 So, welcome, welcome, welcome to Kalshakes First Civic Dialogue of 2017, cosponsored by our friends at UC Berkeley Department of Theatre Dance and Performing Studies. I want to say a really quick thank you to Lisa Weimer, the chair of the department who's been really integral in helping us organize this here today. I'm going to just talk a little bit about what the format is for this evening's conversation. I thought we'd jump right in. Is that cool with everyone? So if you're here, you've probably read a little bit about what we've been talking about and thinking a lot about here at Kalshakes over the last few months, and that has a lot to do specifically with questions of representation, asking practices. What is authentic on stage? This is sort of like these are just, these are questions that are coming up in part because of some of the choices that our directors have been making in preparation for our 2017 season. And so what we thought was that we would take the opportunity to bring some of those directors here to Berkeley at the same time, participate in a conversation along with my great friend Melissa Hillman who we'll talk about, we'll talk about all of you in a moment. But and hello to our friends who are watching HowlRoundTV. This is being live streamed. Don't worry, it's okay. It's totally okay. There are often very few people that actually are watching this live, so we're all good. Sorry. No, it's good. I just want to say, so we're doing an interesting format for the conversation. I've been thinking a lot in the recent past, certainly sort of in the last month or so, about how we communicate with each other, like what is nature, what's the nature of discourse? What is the shape of discourse? And so one of the things that we're trying to do with this civic dialogue is we're beginning to really investigate sort of how conversations happen and how we invite each other into these conversations. And so the format is, this is what I would describe as a modified long table. And the long table format comes from an artist, I think a New York based artist named Lois Weaver. But the idea here is that there is, you might have heard of a similar format called Fishhole, would be a probably more familiar idea. So this is basically what we're doing here. So there's a big table here in the middle of the room, there are eight chairs around the table, there are three panelists, one moderator, which means that there are four empty chairs, so you should move that to your scarf. And so what we're going to do is spend the next 30 minutes sort of heading down this sort of really complicated minefield of a conversation with just the three panelists and myself moderating at the table. At some point, I'll try and keep my eye on time, but I got the clock right there. At some point, what we'll start to do is we'll invite you all to participate in the conversation. And what that means is there are four empty seats. And what that means is up to four of you can join us at the table once I've given permission and be part of the conversation. And you can stay as long as you like, if you want to just come up, sit down and ask your question and then go back to your seat, that's perfectly fine. If you want to come up and sit down and engage in a longer conversation with us, that's also awesome. If at some point, all four seats are full, which I'm hoping they will be, and somebody else, the fifth person, wants to come up and join us at the table, I would just ask that you choose somebody, one of the audience seats, tap out, not our panelists. Leave the panelists. No, tap us out. No, no, no, no. Well, we'll see how it goes, we'll see how it goes, we could open it up. But tap out, you can tap out one of the audience seats and just take their seat. And then we'll just all be friendly and kind to each other and generous in this room. How's that sound? Good? Great. You will see on your program, in your program, the bios of the distinguished panelists that are sitting at this table here right now. I'm just going to take a moment and we might just introduce ourselves, yeah? And you know what I might do just because this is just a small enough space? I'm going to ask everyone else to say your name, so that we can all be in this space together. Is that cool? All right, so I'm going to start, again, my name is Eric. Are we using these? Yeah, if you're sitting at the table, use a microphone. I'm going to sit down. Great. Hi, my name is Desdemona Chang. I'm directing as you like it at Calshakes this summer. Hi, I'm Lisa Portez, and I'm directing Gloss Menagerie at Calshakes this summer. Hi, I'm Melissa Hillen, and I'm not directing at Calshakes this summer. Stay Sunday, Sunday. But I write a blog called Gitter Gertrude. Oh, yes, please. We're going to keep going around this way. Welcome, everybody, welcome. We're going to just get started, right? We had a really awesome phone call the other night, so hopefully that all makes its way back into this conversation. And if not, it's going to be some other awesome stuff. I have no doubt. So I think one of the questions that we wanted to start with was just this idea of, well, so I'm going to maybe just start from a personal space right now. So I have this completed in the last year, my first season at Calshakes. And there were some really interesting questions and comments that came out of that season of plays. And a comment that comes up a bit because we're Shakespeare here, we're going to just start with this. Why mess with Shakespeare? Why mess with Shakespeare? So what I'm hoping that we're going to be able to do here in the next 30 minutes or so is just, let's be unafraid to sort of just wrestle with it. We don't have to worry about hurting anybody's feelings. We want to ask the hard questions. And I'm going to try and be that voice from time to time. It seems like we're sort of landing in the same place. And I might try and disrupt that a little bit. Is that cool? We started with questions? I think we're going to start with that question. I'm not a Shakespearean, but it just seems to me, in my little experience with Shakespeare, is that Shakespeare has always been messed with. You know what I mean? There's not a text for any of the plays. There's not a singular text. There's many texts. And Shakespeare seemed to be both in his time and outside of his time. And it seems to me always a living text that has been changed or amended based on the era in which it's being performed. So it seems to me like you can't really mess with Shakespeare because it's already messed with. Yeah. And there were no period costumes or periods as such during Shakespeare's time that, well, if you look at King Lear, King Lear is set in Britain's pagan past, but they did not put people in costumes that meant to reflect Britain's pagan past. Lear is dressed as a king because it's what they had on hand. So it's not like there's nothing to mess with. When you stage Shakespeare in Renaissance dress, as if that's somehow authentically Shakespeare, it's not. It was contemporary dress at the time. When you stage Shakespeare with actors of color, because that's who you see when you look around, that's not messing with Shakespeare. That's your contemporary pool in the same way that, I mean, I get very exorcised about the concepts of Shakespearean authenticity because if you're not putting a boy actress on the stage, I don't even want to talk to you about my black actress or my Asian female, Feste. I don't want to hear about it. So I don't think I completely agree with you. I think the scripts are already in so much flux. And I feel like what make these, where the engine of these scripts live, even whether where they were set, they were riddled with contemporary references. And the engine of these scripts exists when they are staged in a manner that's contemporaneous to the audience viewing them. That is how they were designed to be seen. And any time you move out of that, you need a damn good excuse. Yes, everything that's said. I also want to, I think when we talk about messing with Shakespeare, I mean, really a play is a blueprint for a production, right? Here's a recipe. I'm going to cook my food from this recipe. And I have an interpretive process that I contribute to this. And then the actor has an interpretive process. They contributed that. And I think when folks say mess with, they're just talking about the interpretation is further removed than what we perceive to be original intent, right? And I don't know, I'm of school of like, why not? Why not mess with Shakespeare? Because the guy's not going anywhere. He's not going anywhere. He will withstand all the messing we can give him. So what are we trying to preserve when we want to avoid messing with Shakespeare? What are the values or aesthetics trying to keep intact and precious, right? And if the answer is nothing, then shoot, do whatever, you know? And then take the consequences of whatever that whatever is, right? Because all the choice you make as an artist, as an actor, will have consequences. So put on your flax suit and deal with those consequences. But feel free to mess with whatever you want to mess with. And it's tricky because you don't have anybody who's a director or artist sitting at the table that it is a Shakespeare traditionalist. Do you know what I mean? They would be able to counter us. Do you know what I mean? Like, maybe there's one in the audience. Well, right. There's a repeat happening. I love angry people, right? No, I genuinely think I'm a Shakespeare traditionalist because I do the plays contemporaneously to the audience viewing them. I think I'm a traditionalist by staging them in the way that Shakespeare stage them. So I feel like I have been called many names that are not traditionalists for doing what I do. I totally agree with you. I mean, I think we don't have anybody who's like, no, there's a reason that they must be in Renaissance clothing. Yeah, for sure. I think there's a very few people. I'm sorry. No, I don't think so. I think there's actually people all over the country that are directing, you know what I mean? That are taking some pretty what would be called like straight up shaker, but again, that it's a it's a it's a non-existent concept. It's like saying an American. It's like, you know, it's, you know, well, anyway, I guess what I mean is that there are very few people who would insist that is the only way it is to be done. Right. That's probably true. I think a lot of times when people want to preserve the Shakespeare, what they largely talk about from my perspective is the preservation of text is usually what the argument is, like changing language. And sometimes we're talking about changing production traditions, you know, keep all the lights on and, you know, live, live acoustics only, no amplified sound, no blackouts, no, right, do it the way it was done in that form. And I think, sure, that's one way to do it. And I think there's anything wrong with that. There's also nothing wrong with your Asian female festes either. But there may be, though, there may not be any artists who would disagree. I wonder if audience members who would disagree. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Eric. No, I mean, so I think I'm not going to answer that question because I'm the moderator here. But I am going to encourage us. I'm going to encourage, maybe, I mean, we'll come back to this. Somebody can ask this question later. But I'm going to actually take this question around as we've been talking about Shakespeare. I just want to make sure that we've kind of traversed the scope of this evening conversation. So I'm going to take this opportunity, actually, to sort of gather what you've been talking about. Just have this idea of Shakespeare as a tradition, as a form, as its own kind of, as its own singular idea, as something that is sort of of such a size and such scale and such a scope that a few artists making choices of the work that may be seen counter to the original version is not going to affect it in any meaningful way. And then I'm going to push us just a little bit over to this question, which is, what about what's done to plays that are not Shakespeare? What does it mean? So for instance, there's a choice that's happening with the glass menagerie, this production of the glass menagerie that I'll let you, Lisa, talk about a little bit more. But I'm just going to ask this question. What does it mean when we start to make choices that seem perpendicular to the intentions of playwrights that are not William Shakespeare, but who, perhaps, we hold as much reverence for? I want to put this to separate this from the concept of intellectual property rights, because that's a whole other situation. And I've texted directors at 11 PM, like, can I change playwrights at 11 PM? Like, can I change one word? So the whole other thing, but leaving that aside, you're talking canonical works like glass menagerie. And I think when you're directing a play that has a canonical place in the culture, you're always, it's always an artistic response to that work. You're always existing in, you're always navigating the cultural positioning of that work, all of the responses to that work, every production that went before. Every new production is a new artistic response to that work within a pre-existing context. So I think when you're talking about messing with something, I don't know, I would feel like, rather than seeing that as something that's perpendicular to intent, I would see that as something that is a response. An artistic response to work and its pre-existing context within our culture. There's something about, I mean, first everything she said, but there's something about the way how a piece loads into the canon. You know what I mean? Like a piece exists in a time and it's one thing, right? And then as we move past it in time, one, does it stay? Two, why does it stay? And then three, it moves into the canon. And as we gain some kind of distance on it, we begin to then have a different conversation with it because we're in a conversation that's across time and across space. You know, I was recently interviewed for a radio show, a podcast about, well, why can't you cast Hamlet with white actors? No, not Hamlet, Hamilton. Sure, that's right. The other, the other Ham, the other Ham. Why can't you cast Hamilton with white actors? And it's a different conversation because that's a piece that's right here right now that's written in a specific way with certain ideas in place and in terms of how it's meant to be presented. It would be interesting to see how it happens as it floats away in time and into the canon. Do you know what I mean? What the conversation is with that piece. And into high schools and into, right. Exactly, do you know what I mean? What the conversation is with that piece. And it's specifically around casting. I mean, that's the interesting thing about Hamilton is because one of the central kind of gestures of that piece was casting. Yeah. You know, how casting plays out as it moves, as it moves away from us, will be interesting. I mean, in itself, Hamilton is an artistic response to an existing canonical narrative. Exactly. Exactly. But I guess, no, please. I was, my only thought was like, why Williams and not Shakespeare? I had two responses. One had to do with like the, look, I don't know, if it's kind of like a narrative that we have around Shakespeare as being like universal and timeless. The way that I don't think, I think we have that same narrative around Williams. We talk about Williams as like an American playwright or writing about the South, he's of a particular culture, in the way that we've somehow taken Shakespeare. And I would say to some of the Greeks, and we've labeled them as timeless, universal human, that we don't apply that same label to someone like Miller or Williams or O'Neill. They're distinctly American. But we do to check off in Ibsen, I think we do start, they're starting to further down the path. Do you think it's a time thing? I do kind of think it's a time thing. I do, I think it's, you know, because I think increasingly, check off would be in the same vocabulary as Shakespeare as would Ibsen. I don't know if Beck would, you know what I mean? I mean, it's just interesting. I think it does have something to do with time. I think you're absolutely right, and I love that. And I think part of it is just the further we drift away from the contemporary references in a text, right? So when you're reading Macbeth, you aren't just, I say it all the time. We're not on theaters. I do it all the time. Theater can't get, theater can't get any more cursed than it already is. Yeah. What? What? What? What? What? What? What? So, Serenity Macbeth in 2017, and you're- Just keep saying it, just keep saying it. Well, don't we stage it? I mean, we do this play, right? No, I guarantee you that's not real witchcraft. So, the, I had a point, I swear to God. So, when you're reading that play and you get to the line, the many references to equivocation and the first thought in your mind is, oh ho ho, those guys that we got for the gun power plot. That's sure on my mind, but it was huge, it was huge reference, right? So if you, you know, if you write a play, go home tonight and write a play and I strongly recommend that you do. And you put the words Muslim ban in that play. That means something in 2017 that it will not mean in 2417. So I think part of it is just that we drift away from the contemporary references and they feel timeless because the timeless issues, the emotional issues, the essentially human issues that exist in all works of art are what's left. So, that's what I think. So at some point, America is so different from Tessie Williams that we would think Williams is universal. And not about the South. Well, I'm sure feeling that actually. I'm sure feeling that right now, feeling that. Dude, I was talking to a student about Katna Houghton Roof and I explained to the student why it was such a big deal that he was in his undershirt. That didn't seem, doesn't seem undressed to a 24 year old in, you know, 2000 and what, I don't know, XX, I don't remember. But so, but then let's say for a moment, you know that we don't have the same distance with the play, like the glass menagerie that we do with Shakespeare's work. And that part of what's happening right now, you were just talking with our staff earlier today, Lisa, and the phrase that you kept using as you were describing work around the glass menagerie, and I just use it as an example, was that it was a science project, right? So like, what I'm hearing is there's something about Tessie Williams, which perhaps maybe is starting to deliver that distance in terms of time and contemporary, contemporariness, sorry. Contemporane, I can't say it. But, I know, it's a hard word. Contemporane. But more importantly, I think this is, I guess, my question so that, so as directors, as directors there's always, so I'm sitting at a table with directors. And it is true, there's like this not, in some ways this is a diverse table, in other ways it's not a diverse table and that's kind of like probably one of the points of conversation we'll get to tonight, if we're lucky. But this idea, I think, of authorship and directors, that any time a director takes on a play by William Shakespeare, there is an assumption of authorship, like there's some degree of authorship that has to happen. Like there's an expectation that the script is going to be cut, and so the director will be making choices in conjunction with dramaturg to make those cuts, right? That is a kind of authorship. There are production choices that are being made that contextualize the play in one way or another. That is a kind of authorship. When directors make casting choices that seem out of the ordinary or unconventional, that is an active authorship on some level. And I think my question is, it feels like a very dangerous place to be like. It feels like a very complex place that it's sort of like whereas there's more ease with choices like that in Shakespeare's work, the closer we get to our current place, right? The more fraught with complexities, choices like that. So I think we could say first right now, we could talk about the casting choice for the Glass-Major that the Wingfield family is a family of color, a mixed family, and that Amanda Wingfield is being played by black actors. And there are sort of consequent choices that come with that. Is that fair to say? Like what are the... Yeah, it is. What are the dangers? Maybe the thing that's worth saying is we're just asking you all, what are dangers of choices like this? I think the biggest danger is that when you have a bunch of high school kids coming to see the production, they'll think that's what Tessie Williams wrote. Which is awesome. Right? And for some, that's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're rewriting the play. And for some people it's like, anyway, that's interpretive, but that's awesome. And I think it's a matter of opinion and taste when it comes to things like that. I do work with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and something we often talk about is when you cut certain things from Shakespeare, you have students coming to see this and they think that's what Mr. Shakespeare wrote. Right. In which case I say, go back and read the play. Just get the book and read again. So I mean, for me, I think that's probably the... From at this moment, I think the most immediate concern if it is even a concern, but I think this authorship question is more of an interpretive thing, you know? Yeah, anyway, at least it's... One of my favorite stories that came around shortly after doing this kind of era of Hamilton was that a friend of my son picked up a $10 bell and this message was, that's Hamilton. He said, no, it's not. No, no, that's Hamilton. No, no, no, no. He's supposed to be black. And now first of all, Lin-Manuel Miranda is not black. He's Latino, but the kid was already Hamilton as a person of color, which I kind of love that story. Do you know what I mean? So when high school students come see Glassman Azure and they go, oh, that's what he wrote, then I go, great, that's awesome. Just because it expands the lens of... And I think one thing is, when we think of the canonical American, what is on our brain pan? Do you know what I mean? What is in our contemporary, not our contemporary, our kind of cultural zeitgeist or Jungian sense of what's the archetype that comes up. And when you start to shift that in casting, you just start to blow open and expand what is the canonical American, you know? And I think the biggest minefield that I see that I'm facing right now are there are certain things that are incongruous with this casting. You know what I mean? If, and it's not clear how Jim, the gentleman caller will be cast, but in the text he's Irish, he says Irish. You know, so then if we don't cast an actor who is, you know, what we think of as Irish, then what do we need to do to justify his being of a different race or ethnicity? Yeah, and that had a very specific outsider context at the time that it doesn't anymore. And so would you preserve the intent of outsider or do you preserve the Irish? Like what do you preserve? I love that you just brought that up because I think the reason that Williams is alive to this right now is William was writing about outsiders and misfits, people who were displaced from their time, their place, their body, their gender, their sexuality. That's what he's writing about and that's what we're all thinking about right now. You know what we've been thinking about I think in the 20th century in general with all the conversations about inclusion that started pre this particular administration but are now even more urgent. What does it mean to be outside of or have a very fragile relationship with the American dream? So I think Tennessee Williams is actually quite contemporary. Sure, you know another thing I think about too with context is that when you have an older play and you cast it with, you take Williams and you cast Williams with people of color or you take, I've always cast diversely and that was on purpose and also because the actor pool available to me and it brings up issues because race has content, race has meaning, it has context. And so I don't, I hate colorblind casting I won't say it, I've written about it extensively. I will not, it doesn't, you cannot be blind to it. I see your race. But you have to be conscious of what it means and what a context is. I did Ray and Juliet and I had at the time a student who's always casting my students, a young man named Reggie White. And Reggie wanted to play Tybalt and if you know Reggie, Reggie, the center of his acting is sweetheart. And I was like, dude, I don't know. And I'll come in and read for it, he was still in college. And the only other role I had open at the time was Paris. But my Julia was white and her parents were white and I could not face putting a black actor in, please God, don't make me marry this horrible. So I was like, all right, dude, I'm gonna, we're gonna do it, you know, Tybalt's gonna happen. And then of course he turned out to be blind because he's, you know, Reggie White. He was growing up to be Reggie White. So, it was amazing and it was fine. But then we get into the, to the party scene and the scene, and the scene where my Lord Capulet who is white is calling Tybalt boy over and over and it brought this new, yes. And then Tybalt gets pissed, goes and kills a bunch of people or you know, one. But it becomes this, it became a way to show this, this racist, the racism, even within one family. I'm born a barrier, I have no problem with multiracial families. I don't even know a family that's one race in the may area, but that brought this intensity to it. That otherwise, that it didn't have before. So I think being conscious about these decisions and what they do, what the context of, the cultural context of race brings to the text as you, as you change it. Sometimes nothing, you know? And sometimes it doesn't make my Asian female bestie. I put the Cindy in, I put Cindy in that part because she's hilarious. I mean, and in sometimes a lot. So I think it's just being conscious of those choices and what that artistic response to the work is and how it shapes the work and changes the work. And it's one other element of casting out of all the elements of casting. Something I just thought of when we're talking about this question of authorship and you know, changing the play is that I think oftentimes as directors, we do this authorship, nip and tuck, tweaking, whatever, to reflect our contemporary situation and also to like fix. I often do this with Shakespeare. I will try to do this because I want to fix the racism. I want to fix the sexism, I want to fix the anti-Semitism. And I wonder now that we're talking about this, like in doing so, am I eliminating Mr. Shakespeare's racist sexist legacy and making him like, he was just this great occlusive guy, right? Like is that a problem? Because I think ensemble, the question for me often now is how do you do a play that contains morals that don't match ours and do the play while yes, that's what they thought back then and not awaiting today, but I'm not trying to rewrite history, right? I think it's important for us to understand that there is a sexist racist legacy in the theater canon. But how do we do those plays today without endorsing those same values and at the same time not rewriting them as if he was a great, inclusive, awesome guy? And it's really interesting with Williams because unlike Shakespeare, you can't change a lot of text with Williams, the Williams estate. So, you know, that it goes back to, there are some definite, in this casting with this sex, there are moments that there are little mind field moments, you know, yeah, that's all I'm gonna say about it. I'll do the same thing, I changed Shakespeare. I feel like to take, I take a racism, I take out the sexism, I take out the anti-Semitism. Unless it's there, like I left it in in Tysandronicus because it explains why Aaron does what he does, right? But I don't, I feel like I have an obligation to the audience to deliver Shakespeare's intent in the way I see it and staging a work contemporaneously to the audience viewing it. And we assume that he was not racist or sexist? I don't know, sorry, I'm just doing that out there. No, no, no, no, because racism has a different, has a different cultural contact now than it did then. When you're saying something, everybody thinks this thing, right, and everyone in this audience agreed with that at a time, more or less. And in the same way that there are things we say now, we're saying now that we think we're fine, that we're gonna, 20 years from now, we're gonna be like, oh, this is problematic or whatever. So I'm a million years old, and I've seen the culture shift and shift and shift and shift and shift. And so, you know, my, I have an 18 year old daughter and she's transgender. And that, when I was 18 years old, that was nothing, it was nothing. Kids just killed themselves, you know, there was no, so it's a whole other thing, the culture changes all the time. So I feel like, on stage, we are staging works for an audience to create a work of art that is an artistic response, an artistic statement. And in the classroom, we read the works on cut and study them unflinchingly. I think we should always reach, experiment and be absolutely clear about the racism and the sexism, the anti-Semitism, that everything, all of it, of that time, without question. But when you're staging a work, I think it's a different set of considerations. But I think testimony brings up an interesting thing. I mean, we can say of that time, and yet, it's our roots. You know, that's Western roots. How do you mean? Well, I mean, I think Desimona was saying, you know, when you erase that, when you cut away the things that are problematic of a Shakespeare text, problematic to a contemporary audience, you know, do you cut away? We kind of erase, you know, our roots as a Western culture. And it's the argument around Hamilton, the critical argument around Hamilton is of course, you know, this is grave, cast this production this way, we're reimagining what the founding fathers may have looked at in doing so, do we erase the legacy of, you know what I mean? Well, many of those characters are slave owners. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know what I mean? And so it's interesting. I mean, on the one hand, my heart with what you're saying, but I'm interested in what Desimona said, which is like, yeah, but when we do that, what are we actually doing? Right, and especially as, you know, I don't know, as people have called, we all have different narratives in the country and how we got to be here and what brought us here and, you know, do we erase the things that our ancestors survived to get here? And also something that you said when we were talking on the phone the other day, which is such a great thing, which was, why the hell even do Shakespeare anyway if you're a person of color as a director? Right, it's kind of like, is it like an assimilating gesture? Like, let me assimilate into Eurocentric theater by proving that I can play Romeo. Why even play Romeo who's never written for me? Or me, he was, I don't know. I mean, right? That's the one thing I always like, I always did it because I felt like I was trained to do it and I'm damn good at it, so that's why I persist in doing it. And I felt like, you know what, if I'm gonna do it and keep my soul, bring my people with me if I'm gonna do this. But then I started to think, why, not to say they don't wanna do it. I'm playing that right there now, Eric. I'm not saying I don't wanna do Shakespeare. When you're here again, when you're here yourself. Yeah, when you're asking this question, like, you take a step back, it's like, why are we not doing other, I mean, when we talk about classics. We are, though. We are. We're only doing Shakespeare. Right, but Shakespeare takes up a lot of airtime. He takes up a lot of energy in the American theater. I mean, there's a lot of odds to go into Shakespeare. And in our sense of like cultural literacy, he occupied a huge amount of space. And when we talk about, even when we talk about theater, talk about, oh, we're doing the classics. Instantly we think Shakespeare or the Greeks, well, I'm not thinking about theater from Africa or like Asia, right? I'm never thinking about that. Even the women that we're writing at the time. Right? Blink a blank. Oh, all right. So, we're after Ben. She's the one, the one name that I know has ever been. Um. Yes. Right, so like, so how come? Wait, wait, wait. Give me one more moment. Give me 10 more minutes. I want to make a pivot and then we're going to open this up to folks to join us at this table, I promise. So at 7.30, I was just going to say this right now. At 7.30, an hour into this evening, or ish, you all, if you want to participate in this conversation, join in, ask a question, come up and start taking the seat. Debate, they don't just have to. Or debate, or yeah. Oh my gosh, yeah, you really join in the dialogue. So I think, so I'm going to, this is a slight pivot, I think in part because we are being co-hosted by the University of UC Berkeley's Theater Department. You know, I think there's this interesting question around just, I want to try and capture the sort of polarity that's happening right here about sort of, is it our job, is our job as director, right? To create a work that is on some level preserves the good and the bad of these plays so that we can understand on some level a kind of context of the work and where this work was created and we can confront that and engage with that. Or on some levels that our job to excise that will allow audiences to enter into the work without being alienated by work, right? And I think there's, for me there's an interesting question that I want to talk about, which is, and this is maybe a crazy pivot that I'm going to do it in now, which is the issue of yellow face. And the reason that I ask, I pose this question about the issue of yellow face is that what I know of is that there was a recent controversy around Lloyd's, Lloyd says play that was being performed at a university where choices were made in the casting because of any number of reasons and I don't want to get into it too much, but where students were essentially like, where white students were cast in roles that were intended for people of color. And so that's one thing. And then on the other side of that is this other conversation about yellow face in general like whether or not, like yellow face as a historic tradition, which is offensive to me for so many reasons. The same time, you know, when I hear, when sometimes I hear people say that there's no place for it in our temporary discourse in our theater today, that there's like that yellow face is something that should be excised from the conversation from the art that we're making. And I say, actually no, I defend this practice as a portal into our past. And we all say this all the time, that we are all a consequence of everything that's happened before us. And so this idea that we can somehow erase a part of that and then pretend like it wasn't part of it, to me is also very complicated and for me as an artist, I think there are occasions when yellow face becomes very important, right? Like when? Well, like when, well, to borrow Lloyd again, when Lloyd writes a play that is about the conventions of yellow face. And as an Asian artist, Do you have Henry Gwangs? Exactly, exactly, right? Or Brandon Jacob Jenkins sort of dealing with the black face in neighbors. That to say, to be absolute in those kinds of statements is always for me very dangerous. Which is not to say that there isn't a huge case to be made for like the importance of this. But this is, so this is the pivot, right? So the pivot has to do with another thing that we wanted to talk about tonight, which is about this idea of representation on stage, right, and in our media. So going beyond just what, let's include also film and television, because I think that's a fair thing to include here, which has to do with kind of like authenticity. Like, what does it mean? We were talking on the phone earlier, I'm gonna just throw this in here about this idea of like, it's interesting when we talk about authenticity on stage. I think we have very nuanced conversations around race. For the moment we get past like the bold strokes race, it becomes less nuanced, right? So if there's a Chinese or a Japanese character on in the film, we don't demand that that be a Japanese actor performing, like Asian is enough. Like this is the idea that there's a certain like, at one point someone calls a line and says, actually, you know, as long as we fit within this box, we're okay, right? But then there's all these questions about who draws those boxes, right? Like who's drawing that line? Who's determining where that place is? So I think my question has to do with, or the thing that I would like to just spend a little bit of time on is, like what does that mean to, like what does it mean to be authentic? I also think on the other hand, and this is where we get into sort of training programs, right, one thing that we're asking our young actors to do regularly in school is to empathize with characters whose background are not like them. And that part of the craft of acting is about learning how to, through research, through imagination, through process, you know, understand those characters, embody those characters. And there's this thing that I just have where it's sort of like on stage, there are certain things that we demand authenticity for. And yet for some reason, there are other things that we do not. I mean, you just brought a whole bunch of stuff, so I'm just gonna say that. There's like a hundred ideas in there. Sorry, this is what happens when I shut up, or 45 minutes. It's somebody who teaches in a conservatory, the theater school at DePaul University, and has been involved in many, many conversations, you know, involved in the Liza conversation, involved in many conversations, involved in the whole, in the Heights conversation in Chicago, which was production that had a porch light in which the lead, Usnavi, was plagued by an actor who's not Latinx, an actor who came out of DePaul, who I had cast as Latinx in other productions at DePaul. I as a Latinx director. I'm gonna say a couple of things about training. I do believe, in some ways, our students' color are more flexibly trained than our white students because they're cast in all kinds of roles. They might be playing Chekhov, they might be playing Shakespeare, they might also be playing August Wilson, or they might be playing, you know what I mean? There's a number of, they're kind of stretched in some ways more than our white actors, and so I do believe in an educational setting. There are ways to teach responsible allyship, and there are ways in which, in that environment, I believe, I would not, as a Latinx director, direct a play that was written by a Japanese-American playwright. I would not cast white actors in roles that are designated Japanese, because I don't believe that, or Japanese-American, because I don't believe that I could be a responsible leader for the white actor in that role. But as a Cuban-American married to a Puerto Rican, I feel like if I'm doing in the heist, I have enough context to be able to help an actor understand responsibly how to embody that role. I do not believe professionally, I would not professionally, if a role is written, and also in an academic setting, I generally call the author. So for example, we're doing Wig Out by Terrell McCraney, and we don't have a Latinx actor to play one of the roles which is designated Latinx. And so I called Terrell and said, are you cool? He's like, yes, as long as this, this, and this. You know what I mean? So we'll always, you know, when we can, I think it's ultimately up to the author, you know, what can be done with text in a contemporary text. But professionally, I will, an ethnically specific role must be ethnically specifically. Now, as you get into Latinx or Asian-American, there's a whole kind of conversation there. And I think one of the things that we do in the Latinx community is practice responsible allyship. So you might be, I'm Cuban-American, I might know that you're Mexican-American, but I've just cast you as a Puerto Rican. But we all know that there are differences, and we all kind of practice, I think, I think responsible representation allyship. I think it's often in the Asian-American community and also in the Eastern community. You know, I think as we move along in training programs and are training hopefully more and more actors of color, we'll have to do less and less of that. Because there will be a large pool of Japanese-American actors or a large pool of actors of Egyptian descent, do you know what I mean? So that we can be to catch up with the writing. We talked about this on the phone in the phone conversation a little bit. And both of you guys, all of you guys said brilliant things and I thought a lot about this issue. Authenticity is an interesting concept. And I think when you're talking about how to produce a play with authenticity, we're talking about do you cut to preserve the right? So, I mean, I worked a lot with living playwrights as well and I rubbed off on you, I guess. And so I feel like there are some things in classic law works where leaving the racism, the casual racism intact would be to vandalize the intent of the scene. Like to say, you're as ugly as an Ethiopian, casually, right? And the thing is, oh, it's supposed to be this, they're arguing and it's hilarious. It's hilarious when you drop a racial slur and vandalizes the intent of this lighthearted comedy. So in that case, I would say that the way to authentically preserve our real intent would be to prune it, although if I were teaching it and I wouldn't, I do leave everything intact and talk about the reality of the world in which that play was written and the people for whom that play was written for. When you talk about casting, again, the concept of what is the authoritative, an author, what is an authentic production or a person? What does that even mean? That to be authentic and every person contains so many different things about them. And we were talking on the phone and I said, if there were a play or a film about me, it would be more important to me to have an actor who is not skinny than an actor who is disabled with my disability. I can teach you how to walk with cane. But so that feels that walking around in a body without thin privilege feels very potent to me all day long. I can go, being disabled is pumped as well. But so what is the authentic portrayal of me? Do you need a Jewish actress? Do you need a disabled actress? What do you need? So the concept of authenticity, like do we cut a play or do we leave it to show the warts and the bad, evil parts of it? What makes this character, what is more authentic about this character? Laura, what is the authentic Laura? That is her disability more authentic than her fragility, than her emotional center. I don't know, I don't know what the answers are. I don't know if there are answers. And so I think that even just trying to make a decision to make an answer preserves some kind of an authority to me as a white woman in some ways. How do you, or a cis woman or someone else as an able-bodied person, how do we even make those decisions without creating, preserving power? The other side of authenticity, you know when it comes to cutting is also equity. I mean, one of the questions, you know when you ask the most important thing in Laura, but I also say, well, there's also an opportunity in Laura to create some level of equity on stage for actors of differing abilities. Yeah, that's totally the other consideration as well. I just wrote a piece about the difference between diversity and equity. And that will often see people will hire a person of color and then plop them into position, a low-run position and never look at them again. And that we don't, we often use diversity as a way to excuse a lack of equity. Yeah. I agree with all that. I mean, when it comes to like representation, I also think a lot of it has to do with what we perceive to be the intent of the character, like what is the function of the character. And like, you know, in Melissa's like biopic, please don't make that. In the biopic, in the process of being written, by even saying that you want an actor without thin privilege or a person who's disabled, you were assuming that she is disposable into one essentiality, right? That's an assumption we're making by kind of putting those qualifications on what the role demands that we assume that there's a hierarchical way of articulating a character. And oh, that's true. But at the same time, like directing's about making choices, right? That's what directors do, we make choices. And for every choice we make, there's infinite choices we're not making. And that's part of the job, yeah. How are we all feeling? I see seven and 30, so the clock has passed. Join us, join us, welcome, welcome. Say your name again. I'm Scott. And this is a great conversation, I'm really enjoying it, thank you all so much. So I just want to kind of pick up on what Melissa was saying regarding critical casting versus kind of colorblind casting. So, you know, what I'm hearing, of course, is that colorblind casting doesn't really exist in regard to race because race and ethnicity does signify even if we pretend it doesn't on stage. Although it's an experience in the last 10, 20 years that there is sort of a standard expectation or communication, okay, this actor's ethnicity race isn't supposed to signify in the role. So, but assuming that agreeing with this idea that an actor's race or ethnicity does signify for everybody because race and ethnicity is so important to us in society, I'd like to ask you to expand this a little bit more with regard to gender and with disability. It's my experience that genderblind casting is very rare in a sense that if a character who is cast against how we might read them to be gender offstage, they're gendered to be offstage, that's a huge currency. That's something that's drastically different to us. I think we read it. On the other hand, with disability, I, it's my experience still that actors while maybe now we certainly don't allow black face, yellow face is frowned upon, quote unquote, creating up is expected and normal. And we look at the Oscar award winners for the last 20 years as far as non-disabled, able-bodied or normed-bodied actors who portray these disabled characters and they get all the awards. So, I'm thinking about like for example, Glassmar and Azure, what considerations do we have to think about regarding both, do we just automatically assume that cisgender casting is what we expect or do we expect to that it's okay and doesn't mean anything to have a normate or an able-bodied actor perform Laura, for example. Yeah, I mean we're not doing that. In other words, in Glassmar and Azure, we're actively trying to cast an actor of a different, a different, able actor for Laura. But I think you should talk about gender. Oh, I guess that affects as you like it. I guess, so this is my opinion. My opinion is that unless specified otherwise we default to cisgender. I am cisgender. And so, and this conversation is something that is relatively new to me. So I might fumble here and there and I'm happy you corrected in school that's necessary. But I think a lot of what I'm learning about gender is that a lot of it relies on optics which may not always be useful, right? So, I don't know, I think it's a tricky conversation. We are looking at, when we cast as you like it, I was really interested in this conversation around the arc of Rosalind and this capture's journey in regards to the translation of Rosalind into Ganymede and how that journey is actually one of revelation and not one of disguise. So by the end of the play, Rosalind is actually both Rosalind and Ganymede and it's not like surprise, I'm back in the dress, right? So the play is more progressive and regressive. And so that meant looking at actors who were gender nonconforming, non-binary. And for me, it was important to have that voice in the room. So in the casting process, we sought out actors who self-identified as non-binary. We haven't started, we're supposed to yet, but I imagine that'll inform a lot of how that role is being presented on stage. And I think it's just, and when it comes to things, and you know, the authenticity questions and I'm going to assume, dangerously assume that the other nine actors of the cast are sedentary. I don't know if that's true or not, but because we didn't ask that first day yesterday. We had a reading yesterday of the first cut. So that's something, you know, we just haven't really invited that kind of conversation and that it's something I'm sensing now that, you know, the conversation pronouns and I see it at the school that I'm teaching at to be really proactive about it because unless it's something that's brought up, there's no convenient time to talk about your gender, like at work, you know, there's no good time to do it. And this, you know, for those of us who are cisgendered and you know, can easily just kind of say, hey, all of my assumptions, you know, match. It's an, I think it's incumbent upon us to make room for that conversation. That doesn't really ask a question about casting, but for me it's problematic because the fact that we cast based on optics, right, the same way we do with race, although we come a little more savvy about race in some ways and less so, but yeah. I think it does come down to the voice in the room. I don't, I mean, I have a transgender daughter, but you know, it hasn't been 15 years it's been, you know, a year and a half, where's my husband? Okay, thank you. I have a terrible time placing myself in the time space continuum. So I do think that, I mean, there are many transgender people who are not optically identifiable as transgender. And again, just even the concept, even the word of transgender reaffirms a binary that does not reflect my daughter's experience. And so I think that, I mean, gender is a lie. I don't even know. I don't say that like, there are three things I don't believe in, linear time, the gender binary and jeet dresses or everything, so I don't believe it, that is the truth. I don't, so I don't really know what's just about that. I mean, I think that's a case by case basis and it's really important and awesome. You have people in the room that don't conform to the binary can speak to that experience. As far as disability goes, I became disabled. I was not born disabled and I have to, having the voice in the room about this, what the experience is like to be disabled is important. But making sure that you have an actor that is disabled to play a disabled role is less crucial to me because I feel like, you know, all y'all are pre-disabled. You know, I mean, anyone at any moment in time can become disabled. It's not something that is discreet. So I feel less troubled by discovering an actor is acting their disability, but I would feel more troubled if there was not that voice in the room at all. That's just, but that's a personal point of view. I don't think there's an definitive answer. Hi, I'm Mary. I'm gonna speak as a playgoer. My first experience up at Oregon was watching Julius Caesar. So gender, I don't know if as a playgoer, I speak for myself because I don't know even if my husband feels the same way. But for me, if the actor, no matter what their sexual preferences are offstage, can portray what the playwright wants us to hear and what the director wants us to hear, that's enough for me because for me, it's the play. For me, it's the words and for me, it's the story. And so to me, I would assume that the actor must inform themselves if they're playing something different from what they're used to. But if they can come across as authentic in that way, that's fine because I'm there to listen and learn and watch and sometimes be entertained. I don't particularly like comedies. So I... I love you so much. I love you so much. So to me, even racial differences, they disappear if the actor is a good actor. If it's a role that has to, should be portraying a particular person of a particular race, because color is there, I think that you're right that it should be an Asian or a black person or whatever, or you turn the whole play into a totally Asian play, like what happened in Oregon that summer. But it worked. So that's all I want to say as playgoer. And the other thing that you talked about was, do you leave in the unpleasanties? Do you leave in what was culturally going on at the time the playwright wrote it as opposed to what's going on now? I don't think you give us playgoers very much credit. If you cut out a lot of stuff that was going on at that period of time, because we look at some of these things as period pieces, we look at Tennessee Williams, at least people of my age, because I know that younger people probably don't know what the history is, but we look at these things as descriptions of time, and it's the interactions between the people that are going on stage, that is as important as what the historical nature of that piece is. So we can take that stuff. We can take slurs because we see they're watching a play. We're not watching real life, but on the other hand, anti-Semitism has not disappeared. Racism has not disappeared. So elimiting them from a play is not a contemporary action. It should stay there. So I'm gonna maybe just add to Miriam's comment here, which is beautiful. Thank you. You want to say? No. No. Okay. So that's a point of view that I hear frequently from playgoers. Actors are writing trans roles right now. When we're writing roles for actors of differing ability, when we're writing, we may or may not have the actors, we may have like three, five, 10 in the country, do you know what I mean? Who may have the training or may not have the training. So when I cast an actor that's my friend, my friend Lillianne Brown, gave this great speech at the town hall about in the heights. When the best audition for, she said this, and I'll never forget it. She said the best audition for the role, if you're trying to cast ethnically specifically or gender specifically or able-bodied specifically or et cetera, trans specifically, the best actor for the role may not be the best audition. It may not be the best audition. It may be the person that is soul to soul connected to the role has not just because of their ability or disability or race, but has some kind of soul connection to that character that includes their race, ethnicity, ability, gender, sexuality, but that needs time and training and that you may be training in process. You may be training in process and you as a director, our job is to pull everybody across the finish line. So the training programs, and I'm part of one, training programs are looking and expanding in order to actually feed the field. It's not just kind of, we wanna make sure that there's lots of representation in our school is that the field is actually demanding. You know what I mean? Writers of many, I mean actors of many, many different persuasions. So it's incumbent upon all of us in training programs, but all of us who are directing plays to provide opportunities to train the actors that the field is asking for. And I think you do know in an audition sometimes, even if it's not the best audition, you can see that spark or that you can see it. Yeah, no, I've done that numerous times. Your brilliance derailed me from what I was gonna say. Which was, which was this other thing. We're talking about lived experience. It derailed me all day, I mean all night. Lived experience versus craft, right? So what's more important than do we privilege lived experience for an actor or a craft? I mean that is an impossible question to answer because then how far does that necessarily go? Do you need a 14-year-old girl to play Juliet because I sure as hell don't really remember what it was like to be, you know what I mean? Do you need to, where do we, does it need to be, how much of those? So anyway, okay, I'm sorry, I swear to God I can complete a sentence. I read a dissertation and everything. I, there's a casting director in the Bay Area who every time I'm in the same room with her I learn 37 things and it's Leslie Martinson. And Leslie Martinson, when I was a baby artistic director taught me when you're casting every, you know, the adjectives thing. Every actor has, you know, 15 adjectives that describe them and every character has 15 adjectives that describe them and your idea is to get the best match. And this is how she ended up with an Asian American Mozart. As she said, all of the other adjectives matched up and Viennese just had to go. So, I feel like when you're, the things about you that we call lived experience in your race, new gender and you know, I'm a white, Jewish, disabled, cisgendered woman of a certain age. All the things about me versus craft. I mean, when we are casting we're always looking for, if it's not always but often, you know, we have age restrictions and gender restrictions. And we want, you know, we're gonna cast King Lear where we want an older man. You know, because it really, you can't be 35 and play King Lear, you can't. There are things about being an older man that are so specific to that role. Or, where do we draw the line between lived experience and craft? When can craft take over? When can it not? And I think that we're experiencing in America, all right. In America. Here we go. Yes. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yay. I think we're understanding that race is something that wherein we're really feeling that lived experience brings something to the table that craft cannot. But I mean, I could not ever presume to be authoritative voice about this. I don't know. But I think that there are some decisions to be made per actor, per role in the moment. Who's taking my mic? I've got this one. What I've been hearing, and of course I agree with everything that's been said, is that what happens a lot in these discussions is there's a conflation between how you cast and then how you work in the room, which are two different things. And so I'm wondering if I'd love to hear from the directors more about how you cast for what you have in the room, you know, that you have authentic experience or lived experience in the room. Because I'm a designer, I just use my eyeballs and I just look at things and go, well, that looks like an Asian to me, that looks like a whatever to me. But that isn't the point. The point is, is the work you make that is built on people's bodies and experiences and thoughts. And I just don't know that that's being talked about enough. No, no, stay. No, no, no, no, come on. Keep the table full, oh, Annie. I mean, let me ask you just, Annie, are you just talking about, are you talking about the need, for example, I just worked on a play that had a trans character. And one of the, one of the criticisms and rightly so from the trans communities we had, and I was brought in on this project late in the game, so I didn't have a lot of choice about who the designers were and had no choice. The role that I was able to cast was not the trans character that role had already been cast. But the criticism that came from the trans community and rightly so was there was nobody trans in the room where it happened. Do you know what I mean? I wanna be in the room where, you know, to quote Hamilton. But, and that makes a big difference, actually. And in the conversation that I had with eight trans actors afterwards, I learned so much about where our blind spots were. I think we talked about this today in the staff meeting. Where in the writing there were things that were, you know, cause the writer was cis. There was nobody, you know what I mean? And well, really amazing writer. But there's something about when you have somebody in the room of the ethnicity, gender, sexuality, et cetera, they can just speak to, they can just speak to actually, you know, the beans in this play would be red beans, not black beans, because it's Puerto Rican, not Cuban. Do you know what I mean? Or, and it's not just down to that kind of like detail. It's like, and what it means to be, to have this kind of abuela versus that kind of nana. You know, I think there's just something about cultural memory, cultural experience, cultural, you know, that I think is important. But you should speak. Yeah, I think it comes down to like, if there's no one there to advocate for the actual culture that everyone else is operating based on assumptions. Yeah. And that's kind of where stereotypes come from. And it's because it's more than just props and costumes and scenic elements, right? Those are the things of stereotype. And without someone in the room to advocate and go, and sometimes it isn't the details, it is red versus black beans, and nana versus abuela, all those things. These are, that's where the lived experience is valuable. And it happens in the room, but it comes out in the work, right? And for me, like lived experience for me, it's when I cast authentically, I'm air quoting authentically, it's because I'm interested in the kind of room that I'm building. It's a political gesture, it's not an artistic gesture. It is, it can be. But for me, it's about people in the room need to engage with other people outside of their culture, outside of their sphere, so that we can come to like bridge building. And so that I can say, oh, I worked with, you know, a deaf actor. And now I know a little more about deaf culture than I did six weeks ago. And I can take that information and then make different choices, you know? So that's for me what it's about. And it's less about the actor's representation. We can always like play at something, I get that. And if it's good enough, most of those who don't know that culture, we'll totally buy it. We'll buy it. But I think it's important to have an advocate of that culture in the room. Right? Yeah, I mean, it's safe to say that. Sorry, go ahead, please. I wanna cut this a little bit differently. I'm a big fan of August Wilson. We lived in Pittsburgh for 26 years. We know where his plays were set. And when I look at his plays, when you look at the Century Series, I'm looking at history. I don't wanna see it from what's happening today. One, because what's happening today is very different from what happened. But it also instructs what the history of the African-American community was in Pittsburgh. So I'm looking at it and one, we've seen productions where we really felt that the actors, the director, didn't get it, didn't understand it. And to me, when you talk about cultural authenticity, it takes someone for certain plays. Now, I don't feel that way about Shakespeare. I think at this point, Shakespeare, any gender could play almost any role, we've seen it. And it works if the actor is good. But I think there are certain things which are historical pieces. And I think if you're gonna put them on, the one has to find a way for that authenticity. You have to know what means. You have to know what it was to be on the hill, et cetera, et cetera. So I wonder if you also end up limiting the choices of the plays that you might direct or put on, thinking by whether or not you're able to get something more authentic into it. Just so. That's a good question. I mean, I think that, do you wanna? There are certain plays I absolutely will not direct because I feel like I'm not qualified, yeah. I will happily recommend a number of colleagues to direct that play. Because I think of me, it's what Lisa said about responsible allyship. And there's certain things I feel like I can't do that and do it right and do it justice and be true to what I think the playwright is looking for. And I think that's really, this goes back to the questions on in the heights and whether the actor who auditioned for Usnavi should have auditioned for Usnavi when he was not in any way Latinx. And he's a young actor and he was just out of school and he was auditioning and he was doing what he should be doing. And I guess one is in this field longer, you know, I know, you know, as you just said, I know what I think I can be a responsible ally for and what I can't be. And I think it's very important to kind of have that come to Jesus moment with yourself or come to Allah or come to whoever moment with yourself. Do you know? Where you go, I should or should not direct this thing. I should or should not audition for this thing. I don't wanna say, but with regards to casting, it's a little different I think for actors because I feel like actors are often the least, they have the least agency in the system. And so half the time is like, I just want the job, right? So I think it's really, we wanna be careful about faulting the actor when in fact we have to look to the decision makers, leadership, producers, directors, instead of like actors, shame on you for taking that gig. It's like, no, they wanna pay the rent, you know? So. Let me just add, for those of you that are joining us at the table and for those of you that have yet to join us at the table, feel free to grab the microphone from the panelists. You don't have to, you don't have to respect us in that way, so just, that's all. Go ahead. I'm gonna grab your mic. Yeah, I know. I just wanted to build on where we're kind of headed, which is. Say your name. Oh, I'm Lisa, and I teach here at Berkeley and the chair of the department here. And I'm a dancer, a choreographer and a dance maker. So it's interesting to approach theater and watch theater making and people talking about it. That being said, I wonder what process is. Well, first of all, say dance does something very different, it approaches the person making, the people in the dance are the dancers. There is that less, there isn't a layer of representation necessarily, unless you're doing like a repertoire piece or kind of a ballet story. You tend to be who you are as who you are as moving. So anyway, it's just an interesting difference, but it makes me think, I have two questions. One, is there a way to, and this is happening in theater more, but to allow the contemporary voices to allow that ensemble work or that making that comes forward from the people telling their stories as a kind of mode of theater making is that becoming more popular or something exciting to you all rather than telling somebody else's story and representing it. And then the other piece of this is what are some ways and processes that we can make theater and dance that don't reify, that don't re-colonize and re, just kind of keep centering whiteness and keep telling the stories over and over that we say are good. You know, we hold and dance often, it's the western balletic body dancer. We hold as good, as trained, as right, and we have to always work against that. So in acting and theater, what are ways or processes that we don't just continue to oppress through our practice? Really, I really enjoy that metaphor. It makes me think about, this is a topic that you really have to approach from an abstract perspective. It makes me think of shapes versus numbers. It makes me think of math versus art and how one of them comes with, one of them you're imposing yourself into the structure, into the system. As a director, that's what a director does. They make decisions from their own personal point of view from how they think the audience will respond from the feedback that they will get as a director. How do you remove yourself from that situation? I think that's more the question about authenticity. Sorry, I get nervous. It's, like you said, the actor in your sense is more of a vessel. You're kind of, you're gonna be the liquid that fills it. How do you, so maybe the question isn't about the authenticity of the actors, about the authenticity of the directors? And kind of stripping away your ego and understanding that, first of all, I also want to bring this back to what Miriam said earlier, because I think that history right now is the most, history is everything, and we're losing it. I think that nationalism has really distorted the way that society perceives Western elitism in general. And yeah, even in, I mean, if you wanna compare Samba or ballet, one takes place in an opera, one takes place outdoors. And there's all these, there's all these binaries, so how do we bring those binaries back into the middle? I think that's the most important thing to be asking. Um, I'm gonna try and just, my comment is maybe to the last three or four thoughts, really more than anything else, which is, which has to do for me, it brings me back to this question of craft. I believe, for instance, that an object is just an object until it is imbued with meaning. I believe, and I wanna recognize, that these plays that we watch, these productions, these performances that we see, they begin as literally letters on a page, right? This is not, like there's no, there's no one that is telling us that this is the totality of this character, right? So that nothing exists whole in the theater. Everything is a consequence of all of the different points of view and voices and hands that are on that work. So that, you know, the set is not a living thing until the actors step into it and start to engage with it. And the costumes are just crumpled on, you know, or hanging nicely on a rack, until the bodies inhabit it, right? And to the extent that, like, I think for me, this question of, like, of authorship, of representation, of like, how do we change this dynamic? It really is in the artist that, like, and this is why it becomes valuable to me to bring voices that have not historically been represented in this work into the work is because in the end it does, it reveals something about the work because the work is not a thing until it is worn by people. And the people is what will always change from generation to generation, from production to production. It's the artists that are engaged in the creation of it that are making choices that are utterly unique. They're utterly unique because of that particular combination of choices. And that to me is sort of a remarkable thing. Yeah, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to speak to you. We said something about devised work, right? Which I- We're just currently meeting. Yeah, that's, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in theater we call it devised work where everybody shows up and then you create a piece together that, which we probably stole from dance. I'm just gonna recognize that right here. Fair, fair. But I find that really fascinating. The concept of devised work is something I've been itching to do for a long time but haven't yet done. And I think when you talk about working in ways that don't center whiteness and that's something I think about a lot because I walk around a white body and I teach classes in a white body and I'm a director in a white body and I feel like I'm trying, consciously trying all the time not to center whiteness as much as I can being in a decision making position like almost everywhere I go. And I think that even in devised work, I mean I've seen devised work that is all about centering whiteness. That's 100% white. Even if it's you, you're centering whiteness even, a lot of times white people will be like, look at the diversity I'm creating. I've bent down to you and given you an opportunity, but I'm still catching the checks. And I'm still, and I think this is a super important consideration. How do we not center whiteness? How do we create real equity? How we put people of color in decision making roles? We put wink. I love you. We put people of color, you Eric. We put people of color in decision making roles and everything changes about the work that comes out. I think that that is working in ways that don't center whiteness come from giving the gatekeepers, placing people who are of color, who are women, who are disabled, who are genderqueer, into these gatekeeping positions and everything else follows. I think it's also about, and we talked about this a little bit when I was talking to the staff, but it was about just changing the idea of neutral. So when we did the Latinx, the Latinx theater commons, the LTC carnival 2017, we did 12 new plays and we made a decision that if the characters' ethnicity wasn't specified as either white, black, anything Asian, anything, the neutral default would be Latinx, not white, because we tend to default to white as neutral. So I think we tend to default to able-bodied. We tend to default to male, you know what I mean, or cis. We tend to default, you know what I mean? So I think changing the default is, I think, crucial to how we move. There's a million ways you can do this. Decenter whiteness. Because even in the classroom, now, if I have, here's your recourse reader. And, you know, you always say like, well, this is an Asian-American, female playwright or whatever. I always say now, this is a white male playwright, like even just to point it out as a specific positionality, like we're looking at a specific white male positionality. That is important. Everything, name it, everything. Yeah, I think that the concept of neutrality, what is normal, what is neutral, what do we default to, is so crucial. I'll borrow this for just a second. In Chicago, there's a number of theaters, many, many different kinds of theaters, many ethnically specific theaters. But there's also some theaters that, though they don't call themselves ethnically specific, primarily do, I would say, white work of the Western canon with white actors and white directors. And I just now refer to them as ethnically specifically white theaters. Yes. You know. This is something also that I think about a lot because we see a lot of funders giving these jillion dollar grants to these big white theaters to do their diversity outreach. Sorry about that. Play. And they. No, you're not. That's okay. But what I, you don't, but, and that's great. But what is less great, what is less great is that those same funders are not also funding the ethnically specific theater that has already been reaching that community. Correct. One thing that I would like to see that I've been advocating for is to see more grants that are designed for larger theaters to bring in, to co-produce with ethnically specific theaters that are already reaching those, what they call underserved audiences because of their underserved whiteness, I guess. Is what that, so. I guess I wanted to, oh yeah, hi, I'm Veronica. I wanted to hop back onto something you had said like an hour ago and it was talking about being an actor of color and feeling like you always have to be conforming to these white roles or things that are written for white people and then assimilating into this culture and stuff. And I guess another point I wanted to bring up too was just audiences. So I feel like sometimes it's like, oh, we're doing ghetto Shakespeare and now we're doing something super progressive because we're putting people of color in something that was written for white people but it still feels like the audiences are still for white people. So you have like Hamilton, which is like a bunch of black and Latino people on stage but then it's still for white people or you have maybe things going on at Kelshakes that are diverse but it's still for white people. So I think the next step in being progressive maybe is making sure that audiences are also as diverse as what you're showing on stage by making the works for people of color and not just casting people of color for white people. Okay. That's all I wanted to say. I went to see Midsummer Night's Dream at Bindle Stiff because I was directed by a former student and it was incredible. And if you ever go to Bindle Stiff in San Francisco, I highly recommend it and there are very few white people there and the mechanicals spoke into Gawleg. And whereas I know the play like the back of my hand, there were some moments where the whole audience is laughing and my husband and I are just sitting there like, okay. And it was a really cool experience and we came back and I brought my kids. I don't see nothing twice but because it was important to be, this wasn't for us. It was beautifully directed and I loved it and it was awesome in so many ways but it wasn't for white people and that was great and I thought it was an important experience for my kids to have as well. So yeah. I'm curious why Bindle Stiff thought Midsummer was an important play for the Filipino community. That's what I'm interested in. I don't know, ask Alan. Yeah. She's been playing for a long time. Hi, yeah. My name's Jana. I have been teaching in Oakland for 11 years and bringing kids to Cal Shakes for most of that time and my question is related to this idea of audience and who it's for and the question of the director's choices, the actor's choices and then ultimately, if it lands or not. And so my question is pretty straightforward for directors because I mean, I do direct my own students but it looks very different than I'm sure your experience does but my question is if you do that work and you pay attention to the representation and you make it for the people you wanna make it for and people hate it, do you regret that? Is that like, oh, no, I'm serious. Like do you go, oh, I missed this opportunity or this didn't land or I'm like, oh, I should have done it differently or do you go like right on and made what I wanted to make and if they didn't like it, it's their problem. So that's my first question. And then my second question which I know you know is coming is what if their kids, does that make it different? Because Eric and I had some conversations mostly over Facebook about the really brilliant Othello that was done and I took 250 11-year-olds to see it and I went to the dress rehearsal actually and I asked, I said, I'm gonna bring 250 11-year-olds. What do you think about that? What did I say? And I didn't ask you, Lance said I wouldn't do it. That's what he said to me, he said I wouldn't bring my 11-year-old. And I said, shit, because I'm bringing them all. I can't get out of it now. And ultimately it was an incredible experience. The sort of safe Othello they could have seen would not have started the conversations that it started for them. And it was really, really amazing. But it also took obviously like a lot of work for me to sort of help them process what they'd seen and I worry since we're talking about like having the person in the room who has the experience, like when I'm processing that with my students, I'm not that person in the room who has that experience and I'm having to translate that for them back home in a different way and it's not about what's going on in the director's room or in rehearsal, it's like now it's the responsibility of someone else to help like very young people interpret it. So that's a bunch of questions. So do you regret it? Do you regret it if it's kids and does a theater community have a responsibility to its younger community to help them understand? That's not necessarily to say dumb it down or make it safe and accessible, but you know what's the responsibility there for very young people, not college young people? I appreciate with that perspective. I also think that I think it's crucial to is breaking down these very like bubble shelter lifestyles especially if we're here, then we all live. And as I think that children today, especially in terms of like American culture and American materialism, I feel like taking these risks as a director and really getting things that you probably get like some negative, a lot of negative feedback on, but that are really are, but if the point that it's making has truth involved then I think it needs to be said and it's crucial and I don't think there's any age, I think that when you can form sentences and interact with people then it's not too late, I mean it's not too soon. I think that exposure is what breeds morality and intelligence and exposure comes from not always pretty nice things and the sooner, especially in terms of childhood development we can cope with those because each time we do we learn something from it, we learn how to cope with other things in the future, the sooner you're able to do that really like the more of a head start you get in life. So I think that's crucial as a, I'm not a director at all, I'm an anthropology major, but as a director. I mean, I hate to say but that's why South Park is what it is, you know, because it pushes those boundaries and parents were rioting, but it's a, for some topics it's a more like factual news source than others. So it's really, it's a really interesting dichotomy. I run a theater for young audiences in Chicago and my good friend Halle Gordon runs Steppenwolf for Young Adults which is for high school. We run from, you know, I'd say elementary school, my theater and Halle runs high school. And I, you know, I mean I think that theater, I mean there are certain things that we, you know, those of us who are in theater for young audiences or theater for young adults do creating study guides and et cetera to contextualize, you know, Halle's one of the bravest artistic directors I know in the country and tackles questions, difficult questions, head on for a Chicago audience, which is an urban contemporary multi-ethnic audience. And so I think absolutely you wanna do work that reflects the world that people, the kids live in, young people live in now and at the same time provide context. You know, either if the theater is a theater that's not built for young adults or young audiences, then it's incumbent upon the teacher to figure out, well how am I gonna create context for this? But those theaters that are for young audiences create often a lot of material for the teachers to help contextualize the work for the students and provide, not contextualize, but provide prompts, provide ways to discuss the work. I guess after what you said a long time ago, sorry. I have a quick follow-up question. You said a long time ago, you know, students come expecting something and if they see something else, they get confused. Like well they think that's what Shakespeare wrote. And so the study guides are amazing but also if you go and you're totally shocked, like I was lucky to see the dress rehearsal because I was like, okay, I can get my ducks in a row. Like I know how to like get these kids ready and like no this isn't a dress rehearsal, that's really what the set looks like. And you know, like kind of prepare them for just the really basic stuff that they were not gonna get. But if you have a teacher coming in without sort of that background knowledge of like there's some stuff that's gonna happen on stage that's gonna be confusing, you know. I don't know, I think with Shakespeare, people come in expecting like, oh we're gonna see Romeo and Juliet. I know how to teach that, you know. Like I've taught Romeo and Juliet. And then you come and it's like, oh this is Romeo and Juliet and it's inside out. And then it's like we go home with more questions than we started with and that's great. But I think sometimes the kids are like, like I don't know what Brechtian is. Like I don't know how to process this. They're being stretched socially by the representation but also artistically by like what the hell did I just see? So that's cool. But I think that context is important too for them. Like in the study guide maybe. Yeah, I total, I mean that's totally right. I don't, I would, to answer your questions. Yes, I would totally do it. And I don't care if they hate it. And it is incumbent of us absolutely to like make context for it. All those, yes, absolutely. Like I know the blueprint set a ranch house. I'm building a tree house instead. And so hopefully, I mean I guess the question is as an educator, do you think the theater is there to support your pedagogy? Or is it there to, right? Like if you teach Romeo and Juliet and you think my production's there to support what you're teaching then that's maybe not a great thing, right? Because oftentimes the Shakespeare's that I make tend to challenge what Mr. Shakespeare wrote back then and I'll make a lot of weird choices that he's not in the play. Why is that not in the play? So I guess it depends on what your goals are. When you bring 250 kids to go see Othello. Yeah, I guess that's it. Also, you know, American TYA, Theater for Young Audiences in the US is some of the most protective theater in the world. If you see Theater for Young Audiences in Amsterdam or in Australia, it's much more engaged with a difficult world actually, much more. We tend to be a little bit overprotective. I mean, when Anne Bogart starts her book, oh, I forget which one it is. It's not on directing. It's the earlier one. But she talks about the first time she saw theater and she was an army brat and it was, I think, in Japan and she didn't know what and it was a production of the Scottish play and she didn't understand what the hell she was seeing and its impact was phenomenological rather than intellectual and it created an artist of her. You know what I mean? I think sometimes we worry so much about contextualizing where sometimes it's okay to be baffled. It's okay to not understand. It's okay to be faced with something that's overwhelming that you can't quite process readily. And that's actually what art tends to do is create, as Anne Bogart will say, create shapes for our distress or create shapes for our anxiety. This is very much like what I was gonna say in that when you say that you are not equipped to you were not in the room, you're not the person in the room to explain it to interpret it to these kids. But you are the person in the room because you have the same experience they had. It's not about the person creating it. You're the person seeing it. You saw it too. So you have all had that same experience and how the audience receives the work is a completely different thing than how we create it. You should be able to walk in off the street and experience a play and get something from that experience whether you know the context or not. And I took a bunch of students to see a play The Salt Plays by John Tracy and they were very perplexing in a lot of ways. But I also took my kids who were like 10 at the time. My kids loved it and I had to endure hours of them playing Achilles or Ajax, no it was Ajax. It was like Ajax in the kitchen running around imitating Dave Mayer. And they loved it and my students had all these questions and so I remember asking my kids, well like what did you think this means? And they were like, oh this or that or I think it was a bird. I thought it was an angel. So that experience as a whole, it is okay to not understand. It's okay to be perplexed. It's okay to make your own meaning. It's okay to approach the work at face value. Right, if there's a way to have critical conversation without feeling obligated to provide answers or empirical answers to what they saw, then I think it's right. I think that's the thing you can absolve yourself as like the educator of those students is that I can conduct a discourse without providing like empirical like, oh the director thought this. Right, yeah. The questioning and the journey is the point. Not arriving at the answer. This is a little bit off topic but one of my favorite things is I was reading in theater for your audience is that the best time to introduce children to Shakespeare is when they're very little, like three because of their interest in language, actually. And by the time they're 16, they're like, oh my God, why do I have to read Hamlet? It's killing me, you know. But at three, and it's funny, well I'm not gonna tell this story. I just think that I think it's interesting. Okay, I will tell the story. So on Shakespeare Day in Chicago, they were encouraging people to speak in verse and so I was teaching my kids, my daughter was three, various things in Spanish, I mean Spanish, Shakespeare. One of which was the Scottish Kings tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps forth this pedipay from day to day. I'm not gonna tell the rest of the story. It's annoying. Okay, so the end of the story is she's learning it and then later, like two weeks later, she wanted to do something and my husband was saying, we can't do that today, we're gonna do it tomorrow. And she's like, no, but I really wanted to do it today. And he said, no, we're gonna do it tomorrow. And she kept on him. He kept saying, no, we're gonna do it tomorrow. Finally, she goes, oh, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps forth this pedipay from day to day. She was three. But there's just something about, the bigger point that I'm making is children meet the work where they are and where they are. And there's things we do and things we don't do, but they meet the work. Now, 11 is an age where students, children are starting to think critically and politically. So it's a different age. I think also, I had only read Shakespeare until I saw my first Shakespeare piece, which was at Cal. So I didn't see Shakespeare until I was at college. So one of the things I didn't realize really until then, and I had been so used to just reading it as like a text and stuff that I was like, this is just something you read. It's done a certain way. Then I saw it and I was like, whoa, that's not what I thought it was gonna be. It was so much more fun. And I think just letting them know that it's just two different mediums. Like you can't just, like just seeing it on a page is just so different than seeing it in person or like seeing it as a play because it's just a different medium and there's different, like casting has different implications and stuff. So just letting them know like, that it's just a different thing completely. Oh, I have a whole different topic. So I don't, I wanted to talk about authenticity and just I think I'm- What's your name? Jamila, I'm Jamila. I'm of the opinion that I hope that one day we get to a stage where, you know, if it is a black actor, if it's a black character, it's a black actor. And the word black has many different things too. You know, like there's African-American, there's Caribbean, there's African, there's all sorts of things, you know. I'm still at a place where there was like Bob Marley the musical or Bob Marley the play and you know, the actors were mostly African-American and I'm like, but you know, we could have found some Jamaican actors just because that's what it's about. And I think I really hope that we do get to the place where if it's a black disabled character, we find a black disabled actor to play the role and I really hope we get there in a few years. And I wonder what y'all think about what that will do to actors and like the craft of acting. Because like even when I talk to some of my friends right now who are actors, you know, you wanna go for that job where you're playing a trans actor, a trans character, or you wanna go for that role, you're playing someone disabled because it's a challenge for you as an actor to go through this process and become something else. So do you think the world of acting is gonna change? And just speaking to that a little bit. It's a great question. Something that Desdemona said a while ago was, you know, we shouldn't put it upon the actor to about whether or not they should audition for roles. I slightly disagree. I mainly agree that it's ultimately the decision makers, the institution, the producer, the directors, et cetera, should be, the responsibility ultimately lies with the decision makers for their decision making. But I also think, you know, we don't wanna baby actors either. Actors can be political and engaged and can be responsible allies themselves. I think something that I learned from talking to the trans community in Chicago, which I didn't, it's gonna seem obvious when I say it, but at the time I didn't understand it. They said, when you put a cisgendered actor in a trans role, you underscore a kind of belief in dominant society that trans is just a costume. And that was deep, do you know, that it's just a costume, not a real person. And so, or not a full identity. And so I, I don't know what it will do to the field of acting, except in as much as I think, hopefully, enrich the field, you know, when there are more trans actors, more actors of differing ability and more, and I think, and I hope that we'll all begin to understand one another more deeply. Because as somebody who feels like I'm pretty woke, that thing that I just said didn't even occur to me until a trans actor told me. That's what it feels like. I'm gonna hold you for one moment. We're about to lose our friends on HowlRound TV, so we just wanna thank everyone for watching the stream. Thank you so much. We're gonna keep going for a little while longer, because I think we can. But I do wanna acknowledge the time we're at 8.30, which was the window of time that we were here. I wanna thank Lisa Weymour and the University, UC Berkeley, TDPS Theater Department, Department of Theater Dance and Performance Studies. And I wanna thank everyone at Cowshakes for being out here. And I wanna thank our amazing panelists, Desimona Chang, Lisa Porte, Melissa Hillman. And I wanna thank HowlRound. Bye. Yeah, I guess there's a difference between how it affects the feel, versus how it affects the personal lives of individual actors, who might feel limited by what they can and can't do. And I think if individual actors wanna challenge themselves, sure, take a class, dude in class. But I think there's a kind of, you can train yourself to be a better actor without avoiding or kind of dodging the reality of a false representation, right? Because there's a thing, it's like what we say, like what we do in school is not what we do professionally, right? And they're two very different fields. One is pedagogy and one is actual, like public interfacing, public discourse. And there's actually, there's a greater social and political responsibility professionally that might don't feel academically, so. I don't know if you've strayed or not. I was actually thinking about what's the discussion gonna be on the drive home? Um. Well, I'm trying to process this. Also, I teach 11-year-olds in a pretty diverse district. And I'm the, I am the tall cis white guy in the room. So, and I would not really call myself woke. I'm kind of at a groggy stage and I'll freely admit that because I'm still figuring stuff out. But in terms of this, all the stuff that's been talked about in terms of my processing is, it's storytelling. You know, what's the story that the director wants to tell? I mean, I'm an actor. So, I'm a co-storyteller with the director. And because I'm at the age where I am now, there's a whole bunch of things I would never attempt because it's about how do I fairly represent a group? I mean, there are things that I would never even think of auditioning for, even though it's in my age, size, whatever range. Because it's unfair to that group. And I can't tell that story. And to my students who are 11 to 14, you know, we all look at whatever the story is and they give me their interpretation. Because they're gonna take the story, however they receive it, or however they receive it, be it based on whatever their home conditions are. And I learn all kinds of things in terms of perception. And I have completely strayed from my original point, but I guess it's, how do we wanna tell the story? Do we wanna keep the racism in it? Do we, because we think it's a period piece? Or do we think the racism isn't so important, but the core story is the heart of the story is what's important. Take this back, I need to do it. No, no, that was amazing. Let me hold, just hold the thought for a moment, because Tiara, hello Tiara, is gonna be passing out some surveys for you all that have joined us today. As we are bringing this to a close, which is the goal, because apparently we have 10 minutes left of video. If you wouldn't mind those of you that have participated in the evening, please consider filling out one of these surveys. It's very helpful to us in terms of our reporting to foundations and whatnot. I don't have anything. Those foundations that give us gajillions of dollars too. I think everyone should give Eric gillions of dollars. Oh, that's very kind, thank you. I'm gonna use that, we're gonna use that in a, good, okay, good. Do you wanna say something? No, no, no. John just handed this back to me because he wanted it. I wanna say something, can I say something? Yes. You know, it's interesting because I'm a little bit, Jamila and I have had these conversations before about, and this goes back to that earlier question about that box within which we carry identity and who defines where that line is drawn that we qualify as something. And I think, it's very interesting to me because I think it's a very dangerous idea. And I speak of this, I'm trying to speak of this objectively because I think I know where I land in this conversation. But objectively speaking, there's a moment when, in the theater at least, right, you carve so much into what is like a real, sort of like the lived experience representation on stage where you carve so much that it's impossible for anybody to work as an actor anymore because there simply aren't enough stories that are being told with that particular person. And the danger I think has to do with this idea of the danger. It's just the danger, right? Which is that, and this is for me where equity comes in, this conversation of equity because on some level what we're talking about is equitable representation on stage, right? So at the very least, if there are characters or roles, at the very least, if there are roles that are being written for a culture, a person of a specific ethnicity, for instance, that we sort of demand that it be played by that person, by a person who is representative of that. The danger is at some point someone is gonna come along and say, well, why doesn't it work in the other direction? Right? And I think to me that's kind of where I find myself right now in the kind of, and I don't mean to bring politics into this, but it's just who I am, right? Which is that I find more and more and more and more that the thing that for me we're wrestling with is this need to simplify, right? The impulse to sort of like to have, to have like to just know that something is right or that something is wrong and that, and that, you know, and I think, and that's all sorts of reasons, right? It's like because we tweet all the time, because we get things in sound bites because things only, like things live in like 60 minute kind of bursts of information because no one writes long letters anymore and because no one talks on the phone for three hours anymore and because, you know, like more and more and more we're losing, we're losing our capacity to hold the space for an extended period of time. And that part of what I think to your question earlier around sort of like how audiences respond to this work, to the work that we're doing. I mean, I think what we've all been talking about tonight if I were to wrap something into this is that what we're talking about is this question of the value of complexity, that part of what we're trying to do is we're trying to say that there's like, that there's no, that there's the easy way and there's the hard way to understand something. And that the easy way is kind of often where like for me the first level of engagement in the theater, the first level of engagement is what I entertain. And that's something that we all try and do and we hopefully do as well as we can and that we entertain somebody. But the hard way is to go beyond that, right? The hard way is to be able to both simultaneously entertain but also to really kind of complicate because I do, I believe, this is what I believe, I believe more than anything else that anything of any value that's ever been created in this world took effort. It took work. There's no easy way to explain why these choices were made. There's no easy way to explain why we're feeling the way that we feel when we see that particular actor in that particular role on that particular stage. There's nothing easy about that and there shouldn't be anything easy about that. There's something along the way we have to rediscover our hunger for that kind of complexity, our hunger for that kind of dissonance, our hunger for that kind of messiness. Thank you. I was just gonna say, I thought when you said there's nothing that you've seen, no great piece of art, I thought you were gonna say that doesn't complicate rather than simplify. I was thinking the same thing. Yeah, me too, me too. So we all, yeah, we all, yeah. But the, you know, TV, there are certain forms of media that are meant to simplify and certain forms that are meant to complicate so that we have to look at it again and again and again and again and try to understand who we are and what we are. And I really was moved by what you just said about the loss of space for extended periods of time, space that we occupy together for extended periods of time. In some ways, theater's one of the last ones. Yeah. Cool, cool. Cool. All right, I'm wrapping. Yeah, and also, no, I'm just gonna say that, that's also about recognizing there's multiple narratives in any situation, right? When we're talking about representation and we keep talking about, we kept kind of going race slash debt or slash, right, able-bodiedness, et cetera, that things exist in multiple narratives. Even inside one culture, there are many narratives inside a singular culture too. So I think it just becomes, you know, we do our best to make sense of things. And because directors have to make choices, that's our job. Our job is to make choices of every choice we make. There's an infinite number of choices we're not making. So, right, so our job in some ways is counter to, our job is to simplify and reduce. I feel like that's my job as a director. I take Mr. Shakespeare and I simplify and I clarify it. And part of that is the kind of, the necessity of paring it down, you know, and what do we compromise when we take what is very, very complex and distill it into a production. I was supposed to wrap up. Sit, sit, sit, sit, sit. Yeah, and simplify it, you know. Melissa? Eric? Do you want to add anything? I, I, I do, I do, I love this idea that theater is there to complicate. That great theater is there to complicate. And even if it's entertaining and even if it's fun, there's always, it is always one of my best experiences in the theater. I've always complicated something for me, made something more complex for me. And I, I, I don't know where, I don't, I, I don't know what authenticity is. I don't. And like as I, I'm, I, yes, I'm disabled. I have a mobility disability. I came to it. I wasn't born with it. And as a significant chronic pain element, it has, I mean, there's all these different things about my disability. That are so specific to me that I, I don't even know if a disabled actor, if I see a disabled actor on stage, if they're gonna be, if I'm gonna see that something and then the way I would maybe somebody my age or where I, I don't even know. Who knows? So sometimes there's a connection with someone who's completely different than you are. But I do feel like coming back to this point about equity and representation. To see yourself on stage, to create opportunities, we know that theater creates empathy. And not just because I'm seeing you go through an experience, but neurologically we know that theater creates empathy and creating empathy for people who are different than us. I think is one of the primary, contemporary functions of theater. Humans need stories. We need to tell stories and we need to hear stories. We need to make stories. We are narrative-based creatures. When we die, what is left in the world are stories. You go to a funeral, what do you do in a funeral, but you tell stories about the person who's gone. When you, when your physical body is gone, what's left in that space are narratives, are your stories. We need these stories. And to create different narratives to enable different people to see themselves on stage. And to enable other people to see difference on stage. And to create those neurological pathways that create empathy will change the world. I believe that. And that's why I cast the way I do. And that's why I do what I do. I'm gonna have to end on that. You can, we're gonna continue this like, but I'm gonna just say thank you to our panelists. The tape is going out. Thank you to everyone that hung out. This was fun. And we'll do it again.