 day and a half, and now as we move into the final portion of this event, we're really first of all really focused on talking to each other, and we're going to be focused on the relationship between concept and concrete action, which is something that we've been really focusing on that anyway, but now this is really our bailiwick. And for this next hour, one of the things that we're going to be talking about is the question of what would you do if you had unlimited resources to engage audiences? And this is, you can interpret the word resources however you would like. My only request for today, for this next discussion, is that as best we can, I would like us to refrain from apologizing for any of our ideas, because I think it can be tempting when we're thinking very idealistically to immediately undercut ourselves by saying, I know this is really stupid, but. So let's do our best to assume that what we're saying is great and it will be heard and accepted and we know it's big blue sky thinking, so we don't have to apologize for it. The other thing I would like to encourage us all to try to do is when we speak, let's see if we can think about the intersection between something conceptual and something concrete. The final thing I'd like to say is today, based on some comments that we heard yesterday. To me a concrete idea is I have this big idealistic goal of what I would like to achieve. I want everyone to feel welcome in my theater. But then how will that happen? What is the actual action that can be taken to make that happen? Is that clear? The other thing is I do want to say too, today as we're talking, if you hear someone say something and you want to respond to them, please do that. I think yesterday the comment was correct that we should not feel like we only have to get up and talk and then sit back down. So as you're talking, if your idea springs from what someone else said, feel free to say that. Now to get things started today, I earlier today spent some time with a few of our other tribe talking about this question and I've asked five of our fine colleagues to jump start this conversation today by just talking a little bit about their response. So this is just a way to get us all engaged, get our minds turning. And they're each going to speak for about three minutes and I'm going to be doing the patented polycarol time on that. And I'd love to invite the first of our participants, Jackie Lawton, why don't you tell us what's on your mind? And you can actually stay seated. We can just, you don't have to come into the middle or anything. Or you can stand up or, you know, you don't have to come like, you don't have to come stand at a lectern. But you can. Yeah. I'm going to stand right here. Okay. So this idea is extraordinary, essential and urgent, okay. My idea, it is, this is true, you're going to feel the same way after I tell you what it is. If I had unlimited funds, I would bring together a civic leader who is in charge of policymaking, an artistic director, a dramaturge, a playwright, a choreographer, and for one full year, they would have to be in residence and they would have to speak to, every single day, five days a week, speak to a member of their constituency. And after the end of that year, they would be in residence for two years, creating, developing a piece that responds to, reflects upon the conversation that they had. So the kind of questions they would ask is, what do you need? What's here? What's missing? How am I not engaging with you in a way that is truly, truly effective, truly impactful? And they have, and they listen to that answer. No judgment. They're just listening to us. And then the next three to five years, they are touring that production of that play, of that dance piece, of that beautiful creation throughout their city, okay? Now the why. Why am I doing this? The reason why I'm bringing in the civic leaders, because oftentimes the only time you're civic leaders who are making policy come into a community is when they're asking for votes. Vote for me. I'm going to tell you what you need to hear because target marketing, I know what I need to say to you. Similarly, when you hear from artistic directors, they are telling you, come buy tickets, buy a subscription, because I have a play that I'm deeply in love with, that I've brought together these amazing artists that I need you to see, but we haven't actually spoken with our audience about it, okay? So those two people who are in powerful positions are now having to engage every single day with their constituency. Before all that, my core belief is that theater is the most powerful tool for social change in this country that we have. Next to that is storytelling. So we combine these two elements together. Of course, they're intertwined with each other. Similarly, theater should be considered not a luxury in arts and entertainment, but a civic contribution to your community. This is why this idea is essential, extraordinary, inspiring, and you should apply it today. And next, we'll hear from Anna, who's just right there. Does anyone want to respond to that? That's awesome. I'm going to sit. I don't like talking in public, so I feel much more comfortable being here, if you all don't mind. So I actually don't have this pie-in-the-sky radical idea. I actually think it's something really close to our fingertips, and I'm hopeful that I can enact it very soon with some additional resources, and so it's right in front of me. We have done for several years now what we call our lobby experience at the ART. This is the space that is the predominant main stage of the theater. We also have Oberon, which is our club theater, which I was talking to Mark earlier, that has almost inherent audience engagement built into it because it is very social space. So anything that we produce over there tends to not have this kind of thinking, but we've talked about how do we steal those ideas, that feeling that we get from Oberon, and put it into our main stage, which is a traditional building built in the 1960s, it has a big glass and marble lobby, and it's a very strange configuration to work in. And so myself in the marketing department and education and community programs manager who actually reports to me, because we see that as part of audience engagement and development, so education, reporting into marketing and marketing and artistic and education working together, we curate what we call the lobby experience for every single show. And we've started to, as we've done it over and over, we started to see what works and what doesn't work, and started to drill down to certain principles and how we curate that. So we work with our community connections partners, which could be a variety of different organizations. This last show we did, we worked with Artists for Humanity here in Boston, as well as a local artist and also one of our education experience partners. And then because we're affiliated with Harvard, we also look to use holdings at Harvard to additionally give context for the work that we're doing. What I really would like in the most successful lobby experiences we've had is when it's been curated by a local artist. So that the space conceived in the way that the audience is often prompted to do something in that space, either pre-show or post-show, what those prompts are, how they're set up, how they're facilitated, and then also what's the art in the context put into the space. I'd also love to just have some really simple things like track lighting networks, because we're using literally paper clips and binder clips to string lights up. And it's all show, guys. And then also projection spaces. We've used really large white post-its from Staples to make projection surfaces on large glass windows. So anything that we can do to band aid that space or duct tape that space, we've done it so we know what works in there. And we often have the artists that are working on our stages as well talking to us about what they think would resonate in that space. So all of those things are coming together in what's a very simple program. But I think we can take it to the next level. And I just wanted to have the same level of purpose and engagement that what happens on the stage, it just needs to equate with that. I think that's awesome. So what I think we need to do is I think we need to truly invest in the natural and spontaneous energy at the heart of our form, which is a group of people who come into a room together bounded by time and space, artists and audience, to take a journey into the unknown. It's time-bound and it is inherently based in community. I think one thing that we have to do in order to do that is we need to make sure that we are relevant to the places where we are. So, first of all, if there's a disconnect between the people of your community and the people who are on your stage and in your audience, it's time to kind of stop shrugging your shoulders helplessly and use all of the ingenuity and creativity and problem solving skills that we have to fix that once and for all. Let's not make the mistake of thinking that people that don't go to your theater aren't making and consuming arts. Let's partner with artists and arts organization that are reaching the community that you need to reach and to give them a home and create a space inside your theater for them and a space for your theater inside of those communities. So what does that look like? One thing is that I believe spaces are metaphors, right? So you want to create spaces that foster meaningful connection and conversation, make sure the culture of participation and meaningful connection is palpable in the space. Adam Buck is right. Artists are really good at creating experiences and making form reflect content. So what if we commissioned an artist not to write the two hours between lights up and lights down, but to write the entire experience of the evening from the moment somebody comes on to the campus? And what if, so you have not every playwright is going to be into that, so you have a playwright whose work is important and meaningful, who just wants to write the play, that's fine. Let's commission another artist to write work that responds to their work. What about a crowdsourced installation that is there in your lobby that responds to that resonates with the play in some way? And what if we try and capture the imagination of the entire city by creating satellite installations in different public spaces where people can kind of contribute to or respond to an idea or prom that feeds to the play that happens in the conversation that's happening in your space. I also feel like we need to invest in the expertise, creativity and leadership of our audience and our emerging artists and our students. So I think the Obama campaign was really good at building upon the leadership and passion of all of its stakeholders. So remember you guys during that campaign how when Obama was giving a big speech, you could sign up to host a viewing party, right? And that viewing, and you could say, I only want to do it for my friends or, hey, anyone's invited, right? And that would be listed on the website. You would be recognized as a leader on the website. You would be given a toolkit as a leader, right? And it was very, very easy. Well, what if we did that for plays? What if we had, you know, kind of playgroups, like a place on our website where you can sign up to host a playgroup. It could just be for your friends or for, you know, you can say, like, hey, I'm just interested in talking to whoever wants to sign up for this. It could be in a public space, a library, or it could be in your home if you want to do that. And then we create toolkits for the leaders to, like, to lead a really meaningful conversation that is about the art and leads to a deeper converse connection and creativity and empathy and imagination and all of those things that we have the unique, well, have an extraordinary power to catalyze in our communities. Thank you, Joy. And Rebecca? So Sojourn Theater is a 15-year-old ensemble that used to be all located in one place in Portland, Oregon. And just because of space and time and personal needs, we are now artists living in eight different cities that come together for project-based work that often happens throughout the country. And so our model is a little bit different. But one of the things that this question brought up to me is a way sort of like a three-prong approach to engaging a community. And some of this is based on the work that we're actually already doing. So finding that time and finding, like as you folks were saying, those stakeholders within the community that you need to partner with, whether they be civic leaders, whether they be art partners, whether they be non-arts organizations who are dealing with something that is an important civic or social issue, and creating those partnerships to really, so when you're creating work, it's in conversation with what are the needs of the communities. And then creating, in this case, the example that I'll get to in a bit is a performance event where the audiences are allowed to engage a curated audience, a designed audience which has people that are from non-traditional audience of going populations to come and be part of it along with more traditional audiences to then engage in a conversation with each other. So using this amazingly connective experience of theater to involve people into deeper stakes issues that are personal. And then the thing that is interesting to me afterward, which is always a tricky thing to do, is following up with those relationships with your community partners. And so in this dream world, this would be a continued effort to keep working with these community partners and to be responsive as an arts organization. We come in often very much and we'll work with an organization and then we'll leave. And so leaving tools or working to create tools with those organizations so that they can continue to be responsive to the work and the interest in their community to go forward and create whatever artistic output that looks like. So the concrete version of that is the show that you've heard me talk about a little bit, which is how to end poverty in 90 minutes, where we have worked with artist organizations, artists and organizations to bring audience in and also to be recipient of this thousand dollars that the audience votes for in a way to have a hosted conversation about your relationship to poverty. The ideal would be if there was this sort of structure that could be done nationally in whatever the issue is that could have an effort to have the third phase, which is the continued dialogue and the continued work with the partnerships. And the why of that for me is because once you've gotten people into this emotional place that theater is very powerful in doing, and you have people relating to each other in a conversational way, then what is the step afterward that allows people to continue this conversation and then affect social and civic change based on that. So ideally, all over the country, that is happening in different models in partnership with arts and civic organizations throughout the country. Thank you. And finally, Christian. So I've been thinking, I was thinking a lot about sort of this, when I got the question about what's your pie in the sky idea, I kind of actually instantly went micro in my thinking about this rather than macro. And I think it was because I've been thinking a lot about sort of the essential structural obstacles that the institutional theaters in this country have to answering this question about audience engagement. And it stems to me from the origin of the not-for-profit movement, which was, in many respects, inherently elitist. And it's idea that we were somehow bringing art to people who had been deprived of it, even though, of course, there were always local arts. And of course, that was not anybody's explicit intention. But there is an underlying bias, I think, in the very creation of the system that many of us have worked in or worked in. And the hierarchical structures of these organizations reflect that, to me, presenting obstacles from all constituencies in the organizations from engaging in this question so that it gets segmented and delegated within staffs to deal with this problem rather than the whole organization functioning under shared assumptions about what the mission is and why they're doing what they're doing. So my pie in the sky goal, I guess, were I still in an institution, would be to actually integrate all of the constituencies of the theater itself, meaning the staff, the top leadership, if there's an ensemble, the ensemble, and the board, in a shared conversation about really essential questions. Who the hell do we think we are? Who are we here to serve? What is our community actually? So that the conversation about how to increase audience engagement or find a new audience actually is a shared expectation based on agreed upon values and ideas rather than a very piecemeal approach to that conversation. I think it's pretty rare in my experience for all of those constituencies to have equal buy-in to the work that's being presented by the organization. They just don't. The board doesn't know the staff. They don't know what they do. The staff doesn't all equally feel invested in a given play by very nature of some of their jobs. They're not asked what their opinions are by the upper leadership of the organization. So my fundamental belief, I guess, is that we have basically within any organization no matter what size, we have an army of people who are ready to engage with this question. And it's the staff and the board and the ensemble assuming they have shared assumptions. So the task is to engage those people and get them to feel as much buy-in and engagement as they possibly can into the plays that are chosen and the mission of the theater so that they will automatically be ambassadors into whatever communities that they belong to from the get-go. And then you can have the conversation about finding new communities and extending that outward. So my solution to this in the immediate would be really just twofold. For every play that you do in a season, devote one staff meeting exclusively with no other agenda to everyone having read the play and talking about it. Seems crazy. For every production that you do, have one post-show, pre-show, talk with, talk back, talk at, yell at with the staff and the board at the same time. Just them. So early on so that they feel that level of investment and that they know that it doesn't matter if they work in the business office or if they're an accountant or if they work in the costume shop, their relationship to the work being made is real and valued by the organization. I don't see that happening a lot. So they're small things but they might be big ideas. I don't know. Great. Yes. Go right ahead. So do you think those sort of the, the sort of engaging the staff in that way will, you mentioned the hierarchy structure. Do you think that'll affect that or? My idea is that that erodes that. It's not that you don't still have a hierarchy of sort of responsibilities but that what I have seen is staff members turning over a lot in our organizations cause we all know that nobody has paid a lot but a big part of retaining staff and getting them to be real ambassadors for the work is them feeling seen and feeling like that they, that the leadership of the organization knows that their work actually matters relative to the play being done. And so I think it doesn't necessarily destroy the hierarchy but it erodes the barriers of communication. If some low man on the totem pole feels that the artistic director actually wants to have a conversation about the work with them really. Not that they're gonna change their programming if the person hates it but that they can take it if somebody doesn't like their choice. Then that's useful. I think that that will breed a healthier organization which by extension will attract people to the theater. So quite a few things to chew on. Does anybody have comments for anything they've heard or have any new things they'd like to add to this conversation? Yeah. So my pie in the sky, if I could have anything would be, I would have a playwright revolution. I would see whether we somehow could refuse the role that you guys have given us which is to come to you and ask you to do our plays. I don't know how to do that, how to break that but it is brutal. I think playwrights are taught to look at plays and what we do is we do something slightly different in them and that's why they've come new. So we look at the form and we look at the content and they've never written about that group so we write about that group or whatever. I think what we've abdicated, what I'd love playwrights to do is I think we've abdicated that we do that to how theater is. I don't think we have looked recently at how theater's made or how we let it get made, our theater get made or how it's presented in a way. We've left that up to you and we haven't said, oh, I don't like what you're doing. Or why don't we do it that way or I wanna be a stakeholder in that somehow. And so I think that's the revolution that I'm sort of talking about. And at first I said I was gonna say I wanna disrupt this but really every time I've ever asked anyone in the theater the theaters that I've worked with for anything you guys have given it to me. So I wish playwrights we could understand that actually you guys do wanna work with us instead of it seeming like why are we walking in as if it's a combative. And I don't know why that's happening. I'd love for us to figure out why we're acting that way. Because it just doesn't work, it's not smart, it's not helping us. So anyway, that's what I'm thinking about. I wanna jump in on that because it goes nicely hand in hand with my pie in the sky, which would be there are more playwrights than there are me as one and only literary manager in the theater. We have resident playwrights and we have visiting playwrights that come in for our season. I feel like one, we lose touch with you so quickly when you leave us. So finding ways to not just invest in the specific production but invest in the playwright as an artist in your entire span of career. And two, find a way the word bridge has been used a lot this weekend and I love it. Because I keep hearing literary managers called gatekeepers and I want us to be bridge builders and find ways to invest in and work with playwrights that we're not necessarily producing at this very moment. But just because we're not producing you at this very moment doesn't mean that five, 10, two years down the line we're not going to be and you didn't write one play you have an entire body of work. And if we're interested in you and your voice then we're interested in all of that and that we need to find ways to make that dedication and keep it going and keep it active and keep the spirit that we get during these convenings and carry it through the whole 365 days of the year. So I don't know exactly how do you do that but that's my pie in the sky. Any, yeah, Laura, who's got the microphone? Yes. So going off of what Adam said and going off of what you said, don't be afraid to be more honest with us. I know it's really hard. I know we all like the idea of transparency. I think the idea for a lot of people, especially like when you are not, and we know the hierarchy so well at this point. Like we know that you may be here but you have to get this person's okay or like this person wants to do it but there are reasons that you can't. Don't be afraid of being like we like it but not enough to do it. Like we can take it and you can also tell us why you don't wanna do it. Like I swear it makes us better writers. So be more honest with us. I love that, I promise. Like I swear to God, right? I think it would be good. The second thing is, this is sort of building off of Joy what you said about the, I was the one who said Disney, the designed aesthetic experience of a show, like a show going experience. One of the things that I love about working in the video game world is that all games teach you how to play them, right? So does anybody play games here? Raise a cobble, like four people, okay. Okay, awesome. So one of the things I love is that games will teach you even if it's a really complicated shooter, even if it's a really like weird indie game, it will teach you the controls, it will actually teach you how to navigate through the world. And I think that sometimes, again, and I think like if we asked for it, I think people would let us do it. And I think something about chilling the spaces out or making them, yes, like I wanna do that, but I also wanna tailor the space. I wanna tailor the entrance, I wanna tailor the exit in the way that Disney does, that they're thinking about the process, the experience of waiting in line and they're saying, how are we altering that? Are we gonna bring a parade through if you've been waiting in line too long? Are we gonna change the music? Are we gonna like have one of the costume characters come over and like start an event or whatever? And they're thinking about this stuff. And I think that like I love going to see shows at Playwrights Horizons and I think Ben, I don't know what Ben has said. Ben was talking the other day about the take home interview with the hard copy interview with either the playwright or Tim or something that you're taking with you. I love that. I haven't been to New York in a couple of years now. My, what I always remember about leaving a show at Playwrights is walking down that really, really, really long four or five flights of stairs to the street, trying to talk to my aunt over the shoulder and being like, did you like it? I kind of like, oh sorry, there's like something in the street, sorry, my bag hit you. Like that is my experience of leaving a play at Playwrights Horizons and then like going across the street to the bar. So part of me is like, can we alter the staircase? Like will somebody let me alter the staircase? Will somebody let me alter the lobby? How can I teach the audience to see the play? And I think it's all just different vocabulary words for what is the curatorial lens that we are giving the audience to see something through. And fuck it, like we don't have to do a talk back. Like it doesn't have to be towards a talk back. It's just about giving the audience a tool, like something to do in the play, something to bring inside the play, like teach them how to watch it, not in somebody telling them, but in them absorbing some sort of aesthetic experience. And I think we can do it. Like we may not be visual artists, I can't draw a mural, I can't do any of that. I do think that we can help design the aesthetic experience of our work a little bit better. Do you wanna pass down? Yeah, thank you. So this isn't my idea, but I've been saying it a lot and I just wanna put it out there is that I really wanna challenge this as a group to redefine as an industry what we mean when we say community, what we mean when we say community theater and what we mean by community engagement. I feel like we need to reclaim and reframe those words because it's a term that we often silo and it's holistic, it's our whole thing. But that's not my big idea. So my big idea is I want a community curated theater season that happens in a city. And maybe it's not the whole season of every theater, but what if there were six or seven theater institutions where you offer a spot in your season that the community can vote on options and then it becomes a collaboration across forms, across artists, across institutions, yada yada. And it's a community chosen thing. That's my big idea. Hey, Eugenie, you've had your hand up for a while, so I will. Eugenie, and I will speak as an institution of one, as a playwright with multiple day jobs that many of you can relate. So I have two things and they're both related to listening. And one of them is for me as a playwright here and now and listening to everyone speak and their ideas and challenges. And I actually surprised myself that I actually could listen. But the conversation here sparked me to think, well, audience, audience engagement, how do we do this? And I realized that I actually wasn't listening hard enough to the things around me that already existed. And one of them in the back is I, years ago I was commissioned by a funder to write an essay about changing demographics in San Francisco, in the Bay Area as it relates to the performing arts. I'm not a sociologist. So I didn't know how to address it, but I was gonna do it, because it's a grant, yay. I'm gonna get paid to write. So I wrote a play. And because I don't know, I, you know, demographics. Well, okay, yes. San Francisco, the Bay Area, one in four people, it's not just Asian, but they're like me, Chinese American. So I thought, okay, this is about performing arts. I'm gonna interview Chinese from different generations of immigration and see what they want in the performing arts or what they thought was beautiful. And so I did this through a social service organization that my sister works with. And some of the people I spoke with were workers there, some were clients. Some spoke great English, some I needed some help with translation. And what I got was, you know, the question of what do you think is beautiful and beautiful and alive, very interesting. I also got, not only that, but just life stories when you give people the microphone. And I turned that into a play, because I did not, that's what I do. And I turned it into a play about circus acrobats. And they became acrobats. And I realized, oh my God. Well, you know what? There's a lot of valuable lessons in this. I thought, oh my God, and now I have to get the right sign to, you know, because it's gonna be posted on a website. I have to make sure they're okay with the story. And asking these people to sign this statement, because I talked to a lot of people, I realized this does not sit well. And so I talked to different people, my sister, some social workers, Sansan Wong, who's a bit, yes, right? Who works a lot with community arts. I said, Sansan, do I do? You know I can't ask people, she goes, no. You don't do that, don't do it. So I said, yeah, what? Because I need permission, and I don't want to just fling this out. She said, this is what you do. And this is, thank God I had listened. She said, make a reading, take a reading, take it to the agency. So I did. Gathered all the people I interviewed, brought actors. And the first thing I said was, I want you to know that what I did with your stories, I changed them, not necessarily the words, but the concept because I'm a playwright. And what I heard was a story about circus acrobats. And the form isn't a circus, and it's a little crazy. I hope I am not offending or disrespecting you. And very interesting, my assumptions were overturned because across the board, these people said, circus, acrobats, we're immigrants. Our life is a circus. And after that, it was great, right? It was great, great reading, really fun. And in ensuing years, I get this through my, if I see people on the street or through my sister, when are they gonna see that production? Mayfoon, this is the Mayfoon, right? The worlds that I walk in. And I said, I don't know how to do this, right? I'm not a producer, but it just reminded me of being here is like, well, actually, I have a little scene money now from a funder. And not only that, but something about, because what people were saying was, we're busy, we really wanna see shows. We, can you do it during lunchtime? Can you bring it to our office or where we're at? And can it be something like 24? I really like 24, you know? Because it's different and it's new. And it's like, you never know what's gonna happen and his life is gonna end. Or, hey, you know, ballroom dancing. That to me is it. Cause I am transformed when I do that. And my aspiration is to invite my family to see me perform a ballroom dance show. So anyway, stuff like that. And so my concrete doable goal is to bring a fantastic high quality production of this one act to these people in their agencies because they have satellites. And I'm thinking, why was I not hearing this? People keep asking, when are we gonna see this? There are neighborhood social service centers where people come to eat lunch or they bring their kids. Like, we can do it. But it's gonna be really, really good. The other thing is, I was speaking in our small group, a lot of this community, which is not the community, or not who I, no, it's actually who I have in mind when I write, partly, but I don't speak fluent Cantonese or Mandarin or even dialect. So what I will need to do is to find some money to not have it translated, but have a translator and incorporate that somehow in the show. Whether that's like the huckster character or something, but that's a new aesthetic challenge that I think is fascinating and I'm really jazzed by. And that idea I got from talking to some of my Tai Chi members who are from the different Chinatowns in San Francisco, you know, they're multiple, who are saying, well, we wanna see your plays. We know they're kind of weird, but, and some people may not, you know, don't do super titles, because, you know, not everyone's literate, right? But we wanna see it in the subjects, but maybe you can just get someone in, like, pop up during a scene break and speak to us in whatever Cantonese or our dialect, and then they'll sit down and we can tell by, from what's happening, because the actors will be great and they'll be, you know, communicate with their emotions. We'll get it, just do that. So it's really about, oh, this is possible, because I think my audience is, they're either older people or they're hipster, people who like kind of experimental stuff, but they're also this other people who I come from, whose English ranges from super scholarly to non-existent. And I've always wondered, how do I bridge that? And most people can't come see things. So this will be my small foray into figuring that out, how to link these audiences. And maybe some hipster will come to a senior center in the sunset to see this awesome play, right? With multiple languages, different dialects of Chinese in it, sometimes some things have Spanish, because that's a community of some of these people too, or the community of the stories I write. The other small anecdote I have is about listening, and I want to share this, because this is with a huge institution, and the institution is the Houston Grand Opera, where they commissioned me to do a one-act libretto for the Chinese American slash Chinese population in Houston, which is huge, and I know in the tens of thousands, to open Chinese New Year's, I think it was 2011 or 2012, and it's a community fair, and Houston has a huge Asian population, Hmong people, Cambodian, South Asian, huge, huge. And unfortunately, I have relations and people I know in Houston, so this is how I created some stories. I was talking to them, figuring out what was relevant and stuff, and they have this festival where 15,000 people pass through this basketball-sized arena, and you see things like rap singing grandmothers, and you see Hmong dancers and mariachi bands, it's a community thing, and you also have games and firecrackers going on in food booths, at the same time you're performing. So the composer, Jack Perla, classically trained, we created this opera, it's about a basketball, teenage basketball, Chinese American, right before Justin Lin. Anyway, so we did that, and we thought, well, who's gonna, what's it gonna be like? It was chaotic, it was great, because there's a fight scene on court, and we were wondering who's gonna sing this, who, because with all due respect to singers, Jack was worried, the composer goes, Jeannie, you're making them fight and move? We just have to worry about people singing, right? Well, we got these fantastic opera singers who decided to recreate a basketball game as they were singing these songs, it's great, and this fight, so this whole auditorium was engaged of the fight, right? But the best thing about it, it was successful, very successful, the best thing about it institutionally for me was that I was walking out with Jack and other Houston grand opera people who do these community tours, and they're so committed, I'm Asian American, Jack is Italian American, the directors are different kinds of white American, and it was great because at the end of it, Jack turned to me and the artistic director turned and said, wait a second, you know, the talent we were so worried about looking for the musicians, the singers, they're there, and they looked into the audience of all basically Asian faces, and got that these faces here were not a monolithic immigrant or community face, that these were people who had been trained in opera, probably by the way they were leaning in, or you know, classical instrumentation, or the pee-pah, or who wanted to sing, and who would be, and Jack said, that's where we can get our talent next time. That was the best moment for me as an artist, as a Chinese American artist, because everyone was listening. All right, that's it, sorry. Yes, it's coming to you from here, okay, sorry. So my big idea is something that we're starting to do at Company One and it's really nascent, but it's very promising for us and for the city, I hope, which is that my big idea is for more theaters to partner with non-theater organizations, potentially other arts organizations, but organizations that are invested in healthy communities and healthy neighborhoods, because there are huge, huge conversations happening in every city about public health, public housing, all kinds of issues that are about the people who live and work in your cities. Those conversations are largely happening without arts institutions, and if we want to remain relevant, I think that we have to get involved in those conversations, right, and one way to do that is by creating partnerships with other organizations, arts or not, who have some intersection with our own missions. So I think first our companies have to know what our missions are, which is sometimes a big step, but once we know that, figuring out who else outside of our own discipline cares about those same issues, and then how can we as arts organizations do what we do best, which is narrative, web building, right, networking, collaboration, how can we take those skills into those conversations so that we have a stake in how our cities progress. If we don't do that, we will continue to be represented by the numbers that came out of the NEA Arts Study this week about vastly declining audience numbers, the inability of people to see the arts as a space for them, right? So that's my big idea and my hope that we across the country will find ways whether we're in very small communities or very large cities to be in conversation beyond just the arts about using our skill sets to build healthier neighborhoods. I just want to, mine sort of ties into what you were saying about the hierarchy and the infrastructure of arts organizations. I've heard several people over the last day and a half talk about how there's sort of a lack of upper leadership here, and I am that top dog at my organization and I run it in a radically different manner than most that I know of. Complete transparency, interns read plays that I'm considering and I ask for their opinion and if anything, it makes me have to justify my artistic choices to other people. My designers are invited to my strategic planning retreat. I mean, it's radically different and extremely successful. So I'm a big fan of shaking that up and making sure people need to have ownership. How can they be passionate in their department if they have no ownership of the work? So to me that seems completely ridiculous when I'm hearing about all of these separations. So I do have that going for me. A lot of people around a common vision. Everybody reads the play, we talk about everything, but my big idea how to engage our audiences on an even deeper level would be to find a way that one of the team members, designers, artists in the show playwrights, me, that every single audience member has an eye-to-eye contact with one person on that artistic staff and I mean artistic box office as well because it's anybody that's wrapped around the organization. If I've done my job and they're all understanding and feeling passionate about the work, I would like every single audience member to be able to have an eye-to-eye and an experience with them about the work, a conversation about the work. Five minutes, whatever it is, but that they can actually connect with someone about the work right away. And I feel like that would be a step in some bigger picture ideas I have about intrinsic impact being a much bigger part of the conversation than the economic impact of what we do. Great, Liz, yeah, I saw your hand go up. And then Salisa will, after you, Liz. I just wanna say in all the really exciting things behind the sky, things that people are talking about in terms of re-conceiving infrastructure and paradigm shifts and generosity and rethinking all of this, I wanna put in sort of jumping off of what Adam said about the playwrights revolution. And I would like to encourage everybody, my pine disguise is that in all of this thinking that everybody doing all of this thinking takes into account the fact that playwrights can't live, that we don't make a salary, the royalty model is broken, and I'm saying this for all playwrights. I just got told yesterday very realistically that I shouldn't apply for a certain thing because I'm mid-career. I'm like, oh, that's so exciting, I'm mid-career. I got two months of budget in my life. I don't know what I'm doing in April to pay my bills. And that's the deal we make, that's the bargain we make. We choose that, and I love that and I own that. But if we're reinventing the theater, let's think about that because we're here as I guess the triple play is artists, theaters, audience, right? And we're talking about how to blow up those relationships and make them work. And that's something we need to think about, I think. Okay. So Lisa, and yeah, go right ahead. And I think after this, we've got time for probably two more comments after this, by the way. So I have two ideas. The first is a question that I ask myself a lot in my practice as a dramaturg, which is what is dramatic, right? What is dramatic about the scene? What is dramatic about this problem? What is dramatic? Where's the dramatic tension? Where's the drama? And I think that question is desperately needed when we think about act threes and talked whips. There's really nothing more boring, I find, as a dramaturg than sitting in a house and having an audience tell me how great the show was. I know how great the show is, I worked on it, right? If I don't think this show is great, I screwed up, right? There is nothing more incredibly exciting than an audience sitting through a show that leaves room for response that is tied to local and national history, and you set up an experience that after the show, they get to be the drama. This year we had two incredible experiences in Atlanta where we did just that. We presented Natasha Trethewey's Night of Guard. If you haven't read it, do it. It won a Pulitzer, it was amazing. We staged it, and then we asked the audience to talk about what the show had made them talk about, think about. I have rarely learned as much about oral history of Mississippi, 1900 to 1968. There's so much we don't know. I've rarely learned as much about vocabulary. I've rarely learned as much about how Atlanta, which is the city that thinks about race and how we talk about race on a daily basis, how people are comfortable and not comfortable talking about these issues in public. It was because people were inspired by Natasha's drama and vulnerability to themselves find the drama and vulnerability in their own lives. Everyone who moderated those three discussions would walk out shaking, and we had a policy of postmorteming for an hour every morning, the next morning, because it was too much. It was an overload of experience. Natasha led one one night. After that, she said, I never want to lead them again. I want to listen. If I'm here, everyone talks to me. I already talked, but she would listen. It was amazing. The second experience was, we were working with Genie Neighbors on a play about the Atlanta child murders, which was a very devastating serial killer in the 1980s. Genine, I believe she was about five when this was happening, and she came to Atlanta in order to read her play, which is very in development, and when she's done, it's going to be incredible, but she came to listen. So we read the play. The play was great. It tapped into the emotional experience of the times, and then Genine said, okay, people who were in Atlanta while this was happening, talk to me. It was another, I'm still recovering from those discussions. A lot of them started with, I have never talked about this memory before. I have never, I try not to think about it. It was so scarring. Does everyone else remember this picture? Does everyone else remember this mural? Because of, Genine got, Genine was not the center. She was the asker, but she wasn't the drama. The drama was people who had lived in Atlanta at Pearl Clegg was part of those discussions because she worked with the mayor's office. She also said, I never talk about this in public. Nobody ever talks about this in public, but they were able to talk about it in public because we're a large theater. They were incredibly dramatic and wonderful. The more of these dramatic and wonderful conversations we have, the fewer conversations we want to have, right? Because if it's not that good, why not just do the play? We just had to say talk was aren't really important, but I think there always has to be a why. Then my second big idea, which is more of a big idea, I guess I was testifying a little bit, but I hear childcare, women buy tickets, women and leadership a lot in this room, and then I hear applause. And then we start talking about something else. So my big idea is why don't we do something about women buy tickets, there's lack of childcare, women and leadership? And why isn't there more money towards those initiatives? And sometimes I think that American theater is a big boat, right? And when we run into trouble, we stick the women and the kids in the lifeboat. But maybe the women and the kids just stay on the ship. And I think we've got time for Michael, I think will be our last, if you could, would you mind taking the, Salise, would you mind giving him the microphone? Hi, Michael Robertson from The Lark. I have two thoughts. One is if we do have all the money in the world, I think we should reduce every single economic barrier to participation as a staff member and as an artist, because I think if we can diversify our staffs, diversify our artist pool, all other things will happen, community will change. So I really think if we have all the money in the world, let's all make a living wage and be able to retire and to pay for our healthcare, and let's artists be able to do that too. So let's just get rid of, like why do we even have to worry about a paycheck and can we retire, right? And can we pay for childcare? The second thing is I think what I love, someone was saying earlier, do we have too many convenings in the field? And I actually think it's the time I see people in New York the most. Do you know what I mean? I spend time actually with people in my own community in a different community, because there's no time. So I would love a national sabbatical and observorship program. So basically it's all the money in the world, so you can pick where you wanna go for a year and there's enough money to pay you that fabulous salary that you're getting because money is no object, but you also get to pay someone to replace you while you're there. That's a great opportunity to diversify leadership and give someone the opportunity to be you for a year. So I think it builds in a bunch of different things to that. So I also, and so the sabbatical can be go to Tahitian paint if you want that, but the other piece would be an observorship, that we actually get to sit in each other's chairs, in each other's boardrooms, in each other's marketing conversations, meet each other's audience, see each other's rehearsals, because we just, I feel like I just don't know people intimately. I just don't know your processes, I just don't know how you make your decisions, we talk at the bar, we come to these convenings, but I think it's very different to sit in someone else's organization. It's like going to someone's house, don't you love it? Especially in New York, it's like real estate, right? It's like, ooh. To see how the other people live, I don't know if it's a half, the other pieces live. So anyway, I would just love us to see each other's work and all just be paid a fortune for what we're doing so that we can reduce the economic barrier to participation for everyone who wants to be involved in this beautiful thing that we do. Great. Well, thank you all very much for those very, very, very interesting and very passionately articulated ideas. We're gonna take a short break, we'll come back at 2.45, we'll start promptly at 2.45 for the final element of this convening. Thank you very much.