 here. I'm just going to turn it over to Polly Carl and let her take us through what it is that we're going to do. So perfect, everybody. On time and off we go. Polly, take it away. So, the, um, so welcome. It's so exciting. And it's not sunny, which I'm really glad about, otherwise it's just a little airy in here. So the first thing, I just really want to start off with welcome. Welcome on behalf of Rina, on behalf of the New Play Institute. This is David convening number one that we've had out of the institute. Five, six, okay. It's going to be number six. We periodically get together and talk about sort of key issues in the field with various people who try to spread the love and invite new people every time. We generally get a certain level of harassment about why people are not invited or why people are invited. We can have that conversation later, but you're all here because you don't have to. You're all here because, you know, this is a field that you've thought about, been in, talked about, the literary office. And so you're here because you bring experts and experience and some new ideas. So there are fresh faces and old faces and that kind of thing. So what I thought we started with is just a quick introduction. The arena staff are here to help you as much as we possibly can. We're wearing a very stylish name tag and silver. And so those people are around. And maybe if they could just introduce themselves first and then everybody else just have you all go around and do a quick introduction. So Kevin. Hi, I'm Kevin Becerra. I'm one of the New Play Producing Colors. Hi, I'm Jason King-Jones. I'm the New Play Producing Intern. Hi, I'm Jamie Gillan. I'm the Associate Director of the Institute. I'm Dan Cernopoulos. I'm the Artistic Associate Casting Director. Good morning. My name is Erin Washington. I'm the New Play Producing Fellow. I'm Aaron Matthew and I'm the Senior Literary Fellow. Vijay Mathew, Associate Director of the Institute. Hi, I'm Laura Reigns. I'm the Artistic Development Intern. Is that everyone at the staff level? Oh, no, they're Amritha. Yes. Hi, I'm Amritha. I'm the Literary Manager. But she mostly gets to not help us because we could be part of the conversation. Unless we change our minds a little bit. And so, then if you all, you know, you're all going to have lots of conversation, but it'd just be great if we know who all is in the room, so you could just do the quick, your name and where you're from. Are the Playwrights wearing the stage? Amy Tree, Resident Playwright. It's a new system. I'm in the stage. I'm going to just run these away in a classical theater column, but based out of PC, teaching at Howard University. Tanya Palmer at Goodman Theatre. Adrienne Alls-Hansel Studio Theatre. Lauren Henderson, Playwright. Janice Perron Sundance Theatre Program. Heather McDowell, Playwright, based out of PC. Molly Sutton, Artistic Director, Arena Stage. Welcome, everybody. It's great to have you all here. Ms. Engelman, I'm on the 48th parallel. I'm the director here on Wimby Island, and Talk to Lake Center up in the Boundary Waters. Danielle Magesomato, I'm at the Old Globe Theatre, and I'm the president of Helen D.A. Shirley Serovsky, I'm with Peter Jay. Jessica Burgess with the Inkwell Guarantees. Lily Skid with the Inkwell Guarantees. John Worson, District. Jerry Patch, Manhattan Theatre Club. Madeline Oldham, Berkeley Rec. Reed, Center Theatre Group, Nellie. Rafael Martin, Soho Rep. Jojo Roof, National New Play Network. Pat Flick, Orlando Shakespeare, National New Play Network. Nan Barnett, at Liberty. Former president of NNPN, and former managing director of Florida Stage. Emily Morse, New Dramatist. Julie Givner, Oregon Take-Thru Festival, and board member of LNBA. Marilyn Millstone, I'm a local playwright. Lauren Howardson, Studio Theatre. Martin Peppley, Latino-Nail Theatre Center. Liz Frankel, Public Theater. Erin Garter, St. Wolf. Eric Ramsey, Ohio University MFA, Playwriting Program, and Wardbridge. Cheneen Sobeg, QP of Communications for LNBA. Ignazita Lara, St. Elizabeth Theatre Program. Charles Soglin, Huntington Theatre Company. Matt DeGarden, our signature theater. Ilana Brownstein, Playwrights Commons, and Company One Theatre, and Boston University. Christopher Parker, Atlantic Theatre Company. I think that's everyone. Yeah, everyone, go ahead. And then just so you know, Janice Perron is here. I asked Janice if she would be the scribe of this event. Every time we do one of these convenings, we do what we call a white paper, just to do our best at capturing the spirit of the conversation that happened. Janice has been tasked with writing that. So she will mostly be observing versus, you know, in the thick. If you feel this kind of urge that you have, we can allow you to say a thing or two, but in general, you know, in general, she'll be... That's exactly what you're on. I'm outing you, yeah, so people know. Yeah, don't have your picture taken with Jan. So all of you have received a folder that you have your name tag, your agenda, your participant list, logistical info, all that logistical stuff. For those of you who have already lost your folder, like I... We're all logistical stuff. No, Kay, I was laughing because she knows I've already lost it. Kevin said, Janie, we can help you with that sort of thing. In your folder, you're also going to find a media release form. This allows us to capture you on video and photo. Reminder, we are live streaming this. And hence the makeup, you know. We're live streaming the full convening. The only thing we're not streaming are the breakouts. And then also, it's on Big Play TV, and then you're doing some tweeting out on hashtag and play on Twitter. So that... And then in terms of, I guess, other media stuff, Aaron Valkin is here, and Aaron is going to be doing the kind of summary blog post at the end of the day, just to, again, the goal of this, and just so that you understand, you know, in many ways, you're really delicate, just you may want to consider yourself the chosen. You are really just delegates to the larger community, and so I hope that you'll take that job very seriously. So for whatever ways you participate in your community, whether you're doing via Twitter or Facebook or, I don't know, your own personal blogs, or just, you know, you actually do live communication. Hi. We'd be very indebted for you to take responsibility to try to do what you can over both the course of these two days and make sure people feel like they've been asked to participate, given that we only have the funds to bring, you know, this group of 40 here and that sort of thing. So you really are... It's a very important sort of responsibility to invite that third circle in and say, you know, you can also be joining this conversation. And you...it's amazing, at the time that I've been, you know, around these convenings, how many people actually participate in that way, either during the kind of the heart of it or after the fact that you're watching the live stream later on. So we get a lot of people just, you know, coming in later when they can. So... And then my goal is to go over the basic schedule for Friday, except that I don't have my folder. So next up, David is going to be having an interview with Jerry Patch, the following... Jamie, do you want to just say the schedule because you haven't even brought a view? Sure. Yeah, so from 2 to 3, David's going to be interviewing Jerry. And then from 3.15 to 4.30, we're going to hear Matt Vectos and then we're going to hear him about the Literary Office, the 21st Century Literary Office, and then following that will be a breakout session where everyone will get a chance to just still and talk about what you've heard from the afternoon. And then after that we go to dinner and shows for those of you seeing shows here at Arena. If you have reserved a ticket there, you can just pick it up at Will Call, it's under your name. And nightcasts afterwards at the bar, and if you have any other questions, just let us know. And then breakout groups are details in the back of your name page. So when it's time for breakout, group leaders will raise their binders, because we're a binder, and they'll have their group letter on it. So we're going to do that. And yeah, so I think that's it. Anybody have any logistics questions or anything you need to know? Jamie's giving me the thumbs up that I covered all the things on it. Okay so the thing that, so what I'm tasked to do this afternoon is I'm really briefly, because I'm not going to be able to cover all of it because I just want to talk about the context of why this can be. So if we can do two or three convenings a year, why do one on the literary office in the 20th century? I'm going to try to just make sure we remember the history of where the literary office comes from. So again, most of you probably know all this better than I do, so feel free to kind of break in and correct me or something. But just to give us a little bit of that history. And then the last thing I want to do in this 45 minute stretch is talk about just the idea of a convening and how, I don't know, how we should all try to behave. And I mean that in the best way. And I'm going to track my, keep watching my time here, so this particular convening comes out of the swirl that really does. There were a couple of things that happened for those of you who were born prior to 2007. There were a couple of things that, you know, not that many people know, but a couple of things that happened, you know, 2007, Richard Nelson writes this piece, which if you did anything related to dramaturgy in 2007, you took utterly personally. If you were running a playwright center as I was, you felt completely offended by this piece. And I think it created a big stir in our community. So I want to just remind us of that for a brief moment. The thing that Richard said was playwrights are in need of help. This is now almost a maxim in our theaters today. Unquestioned, a given. But where does this mindset, for that is what it is a mindset, come from? Of course, playwrights need things. Many productions support encouragement, so do actors, designers, artistic directors. But this mindset is different, because what is meant here is playwrights are in need of help to write their plays. They are in need of help to do their work. They can't do their work themselves. Now a culture of help reads a culture of dependence, and this is what I believe we now have in the American theater, the culture of readings and workshops, the culture of development. I took this piece to heart, and I know the conversations I was in, there was a lot of conversation that emerged from it. Shortly thereafter, so in 2008, Outrageous Fortune comes out. And in Outrageous Fortune, although I think a book all of us would say had enormous value in the contributions field, again, there was a weird thing that happened around literary offices and dramaturgs in terms of how that was articulated. So I like to call it credit for nothing and blame for everything. A mantra that I often use when I'm working dramaturgically, I go, okay, I didn't get any credit, but I sure do get blamed for what goes wrong. So in the world of credit for nothing and blame for everything, there was a conversation about literary offices in Outrageous Fortune, and again, I'm just going to do a lot of this quoting today so that you know I'm not making it up. For most theaters, it is the literary manager who mans the gate, or woman's it, through which the most plays pass. Literary managers are, as one agent calls them, the book club, keeping eyes out for talent and possibility. Playwrights speak of literary managers with sympathy and sometimes affection. Many feel they have supporters in literary offices, people who read a lot and care about writers. Writers know that these literary managers speak to each other and recommend plays. Ultimately, however, most playwrights believe that literary managers have at most the power and responsibility to say no to a play, but they lack the power to say yes. And I think that, oh, and then the last line here, literary offices serve theaters, not playwrights. And it seems to me that in the world of literary offices and dramaturges as kind of background people, there's been less opportunity so a book like this comes out where it becomes a conversation between playwrights and artistic directors, but it becomes about literary offices and dramaturges. And so what between sort of Richard Nelson and this, as we were starting to do these convenings, and again, we've been planning the sort of string of convenings for a while, it seems like it was central to bring together the group of people that keeps getting talked about but less often talk to. And so I just, again, contextualizing this is why we're all sitting in this room today. How do we talk about ourselves? How do we think about ourselves? And how do we find a way to sort of get that message out? Because the message of the artistic director and the playwright's been one that's been told now pretty consistently. And then I just want to note that the swirl that is 2007 and 2008, for those of you born before 1988, that you might know, Douglas Anderson wrote a piece with a dream machine 30 years of new play development in America, which is one that I read that piece all the time because it's completely relevant and it's like 25 years old, and it's like, you know, 25. And it's a, nothing's changed, everything's the same. So it's good to remember that we just are repeating history fairly consistently. And he starts off that piece, you know, in 1987, I think it was, or 86, Terrence McNally wrote that piece in the New York Times. I think a dramaturg can do more harm than good. And Douglas Anderson says his article, a short straightforward piece in the New York Times seemed particularly daring in view of the influence literary stats now wield in our nation's theaters. A playwright hungry for regional productions might think twice before going public with the following. I have seen so many plays, so rewritten and improved at the behest of a well-intentioned dramaturge that the actual life force that caused them was stifled. One shudders to think what a structurally minded dramaturge would have wanted O'Neill to jump through. So, you know, these are the things that we're all contending with. And we're not going to spend the whole weekend weeping over them. But I want us to sort of know that there's a conversation that we have not we have not moved past, right? So we did it in 86, we did it sometime in the 70s and in the 90s and now, you know, with outrageous fortune and Richard Nelson in the 21st century. A couple of things I think are important to note about that, that these questions come out of assumptions of what are at the core of the formation of the literary office. So the idea of the literary office is a relatively new phenomenon and even dramaturgy in the U.S., I'm not talking about dramaturgy in Germany now, but dramaturgy in the U.S., relatively new phenomenon. And so, again, I want to spend like two minutes contextualizing that. And the and I feel like it's important in part because you know, one of the things I'm feeling in the you know, I spend a lot of time in the blog world the social media world, which I think is terrific. But one of the things that's happening in that world is because anybody can say whatever they want and just publish it themselves it used to be if you were going to publish something somebody else had to read it and confer that it had an ounce of credibility to it, but now that doesn't actually have to happen. And so I feel like this question of context and remembering the historical part is a huge responsibility as we have this conversation today because otherwise it becomes like we're just sort of you know, we don't want to fall into that kind of blog world of oh, this is what we think today, so that means it must be new and fresh and meaningful. And so I kind of went back to, you know, our Preca's got that great piece about dramaturgy and we play dramaturgy and most of you probably read it at Yale and the Iowa Ideals, but it's such a great reminder kind of like if you look at sort of Yale School of Dramaturgy and where we really start talking about the dramaturgy in the room that kind of comes out of that sort of 60s and 70s motion and many of you know it better than I do it again. My job is just to put it on the table today. In 1977, you know, 1977 Bob Brustine in Yale reworked the literature and criticism program into an MFA, DFA in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism, and again I'm just going to remind us of what the goals of that were. The new program had in Robert Brustine's words the explicitly objective turn, objective to turn alienated critics into helpful and creative associates you see where Richard got this word helpful, creative associates imbued with the philosophy that the theater must participate in the intellectual life of its age and that the intellectual aspect of the theater too often scored by American theater professionals must be ever present and sound. The goals of the program are to resolve the antipathy between the intellectual and the practical and to fuse the two into an organic whole. And I think it's important to know here that what Mareka reminds us in this piece is that the idea was that to take something that was external criticism, so to take the idea of the critic who's a person who's telling an audience, here's what you should think or, you know, not think of this play and to take that and bring it to the internal workings of the process. So now we've charged these same people who are interested in external criticism to be internal critics of the play in the process. This is an editorial comment on my end, but that feels like a terrible setup for people who are asked to do drama tergy in a room. We're going to hire an internal critic. And so I hope you feel safe now making your play. So I think, but I think it's a really important piece to note about, you know, kind of this notion of where it comes from. It comes out of that notion of criticism and it comes also out of this idea of intellectual rigor. And, you know, that's another strange position to be in drama tergy, and again this is my editorial comment, which is a strange position to say you're going to be the person who brings intellectual rigor to the play, right? I mean, that could be offensive, potentially, to somebody who is a playwright and thinks maybe they're doing that on their own. So I feel like there are some things that are rooted in kind of the history of how drama tergy became part of what we do in the theater that I might be interesting to contend with over the course of this couple days. Then there are some more assumptions rooted in that 77 document about what the drama terg does. It's the 77 drama tergs guide handled for the student drama tergs at the Yale School of Drama. This is one of the phrases from there, which I this is one of my favorite things. You and your critical skill are there as a resource, ready in case the director feels he needs your opinion. Anything is possible. He may need you, call upon you and use your advice to stunning effect. He may call upon you and ignore you. He may need you and not know it. Or he may simply not need you. Whether he will call on you or not depends largely on his personality and work method. Yours, the relationship you have established in short chemistry. He will let you know if he wants to hear from you. If I had read that, I would never have dramaturged anything in my whole life. I wasn't trained to dramaturg, so that worked out well. I didn't know that was there. I just wanted to put in here are some of the things that the core of the formation of a field, which are rooted in this idea of you would be called only speak if you're spoken to. Given because I know many of you in this room, the level of intelligence and sort of commitment to theater and experience in the room, that's a weird position to be in. It's not one I do very well personally, and so I think it's interesting to know the relationship, the history of the relationship of the dramaturg process. Again, I put it out there. It does have my editorial chuckles in there, but I put it out there. And then finally this is the last piece I want to contextualize for just the history part. And this comes from the Douglas Anderson piece. And here he's talking specifically, he does this, he goes on this little journey around the country, you know, and he visits every new play development center and talks to everyone, and he says this implicitly, he's talking about O'Neill here now, his visit to O'Neill, but he's also, you know, I think talking about play development more generally. Implicit in the O'Neill system are several relatable ideas. A, that massive input is helpful, perhaps necessary to the development of new work. B, that massive on-the-spot rewriting improves the text. C, that directors can be randomly assigned to text and respond to them with creativity and insight. And D, that a public debate with audiences and a wide array of conference members is valuable. And again, I put that out there because, you know, when I was re-reading that's a really interesting set of assumptions, right? I mean, but if you've run a play development center as I have, it's exactly the assumptions that you are taking for granted. The idea that there is value in randomly assigning director on occasion, ideally it's better if they know the director, but we randomly assign on a regular basis, we actually believe rewriting makes the play better, we think it's better, although I bet every one of you would tell the story of the play that got rewritten that got worse, but the idea is that it will get better. And so and that, you know, audience involvement in that process could somehow be valuable. So what I want us to just, you know, have in mind this next couple of days is just, you know, where we started from, which isn't that long ago, A, and B, what are some of the assumptions that we started on? So, I put that out there, I think we'll come back to it in lots of different ways, but I just wanted, you know, to sort of say here are the things that were driving us as we were thinking about this conversation. And then so now just a couple other things I want to do. The next is you all, many of you, most of you, we asked if you would talk about what your hopes were to get out of this couple of days. So, I want to just quote from you what you said that you would sort of ask for and then maybe give you a second to add if I missed anything. And then I have one last section, and then thank God I would be off my screen. So, what you said you'd hope to take away from this weekend, and this is, I'm focusing now, I ask professional and personal, I'm mostly focusing on your professional hopes. Many of you said, and I've taken I won't be quoting all of you, but I've taken sort of what were the consistent themes. So, consistent themes. How can we use new technology to make our work faster, greener, more efficient? And I certainly would be interested in getting some practical information about how other managers and literary officers have incorporated new technology to help them in their process. And I'd be interested to talk to playwrights about ways that we could take advantage of new technology to communicate with them in more effective and efficient and cost-effective manner. Another idea, I want to discuss what are signs of promise in an early career. Another idea, I'd like to discuss where the influence of the literary department manager lies in relation to our ability to influence the decision makers, artistic directors, in our theaters toward development and production of writers. We feel need of writers we feel need a voice in troubled times when safe decisions are the norm. On the one hand, and then another idea, on the one hand I work on projects that come to me with legs and then go off to have a life. On the other hand, I encounter worthy works with writers who like Hester and Susan Laurie Parkes in the Blood can't get a leg up. What can we do? I've been thinking a lot about the way we introduce or don't new plays to artistic directors and producers. Is there a need for a new different enhanced format for communicating information about pieces available for development and production? Next one, I would like to see how we can talk about new plays in terms of relationships and connections with writers. What opportunities and environments we are creating to better know their voices and their work rather than talking about plays as commodities as play shopping. In other words, process over products how to be facilitators and stewards of relationships. I'm interested in an aggressive and honest conversation about unsolicited script policies at large theaters and how they are evolving and changing how much replication currently goes on with literary offices around the country and how might this be combatted. I want to engage in an actual productive practical conversation about how institutional theaters and smaller upstart theaters that are yet modeled on institutional priorities can productively support different models of the creative generative process. How artists can both lead the conversation about process and also how literary play development offices can help emerging artists try new forms. I'd like to discuss the value of extra dramaturgical material for reading a new play including research, visuals, dramaturgies websites and each new play to provide context images, synopses. Does the writing speak for itself or do these elements help understand the play better? And then this person asking the question is there more we can do to free up our imaginative brain space as well as limited hours in our lives to do the big picture work rather than reject the next playwright in line work which kills my soul by the way. A subject that interests me and is increasingly a topic of painful conversation among friends who are writers, actors, directors is the issue of sustainability of our souls really. Once you have emerged and have had a crack at some regional productions and one of the wonderful fellowship grants you put this past desert that has few points of navigation and just when you have some craft and we've been a wisdom human grace you are also likely faced with an array of life demands that mean you need some sort of it seems there's a big gap in our field between the emerged world and the elder statesman woman and you make that journey. So that's from you all. Anything that you're not thinking about it's done. I'm just going to take a break because that was a long kind of long intro. I have one more little section but I wanted to stop for a second to say is there anything I missed of yours that you hope to have on? I'd love someone else to speak besides me I'm glad you're not. Yes Christian, thank you. Help me. Thank you. So now I'm thinking my answer but I think I'm interested in the ways which actually artistic staffs or literary staffs other than the artists who direct Henry assert themselves as sort of stewards or keepers of the mission actually here and therefore hopefully have an impact on their own influence. Yeah related to that I also failed to do that but I was sitting here thinking it would be wonderful to include some conversation about institutional dramaturgy and the notion that you know I love the quote you read from Bob Ruskin and another one of my favorite he said was that dramaturges are the intellectual conscience of the theater itself and play a role not necessarily the most important in the room but involved with the artistic director and the staff. Good. Good. I think these things are embedded in what's going to happen but that's great. Yes David. There are three people coming to the introduction part sitting right there on the end. Oh thanks David I appreciate that. Yes so the three of you, yes introduce yourself just just your name I'm Miriam Weisswald with the William M.F.E.M. I'm John Baker with the Wally Mammoth I'm Rachel Jeffkin I'm the artistic director of the team Thank you guys. Miriam didn't do it wrong because you're doing a big cyber narrative thing so we can hear a little bit. Other things that we want to make sure we cover? Yes. We're talking at some point about the education of playwrights in terms of the really MFA programs but how I guess the editing process is taught or not taught in a component or value of either of that. Yes. Some players that don't have MFA's are curious about how to convey the training that they do themselves either by taking classes at institutions like playwright center or playwright foundation or these various things and how to convey that without the letters behind the name. Oh great. How does one emerge out of the pile? Right. I have some training. I just don't have the masters. This is actually also about training. Training for dramaturgs. How can we redefine that to help us redefine the profession? Great. That's great. Can I have a hand? Joy, thanks. I'd like to also think about the dramaturg's place in the system of the theatrical community so how playwrights can be instrumental in really listening to the play and certainly not to committing dramaturgical malpractice but listening to the play finding its pulse and keeping another finger on the pulse of the audience and trying to find points of connection and ways into the place for those audience members who want to dig deeper and want to feel like they're part of a community of intellectually minded lifelong learners who explore imaginatively in these worlds and also to really help audiences find ways into works that might not meet their expectations about what a play is. I think there's something implicit in this what I was saying but it feels to me always like the tension and I know we've talked about this a lot in preparation so I know we're going to cover it in these next two days which is that tension between this kind of external and internal role and just the question I suppose put not in the positive is that a reasonable expectation that one person can navigate inside and outside at the same time it feels to me like my experience particularly as a dramaturg but also as the person not really a literary manager but overseeing the literary department that is a lot to ask of person A and I don't know if there are always things that go together to sort of go I'm going to try to make the play make sense to the audience and I'm going to try to make the play make sense to the people who are making it in the room at the moment they're making it the internal thing is something I hope we'll get at because I think that's what a lot of your comments are connecting to yeah Tanya building on that same idea the other external community that we've spent a lot of time thinking about and wearing our handbutt are critics too is there any I mean is there any relationship between the drone corridor literary staff and conversations with critics is there anything to be is that a conversation that can even happen yeah I mean it's so interesting the truth in dramaturgy and criticism and then how that this is true of a lot of times we'll hear when the critics are giving the reviews that they're actually dramaturging the play and the review so there's a way in which critics get into dramaturgy and dramaturges get into kind of the criticism element so I think it's a really good question Liz I think what you guys are saying these are really great topics just to say that I mean going to LMDA conference for the last how many years a lot of this we talk about all the time and have been for you know for 25 years plus so what a goal for me in this is to make sure that the conversation goes back to what you're saying in terms of the what you started with which is their playwrights and institutions and often were caught in the middle and people speaking for us but what do we want to talk about in that relationship because a lot of the internal stuff about these feelings about that we have as dramaturges I feel like we do that a lot at conferences anyway amongst ourselves so I just want to go back to I mean Michael just let's get back to the people speaking for us but let's talk about what's being talked about right now and just so that again I'll just contextualize a second more based on that kind of you know from our perspective in the work we're doing with the institute and trying to sort of really build a theater comments it's about for us I think you know just making sure that we understand the conversation and the research and adding to the contribution so we know I mean not to there's no sense that those conversations haven't happened for 25 years at LMD I think we are I mean I just so you know I think they're super important but no no I hear you I just to say I think it's you know exactly to your point we're trying to figure out how we make space in the conversation of these convenings for the voice that it's talked about but doesn't do the talking so that's you know because we've had a number of meetings where this voice has not been heard so I just wanted to put it in that these are great I'm so appreciative of the additions yeah well the artistic things I think are also a concern I'm really interested in the fact that many of us who run literary departments and selection processes have kind of developed them ourselves by hooking crook and stealing and borrowing and figuring out how to do this on our own with the education of dramaturgs of how to basically assemble best practices for a literary office and to actually train not only the artistic portion of the next generation but also to train us as good administrators because it's huge administrative talent that often I don't see being addressed when we start talking and mixing words of literary office versus dramaturgs there's agency in all of that I think that's the thing you talked about without talking to you last thought yes David question I should probably come out explicitly in terms of my own goals for what we talk about I'm really interested in making sure that as we move into the 24th century literary office where we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater which is the old thing I don't know what the baby is part of trying to think what comes next we want to use this weekend and your expertise to help identify what the actual baby is before we go into this whole sort of move of change for change what's the thing to be conservative and I have to say what that means to me is you just said it the easy way in which we move between literary management and dramaturgy as all one conversation I don't understand that as somebody who's come out of the world of practice and not out of the world of academia to get to where I am and so for me a lot of what I'm trying to understand is how come that's such an easy how do we just make that relationship so easily linguistically so easy so that's part of what I'm hoping we understand I wonder if in light of what David just said if we could have a show of hands to see how many people consider themselves dramaturgs how many people consider themselves literary managers and how many people concern themselves dramaturgs I thought there would be more in the both and I'm the interesting how one chooses what your artistic director say what you would say just the last thing I want to do we're going to get into the meat of it that seems obvious by the comments and questions what I wanted to just talk a little bit about the idea of the convening so we did a convening last January which I had a I thought was terrific felt smug about it it was good and then I went somewhere to visit another theater and you know we were having a conversation with a bunch of playwrights and a person who was at that convening was like oh my god the worst experience I've ever had in my life was attending that convening I felt the smug in that moment but so I want to there may be those of you who say that anyway but I want to try to avoid that as that will come from anyone here so that would be my my hope would be that no one would have that experience I find convenings to be incredibly difficult any kind of conference convening and I'll just speak personally I don't care for them very much I don't like the kind of public schmoozing I much rather I would like to write an article for Hall around and send it to you that someone could read it here and I would watch remotely from New Play TV I also find that it takes me a while often I have a really good time to get going I feel everybody's angling to start with kind of what their role is or position or why they're here or you know there's a I would say a kind of self-consciousness that overtakes us I call it the world of the eye the eye of the personality that is like you know about me what about me what about me and will I be heard and you know it just becomes kind of you know a kind of narcissism that conferences bring out in us and so I want to talk a little bit about how I hope we'll you know think about this couple days and do my best to help you know to the degree that I need help overcoming it others of you as well and I was thinking about the importance of convenings for me as much as I don't like them very much like how formative they have been and David Dower and I had this you know a story in 2002 we went to a convening and we were you know I don't even know I was invited I got this invite works in ways in 2002 and it was like I just become the artistic director of the play center and I you know totally kind of hanging out and David was there and this conversation started and both David and I looked at each other and we not met each other at that point and we were like what the fuck are we on TV what the hell are we and so and David I don't know you could speak of that you always saw that story but but something magical came out of that horrible experience for both of us that wouldn't have happened and in fact one of the things go ahead I can feel you're about to speak and it'll be more interesting than what I'm saying this is a longer story I won't make it I can feel him jumping in the middle it's important though because what you just said I'm gonna sit in that chair one of the things that you just said is actually really important to what we're starting which is the starting in that sense of alienation because in that conference anybody here at that conference 2002 in Portland there was a TCG sponsored conference called New Works New Ways funded by Mellon and Duke nobody so we can say anything we want it was a conference that was designed to pull people together from around the country who were working on New Works in New Ways and at the time I was working at the Z-Space you were at the Plurite Center and the Z-Space was largely a volunteer organization at the time almost no paid staff I had a little bit of money just a little enough money to get myself there and what I thought I was doing when I got there was I was gonna figure out for the artists at the Z-Space how it was that I could put them into the national conversation it had been very much focused on San Francisco it was kind of stuck behind you know, stuck by the peninsula of the Bay Area and nobody was moving out into the world and I say this all the time I thought there wasn't infrastructure there was like a super highway that you could get a career like if you could just get in the car and get on at an on-ramp then you'd have your career and the reason that none of these people had careers because I didn't know the directions to the on-ramp so I was failing my job and so I took all of our money and I went to this thing and I mean so what was it like $400 and that was like a huge indulgence maybe it was a little more I don't know I was on the west coast already so I went to this thing to try to find the on-ramp and in this conversation as you're describing my experience of it and I've since talked to many people who had different experiences also many people who were alienated at the outset was that the room was full of people who were doing it exactly the same way and there were a handful of people that I went there cause I saw the names on the list of people who were going to be there like Polly, like Todd like at the time Kim Eisner and the Skirball folks done in LA there were a number of people who were going to be there and some presenters who were doing things very differently but the conversation for the first several hours was entirely dominated and the moderator fed into this she would go from let's hear from a producer and it would invariably be a Lord producer talking about the challenges in Newark and the playwright would respond to that and then she'd say is it different for the presenters presenter go and then producer playwright, presenter, producer, playwright, presenter all people who were the same people doing it the same way and so I finally raised my hand and I said I'm sorry I came to hear there are other people in the room who don't fall into this little rubric that you have and I came to hear that and she said what's your name and I said David she was well I can promise you David and I was really and I literally this is a dead true story I'm sitting right next to her I sit down still I don't think we've talked to each other and she just kind of poked me she said I'm glad you said something but I got up I actually left I was on my way out of the field this is no exaggeration I got up I was so embarrassed that I got up and I walked out into the lobby and I was trying to decide whether I should stay the night I already paid for the hotel or go to the airport and try to get my flight and just go back and I was literally standing there trying to figure out I didn't have smart phones in those days just trying to talk myself through what just happened I just resigned from the American theater I got to tell my wife this was a waste of money because it was our money not the Z space money and this woman came out and she poked me in the ribs and you know when I say she's tiny she forgive me she is tiny but she has had an extraordinary impact on the American theater and her name is Olga Garay and she's the director of the cultural sorry Olga what's your title she is the director of the funding agency that is the Los Angeles city the city of Los Angeles is cultural funding prior to that she was head of the Duke Foundation and she was one of the people who was sponsoring this and she came out she elbowed me in the ribs and she said I'm so glad you said what you said and I said I'm glad that you're happy about it but I'm actually leaving I feel totally embarrassed and I'm leaving you to hell you are and she grabbed me back and she goes I'm Olga Garay and I funded this thing and she dragged me back in the room and then she kept saying all right what do you think about it every time someone has well what do you think and at the time she asked me well you can't you just get to be bitter you actually have to be productive and so what would you do and I said well I get some time for the people who are doing them in different ways okay fine there's time she sort of drew a circle in the agenda then what else would you do well I asked I want to talk to them about how we could okay fine there's dinner you make a table and if anybody shows up at your table you'll know there are other people and at the time she was asking me who are the people doing what you're doing and I couldn't answer and so that was what we used that meeting for but the main part of that whole story is the alienation piece when she kind of grabbed me and pulled me back in and said you don't just get to be bitter you actually have to be productive that there were people all over that committee who were feeling similarly like they didn't understand the words they didn't understand the roles they didn't understand the process whatever but they were sitting there like this and what she caught was that I said something so that gave a way to begin so there's alienation in this room from all different ways at this some of you are from play labs some of you are playwrights some of you are from major institutions that are always the boogeyman some of you are from mid-sized institutions some of you are straight you came through this academically some of you came up to practice without that benefit of that background so that's why you're here it's composed that way on purpose we wanted people here to sit in your alienation together and be productive not bitter and so we're going to pull at that and that's why you're delegates you are not the anointed and it's hard to keep that in mind as it goes on all week we are not somehow especially charged people who can solve this we are delegates of the people who think about this and it's just the beginning of trying to move it into the 21st century yeah and I'll just say a couple more things the thing I'd say is what came out of that for those of us who were alienated from that experience was we all started working together and it's a collaboration that's now more than 10 years old of us having a conversation for David and I in particular you know that alienation of I think all this point of you don't just get to be bitter you have to do something made all of us to really begin to think about what are new practices, what are other ways and some of those things I think are David and I can talk about our own personal agendas but just coming to fruition now you know 10 years like understanding those things are just coming to fruition now so it's kind of knowing like we hope it will be the kind of thing where the alienation is about something productive not about a few months later saying the experience of my life but you know I mean you might for that but I hope not a couple of other additional things I want to say about that in terms of just the style of this and what I hope you'll feel free about we've been all reading amongst us at the institute that great little piece by Jonah Lair called group thing a lot of you have read it in the New Yorker it's a great piece about brainstorming and about the sort of limits of brainstorming and so you know and I just want to reference it here because the idea of brainstorming historically traditionally idea of brainstorming is there are no bad ideas everybody should put out their ideas on the table and you can never have enough ideas and you should just rip on as many ideas as possible and the safety of no bad ideas means you can say anything and we've kind of built up a culture around the importance of brainstorming as like the key to sort of innovation in ideas and what Jonah says in his article is there's good things that come from brainstorming but there's kind of a flawed idea and he wants to sort of take it a step further and I was really compelled by this he says and so they do a bunch of experiments about the power of dissent within the sort of context of brainstorming and idea-forming and he says in a way the power of dissent is the power of surprise after hearing someone shout out an errant answer we work to understand it which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives and be difficult but it's always invigorating it makes us right up and so what I was thinking about was both the importance I think in this convening to feel like there can be room for that that this isn't about just brainstorming there's room for dissent there's room for friction and that friction will wake us right up and that I have no doubt because I know so many of you that that can be done in the utter respectful way that we know how to do it because we've been giving feedback to sensitive playwrights for a long time and so I know we can do it and people we're all sensitive and then I think the other thing that he says on that piece which I love is he talks about the whole Broadway formula for like what a good collaboration looks like you should read it if you haven't that a good collaboration he has a thing called a Q quotient and the idea of the Q quotient is that if you put five people in a room to make a new Broadway musical who have never met each other and trust anybody else people will kind of tear each other apart and you put a group of five collaborators in a room to make a Broadway musical who all know each other and have always worked together before you may not have a very great product because nobody will challenge anybody and nothing new will come into it and so when they look to do this Q quotient what's a successful Broadway musical the way they assess it is the right mix of bold and new so there has to be some amount of familiarity in the room there has to be some amount of trust in the room so one example is you've got West Side Story and you bring in one new voice like Stephen Sondheim and that changes so if the Q quotient is one to five you don't want the familiarity to be five but you also don't want it to be one nobody knows anybody or you want it somewhere in between I think we have a great Q quotient here there's a lot of familiarity and we've worked together before in some capacities and there's some new people in the room and so I feel like we've kind of set ourselves up we've collaborated a couple of days for the kind of zone and then this is just the kind of last idea but let's see the final thing he talks about in there is just getting the right composition of a group he gives that great example of building 20 at MIT where Noam Chomsky worked and all these people kind of came together and it was this old building that nobody wanted to be in and so they came in and everybody got to kind of create their own space and make their own room and the amount of creativity that was generated by just putting people in proximity to each other and so I feel like I just love the lesson of building 20 which is I hope kind of what we're going for here in this idea of the composition the lesson of building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways the group dynamic will take care of itself and the different discussions add up in fact they may even be the most essential part of the creative process although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant now everyone is always in the mood for small talk of criticism that doesn't mean that they can be avoided the most creative spaces are those which hurdle us together it is the human friction that makes the sparks and so I feel like I hope that this will be a building 20 for all of us here we're throwing ourselves together the best spirit and intentions will embrace the friction of it, the alienation of it and we'll feel as quickly as we can because our time is short some sort of sense of safety to take the risk to have those kind of conversations and do that work could I do two quick little exercises around that that just occurred to me while I was listening to you hold on, let me see if you can I'm not even like I can cut into it 158 is where we are really fast, can everybody stand up take a look around and actually maybe face each other I just want to see take a look and sit down if there's nobody in this room that you are meeting today for the first time sit down if you've met every single person in this room who's single person she works there okay sit down if there's less than five people who are new to you today sit down if there are less than five people who you just met here do we count Facebook on that David? no, in the room I'm just going to leave that one at that but you see, this was on purpose we always get this thing, oh it's the same old suspects it's just the same group of people but you don't even know each other better about that stand up every stand up again for a second can you just sit down if you have an advanced degree in dramaturgy or literature great, so a balance excellent, alright, stand up again and sit down if you have no advanced degree in theater sit down unless you are primarily a playwright in this conversation sit down if you're ready to sit down it's simply people working in the context of so like, I know, Sundance Dramatis, advocacy playwright sit down and so people stand who are freelancing at the moment in this work you're, yeah, I consider you because you're in about more stringing it together only? only freelance? more stringing it together by freelancing in an institutional context I just wanted you to see where we're starting out and now stand up if you're here in DC so these are your local halls for the things that you need to do I know John's been in DC before John Gloria used to be here there's early days of the field that's right, okay good so just to give everybody a sense of part of the ammunition for me in that earlier thing was I think I'm such a freak I'm the only person in the room who's like me that's not true and you also can find that there are you have your tribe and there are also new things to meet in here so I think the Q-quotient is going to be okay