 I have to take my, I took all these notes last night in like a fit of peak, and I can't read without my glasses, and this is what my handwriting looks like. So we're also in a culture of continuing violence against women, of continuing violence against Native Americans and first Native citizens, systemic oppressions against people of different abilities in the disabled. We have people who are stuck in cycles of poverty and addiction, and there's a thing you should know about Oregon for those of you who are visiting my beautiful state, that Oregon, when it came into the U.S. in 1859, it was during the compromise years leading up to the Civil War, and Oregon was incorporated as a state. They agreed to not have slavery here, which was great, but in the compromise they also established themselves as a white state. Oregon and Idaho both were established with no legal way for people of color to move here, including the Native Americans who were already here. So this is the land that we sit, and that is the country that we have inherited. You know, I'm in a position of seeing anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic violence on the rise. I had an incident in Ashland just last week, which was interesting for me as a nice Jewish girl from Long Island. And we're a bunch of artists, we're a bunch of dramaturgs, and I know for myself, I often, often wonder, am I doing enough? Is my contribution to the world through theater actually worth a good goddamn, as my father would say? And I don't actually know, but I will keep trying, and I will ask all of you to keep trying, and I'm especially looking at the students in the early career dramaturgs and asking you to be a little bit more thoughtful than I was myself when I was starting my career and asking yourself, why are you choosing to make theater? How is this your contribution to the world? And to really check in with yourself as you continue through your career to make sure that this is what you really wanna be doing and that you are making a contribution. When I started my career in the storefront theaters in Chicago, in the comedy scene in Chicago, it was a profoundly misogynistic culture, and for those of you who read the article about Profiles Theater that was published in The Reader a few weeks ago, that's where I came up, and I have to say the number of text messages flying around me and my girlfriends from the people I've traveled my career with for the last 20 years, and what we accepted is unacceptable, and so I ask you to approach all of your encounters and make sure that you are feeling at a place where you can call it out for being unacceptable, whichever injustice it is that you see. We don't have the luxury of not thinking about these things anymore. I personally believe that this is the hopeful part of me. Hi, welcome, you ready? I feel like we are in the last convulsive days of white supremacy and the patriarchy, and that is leading to a huge level of anger and violence from people who feel that they're about to lose power. And that is how I approach every day that I am in these dying days of it, and I will survive it, and I ask all of us to be vigilant and to know that this is what is happening. The shit that has been real for our colleagues of color, for women, for the disabled, it's now real for all of us. None of us have the luxury of ignoring it anymore. We don't have to, white folks have the ability to just walk through the world and not care about these things every day, and I'm gonna ask us all to care about it together. We just can't ignore it. As artists, we are part of the world, and we are doing theater, we are putting up that mirrored nature, and what is that nature that we wanna show, and what is the future that we wanna build? I have the luxury of working at a theater where this is, where equity, diversity, inclusion are actually built into the core of the theater. It is at the heart of our work, and it doesn't always work really well. It is hard, hard work, but it is built in, and for me, that has been very gratifying to sort of know that when I walk into a meeting, if there is something that is hinky for me that I can bring it up, I can ask the question, I can dramaturg my institution, and that is what I ask all of us who are at institutions to continue doing. We have a social justice mission at OSF that we consider theater to be part of a social justice mission. We're still doing Hamlet, and we're still doing Hamlet in Oregon, but what are we doing? What are the conversations that we are having? I will just mention briefly before I turn this over to my esteemed colleagues up here, just a few of the things that are happening at OSF, and I'm looking right at Louis Douthis so she can raise her hand when I forget something that is dearly important because I did write this out at three in the morning. On our stages, we are responding to the culture of equity, diversity, and inclusion. We are doing nontraditional and expansive casting. We are looking at representation of historically underrepresented groups in our programming and in our commissioning programs. Louis and I in particular both work for commissioning programs where we have specifically looked to tip the balances that we have inherited and make sure that we are having a conversation with what we believe represents America, and Canada, hi Canada. I'm sorry, I'm getting a little emotional. We also had an incident in Ashlyn a few weeks ago which I imagine anyone on Facebook probably knows about where a company member, an African American woman, a beloved woman in our company, and not that this should happen to anyone, but Christiana is a particularly beloved person in our group. She was walking her dog, actually two blocks from where I live, and she was approached by a man on a bicycle and her life was threatened. And her life was threatened that in Oregon it is still legal to kill a black person and only spend a day and a half in jail, and that the KKK is alive and well in Oregon, which it is. And she took to Facebook to talk about it and it opened up this groundswell at OSF which has been gratifying as a weird word but I can't quite think of another, but it's led to two open dialogue sessions for our company as well as a community engagement event which happened sponsored by the university, the synagogue and OSF and a couple of other groups as well. We're about, our town is only 10,000 people and about 300 people showed up to our local armory, our community center to discuss issues of race and privilege. In our fourth of July, Ashland I may have mentioned for those of you who are at our panel yesterday which was a lot funnier, I'm sorry, was it's relentlessly adorable and part of the adorableness of living in a small town is they have a tremendous fourth of July parade where it can never figure out who's actually standing on the sidelines because it feels like the entire town is marching down Bain Street and Oregon Shakespeare Festival organized the company to wear Black Lives Matter shirts as part of our entry and for those of you who haven't been to our theater we have an enormous fake Elizabethan theater that we've run a flag off of and last year when marriage equality passed we ran up the rainbow flag and this year we have run up the Black Lives Matters flag. We're doing this in Oregon. We are also invested, there's a diversity officer coming in to work with the company. There's a different level of recruiting going on specifically through our fair program which is fellowships, apprenticeships, internships and residencies. So it's the starting artist way of coming into OSF, the work that they're doing in there. We have a community engagement department, a community production department and an audience development department. I also ask if anybody is really interested our website is particularly difficult to navigate but if you just Google Oregon Shakespeare Festival Audience Manifesto you will see one of the most beautiful documents ever created about the kind of audience you would like your theater to have. I have been in the position of standing up for things and for people who have known me for a long time they know I have a propensity for standing on chairs because I'm short. I have also been fired before and I will tell you that it is completely worth it to stand up for what you believe is right and that if you get fired eventually you'll be asked to lead a panel that's being televised and howl around TV. That these are the things to carry with you. There is a thing that I tell my son that I will ask all of us to remember which is that being brave is not the same thing as not being scared. Being brave is being scared and doing it anyway. And so we can all be scared, we can all be sad but we still have to fucking do something. On that note, I will just say one more thing about the larger institutions and to a certain extent educational institutions as well. The regional theater movement when it started 50, 60 years ago, a little bit longer for some theaters these theaters were founded by very, very wealthy people. They were founded in a large extent by white men who maybe were married and maybe had a family but had the means to have a spouse at home and lots of help. And the systems within those regional institutions are what we are still trying to work within which I think is quickly becoming a square peg round hole situation and yet we are sort of and we come up every time you bring it up you get the cruise ship metaphor that you can't turn a cruise ship fast. I would very much like to go on a cruise. I really need a vacation but I don't actually work for a cruise ship. I work for a theater. And if we can't be part of making the change then we should be off finding our founding our own theaters or doing our own thing or voting and joining politics. We should be voting and joining politics anyway. Especially in the United States we have a pretty big scary thing coming at us in November. And I would like to open it up to all of you. I'm sorry if that was really rambly but again it was three in the morning and I have terrible handwriting. So I'm gonna let my panelists introduce themselves and talk a little bit about their work and we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. I'm from New York. I don't mind being interrupted. So yeah just yeah don't don't don't stand on propriety I think with any of us. There is a runner in the audience with a microphone. So if you have a question please feel free to raise your hand and we will take them as they come. I would very much enjoy this to be more of a conversation than us yammering at you even though I am still yammering and I am aware of that. But let's all be here together okay? Okay? Okay. All right should we just go down the road? Hi I'm Dimee Roberts. I have lived in Oregon since I was 10 by way of Asia. I am biracial Asian American and most of my work has been in either theater or public radio both of which have had little interest in historically our little contact, little interest with people of color and it has been an uphill battle in both disciplines for me in both areas. In the 90s I wrote quite a few Asian American plays that were produced here and elsewhere around the country. I took time off to concentrate on Asian American history series on public radio which was aired on 230 stations around the country and when I started to emerge back and look around at what was happening in theater here I noticed things like white actors donning Kabuki makeup in really inventive plays that are Kabuki Shakespeare or Kabuki this, Kabuki that and then I noticed that there was a play that was produced with mostly white actors that was set in a Tokyo manga bar written by a Japanese playwright and this was 2014 and I said yeah this just can't happen anymore. It just can't. I wasn't really actively involved in theater except through a local radio show, a stage and studio that I produced as a volunteer but I started having conversations with local Asian American actors and who were auditioning, who were good, who were not getting roles and certainly not cast as Asians in an Asian play. At the same time Portland Center Stage was doing Chinglish, David Henry Wong's play and I started conversations with Portland Center Stage as far as doing a reading of another David Henry Wong play, Dance in the Railroad. It had occurred to me that it had been more than 20 years since the David Henry Wong play had been produced here. I was an understudy actually for that one and that was OSF Portland back then and it was Am Butterfly and that was in 1993. So what happened? That's what I wanted to investigate. So we did this reading, people started coming and so we started to gel together and I took it on as a project of my non-profit media rights to produce about three to four stage readings a year of Asian American playwrights that are likely never to be produced here. What is happening? What is going on? Why are Asian Americans not being represented here? When I was growing up in Oregon I would assume I have to look back on the demographics but it was mostly white. It was, we were the only interracial family in a rural area. In the 2010 census there were 83%, it had Oregon is stated to have an 83% white population. As of last year it's grown to 87%. So it isn't that there couldn't be diversity but we are perhaps not doing a good enough job of drawing more people of color here. We are not necessarily offering what needs to be happening here in Oregon for that to change. So as part of Theater Diaspora we do demographics. We have a survey that we hand out to everybody who comes and we have a response rate sometimes of 55% to 80% and it depends on the raffle items that we're giving away whether or not people want to fill them out or not but as an average we have about 44% people of color come to our readings. So we know that if there is something that is worth seeing that has inclusion that people can see on stages as themselves and as represented that there is an audience for it. We'd like to grow that audience actually and so that's what we're working towards. We are in contact with a lot of Asian American playwrights who send us their material just from hearing about us and we have personal relationships with them and with other theater companies. In fact OSF is hosting the consortium of Asian American Theater Alliances Conference Festival the first week of October in Ashland. So there will be a convergence and perhaps the most Asian Americans in Ashland ever. I would suspect happening that week. So I'm at a point where I am not necessarily angry. I'm saddened. I'm in grief over what's been happening. It's been happening for a long time. It isn't new. That's what I'm sad about and it hasn't changed. It hasn't changed in my lifetime when I thought it would to a degree where I feel like we're making some progress. I don't have any answers. I don't think there are any answers. You have to keep trying a lot of different things. And so for me this art for art's sake is not a luxury. We can afford it anymore. I am very mission driven whether it's been in public radio, whether it's been in theater. Very mission driven to give voice to voices that are unheard, that are neglected, that aren't represented. So my questions for everyone here is how do you choose place? How can you do something that doesn't have the lens? Your particular lens or a particular lens that allows fewer roles for people of color. How can we change that? How can that system change? I think it has to be systematic. Other questions I have are how do you involve communities of color? Not just here come to our audience. How do you involve them from the very beginning stages? As dramaters, how do you go to cultural communities and have them come to rehearsals? Actually Milagro does a really good thing. I point to Olga Sanchez and I hope she talks about that where she invites members of the community to come or she has invited as a director but as an artistic director in the past as well. And I think it's something Milagro probably will keep doing. They invite people to come to a tech rehearsal. That's pretty gutsy. When I went there I went, oh, oh, I didn't realize this was happening. But it was so gutsy and it really, they got feedback directly from community members and colleagues on this new play that they were developing. So how do you include people? Not just at a tech rehearsal but in choosing plays in being part of the rehearsal process. Often actors of color and directors of color are often the only or probably geometrics of color are the only people that are the cultural representatives. How can that change? How can we expand that to have more inclusion in the process itself? I think I had some other questions but I'll just wait. I'll wait for the lady. I'm Desmond Galant. I am originally from Montreal but have been living in Florida for 20 years now. I started working there. I started as a grad student and then postgraduate started working as literary manager at a theater company called Florida Stage. That was dedicated to new play development. And then from there moved on to teaching and have been at the university now for about 12 years and have become chair of the department. And through the course of that whole experience have really encountered these questions in various ways. And I think through the university has offered a new lens, a new way of looking at it and in terms of engaging with the university population, the students we serve but also students from other areas and who come into contact with us through various courses and how to approach this whole question through that lens. I think it also comes from obviously as you were raising choice of season and moving from a theater that was dedicated to the development of new plays to an institution that has to approach this with a greater variety in mind in terms of offering the students that we work with a variety of experiences in terms of the type of material they're going to encounter. It becomes a bit more of a challenge in terms of the type of material that perhaps looking at material from past generations and past centuries perhaps is seemingly at least on the surface not as open to an inclusive and diverse approach to casting. And I think that's on the surface. I mean, I think it takes at this point not much imagination to move beyond that but it seemingly I find sometimes a challenge and maybe later on I'll talk about some of those specifics but a challenge to get some of my coworkers to envision a way of looking at a play that has a whole tradition associated with it in a new light, a new way of looking at it so that we can work with ways of approaching diversifying the cast, the audience, the experience of people who are working on it. And then interestingly enough, having sort of come full circle now, the producing artistic director of Florida Stage, Lou Turrell, he and I began conversing about bringing, starting a company on campus and a professional resident theater company on campus and that's exactly what we did and we've gotten great support from the university and so now we've got a company on campus that is again dedicated to the development of new work so it's really gonna compliment what we do in the academic realm in terms of the type of material that we use and what is going on in that space. And an interesting question for me, I think as sort of grappling with audiences and using diversity in a way to include I think age, our audience traditionally is pretty old so how do we engage younger audiences? And I think I'm seeing a trend that I'd kind of love to explore of plays that are being written today being written shorter and shorter and shorter. Of the about 30 new plays that we did readings of at Theater Lab, I would say maybe half a dozen were two act plays of an hour and a half or longer. The vast majority were an hour and a half an hour and 20 straight through and we had some that were even an hour and 10. And as this became apparent, I was looking at and asking the question of what is going on here? Are we creating an hour long live drama, television drama? Hopefully we'll never get to the half hour sitcom situation because I think paying $25 to go in and sit for half an hour and watch a show and then leave. Right now, even the hour and 10 felt completely unsatisfying. But I think I don't know if there's this effort to reach out to this new audience, this audience that seemingly has a shorter attention span and therefore we're writing to that or are we in danger of actually creating that audience by doing this type of work, by doing plays that are just an hour and 10 minutes long or just an hour and 20 minutes long and not taking an intermission and not having an act one and an act two. And all of a sudden you're gonna create an audience whose expectation is is that I come in, I sit for an hour and 20 minutes and I get to go home. And so for me, that's an interesting question and that's become really apparent to me because the professional Theater, Theater Lab is doing that type of play while we're doing Ibsen, Shakespeare, Carroll Churchill, a wide variety of work, but all pretty much sitting in this two act or three act form. And how is that, how do we keep an audience for that or do we have to go to the hour long drama, TV drama? Hi, I'm Stephen Clella. I'm originally from Philadelphia but I moved to Toronto about 15 years ago and about 11 years ago I became the dramaturg at Young People's Theater. I'm now the Associate Artistic Director in Dramaturg. Young People's Theater creates professional work by adult performers for young people ages six months to 18 months. So when Beth asked me to be on this panel a couple weeks ago, she said, do you want to be on a diversity panel? And I said, well, I'm a white guy. I could be, I guess, why would you want me? And she said, well, I want to talk about young audiences and how that affects diversity. And I said, well, okay, I'm kind of interested in that. She goes, you know, because you're growing the audience of the future. And I said, well, fuck that. I'm not actually, I've got a very important audience right now. If some of them choose to go to theater in the future, that's lovely. But really that's not what I want to do because I want to engage the people who are coming to see our shows. Because that, to me, is what is important. And being in Toronto, I think we're in, somebody can fact check me on this, one of the most diverse cities in North America, if not the world, and the bulk of our audience is coming to us from the schools. So by default, we have a fairly diverse audience already sitting in front of us. But we have to do even more work to continue to cultivate that, to provide accessibility. Our company just had our 50th anniversary, but in our 40th, we cut our ticket prices by 40%. So that no ticket would be more than $15 to help provide access. And then on top of that, we also provide additional ticket subsidies through fundraising to ensure that there's access for schools on the Learning Opportunities Index, which are the most underserved schools in Toronto. So what we're trying to do is make sure that the audience we have is diverse as possible. And then our role becomes to ensure that that audience is reflected on our stage. So I don't know that we have any particular programs in place, but I think it kind of just sits at the core of our ethos, that the people who are performing the work and creating the work, we will be drawing from as many different communities as possible to ensure that everybody in our audience at a young age has a chance to see themselves represented and access that work. So part of that also becomes, again, just having the cover ethos when a director comes in to do a show that hasn't worked with us before, we have to explain to them, your cast cannot be all white. You have to have in a meaningful way, an incorporation of every different community as much as possible, unless there's something that specifically needs to be clarified in your storytelling by using someone of a particular race. We assume that every race can be involved in some way and it's not necessarily in a way of colorblind casting, but what does that person, what the performer bring to that role. So that's something that we focus on and then it falls on us as the artistic staff and as a whole company, I think it's something that we embrace to ensure that we are not just opening our doors but sticking our head out and looking around that if we're not seeing people, taking a walk around the block and making sure that we're including as many people as possible in the creation of the work so that we do reflect what is in our community. So in a way, we have a head start to think over some of the theaters out there that might be struggling with the audience being predominantly of a certain demographic. That's not our reality and that's great for us but we still have to continue to push forward to ensure that we are giving them something that represents their experience. That's about it. So my name is Olga Sanchez and I've been working for Milagro Theater for about 12 years. I left to go to university, I'm at the University of Oregon, go ducks, and I'm studying theater arts and my focus is Latinx Theater, Latina Latino Theater. And I wanna, I'd like to take an opportunity to say something really just, if it feels like, okay, so I'm gonna talk about African American Theater and how it has a trajectory and it's been quite, part of my studies this past year has been to really immerse in that to a certain extent and learn. And it's been a remarkable experience to learn about the work that was written during the times of slavery by African American writers who were pro-abolition, who were stating their case, who were representing. And that work has been built upon over these decades and all the work that we see now that is so powerful that speaks whether it's to the mainstream community or to the African American community specifically has been, it's a tremendous history of dialogue, of response, of adding to the representation and it's been part of the solution, part of the work, part of the strides that are being made in society among all of us. And what was most disheartening this past week was to hear, read voices of friends who were saying it's never going to change. And these are voices that up until perhaps this week were saying, no, we can do this, we can do this, we can keep fighting. And it's a legacy of fighting, a legacy of making strides. And I bring this up because earlier today and this week, the question what can we do has come up more and more. And I think the challenge for me is I want to make a change right now. And I can't make a change right now. I can only continue to work in the direction of peace and love and equity. My concern is that this hopelessness that I'm sensing may not only be felt by the African-American community but othered communities. As more strides are made forward, something pushes us back, something slaps us in the face, something knocks us down again. And that us is all of us. And so I am so grateful to be here among people who are part of a transcendent art form, who are committed to continuing to move forward. And I just, because I know there is the next generation here in the room. And that banner, that art, that art is transformative. And we know this. I'm speaking the obvious and forgive me. But I just want to add to the hope that we all hold, that artwork is not, it is time consuming, but change is time consuming. It can be as immediate as a pre-show announcement or a blurb out at a panel conversation. But it is all part of what we can do because we have a stage. We have the forum and we have an audience and I look forward to hearing your thoughts. But it is about helping each other keep our hope alive and keep our work going and not losing sight of that. We are a part of the solution. I had to say that. So I work with Latino Theater, Latinx Theater with Milagro. Milagro's been around for 33 seasons and I came on board about 13 years ago as artistic director. Before then I freelanced. I worked in Seattle. Latinx Theater became very important to me. In particular, I'm originally from New York. In New York, there's a lot of Latinx Theater and I didn't really engage in it because my Spanish wasn't that good. Just what the other people who would do it better than me. But when I got to Seattle, there was a need. There was not quite the same representation. And I remember somebody shaking me, like literally shaking me by the shoulders and going, you don't understand. They're watching us. It has to be perfect. And they meant it and I understood. And I don't hold myself to perfection but I strive for excellence. And because there is not as much representation as there is population. The work we do, one of the things I heard while I was in Seattle, an argument for why there wasn't as much, Dime, this goes to your point about not seeing enough of that theater happening was that Latino theater doesn't sell. And, okay, I get it. So for us at Milagro, it's been about going into the audience of things that Luisa Alfarro was talking about last night and building audience. It's all doable. It just requires some extra work. Somebody asked me about, said, well, what recommendations would you have? And I said, well, I think it's important for people to go out into the communities because we keep asking our audiences to come to the theater but we've never gone, we're asking them to our home and that's very generous but we don't go into their homes. We don't get out of our own comfort areas to go into where we are uncomfortable. And again, one of the things that's happening with all the video is that we're being made very uncomfortable and that's important. The other thing has to, the other kind of response that I wanna make has to do with the work we do as a Latinx theater is specific and we are very committed to pan Latinx expressions so there's a difference between Argentine theater and Venezuelan theater and Puerto Rican theater and Chicano theater and Mexican theater and different regions of Mexico theater and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And part of the work that I am so grateful to the drama churches in our community is to be specific about all of those nuances and I'm just talking ethnicity now and again, going back to the otherness, the specificity of those experiences, it's critical, your work, our work is, and I include myself because as an artistic director I've also had to be a dramaturg for new work. I'll props to everybody who does it really, really well. But that keep up that fight, please, that's critical that we stay specific because it's important. Otherwise, it's offensive. It is. And disheartening. And if we go back to that notion of hope, it is disheartening and that's not what we want. That's not what I want, what we, I think I'll stop there, thanks. Thank you guys so much. I don't think, somehow we wound up with five people in four mics, all right. We're not math majors. I have one more thought. Go, all right. So I mentioned that I do dramaturgy as an artistic director and I'm also the literary manager when I was artistic director. And it occurred to me that one of the things to be perceived, perhaps, is that among theaters of color, and perhaps, I'm not gonna venture out to theaters of other, but theaters of color in particular, ethnicity, we're often much lower budgeted companies. We don't have the resources to have on staff a literary manager per se, or a dramaturge per se, or slash. And so, the artistic director often becomes that role. I'm just putting that out there by way of what's available to us, it may be about reaching out to artistic directors for information about plays, et cetera, et cetera. No, although we talked about this a little bit last night at the restaurant, one of the things that the program I work for, American Revolutions, has been trying to do, and one of the things that Alison Carey, who's the director of the program, she and I talk about a lot, because both of us came from smaller theaters and now work at, I think, the biggest institution in the country. I mean, it's enormous. It's very strange. But I'm also looking around what I see as a somewhat broken theater ecology, that there's something that happened either with audiences or with laziness or with the various economic crises that a lot of our mid-sized theaters sort of disappeared. And the smaller theaters, they always survive, right? Because everyone is used to, I can do a show for $50, go. But that mid-sized theater, that a lot of those theaters disappeared or got safer. And then there's larger institutions, like the one that I work for previously, that are, there's a struggle, but it's a different struggle. And I feel like for me, looking across the field, especially in new work, there's this peace missing from someone being able to start their career or build their career or build those formative relationships with their own affinity group and then grow into taking over eventually OSF, so that step that's missing means that the access point to OSF is generally only available to people who can start there. And we've done our own small attempts at correcting many injustices, but I don't know how many of them, I will ask me in 20 years when I write my dissertation how many of them actually worked, I'm never going to write my dissertation. But one of the things that we have tried to do very hard with American revolutions is a large commissioning program. We're commissioning 37 plays about moments of change in American history. And with our artists, we have encouraged them to see where their relationships are, where are the places that have made them the writers that were the artists that we want to bring into the American revolutions cohort. And so we've been doing co-commissions and we will cover the entire commission fee so people can work with theaters. Where's company one? Company one's here. Hello, company one. We've been able to work with theaters like company one. We've been able to work with Penumbra Theater and then we're also working with other theaters like Steppenwolf and the Kennedy Center and things that are in the same budget families as our theater is. But I've actually really encouraging our artists to maintain those relationships instead of feeling like they have to walk away has been something that's been very important. Hello. I wanted to address what Desmond said about the plays, the new plays being shorter and shorter. That actually excited me because I want more young audiences in the audience and the shorter the play, the one part I left out about theater diaspora is that we do talk backs right afterwards. And so that to me is interactive. And what I'm finding with cultural communities too is they want a voice. They want to be able to say things. They want to be heard. And young people want to be heard and they want it to be more interactive. So the idea of a 75 minute play excites me so that I can have more engagement with the audience. So I think that's actually not, it's a good thing. I don't know as far as coming from the point of view of the dramaturge or literary managers or the theaters, but that kind of engagement is actually more and more fundable. And I'm looking at it also as somebody who produces and who grant rights and fund raises. The other thing that I want to say about large theaters is that we have had some really good support from large and smaller theaters or mid-sized theaters in the way of Portland Center stage. They have been most of our home thanks to Kelsey Tyler at PCS at Portland Center stage who's the education and outreach director. And we have had a venue to go to to be able to produce our shows. Artist's Repertory Theater, which is also an equity company here and now a Lord Theater here, has also supported us with venue. Milagro Theater supported us with a venue. I don't think that we could have afforded to do any of this without that support. So I also heard that we have shown up in other people's final reports from funders. So we are at a stage right now, at least in Portland in Oregon. I don't know how it is in other states where EID, Equity, Inclusion and Diversity is a mandate from funders. And I think that's fabulous. I think that that is where it starts and that is a motivation. I also think we're at a place where younger audiences care about this now more than ever and that needs to be addressed. So I think we can all work together. I guess that's my point of view. And I think in those reports, I think one of the things that I know I struggle with at my institution, although my development department is awesome, because it is such a large place, we're very siloed. And being part of those reporting processes as dramaturgs is incredibly important in creating the narratives as well, but also to be in on the reporting aspect, to be able to know whether I am, as a large institution, as the big patriarchal daddy place, am I taking advantage of using the name of the diverse theater for my funding or am I actually living up to what I promised in the grant? I think that's an important issue too. And educational institutions too. We're at PSU right now at Lincoln Hall, just across the hallway. We did our largest show thanks to Karen Magaldi, who is here of the theater department here, who also lent us a venue in the studio theater, a smaller theater across the hall. And we were able to bring Philip Cangatanda because of the Dramatist Guild Fund, and Francesca Piantadosi, who is a dramaturg and a playwright, who mentioned us and got us to be able to bring a playwright. So we have done larger projects and we're doing larger and larger projects, but it has to be a community, a community that cares, a community that includes, and a community that works together because it's not the responsibility of just one theater. I'll just respond to that real quick. I think the notion of the community that works together brings up for me the phenomenon or whatever of intersectionality where we're not siloed, none of us is siloed. We have many identities. We have many affinities. We have, and they tug at us in different ways and our children are growing even more diverse and more aware of their multiplicities of identities. And that complexity is gorgeous and again requires dramaturgy. And it's just another awareness. One of my retorts to the question of Latinx theater doesn't sell has to be the diversity in our audience, that milagro, anybody that's come to milagro kind of sees it. People mention it. I don't even notice it anymore, but it's just like, oh, wow, there's so many kids here. Like, oh yeah, you know? Okay, and that's, I think that, I know that makes me feel good. That makes our company feel good. It's something we just assume as part of what our audience is. So it may be an audience that can't pay big ticket prices, but it's an audience. It's an important audience. We're happy to serve. Well, I was just gonna jump in again on the question of the length of play. And to me it's just a curious question right now because I think there's a British playwright, Howard Barker, who basically talks about creating the audience that you want. And he also argues that there's an audience out there that is really interested in being challenged. And I wonder if it isn't saying, in terms of this attempt to get younger audiences in, is it not an insult to them to say that you're incapable of sustaining your attention for two hours? That the only way I can attract you is by creating an hour and 10 minute play because you don't have the attention span. And that to me just feels insulting. And to keep in mind that this younger audience that we're talking about is the adult audience that we hope to have in two years, in five years, in 10 years, in 20 years, because for all intents and purposes they basically are adults at this point. But they're that audience that we're gonna look at for 10 years from now and it may negate. And I'm not arguing whether this is even really positive or negative but negate a traditional part of the canon. But I wonder if it doesn't become a slippery slope where it was one thing when it was an hour and a half straight through or 75 minutes straight through. But I remember sitting through one and going 60 minutes, 65 minutes is really short. And does that then trickle down to 45 and then trickle down to 30? And it just feels insulting to me to suggest that a younger audience is incapable of sustaining their attention for that long. I don't know. Trying to stay on topic a bit and veering a bit away but also address that. I guess I asked a question, how much are people actually talking to that audience about what they want? Are people like, or are we making assumptions about what we think we need to do to make an audience come? I know that part of our development process, whatever age range we think the play might be for and I'm probably talking a different younger than you're talking but we bring that audience in and we say, what do you think? Talk to us about, obviously better questions than that. But we want their feedback on whether this engages them and I think one of the powerful things about what we call theater for young audiences is that we're not afraid to say who we think the play is for and we're not embarrassed about trying to have that discussion and it is a discussion, it needs to be an engagement and it can't be we are making this for you, enjoy it. It has to be a two way street and I think that applies not just for age demographics but for any kind of demographics of if we are creating we need to have those people in that discussion and I just think across the board that's an important aspect of what we're doing. I think, yeah. No and I think too like to me there's a couple of things embedded of just sort of the question of diversity of style as well as sort of looking at things. You know if you really wanna see a three and a half hour play like we run a theater down in Ashland where you can get that for probably the next 80 years. I'm actually really excited personally by two things. One is the writers that I'm working with and the writers that I'm loving right now are some of them actually have a story that is just an hour and five and there is a place for that now. One of the things that concerns me especially at the larger theaters is a perception of value that if we are charging $80 a ticket we have to give you three hours worth of theater and so that's a double back on it and again I'll just keep plugging American Revolutions because I'm incredibly proud of this program but we have invited our artists to think more epically than I think they have been asked to think for the last 20 years or so that I have seen plays get smaller and smaller which is not the same thing as getting shorter and shorter but I have seen a number of graduate programs in particular encouraging writers to create the four person play or the three person play with the expectation that those are the plays that will be produced and I think if you look at American Revolutions track record you can see that we are exploding that expectation and what we have learned just to double down on what Stephen was just saying is we have no idea what our audience wants. We are at a big creaky old Shakespeare theater and percentage wise our new plays are selling as well or better than our classics which I think shows us that we have to be asking different questions of our audience. I would really like to open it up to you guys and I see, yes, can we get a microphone? Hi, I'd just like to turn the conversation kind of back to like what it originally is that we all recognize we're sitting in a room with shockingly few people of color in a city with shockingly few people of color what do we do to bring, not those voices just as actors but within the artistic staffs themselves to bring more diverse voices into our artistic staffs not just on the stage as actors which we've talked about a little but systemically. I would say there are obvious steps that organizations can take right now in terms of programming but I think if we really want to diversify an audience we have to reach out to them early on. I think a lot of artists talk about having an early experience as being a sort of transformative experience that made them realize I love this thing. Oh, right but I think what I'm saying is that until the general population that is attending and working in the art form is diverse the pool with which to draw from is not as diverse as it could be or should be. Well, I think that to some extent yes but I also think one of the things that I'm seeing a lot of success with or change with at OSF and at other theaters is a different way of recruiting that to just assume that because the last 30 years of students or the last 30 years of practitioners have been one thing that that is who we have I think and Louie please interrupt me if I'm getting any of this wrong but I know for us our leadership team at OSF they just expanded the circle and so it is now instead of getting rid of people or moving people off they actually just added more seats to the table which is incredibly gratifying. I'm not on it so I only guess what happens in those secret meetings but that part of it of adding the seats to the table I think is incredibly important. I think also our fair program again that recruiting of making sure that those doors are open that we are whether it be in recruiting interns who will eventually grow into administrators and dramaturgs and artistic directors and that side of the keeping the doors open but also in our staffing recruiting that when we are one of the things that Sharifa Choka who is our fair manager did which has just stayed with me so incredibly was that they were looking for Wig and we do a lot of wigs. There's so many wigs at OSF it's incredible the number of wigs but they were looking for a hair and wig intern and instead of just sort of like going to the 20 colleges that still subscribe to art search Sharifa actually hit the road and she went down to LA where she's from and hit up a bunch of cosmetology schools and I was like that is so genius of maybe that audience that was missed in the round of budget cuts during the Bush years of arts education that didn't go to theater that presenting this as an option this is a place for you to use your skills where you will be welcome and you'll be part of a larger community which I think is what theaters in general should be offering to people that when you come in, I mean a lot of theaters toss it around the family and company and all of these things and the family thing gets my goat so don't do that but the company thing, the expectation that we will live up to that I think is very much a part of it. Do anyone else wanna jump in on this? Yeah, real quickly, TCG, many people know but for anybody who doesn't has a strong young leaders of color program that is constantly finding ways and every time it has a conference it particularly invites the young emerging artists and administrators from that community to participate at their conferences so every conference will have people of that area there, young people who are looking for jobs. That said, there's a tension between, bless you, there's a tension, bless you, there's a tension sometimes when people want to work, as you said, for companies where they can find sort of an aesthetic, artistic, cultural, home affinity before they branch into a larger organization so sometimes there's that sense of like I wanna develop my footing in a cultural community area before I move on to a better gig frankly, a better paying gig. There is also a tension of obviously tokenism that occurs, these are issues that have come up in these conversations at the TCG conferences for 15, 20 years now. The other place is the other way to make change happen in institutions obviously is on the board of directors find ways to transform the boards because theoretically there will be some voice there, some awareness, somebody reminding of change that needs to happen, of where there's community connection to be made and such. Ah, it's being broadcast, okay. Well the way really to get more diverse people and put this into power, hire them. That's the first way. But also there's a story, I have a disability so yes I'm white, male and cisgendered but I'm all of those things and disabled so I have a slightly different perspective on this. At least in my community there has been systemic discrimination against folks with disabilities for years. So we were not invited into the programs, we were not accepted into the programs that the leadership is then chosen from and then the answer is well you don't have the credentials. Well no we don't because we weren't allowed to get them. So that's a whole nother, that's a whole nother story of how do we, how do we begin to take chances? If you think about it, at something like, someone like OSF, a theater like OSF they have a budget of what, $10 million? So let's say you take a risk. 37. 37, even better. So let's say you take a risk on a literary director and pay them $100,000, right? That's less than 1% of your budget. So that's the big risk, 1% or 0.3 of 1%, 3 tenths of a percent. If they don't work out, fire them. It's not hard. It's not like there aren't plenty of people for that job. So I think at some level we have to stop fetishizing jobs in this industry and we have to take those chances and we have to accept that if we're working with communities that historically haven't been in the circle that they are going to have less classical experience that the kind of people are looking for. We have to train the HR people to pass on those resumes even though they might not necessarily meet the standards that people have to think that if you're disabled and you've been doing a lot of reading your entire life because you're not very physical, you can read plays that you can write a script report even if you haven't had the experience doing that. That because we've presented ourselves to people our entire lives and tried to pass our entire lives, we're pretty good at working with different kinds of people. We can be team leaders because we've had to be. So yes, you want us in there, take the chance, hire us. If we don't work out, fire us. I just want to say it's all like a train car, right? You've got the engine, you've got all these little box cars and you've got the caboose. One thing leads to another. So if you have the staff that has diversity within it then perhaps it'll lead to actors on stage and directors with diversity. Perhaps then it'll lead to audiences with greater diversity. It's all a train, it's all connected and it isn't one easy fix. I'm not an expert. You guys are more of an expert on this than me. This is just from my personal experience. I think that it's a lot of work and there's no easy answer and it takes a mission, it takes commitment and it takes a lot of energy and it might take extra time. Okay, I am super excited to say I just graduated from undergraduate in May. And so, super pumped but I'm like wondering, like I come from a college in Southwest Virginia where there is not a very diverse population in my college just this past semester, very sadly has had protests that students felt the need to protest the lack of diversity and inclusion. And like, how are we working in universities where you have these young theater practitioners who are trying to make this art? How are, is there any play, are there any people out there who are reaching out to them? Do those people literally just taking their first steps into the field? How are we including those people in this conversation as someone who is maybe one of the few like recent undergrads? Like we have people in graduate schools doing MFA's and PhD's, but what about those practitioners who are the little babies? How do we, how do you help us babies like promote this? Where is that coming into the conversation? Okay, so one thing that I really appreciate is your awareness of the demographics and the issues and that's where it starts, you're an artist. Do it, right? You have the will to do something, you have a degree, you'll have jobs soon. I mean, like it is to you. I'm also inspired by the conversation that we had earlier about the different shapes and role of theater and how there's different ways to connect with community. One of the things historically that the Latinx kids, students, we haven't gone into theater. That's one reason we don't see as many Latinx people, nevermind demographics and there's not as many of us, although we're growing, is because it wasn't a viable way to make a living. It's crazy. I mean, theater is a crazy profession, so it didn't make sense for many people who children of immigrants in particular come here and their parents are like, I didn't come here for you to not make any money. So, but that is changing. That's transforming as our casting is changing, as our opportunities are changing, that's part of the positive good news. Not everybody wants to be in theater, but if you have a need to create theater that responds to the things that you see around you, do it. There are models, there are people who are doing it. I'm just inviting you to own that instinct and impulse that you have and make it true, make it so. Yeah, I wanna quickly bounce off is also the notion about different forms of theater, because there's been this conversation about length of theater, but I think part of the thing that emerges and again speaks back to your panel was on the shape of theater and how theater takes different shapes when it is of different peoples who come with different aesthetics and to honor that and let that be a guide to making the work that you make. So, I don't have one answer and I don't think that there is one answer just because things are so complicated and systematic. And thinking of how theater is historically like an elite discipline and just culture as somebody who experiences white privilege but again is experiencing other forms of marginalization because we're all intersectional and some just like Olga said and tie-dye fellow down in the front row. So, I think it just, I think a large part of it is continually checking yourself and checking the way that you interact with the world and society and being aware of your own positionality and society and what types of power you have and what types of privileges that you have and help you live basically. And I wonder, I think it also starts by thinking about how you take up space. As somebody who's queer, trans and non-binary, I know that that's part of my identity that's marginalized but my whiteness is not and so I have certain privileges in some areas and no privileges in others, you know. So, I continually try to check myself and make sure that I'm not taking space up as a white person and trying to make space for folks who are not white because I cannot speak for people of color and I will not. So, I wonder also if it's less about diversifying instead of kind of maintaining a type of white savior complex or cis savior complex or privileged dominant identity savior complex and really rethinking the framework of how this discipline functions and many forms and many ways and I say less about diversifying and thinking of who has power and who controls the means of production who controls space because if somebody is in a dominant position in society and wants to take on lots of marginalized folks into this community, into this program, that space may not be sustainable for those folks because it's a space that was created by somebody who does not share the same identity as the participants or folks in the community and so that no longer becomes a sustainable space. So again, I think it has to do with realizing what space you're taking up and what space is for you and what space is not for you. And yeah, so like I said, rethinking the framework and structure that we employ when we make theater, when we produce theater. So yeah, that's my two cents. I'd like to just respond to that a little bit and respond to some of the things I've been hearing, which is that we all, every single person in this room has the ability to be an agent of change and to be an advocate and that is a really important power to remember. And I think that one of the ways that I do that is I reach out to the people in my community, I reach out to young artists of color and I say, hey, let's get coffee. You get to know these people and then you introduce them to other people and then they get an assistant directing gig or they get hired in the box office or they get hired as the new literary assistant. And that's a way for you to be an advocate on behalf of people who do not look like you, right? Another way that I sort of find my own advocacy is that I actively seek out plays that would not end up on the desk of my artistic director otherwise. She's gonna get Tony Kushner's new play. I don't have to send that to her, right? But is she going to get the play by a young black playwright who nobody's ever heard of? Maybe, maybe not, but I'm gonna make sure that I'm sending the stuff up the flagpole that I think she might not come across from her friends. And that is, I find a lot of satisfaction in that advocacy that I'm able to do. The other thing is that I work at Steppenwolf, which is a theater that has wonderful diversity and inclusion program with a huge amount of fellowship opportunity that I highly encourage any young people of color to apply for that program because it's a really well run program. And very, very often those people wind up in positions of employment at the theater following that because they've had that experience. So, thanks. I just wanted to jump back on something, Holly was just saying we've had a lot of talk and we haven't, this hasn't come up and maybe it'll come up at the literary office panel, but there's a lot of conversations about open submissions and closing submissions and all of these things. I have to say just from my own experience, when I got to OSF, we closed the submission policy because we realized that it had nothing to do with how we were programming plays. And I had gotten very burnt out in my previous job of feeling that our submission policy didn't actually match and that what we were telling playwrights didn't match how things were actually being chosen. And one of the things that I've realized in doing this is that I'm actually reading more than I was before. It hasn't made my pile any smaller but it's made me do a different kind of work and a different kind of due diligence which I feel really empowered by and also feel I have the opportunity to empower others that instead of just waiting for a play to come, I can read all the local newspapers from all the different cities and see who the cool kid is and then figure out how to get to that. Much less of really bothering all of my agent friends. I still bother all my agent friends. But that part of it for those of you who are working in literary offices or interning in literary offices, that there are ways to actually do things other than to just wait for something to show up in the mail. Is it okay? I have one too. Oh, she has a microphone, sorry. I'll be short. I feel that there's a connection between this inability to achieve greater diversity and aesthetic convention. And I think it's the obligation of the dramaturgs all around to ask what that relationship is. And to really move beyond the notion that to achieve greater diversity is to have the contemporary version that's set in a particular place or that's updating the play in a certain way. And I know that there's a lot of work out there that goes beyond that. And I was really struck by the way as you described your department having this really important initiative of a new company that generates new work, albeit short work. And then the attachment to still having Ipsen be two and a half hours. And I wanted to propose that Ipsen can be a lot shorter because I just mentored a project that's going to go to Edinburgh. And it started out as When We Dead Awakened. And then it became a hip hop soul version that's now called Dead Awakened. And because it needs to go to Edinburgh, it's gonna be an hour even though it maybe means really to be an hour and a half. And I just think in the process, we need to keep evaluating what has value and what things want to be. And to really say, first of all, the diversity needs to be in the work. And when we have diverse work, then we will have diverse audiences. And just wanted to harken back to what Louise said yesterday, having a person even on the box office staff or especially on the box office staff, having a person of color who speaks different languages, it's really about having sort of affirmative action in every area and really really searching for people who bring other perspectives to the table. Thank you. Yeah, I just, I was gonna say that I liked what you said about the board of directors and diversifying there. And wanted to also point out, in addition to all of the wonderful suggestions that I am for the first time in my life working at a larger institution after having worked at small ones. And I think a part of my job is acknowledging a history of racism and privilege and imperialism that we have perpetuated, not just my organization, but all of the larger organizations around me for a really, really long time. And we have a huge amount of undoing that we need to set out to. And to your point earlier, we don't have time to wait to train new young people. And we have to start talking to each other honestly about the oppression that exists every single day in our organizations, even if it's embarrassing and ugly and disgusting, but that we have to be able to call ourselves out because it's not gonna start unless we do. I just wanna speak to this idea of training and not having time. I heard what you said, and I agree with all of it, but it reminds me of things that I hear here where we don't have enough trained actors of color and we have to bring them in to Portland and it costs too much, but we can try to get funding for that. And my response is, why aren't you putting funding into training here? Why aren't we home growing here, you know? And Milagro is a great example. I'm trying to, you know, we at Theater Diaspora is trying to do that too, but there's an issue of pre-casting that I wanna bring up. When things are pre-cast, that could potentially be actors of color. I just want it abolished, I'm sorry. I know everybody does it, but there are opportunities you don't know even exist when you pre-cast. And when you're pre-casting potentially, you know, white roles, I mean, I'm sorry, white actors and potentially roles that could be filled by actors of color, you're doing a disservice to the local community. So I just wanted to, that's my little angry point. But you had something to say about training, didn't you? No, just really quickly to mention that we started Spanish language theater program just before I came on board. And it was clear that we needed to provide training for the actors, many of whom had great passion and interest, but just didn't know the basics of theater performance. And so that began, it was a two-year initiative. They were all on board, we had to make it free because again, not a viable investment to make to gain a living. And over the years, now 12, 13 years, we continue to train actors and we've got some really strong actors that are working all over town and we're really happy about that. I'm curious for those of you who are in the rehearsal room how you create spaces for diverse performers and diverse ensembles to grow in that area. Just thinking about accessibility of process and acknowledging that all of these legacies of oppression that we are talking about exist in that space as well. How do you create accessibility and how do you create safety, especially looking at what has come out of profiles and what happens to some extent in a lot of spaces around the country? I don't know if this actually answers the question, but one of the things that I'm sort of hearing between a lot of the discussion about actors and then also administration. To me, one of the things that I've tried to do is to be a good mentor and to look at my colleagues who are just starting their careers and asking them to demand mentorship from others. I think there are, I never had a mentor. It never happened for me. And so that part of it, I feel actually stunted my ability to stand up for myself in a room and not that I'm, I have no trouble with it now. But there is this question of professionalism and what is implied in that? And there is, I think, to a certain extent, a need for the regional theater to die so it can rise again. Right? I live with the Catholic guy. But I think when we are in those rooms, there are hierarchies and there are systems that are built into it that we are still trying to figure out how to disrupt well. The issue of safety, like personal safety, is one thing, but the ability to actually make a fool of yourself kind of safety, that there's a negotiation between those two things that I think we are still working out, even places with the best of intentions. And that, of course, you may remember is how you pave the road to hell. And so that idea of safety, I find a really interesting one and I don't know that this is really the panel for it. And again, I'm not talking about personal safety, I'm actually just talking about risk taking, is something that I think we're still unpacking in a lot of ways. We have sort of a slightly different experience and I'm looking at Julie because I'm thinking about the production that Hannah Mouth brought to us, Dos Pueblos, and it was a marvelous encounter, a generative work that we hosted at Milagro that I was able to participate in on the sidelines and kind of, I don't know, referee with Milagro. But it, you went to Mexico, met with a Mexican company that was created, that came here, that worked with Hannah Mouth, that created this show and it was very, and it was about the encounter of two cultures and so that was right up front and in the room. But a beautiful example of respect and I think that is at the heart of it always. One of the things that happens at Milagro then generally is because we're a Latino identified theater, we do plays predominantly by Latinx playwrights. We haven't always been able to cast from the Latinx talent pool and we are local and we have to work local, we're a small company. And so we don't usually hire from out of town. So we've worked with a very diverse pool of actors to come into our shows, actors who like, ah, yeah, they get it, right? But they come in and they don't necessarily have the cultural background and even, let's say, we're doing a play that's a Puerto Rican show, the Mexican actor isn't exactly gonna know what's going on in this Puerto Rican play, right? So there's always an environment of education and of respect, who's the expert in the room, who knows about this, who knows about that, and who needs to be learning. And that is just kind of the, that's just the ambiance of the work and how we create it and we just all end up better educated and a happy ensemble, I'm gonna say. So I wanted to follow up on a couple of questions. I'm in Chicago, which is, of course, still one of the most segregated cities in the country. And I'm part of two theater companies, both of which have been not entirely white, but very white. And for both companies, it became a priority to not continue that. And I think that that is where the answer lies is you hold your own company accountable and you say, are we having parity in our season? Who are we putting on our stage? And then at every level of your institution, from your company to your board, to your staff, to your box office, are you hiring diversely? And then also, and you keep calling yourself to account and allow everyone in the institution to do the same thing so that last week, a box office person came to me and said, do we have a large print program? And I thought, no, we don't. And that's your responsible office. And so you keep doing better and we're gonna fail a lot as we do that. And you maybe lose those subscribers and you maybe gain other people and that's part of it. And to the question of creating a safe space since we're in Chicago, I'm a part of not in our house so if you wanna talk more about that at some point, I think a lot of the things are self-driven. There's a really lovely group in Chicago called the Diversity and Inclusion Project and part of what they did is it was a group of diverse actors who were tired of being, say, always cast as a terrorist if you're South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. And so they started working with big theaters in Chicago to do readings where you're doing Shaw and you're casting it in a different way. And so they are also changing and educating the larger theaters in the city as they go along doing it. And then finally, Julie, you may be able to say this. One of our ensemble members has done training at OSF that is Diversity and Inclusion Training and brought it back and is training our board and training staff and training company members at one of my theaters to talk about intersectionality, to call ourselves out and to do that really hard work that's really important. So I feel like there are so many tools out there and other people that you can model and that it's just not impossible. We have one last question and then we'll do a little wrap up. Hi, I don't know how much you can see me but I'm the elusive 20-something person of color or one of a few in the room. Yeah, mystic. I feel like I spend a lot of time questioning if I'm good at what I do or if I'm good at meeting a mandate that you have in place. If I'm a good artist or if I'm just good at fulfilling funding purposes. And it leads me to have no option but to be excellent and this sort of claustrophobic excellence or pressure to be excellent that is pervasive through the educational system, especially in this dramaturgical field but in our industry that is increasingly, I don't know, I was gonna say becoming elite but I don't think that's quite correct. I don't think that theater started as an elite thing and its grassroots, it was an agent for change even when it was, I don't know, many models that are not necessarily Western but the point of this is that I think that there's an emergent conversation that's happening around class and when we talk about excellence, for those of us who don't fit the norm, excellence is not, there is no option but to be excellent. And I grew up in a really working class family and so the opportunities that have been afforded to me and my path has been different because of that and I'm really interested in the things that have been discussed about breaking down class barriers because it's not always as easy as there being a position or finding the right person when you are working six jobs to get your way through university. So I wanna hear more about taking down ticket prices or programs that operate outside usual hours or I wanna be in the conversation somehow, some way, some shape and I want other people of color to lead these conversations and so as much as there are many programs going on and there are many options out there I think I'm just curious what your response is to this notion of classism maybe and I think it's emerging in many parts of the world and if that tweaks anything for you on the stage. No, I think theater is incredibly classist, you know? That's what we need to break down those barriers. I do recall when I was in high school, the, I'm that old, OSF came and actors performed scenes and it was just such a marvelous experience to go to Ashland as a young person but I also realized I could not afford those tickets without that experience of the class taking you down and getting that whole experience at that time. I think that right now ticket prices, especially in Oregon, I correct me if I'm wrong, is it like 70% has to cut a revenue of theaters? What's the percentage of revenue for theaters here in Portland, do you remember? Ticket prices versus earned? Yeah, earned. You know, ideally they always say 50-50, I think it's closer to like, I mean a lot of it is contributed income, 70%. That would be a reasonable average. So I mean ticket prices do reflect a need for theaters here at least. But I think that there are ways to not have those expectations of the set, you know, and to do Bear Bones Theater like we're trying to do so that we bring in people and it doesn't really matter if they pay or not. Our ticket prices are so extremely low. We went from $5 to 10 and then if somebody can't afford it, they get in anyway, you know. That's not what we're relying on. We're relying on Asian-American communities that have had no experience with theater. And the reason why we do the interactive talk backs, why we have pre-show music or perhaps a poetry slam which we might do for the next show, we have that so that it becomes more of an event, an interactive festival kind of an event within this one little afternoon or evening. And so for me that's breaking down barriers. It's saying we're personal, we welcome you, we host you, you know, you're not here to dress up, you're not here to watch something that's going to educate you, you know, to make you a better person, you're here to participate. And so that's the way I feel about it. I don't think, I don't hold theater in this lofty position. I think that it can be something that does change lives but it has to be on a personal level with people that really have that mission and then people who have had no exposure to it to perhaps grow an appetite for. For YPT and we may be an anomaly, but when we did our ticket price decrease, our revenue increased because our audience went up. So that's another thing to think about is how many, is it better to have 10 people in your audience paying $50 or is it better to have 50 people in your audience paying $10 and see if that decreases the barrier and actually gets people in and involved with what you're doing? That's amazing. And there's a model mixed blood theater did a similar thing for folks who want to share that information. I would add advocacy for the arts. You know, however we can raise that flag and just say that arts are part of the nourishment and part of our health and part of our wisdom and part of our social fabric. And as much as we can do that to the people who control the money, honestly, to help make access more available because it does cost money. Even with all the shared resources and the generosity of so many companies that support so many other companies in our ecology, we still need more. And so the more that we can be part of that advocacy for this sacred work. I think that's a beautiful way to end. The conversation will certainly continue for our whole lifetimes and on Twitter and on Facebook and with LMDA and with all of us. Thank you all so very, very much. Thank you all so very, very much. Thank you, Joy. Thank you, everybody. Thank you panelists. Thank you all for participating. I'm gonna do a super fast kind of housekeeping stuff. So we are headed to lunch at the Andine Dining Hall if you head out to the registration area.