 It's a little bit of a hassle, but could I ask you guys, would you mind shifting down closer? There's this weird gulf and it makes, at least my insecurities come out. Thank you, I really appreciate it. Then if anybody stays sitting in the back, you'll have to feel insecure and we'll feel comfy and loved. Before we get the panel started today, we have the honor of having a president here, a newly elected president here, of the Dramatist Guild, yes? And so Doug would like to say a few words about that organization, their mission, and why in the world are you not a member already? Okay, and then we'll go right into the panel with Liz Engelman, who will be moderating the panel. So I'll get down. Kevin, very kindly, let me do. Guild, do we have guild members here by any chance? Yes, yes, yes. We also, Kia Corthrand happens to be one of our August Council members. But for those of you that don't know, the Dramatist Guild is the oldest professional organization of playwrights in the country. And we've been in existence since the mid 1920s and we exist to protect the artistic and economic integrity of playwrights' works, also the works of librettists and composers for the musical theater. The Guild does a number of things on behalf of writers across the country. We provide model contracts at virtually every level of production to make sure that playwrights are fairly contractually represented. We also run a business affairs office and a legal office that can offer you free business and legal advice on plays at any level of production. We also host great seminars. We have a fabulous magazine and a resource directory of all of the play competitions and production opportunities across the country. We're having our third national conference in July in beautiful La Jolla, California with four days of workshops and guests and panelists, including the playwright John Logan and the television producer Linda Bloodworth-Thompson. So it promises to be kind of amazing. We also have something called the Dramatical Legal Defense Fund, which kicks into gear whenever there are issues of censorship or plagiarism or messy legal situations regarding our craft. And so I would urge you all to join. It's a nominal fee. There are a lot of advantages. And oftentimes in our pitch, we cite all those beautiful, beautiful things and playwrights will respond with, but I don't get health insurance or there isn't a pension fund. And I just want to explain how the Dramatist Guild is different from our sister unions in the theater. We are not like the SDC. We are not like actors' equity. We are not like the Scenic Union because those are all proper unions. All the members of those unions are employees for hire by producers. Playwrights decided, back with the founding of the Guild in 1920, that we would be owners of our work. And as such, no one could change a line of our text without our permission. We get to approve directors. We get to approve design. We get to approve cast. We get to license our production based on what we believe is best for the future life of the play. And we have complete creative control over our own work. This is not true for TV writers. It's owned by your employer. This is not true for movie studios. The copyright on Into the Woods is owned by the Walt Disney Corporation. So playwrights are the only dramatic writers who control the creative and economic destiny of their work. And as such, we are not employees and we cannot because of trade laws. We cannot unionize. So we can offer you pension or health, but we can offer you the opportunity to see your work preserved as you originally wrote it in the culture for the rest of time. And that's the bargain we've made with fate, but that's also the very root of our mission. And we're fighting to protect it all the time because producers would love to own the copyright on the play they commissioned from you. So it's an ongoing effort with our legal team, with the close ties we have to the Library of Congress. And even if you're not a member, we are working in that way on your behalf. So just go to www.dramatiskill.com and Kia, any thoughts? Any last plugs for the guild? Definitely, check it out. And my thanks to Kevin for letting me speak briefly and my apologies to the panel for detaining you even a moment, but thanks so much. So hi, everybody. Thanks for letting me crash your party. My name's Liz Engelman. It's so weird to introduce people who you've seen all week and I'm here who you don't know and I'm introducing them to you. But my name's Liz. Hi, how around? I'm a traveling turg. I just left Austin, Texas and I'm going up to the boundary waters of Minnesota with a stop here. And I just wanted to say really briefly for context, this feels like a metaphor for dramaturgy in a way. I'm going from the bottom of the country to the top. I'm in a car with a GPS that tells me where I'm going but also shows me options. And I've got two dramaturgs in the car, a mother and a dog. So my mother's always saying, did you mean to turn left? And the dog's like, I'll go with you anywhere. So I think all of that is basically dramaturgy in a nutshell. So, okay, that's me. That's all you need to know. And I think you've got it all. In terms of these folks up here, you've got your hymnals. For those of you on How Around, you can look online their bios. What they've done is way too long to talk about here. They're all very accomplished human beings. So you can look on your own. I'll say their names in case all of you out there don't know. Jodi Makalov, Drew Lichtenberg, Heather Holinski. This is Emma Goldman-Sherman who is listening to her gut and realized her gut told her she should be in rehearsal right now. So that's where she is. She is listening well. I just wanted to start by looking at the title of this, which is Listening Well, New Paradigms and Dramaturgy, and to start with Listening Well. And to turn it over to you guys and just ask what's important about that, about Listening Well? Why are we talking about this? Okay, I'll go first. Like always. I'm a classical dramaturge. I work at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. I'm a literary manager and Dramaturg, five or six shows a season there. So I am the alpha and the omega of the literary department. And one of the things that I've been struck by here at a new play conference is that for a classical dramaturge you approach plays with a set of assumptions. So when you talk about them at a panel or with a collaborator, you proceed from the assumption that the play is finished, that it is a masterpiece, and that everything is in the play for a reason. And what I've been struck by at this conference is that every one of those presuppositions is reversed. When an audience sits and hears a new play and then responds, they assume that it is unfinished, that it is in process. They assume that it is a flawed work in somehow, that you need to find the symptoms so you can cure the patient, root out the disease. And there's also an assumption that not everything is there for a reason, that some things are placeholders or are about to turn into something great if they can just be further realized or arched. So it's been surprising for me in eye-opening and I've tried to approach every play as if it were a piece of classical theater, assuming that the playwright has produced a finished work, which they all have, that everything that they've written, they've written for a specific reason. And that maybe this play could be a masterpiece, who knows, right? We could be sitting here with Doug Wright or Kea Corthrand or the next, Moyer or Shakespeare or Tony Kushner, you know, you name it. And I think when you approach a play that way, a play can unfurl itself to you. When you assume that there is something of merit and worth in every moment and that you are the dumb one, right? That you do not know the answers, that you are humble before this shrine of the text, that to me is what listening is about. It's trying to understand what the playwright is doing and assuming that you are not smart enough to have figured it all out yet. And I'll just say one more thing before opening it up. The other thing I noticed about the way we talk about new plays is we have a kind of dramaturgy for the discussion of new plays. We talk about backstory. We talk about character arcs. We talk about plot reversals, right? You'll hear these notes in some form at every response panel where, you know, maybe this play needs another event to happen and you need to move this 20 pages earlier and then what are the consequences if that happens? But again, returning to this idea that everything's there for a reason. What if the playwright is trying to write a play in which nothing happens for a reason? Because of course nothing happens is just code for something else happening. So trying to understand the play, listening sympathetically in a humble way is to me what dramaturgy is all about. I have to agree that, and riffing off of this theme of assuming, because my mantra has always been treat a new play like a classic and a classic like a new play. There's, I think I have a, when it comes to, when I work on classics, I tear that piece apart and I question everything and I say, why was this writer doing that? So when it comes to working on a new play, I do feel like that's my, okay, this is exactly what it is and let's try to honor all of these intentions and figure it out and put my finger on. Then why does that cause a lot of audience members to question the text or get into a discussion about it? I love listening to audiences. If you've noticed all week, I've been sitting off to the side and that's mostly because I'm watching the audience just as much as I'm watching the play. I try to keep that in mind because in Philadelphia where, I'm a freelancer but Philadelphia is my home base. I also serve on the Barrymore committee and I'm constantly going out to see plays there that are considered finished pieces and I'm just always, always looking at, okay, well, why did they choose this one? Who is this audience that they think it's for and then who's actually coming? All of those questions I'm constantly thinking about so that when I am in a new play development process, I've definitely got that in my mind of like, because I really do feel like, who are we speaking to? We're speaking to a city and I'm trying to learn my city as much as possible. I'm a little bit of a weirdo up here because I'm primarily a director but I also do a lot of dramaturgical work and then sometimes I am the dramaturg. I was first a dramaturg at Sundance a long time ago for a playwright named Shem Biderman. I dramaturged for Oscar Eustace and to be honest with you, I can't remember much about what went on. I remember what I directed there which was what turned into sight unseen by Donald Margulies so I have a strong memory of that process but I've worked with a lot of writers at various stages of production, some writers and for me, the idea of listening is reading and reading is listening and reading is also a creative act and what I always try to do is tune into the very specific moment-to-moment creation of image gesture and idea and with a playwright like Neil Bell, for example, he's gonna give you a script that's virtually finished. Everybody doesn't do that and so what is required of the person who is responding at the various levels of production is different. Most recently I was, Sybil Kempstin directed her play, let us now praise Susan Sontag and I was the dramaturg which was just a fantastic experience for me and when we first started Sybil produced a draft, her first draft of the play and it just was kind of serendipitous that I happened to be in my own work interested in many similar questions and issues, ethics and documentary was one of the big ones and also cotton. The production of cotton, sharecropping, a lot of issues around the capitalism and the production of cotton and I also had read a fantastic book called The Abu Graf Effect which ended up figuring in a really interesting way in the final version of the text and what I basically did was, Sybil told me what all her resource materials were, I familiarized myself with those and I have an associate of mine which for a lot of writers that's a really good thing for me to be a collaborator, for me to be at the table when we're dissecting something, expanding something, developing something and so I was able to bring materials to the table that Sybil hadn't thought of and respond to materials that she was bringing, et cetera and so we just had a marvelous collaboration. I'm also, because for years, I've been editing my husband's novels, I'm a really good editor and so if it's a playwright who kind of doesn't like to cut his or her own work, I'm the person you want because I can really, you know, it's a lot like also directing actors, the playwright in a funny kind of way is another actor. You're just bringing, you're tuning in, you're bringing out what they're doing and bringing out their strengths and sometimes and cutting away what isn't necessary or what's obscuring the really beautiful stuff that they're trying to do. So, this is not probably enough for now. Yeah, go ahead. That's great, I wanna poke at something you said to you about, so if nothing happens and just creating this a play where nothing happens, so then when you know that, you've listened and heard that, what do you then listen for and what do you listen with? Right, well this is one of the favorite themes of Eleanor Fuchs who is my teacher in grad school which is that in other countries, they're taught multiple plot models and that here in America, you're taught that the memetic Aristotelian Stanislavski in plot model is the model. So, and there's a great essay, I'm sure everyone's read it called Visit to a Small Planet which started as a handout at the Yale School of Drama that they would give dramaturgs in their first semester of Crit class. And it's really nothing more than a series of questions to ask of a play. What kind of world are we in? How many worlds are we in? What is the weather like on this world? Encouraging you to think in terms of landscape, in terms of texture, in terms of atmosphere, in all of these ways that defy or are outside or are not captured by the six elements, plot, character, thought, diction, music, spectacle song or a spectacle below song. Spectacles the last one. Yeah, spectacles on the bottom which Aristotle was totally wrong about when we get to romanticism, spectacle and the idea of the romantic sublime are hugely important. So, part of it is an immersion in not just our parochial contemporary play worlds but all of dramatic history and part of it is these series of questions. I taught a class in New York this semester and I told the students there's gonna be two papers or actually three, one short response at the beginning of the semester, one in the middle and one at the end and you don't have to go read any outside criticism. You just have to ask questions of a play and they were terrified. They hated it because they had not been taught aesthetics. They had not been taught how to listen or how to read a fictive cosmos and come away with not necessarily answers but things that you notice when you ask these simple questions of the world of the play. So, Heather, might you take that up a bit too and talk about what questions do you ask a world of a play? What do you listen for as you encounter the play for the first time or as you are in process with that play and writer? Well, I guess like just some of the basics is just listening to what I always love asking the question like what is your first impulse for writing this play or what is your first image that brought you to that play? Because I'm listening really hard at the beginning of the relationship with a play because I often feel that as we go down and we make thousands of choices of how the play is mapping itself out, I'll wanna go back to that original impulse. So, I mean, I think it's freeing to keep moving in different directions but I try to ground it in what was that first thing or what was that central dramatic question that led you to write this in the first place, right? And Jodi, I was Google stalking these guys since we hadn't met each other before and I noticed that you were doing a workshop on visual image and wondering, so how do you listen to a visual image and what that said, the non-textual parts of a play? I just wanted to respond to something that Heather said, that's what Lee Brewer used to call the image of the writer writing, which was something he always thought was really important for directors to key into. And sometimes he would say put the writer on the stage. Which is kind of Brechtian, isn't it? It's like a literarization of a theater. Yeah, it's about visual thinking. Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing, if I could go back, just backtrack a little bit, what to me is really important is struggle. If there isn't some kind of struggle going on, I wonder what it is or where it is if I'm reading a play. I think that's really important. I actually don't, I'm not convinced that, I don't agree that the only model is the Aristotelian model. I don't think that's true. I think it's certainly a... Oh, I'm not saying it is the only model. No, I mean that people are taught or that people use. I don't think it's true. I think I see a lot of plays and people are experimenting all the time, trying different things and not feeling so confined to the conventional model. You're an optimist. I am an optimist, or I, you bet I am. Well, what you're saying too, though, about that we use that dramaturgical script, that we use those terms in order to have the conversation that then gets reacted to like, no, I'm not trying to do that here, versus maybe finding other words that you're not going to those in the first place. Maybe I'm also talking about the vocabulary we use to discuss art and theater. This is one of Robert Brewstein's favorite themes, is the difference between criticism and reviewing. Reviewing, we'll talk in these very Aristotelian and normative vising terms about do you sympathize with the characters? Will you have a nice night of culinary theater? And I think the job of the dramaturg is to go deeper, is to, you know, we should always remember are people being entertained and is the narrative, if there is a narrative in the play, is that clear? But if the playwright is really interested in doing something else, it's arch, we fail if we're not sensitive to that and if we're not helping them, not even helping them, if we're not learning what kind of world they're trying to create for us. I also want to say that for me, my time as a dramaturg, I feel like I had a beginning thought of what dramaturg you was and my role as a dramaturg was and now I'm here and it's been an arc, right? I thought at the beginning was, oh, if I'm going to be a dramaturg, I'm going to work in institutional theater and I'm going to work with new, with playwrights on their new plays and there's kind of, we have a set of questions, we've read some of the same books and now we do that. And the journey now has been, well, it's not necessarily just working on a play, it's the environment, I think, dramaturg is the environment that we set up, the container that holds the exploration and the discovery and the conversations that the play are having, but also the conversations around the play, they don't have to be just in rehearsal rooms, they can be outside on a kayak if they need to be. So that, how do we set up the environment for the questioning and the conversation to happen and that's as much, I think, the dramaturgical role as it is about scene two of the play, that it's much more a facilitating of an experience to get to the conversation around and about work and I'm just wondering, that's my own, kind of how I had to kind of explode dramaturgy for me to keep it interesting and find my place in it and I'm wondering if you guys might have similar experiences where you came in thinking it was this one thing and now it means something else to you and I guess in part B of that question would be, is that also reflective of the way work is being made in the country and maybe in abroad right now that we're making work differently and so our place in it is different? I think so, certainly the experience of my career I started out as an institutional dramaturg but what I heard or I listened to in 2008 and 2009 when the economy was crashing was that as I was listening to the institution panic about the economic crisis and why are all these theaters closing and trying to get the root of the problem of why things were shifting is that I was like, huh, this could be really interesting. So if I could just share like something I learned actually because after that, working on a national new play network show where you have a rolling world premiere and you get three opportunities to listen to a production, we had this one workshop in Arizona where there were three artistic directors in the room, a whole team of designers, the marketing staff and at the center of the room where the actor's doing the reading and the playwright and it was a really interesting setup as we were crammed into this room. By the way, it was like 111 degrees and what we began to realize very quickly is that the three artistic directors looking at the play for the workshop all saw the play in different perspectives and yet we all were having to get on board with and it was really fascinating. So I turned to the writer at lunchtime as we were trying to figure out how to make the thermostat work and I'm just using this as a metaphor, just a metaphor is I said, okay, so you've heard your play read and the actors did a beautiful job and it was actually the cast of the first production in the rolling world premiere which again would have changed the play twice more as we were gonna get those casts and I said, what do you want? And she said, I want you in the center of the room and you structure the conversation because I could tell she was feeling that there were different pockets of the room with different agendas going on and everybody definitely had a valid reason for all of those agendas but without some structure to the session afterwards and so that's where you go from your head or your gut and I said, all right, I think because I'm seeing that I've got like three gung-ho artistic directors who all want to like challenge this play from their perspective of what's gonna go on when they have to put it up and then we have designers and then we have all parties in the room that I want the actors to speak first because sometimes I think actors can be the best dramaturgs on a piece and then we sort of like went out through the different circles of the room and it just clarified for me what my role was in the process. I'm sorry, what was the question again? That was a great story though, Heather. I don't want to. You are not listening, were you? I was trying to formulate my response and I realized I was not listening to what Heather was saying. Talking before you listen. What dramaturgy, how it changed for you and where you find your role now and how that's explored. So you were saying, Heather, essentially that you started as an institutional dramaturg but the recession opened up or necessitated thinking outside the box, right? And NNPN is one possible solution to that. And I am one. I am at a big institutional theater and I've had a number of conversations this week with people because one of the great things about this conference is you meet all these really talented and we do eight play labs plays and one or two main stage readings. So you're reading and talking to and meeting a lot of people who are really, really, really good and it's frustrating to me that I work at a theater where we have large houses and most of the writers we work with are mid-career veterans and it's painful for me that we don't have a black box or that we don't have a third stage. Even though arena stage just built a third stage. Oh, we're on HowlRound, I shouldn't say anything about arena. But it's a real problem. And yeah, there was a feeling in 2008 and 2009 of this kind of vertiginous spiral that a lot of the big box theaters were looking at and like how are we gonna save ourselves? Do we regroup? Do we go back to basics, whatever that means? Do we do big crowd pleasing shows or do we just break the model open entirely? And I think what's interesting right now is that that answer has not yet really formulated in the country. I also just want to say that in terms of my personal journey, I'm a second generation dramaturge. And dramaturge is a very young profession in the country. I think it's less than 50 years old. It was established by Bruce Dean at Yale in 1967. So in the early 70s, you mass Amherst endowed an MFA in dramaturgy. My mother has an MFA in dramaturgy. So it was like pretty much from the time I was able to read plays, I was pulling down my mom's plays and her books of criticism. And that was always my dream. So I still have this very starry eyed idealistic vision of dramaturgy and of its importance to the American theater. I see it as synonymous with the establishment of the canonical big box regional theaters in the wake of World War II with the, what was it, the Rockefeller Foundation and the NEA and all of that stuff. All of a sudden there was a need for dramaturges. So one of the interesting things is if we go to a different model, where do all the dramaturges go? Do we still need them? Yes, we do. I just wanted to say, directors and dramaturges, this was how I was trained and worked together. And in every dimension of directing and production, including design, including working with the actors, including working on the text, if it's a new writer or if it's a classic. And I think that one of the great things that's happened with the breakdown of institutional theater, the, you wanna say decay, whatever you wanna call it, is the hierarchy is being broken down. And the director is the person who really is responsible for creating the atmosphere in the room. What's the room like and what are the rules in that room? And sometimes the rules in the room are the same rules of the play, whatever that might be, I think when the director is really creative. And everybody is empowered to participate in the creative process. And in my experience, especially most recently, the less hierarchical that is, the better it is. And it's really exciting. I think it's a kind of exciting development in the creation of new work, this lack of hierarchy. And definitely with the dramaturge in the room. I think you need a dramaturge. If you can have the, sometimes it's a luxury that would be the only thing I would say is that it's kind of unfortunate. So as far as where are they gonna go, I know there are gonna be places for them to go, whether how much money they're gonna make. I can't answer that one, but. Key again. She said you can make hundreds of dollars. Yes. We'll get there later. How much money is anyone making? It's from my kid, it's from my kid. It's a whole different thing. I do wanna say, Drew, thank you for telling me that your mother was a dramaturge. Now I know my metaphor in the car with my mom saying, should I turn left? It's actually true. She could have been a dramaturge. There was a narrative and there was a backstory and we set it up and now we're paying it off. Appreciate that. I do wanna say too that we talk about the role and function of dramaturgy and that you don't have to have a dramaturge to have dramaturgy happening in a rehearsal process and we all commit random acts of dramaturgy every time we listen and ask a question. So do there need to be dramaturges in the world? I don't know. I mean, that's just about like can we get some, a dramaturge could get hundreds of dollars on a project. But what kind of theater are we making, I think. And that's how dramaturgy is happening in the theater making that we do. And so I'm sorry I missed the South Omaha stories that you had the other night here I heard about and just other ways that theater is being made and stories are being told and people are participating in the making of theater that is different from a playwright in the room, a director coming in and possibly having the luxury of a dramaturge. And if there's some projects that you might wanna talk about about ways of making theater or theater events in different forms, I'm thinking also, Heather, about your Montreal project and really having Montreal being almost a kind of character in and of itself. How do you ask questions of a city to begin a piece of work if you might talk about that a little bit? Sure. I'm excited about what I'm going to learn with this particular project because it's sort of just my theory and my hunch is from listening to a lot of different cities as I've traveled around the country and since I sort of had to first ask the question is why don't I know the playwriting in Montreal? I thought it would be just a great experience to start looking at all the plays that have been made in that city and I've been working with two professors at Concordia and McGill to guide me on that project and it's gonna end up being some site-specific thing around the city. But it's all starting with listening to the plays and examining the plays from the perspective of location and I think I do that in my work in general. Every time I get a new script I try to say how is the city informing the shape of the play and how it's made. I'll even give the example of this week there was one play I worked on that was set in Detroit and that told me everything. So I look for that very specifically. Not that I'm using that in a realistic way but I do think that looking at the heart of the city and the character of the city is something that I'm always looking for and listening for in a piece. Is that a question that you might ask a writer if it says in the stage direction set in Detroit and then you never see that in the play anywhere except that it's set up that way. Would you respond saying I see you say it's set here I'm wondering how it plays out in your. I mean we have very personal connections to cities and I mean I have to say I'm sorry I'm from Philadelphia and being an Eagles and sports fan. No don't apologize. I'm from Philadelphia too. And I know that the character of my city comes out strong in the choices that are made and then because I have to leave my city so much it's not just like tuning your ear to how people talk or what they care about it tells you sort of everything about a person understanding the character of their city. So I've done this project in smaller scales during Kennedy Center projects in Shreveport, Louisiana and in cities in Texas, Lubbock, Texas. So yeah. And there was a good example of a play I read for this conference where the setting wasn't specified and I set up meetings like a month ago with all the playwrights and I asked her I said Erica are we in the Midwest somewhere? Because it just seemed it seemed from all I don't know what it was that there would just seem to be something of the tissue of the fabric of the play that cried out for a very specific kind of placement that would contextualize because the play is about these universal themes of addiction and struggle and overcoming this narcotic family dynamic but it comes out of this very normative kind of Midwestern sunny sense of the world that is then shown to be very complicated. It was a Midwestern planet. Yeah, it was a Midwestern planet. It was Kansas City Mo or Kansas City Ka. So yeah, I think that's true is that you have to be sensitive to that stuff. And yeah, it's important to have your antennae up in that way. I would love to open it up for questions for those of you who have any. If you do, if you could come up to the mic so your question can be recorded for all time. Oh, what's the correct spelling of dramaturge? Kate asks, it is I think it is not dramaturge with an E on the end. I like that hard G German sound. I think the French use the silent E as is there won't. Which of course it means playwright for dramaturge in France. It means something different in France, so that's why the hard. Yeah, I was also, right. I was looking, Play-Doh speaks of the demi-urge and I don't know if this is where it comes from. It's kind of pretentious, but like the mediator between the world of ideal forms. I'm gonna call myself a new play demi-urge. The demi-urge. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, we don't go with the New York Times E on the end. We're not, we are not fans. The New York Times is wrong. Yeah, they're wrong. Their style guide is wrong. It's the only typo that they'll never admit to. Other questions. The cross, the cross to the microphone, yes. Don't trip or anything. Don't be nervous. I think it's not on. How can playwrights better listen to dramaturgs? Awesome. Could you repeat the, just kidding. What'd you say? I didn't hear, yeah, you couldn't hear it. I'm not taking that note. I think listening, right? Just period. I think dramaturgs can help. I've definitely met many dramaturgs who have cultivated either a sense of passive victimhood or an aggressive like, fuck you, I don't wanna play in your play pen anyways attitude. And I don't think either are productive or helpful. And I've been guilty of both, I'm sure. I think it's a process. And it depends so much on personalities. And I would say, I would say that the responsibilities on the director of the dramaturg to find a way to make it easier for a playwright to hear whatever it is that's being said. And that deck, it has to depend on respect and also appreciation for what somebody's trying to do. If you don't understand what someone's trying to do, you really can't be helpful. And a lot of, also I think patience because sometimes knowing when to let things drop. And really, like I say, the onus is on the person, not on the playwright, but I think on the person who's responding to what the writer has done because things take time. And you can't expect somebody to, oh yeah, right away, whatever. And you could be wrong. And so I think it really is a kind of mutual respect and dialogue. And sometimes that dialectic takes longer than, and maybe people don't even know whenever whatever is gonna come out of it. One of the nice things about being, well, both an institutional dramaturg and a freelancer is that you get to work with people over and over again. And definitely like the directors I've worked with three or four times, it's gone much better the fourth time. Yeah. Also there's this canard that Jim Lever used to say the theater has been dying since 1888. Oh yeah. Which is The Preface to Miss Julie by Strindberg, which the thesis of which is the theater is dying. And if you wanted to be a great writer, you had to plant your flag and say the theater is dying. I kind of feel the same way about dramaturgy. Dramaturgy is always dying. And what I mean by that is that it is a position that is hard to understand. You need to explain it to yourself and to others every time you do it. It's like the dramaturgy of a play. A play does not pick up from where other plays leave off. It creates its own context and then unfolds in real time and space. And dramaturgy is similar. You have to create your own context every time you work with someone. Because the great thing about the theater dying, the great thing about dramaturgy dying is that you can make it new. Is that it doesn't have all the weight of history laying it down. You can have the best collaboration of your life or career or the worst. It is and has to be modernist in the truest sense of the word. It has to be invented in the moment. It's not something that is prescribed in any sense. Even if you're working with the same writer, then work is different. The work itself dictates what the dramaturgy does. And I think, you know. And I have to say, working as a freelancer, one thing that's freed me up a bit is that I can work with a writer in multiple times. I can, I build that relationship and I'm always listening across plays to the different variations of the themes that you're working out. So often times as I'm working on a second play or a third play with someone, I'll say, hey, back when you did this in your first play, is that what you're intending or is that what you're wanting? So a lot of times it comes from just listening to who you were in your first play and who you are in your fifth. I think to trust, as a playwright, you trust that the dramaturgy you're working with cares. Cares enough to wanna work with you on your play and wants to know you and is listening to you and your play. Then maybe what they have to say is also worth listening to because they care. Beer helps, you know? I mean, like getting to, we're hanging out and having a conversation as two people who care about the same thing, then maybe you'd listen to each other. And I think it also helps to be smart and to have listened to the play and have something interesting to say about it. I think you do have to prove that you're smart and that you can do the job to people. But I think that's true of every theater discipline. I think designers have to constantly prove their chops. I think it's a good kind of discipline in that way. Patrick, you have a question? Boston. It was much of a performance as Eliza did. So my question is about actors. What Heather said, I thought was really interesting about actors and I just love to hear more about. I feel like inherently most actors are lazy. Just that's there. And what I mean by that is lazy in the sense of dramaturgy sometimes. I think actors, there's a lot of actors who are amazing in terms of how they think about plays and how they approach it. And all actors, if they're doing their work, are actually coming from an instinctual, impulsive, sort of human behavior aspect of the work. And with these shorter and shorter rehearsal periods, I think actors get shortchanged in the exchange where when they walk in the room, everybody thinks they are the dumbest person when it comes to what's going on with the play. And actually when they may have an avenue to the play that hasn't even been explored yet, we're talking about human behavior. We're talking about relationships. And so I'm just curious as to what your experience has been with actors and how you feel the dramaturg interacts with actors in that capacity. I was gonna ask a question about the relationship between directors and dramaturgs, but that's boring because we all know that. So I'd love to hear that. You're all turning to me because I brought it up. I can comment if you want. Just to comment about the process here working with Kat Ramsberg, I think some work can be done just between the director slash dramaturg because I kind of Heather sort of gave me the football and I ran with it here and that was kind of you. But some of the work can be done off the page and then working with actors here, hearing the text, you see things you didn't see, you hear things you didn't hear and without that part of the process, I don't think we could have made the changes that you wanted to make and things become clear second time you hear it, third time you hear it. So I think even without actors commenting specifically on gee, I don't understand this line or I think this line should be cut or any which can often be useful, just having the actors reading the text and hearing it with the playwright in the room can really be invaluable. Yeah, I think it's, well one is it's easy for actors to look at the dramaturg as the guy or girl who gives them a research packet which they will not read. And I also think from the dramaturg's perspective we have too much respect for the actors process to want to get in the way or interfere with that too much because you guys are working really hard and you don't wanna interfere with that. My favorite thing is when an actor will come to me privately outside of rehearsal and ask for a book or something specifically tailored to their character or something they're curious about and then I will not do all that work for them but get them started and let them take the football like Jody was saying and let them run with it. And I've become, when I was in school I was totally a packet dramaturg and I've become much more minimalist. Not because I don't love research, I do. I just, I think you end up doing a lot of the work for the actor and for the director and the team and then prescribing that in some way to them. I think it's better to start all at the same point. I think the dramaturg, and I know I'll keep this very quick because we're short on time, has an interesting relationship to a play because oftentimes when you're working directly with a writer before it goes into production the dramaturg may be the first person reading the play and then it goes into production and everybody collaborates but then after opening night the director walks away and the actors are left with telling the story to the audience every night but sometimes the dramaturgs are there taking that journey too. So with the actor-dramaturg relationship I found that period after the play opens up and I'm around answering talk back questions and still talking to audiences to really, I get to go on that whole ride and it's really wonderful. So I'm always listening to the actors. Sometimes I think actors ask the best question we can ever ask which is why? Why is this here? Why am I saying that? And the answer around that question can also enlighten on other parts of the play as well so it opens up conversations sometimes and if it sounds like the note is a more prescriptive note then it's like, well, that's what they're saying but what do they mean? What's underneath that? And it also can open up conversations so I think dramaturgically they're so helpful because they point to a moment that we need to then examine so we understand the context around it and it's place in the play. We are at times, so thank you for seeding your question Patrick we can talk about it later. Thank you all for being here and you guys today for listening. Thank you. Thank you.