 its live stream series of conversations with artists that don't fit in the box. For those of you who may not know, Golden Thread is the first American theater company devoted to plays from or about the Middle East. We are based in San Francisco and are currently celebrating our 25th anniversary, which is very exciting. Today I'm very delighted to welcome lovely artists who are with us, Jamil Khouri, co-founder of Silkwell Rising in Chicago, John Eisner, who is the founding artistic director of The Lark and currently in his first year of retirement, which is very exciting. And Taran Jehazarian, our dear founding artistic director of Golden Thread. And our conversation today is about the Middle East America Initiative, which was a national new plays program. And I'm here to help us all learn more about it. And it's inception and I would just love to know where actually the idea was born between the three of you. Go ahead. Whoever wants to take that question and go for it. Your three are very eloquent. I think we each have a different memory of how it was born. We were just talking about this and my memory is Yusef El-Gindy, who at the time, who's an Egyptian-American playwright and has had a long history with Golden Thread. He was at the time working with all three companies. He had a play being developed at The Lark. He had something coming up at Silk Road Rising and he had been produced at Golden Thread for a number of years. So he suggested that the three companies come together and develop some kind of national partnership to support Middle Eastern American playwrights. And yeah, John, you were just saying that The Lark also had a Middle East diaspora initiative at the time. Yeah, no, I think one of the words that I've been thinking a lot about lately that Jamil has introduced me to is this notion of polyculturalism. And I think that small communities, meaning theater companies like ours and different parts of the country have our own culture of what it means to create platforms for voices. And so I think we all have very different histories coming into this initiative and what the beauty and power of the initiative is over practically two decades is that it's created some sense of order and coordination around some voices that the three of us have been able to agree were important voices to be heard. And in the pre-show talk, we were trying to recall how it all began. And I do know that we have a Playwrights Week program that is a general open submissions program for many, many people. And modeled after that, we created a South Asian diaspora program for a number of years at the request of the Indian American Arts Council. And then we got to know USIF because USIF was part of that Playwrights Week program. And other folks in the Middle East diaspora community and they asked if there could be more space. And so we put it into the Playwrights Week format at first as part of a sort of a structured conversation around those voices. And really the most important outcome was a conversation in 2006 that Taraj and Catherine Coray co-facilitated that brought together people from many, many different backgrounds in the Middle East diaspora. In fact, I just remember there are people sitting next to each other who actually spoke about how they never thought they would sit next to another person of that difficulty. And it was very moving and talk about safe spaces. It was a complicated and challenging circle to be in, but what was really clear in that circle was the problem, which is that there weren't spaces where people could find their own voices, where they didn't have to pretend to be somebody else's idea of what their voice should be, where there was no continuous, I call it stones across the river, step by step opportunity to move your voice forward without compromise. And that the notion, eventually this fellowship idea was one of a number of things we thought needed to happen in order to create a coherent net in which the folks we really cared about, the artists we really cared about could feel bullied and that they could actually travel from theater to theater in a deliberate way and that they could have different kinds of perspectives to bounce their ideas off of. So it didn't have to be about pleasing one. Yeah, and I remember at Golden Thread, we had just started commissioning new work. I think our first commission was in 2005. And what we understood from that process was how much more resources a development process requires. And as a producing company and a small company with limited resources, I was very, very aware of how, for example, a two year development process at the LARC could really be life changing for a playwright and for a play. And I was really drawn to this idea of making that possible through a partnership. Jamil, how was it for you? What are you? I think there was so much excitement around the sort of creation of a community. And building on what John had said, this idea that so many of us are not even supposed to like each other, let alone create together and share a space where stories are being exchanged and heard and received across what are oftentimes perceived or very real barriers. And to me, that kind of energy and that kind of possibility was particularly exciting. And also, to your point, Taranj, the opportunity to attach ourselves, connect ourselves with an institution like the LARC that was dedicated 24 seven to developing new voices and new plays and so forth and to draw upon that expertise and those relationships, I remember those early years as a time of a lot of discovery. And we were just all meeting each other and we were getting to know the respective voices and who was telling what stories how. And there was so much personal growth and artistic growth and I think organizational growth that was really accelerated by the opportunity to work in tandem, in collaboration. And also, because we consider Chicago to be an inland coast, this idea of a tri-coastal partnership and that we really were reaching across America and speaking of diasporic communities in a very broad sense was also very invigorating. So, how did it work? Did you have, did people apply for the fellowship or how did the inception of the idea or did you call on people to come forward because I actually don't know? And initially, I mean, initially was, I mean, people did apply and they proposed a play that hadn't been written yet. So it was just, we just went on the idea and their passion for telling that story. So, yes, so people, so playwrights applied and then we had a selection committee. Yes, there was a selection committee. The LARC ran the whole process. So maybe John can speak to it more. Yeah, you know, that part was complicated because we'd been doing a lot of other selection processes, but the challenge with selection processes is you don't want to just automatically decide what a committee should look like or what a process should look like because some of the convenings that we, because we really committed ourselves to a series of convenings over the course of this fellowship and before that. And a lot of that just had to do with what were the challenges in the field? Were institutions willing to take risks? And so a lot of those questions that came up, were Middle Eastern diaspora writers, people who could write even feeling incentivized to write because there were or were not opportunities if you actually got a chance to share something and you only had a reading, but you didn't have the opportunity to become a better writer by working on that piece with colleagues, why would you continue? So a lot of, we made lists and lists of what the environmental challenges were and that came back to the questions of the selection process. So the selection process involved a committee that involved the three of us. Eventually I think it involved some of the previous fellows so that they could actually give us information about what their fellowship had provided to them and what we wanted to look for. But there was a lot of outreach into communities at Golden Thread and Silk Road because those two organizations had spent quite a number of years sort of focusing on those things. So there was a focus on the purpose, what we were looking for and communicating that to people who might or might not be willing to consider making a submission. And there was a question of outreach and were we reaching those writers? There was a question of essentially how was the program itself going to function over two years and would the writers who we gave the award to be willing to commit to showing up in three parts of the country and committing to that kind of thing. And we didn't wanna put those writers in a compromised position of not giving them enough money and enough resources to do that. So they felt as though they were essentially show ponies for a program. We were really trying to create a program that was really going to buoy these folks up and we felt three parts of the country doing that together would begin to connect to other organizations which I think it eventually did. But this is a long-winded way of talking about how the selection process as it evolved every other year because it was a two-year fellowship and we did it in three cycles. How that selection process evolved. It looked like a lot of selection processes, a lot of organizations but also different because I think that the purposes were so clear. That's just a reminder of all the legwork and time it takes to bolster and buoy these processes. I don't know that people know that about how work evolves. I just wanted to take a minute though to show when he's gonna show the three images of the artist, the fellows who eventually were commissioned to do these projects. This is Adriana von Nichols, right? Who wrote the first one. He was the very first one. And so we'll show a few clips later from that. And it's interesting because, yeah. And this is Mona Mansour. This is Mona Mansour who's actually a third commission. And we swung the talk and this is Yusuf El-Gendi, our beloved Egyptian co-host. In the world who I adore. And we'll get to more detail and sort of digging into each project separately. But Teranj, you were saying something. You're saying it's interesting. Well, I was just reminded that in the process of defining the selection process and the goals of the program, it was an opportunity to also revisit the term Middle East which is so problematic for so many of us. And yet we continue to sort of like baggage, drag it along with us, you know? And it's interesting that our first awardee, our first playwright was Armenian. And we felt that that reflected well on the fact that we're committed to a broad and inclusive definition of the Middle East. And that her project, Night Over Zynga, was really a process of self-discovery and reconnecting with a family history that she had sort of hadn't explored for many years. Yeah, so I was just reminded of, again, this definition of the Middle East which is always so challenging. And the fact that she's of mixed heritage, Armenian and Dominican, which is in many respects, representative of a majority of people of Middle Eastern or Southwest Asian heritage in this country. And also she was an actor who had created a one person show that was quite successful around the 9-11 and her 9-11 experience. And this in fact was such an incredibly interesting response to one of the criteria, which was how do we encourage people to move into the area of authorship, into writing, into becoming playwrights and authors. This was her first full-length play. And that required a lot of support because nobody wanted to tell her how to write a play. She knew how plays work. She was understood it in her bones. But it was interesting because there weren't actually like the senior statesperson in this community in a lot of ways was use of. So it's interesting to go from her and then to Yusuf who had so much more experience and then to Mona. So the resources were slim in a sense because I think we could have served 50 people in this way if we'd had the resources in the time. And so because she, and she was the first project and actually the one of the three that has gone to all three companies, right? You each experienced working with that play pretty deeply. So can you just clarify for me that portion in the law, how long of a phase was that, that she was working with you guys? Well, I don't, you know, we have these kind of diagrams like this, which is to say that we designed it so that it wasn't necessarily, you go here, you know, and then you go to the next place and then you go to the next place. We tried to keep in conversation throughout. And so I recall that, and I don't have the calendars here with me, but I do recall that she spent time with us, but then she spent time with the three of us. And then she spent time at one of the other theaters and then one of the other theaters. And so to a certain degree when there was the need for a development event, you know, when I say that, I mean a round table or a week-long workshop, et cetera, we designed it so that it would happen in our different communities. And while we were working with her on the play and her collaborators, we were also working in the local community in terms of creating a conversation around what this work meant to them. So there were, we have a few images from the workshop at the LARC that Wendy will share with us. So just for my mind, were those, that was the first sort of public event. Is that correct? Yeah. This is the Bear Bones production, which is essentially a non-reviewed note. You can see it's all modular furniture. We're cursed, fully rehearsed. In fact, the whole cast spent a lot of time, you know, at an Armenian church and eating Armenian food together. So it was very, you know, a lot of the staff had come from that background. So there was a lot of sort of absorption of community and connection to those kinds of things. And there's, you know, that whole cultural question of what it means to be Armenian in America is a whole other side to this. We're talking right now just about the process for the artists. But this, there were round tables before this and, you know, week-long retreats. This was, you know, I think it was a four-week-long rehearsal period and eight or so performances. Oh, great. That's quite a lot for a workshop, actually. That's rich. Yeah. I think as a performer, that sounds like a little experience. And so then now it would be lovely to segue into the first, a little, a clip from the first production, which is that whole thing. Yeah, before we watch the first clip, I just want to build on what John was talking about. Connecting with community, because what the extended development process, the opportunity that it gave us was to actually cultivate community around the play and introduce the playwright to the community well in advance of the production so that community members could actually participate in the development process and watch the play grow. And so in San Francisco, like that, you know, Adriana received the award in 2008 and the San Francisco production was in 2011. So we had three years where we reached out to the local Armenian community in the Bay Area and built excitement around this production. And when Adriana was here for the first stage reading, we had a full house of enthusiastic supporters from the community who couldn't wait for this play to be fully developed and staged. So, and they invested in the production financially, they invested in the production by sharing their own family stories. And I think even helping Adriana find contacts and connections in Armenia and all of that. So it was really an amazing process. And, you know, I wanna add to that, working with the local Chicago Armenian community and really getting to know the lay of the land in terms of, you know, institutions and churches. But we also attempted to work with the Turkish community and to bring, you know, Turkish people. So at an official level that did not go over very well and there was pushback and, you know, people who wouldn't engage us, but on an individual level, there was certainly some success and individual, you know, Turkish Americans coming to the play and wanting to talk about the issue of genocide and just, you know, the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman legacy, you know, in general. So I do think that some relationships were developed out of this process that may not have or probably wouldn't have had it not been around a piece of art that I think so beautifully and so effectively invited people in and allowed people to find themselves in the story. There was also an Armenian production, you know, in mixed. Yes, in Armenia, yes. Oh, there was, I didn't realize that. Which we didn't get to go to see, which I'm very disappointed about. Did someone, was it, was there, who translated it, somebody in Armenia or? I think it was someone, an Armenian in New Jersey who had seen the production. I don't know if it was the Chicago production or the San Francisco production, but then they reached out to Audrey Anon and translated the play and produced it in Armenia. What a rich experience. As you said, the play that put us at the lark on the map on a certain level, before we really committed to development, we did productions. It was a Turkish, it was by a Turkish-American writer, Saint-Honornau, and so we had made all of these connections within the Turkish community and when we made this deep multi-year commitment to this Armenian writer, it actually, you know, every time as a community, you hold everybody together, you know, you don't just have, frankly, Black History Month and you know, you don't try to create silos but you actually find a slow and deliberate way to have human conversations. It was, I think it was fascinating to our community to actually have to grapple with the complexities of that history within the context of actually making art that mattered to everybody. Mm-hmm, yeah, it reminds me of, yeah, Jimmy Leucoyne's, the term culinary diplomacy. When you talked about a conversation I had with you and Catherine Croy, I think of artistic and culinary diplomacy and how it can hold space for so many people, it's incredibly important. So I'd love to move to these clips. So we'll watch first the one from Golden Thread Throne. Could you just set the sort of contextual stage of one? Yeah, and I wanna suggest in the interest of time that we just watch one minute of each video. Okay. That's okay with Jamil. Yeah, so this is our world premiere in San Francisco in 2011, it was at the Southside Theater or in Fort Mason at the Magic. And what's interesting is that while the lead actor throughout development and production in San Francisco remained the same, we did have a director change. So Daniela had directed the development process of the play and was slated to direct the San Francisco production, but then she got another offer. And so we had to make kind of a last minute adjustment and we brought in Hafiz Karamali to direct our production in San Francisco. And one of the things that was really striking about the production is its scenic design and lighting design and the music, which it just like transports you to these various spaces because the play spans what, 40, 50 years, three generations from Armenia to the US from Adriana's grandmother to her mother. And so it's a massive story. And I think the design team here really did an amazing job of creating a space that could contain, in a way, contain and free that story simultaneously. Yeah, so we'll watch that clip first. Here we go. See, I didn't get to see it because it was probably nursing and newborn. It was so beautiful. I feel like I have a sense of the landscape of this, the whole thing through watching that. Yeah, great. It's a play about memory and trauma and apprehending trauma and finding some path to healing. And you can see that in the way, in the fairy tale look of it in a certain way. John, did you get to see both productions? Yes. Okay. That was part of the point and I think it's actually very important to writers is to be able to have for long periods of time, peers, colleagues, to talk about the work. Not that it's good or bad, but what was most successful in each step of the process? Yeah. And so this second clip is from Silk Road's production, which was, when was it, Jimmy, do you remember? So we followed Golden Threads. So this is terrible. I wanna say 2012. Yes, it wasn't 2012. 2012, yeah. Now, I knew that question was coming and I'm like, I believe it was a year, yeah. Great. So this clip is, I think, is the past, right? Is what we're calling it, yeah, okay. And really, yeah, and to what John just said about, essentially inherited memory and inherited trauma and how that becomes and how difficult it becomes to move on, without any sort of redress. And also, the fact that for so many survivors, they were surviving in a type of isolation and they were running up against the dictates of American assimilation and sort of leaving behind what you left behind and how, ultimately, that is impossible. And yeah. Okay, so here we go. Agig, quiet, I said. You wash those hands, all that filthy drag in here. And when you are finished, you come in here and set the table, it's like everything around here. Quiet! Oh, yes, I can hear you all the way down the street. How nice of you to come home. How nice of you to drink and laugh and smoke at the club with your friends while I clean your house, feed your child, cook your dinner and sign all the orders for your damn tea house. Alice, please, please. Alice, please, please, what? Please don't tell you how I feel. It was a very bad day today in the stock market. It was a very bad day at home. I'm being set the table! The doctor said I should rest and he said I am here working myself to the core. Oh, Jesus, Mrs. Bestion, for the help! I don't want the help of a neighbor. I want my husband to get enough to help. That was a great clip, by the way. It's sort of a little bit like a Hollywood award show clip. I know, I was going to... It's well filmed. It's a well filmed. Sometimes I find watching theater on video painful, but that was actually really beautiful. They're close, I'm sorry. The perspective from below, yeah. Thank you for that. Thank you, I feel like we could spend so much more time talking about that piece. But in the interest of time, I'm going to segue. I feel like that was a very full conversation. I've learned a lot. And so now we're going to move to the second commission, which was USIPs. And that was the Mummy and the Revolution, from which we have one image, which I believe is from the workshop at the Lark. And that Wendy will share with us momentarily. But I would love to hear about what happened there, about the commission and the piece in general, why it wasn't fully produced and all that. So maybe, John, you want to talk about this moment? I'm not sure you could... We'll all pitch in. USIP was our second fellow recipient. And USIP had a career already, as opposed to Adriana, who is sort of starting in her writing career. And one of the things that I really enjoyed was the very first play that you recommended was not this play at all. It was a much darker, difficult, serious play. And we did the reading of that first, I think. And then he said, but you know, I'm writing this other play. He said, I always write two plays at the same time, one happy and one sad. Because otherwise, I don't know where I am. And you know, in the meantime, we'd worked with him on three or four other plays, maybe four before then. And I know that he'd spent a lot of time with each of you guys. But it was interesting because we became less of a platform to have to deliberately launch a particular production of a play, because my real interest is in the writers as visionaries, as platforms themselves for ways of thinking of the world. And so really, Yusuf was working on many plays at the same time around the country at that time. And we were just, you know, the Mummy and the Revolution is a farce about the essentially about the Arab Spring. You guys can pitch in on talking a little bit about what it was. But Giovanna Sardelli, who's a director who's worked on a lot of, you know, very funny stuff. A lot of what we worked on there, he was working on there, which was a little bit like, what was the other play you were mentioning before, Taranj, the Hollywood play that he wrote, just he's very, he was very interested in talking about humor, exactly. And so a lot of what we spent our time doing was just creating a community for him and the emphasis on having to move that work to production because he was already seeing productions was really more on his personal development of the things he wanted to work on as an artist. And how did that, so how did the two companies, Silk Road and Golden Thread, help support that process as well? Yeah, we did a stage reading of the first play. I'm now reminded that we did a stage reading of it and had a, and I think, Jamil, you were, I think, I don't know if Jamil and John were both there, but I remember an extensive discussion afterwards and kind of the desire for something different. And that's when Yusef said, well, I have this other play, it's actually more timely because it's directly, it's happening in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and it deals with Egyptian antiquities being smuggled and it's a farce and, you know, there's a mummy, you know, whenever there's a mummy, I mean, my God. So, yeah, so when he kind of offered this other story and this other play, what's striking about the play is that it's production needs are extensive. And I remember telling him, you know, this is beyond Golden Thread's ability, you know, and he said, well, thank you for, you know, giving me the opportunity to write a play that you can't produce. And I said, well, you know, if that's what you need and if that's what, you know, like this moment calls for, that's fine, we ended up doing a stage reading of excerpts of the mummy and the revolution at one of our reorient festivals and, you know, and we kind of left it at that. And I would actually love to see a production of that play because it's a very fun and humorous take on, you know, theft and betrayal and political corruption. I mean, ditto to what Taranj just said about the production needs and the design needs. And I too would love to see a fully produced version of the mummy. We were kind of marketing our staged reading as, or staged readings, I think it was a weekend of stage readings as Abbott and Costello meet the Arab Spring. So that seemed to work for audiences. And it is such a, it's a smart piece, it's a funny piece. And, you know, we have all this sort of sadness and horror associated with the destruction of antiquity and the looting of antiquity and so forth, particularly in the past decade. And, you know, he's able to frame the conversation within a very political context, but also a very human and relational context and one that allows us to really think about the value and the meaning that we ascribe to antiquity and to history and to some of the treachery in the antiquity business. So, you know, just the opportunity to be in a room with you, Seville Gindi and to hear his words and to watch his process is always such a gift. And to us, this was, no, it was never fully realized as a production, but we got to be part of a process and a journey and Yusuf is always working those muscles, you know, and he's always looking for new language and new landscapes to tell his stories in ways that only he can. And I think, I think Mummy is very representative of just his complexity, his inner complexity and then what he brings to the page and the stage. And, you know, I'm still advocating for that. Now that I'm emeritus at the Lark, I'm just recalling so many plays that, you know, so many plays don't find the exact right opportunity and it's so interesting because he really knows British farce. He grew up to a certain degree in the UK and this is kind of noises off. And I remember how many theaters I've worked at that all they wanted to do was to produce noises off, but they didn't have enough height for a big double floor slam and that's what this is. And actually, you know, in a certain way, one of the values of taking the time for all of us to work on it with him is that sometimes work that is culturally explicit or that is focused on representation becomes very family-oriented or very psychological. And what was so extraordinary was to actually go into a different kind of more broadly comic structured kind of art form to sort of explore many of those issues. And I would ask my peers, by the way, you know, because he had a different experience, say than Adriana or even Mona, you know, I think that he, I think that in my conversations with him, he's very polite. I think he got quite a lot out of the fellowship, you know, besides the support. But one of the things I know we got out of it at that time during his presence was a time when we were doing a lot of outreach to artists in the community, trying to get them to be on Facebook groups. And he was a real leader on a certain level in bringing that community together to sort of really shine a light on a whole set of voices that weren't being featured. But if you guys might have thought about, you know, what that different kind of fellowship meant to a person? Well, I remember, you know, it kind of instigated a conversation around what are some other ways that we can support a playwright's career. And we talked about publications, we talked about partnering with larger theater companies for underproduction. And we also talked about, you know, at Jamil, do you remember this? We've talked about simultaneous production of Yusuf Al-Ghindi plays at Silk Road on Golden Thread, which is still something we wanna do at some point. But, you know, just what are some other ways that we can support the careers of playwrights? And it's important to remember that it's not just about a production, it's actually about, you know, a lifetime of creativity and storytelling. So that's, I think that's what the program is dedicated to. And I think that that's what all three of us are dedicated to supporting. It also sounds very liberating for artistry, right? That you have this opportunity to not worry about pragmatic issues, like how am I gonna put this very wacky idea on stage, but I can just release this aspect of the story in a way I wanna tell it with all the support. It sounds very liberating. Yeah, the other completely unpractical, I mean, Mono's play, you know, it's all about a conversation in the Pacific Ocean. And from the time we read the proposal, we're like, okay, and how is this gonna be staged? That's what makes it art. I mean, in that solution, I mean, yeah, I just love that piece. And so we're segueing now to talk about the third commission, which is Mono Mon's play, We Swim, We Talk, We Go to War. And we had that one image that showed up earlier, which is from the workshop. It's one of, actually, such a beautiful picture of Mono and Ebron talking, I think, was at the LARC and their relationship and collaborative artistry is really rich, I find, the way they communicate. So again, this seems like it started really sort of, you worked richly with it at the LARC, and then it, so you guys talk, I wanna stop talking. Well, Mono received the MEA at a time when suddenly her career boomed and she received a number of other commissions and opportunities. And so the development of We Swim was a little delayed in terms of process. And I think my take, I mean, Mono probably has a different take on this, but I also felt that the story was very personal and very difficult for her to tell. And so, I don't know, maybe she just kind of put it on the back burner when she could. But once she sat down and started writing, my God, I mean, it just, I don't know, just flowed out of her and she was, you know, both creative in terms of how she wanted to tell the story and keeping the humor and her own kind of exposing her own vulnerability because it's, the story is about a conversation she had with her nephew about war. And it has impacted her relationship with her nephew and her family and so she was sort of working through all of that as she was writing this play. And I think, you know, I really was very impressed by how open she was to telling the story and examining some of those sort of difficult moments and difficult nuances of, you know, family relationships when we are in disagreement, political disagreement with people we absolutely adore and how do we manage that? So, yeah, I have great memories of both the readings of that play. Remember John, the first time she gave us five pages of the play to read and we did a quick reading during one of reorient festivals that you were able to attend and then we had this amazing conversation afterwards. So yeah, so it's just, you know, small steps over the course of a number of years and then really diving into the development process and Mona was lucky because she was able to work with everyone from the very beginning. So they partnered on this production and I think everyone was instrumental in helping her sort of visualize how it could be staged. Yeah. You know, it's such a play for the Trump years in many respects because, you know, we talk about this, we're at a place in our polarization. I mean, hopefully this is diffusing some but where people could not speak across ideological lines and it really was, I mean, I was reading an article a few months ago about the extent to which family relationships were really damaged by, you know, what we had just experienced and this play that the fact that they don't walk away, the fact that they don't, you know, unfriend or block each other or whatever one can do, you know, in these sort of online mediums, but they are literally in an ocean swimming together and processing and unpacking and that the relationship and the love they have for one another and the respect they have for one another and the familial bonds won't be free, you know? I mean, it'll be challenged, it'll be tried and tested and all of that but I think she, I think you can take this play and put it in any number of, drop it in any number of conversations and it lives in a very vibrant and effective way. So it's testimony to Mona's writing and also, as Turan said, to just her courage to take these kind of risks. So we did a staged reading of the play that also, I think was really well received and we had wonderful talk backs. Once again, I don't remember if it was two or three readings we would tend to do, you know, across a weekend and someone in, well, my dentist has much more conservative politics than I have, let's say and she comes to everything we see. She comes to our readings, she comes to our productions, you know, she's a big support but she has referenced, we go, we swim, we, we, I'm sorry, we swim, we talk, we go to war several times over the past few years and just how angry it made her and she will still repeat different lines and different. So clearly it had quite an impact. I say this with all due respect, I am very fond of my dentist, but we think differently. That's a lot of resonance though. I mean, when a piece lands like that for someone, that's amazing. So now is a good time to show the clip that we have from that piece. And I feel lucky I was there that night when the majority of Mona's family came. Her father came and her brother and so, yeah. And I said, I said, every soldier has blood on his hands, every one of them. Well, you still think that? And then what did my mom say? What did she say back to you? Well, I'm asking, I deserve to know. She said, she said he's going off to war. He will be deployed soon and he's already doubting it all a little bit. You cannot say those things to him, you understand? You cannot say anything that's going to create doubt in his mind because if you do, you are putting his life in danger. And she was right, I mean, I know she was right. I mean, you're my nephew, you're not my kid. I don't have kids. And I can't imagine what it's like to know your kid is going off to war. What are you talking about? I just got very emotional watching that little piece right there. Yeah. Yeah. And what was beautiful about the scenic design for this piece was if you noticed in the background, it's a chalkboard that is, what is it? Convex, chalkboard upstage. And so the play begins by engaging the audience in this conversation around war. And we, at Golden Thread, we have this, you know, process that we're committed to called deeper dialogues where we, you know, sort of identify the themes of the play and with an eye on making the themes of the play personal for our audience so that it's not about, you know, the Middle East is far away place, but really about their personal relationship. So generally, we would have a interactive lobby display where we pose a question to sort of prime the audience to experience the play from a personal perspective. And for this play, it was, how has war impacted you or your family personally? And instead of having the interaction take place in the lobby, we actually used the chalkboard and invited the audience after the play to get on stage and write their thoughts. And then we photographed it each night. And the image that you saw contained some of the feedback from the audience. And Mona was so moved by this activity that she actually wrote it into the end of the play as something that was done at Golden Thread that she would love to see at other productions. Yeah, I loved how it created a visual landscape at the end of impact to me. And it was like, it was very poetic, actually. It was very impressionable and a reminder for the ways it can layer in connection and performance. I thought it was a wonderful idea. In the interest of time, I could go on talking more and more about this, but we don't have much time left together. So I would love to just pose this question, which is what next, what's in the future for this relationship? Does it? Yeah, simple. Well, I just want to say that in addition to considering Taranj and John to be friends and collaborators and co-conspirators, I also consider them to be teachers. And I have just learned so much from these relationships. And I continue to learn. And I look forward to learning more. And I think that the learning curve that we've all been a part of has been revelatory and beautiful and just so empowering. It's easy as a producer to feel like you're stuck in a cave somewhere. And you're on the gerbil wheel of productions and grants and this and that and the other thing. But the opportunity to be in conversation with John and Taranj over all these years has been an extraordinary gift. So I want to express my gratitude. And just looking forward to the next stages that I don't know we've necessarily defined, but we know we are in community and we are working together towards shared goals. The community was so disconnected compared to now when in 2006 and in 2001 that it's astounding to look at the kinds of relationships, not only among producers, writers, directors, actors. But the difference in perception that they all have about the field and society. I mean, there was such a sense of marginalization at those early conversations. And I have to just say something about the language we talk about all these companies of language I hate, the language of risk and the language of the field. Just because in a way the field becomes this contained, this thing we think we can control in the world that defines how we're going to do things to make art happen. And that's deeply connected to risk, which has to do with our perception of what will blow our cover, what we're scared of. So I just feel as though what we've done by being patient and appreciative of each other and by bringing these fellows have not just become people who we were able to support as part of the fabric of their careers, but they've come in to be part of our companies. And in a certain way, so many projects have been generated from this kind of woven fabric of what we've created that are happening all over the place that sometimes you just have to step aside and watch those things as they happen. I mean, I'm excited about continuing in conversation with these two collaborators and with the three fellows we had and with the, I've printed out lists and lists of people who showed up to have conversations, many of whom didn't know each other before and now are part of a larger conversation that is not just about what we think of as the Middle East diaspora community, but how that connects to so many other parts of American and global society. So I feel as though the three of us are not just coming together because we've been invited to have a little memory lane conversation, but because we actually talk to each other quite frequently. And we like each other. Yeah, I think it's really, I don't know mind blowing to think about back in 2005, 2006 in those convenings, the artists actually questioned their right to tell their stories, whether they had the right or the skills to represent their community fully or in the way that it needed to be represented. And today we have Mina Theater Makers Alliance, which is the first national advocacy organization for our theater makers of Middle Eastern heritage. So we've come a long way. We've, I think we are claiming space for our narratives on American stage in a way that we haven't before. And of course, I think American theater is changing and I'm also interested in sort of observing where these changes are gonna take us, but as a playwright, I'm also interested in making sure that development support, production support continues to exist for playwrights because we are the storytellers and without the stories there isn't much else that can happen on stage, right? So we need our playwrights to be supported and we need a diversity of stories to be told. We need to sort of push the boundaries of how we define Middle Eastern American or Middle Eastern to include all kinds of stories that haven't been told yet. And I would venture to say there's a broader appetite for these kinds of stories as a consequence of the politics of the last 20 years. And I think also as a consequence of the investment that we and others have made in people don't just turn overnight into a person with all of the skills of telling a story. They need time and support to be who they truly are. And I think the world is ready for this in a way that it wasn't before. So whatever it comes in the future is going to be much more about connecting different kinds of people to different kinds of ideas. Don't you remember back then all those theater companies would just sort of say why would we produce this? Nobody would come. Yeah, right. And when there are dozens of stories, when there are hundreds of stories, no one artist or one company carries this burden of representation and it allows us to play with genre and style and theme and perspective in ways that in those earlier years I think people felt very constricted and they felt policed in a certain way because everyone was having to respond to news cycles and about a terrorist event or this, that or the other and contextualize and explain. And I want us to move beyond that. I want us to move beyond this what I call react and respond that you're sort of and be at a place where we can really interrogate our own truths and our own experiences in a way that feels right. I want to thank you three. This has been really inspiring. And as always, it's a conversation. I didn't know how much I needed. I wasn't aware of how much I needed it. So thank you all. And I want to just say that we've come to the end of our time together and I'd like to thank HowlRound for hosting this live stream event. A recording of this session will be available on both HowlRound and Golden Threads website. Many thanks to our live stream technician, Wendy Reyes and Christiel for managing the live stream on Golden Threads Facebook page. And many thanks to all of you for joining us today. Goodbye. Thank you for having us. Thank you.