 I have a session just to be clear, we'll take a little break for before our first reading so I want to get us started. My name is Diane Rodriguez and I'm with the steering committee for our first event and part of the task force, we'll work with the task force on organizing. I am president of the TCG board and I'm entering my third year as president and I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some TCG board of past and future TCG board members. I wanted to first, before we begin our session, before I introduce and contextualize why we're here, I wanted to thank James Bundy and Rochelle for their service at TCG and for their wisdom. They're here joining us this weekend. I just want to acknowledge that I really have learned a lot from them when they were on the board and their wisdom is unending and I wanted to thank them here. I also want to introduce our newest board member who is here today and that is Christopher Acebo who has joined us. One of the great things at the conference here at TCG was this feeling that we were all in it together, that the notion that we have to diversify our theaters on many levels, both more women playwrights, more works of color on our stages, more varying aesthetics, all of that is about diversifying our theaters. We're here today to have a discussion about how we can move forward in a very strategic and very positive way to get our work more on people's stages and that the fact that we're here, the fact that we did this together, the fact that we're offering up new work is a very different paradigm. Before this work was generally done within an institution, you know, Louise and I went on LTI, Juliet, HPP, among many others here and now this is something we're doing on our own. It's a very, very different thing. We're in control of it and I think it will take us farther. We're at that point now. We're really self-empowered and that's really brilliant and really positive. So this is done in that spirit of how we can move forward in a very positive way and engage everyone as our partners, not with necessarily, not with Hattenham, but with saying we have something major to offer. So with that, I'm going to, what we're going to do is we're going to do a series of discussions. The first two will be among two people and I will give them a prompt and they will discuss. It will be seven minutes and then after those seven minutes, I'm going to ask for very quick responses, very quick and we will then have them scribe, very quick, you know, two words, three words and that. Then the second prompt, a new discussion with two new people, seven minutes, we'll write, we'll ask very quick responses, we'll write them down. Then you will be sitting in front of a person, I will do a prompt and then you will have a discussion with that person who's facing you, seven minutes. I might shorten this a minute. And then we'll do what you discussed and then we'll do a reaction, a thought against Broncos, a second prompt and probably a third, we'll see where we come. But in the meantime, after you do your first discussion, we're going to ask you to move around the space, get a new partner, sit down and then we'll do the second discussion. That's the ziti configuration guys. I know that it's a little awkward looking this way. How are you guys doing? Are you okay? But I wanted to introduce our first two. How do you get? We know Collie Carl. I'm just going to go through them to talk about, let's set aside race, ethnicity, and what is it that, in their experience, when people are looking, and we're talking midsize, whatever theater is looking for a piece of work to produce at the theater, what is it that calls them, that resonates with them? What are they looking for when they read a play or when their theater is searching for something for their audience that resonates? So that's the first question. What are you looking for? Well, you know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm looking for, and just thinking a lot about what I like and what I don't like, but I have to say that as I get older in the business, what I like matters less to me, and I'm really thinking, I think a lot about the curation of listening and being really connected to the communities that my audience that are part of, and then listening to those communities and really curating a season based on a lot of listening. And I think about that, there's a theater maker named Matthew Goula, she helped me think about this. He said, you know, we come to theater in a couple of ways. He said we either come in form as an informed viewer, and when I was young, I came as a very informed viewer. So I would come, you know, with my idea of what I liked and what I didn't like and ready to hate on an instant or ready to love on an instant, or he said, you know, we come ecstatic. And so part of what I kind of do now in work is like, how do I come ecstatic? How do I come ready to receive? And then what do I experience when I come ecstatic? And how do I see what other people around me receive? Because I feel like not every story is written for me to like, but as a curator, I'm really responsible for listening and thinking about what other people are responding to. And so it's kind of some balance between, I don't know, you know, trying to find places that are surprising and exciting and voices that you haven't heard before, and then that duration of listening. Yeah, that's a good word. I mean, what, you know, I've worked with Bob Salt at The Goodmans for 30 years and he really brought a different way of thinking about a large institution's artistic leadership because it's not the single ego. It's not just what Bob likes and what Bob wants to do because for a long time we've had an artistic, what we call the artistic collective and everybody has Chuck Smith, Regina Taylor, Rebecca Hillman, Mary Zimmerman are all part of that. So in a way Bob has become a curator over the years because The Goodmans artistic direction is kind of the sum total of what those collective members are passionate about. And of course what Bob is passionate about, passionate about as well. But yeah, the whole thing of listening is Bob jokes about the fact that he thinks that sometimes the subscription brochure should be bigger than Bob going, I don't know, because he backs, it's about individual artists in my opinion. So there's playwrights and directors and if they come to him and say, I am really passionate about this play or this playwright and I think we should commission this playwright or we should do this play, he's likely in most cases to do it whether he really gets it or not. And that's what's I think made The Goodman kind of distinctive over the years and then in terms of audiences, I mean the thing that we found is that people, what kind of plays do we like, I don't know, we like all kinds of plays. I mean on the one hand it's great to work with writers who really are writing for the theater and I'll try to paraphrase what Bob has said that he really likes plays that can't be turned into movies or television shows. In other words the experience is intrinsically in the theater. If you don't see it in the theater you're not going to be able to, because it's impossible to miss anything anymore. So the thing we have going for us in the theater is you can gather people in a room and have a very special experience that you can't tell your friends will check it out on live stream or on YouTube or whatever because it won't be the same. At the same time great stories, great stories, I mean it's as basic as that because we just did focus groups with our audience and stuff like that and one of the interesting things that we found is that the producers in theaters and artists get more worked up about, we're doing a world premiere and audiences really don't care for audiences. There are familiar works and familiar artists and there are unfamiliar works and unfamiliar artists and they are willing to pay more for the familiar works and the familiar artists. But what we've learned with dynamic pricing is that I could go far afield on this but the price is a big factor, the price is a big factor in people's willingness to attend new work in large institutions and we've been able to lower prices over the years. In response to new work, there's no built in audience antipathy to new work they're perfectly fine with new work, just think of yourself and whatever popular entertainer you like the best you pay a lot more money to see that individual than you would for somebody that you don't know. Well it's sort of the same thing, there's really nothing that magical about it. I wasn't one of the people to curate this festival so I'm experiencing it in the ecstatic way that you all are and the beauty of the wild diversity of the stories that people want to tell I mean yesterday was such a great snapshot of that, right? Like all of those plays were entirely different one is mastery of form, one is breaking form, one is mastery of character they were all doing different things, doing it in different ways and telling stories that I hadn't personally imagined myself before I got there and I feel like that eclecticism for me is really what excites me about work in general and really about a season because I think there's a difference between picking a play you like and then putting together like a series of plays and what that means and how they speak to each other and I find that challenge more interesting than just thinking about a singular play that I'm excited about, which there are many which I'm excited about but that thing of like how do you put a bunch of voices together and curate a conversation versus curating a series of things I personally liked I mean I just feel like who cares about that you know an audience may or may not care about that so I'm more interested in how we provoke a really interesting conversation through the course of the season with a bunch of different plays and I thought we really started that yesterday I've had a bunch of conversations and it's like it's really exciting to talk about that Yeah, we don't do that white as consciously from a curating standpoint it really, I mean a lot of times we've ended up with, I don't know a season that would be dominated by women writers or writers of color and because of the wide net and the artistic collective structure it sort of we realized after the fact that you know I'll look very like this sort of theme is sort of like you know if you don't have a theme for the season you find out the same after the season it comes together I mean you know and this is like shameless self-promotion of the Goodman but I mean when we finished planning the next season we realized you know there was sort of a concentration of Latino themed work ranging from Cuba to Mexico to Columbia to Chile in three different works and you know there were Vera, Cherise, Gaston Smith, Henry Guadena and it wasn't a conscious choice to say well we're going to program you know a concentration of Latino works next year it was kind of like oh look at this, this is the way it turned out and I think what Polly said at the outset though is you know we need more large institutions who are doing more listening and curating and I said to Polly before we started and I'll be very I'll try to be controversial the single ego artistic director model at large institutional theaters I think is actually dead and nobody's really realizing it yet and the whole notion of having a broader more diverse group of artists and I love the curatorial instinct that the impulse is an institution of American theater Do you think that that would bring in more aesthetics and aesthetic change? Oh, well from the standpoint of why not in Chicago you know what I mean by that is that the thing about audiences here I mean this is a great city for theater but they like a beginning, a middle and an end and when you start to fuck with time I mean you know we're a little less beaten potatoes in Boston I was here in Chicago for a few years and people know and it isn't definitely they like their story but I think what's happening this idea and we've been talking a lot about it at Arts Emerson this idea of shared leadership and shared aesthetic and what it means to bring a bunch of people to the table in leadership roles to really have a say in what the aesthetic outcome of the season is going to look like feels to me like absolutely the future of American theater and I think that will change that audiences in conversation with those curators and a lot of good listening will broaden our sense of what the air can be Great, thank you too, very much applause during the discussion that we can chart yes curation of listening curation of listening curation of listening yes shared leadership shared leadership yes not every story was written for me not every story was written for me good, yes non-thematic theme non-thematic theme theme after the fact theme after the fact no, I'm sorry? I don't know I don't know ecstatic ecstatic can't be made into a movie can't be made into a movie, yes, yes a season of work that speaks to itself and with each other okay good, yes new American theater beginning, middle and end beginning, middle and end, yes shared aesthetic audiences don't care about world premieres audience! well no, come here the death of the artistic director yes I'm sorry, text to I mean just a few she's real and David was on it as well or I directed it from right so thank you and energy in Dallas, Texas so it's cool next question and I think we have to sort of start here almost like when you take a survey this is where we're at and how do we improve it but one of the things interesting question is why do Latino theater and what in your opinion when you're looking at the field and that's kind of a side question really I think the answer, the real question is what are the models that you see out there that have really worked and that really you feel will really charge us forward well we both have directed Lydian and I directed the premiere in 2007 I think and it went on for a few years because we started at Denver and then we went to Yale and then you've done it recently, just in the last couple months so it's interesting to see the life of that play how many productions have there been on TV? like seven, eight so yeah so what worked about that play doing it for me it was kind of a remarkable journey going to those three major regional theaters which were what's that? which were the Denver Theater Center and the Yale Repertory Theater and then the Market of the Forum but I feel like Artavio reached so deeply into his soul to write that play and it's so personal and so profoundly real and yet as a craftsman he really found incredible poetry and kind of an experimental form in some ways playing with time and having this character that was real inside the family and came out and spoke to the audience I think all of those things made it somehow really accessible to people it was still family you know in a living room it was a family that we recognized and yet he was playing with poetry and form within the play so pushing form but at the same time having to be incredibly grounded in a very, very, very personal way deep, deeply personal way and I know for me as a director that was an incredible springboard for me to reach inside a very personal and very take risks as an artist because he gave me that platform so I feel like what was so remarkable going into these three theaters was that you know people that obviously we have a lot and a lot of non-Latino audience members that completely identified this play because it was their family then people came up to me and said you know we've been like this was my family and so I mean you know it's that thing like the more personal you can get the more universal you can be so I think that was for me the experience of why it was so successful and I'm curious about the journey where it landed and because you did it for a primarily Latino audience I'm curious about what that experience was like well I think I can also look at this production in a very personal trajectory because in many ways Lidia was a landmark production for us that even critics were saying that this was the best production that they had seen of us of the plays that they've seen of Katemia and so and then as an artist I can see how in terms of design the maturation of our resident ensemble in which five of the principal roles were played by a resident ensemble and then two were from other outside members that it was like a bonfire and it was just amazing artistically experienced but one thing about the trajectory is that you know as a producer there's always this anchor in our community that we're not producing just simply because of our aesthetic interests but there's also this umbilical cord this connection to our community about what they really need to hear and so I would say our company was reborn again in 2009 after we were about to close down and we actually focused on original work created topical, original work very physical theater and then as we started building out our seasons one of the first plays for us to do a tech based play was Lidia and I read it and Ronsong read it and boom this fits perfectly for us what was amazing was that these audience members who are often activists and lawyers and really grassroots organizers is really culturally centered Latinos is that they would walk into Lidia and they would experience the craft of the player of the writing of the production and we would have astonishing results and I remember one lawyer walked in stone faced because and he met me and I could tell he was being forced to go by the wire and right after the play he walked right up to me and he said I really want to support your theater company and since April he's donated several thousand dollars and I was getting phone calls and so it was just that kind of so for me it's this anchor and how far can we go into like the aesthetic stratosphere also thematic stratosphere but we're not Latino if we're not connected because then once we lose that connection then we move out into another I think we move into the mainstream I guess no it's not bad we had a strategic planning last week one of the board members said the vision of our company should be that we no longer need to exist that Latino does not need to be identified that everyone has a voice and it's a very utopian vision but that's what he was saying is that all the mainstream theater will be doing all of our plays small and large and so that's kind of a theoretical thing I just pulled out but it's like the anchor I think is very important to us so a model is finding a piece of work that really speaks to both a more traditional audience and then also the Latino audience that's one model that partnerships are created and then your theater company is really a moment that's provided anything else? Well we're jamming about the productions Latino productions that were visible in the last 3-4-5 years and obviously we're really excited about Hamilton and what's happening in New York but I haven't seen it has anybody seen it yet? is it the same thing? yeah I'm excited that that's happening but in the regional scene Daniel's work and putting stuff out gay pictures and we have we saw Barlow's work has done consistently and PR's work has done consistently so we're kind of just looking at what the common thread I mean humor humor seems to reach universal audiences and yeah I mean again I think the willingness to to take risks as artists in the personal sphere you know to reach into you know to not do what you think people accept are interested in it's like what Paul was saying you can't just do what you think people like and so I think that those artists are doing they're taking risks and they're pushing themselves across men they're people that are super disciplined about their work that's something we have to continue to work on that it just doesn't come out of us we've got to work we've got to go to school we've got to educate ourselves we've got to see work the artists that are doing well are the artists that have worked their paths off and I see that just from HPP the last HPP was 2004 it was like 10 years ago but just it's interesting I was on the selection committee for this festival and it's so great to see where the work has come and I know it's because people are working they're doing the work they're focused in a different way and that's really exciting so the best model is good work alright thank you guys our reaction yes Christina super disciplined yes Juliette is gorgeous the vision of our company should be that we don't need to exist the vision for our company is that we don't need to exist if we're not connected if we're not Latino doing what the listening inspires good what they really need to hear humor is a driving force humor is a driving force craftsmanship how far can we go with the thematic and the study strategy that was what I was going to say eventually companies won't have to exist anymore more personal more universal more personal great thank you guys welcome to our first session with your conversation your conversation partners are different some of us artists some of us run our own companies some of us are on staffs at large theaters some of us are on staffs at smaller theaters some of us are scholars strategies to champion Latino work what are the best strategies to champion Latino work and if you think about the ecology where are we championing this work we're also championing theaters we're championing it was right to write about it what are the various strategies that we can champion our work so I think Tiffany should we do a movement first and then what do you think so let's do that let's do that now we're gonna have this side this side you're gonna move you're gonna move thank you we're not we don't we think we're not we're not I need to behouse I'm in a business audiences to respect theater makers great the system and the the majority, minorities Be sincere. Be sincere. Dramaturgie. A white audience can't be interested in vital work. I'm sorry? A white audience is interested in vital work. A white audience is interested in vital work. Yes. Taking over what is already ours. Taking over what is already ours, yes. Mission. Mission, yes. I just think partnership without being exploited. Oh, good. Yes. Exposure. The role of critic has changed. The role of critic has changed. Touring. Touring. Yes. Yes. Be generous. Be generous. Yes. Global theater is not theater. Global theater is not theater. Advocating for resident producers and artistic directors with well-crafted plays. Good. You helped us. Now how do we help you? Great. That's great. Required reading on the syllabus of Black Inner Flame. Required reading on the syllabus of Latino Place. Yes. Mentorship. Mentorship. Great. Very good. Okay. These two last ones. Go ahead. Representation on staff. Representation on staff. Yes. Latino plays on the American Theater Syllabus. Yes. Latino plays on the American Theater Syllabus. Very, very good. Great. All right. I'm going to take a... I thought what David mentioned was very interesting. About not the... Eventually in a sort of ideal world of Latino theaters, the need not to exist because the work is being done on all stages. I have to say that with the theaters of color at TCG, there is actually a stress about that. That because more and more of our larger theaters with more resources are producing our work, what happens to our theaters? So, my question for you before I move you around... You know what? Let me move you around first. Music! And then I'll ask you a question. Woo! I mean, sorry. No, that was our baseball. Leadership House of Chains. Yes. We are an ambassador. We are an international community. Getting out of the kitchen and taking the table. Out of the kitchen and taking the table. Embrace non-violent communication. No name calling. Embrace non-violent communication. In other words, no name calling. Yes, right. Student programming leads to programming for larger audiences. In most large theaters, they put on shows for such audiences. They have all these great student programs. But what happens to those students with colors? People can do audits too when they want to go see a show after they're 18. They let them go to see anything that she knows better than that. Great, yes. Cross-organizational collaboration. Cross-organizational collaboration. Say it loud enough for the guys to hear. Can I be categorized by market-driven terms? Great, yes. We need to get over premier items. There's enough work to share. As long as there are Latino communities and theaters reflecting their community, there will always be Latino theaters. Are we going too fast for you guys? Probably. A little bit. There is no scarcity of our youth. There is no scarcity. Right, sure. Yes, Kevin. Shifting or reframing the value proposition of culturally-specific theaters. Where would you repeat that? Shifting or reframing the value proposition of culturally-specific theaters. Great, OK. Shall I tell them? Advancing Latino directors and the plays. Yeah, that's right. Great. Yes, yes. Local stories, local work. Local stories, local work. Great, OK. I'm going to take a few more. Yes. Remember where and who you come from to take them with you. Great. We are ambassadors of Latina. To not replicate the regional theater model by reducing the voices that are not on the regional theater stages. There are other choices, yes. Play had a different response whether it had a Latino audience or not didn't have a Latino audience. Great. All right. Good, thank you guys. Very good, very good. I'm going to do one more question. I'm going to move these people who are facing back. That's hard.