 Test, test, test, test, test, test, is this mic working? I love mics that work. Ah-ha. You can hear me all the way in Boston. It is a miracle. OK, so I think that's all the testing we need to do. Yeah? Good morning. Ah, good morning. Hi. Good morning. Welcome. Hi. Hi. Thanks for joining us today. It's good to see you. Welcome to the 2014 Theta Bay Area Annual Conference. Connect. Connect, learn, celebrate. If only our PowerPoint was as connected as we hope to be, because here's our flashing disco sign welcoming you to the day. Awesome. I just want to start by giving a quick thanks to Berklee Rep and all the fantastic Berklee Rep staff that have helped us settle in already this morning. I want, yes, also want to thank our volunteers. You'll see lots of volunteers throughout the course of the day. Please be nice to them. We couldn't do this without them. Yay. Theta Bay Area staff, of course. Everyone's names are listed inside your program. So if you don't know someone and want to meet someone, flag me down. I'll point them out to you. We would love to be able to chat with you. And I want to thank, who's here from our Theater Services Committee? Stand up. Stand up Theater Services Committee. Yay. And our Individual Services Committee. I have a few folks. Stand up. Stand up. Yay. So both of those committees help us quite a bit in putting on an event such as this. So we couldn't do this without them. Thanks very much. I want to take a moment and go through, everyone should have received a folder. Yes? So this is going to be your help through the day. I want to highlight this fantastic friendship is magic or how to exploit your contacts to earn cash and prizes. So this is a membership drive that we have going on with Theater Bay Area. And we need your help to help spread the word about Theater Bay Area. So take a look through this. If you have any questions about it, please let us know. But we would love to have your help in spreading the word of Theater Bay Area. And yes, you can win cash and prizes. Agenda is in your folder. You will notice if you want to participate in things like the consultant speed dating, which is back this year. Yay. Then there's a sign up for that at the front desk. You can also sign up at the speed consulting or the producer director slash technician designer speed dating. You can sign up for both of those at the registration desk. Once we get started with our plenary sessions today, I do want to point out that there are microphones on the side of the theater. So when it becomes time for question and answer, you can make your way to the microphones to ask questions. And I also want to mention that we are simulcasting on HowlRound TV. Yay. So welcome to anyone who's watching us remotely. So everything that's happening in this room today will be streaming on HowlRound TV. So that's exciting. Excellent. I think those are all the welcome. Oh, you know what? Everyone needs to stand up and introduce themselves to someone that they don't know. Go. There is a Wi-Fi password. I will mention it. Remind me. I'll forget. That would be great. Thank you. Excellent. Did everyone make a new friend? I hope everyone made a new friend. That's great. OK. And we have all day to chat. So excellent. Everyone made a new friend? That's great. Excellent. Two things I also want to mention. One, please freely use the hashtag Tbacon14. Yes, bacon. Yes, great way to start today. Excellent. And also the Wi-Fi for Berkeley Rep is lowercase t theatrical2. So it's theatrical2 is the Wi-Fi code. We can also give that to you at the registration desk if you missed it. OK. Thanks, Sam. Excellent. So now I'm going to bring up Brad Erickson, the executive director of Theater Bay Area. And he will get started with the plenary session this morning. Thank you. Good morning. I'm coming with a bunch of friends. Hopefully, many of these people are already familiar to you. So this opening session, we're going to be focusing on a question that seems kind of obvious for a service organization to ask. But frankly, one that we've never actually articulated before, which is, as Heather was saying, if you were doing your work really well, what are you aiming at? What would success look like? So what would an ideal theater community look like? What are the components? What do we have here in the Bay Area? What are we missing? What are people seeing in other communities that we might want to emulate? What are sort of boxes that we can say, OK, great. We can check that off, done. And we'll just make sure that we keep on sustaining and maintaining those things that are already working for us. So we're looking at this in two different angles. I have with me now a panel of ex-patriots, some beloved friends who are no longer living full-time in the Bay Area, but who used to be, and made a really important mark here with their work and are now continuing their work sometimes elsewhere. And sometimes, as in the case of Ben, still here, and Meredith as well. So that'll be our first panel. And then a second panel will be coming up with folks who are continuing to be based here, but often are working outside of the Bay Area. And in each case, we'll be wanting to take a look at their own career trajectories and then understanding what they're seeing around the country and maybe even internationally and what we might be able to learn from their perspectives as we try to do our work better and be the ideal theater community. So I've been thinking about this quite a bit actually over the last several months because I've been traveling around the country with this project that we are doing with Theater Development Fund, our sister organization in New York, the ones that run the TKTS booth, I'm sure you know of it. And we're engaged in a project called Triple Play, which is looking at the relationship between generative artists, playwrights, and ensembles that are creating new work, audiences, and then the theaters that produce them. And we were traveling to six different cities. We went first to Washington, then to New York. We went to Chicago, Minneapolis. We were here in Berkeley and we wound up in LA finishing up the tour. And it was, first of all, it was really refreshing to me that the cities are really, really, really different. So in a country that sometimes I think we're afraid, at least I am, that we're becoming a little bit of sort of like Walmart-ized, you know, especially outside of the Bay Area. It's all just sort of like one vast corporate sameness. It's actually not. The cities are really wonderfully, wonderfully different and the communities are very, very different. They have different concerns and different interests and different kind of feeling of a dynamic. Not that I can tell completely in one day, but I've got a better sense for it, I think, than just sort of parachuting in and seeing a show or two if I happen to be going to a TCG conference or something. So it was interesting, for instance, like in Washington, very, very concerned about who isn't coming to the theater and doing new kinds of forms, things that aren't even maybe, they wouldn't even label as theater. So that was a big interest in Washington. In New York, really busy, they're really confident. I'm sure you're not surprised to know that. They're really completely unconcerned about community. Doesn't even come up on the radar screen. Doesn't come up on the radar screen. It's just not important to them. On the flip side, in LA, surprising to me, they're very concerned about community. I'm not sure why, but they were the most intensely concerned of all the cities we were in. My guess is because they're actually really isolated from each other because they kept talking about the traffic, they kept talking about the sprawl, and the way that I think, in many ways, they were really not connected. And so the idea of neighborhood and geographic communities was really, really important to them in Los Angeles. In Chicago, not surprisingly, they were incredibly pragmatic. And so they were very tightly knit. They knew each other really well, and they were really about wanting to roll up their sleeves and figure this thing out. And then in Minneapolis, the really interesting, very heady, really intellectual, really concerned about form, tightly knit, but feeling, I think, kind of under siege and a little isolated from the rest of the country. So that's my sort of one-day drop-in perspective. And as I was flying from Chicago to Minneapolis, it occurred to me I would really, really just love to know this better for ourselves and our work here and what it might show to other communities around the country. And I thought, ah, we need to get a grant and do a big study. But we don't have the money now to do a grant. So instead, we've got these two panels to talk to this morning and see what we can find out. And that didn't cost us anywhere near as much. So I've got here on the first panel, you'll know, I hope many of you will know, both Meredith McDonough and Ben Yalem and Heather Kitchen. So Meredith right now is the Associate Artistic Director at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Ben continues to head Fools' Fury, although right now he's living in LA and he'll be telling us where he's headed to very shortly. And Heather Kitchen, who was for 14 years the Executive Director at American Conservatory Theatre, has for the past three or four years been the Managing Director at the Dallas Theatre Center. And she has some surprising analysis for us about the differences and the peculiar similarities between the Bay Area and Dallas. So I wanna start by asking each one of these panelists about sort of their own personal trajectory. Where has their career started? Where has it taken them? Where did they see themselves going? So we'll do that first and then I'll come back and kind of see what their perspectives are on us and on the cities where they are currently living and working. So I'll just start with you. Meredith, you're right here on my left. I knew if I sat here it would happen. I'm Meredith McDonough. I am actually from the East Coast and I'm from a small town in South Jersey outside of Philadelphia and went to Northwestern for undergraduate and then went to Actress Theatre of Louisville as a directing intern 15 years ago now. And in that, so it was really about a theater sort of taking me under its wing. John Jory was there as the Artistic Director at the time and really believed in mentorship which I think is a big, I actually think is a big part of a conversation about what makes successful communities is this idea of mentorship rather than the idea of claiming someone which I think is the dangerous version of mentorship is to be like she's ours, we found her. So, but John really mentored me and then hired me on to help run their apprentice intern program for the next two seasons which was when I met Les Waters when he was there doing Big Love and ended up going to graduate school at UCSD to study with Les and then sort of that mentorship and then we stayed friends for many years. I freelanced in New York for six years which is rough and I worked for an organization called the National Alliance for Musical Theater which is where I met Kent Nicholson and came out to TheaterWorks and thought this is like the greatest job in America because you get to do new plays and new musicals and no one's doing that. And then when Kent left, I ended up moving out here and taking over his job at TheaterWorks and then when Les moved back to Louisville he called me and said, do you wanna do this thing? And I said, yes. So now I've been back with Les for two years in Louisville so it's this sort of great, I will say for the first and only time in my career I feel like the steps actually made some sense because I think a lot of the times we sort of sort our way through the middle but yeah, having worked, I mean, it'll be interesting. I think this isn't really like, I think the assessment of those cities is so right because I still freelance and really trying to figure out what places feel like home which I think sort of inherently happens or doesn't happen for me pretty fast in different cities. So that's the nutshell. Great, Ben. So I'm, is this working? Yeah. I started Full Fury 16 years ago and very much invested in the Bay Area and being engaged in San Francisco. I wanna echo what Meredith said about mentorship that would not have happened had not Paul Walsh at ACT taken me under his wing and sort of pushed me forward. And after about 10 years, I started to look out, I guess what I'll say is I saw about eight years ago at the Theater Bay Area Conference at the plenary session. Tony Takoni was speaking and I don't remember everything that he said but one thing he said was theater in America is not a profession for adults. And the context was that as we get further up the scale, there are fewer and fewer positions that one can have a livelihood, have a family, et cetera. So not entirely negative, but it lit something up in me and it was like, oh man, I better start looking around and figuring out what I'm gonna do as we go forward. And Full Fury continued to thrive at that point but I wanted to do, I wanted to see what the next steps were and I was very drawn to New York. We had performed in New York the previous year at PS122 and that was very welcoming and we were very well received and I also just personally started to have a bit of a love affair with New York. So I was really interested in building some bridges between the Bay Area and New York and I started to spend half my year out there doing some freelance work, doing some teaching but really looking to build something that would be a conduit from the Bay Area to New York and back from New York to the Bay Area. And I had great plans, I tried to buy a building, I was in contract, got the last minute, it turned out the person who was selling me this building didn't actually own it, which is one of those things that happens in New York. You know, yeah, this was $10,000 worth of lawyer fees into it, so a bit of a disaster. The other thing that happened was, well the world economy melted, so it was a bad time to be doing a really big vision that was cross-continental and that sort of derailed that project. And then I was very, nonetheless was moving forward, was doing work in New York, was doing work here, was really liking that setup because in New York I could see things like here might be the next trajectory, here might be, you know, you can put a show on in New York in a small downtown theater and get it picked up at New York Theater Workshop and maybe it moved somewhere else. Doesn't happen easily, but no, I was sitting there going, okay, this could happen, this could happen, this could lead to this. And then some circumstances beyond my control, I fell in love, my now wife was in Los Angeles, I was in New York, we were both very much, I was saying I have to be in New York, I can't move, this was my theater career and she was saying I'm in Los Angeles, I'm doing a medical residency, I can't leave. And then finally she said, okay, I'll leave and come to New York if I can and it turns out that being a more or less freelance theater person connected to a company that you're not even at most of the time is a whole lot easier to pick up and move than a medical resident. So she decided she would come to New York and as a result, I live in Los Angeles now. But I do, I continue to make work with Fool's Fury and be deeply involved in what's happening here. One development that has happened quite recently is that for years, I've been the artistic director of Fool's Fury, I am now the co-artistic director of Fool's Fury with Deborah Eleazar, which is wonderful, we share the load, we share the vision, and that is making my not being here physically much of the time possible. And the reason I'm not here much of the time, not only is that I live in Los Angeles, but we've had a baby, so I'm up against this career for adults issue and it turns out that with a small child, it's much harder to pick up and go away for a week at a time. So that's my trajectory thus far. I'm hoping to, I definitely consider the Bay Area the center of my art making, but I've also been experiencing these other communities quite a bit. My hope is to get back here eventually full-time, but who knows? Great, okay, and Heather? So I began my career about 40 years ago as a stage manager at the Stratford Festival and that too was all about mentorship for me and the three people who mentored me 40 years ago are still enormously strong influences in my life all these years later. I think the thing that I also learned was standards there and I have failed miserably at times, but I have known the aspiration of where I would like to be has been there and I think that mentorship and standards are both very important facets of what I hope to achieve. So I worked in stage management production, I was a production manager, I was a company manager, tour manager. I did a lot. I taught, I have moved 42 times in my professional career, four or two. I do not recommend this. But if you need someone who's really, really good at moving, you should come and see me because I really know a lot about it. When I was younger, if it did not fit into the van, it didn't come and I have also been, I learned very early that things that we think we have to have, especially books, that it is better to share them at the library and I have gone, I am such a public library person because of this. Wednesday night, when I lived in the Bay Area, I lived in West Portal and I used to go Wednesday nights to the library and that was my library night. So after these first about 15, 17 years of my career, I really wanted to have not only responsibility, which I always felt that I was given a lot of responsibility, but I felt that I wanted to be part of change and I felt that as an industry, this is 25 years ago, that there was a lot of change needed, rightly or wrongly, I thought I could be part of that change.