 Hello, hello. Welcome. My name is Adam Belcore. I am the Associate Producer here at Goodman Theatre, and I'd like to welcome you to today's Artist Encounter through that you could join us. Before we jump into the discussion, we certainly want to acknowledge the people that have helped get us here, which are our wonderful sponsors. So without further ado, I will publicly acknowledge and thank them for their support. Our own season sponsor is the Bank of America. Our corporate sponsor partner is Edelman Worldwide. Our contributing sponsors are Baxter International Incorporated, Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Illinois, and Studley Incorporated. The major contributor to research and development for Askant Susan is the Davy Foundation, and additional support provided by the season and production sponsors and the New Work Endowment Fund donors. And finally, our New Work Endowment grant benefactor is Sean M. Donnelly and Christopher M. Kelly. So thank you very much to all of you for your support. These Artist Encounters were fortunate enough to live stream via howround.tv, and so today's conversation will be live streamed, and hopefully those outside of these walls can join us for the conversation. For those of you out there, if you are interested in interacting with us, you can participate via Twitter and using hashtag New Play, or send your questions directly to at Goodman Theater, and we will respond accordingly. If you would turn off your cell phones so that we can have an uninterrupted conversation, and without further ado, I'll turn it over to Tanya Palmer, our Director of New Play Development. Tanya? So I just want to introduce briefly Henry Wishcamper, who's the Director... Thanks, Amber. I'm going to introduce briefly Henry Wishcamper, who's the Director of Askant Susan and an Artistic Associate here at the Goodman, and Seth Boakley, who's the Playwright of Askant Susan and a Playwright in Residence here at the Goodman. So I'm just going to ask a few questions to give a sense of both of these artists' work kind of generally, where they come from, how they approach their work, and then we'll talk a little bit more specifically about Askant Susan. But I just want to start by asking those in the room here, who has already seen the show? Oh, only one. Okay. And who is... Is anyone going to see it today? A lot of people. Okay. So we'll try to both give you some sense of what we're talking about, so you know what the play is about, but also maybe not, you know, ruin it for you. So maybe I'll just briefly summarize the play and then talk with Seth a bit more about its development. So Askant Susan is a play that is very loosely adapted from Nathaniel Loest's Miss Lonely Hearts, which is a novella from the early 30s. And basically the premise is that a young man is given the job of being an advice columnist. In the original it was, you know, a newspaper columnist. In this version, which is set in present day, it's an online kind of agony ant who gets sent all of these anonymous woes and he responds. And at first he thinks of it as kind of a joke, but ultimately he becomes kind of enmeshed in it and obsessed with it and it takes over his life. And then hilarity and wackiness ensue. Right on. So first off, Seth, I'd love to just hear you talk a bit about, you know, your sort of development as an artist. I mean, I think, you know, you're unique amongst playwrights in that you're also a director. You've done a lot of adaptation. This is a very loose adaptation, but you've also done more traditional adaptations of work. You've been a performer. So can you talk a little bit about how you've come to playwriting specifically? Yeah, sure. So I was an actor originally. I moved to Chicago about 11 years ago, started working with storefront theaters, but also I worked very much as an actor and as a director in visual theater. And visual storytelling has always been really important to me. I worked with the company Red Moon Theater, some of you here might know, for their large outdoor spectacle performances. And that was really very much my world. But my heart was always in literature and I was a comparative literature major as an undergrad. You know, I loved books and I loved the literary richness of, you know, American literature, but also of, you know, the canon of theater and plays. So I went like really far in one direction, which was towards what I thought of as just the exciting physical visual spectacle that theater can be. And then I kind of came back around. And I came back around both through my work with Red Moon where I started writing actual, writing plays for them, writing songs and texts for those shows. And then slowly but surely I started wrapping my hands around larger stories that I wanted to tell and that I wanted to apply myself to as a writer. One of the first things I really did as an adapter and as a writer was George Saunders-John, which is an amazing short story by an amazing living short story writer, again, George Saunders. His short story, John, I adapted and directed about seven years ago. And it was really, I think, that production that allowed me to feel like I was developing a voice as a writer and sort of proceeded from there. But this, and I guess that's a good segue briefly into how I got to know you and the Goodman, which I think you saw John and shortly after started talking to me about getting involved with the Goodman. I did get involved with the Goodman Playwrights Unit, which some of you might have heard of. It's the Writers' Group here at the Goodman where four writers get together for over a year and each write a play and support each other in sharing pages and scenes with each other every month and then critiquing and talking about what each other is doing. And I find the Writers' Group to be just incredibly exciting. I'm a really collaborative artist. So I continue to work as a director and as an actor and also as a playwright. I come to theater from a very collaborative point of view. So this kind of environment for a writer was really great for me. Really not just sitting alone at home by myself, but being with other artists that I really admired, those other playwrights, and hearing their opinions. That was where I wrote Askant Susan, actually, the first draft in 2010-2011. And then, subsequently, Askant Susan was mounted in a workshop production as part of the New Stages Festival here. And I got to see it on its feet. Joni Schultz directed the workshop production and we got to see what it would be like for actors to actually stand up and do it in front of people, and that was incredibly valuable. And so then I was able to take the information I got from there and fold it into revisions for this final production that's now up and running. That's great. Well, yeah, so as Seth said, I mean, this is a play that really has come through kind of all the levels of development that the Goodman does. Seth was in the first year of the Playwrights Unit, which, as he said, is a year-long program. We choose four playwrights, Chicago-based playwrights. And part of the goal in selecting those playwrights is to bring people with very different aesthetics, different voices together so that they can really feed off of each other and respond to each other's work. And then, as he said, it was part of our New Stages Festival, which is our kind of most public new work development festival. And it happens every year. It's shifted over the years exactly when it happens. This year it was in December. Next year it's going to be in November. But it's a real opportunity for those of you who are interested in new work to see what we're developing, what we're considering for our next season. And it really gave us a unique opportunity, I think, to get to know this play incredibly well. And so when we came into rehearsals, we already had a real dialogue going about what Seth was trying to do, what the world of the play was, what the questions were, all of that. And Henry was also part of a... We did another reading post New Stages to work on a new draft as well. So, Seth, just going back to sort of the conception of Ask Aunt Susan. You know, as Seth said, I saw his adaptation of John. I was really excited about that. And we were talking about other projects. For the Playwrights Unit, you came in with this idea. I think actually originally you had a different idea than you came in with. Probably. But can you talk a bit about, like, why you chose that specific source material and then how it came... how it evolved from there? I actually walked out of a meeting of the Playwrights Unit and went to the bookstore that used to be there on the corner of State Street on Washington or Randolph. Anyway, the borders. And I went there and I literally just walked around and I saw a copy of Miss Lonely Hearts on the Shelf. I had never read it. So Nathaniel West's amazing novella. And it had an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, an author that I love. And it had great cover art also, this book. And I am a sucker for great cover art on a book. So I bought it and I read it. And then the next time we came in, I said, I want to adapt this. And now what attracted me to it was that it's a story about a young man who becomes really alienated from the people around him while he becomes ever more connected to these sort of imaginary people or not really imaginary people, these real people that he's corresponding with. And I thought, well, that is exactly what's happening in our culture right now. I mean, even to an exponentially greater degree, that's possible. So Nathaniel West imagined a New York of the early depression in which a young man could sort of in this disillute environment where his newspaper editor is a sort of terrible, bullying, drunk. And everyone around him is a little bit depressed that he found solace in answering the sorrows of these people writing into his advice column. But he also found a connection that was in ironic juxtaposition with how he treated the people around him. Kind of a jerk to everyone around him. And I thought, well, that can happen too now. It does happen now. That people are really disconnected from those around them while they are connected to people through the Internet. And I thought, too, that this would be really fun to update for the 21st century. I think my original title was Miss Lonely Hearts in the 21st Century. But anyway, as it went along, my plot, the plot of Askan and Susan ended up taking a different direction. So the play actually has a bit of a different plot from that original novel. But it was that basic premise of the ironic view of some young people, actually, both Aunt Susan and his girlfriend, Betty, that they both have sort of ideals of how to be connected to the world around them. But they are unable to actually live those ideals out in reality. They're actually quite rude and disconnected to the people around them. That's great. Well, I want to bring Henry into the conversation. So Henry, just to give a little bit of background, you have been an artistic associate here for two years. But you had worked with us a few times before that. And you're a director who works on both new plays and classics, or modern classics as well. Can you talk a little bit about how your approach when working on a new play differs from working on a classic or a play in which the author is not around? Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I think, you know, you always need to have a point of view as a director no matter what. But when you're working on a play that's a fixed text, your point of view sort of is the heart and soul of the show. Whereas, you know, when you're working on a new play, your job really is to do your best to serve the writer's vision in an active way and in a way that is something that you can communicate with them day by day. And so, you know, I feel like part of what's exciting about directing new plays is the challenge of telling yourself that whatever is there on the page works, and treating it as if it works, and speaking to the actors as if it could work, and also having little tabs, little pins that you put in that maybe if the writing changed here, it would be stronger. And so that sort of ongoing process of, you know, whatever the text is for the moment that you're working on it, it works and it is fixed. And also, whatever you're looking at can shift at any point in time is a really interesting and challenging process. And, you know, one of the things that was great about this process was that Seth had had a production that I knew nothing about. So Seth knew a whole lot of things about what really worked about this show, and he also had a real set of things that he felt like hadn't connected the way he wanted them to before. And then I had a very different take coming in as somebody who was just engaging with it for the first time about what I thought were questions that needed to be asked and what I felt like were things that, you know, were sort of the core elements of the play. And then the Goodman was really great about giving us five days in a room after having already done a production before doing another production for me to just sort of get used to the play because I was sort of the only person who hadn't done it before. And so Seth and I had a chance to spend five days with the play and to hear it read with a group of actors, four of whom ended up being cast in this production. And so one of the things that was really nice about that that I find is very rare with a new play was that I really felt like I knew what the physical production of the play needed to be. I mean, a lot of times when you're designing a show, you sort of have to give yourselves escape routes with the physical production because the show could change and a lot of times new plays like this one take place in many locations and many points in time and you know, sort of have this kind of filmic vocabulary that can be really tricky if you're cutting scenes and adding scenes. But with this show, you know, I just felt like we were able to take a much more aggressive approach to designing the show than I would have, I think, at most other theaters and most other developmental processes. That's great. Well, since, you know, we've talked about the fact that the play deals with, you know, the internet, the online world, the way in which we deal with that reality in our lives and how we interact with it. You know, and one of the challenges, I think, is in then realizing that on stage. And one of the things we were talking about while we were waiting to come on today is just, you know, how that's becoming much more of a reality in the theater. Well, in all mediums, you know, on television and film and the theater and literature, naturally, because much of our life is now spent online. And so it's a part of our lives. It's part of how we speak to one another. It's about how we communicate, how we deal with the world. So it's, you know, obviously becoming part of the art that represents that life too. But how you then realize that on stage can be a challenge. And, you know, how it's, yeah, how it's communicated visually and textually. So I'd love to hear you both maybe talk a little bit about, you know, Seth, from your point of view, how that, how you thought about it as you were writing the play and realizing it and production-wise how that has affected the way in which the world is created. I'll start. So, yeah, I always wanted to play with the audience's expectations of what a play about the Internet would be, because I think when you come into the theater and you think that this is about the Internet and you see these screens that are up on the stage, I think you sort of think that there's going to be a lot of representation of the Internet. But what I did as a writer, I challenged myself to really make each scene about human beings and their ability to connect with each other or inability to connect with each other where the Internet is the thing that's between them, but it's never actually the drama. It isn't the drama. And I also was doing that for a deliberately satirical reason. I mean, I'm trying to satirize the whole Internet culture in its alienation from reality. I wanted to have every scene have food in it because I find that the essence of the Internet, really, is people eating pastrami sandwiches while they're writing emails. It's just gross. I just thought, yeah, that's what the Internet really is. It's actually a bunch of giant computers in Utah or Colorado or California gobbling up a giant amount of electricity produced by a coal power plant or a nuclear power plant. And then a guy eating a pastrami sandwich writing an email. That's what the Internet actually is. And so every scene I wanted to be about the guy eating the sandwich and not about, like, you know, a window and a web page. So that's, yeah. So that's what I felt about the Internet. Sorry, one more thing about that though is at the same time, I wanted to feel the Internet at the fringes of the production. And as you mentioned, I'm a director too, and so there's another, just like you said, Henry, that you have, like, two hats you're wearing when you're a director of a new play. I also, when I'm writing plays, I tend to have this other hat, which I'm always thinking about the visual aspects of the production. Maybe a little bit more so than some other playwrights who maybe don't have a background in directing. And I'm really happy to, by the way, parenthetically, really happy that Henry, that you were directing this production, your vision. I'm not repeating vision, but there's a sense I always have as a writer that I'm writing visual information as well as just textual information. And so, for example, in the play, there are little directions that suggest what the video should be displaying, and there's video titles, and there's an idea of the spectacle side of the play. So that's also how I approached the Internet. Right. Yeah, well, I mean, sort of similarly to what Seth was saying, about this play, as a play about the Internet, is how little of the information is conveyed through the Internet. You know, usually when you get information through any sort of electronic or digital media, it's a single chunk of information. It's not one of those plays where you have to figure out how to do a five-page text message conversation. It's just a single fact that comes in, and then, like Seth said, it's human beings talking to one another in the same space-time continuum. But Seth, you know, and maybe it is because he's a director, I'm not sure, but he's created a very fertile visual playground that you can play around in that is sort of on top of and around the plot of the play, but has nothing to do with the plot of the play. Which just makes it a lot more fun to explore from a physical standpoint, because, you know, unlike really any process I've ever done before, we threw a whole lot of technical and technology elements up on the stage, and then ended up cutting most of them just with the idea of like, let's just see what helps, let's just see what's fun, and then let's also see what gets in the way, and most of it got in the way. And, you know, one of the things that I sort of knew at the first preview was that the way that you understand this play is by listening to the people say the words that they're supposed to say, not by seeing all the clever things that we've come up with that we've put on the stage. So we ended up cutting, you know, almost everything. And, you know, I think one of the things that's fun about the play too, is that what Seth is talking about is the sum total of the internet, not just, you know, what we get when we turn it on. So when we started when Kevin Depponette and I started working on it, he's the Seth designer, and we started out, and we were like well, it should be really sleek, and it should be really slick, and it should look like, you know, it should look like an Apple product, and Kevin went away, and he did a whole bunch of drawings, and he came back and we were both like, this just feels really wrong. You know, it doesn't feel like the play at all, and we were like, well what if we just imagined that rather than looking at the outside of the Apple device, we were looking at the inside of the Apple device, and all of the wires and crap and chips, and, you know, just like the crap that we don't look at that is what conveys this information, and we put that on stage. And it felt much more appropriate. I mean, it sort of provided a visual metaphor, I think for technology, but also a visual metaphor for the character who sort of goes on a journey that sort of turns his brain inside out, and you know, so it's what I find exciting about the way Seth is talking about technology in the plays, he's talking about the messy the messy parts of it, not the, you know, not the sexy dopamine producing parts of it. And one more thing about the video design because we've been talking around the video design a little bit. We have a video designer named Mike Tutai, who's a wonderful designer, and he's famous for always, whenever he comes into a production, he always says why do you need video design in this play? And he refuses to use video just as like texture or background or just to be clever or slick. He always wants to make sure it's needed for the play. So I think that's actually one of the reasons that in the end, you guys ended up pulling back on it is, like you said, like letting the words and the human behavior, which is the soul of theater, you know, kind of carry the story. And he does have these clever tricks that are played with video that only video can do. And that really do suggest the world of Aunt Susan, but you never quite get to know inside Aunt Susan's mind. It's always just a little bit mysterious. I do want to just take, just because we've started talking about the video, I'd love to take just like a little detour to talk more generally about like video in theater in a way, because I do think it's like, I mean, it's not new, you know, projections have been used for a long time and it's, but I feel like it's becoming more and more embedded in the way that we make theater. I think maybe because the technology is advancing and so it's a little easier to do and it's also so much a part of our visual language in the way that we understand information. I don't know, Henry, or said that if you want to talk a little bit about sort of the unique challenges, I mean, you know, maybe specifically with of how you then incorporate that new language into realizing the production and what some of the both benefits and challenges are of that extra layer of design. Well, I mean, you know, I have found, you know, when I first started, you know, it's sort of what I was talking about before, you know, I do find when you're doing new plays that oftentimes, you know, particularly with with the subcategory of new plays that take place in many locations and they have sort of a filmic sense of how editing happens, that it often feels important to leave yourself some sort of flexibility about how you're going to adjust with the shifting shape of the play and when I first started doing working with video designers, I often tried to use video design or projection design as a way to sort of buy that flexibility and usually that by two, I think. You know, I think that so what I really like about what we've done with this show and sort of Mike's approach as Seth was talking about it, you know, I feel like, you know, Mike is really rigorous as Seth was saying about how are we serving the play and and he really, I think, created one specific dominant metaphor that he was trying to put on the visual design of the play that he had a very clear arc for how that was going to happen and then on top of that it was just these little playful moments that just sort of, you know, were kind of parenthetical moments in the show, most of which got cut. So that sort of idea of just trying to do one singular very specific thing that was very much serving one specific dramaturgical idea and then the idea of having fun on top of that sort of worked more successfully than I think has happened in the past. You know, I do think that increasingly lighting design and sound design are functioning more like projection design in the amount that you are able to shift really quickly and and so I do feel like, you know, you can you can make wider changes in how you are attacking something from a very technical standpoint than you could even two years ago because lighting designers have so much more access to color than they did before and sound designers have so much more access to how they manipulate their work in the space while you are there you know, I find I'm less scared of projection design than I used to be just because I used to feel like everything else had made a choice and projection design couldn't and now I feel like everybody sort of can choose in the same way if that makes any sense at all but I tend to be I tend to be a little scared of projections I think we are entering a brave new world of design here both from a software and the hardware point of view you know, you can come in and you can throw up on stage a live camera feed of what an actor is doing and just project that on the back wall I mean, you know, with a device that costs, you know, almost nothing and that's the kind of stuff that I mean avant-garde theater groups were trying to do in the 80s and you know, and really went to great lengths to try to achieve certain kind of film effects that are now available at the touch of a button and with, you know, about 5 minutes worth of time that might have taken hours or days 20 years ago so it is a brave new world and I think audiences and artists are being sort of acclimated to that world where video and projection is easily accessible right I want to talk a little bit about because so we're now, you know, tonight is the final preview and then it will officially open tomorrow night so we've had an opportunity to see the show in front of an audience of, I guess, like eight performances so far and so one of the other things that we were talking about before we started today was the sort of the interesting dynamic of how different generations, different generational audiences respond to the information because it is so much about this contemporary moment and how, and the play itself deals with how two different generations within the play deal with technology, view technology, interact with it and then we, you know, our audience tends to be somewhat intergenerational too and so we get to experience how different people respond to the play depending on where they're coming from. I'm interested to hear what your observations have been thus far about, you know, what lands, what doesn't and what your thinking was in terms of, you know, how you wanted to pitch this to different audience members and, you know, how you thought they might receive it and then how it is being received in the room. Yeah, well like you say, you know, the Goodman does have an intergenerational audience and almost every night I've been able to see that and I, you know, I mean, I want to write plays for everybody so, you know, it's certainly not a case of writing towards one audience or another but I think just as an outcome of what this plays about and also the source material, in Miss Lonely Hearts the young man who is Miss Lonely Hearts has this boss and his boss's wife who are these slightly sinister figures and in the play I've also, the main character, Ant Susan also has a sort of craven capitalist boss and the boss's wife is also part of the organization Steve and Lydia and they are sort of the capitalists at the heart of Ask Ant Susan, and it's a surprise and, you know, they're, you know, somewhat con artists in their own way and they have a very craven approach to the web which is just, you know, how do we make money off of this thing, you know, when's it going to spin off profit and stuff like that so I think maybe unintentionally what I've ended up creating is a world where the young people who are obsessed with the internet are kind of idiots and the older generation is kind of looking at them like, you know, you guys are kind of idiots, right? You're kind of getting lost and wrapped up in all this electronic stuff but what are you, are you really enjoying your lives and the older couple in question are kind of constantly enjoying themselves and so I think it ends up with this kind of funny maybe unintentional kind of intergenerational commentary that I think is landing in a fun way with the kind of audiences that we get at the Goodman. You know, maybe coming in and expecting, oh, there's going to be a lot of talk about technology and, you know, maybe I won't be able to have access to the story but in fact I think a lot of the characters within the story are very tend to disregard all of the tech stuff like, okay, yada, yada, yada, like when are we going to get the return on our investment? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think one of the things that's interesting about the play is that in addition to being a satire on the internet it's also a pretty old fashioned crime caper and, you know, and it really just is the story of how these con artists took this guy and, you know, and lead him around a little bit and you know, um, so I think what's been interesting is that night by night we've had quite different responses but there's sort of an over a consistent arc to how an audience engages with the show that seems to me to be more connected to the plot of the crime caper than to the satire of the internet that the satire of the internet works with different pockets of the audience but that everybody sort of gets hooked by, you know, this guy's journey from regular guy to sort of crazed, um, you know, uh, media magnet. Yeah, okay. Um, well I'd love to open it up for some questions and we can continue our conversation but I do, I would ask you if you have a question to come to the um, microphone. Don't be scared. Don't be scared. And if you're listening online or whatever you can send questions either using the hashtag new play or directly to Ed Goodman. Not about this play specifically but I also have a son who's a director and I can't see him working with another director. So how do the two of you keep from clashing? Well that's a great question. I actually have worked with this is not the first time I've worked with a playwright who's also a director um, and uh, you know, I mean I guess I find that with the new play process that there's a certain, that there are guidelines that are useful about how actors participate and how writers participate and how designers participate but that a little bit of messiness is also useful. That everybody is trying to do the same thing which is to make the playwright's vision appear on stage and that everybody has a slightly different point of view um, from, you know either being on stage or being off stage that it's sometimes useful to let things be a little messy. I mean I do think that you know, one of the things that was amazing about Seth is that since he's been an actor and since he is a director and since he is a writer he's able to see his own play through each of those lenses but he always attacks what he sees as a writer um, so you know he'll see a problem and he'll ask you about it and he's very eager in getting feedback from a lot of different people and then he he makes a change to the writing or he says I think that's a problem and it becomes my problem um but you know, so you get the advantage of his sort of being able to see his play from three different angles um, but he really does you know choose to attack it pretty much only as a writer um, so it really from my standpoint it's never felt like it was a tense dynamic on this process um, you know, and the other thing that's been interesting is because all of the development has happened here and Tanya has done all of it you know, there's just a very familiar conversation that's happening about the play and it's continued to happen through multiple evolutions of the play so you know, I feel like there wasn't a whole lot of time sort of spent in our rehearsal process figuring out a vocabulary for how to talk amongst ourselves um, and and so, you know, we, you know usually what would happen is we would have a conversation at the end of every rehearsal and Seth would go away and he'd come back with new pages and I would also sort of have a sense of what things needed to be accomplished outside of that and that sort of became my focus yeah, I'll add to that and I agree with everything you said about the dynamic, especially the three of us also because Tanya has been involved as an outside eye dramaturg on this play from the very beginning um, so we have a really solid foundation here um, the thing one of the best reasons to study or to practice directing theater is it's an art form where actually the training I believe is to get to a point where you're listening for the best idea in the room at all times I actually think that's what good theater directors are doing, they're in a room they've prepared how to do a scene or whatever, but they're really open, I mean you have to be kind of radically open to being wrong with what you thought was the right way to do a scene with an idea coming from an actor with an idea coming from a dramaturg coming from a writer and being really open to the best idea in the room and then being the decisive person to say that is the best idea in the room and um, so I I feel like that training has applied to a lot of other parts of my life not just writing plays or doing art itself but it's a good training and I think that um, when I've also as a director worked with playwrights who also have a background in this and I think that just having the muscle of collaboration um, leads to a healthy, an honest dialogue where you do know your jobs, okay and you know, yes my job, the buck stops here with the play, the buck stops here with the production but in the other hand, you know, it's like you say, it's not um, you're not making we're not making widgets, we're not this isn't a business, like this is messy it's art, we have to be passionate we do have to fight for what we care about and say, no you're wrong, I don't like that I don't like that at all, but in the end of the day having training as a collaborator you're just listening to try to find out what the best idea is and having the humility to know that it might not be yours I'd love to, just because we sort of started talking about this, oh you have a question no, yeah, come on up so I won't spoil anything I saw the production this afternoon um, and to my surprise just for me, I thought Mark Grapey stole the show he had a lot of charisma he'd got a deep voice and I didn't expect to be so riveted by his character but I found myself kind of wanting to watch him on stage and I wonder, and I don't know how much of that he himself as an actor brought to that role particularly the humor, or if that was really written in and then delivered in the way that you expected but how do you balance kind of the star power of actors in terms of telling the emotional story that you want to tell well, I'll take this too and I'd love to hear what you had to say to use a sports metaphor I don't usually use sports metaphors but here I go, I think that a play is like a team sport event where everyone should have the opportunity to steal the show, just like anyone on a soccer team could do something amazing I don't know, I think a good play provides a platform for anyone to steal the show, and so great actors and of course they change from night to night and I'm really glad you were taken with Mark's performance, I think he's brilliant and certainly the role is written for someone to really chew it I mean, it's certainly media that he's got a lot to say and some outrageous things to say but to speak personally I feel like at different times other actors have stolen the show so to speak or sort of stolen my heart and been like oh man, I want to see that person again so I feel like we're really succeeding at making theater when we're making a play where any one of the actors could kind of steal it Yeah, I do think that all of the characters are colorful I mean, from my standpoint as someone who, I was a big fan of Miss Lonely Hearts before I knew this show and the character that Mark's character is based on is also a very colorful, very charismatic, really sort of funny character so I guess I wasn't surprised that that part was as sort of juicy and but I also think that Mark is sort of the perfect person for that particular part and you know, I mean part of the fun about this play is that all of the characters are pretty colorful and that all of the characters have a great deal of size and as Seth says, you know plenty of opportunity for chewing and I mean part of the fun of being in this rehearsal room is just sort of letting them go and just sort of sitting back and watching them play with it I'm curious just to hear you talk a little bit, Seth, about because we've been involved in the work on this play for so long and in these different permutations do you feel like it's changed over the course of time and Henry you've seen a couple of you've watched it through this process but from your memory of where you started to where it is now are there sort of major things you could say okay, so this is how it's radically transformed or what I've learned about it or whatever I think that the play got more and more confident in its style I think in the beginning I was in a way too attached to the original book of Miss Lonely Hearts and I think that as I've gone along it's just gained more confidence and as the characters have had time to just marinate and live in my mind for a few years then their voices are more accessible to me when I'm doing rewrites or something I can write a scene with Lydia more confidently than I could when I first wrote her three years ago because I've been living with her for a while and so I just know her voice and so I guess I would just say it's become more and more my own thing but also yeah, you know having lived with actually the actors who have done all the readings of the play, there have been several and different actors playing the lead role for example of Aunt Susan have really helped me understand how that character works and doesn't work and what kind of material will really work for him but basically the plays remain the same, the spirit of the plays remain the same and it actually comes from a time in my life too, it comes from four, five years ago in my life it's sort of where psychically it came from and so I've had a weird experience of feeling like I'm also returning to the writer that I was four years ago whenever I do rewrites on this play because I'm actually trying to tap into some of the observations that I had as a 28 year old guy about the internet and culture and just sort of what I was seeing around me and it's a little different now, four years later I still see the same things but I tend to try to actually go back into that headspace of where I was when I am working on it but then the plot has changed too Aunt Susan used to end up with someone else or in a different place than he does in this version, you'll see it maybe we'll do the outtakes sometime or the alternate endings, the Scooby-Doo ending I've always wanted to do multiple endings so maybe someday Did you have anything to add to that Henry in terms of what you've observed through the course of that? I came into it sort of at a point where I would say Seth had already found the things he was talking about it felt like a very confident sort of lived in play but it's extremely economical and it's one of the densest plays I think I've read in terms of the amount of information that's conveyed directly through people telling you things and so I would say for me the main thing has just been the efficiency in terms of adding things when there's a whole or taking things away it's much more been sculptural sort of in the time I've been here I would say yeah Did you have to deal with Nathaniel West's state and if you did did you just start writing anyway figured oh I'm at the Goodman, they'll fix it or how does that come about? We didn't deal with Nathaniel West's state and I decided early on that I wanted to make it my own thing and early on it was much more indebted to the book than it is now it's very much an inspired by rather than an adaptation sort of how I've been thinking about it We did have that conversation early on because initially Seth was kind of imagining it more as a direct adaptation and so we looked into it but then the play started veering in a whole new way so we didn't I hope his spirit is blessing this, I really do I really hope that, it's true Yes I was wondering whether or not writing an adaptation even if you strayed from the original story eventually, was easier or harder than sitting down and just writing a play so to speak from scratch with your own original ideas and kind of following up a little bit on his question about dealing with the West's state if you're doing an adaptation from something written by a living author is that even more unique and difficult to do? So there's two things, one I have done authorized adaptations that are really adaptations like I'm trying to take this story and put it up on stage and that's not what this play is again, this play sort of takes West's premise and sort of runs with it down the field in a crazy direction but working on John for example the George Saunders story George Saunders is a living author I applied to his agent to get the rights and we ended up getting the rights and different authors, different playwrights have very different experiences with adaptation sometimes the author, and it's all about what the author wants to do because once they give you the right to adapt you can, you really can do what you want with it often times the author, the original author will have approval over it or they'll have some moment in which they need to look at what you've done but there's not a lot of hands on interaction in other cases in Hollywood for example in the production by a studio you will not even have approval most of the time so once it goes up to Paramount or whoever they will just hire a writer, a screenwriter and then you won't have no input whatsoever into what happens to it after you sign it off and you get paid but George Saunders in this particular case with John had this amazing experience where he was a real well he was like an idol of mine like he was like a hero of mine I couldn't believe that he had allowed me to adapt his book but as I started writing it I actually got into a dialogue with him and he started reading my draft, not just the final draft but like each draft he would read and then comment on the draft and then send it back to me and it was a really collaborative, that's unusual both generally and also with someone as amazing and famous as George Saunders so I had I've had a great experience with that I'm sure I'll have other experiences too but so that's what the living author that can be, that's kind of an ideal scenario with this case, with this one though you know once I just really just took the premise and ran with it like I say so after I started writing this play I never looked at the book again at Ms. Loneley Hart to just put it away so that I wouldn't be burdened by it and then finally to get back to your question it is a burden in a way to be adapting because you're trying to serve their idea, you're trying to tell their story in a new medium, it's almost like translation like translating from one language to another and that can be a burden it's also kind of a problem solving endeavor, just like translation is kind of your creative but your problem solver so when I adapted John I knew how it ended and how it began and the actor adaptation is sometimes about expanding a scene that maybe isn't very theatrical to become more dialogue-driven or more theatrical but you're really solving the problem of how to translate into a new medium but with this play I just wrote whatever I wanted to and so I let the characters go where they wanted to go and they ended up going somewhere very very different from what they do in West's book. Are there any other questions? Yes sir You touched on the fact of using video and plays and certainly in musicals tend to use a lot of videos these days so my question is when do you get to a point where you're almost leaving live performance and doing a cinematic performance because you're not seeing someone singing live on a stage or singing them on a screen or a video is that something you want to keep away from these days or is that something we're heading more into these days? I think we're heading more into it but I think the great theater artists are doing it in a thoughtful way and the people I admire are integrating video into their productions in a thoughtful artful way so that you're not like watching a play and then stopping to watch a movie and then watching a play again now that being said the avant-garde experimental performance has been doing a mixture of video and live acting for many years I mean there have been multimedia performances so called in which you really will just watch a movie and then watch a person and then go back and forth toggling but the narrative literary tradition of the American theater I think will start to integrate video more into its storytelling but I think to remain the kind of live medium it is, I think it's going to do it in a more creative way so that it isn't just stopping to watch a movie but it's about maybe live camera feeds making live movies on stage there's a great avant-garde director Daniel Fish who does a lot of that stuff or Jay Shy, really interesting directors who are doing more experimental work but I think it will come more into the mainstream where you're playing with video and showing the audience how you're doing it but making clear that it's live and most deadly of course about video which maybe is behind your question a little bit is that video is dead I mean it's one of the only reasons that I think theater still exists because movies are so much better than theater at doing so many things at moving between locations at capturing specific moments and intimacy and close-ups but what they can never do is to create that live feeling of watching human beings interact with each other and go on a journey I think that you will see more video but I hope at least that it's integrated thoughtfully and that you're seeing how it's being done live Yeah, I do think it's a really unique you know it's I mean my experience working with videos primarily like on new plays and how it then gets incorporated and often it's incorporated in a way that like with Cess Play and other plays that envision it from the beginning and so often there's text involved too like with Cess Play there's titles there's and it's always interesting to me because it really the way that we work often is we have a rehearsal period we have like four weeks of rehearsal and then we go into tech and it's really just about solving problems quickly in tech and getting something up there but I do think it's unique when you have these things that are really affecting meaning in a way that is like it can really it tells a very particular story when you have big images on screens and when you have text on screens in a way that's a little different I think than just like lights and sound and so I also like one of the things that I think we may want to you know we may end up needing to evaluate is how we structure our time too because I feel like I mean and I think that's something we talked about in this process is what would have been amazing is if we just had a longer tech period so we could even if it wasn't complete but to play around with how those images work and how they interact with the actors because they do you know they're part of the storytelling in a way that's a little different from how sound and lights work on us kind of unconsciously yeah that was my question as you were talking about this is was there a time and when you actually were able to get your lighting your sound Mike to type for the video and the set everybody together with you and the playwright to to really talk about concept and really talk with each other was there ever a time when you were all together yeah we I mean with this show more than most we spent most of the design process in full with the full staff you know oftentimes with the way people you know schedules work you meet with the set designer you meet with the costume designer you meet with the lighting designer maybe you don't meet with the lighting designer but you know we really made a point with the show that I think we probably had four or five separate meetings where we had everybody video lights sound costumes set and I would say we had you know on three separate occasions in the six weeks before we started rehearsal we storyboarded the whole show pretty much none of which actually ended up on the stage but you know had some sort of sense of at least metaphorically how it grows from the first time you know you see Aunt Susan to where you are in terms of the visual landscape of the play at the end and I agree with both of you I mean you know I think that there's a lot that's extremely exciting about video design and projection design and everything that's happening in terms of you know new technologies and the way in which writer you know I'm really excited by writers who are looking to play with expanding the period of time that their show engages with an audience people who want you to engage online before you come to the theater people who are interested in what happens to you as you walk into the theater you know I think all of that is exciting in addition to what Seth was talking about how about how video technology is being used on the stage you know during the course of the performance but in addition to what Seth was saying about you know it being important that the theatrical experience be live I think what's important about the theatrical experience is that energy goes both ways and and you know I think that as these technologies get used you know I think that really thinking about how that information is being experienced in the moment is important and and I do feel like you know more so than any other show that I've ever worked on I would have given up a week in the rehearsal room for two days in the theater and I do think that as you know authors are looking at you know using I would say physical production as a way to tell a story or to talk about an idea you know that we as an industry are going to have to be a little more flexible in the way that we think about our time and I do think that the fact that you know like I said that this show had a production even though it was a workshop production and then it had a workshop and then it had another production I don't think I could have directed this show if I hadn't had that workshop in between the two you know and I think there was a great deal of care on your on your part about how to develop this show given a specific you know the specific ideas and things that Seth was tackling and I think we'll have to do more of that as time goes on. Yeah I just want to say like for anyone out there who's listening and who supports new play development I do think having been involved with this process which is unique to have been involved with it from the very beginning and it followed it all the way through that the joy of that was I mean first of all I think it allowed the play to really grow but it also just you know often playwrights develop work all over the place with different artists and they're always coming in and you're always sort of establishing a new vocabulary and building trust and trying to figure out what's going on again and again and again and so not that the play isn't progressing but you are taking a few steps back to try to figure it out and to sort of you know have the time to grow and develop that vocabulary has been really to me like you know great and kind of joyous to be able to really see that and I think it's helped in all sorts of ways in terms of efficiency and ability to understand the world and to support what Seth is doing it's my experience. Yeah we have time for one more question so please. You mentioned that the tech part or maybe I'm confused on that if it didn't how do the actors respond at the last minute with the video coming in? Well yes so in the rehearsal room we didn't have more what we would call tech in the rehearsal room than usual we basically put in the whole sound design there's live music or not live music original music through a lot of the play and we put all of that in the rehearsal room so that the actors had some sense of what they would be hearing but you know and we tried to tell them some sense of what would be on the screens when we got to the theater and you know like Tonya said there's all sorts of titles that actually are sort of the primary source of expository information from a physical production standpoint you could always read those out loud even though they aren't actually read out loud so that the actors would know the audience is getting information from someone other than you right now so keep that in mind but but there was a lot of stuff that ended up on stage that they had never seen before or videos that we shot of them and then put on stage you know sort of as they were going through but this group of actors I think was really coincidentally very useful for us in that they are a type of actor who is both sort of experiencing what their character is experiencing moment by moment and also have some sort of larger understanding of what an audience is experiencing moment by moment and they would often they were stopped to program what was going to be on screen asking questions about how long is this going to last how I know it's over are you responding to me or am I responding to you you know are you taking the call off of something that I'm doing or am I watching for something that you're doing and there was a lot of that very highly technical kinds of conversations that we had to have because not only did they not see 80% of the physical production before they got there but we kept changing it on them day by day but you know I mean one of the things that's great about The Goodman is that you walk into the rehearsal room and you have on the first day of rehearsal you have working prototypes of everything and every piece of scenery in this play moves often times you know it sort of lands an instant before the actors are supposed to begin and we had those things on the first day and there's a lot of things about this institution in the way that they believe that production should support performance that you know made it so that you know we could limit the amount of things that just got thrown at them I would just add a tiny side note to that which is that I think for the actors the costumes were way harder than the video because every scene every character other than ants who's in the main character changes costumes for every single scene and I wrote that into the play very deliberately like I wanted Lydia the sort of femme fatale I wanted her to just enter in different you know outfits that are commented on by other characters every single scene and wearing a bathing suit, wearing a power suit what is she wearing in the next scene and so I really wanted that and I think that that's really part of my philosophy the theater as I said earlier to be about people and the stuff of life not about you know not just about ideas and words so like people are eating waffles and changing their clothes and drinking champagne and running off and having to be changed and that's theater that's what theater is it's the spectacle of something really happening and from the actors point of view I think their quick changes into their costumes are way harder than paying attention to the video I also think that you know this show was in really solid shape when we started rehearsals and I think the hardest thing for actors on a new play process is the change that happens in the script on a daily basis and Seth did a lot of writing but Seth didn't do a lot of structural writing he did a lot of you know making things clear giving people more fun things to say you know just making things clear and sharper and crisper but we weren't you know I've done many plays where you know you get three separate second acts in the 10 day preview process and you know literally who your character is changes and there really wasn't any of that which I think made a big difference in terms of the amount we were throwing at them tech wise. Totally Well thank you all so much for coming and thank you very much for sharing your process and your thoughts and I hope you enjoy the show those of you who are seeing it today or later Thanks. Thank you.