 director for it and I had the right director and then he had a Broadway gig at the last minute and suddenly there I was left with it. But I thought that Doug not only thinks as a writer and well he thought so things like a director, he had a big vision. And I wanted to see him play with that in a very unpressured situation which was our festival on a, which was at what, at that point 99 seats I think on our main stage. We just cleared everything off and put 99 chairs down and there he was doing the work and it was thrilling to watch that work happen. So sometimes you do things, especially when you're running a theater it's all gut instinct and it's just gut instinct that you could be good at this and have fun. I don't know if this was your experience at all, but as a young writer who was seeing his work directed early on, I got so accustomed to those unnerving 3 a.m. phone calls from actors where they say, I don't know what he wants from me, I don't know what he wants me to do. And I people in a maddened on my end of the line would say, in that scene you just want Alfred to apologize and if Alfred will apologize you could get on with your life. And so then this actor and I would show up the next day of rehearsal and I'd be speaking English and he'd be speaking English and there'd be this bizarre person running the room who was speaking some inscrutable East European language. And I just thought, let's cut out the middleman. I think I had an experience where a particular director who will remain nameless, spent the first 10 days of the rehearsal of a new play of mine playing what it calls Crush Ball. They were playing, you know, they were playing theater games. And I wanted to rehearse my play and I also wanted to make some changes. And I was barred from the rehearsal room because of their process. He didn't want me to make the actress nervous. I thought, no, no, no, no, I am never going to go through this again. And I find out if I don't now direct at least the premiere of a play, I don't finish the play. And that's the one play I'd say is not finished. The other thing interesting enough is I know you know Mrs. Packard really well. I didn't want to direct that play. I wanted to be able to have the ability to just be the writer because it was so complex directorially. And I think I wore writing work to do on it. So you learn about your plays by directing. Absolutely. And like Doug, I'm not going through a middleman. Look at this. A scene isn't working. Why isn't it working? Is it the acting? Is it the staging? Or is it the writing? And I can make a difference with all three things when I'm directing it myself without the middleman. Say, oh my God, this speech doesn't work. I'm not calling the playwright sobbing at three of the plays. You know, you can't make this work. It's just like it doesn't work. Conversely, you've adapted the great deal. And I just started adapting Strinberg and directed it last year. And I discovered that there's no better preparation for directing a play than just adapting. Exactly. Because you know every moment you've unearthed it for yourself in the most honest way. And you've had this really intimate collaboration with a fellow writer from the great. Some of this is very crazy. Well, I found out that I've done three of the tempos. Right. We would have really gotten on. It does sound that there's a little bit of a warning in talking about plays directing. And it sounds like your mind pitfalls. If a playwright in this audience now gets the idea from our conversation that they should now go out and direct their plays. What would you warn them about? What would you say, you know, tread carefully here? I couldn't say something there. I mean, I know because I've had the problem. One is objectivity about the work itself. Secondly, storytelling. Are you, as a director, telling the story clearly enough because maybe you know that too well. You make certain presumptions that an audience who's got virginized will not know. Also, sometimes if you care very much simply about your words. If you think your words are being heard, you think something's working. I've had this discussion with Edward. I'm just thinking all about this. And that's a bad assumption to me. So my suggestion is if you're going to direct your own play, especially in its premiere, you need to have tough critics from the inside telling you what you've got. Someone's coming to your first run through and your second and your third. And through effort to prove you're telling you what works and doesn't work in their opinion. And you take those opinions very seriously. Did you work with a like a missing director or someone who's kind of your dramaturg person with you? Well, I've been very lucky on that. Because I've had good assistants. I've also had, I don't know if this is probably a very big discussion at some point. I've actually worked with two great dramaturgs in my life. And I know they're rare. Right. Well, it's something that would be crucial in this situation to have that objectivity. Had you also worked with a dramaturg? Yeah, I would say I guess the first thing. I think the reason playwrights are so routinely not allowed to direct their work is the expectation that because they know the text and because the play has fully flowered for them in the writing process, they'll be too prescriptive, too early in rehearsal. They'll want to see results. They'll want to see actors get it right away. So what I always counsel with writers directing their work is patience. Because you learn over time that a discovery an actor makes for him or herself in a rehearsal hall, they can claim every night as their own and hit beautifully and build a performance atop it. Something you've told them to do because it serves your play becomes a moving target that they have to try and hit. And some nights they might and other nights they might not. But by pushing them too early toward a result, whether it be an actor or a designer, by short circuiting the process of your collaborators to achieve the perceived end result of your play, you can end up sabotaging everyone's process but your own. So I think a lot of writers need patience to let their collaborators fully indulge in their own process when their work is at stake. And that's a great definition of a good direction. Right or not. What it means, and I mean both not only directing your own work but directing other playwrights' work. Would you say perhaps try working with another playwright's work that you can be objective with first before you try to direct your own work? Just to develop and directing chops or did that not work for you? Did you actually start off directing your own work and directing it? I started out directing my own work but I was already a director. You were a director. Yeah, I was a professional director by the time I was doing that. So you had learned your chops and so it might make sense. Yeah, at least getting better at one hopes. I mean the fact is in the audience may not know this is that Edward all being, because even though he's not here, he's here, did direct a great deal. And in fact, if you're interested, Rakesh Solomon has come out with a volume on all the in-performance, him directing and I think also other directors directing including some historic productions that Edward directed. And it's really fascinating because he talks about the fact that he doesn't change his work, he doesn't change his work. But in fact, right. Well, it's out there, it's published. Oh it is, okay. Yeah, Rakesh totally changed his work. Yeah, and exactly for the reasons that you actually talked about it, it doesn't fit in the actor's mouth. It's taking too long, it's explaining too much where it doesn't need to. And for those of you who just are curious about that, because I think Edward has also gotten beaten up for directing his own work, but he actually worked really hard on his directing. I think mostly so that he could develop his own plays, you know, to help him write his own plays. And I think one of the other things that Rakesh is as a director and as a playwright, do you then have an opportunity to polish it for other directors later so that you're what you're trying to do is give them a sense of this is what it should be. You know, do you think about that? You thought about that as when you're directing your work that I'd like for other directors to see how I direct my play because this is in some ways my vision, even if they choose not to do it that way. Yes, but I'm always interested to see another director's take on the work of mine. I actually think a play might call it Still Life, which did wonderfully in New York and around the country. It was in Paris where I saw a French production of it that was a completely different from how I directed it that I found most thrilling. I would never have thought of doing it the way he did, and I thought maybe he did it better, and I loved learning that. And the play was strong. I do think it, I always look at plays as being less analogous to novels or poetry and more like a list of instructions that come to back you. You take out the list of instructions and you're a director anywhere in the country, and you take this character and that character and you put them in a living room and they say this to each other, when you're done you'll get the play. And so the instructions have to be rigorous and careful and consistent and clear and stand up to the brightest minds and the grossest dullards. And I will say that, you know, if I've written and sent a vacuum out into the world and I go to Des Moines to see it, I kind of want to see a vacuum. But if I haven't, oftentimes it's because of weaknesses in the text or the instructions that I've sent. And I think by directing you're testing those instructions all the time. Certainly, as Emily says, I've seen productions of my work that were revelatory because they did depart from my mandates or expectations and that's been thrilling, but I think it's more common to see work that sometimes misses the mark and then you have to evaluate if it's the fault of the production or the fault of the instructions that you've sent. We were also talking about another synchronicity between the two of you, which is the fact that you both write about history, that you write about people's lives who actually have lived. And as I mentioned, you both work differently, and of course you work differently in every single play, but in Mrs. Packard, it's a very different way of writing than you're still alive or the other plays that are really documentary. And with I Am My Own Wife, it's very, very different from Will's. And the difference is fiction. The difference is what you've created in some ways, what you've had to create as a dramatist. And I thought it would be interesting to kind of have you talk with me, compare your processes and dealing with those issues with these very, very different plays that you've written that deal with history. Well, I would say immediately that again, I have to credit Emily because her beautiful play, Execution of Justice, was profoundly impactful on me when I saw it. And then in working on I Am My Own Wife, I suddenly found myself with a stack of documentary material, transcriptions, absolutely. And the commitment that I would turn those transcriptions into drama. Now, if I'm correct in remembering Emily, Execution of Justice is really the deletion to the original transcripts. Yes. With Wife, I took more liberties and I compressed events and I changed the names of characters and sometimes worked to clarify action. So I wasn't as scrupulous as you were. But I think it was that play that influenced Moises Kaufman with the Laramie Project that in turn led to my play I Am My Own Wife. So I think there's a real lineage there right back to that work. I didn't realize that that, I didn't have effective Moises. I didn't know it had effective you. Yeah, it created a kind of documentary theater that both he and I have been practicing for a while. And I think it's due to that play. Oh, I'm very moved to hear that. Absolutely. Wow. So what was the difference for you, working on Mrs. Packard and working on a play like Execution of Justice or Still Life? Well, each play is asked for something different. The first play I wrote was a monologue of a woman I had met who was a survivor of World War II with a Jew. And just sat in her kitchen while she was making chicken soup and she gave me this incredible story. And then intercut myself with that. But Still Life asked for something else. I met these three people, but somehow making monologues out of them didn't work. And I remember someone saying to me, why don't you order these monologues one after the other after the other? And then I answered by saying, don't you see how this connects to this and that connects to that and this connects to this? And he said, well, why don't you put those connections closer together? And then I don't think I slept for a week. All I did was get all of the resonances going as if I were making music and the whole thing became its own creature. And that was a kind of new form that I hadn't seen before. Execution of Justice was, I thought that the story was probably embedded in those transcripts. I got that telling of the story through the transcripts. And when you only kept it like that, I had a reading of it and I forgot La Mama. And it was a reactionary play. It was an apology for the killer of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. But what's missing? And I realized that there were uncalled witnesses at the trial. There were people who weren't heard from. So you didn't get the whole story. So I then had the chorus of uncalled witnesses and I went to San Francisco and I interviewed everybody I could find on every side of the issue. And then you cut that with a trial and suddenly when things got just too tough to bear, as everyone was celebrating the killer in the courtroom, these people got a chance. They were given voice. So I realized that I had to give a voice to those voiceless people in this particular situation. And it also explained why he got such a light sentence. You didn't hear what he really had done. So every play has asked itself to be in a different form when it was sheer documentary. And I was always getting like, why did this happen? You know, the thing about dealing with real life and real people is you can't necessarily make the easier, thematic choice and just say, oh, well, everyone on the top of the ever after when they didn't, for example. Well, why didn't they? You had to find it and you can't find it. You keep digging. So that was always a great rigor exercise for me that I found extremely exciting. But with Mrs. Packard, because I couldn't meet her, I only knew what happened to us in the story about a minister's wife in the 1860s who was married to a very, very conservative calculus minister, just when she was discovering liberal theology and all kinds of new ideas. And she kept talking about it in public and her husband said to her, if you don't shut up, I'm going to have to have you shut up. And she said, you can't shut me up. So I can. And he was totally within his rights to throw her into a lunatic asylum, which he did. For me, that was a fascinating story and I couldn't stay away from it. So I read everything she wrote and I did the usual research she would do on her historical project. And then I decided to let all of that go. And it was Edward Albee. I was asking him, I said, when do you know it's time to sit down to write? And he said, usually I'm walking along the beach in Monty and the people, the characters in my play, won't stop talking to each other. And in order to shut them up, I sit down and I write and it comes out in a flood. And I thought, oh, it's really good advice. And I happened to be walking on a beach in the Caribbean actually, which was very nice. And the characters started talking to each other and I got the first scene and then the second scene and then I said, I better sit down and write before this gets away from me. And it poured out in about three weeks. That's a different feeling than... I always liken it to with sculpture. You know, is it Rodin? Or Michelangelo? Michelangelo, you know, that you're looking for the form inside and letting it emerge. That's how I feel when I'm doing strict documentary. You've got to transmit this big and you end up with a much smaller set of papers. And when you're writing a play like that and discovering it and the pages grow. But I discovered the play as I wrote it. People started walking into the room and other characters emerged and had that wonderful excitement of following my nose on that. Whereas it's a different process doing a documentary play. Do you have in mind a structure that you're going to build around as you choose material for your documentary work? I mean, do you kind of say, well, I'm going to use a trial structure. I'm going to use that help you make that... That to me is a terrifying idea of having that stack of papers. Right. Sometimes I know and sometimes I don't. I came up with the idea for having our say. This is two African American sisters, both over a hundred years old. I thought wouldn't it be fun, because I'd already done this with the first piece, to have them cooking. And then I remembered they told me that they made their father's favorite meal every year on his birthday to celebrate their father's birthday. And I got the idea because I realized that the first of the dress rehearsal when we did it for the premiere would take place on their father's birthday. So I thought wouldn't that be cool to do this? Suddenly that gave me the idea of when we first met, they were very, very formal and just, you know, in chairs and they're living with me and had an interview. The next time we got along so well, they invited me to the kitchen. And then the final time they said, ah, we hope someday you'll come to our family's feast. So they gave me the, you know, the structure. Wow. Yeah, I never know. What, how did you find, how did you find the Marquis de Sade? We've talked a little bit, I think, about unlikable characters. Yes. You know, of course. So how did you find this interesting character? I was in a love relationship with a psychiatrist, not my own. And it was Christmas. And he gave me a biography of Sade. And I think I knew that when you do. But I started to read this biography and I got obsessed by it and a dating passage where the Marquis de Sade abandoned his wife, kidnapped his sister-in-law under an assumed name, took her to Italy, ruined her for marriage, as they used to say, and left her in a convent and then sought an audience with the Pope. And I thought the Marquis de Sade and the Pope, that's a plan. Because I thought you could take those two fellows and show that maybe they had a lot more in common than they would be. You'd be up to something. So I started to write what was a conversation between Sade and the Pope and it was a dialectic and it was full of all kinds of flora and debate, but it lacked drama. And I continued to read the biography and came across another passage that said, well, in turn it was Sharon and Asylum, the Marquis de Sade had been placed there in hopes of inhibiting his pornographic writing but surrounded by lunatics all day. He was more inspired than ever. And so he wrote 120 days of Sodom on a rolled piece of parchment that was hundreds of feet long that he hid in the walls of his cell. So to get him to stop they confiscated his quills. And I thought that act, the confiscation of his quills, the lone instrument that was preserving him from madness. I thought what would the consequences of that be? And suddenly I had a dramatic action that set the play in a kind of irrevocable motion. So it's just a reminder that no matter how high-minded your interest in thematic intent, it ain't got a problem. You don't have a play. And the confiscation of his quills became the problem. I have to give some time for people to ask some questions. I have one last little question for you, director of playwrights, which is, it's my own kind of weakness, which is talking to designers and talking about design and I assume that you both do this. How do you do this? And how generally, Edward I know works with designers and talks to them. But that's not the norm for playwrights. We don't normally do it through the director, I think. How do you deal with this? I'm fascinated by design and how playwrights work with design. Well, Emily's done it far more than I. I would simply say that as a playwright, I would say this to you guys too. You should be in that room. In your play, this person is creating the vessel that's going to carry your soul. You might as well have a word about it. So I say the person to do is talk to the director and they have a problem with you being in the room. Maybe that's not your director. That's right. I absolutely agree. And I cannot tell you how many times I've seen the wrong set really destroyed a play, whether it's the world premiere or the 20th production or two. It's about what was created. It's about the play. It's about them. It's about you. It's about honoring the work you made and making sure that it cannot be a stillborn birth. And one way to kill the baby is to have it encased in the room. And I think you can and must have that discussion early on with the director. You have the right to do it and you should exercise that right. One more question. Yeah. Have you abandoned a play and what prompted you to do so? I just abandoned for last week. I hope it's temporary, but I don't think it is. I haven't. There are some that I... that didn't receive subsequent productions and I'm fine with that. Do we have other... yeah. This is for Emily, man. I did not see your production of The Terri Orchid, but it's a play I absolutely love. And I wanted to ask about your adapting it and why or that process and if you could just talk about it a little bit. Sure. If you felt like it. Sure. Well, I love Terri Orchid. But essentially with me with Chekhov, I've done all four of the sort of great plays, but I'm very out of order and I found that it was at each point in my life one of the plays suddenly makes sense to me. For example, the last one I did was Sego and I realized it was because I finally could forgive or understand the adults in the play and always had to get through the children and I don't think Arkadna is a monster. She's selfish and all the kinds of things, we know her in fact. If anyone who works in the theater knows that. Once I knew that I could do it. It was Terri Orchid. I was in South Africa where I was doing two things. One, my play having our say was being done at the Market Theater, but also I was doing stage, this writing a movie on Winnie Mandela before she had been disgraced. And while I was there, John Connie, who has become artistic director of the market and a great, great Black South African actor said he'd always wanted to do the charity. And I thought, oh, okay, why? Then I realized he looked at me like I was nuts and he said, well, you know, serfs in Russia were not like serfs anywhere else in Europe. They were property, they were owned. And the light bulb went off. And I went back to the play because I almost thought it would be a play that was really too hard for Americans to understand. And it's crystal clear once you know that. So I was immersing myself in the play and working with the Russian translator to get the literal. And I picked up Souls of Black Folk, WB Du Bois' extraordinary book. And it was about the sorrow songs. So I read the chapter on the sorrow songs and suddenly the language of the sorrow songs became part of how I interpreted how to bring his gorgeous play to life in an American context. I kept it in Russia. I mean, it's in a theater. And in a period. But Avery Brooks played LePonkin. And Roger Robinson played Fierce. And Caroline Clay played Varia so that there were the plantation owners who had the adopted child and the adopted child is Black, so someone in the family, you know. And then Cornell West came to see it and said, oh my God, I've always thought that the play was about this. And so I cannot take any credit for it because I got it from John. But when you do it, it's just revelatory. I forgot your question. Oh, okay. We must stop there. We are out of time. Thank you all and thank you so much.