theater Marathon and Boston Clearights Theater, which is a home of new plays in Boston. She's the author of the Actors Theater of Louisville's Heidman Award-winning play Haiku. Snodgrass has been recognized with two independent reviewers of the New England Awards for Best New Play and a Steinberg Award nomination from the American Theater Critics Association. She's a professor of the practice of playwriting in the Boston University Graduate School and is a member of Actors Equity Association American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Dramatist Guild of America. She was recognized by Boston Stage Source in 2001 as a theater hero. Snodgrass is a former national chair of playwriting at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and she received their inaugural Milan Stift Award as an outstanding teacher of playwriting. Also awarded Boston's Elliott Norton Award for sustained excellence in 2012 and she is a playwriting fellow with the Huntington Theater Company. We also have Ruth Margraph to Kate's left. Ruth has written Marshall operas with Fred Ho for BAM's Not Last Wave, Next Wave Festival, the Guggenheim Museum, Japan Society, Apollo, La Mama, and a C.A.M.I. Cammie produced tour of performing art centers nationwide. She has toured with her cafe on Tarsia Ensemble, thank you. Another place to rush is Japan, Azerbaijan, and Egypt. Chicago Margraph's Anger Fly opened to critical acclaim at Trapdoor in 2001 and Stadium Devil Dare is running now at Red Tape and theater Three Graces will open at Pivot Arts Festival this June and with other work at Chicago's World Music Festival. She has received awards from the Rockefeller, McKnight, Jerome, and Full Bright Foundation as well as numerous other highly enviable accolades. Eric N., we have with us as well, he recently completed a writing workshop with the Belarus Free Theater in Minsk, Belarus in addition to producing the annual Arts in the One World Conference, which engages themes of art and social change and conducts annual trips to Rwanda and Uganda so that students and professionals in the field can study the history of these countries and explore the ways that art influences recovery from violence. He has taught in universities across the country including the University of Iowa, Naropa, University of California, San Diego, and University of Texas, Dallas. His plays have been produced in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, New York, Chicago, Belgrade, and elsewhere. And he's currently a professor at Brown University. Yes. And then we have Mack Welman, who defies an introduction. I'll do my best anyway. In addition to his many plays, including Three Two's or A Far, Bitterbeer's, Jenny Richie, and Anything's Dream, Mack Welman has also written the novels The Fortune Teller of Jest, Annie Salem, An American Tale, and Linda Perdido. His collections of poetry include Miniature, Strange, Elegy, Left Club, and Split the Stick, A Miniature's Vivant. In addition to his obi awards, including the award for Best American Play for Bad Penny, Turner, and Pro Bar, Welman has received National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller and McKnight, and Guggenheim Fellowships. A number of very impressive awards as well. Anyhow, so here we are at the TNC, the Capitalist and Theater panel. And me, I'm Eliza Bench, I'm no economist, but I do live in the United States, so I guess that makes me a consumer and a capitalist. Let's just get straight to work. Communism is dead, capitalism is flawed. Life is short, brutish, and dark, or something like that. How does theater and capitalism, how do the two talk to each other? I'll start. I have as bookmarks some checks I've gotten from William Morris, my former agent that's now William Morris Enterprises. One is for 43 cents. One is for $2.02. And another one is I think about $34. I will eventually, you know, cash these because some poor schmuck will have to trace me down if I don't. That being said, the history of American theater has always been a commercial enterprise because America is a commercial enterprise. And so, I think it's an uneasy alliance, yeah, alliance, thank you. I was looking for the word there. Because theater does not make the money back it takes to produce it. In Minneapolis, a big flood, Jack Rule just started doing place for free. The actors get paid, I believe, he has a budget, he got funders to step up to the plate. But the fact was that the ticket sales barely paid for the running of the box office. So unless you bump the ticket sales way up, it's really hard to make money back. And so we get into this whole critic driven, New York Times criticism driven theater which is commodity theater and the regional theaters have become commodity theater because they have to present place to pay for their buildings. And of course the actors should be paid and the designers and, you know, you have to pay for the costumes. Somebody has to make them. All of the enormous costs it takes to produce theater are not made up by ticket sales unless the ticket sales are enormous. So I didn't see the Lion King even though I had two close friends at it because there were no comps. And because the tickets were I think $150 and that in my life is four or maybe five new plays I could see, which I'd rather spend my money on. Okay, that's my, oh and I want to thank all the funding throughout my life that's allowed me to continue as a playwright. The Rockefellers, I had the W. Alton Jones, the Albee Sloan, all of these corporations sometimes who are using it as guilt money, whatever. I'm happy to have the money and that's really, that's what kept me alive and the theaters produced my work going. So theater functioning in the capitalist society, I feel like I should probably amend that question a bit. I don't know if I asked it in a clear enough manner. This is more about the malfunction but that's fine too. I do have some things to say about the function but it seems like every five years or so I end up shaking my fist at capitalism and in some kind of article when I looked at the question I thought about an article that I wrote in a 2002 book called Theater in Crisis that Karadzic published and Eric, she actually in the introduction writes that Eric and I, I'm sure she includes Mac as well. I think you guys are all in the same anthology of passionately and fearlessly breaking down the walls of holy commerce. So I think by now they should be gone. But anyway, in that manifesto I tried to unfurl Robinson Crusoe as the father of all of our stories and the plots of all of our plays and as a self-absorbed island of imperialist conquering of time and space and I tried to create a girl Friday as the protagonist with a parrot who could speak Crusoe English on her shoulder and my title was, and I'm just going to read a little bit from this toward an evangelical capitalist message in a bottle to the next millennium of Robinson Crusoe's infrascenium which is all the rest of the playwrights. What if someday this girl Friday type of figment rid were to wake up in a state of omnipregnant omniscience that would rise above the wilderness of melodies in the third act? What if she could read from east to western gold rush? What if she had a far sight further than the 15 minute killing spree ejaculation sold to us evangelicaly by the same old likely cross we lust and gamble for in every pop star? What if it's too hard? What if we give up? What if she starts writing what we can't possess at all? To dumb it down, pointless, it's an act of oppression to write our characters in Crusoe English first word master with our foot placed firmly on Friday's head. Any play with a blurbable single meaning valued at the ticket price makes a junk deposit. These plays are childless. These plays are uninhabited. Shut your eyes the Crusoe's murmur to the parrot because it's very green here. Girl Friday, green, but in the pitch dark everything is black and white like an old film. You only know it's green because you recognize the shapes or maybe velvet and they say it feels like velvet too. And the parrot says oh I always wondered what it felt like, velvet. And they hesitate a little in the way and tip the parrot back into the night until it feels a coarseness holding it up which used to be a tree. We're shy. On the note of evangelism the priest was saying in church the other day that he asked the question if a shark eats a baby does the shark sin and he said no the shark doesn't sin the shark is just filling its nature. We don't understand why the shark was given its nature but it's not sinning if it fills its nature. So capitalism is just fine like a thunderstorm or a shark is fine and a thunderstorm will wipe out your neighborhood and flood it. It will kill your children. Capitalism gets things done but its nature is really indifferent to you and your happiness. Capitalism serves capitalism and in the wake of that it can also serve theater but it has nothing to do with the making of meaning. It has to do with the making of money and the making of meaning is people in Congress with each other reflecting deeply to no purpose. It's being alive to each other and that has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism per se which wants money and money is fine. Money gave us these microphones. I used to rail against capitalism but it's like railing against sharks. Let it continue to eat the babies of the world. I'll just try to keep my babies out of that water for example. I'll look for the fins. So I look for alternatives to the capitalist system and try to build my life around the making of meaning. Indifferent to outcome and certainly indifferent to money. I think it's been said often that every exchange of money is a failure of hospitality. Every time you have to give someone a dollar for a pack of gum it means you don't know each other well enough to have a free exchange of goods, a direct exchange of goods. I'll also say that theater ultimately doesn't matter and can be as full of guilt and can be as brutal as capitalism can be. The making of meaning can be precious or irrelevant or biased or cruel. Theater artists have been involved in genocides and repression throughout time. Dictators often align themselves with artists because artists are as useful to the control of the population as the control of capital is. All that really matters or what matters absolutely is everything and nothing and capitalism and art are equidistant from everything and nothing. And they aspire to both that there be nothing in opposition to capitalism and that capital own everything seems to be aspirational. That theater be able to reach into both disaster and heavenly chaos seems to be aspirational. So in the middle of this grid I will separate myself from capitalism as best I can not because it's evil but because it's irrelevant to my purpose. Can you talk a little bit more about the alternative models that you seek out despite living in a capitalist world? Well as per the Catholic worker you don't sign written contracts, avoid payment. I never ask about money and sometimes it happens that money comes and pursue projects without outcome or that are only inappropriately assessed. So I like plays that don't mean that don't deliver meaning like a commodity but open up the possibility of making meaning. So you bring people together through the trauma of a play to a crisis of indecisiveness and that percolation of a community desperate for meaning and not in possession of it. That's exactly where I want to play to end up just prior to the moment of possessing meaning because as soon as you possess it you can market it. I want to preface my remarks by stating that I intend to be the first off-off Broadway billionaire. I think if you read Adam Smith he's not so different from Karl Marx. Capitalism as a regionally invented and construed is not a wicked awful set of theses. I do think something has happened in the last 30, 40 years corporate culture in this country has become distinctly disturbing. My own feeling is that this move to the right is not the fault of the Republican Party. It's the fault of the Democratic Party particularly the Carter Clinton wing which moved deliberately to the right. We don't have the language to talk about politics anymore. Most good journalists are losing their jobs. I don't think theater has done a particularly good job of addressing political issues in a very, very long time. It doesn't have the vocabulary for it. People don't have the knowledge and distance from it. I agree with Eric that we tend to produce message art which ends up in the horrible realm of the already known. The thing that's dangerous and provocative about theater is that it's a stupid low income craft. It's about people in a room or help us outside in the rain with Connie. And that's what makes it provocative and dangerous. You can trace the history of theater very neatly by tracing the opinions of the people that hated theater. Going back to Plato, the Christian Fathers, Augustine, right down to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It's also interesting that every new development in theater comes from people saying I don't want to do that old shit anymore. I don't want to do something new. So anti-theatricalism also gives rise to new things. I think it's a very tricky time right now because there's not many ways of communicating with each other or for us to communicate with the public at large and that is a big problem. When I think about capitalism, I think about the people I know and playwrights in this business, so-called business. And what Mac and Eric are saying about it brings it down to the individual writer. And what I think in terms of years ago I worked over in Cambridge and went a little bit with Robert Bruce Dean. And he was mad at me at one point because I was a young teacher and I had a friend who was making a very good living writing screenplays. And I wanted him to come and talk to the class and tell them, regale them with stories. And Bob was really upset with me because he did not want me to encourage in any way a playwright to go to Hollywood. Which, believe me, I agree up to a point that we live in a cap, we live in the United States where we want to make a living and want to pay our rent. And we can't do that. So there's a conundrum there. And it comes down, for me it comes down to we have to be very, very, very careful. Because there's a little preposition, two prepositions. We are either, like in Hollywood, writing for an audience where we want to make money, we want to have people come and see our movies. And we're writing for a specific, to connect to a certain demographic. And in theater, I hope, we are writing to an audience. So we are writing to communicate something that we all share. And it's very different. One is, can be very lucrative, but it also, it introduces you to the devil. Because then we somehow think that it's the same thing, and it's not. And if we do start writing for an audience, it seems to me that what capitalism encourages us to do is then we go down the road where we are lost, all of us, in terms of just our souls, if I may be so silly. I want to say something that's good about Hollywood, but I would also include New York in that. I actually encourage my students to think about writing for cable television. And I don't mean, like, you know what I mean, HBO, Showtime, etc. Some of the best writing in America actually is on those shows. I've had students do well there. And Mack and I have an old friend, well, Mack has a really, really good friend. I have a person that I've had a complicated relationship with, Barry Overmire, who I admire tremendously, who was a pioneer in changing the quality of the writing on cable. So you can find really wonderful writing on cable, and you can find people who write for that and also write plays. As far as a theater not doing a good job, I would say that it's really, when we talk about theater, we're talking about, well, a lot of people, but we're talking about the people who actually make it, who write it. We're talking about the people who choose the plays that get produced. I certainly know lots of work that is political in the best sense of the word, but, you know, it doesn't get produced. Or if it does, it's in what I believe has kept me alive as this small network, well, actually it's large, because I think of it's hundreds of theaters all over the United States who produce new plays. And there you find a voice that's critical, and I mean critique in terms of apologia, apology, explanation, as well as being critical of what's going on, what we would call political theater. These are not the plays you're going to see for the most part in New York City. You're not going to see them. You're not going to see them in regional theater, which is a commodity theater, as I mentioned before. They have huge budgets, and they have huge expenses. So, but the, you know, America is about, America is a capitalistic country. It's a side from a small period of history where we had the barter system. It's really been about the making of money, and I don't have any problems with the making of money. I think it's a good thing. I hope to make more before I die. The problem is greed, and in socialistic societies, the problem is still greed. That's the problem. I think capitalism as a system works in terms of what works, works pretty well. Socialism and communism haven't really been tried in their purist form, so I can't really make a judgment. Certainly a mixture of socialistic principles and capital, in a capitalistic system. That seems to work okay. I, I'm going to stop there. Thank you. I want to clarify that I said, I don't mean, I'm not telling everybody not to go to Hollywood and make money. I'm just saying we all need to know the difference. I think it's all, it's all part of a continuum that has non-commercial art at one end of it, and this very highly commercial art at the other side. And I think we all need both sides. And what's interesting to me about the visual art world is that the space of painting has lost its dependence on the figurative, or the kind of, not the prefigurative human being that is representational, and also the line of the horizon that is mirroring back reality to the viewer. But theater still has these two forms of what is figurative or real, and then the horizon line of time. And I think that, I mean I think it's interesting that I do commercial projects. I have made money somehow in the theater, and yet I'm constantly pushing the form. And I think that that's part of capitalism, because those innovative margins and thresholds and vanguards of the form are where all the ideas eventually trickle up to the places that make money. My problem with capitalism is that the people that are sometimes making the work, generating the ideas, and doing the labor are not getting the money. So I would like to see it trickle down a little more, and I don't think it's trickling down in capitalism. So I think we need a new model. I mean I think Connie's right. Socialism, when I read Marx it sounds like a poem. I don't know, and if it hasn't worked yet, how is that going to work? So I would like it to work, and I'd like somebody to come up with a better plan. But I think that they can actually, the capitalists can look to the artist because we're both entrepreneurial and we are making this art. And theater is really in between because we've got people collaborating and sharing, like Eric's saying, the hospitable bartering of services and spaces and time. And we also are somehow able to survive as an art form. So I guess what I would like to see happen more in theater is more like what's happening in the art world where somebody like Rem Kuhlhausen, an architect, can say, luxury is rough. So where everything in the world is smooth, art is rough. And if things are common, art is uncommon, art is unique. So my question is, why is it that people that are really stirring up trouble at the margins of the form, why are they not in the luxury of the form? And I think they are in the art world a lot of times, and they are sometimes in architecture and other fields, science. So why aren't we honoring those margins and really looking to them as fertile crescents of productive work? And I think, okay, the university does, and I think even television does. Television is attracting a lot of our great writers, and there is really great writing on television. Somebody needs to write a new 30 Rock in office because those are now gone. But so I don't think we're trying to say, you know, I don't tell my students either not to write for Hollywood because they've got to make a living. They've got to also figure out a way within the system to pay their rent. So we are, as artists, very resourceful and entrepreneurial in finding those little tiny bits of money under every rock, or some rocks at least. We have a very short amount, oh please. My first plays were actually done in the Netherlands, which particularly then was a socialist scene. The thing I found impressive about Holland Bend, and I still do now, was the extent to which people living there have what I would call institutional imagination, the thing that we sadly lack in this country. We have one idea of how to structure institutions in its corporate institution. When I applied for a grant from the Amsterdam City Council to do a play, the committee met. The committee does not meet unless there's a proposal. There are no application forms. I had to make my own application. We made a big coloring book with the script in it. Three quarters of the money went to an insurance policy which meant the show could not fail. It traveled for six months all over the Benelux countries. There's nothing like that in this country because we do not question forms, institutional forms of any kind. And that I find a problem. We also don't argue about anything. Americans are very good people. We do as we are told, and that's true. Much on the left is on the right. Let's get into some more arguments, shall we, and open up to some questions, comments, debates, concerns. The panel that I spoke to the other day about the impact of internet on internet. I'd like to go over through it and ask the panel to comment on the phenomenon of the new kind of funding mechanism of crowdfunding such as Kickstarter. I know two theater companies that have done quite well in getting projects launched using that rather innovative and new form of raising money. Anybody up there have any thoughts about that and maybe the future of crowdfunding? I think it's great. I think it's successful. Connie thinks it's great. Eric has something more concrete to say, and please give that man the mic before he has a heart attack. Eric, how do you go? I'm going to be a little disruptive, a little sort of impolite. Personally, I say to people here, the people, the panel, and myself, I'm a lifelong Marxist. So I don't know that much about capitalism. Even the people at the panel, I urge all of you to go read about it. Find out as much as you can about it. Because it's an important subject, you're living in the midst of it, and you're swallowed up by it. So learn about it. We don't all know about it, but you can learn about it. The fact that we talk about capitalism, I have mentioned class, shows the fact that we don't know much about capitalism here. Capitalism, in front of me, a lot of class and separation by the ownership of basic things in life. That's what capitalism is. It's not just money. It's only the factories, it's only the land, some of the resources, the mines, the labor. That's what's meant by money. It's ownership of the way in which we stay alive. So what you learn about that. Also, with all the respect that I've felt about Ivy League, I think we're mystifying it. We're talking about it like a shark. It's mystifying. It's created by human beings. Sharks are not created by human beings, as far as I understand it. These structures of living and ownership of it, you can just trace it historically back to the 17th and 18th century, as the aristocratic class collapses of its own place, and the bourgeoisie moves in and creates laws that allows it to own things, until it now owns everything. The United States is probably not a very successful capitalist country. Maybe 30% of people, 35% are in poverty, are just barely out of it, trying to stay out of it. And that's success. It's not success. It needs to be challenged to find observations. Baal said a great thing. He said, changes will happen in art when it's not a matter of what you do, but for whom, with whom, and to whom. Now the women's movement is an example of this. Women begin to make theater for women. American people, the teams for the teams. Workers for workers. That's how it changed. And finally, new people to dialogue with, and not creating it as a mind a big period ago, not to be a heritage, out of the individual, a single playwright, but out of a community of people who were in dialogue about their stories. It's another model. Who's doing it right now? It goes for Baal, the theater of the oppressed, in which you work in the community. You don't come in as you know it all. The theater doesn't know that much about politics. Or about how to change things and make things different. They don't know much about that. But we do know how to make structures that can help other people tell their stories. And in that sense, what Baal is challenging is the individual performance coming from the stage in a monologue and coercing people to think and believe and feel certain things. It's a profound challenge that Baal is offering. And I think it would be good if the Great Place Theater Conference sort of took that up to something to think about in the future. Thank you very much. Just one argument. One point of debate. It's really great what you said. I did have class between Robinson Crusoe with his foot on Friday's head and also the parrot. I just didn't call it class. I want to add that there actually is quite a lot of theater that does what you thought so eloquently talk about, sir. And class is becoming more important than race in this country or gender. However, I still love to go to a play and have people on stage pretending and enjoy myself and I even like plays that were written 400 to 2000 years ago. So I do know that I am surrounded by people who have paid for that. And that's a very different experience than what Boal wanted to do and what communities are doing and what we've done a bit at this conference. I just want to add that my father was a welder and a union man. And one of the things that we in the theater always have to deal with when it comes to community theater is that in the so-called professional theater we have actors' equity and we have the stage hand union and those people need to be paid should be paid, but of course that is a large expense. Community theater is amateur theater, which I believe in theater for the love of it and it has an extremely important part in our present and I hope future. I know my students are very, very interested in doing it and I know there are a lot of young companies that are doing it. They're going out in communities and I think that's a tremendous part of theater in any country. I'm afraid that's all we have time for. We barely even touched class but so it goes when you have a short amount of time. Yeah, thanks for everyone's coming to be here.