 Okay, everyone, we're back, yeah. Some of you may have noticed the sound of a child's laughter in the hallways or a TCG staffer pushing a stroller or a father with his young son making visits with us on Capitol Hill. For the last three years, TCG's conference has been family-friendly. And it's, yeah, and it's so much fun to meet all the children, the nieces and nephews who are here at the conference with all of you. This is also the legacy of our time in San Diego. While there's something from every conference that stays in our host community, there are also things that leave with us and that's one of them. A legacy from this year is an increased global connectivity, a sense that as theater makers, we can work toward building our own theater nation that transcends cultural borders and political borders to create shared spaces for theater-making and for examining global issues we can help solve together. Over the past year, TCG and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University has developed the Global Theater Initiative. By combining the unique reach of TCG's international programming with the lab's distinctive experience in humanizing global politics through the power of performance, GTI strengthens, nurtures and promotes global citizenship and international collaboration in the theater field. It also honors and intersects with the work so many theater colleagues have already invested in cross-cultural exchange and understanding. This week we held our first major project together, a global theater pre-conference, and to tell us more about it, I'd like to introduce DC host committee member, Derek Goldman, co-founder of the lab and our partner in the Global Theater Initiative. Thank you and thanks, Teresa. I've been coming to TCG conferences for over 20 years, first as a daunted fresh out of college newbie who had founded a small Chicago theater company that had joined TCG, where I remember well the sensation of feeling like person after person would take a furtive glance at the name tag and move right on. And equally as strong, I also remember the sensation of being welcomed into circles I felt far too young and clueless to be in and being treated like a peer by people I revered and would come to revere. For the past few days, as never before, this theater nation has felt like the nation I want to live in. In my 11 years living in Washington DC, this is the most proud I have felt of our community, locally, nationally, globally, and its capacity for radical hospitality and for galvanizing action. We've gathered against a wildly eventful, tumultuous backdrop of Brexit and crashing global markets, the Supreme Court ruling blocking Obama's immigration plan, vital sit-ins on gun laws at the Capitol and then panning the camera out as Georgetown School of Foreign Service Dean Joel Hellman reminded us of our Wednesday pre-conference. According to the last reports from UNHCR, 65 million people are being faced with the travails of forced migration as a result of conflict, violence, and deprivation, the highest number ever recorded by UNHCR. The theater nation I have encountered here is a nation that is not in pursuit of nationalism or any other kind of isms or schisms that instead of building walls seeks to foster genuine human exchange, empathy, collaboration, and relationship building across differences. Those who would build walls have always understood the power of silencing artists, of nipping culture in the bud. At GTI's Global Pre-Conference on Finding Home, Migration, Exile, and Belonging at Georgetown, we hosted artists and thinkers from 25 countries, almost all of whom have stayed and participated in our conference. Profound thanks to these friends for making the long journeys and to you who've offered them hospitality, fellowship, have been hosts in the fullest sense of the word. There's inspiration to be taken from our guests. Many of them have spoken of their experiences facing down danger, repression, and violence in their own countries and how they have found it essential to continue to make their art amidst mortal dangers. Our friend, UNESCO artist for Peace, Ali Madi, arrived today from the Sudan and has been doing this work in camps in the Darfur region with war orphans and perpetrators for many years, using theater to do large-scale healing and to imagine a new future. As Theresa mentioned, our Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown was formed to harness the power of performance to humanize global politics, something so many in this room are already doing. I'm thrilled by this partnership with TCG, these first few steps that the Global Theater Initiative is taking toward that future, and I'm grateful to have really wonderful collaborators on that journey. A special thank you to Theresa, to Amelia Kashapero, and Kevin Biderman at TCG, to my wonderful lab colleagues, Ambassador Cynthia Schneider and the amazing JoJo Roof. And whether you're a peer I revere or a peer I've yet to meet, if you're interested in the Global Theater Initiative, I hope you'll reach out to us and get involved. I look very much forward to what our theater nation can achieve together. Thank you. Thank you very much, thank you. Thank you, Derek. We're so excited for this collaboration and for all the work that you do and JoJo does and Cynthia Schneider does into making the global pre-conference such a success. It's now my pleasure to introduce our presenter of the TCG Theater Practitioner Award. Susan Hilferty has designed over 300 productions across the globe, receiving multiple Tony and Drama Desk Awards, as well as an Obey Award for Sustained Achievement. In addition, she chairs the Department of Design for Stage and Film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Please join me in welcoming Susan Hilferty to the stage. I'm so excited to be here today. To see all of you to be part of this conference but also for this special moment. Cause we're here at this moment to celebrate the mythic spirit that is Michael Kahn. Artistic leader, educator, artist, mentor, colleague and friend. Michael has been an influence in the American theater for so long that I'm sure that even he is astonished. His vitality as a force in the arts in this country only continues to grow. Michael's contributions have been extraordinary. The list of his accomplishments is too long to read. But for me, his most impressive talent has been his nurturing generations of theater artists. I believe a great leader recognizes and acts on the task of inspiring and encouraging the future leaders of our field. Fearlessly husbanding talent, that's how I see Michael Kahn. Whether it is his leadership at the Juilliard School, guiding an impressive list of actors or his creation at the Juilliard School of a directing program with Garland Wright and Joanne Acolytus. Or the establishment of the Academy of Classical Acting here in DC. Michael has always been a leader in the conservatory education. But his Michael's role in mentoring individual artists that I'm especially proud to celebrate today. He has supported and encouraged countless artists who have gone on to become influential in their own right in the American theater. I think that there are probably many of you here today. I've known Michael for years, but I've designed twice at the Shakespeare Theater. Experience is separated by 20 years. The first, the tempest, directed by the late, great Garland Wright, and the second, this past season, Salome, adapted and directed by Yael Faber. I think these two artists helped define the depth of Michael's influence. Garland, who if you don't know, and I can't believe that it's possible that you don't know, but if you don't know, before his passing, Garland was the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater, after blazing a deeply passionate career across the stages of America. Garland's first job, though, in the theater, was his assistant director to Michael at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford. This relationship nurtured the astonishing talents of Garland and the beginning of his rich career in the theater. Over 40 years after first working with Garland, Michael continues his unstoppable, fearless commitment to vital challenging theater that he's always encouraged by supporting the work of Yael Faber, a South African director, by inviting her to come to DC and share with us her vision. In this case, a radical revisionist version of an ancient narrative in her production of Salome. These two amazing directors bookend Michael Kahn's visionary leadership in the encouragement of new talent. It is Michael's continual recognition and support of developing talent by his many acts of mentorship that has strengthened the community of our theater. The TCG Theater Practitioner Award, the TCG Theater Practitioner Award recognizes an individual whose work in the American theater has evidenced exemplary achievement over time and who has contributed significantly to the development of the larger field. I can think of no one better to deserve this award than Michael Kahn. So Michael, come on up. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Oh my God, thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Yeah, anyway, I'm very moved by all the things you said. Am I stopping somebody's speech now? Okay, it's not mine. And first of all, thank you all for coming to DC. You know, this is my home now and it was great that you're here. There's so many of you and you've so enlivened just the city and I want to thank you for choosing DC and thank you for this. I'm just gonna take a little, I realized in these conversations which have been so exciting that how privileged I had been, how lucky I'd been, but also how privileged I was. My mother was a Russian immigrant, a working mother, but she told me to read at a very early age and when she would come home from work the bedtime stories were Shakespeare and the Bible. She didn't think there were any kind of dirty jokes in Shakespeare so she didn't cut anything out. She knew there were in the Bible so she cut out a song of Solomon, but later on when I did Shakespeare I realized how many dirty jokes she actually read to me. Then I went to a school where I told them at a very early age that I wanted to be a director in the theater at the age of six and which only meant I was a terribly bossy child. And they said, okay, in the second grade you can go off and write a play and direct it about any subject you want. And I said I will do the Pony Express and I wrote a play about the Pony Express and directed it and nobody ever, ever in that school, in that faculty ever said to me, what an idiot you are, Michael, you just taken the Pony Express to London in Paris. That was totally impossible. But they said they didn't stop my imagination and they didn't stop my creativity even though I didn't know either of those things what they meant at the time. Then I went to college and I went to Columbia and I crossed the street to Barnard because they said, well, would you like to direct? And I said, I would like to direct Pericles and Pergint. I didn't know a whole lot then but I didn't know I wanted to do those two plays and they let me. And I realized when I was doing those plays that I wanted to do, I loved doing complicated, ambiguous, I knew what those words meant by that time, difficult material. And I was born in New York and I used to go to Broadway shows all the time, so I was at college, I was walking down Broadway and I was looking at what was gonna be my life and I was looking at all the marquees and I realized I didn't want to do any of those plays except for the one Tennessee Williams play that was running. And I thought, what do I do? I can't, I'm not interested in this material. Where am I going to go? Well, I was living in New York and it was a wonderful time for as it is now for new playwrights. It was a golden time and I think this is now a golden time also. And I was able to work at Coffee Houses, the legendary La Mama. I did got to do the new plays of Sam Shepard and Jean-Claude Venetalli and Maria Irene Fornes. And luckily I met a young writer, Adrienne Kennedy, and I did a play of hers in Edward Albee's class and he produced it off Broadway. And from that, Joe Papp found me and gave me a Shakespeare play. And I thought, this is what I wanna do with my life. And as I found that, I also realized I would like to be someone like Joe Papp. I would like to have responsibility for my own career, for the work I do. I would also like to have, as he did for me, responsibility of surrounding myself with the most interesting people, the better people than myself. And where could I do that? And luckily the regional theater movement had started and TCG was there and my life began. And I was lucky to be able to follow something that I believed in. Now, this has been a hard year. Why should it just be a hard year for the theater? It's a very hard year for the world. And the theater reflects the world and the world changes so fast and it changes so fast in our own theaters. These, coming to a TCG conference is a source of inspiration. Not only the fact that there are so many of you with new ideas and have stuck to theaters, have brought new life and new ideas into the theater that you're able to share with me to hear young people talking about how they solve problems is always a huge, huge inspiration for me. So tomorrow, this is a great moment. Tomorrow the real world starts and it's a little scary to go back to it because this is a kind of amazing Brigadune which happens just once a year. But I'm gonna take everything with me that I learned today because I still believe that the theater is the place that we can break down walls. We can change people's hearts and we can change people's minds and we can help make our communities a better place. So thank you all very much and thank you for this. Thank you for your good talk. Thank you. Move over, sir, move over, sir. Oh, he's liking your picture. Thank you for that. Okay, thank you, that was beautiful. Okay. Now, thank you, Michael. Thank you for your artistry and your leadership. Thank you for, Michael was really helpful in the organizing of certain parts of the conference. He's been really involved and it's just been wonderful to be here and to work with you, Michael. I'd now like to welcome Rosalind Barber to the stage to give us some context for our closing plenary. Many of you may know Rosalind as the brilliantly multitasking chief of staff at the Public Theater, but we've also gotten to know her as a core participant of our first Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Institute cohort where we've been lucky enough to witness her commitment to justice firsthand. Please join me in welcoming Rosalind Barber to the stage. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to take this here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Rosalind Barber and I'm the administrative chief of staff at the Public Theater. And I have the great privilege of working with Oscar Eustice and Patrick Willingham on the public's government affairs and institutional strategy. And in that role, I've had the great honor of fostering a relationship with the U.S. mission to the United Nations through Ambassador Power and her amazing staff. I graduated from a small Jesuit liberal arts college with a major in theater and minors in political science and philosophy, but I never imagined how I might fuse my passion for social justice with my love of theater. Yet about 18 months ago, I was given that opportunity as I began working with Ambassador Power and her team to bring U.N. ambassadors to the public theater for performances there. A few months ago, during a visit to the United Nations in New York City, a member of Ambassador Power's staff pointed out to me and my colleagues, article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads, everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancements and its benefits. I am so honored to work with the amazing staff of the public theater, which embodies this right every day with the work on its stages, both downtown at the Dalla Court and at the Dalla Court in Central Park and through its programs like the Mobile Unit and Public Works, which seek to create a more equitable and compassionate society. And I'm equally honored to be represented by Ambassador Power, who recognizes the unique power the theater has to shift perspectives and in so doing, change the world. Now it's my pleasure to introduce our closing plenary speakers. Oscar Eustis has served as the artistic director of the public theater since 2005, after serving as the artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island from 1994 to 2005. Throughout his career, Oscar has been dedicated to the development of new work that speaks to great issues of our time and has worked with countless artists in pursuit of that aim, from Tony Kushner and Susan Laurie Parks to David Henry Huang and Lin-Manuel Miranda. He is currently a professor of dramatic writing and arts and public policy at New York University and has held professorships at UCLA, Middlebury College and Brown University. Kwame Kwe-Arma, OBE, is artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage. He is the former artistic director of the Festival of Black Arts and Culture in Senegal, chancellor of the University of the Arts London and former ambassador for trade and Christian aid. In 2012, he was named an officer of the most excellent order by Queen Elizabeth for services to drama. Ambassador Samantha Power is the US permanent representative to the United Nations and a member of President Obama's cabinet. In her work at the United Nations, Ambassador Power has worked to promote and defend universal values and human rights. She has become known for the innovative ways she uses New York City's vast cultural resources, especially the theater in her diplomacy with UN leaders. Prior to her current role, Ambassador Power served in the White House at the National Security Council. Before joining the US government, Ambassador Power taught at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and was the founding executive director of the Car Center for Human Rights Policy. She is a Pulitzer Prize winning author who began her career as a journalist reporting from conflict zones across the world. Please join me in welcoming them to the stage. So good afternoon, everyone. Excellent. My role today really is just to facilitate these two rather brilliant minds talking about issues that mean things to us. And in a week where my country or my home country sent out a terrible signal to the world that could at least be interpreted as isolationist, it's wonderful to be at a conference where we're talking about a nation. Can I just give a big up to the British contingent who are as depressed as I am? So, cultural diplomacy. I mean, I think everybody in this room understands it within the context of what we do as theater, as a community, within the context of race or gender, we are one community explaining to the other who we are and what we are and asking for empathy. But Ambassador, I'd like to ask you in the context of international diplomacy, do you see a role or how do you use theater and the performing arts in that context? Well, I use Oscar to get tickets. And I start from there. No, one of the biggest surprises to me in moving to New York and having the privilege of having this great job in representing the United States is how automated things are at the UN and just how wrote the talking points are. And sometimes you're in meetings where you really just feel that people have dusted off points and arguments and that they've ceased to... There's not the same intentionality that there might once have been and they're reading from what their capital has told them to do. So my central challenge in getting anything done is how do you bust out of that and what are the ways to puncture that reflexive business as usual kind of way of doing, given the state of the world that has been alluded to and which we're all familiar with. So theater has been one incredible vehicle for that. And maybe the best example I think is LGBT rights, which is totally polarized within the UN community. The 78 countries have criminalized being gay. A dozen have the death penalty for those who are LGBTI. So how in a million years do you get past that? And we tried a bunch of different ways kind of within the confines of the negotiating room or of the UN itself. But the best vehicle by far was to take 17 ambassadors to Fun Home, right? And what we're including, ambassadors from Russia, Vietnam, a couple of African countries, and I'm not sure they knew quite what they were getting into today. I might, a small print might've been a little smaller than usual. But the thing about any personal story is that life has lived forward, right? And so they, when they watch Ali herself fighting her own identity and just having a crush and kind of not knowing what to do with it, wanting to go away and then wanting to go with it. There's no human on earth, I think, who can't identify with that if they are proximate to it, if they are living it forward, rather than living it out of some textbook or diplomatic cable. So to watch these ambassadors, initially a little squirmy, some of them, and then just fall into the narrative and fall into the drama of this individual and her father and what he was going through and so forth, which you could just see a dent. You don't see the world change, it's not a panacea, but my question always is how do I create a space then to come in and try to get something new done? We, in the wake of Orlando, were able to get the UN Security Council this two weeks ago to condemn the targeting of people on the base of sexual orientation for the first time in the 70 year history of the UN. But I can't tell you that there's a straight line between Fun Home and that, but I can say Fun Home happened. People lived that, they were moved by it, they forgot about what their national position was because they were watching a human story play forward and then a few months later we did get what we got, you never know. So my job is to maximize the number of, again, sort of the means of piercing the architecture and the artifice and the automation that the institution unfortunately projects. Oscar, the ambassador spoke then about the straight line between creating art and catalyzing debate or even change. And some might say, Hamilton eclipsed, not just to talk about the plays that you've transferred to what was formerly called the Great White Way, but now feels a little bit more diverse. This, on Monday, I had the pleasure of being, part of an event at the Delacorte. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what the impulse was behind this, the swearing-in ceremony that the public facilitated? Well, you know, wouldn't have wanted to have escaped you. Notice that actually Samantha said she couldn't say there was a straight line. And I'm assuming that's because she's a diplomat. I will say there's a straight line between art. And what we did on the 20th, which was World Refugee Day, is we used the Delacorte for one of its most beautiful purposes that we're going to do more, which is a kind of town hall. And in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee, we put on an event called Welcome Home, which was essentially trying to memorialize and celebrate the better angels of American nature and the fact that this is a country that was built by refugees and immigrants, all of the strength. And everything that is actually true about American exceptionalism is because we have embraced immigrants and refugees. And we had a... It's true, it's true. And actually just a quick sidebar. I have to say one of the unexpected pleasures of having commercial companies with Hamilton and Eclipse and Fun Home is that we are allowed as commercial entities to support whoever we want. All of us know that as nonprofits, we can't advocate for political candidates, right? Well, as commercial enterprises, we can. So I'm happy to say that Hamilton is doing a big fundraiser for Hillary Clinton on July 12th. And who would have thought that by going into the commercial sphere, I would feel a little bit unleashed politically? And actually the important thing though with the discussion with the company was really trying to take them through from their position, many of them as Bernie supporters into this. And the company was wholeheartedly behind it as I hope that will be a conversation that is repeated around this country over the course of the summer because it is so important in any case. So the Welcome Home was a beautiful event that had readings and music. Kwame read, did a beautiful job of reading John Winthrop's speech aboard the Orbella, which includes the famous city on a hill that was misappropriated by our former president Reagan because it really is talking about the way that, the way that we are a city on a hill is because we all share, we struggle together, we suffer together as one person and that's what will make us a nation. And you did that beautifully, Kwame. The check is in the post, sir. Thank you. But no, it's true. You know, Kanan sang a couple of beautiful, it was a great event, but the real heart of it was the beginning of it where we, the Secretary of Homeland Security, delivered the oath of citizenship to 19 new Americans from, I believe, 12 countries and we sat on the Delacorte stage and said, now this is actually a worthy event for the stage. This is a place where we are literalizing the fact that we are giving center stage over to these people. And there wasn't a dry eye in the house, including mine, it was just astonishingly moving to see, you know, my favorite was what seemed to be about a 75 year old woman from Afghanistan taking her oath of citizenship and getting her certificate from the Secretary of Homeland Security. It was just a tremendously powerful event and it's one of the ways that, and it was, again, I hope something will do a lot more, where we can actually take what the theater does, which is put the spotlight on people, give people center stage and literalize it and say, actually we can use this place as a way to celebrate those who are so often not celebrated. Ambassador, indeed. Ambassador in this environment, of course, everything that Oscar said, you know, I cheer and clap, but within your world, how seriously are the arts taken? How seriously plays and theater and drama? I mean... My batting average in terms of extending invitations to my colleagues, again, not the like-minded but deliberately trying to do so to a diverse group but is very, very high. I mean, it's, I don't have anybody, turning me away from anything other than some emergency or something they have to do. People really wanna give it a go. I think, this is what I always say that Oscars like my soft power projectile, that this partnership is just this, like just to take Hamilton, right? Okay, so he enabled us, Rosalind enabled us to take the UN Security Council to Hamilton. Yeah, right, how did I get 15 tickets to Hamilton? I'm talking about 15. But, so what is, okay, they didn't even know what they were, like they actually enraged me. I was like, don't understand how valuable this is. You don't know what people would give for this, you know? And they're kind of there and they're like, you know what the feeling is? It's like six weeks into the run at the public, so Hamilton hadn't quite exploded though. Well, you guys were winding down, it was already, it seemed that same, I felt the only way I could get one ticket was to do this whole UN Security Council project. I'm good to go. So I'm like, peace, peace, ask for it, yeah? I'm good to go, I'm good to go. Declam, see, please? I guess I shouldn't be disclosing that just yet when I still have, but anyway, I got my ticket, they got their ticket, they had no idea what they were, but it was just, you know, the United States ambassador asked, you know, it's Hamilton, it's about the founders, and I was telling Oscar this the other day, what made it so extraordinary is that a lot of countries, of course, within the UN are underdeveloped, or they're developing their political systems, or they actually had advanced political systems, they're regressing. The... That's Oscar, he's 50% president. Yeah, but we look, we look, not withstanding our current political climate, but we look like a fixed enterprise, like an established democracy, like our checks and balances, or, you know, so many checks and balances now, given the Supreme Court, and given what happens in Congress, like, but nonetheless, they see these as developed institutions, and they have no, particularly the smaller countries who are, you know, like in Sub-Saharan Africa in place, I think the idea that we were once a work in progress, that there were these historical contingencies, you know, that these things were contested and fought for, and hard, and, you know, the fact that they could see that part of America, it's again, is a little bit akin to the fun home, because it's living life again forward, rather than the false necessity of where we are now, and assuming it was always that way, and destined to be that way. So, you know, they came out, not only having had an amazing night, totally unappreciative of what had actually been secured for them, but they came out with a sense of, you know, we're more, you know, we have more in common than not, like we're all, for all of us, it's a journey, you know, it's not, when no one's at a destination, and that's actually quite recent, all things considered, given how they would feel, you know, in looking at our institutions now, it looks like it's, you know, kind of been that way for a while, and then of course to see the founder's story turned on its head with African American, and Hispanic, and other actors, the idea that we would be doing that today is also a reflection of the dynamism, and the subversion, you know, of ours. This beautiful phrase when you're talking to me, you said that it made America vulnerable to them. Yeah, it made America vulnerable. And I loved that thought. Yeah, that's, thank you for reminding me of that. Yeah, it really did, it was, again, that it could go anyway, because they feel like they themselves are going this way and that way. I mean, I'm talking again about countries that are really struggling, more than half the countries in the UN are not democratic, you know, and so many now are dealing with either the influx of displacement, or the outpouring of their own citizens, of their people, you know, no one wants to be doing that. But so to go back and to see us again in that experimental phase, where everything's up for grabs is very moving, but they, I haven't, I mean, I don't know if it's because I'm the United States asking, but I also, it's New York, I think they also feel, you know, so it may be a little artificial. I mean, but I think in Washington also, there's an appetite as well. I think the question is how to get young people and, you know, make sure this passes along. And thinking through, we've been thinking within our own mission, how do we get our younger diplomats to be doing something other than negotiating resolutions, but getting out and about themselves, you know, bringing their colleagues. It's one thing, again, for the sort of established heads of the mission to do something like this, but if you're really going to change hearts and minds generationally, you know, we've got to think about this more ambitiously. Oscar, I, you know, we've worked together a number of times and I've been greatly inspired by your access for all philosophy. Can you talk a little bit about that in terms of nation building, in terms of building a relationship with the boroughs of New York, did the Delacorte, can you talk a little about that? Sure, but the first thing I have to say is that's not my philosophy. That's what Joe Papp started with in 1954 and George Wolfe continued. And really the most beautiful thing about my job for me is I got to take a job where there was not one iota of air between what I believed and what the theater stood for. So I literally, I mean, I feel like I am completely invested in and identified with that idea. And the idea is essentially a democratic idea because the brilliance of what Joe first did was say, Shakespeare should belong to everybody. And, you know, something, in fact it's, you know, frankly I didn't even really know this till a couple of years ago. He was inspired in high school by his English teacher whose name was Eulalia Spence. And she taught him Shakespeare and what got him going. She was a playwright in the Harlem Renaissance. It's extraordinary. There are actually a couple of her plays published. And, you know, he never talked about that. I don't even know for sure if he knew it. But just the idea of this woman, this artist coming to fruition in the Harlem Renaissance and then not having any other place to go but into the high schools to teach and then her influence going to this, to Yosel Paparovsky, which is what he was at that time. Just, it's tremendously moving to me. So, Joe figured we need to do Shakespeare for free. Shakespeare needs to belong to everybody. Why partly because Shakespeare's great. But partly because for historical reasons, Shakespeare is the key to participation in the culture. Is we all have agreed as an English speaking society that he's our greatest writer. So, if you were going to say, I get to have a place at the table when we're talking about culture, you have to own Shakespeare in some way. So, he did that. And he did that for 13 years, just that. Producing free Shakespeare in the parks and the boroughs. We eventually settled at the Delacorte. But then the brilliant thing he did after that was the founding of the public in 1967. Because what he figured, and I don't know how, where this came from exactly, that it's not enough to simply offer up culture to the people. You actually have to turn not only the auditorium over the people, you have to turn the stage over to people. You have to let people make their own history, not just receive the canon, but make the canon. And that's what opening the public theater was about. And so, that democratic circle of both making it available, turning the stage over, remaking the canon, has been at the heart of the public certainly since 1967. And it's just my job. It's my job not to change that one bit, not to change anything about it. It's my job just to figure out how can we continue to execute that in our current circumstances with all the radical expansiveness that's implied by that piece. Because the thing I love about that mission, there's many things I love about it, but one of the things is you can never accomplish it. You're never done expanding democratic enfranchisement. And like the penummer on the Bill of Rights, it's something that just keeps growing. And so now the show that you're directing in our public works program is a continuing expression of that where we're saying, all right, we're gonna actually blur the line between amateur and professional. We're actually going to say, being an artist is not a binary. You are or aren't an artist. It's actually we're all artists and we're just on a continuum of some people are really, really experienced and practiced and skilled at and get to spend their lives doing it. And some of them are doing it for the first time. But it's not a difference of kind. It's just a difference of grade. And so we can put 200 community members up on stage singing and doing Shakespeare, which you're going to direct them so wonderfully. Thank you, sir. I'm sure I will. And but that's all. No pressure. We pledge in front of all these people. But the thing I love about that is that's still the same idea. It's just figuring out a new and groundbreaking expression of that idea. And so that's what we try to do at the public. Samantha, though I'm certainly loathe to even mention Britain at the moment, but we're used to cultural diplomacy. We have the British Council, which is tasked and funded to go out into the world and say, here is Britain. Here is Shakespeare. Here are many of the things that we define as great. And we interact with you as a nation through that lens. How serious does the American government take cultural diplomacy? You guys, you may know better. That doesn't sound very... I didn't mean to ask you to throw up a couple. I don't know. I can't speak. I know how seriously President Obama takes it. I know that Hamilton was conceived of for a casual encounter with Lin-Manuel, right? Sure, most people know this by now, but when Hamilton was only one song on the concept album that Lin thought he was creating, the first performance of it was at the White House in front of the President's First Library. It's just, he said to us the other day that he thought he should get to pick up the tone and that he deserved to share of it. So... Along with his Grammys. But I recommend looking on YouTube because I think if you want to see the power of art and the piercing that I was talking about earlier and I think was alluded to also in the presentation before ours, look at President Obama's face after Lin-Manuel has done his thing. Now we all know Hamilton, of course. There's a hip-hop musical with all these actors playing the founders. But imagine, so you don't know any of that and you're the president, you invite this guy and he decides he's gonna do a rap about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr and Obama, you can just see him the very beginning. He's like... And then at the end, he just leaves to his feet and it at least was with all the rights and the patents and everything now, but it was on YouTube and it's just the magical experience. So I think some of it is personal. It's if you yourself are interested in the theater and have lived the theater and or believe in storytelling or believe in narrative, you're gonna embrace this as part of your role and see it as a secret weapon or not so secret weapon. Samantha, could you... You've talked to me the other day in the Security Council with the kids about the way you use personal stories and testimony actually at the Security Council. And although that's not technically theater, I thought it was incredibly inspiring. I think I might be losing my secret powers here. Okay, that's working again. Yeah, thank you. So I mentioned the context in which we're trying to talk about Syria or trying to talk about the refugee crisis. We have made an effort every time we're doing a meeting in the Security Council of some importance to break through. And here our batting average is much lower than the take up on invitations to New York Theater or the public theater in terms of breaking through, but we give ourselves a better chance by bringing individuals literally into the physical institution of the UN Security Council who are speaking from direct experiences to someone in theaters because it sounds so obvious you would think this had been done for 70 years at the UN, but kind of crazily it hasn't. So the best example of this for me was lots because we try it in every context. But during the height of the Ebola crisis when Tom Frieden, our director of the CDC was showing us internally charts. This was in September, 2014 showing us charts that showed that there'd be 1.5 million infections by early 2015 because of the exponential rate of infection. And just after we'd had the Liberian man die in Texas and the nurses get infected and a New York health worker come back and get infected where our political leadership, even some Democrats just freaking out to use the diplomatic term. And we staged the first ever, I happen to be the president of the Security Council in the month of September in 2014. And so we staged the first ever emergency meeting of the Security Council on a public health issue because it tends to be peace and security, war and conflict and conflict resolution, that kind of thing and the social and economic issues tend to be dealt with elsewhere. But this was something that was ravaging these countries. And so we just thought, okay, how do we get away from like the WHO reading the numbers and even as graphic and dramatic as the chart was, how do we humanize this? And so we beamed in, we did a video conference into the Security Council and there's the big mural that you saw on the Security Council behind where the president sits and the secretary general speaks, completely covered with this video screen that drops down and it's this Liberian health worker, not terribly educated, somebody, the way the Ebola response worked is sanitation and chlorine and is every bit as important as being like an epidemiologist or something. And this Liberian that MSF, Dr. Lila Bortas had put forward to us and said he'd be your best speaker, described what it meant to have no beds for people who had Ebola. And he described a man coming to the gates of the Doctors Without Borders Clinic in Monrovia carrying his daughter desperate to be able to deliver his daughter to Doctors Without Borders and he, Jackson, who's now become my friend, but Jackson's saying we can't in the way of the Ebola treatment where she can't sort of pile people up and triple people up and if you don't have the beds, each of the beds are like a specific unit and he had to tell the father no and the father just laid his daughter who was clearly gonna die at the gate of the clinic and he tells this to all of the ambassadors of the UN who are crammed into this first ever historic and he says what made it so devastating as a father was to imagine what it was like for the father but then to leave your daughter but then also to know that the father was going back to his family and he was gonna infect them all because the way Ebola, he'd been carrying his daughter like forget about it and he said in front of it he said, people, you must understand if you do not come, we will all be wiped out and he said that and it was like that in the Security Council, just everybody stopped and I really, I view it as a lot of inflection points the main inflection point was President Obama deciding to send 3,000 health workers and soldiers into the eye of the storm and into the center of the epidemic but the combination of us deciding we were gonna act and then that where you actually, you turn 192 other ambassadors into advocates for action instead of into sort of messengers of instructions and people were much more personally at stake and we've done that on Syrian chemical weapons bringing the doctors who actually treat the people who've been afflicted with chlorine when the Assad regime had their chemical weapons taken away they started using chlorine, household chlorine in barrel bombs and so forth and we just, we're not breaking through with Russia or with some of the other countries that just sided with the regime instinctively regardless of what they did so we brought the doctors who showed the video the hand taken video of the kids that they had treated who had just been, had no cuts on them, nothing just were frozen like almost pompe-like by virtue of the chlorine and kills and from that out of that we were able to get an accountability mechanism to basically hold accountable those people who carry out chlorine attacks so when you break through and you, again it doesn't happen every time but we have to try unconventional ways to get around the same old, same old because we see in the newspaper what the same old, same old is buying us. Amanda's use of first-person narrative. Yeah, it's people's stories and yeah. I'm gonna open up for some questions from the floor if that's all right. I'm just going to, if I may, just that. I think there's a microphone there and a microphone there and there's also some roving mics. Is that correct? Am I correct in that? No, evidently not. So, so please if you have any questions please do just line up in the aisle and ask them. I would beg, not that I need to, that the question be a question and with that I open to the, I open the floor and I'll point, thank you so much. Hi everybody, it's Adrian Schwartzstein from Spain from a theater group called Kamchatka specializing in immigrant, refugee, migrant theater. I have a question for the ambassador and maybe for all of you. I was really shocked the other day in the pre-conference day and my question is why you are afraid of some Syrian refugee in Jordan to get to the United States to talk about theater? Why she didn't got the visa to come here to explain her wonderful story? Why you are talking about going abroad to save the world but you close your world to other people to come and share their wonderful experience? This is my question. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And not in any way am I trying to deflect at all? There may be some questions that we may ask like that that ambassador just might not be able to answer specifically. So I just want to put that framework out there and then ma'am, please. I know nothing of this case. You know, the process of granting, I mean, I'm going to sound like a total bureaucrat here but it just takes a little time. We've got to run the security traps. I promise you that it'd be good for no refugees Syrian or otherwise if we had an incident. And so I take your point, you know this woman and you're vouching for her but that's not how our system works. So we just have to run it through the system and we have, as you know, not taken a huge number of Syrian refugees up to this point to resettle them which is a huge issue for us and we're trying to get the number up to 10,000 by the end of this year and our overall number of refugees up to 100,000 next year from 85,000 this year. So we're trying to do better at achieving both of our objectives which are being a country true to what Oscar has described true to our values but also, you know, enriching our country with perspectives like the woman I'm sure that you described while also keeping the American people safe. Our political climate is such that, we need to maintain political support for this program and right now that has over the course of the last year that has been much more challenging than it has been in the entire life of one of the most important programs the United States has ever stood for. So I don't know anything about the specific case I wish I had known about it. Some of you have Oscar's email, Oscar has my email. If there's a case I can, these are the kinds of things that one knows about it. So. Happy to help. But helping just to be clear means putting people through a process where you try using the information you have to ensure that they can get a visa. It's not a willy nilly process. It's gotta be a good process for the sake of the program as well as for the sake of our country's security. And so just to give a little bit of clarity to that apparently she was not denied for this conference. It was for a previous engagement. Good question over there. Thank you, Mike, coming to you, ma'am. Is this, okay, great. Sounded like it was off. This is also a question for the ambassador. You reacted when we laughed about the support of the U.S. government for arts and culture in the U.S. And you may not be able to answer this question but that's my personal view and probably of many people in this room is that there is a significant lack of funding and support by the U.S. government of arts and culture in the U.S. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts in your position how you can advocate to your colleagues for more support and value of arts and culture in the U.S. And also what we can do as advocates, I mean, I know that many people went to the hill and met with representatives, but what we can do to showcase the value of arts and culture and change the viewpoint of the people in power in the U.S. and the American people to view it as a pillar of society rather than as an entertainment benefit. I am definitely on the foreign policy side of the house so I don't have a huge amount of insight into the sort of funding picture and what is the hill and what is the administration. But I think, so my answer is just that of the citizen which is that the more personal exposure people have, the better. And so the question of how to, that all institutions are comprised of individuals, they develop as collectives habits and in the case of arts funding as I understand it also from Oscar, just being way down steadily down I guess over the course of the last two or three decades. And I can imagine that that makes your jobs incredibly hard and what you do is incredibly important. So the question is how to take these collectives and disaggregate them so that people get off there. It's like what I was describing earlier off their talking points and are living the experience of theater. And I think Hamilton, not every theater director gets to have a Hamilton every year but taking advantage of something like that that has history lessons in it as well as contemporary political lessons as well as insights into sociology and the reaction of everybody in the theater is its own sociological study in the making. So to take advantage maybe of some of these large successes as a way of making the case for what lies out there, the sort of pearls that lie out there in all of your respective theaters. But Oscar, you've been fighting this fight for three decades to get this funding. If I can just say two things. One of the things that we can do is try to make sure that our work matters to try to make sure that we're reaching the people that we say we're supposed to reach and try to demonstrate what I believe is true that the theater has something to offer to our civic discourse on the largest issues facing our society. There's things that theater can bring to that discussion that are vitally needed. Samantha's example of the Security Council and First Person Testimony, it's we have to make work that actually demonstrates on the face of it that we are reaching the broadest mass of people and that we're reaching them with something that matters. Now, I'm gonna say we don't do that, but that is what we can do doubling down on that. The other thing I wanna say is also has to do with the immigration question is not being a member of the administration. I can say. Could we close now? I have a discussion. The job offer coming. No, I can say there is a huge epic making conflict going on in this country right now. And that conflict has many different faces, but that conflict on some level is between two strands of American history. And one of them is about immigration and openness to the world and refugees and about building a nation for everybody. And one of them is about putting up walls and slamming down borders and trying to recapture a mythical past that never existed when this was a white conflict. And on the one hand, what we're seeing heading the Republican Party is a joke, a clown. But on the other hand, it's a representative as the Britons has just found out of a very real force in our society. And we have to struggle with that and we have to win. Now, one of the ways we're gonna win is by not simply struggling, by also bringing people over to our side. But this is, that's gonna change arts funding, that's gonna change our border policy, it's gonna change a lot of things when we can actually make an America that proudly is standing up for the best of America. And that's about who we elect and it's about who we support. It's about what their policies are. It's the pressure we bring on those people that we elect to follow their most progressive selves. And that's something that we can all do as citizens. I have to say, I think I've said before, I profoundly believe in theater as foreign policy. During, and again, not being a member of the administration, I think I can say this. During the Bush years, America across the world was not necessarily seen in the best light. But yet one would go to the theater and see Jesus hop the aid train where the heart of America was being displayed. And you would say, oh, that's the nation that I know and that I wish to celebrate with. And that sense of anti-intellectualism that America seems to be going down at the moment is very dangerous, not just internally, but externally. Because actually we begin to think of America again and President Obama changed that. But we might begin to think as a nation of idiots that you go, really, that's what you want. You're going to shut down your border and build walls and close down. And I think our role as theatrical practitioners is to make sure that, as you've said, that the work that we create matters so that when it is exported and when it does travel the world, it represents America's best self. Any questions? Yeah, there's a question there, thank you. Thank you guys again for speaking today and for an awesome conference, this is my first one. But I have another question for the ambassador. I think it's really remarkable that you see theater as a tool and I'm kind of curious about the discovery of that. Was it something that, like, was it a slow discovery or one day you were like, Eureka, theater, that's it? Yeah, I'm just wondering what your personal journey to using theater as something that can affect change outside of, because all of us, that's like our goal. But you noticing it and actually using it, I'm really interested in that discovery. Is that question a, tell me about your first time? Yes. Like, thank you. Sorry to be cheap, but alas. So, I'd say a couple things. Well, actually, if I can respond just a little bit to what was said before while saying that I can't get into politics and the elections and all that, we don't speak to that. But I do think, I think there's a little bit of a risk, particularly given how dark, you know, all of us feel in the wake of Brexit, but of not looking at some of the glimmers here and some of the, like, we did just, you know, have Barack Obama, will have just had Barack Obama as president for eight years and we've kind of come to take that for granted. Like, that's so obvious that a guy named Obama with a middle name who's saying, like, that's so obvious he'd be our president for eight years. You know, we have, when it relates to LGBT rights, you know, gone in the shortest period of time at the most astonishing pace to a place that none of us thought possible, even just a few years ago. We have universal healthcare, you know, for Americans, one of the most polarizing issues, again, complicated and perfect, but different. And anyway, there's a lot to be said and the thing that I found most striking, just studying, crunching the data about Brexit is just all the young people just wanted to be European. And so there's this, you know, kind of, you know, very dispiriting, but also kind of uplifting feature of the numbers, dispiriting insofar as, you know, you now have all these young people, some of them, of course, didn't vote, saying, ah, if I could only have done it on my smartphone without leaving my apartment, you know. And then others saying, we're saddled with this decision that is so not us and our generation, and in, you know, sort of, anyway. So just, I reject a little bit the, we're this close to being a nation, just to use your phrase. And to be frank, I don't think that I was saying that we are this close, but it does hang over us. And I think you're absolutely right, Ambassador, to say that there are kernels of great hope out of what road we've traveled thus far. But I think as a challenge to us as theater makers. I understand, I understand. I mean, I don't think, like this day in 2016 is a day that anybody's feeling particularly complacent. So just, again, given some of the forces that we're confronted with, but I think some of these forces are getting strengthened, in part as a reaction to some of the headway that we were actually making. And so just to put it in some, now, my mother, my mother is just the most amazing woman in every respect. So she split up with my father, but she went to medical school, she's Irish, but she went to medical school in England and she would sneak away from medical school and I think it was like 20p or something at the time to go and catch the matinee waiting in line and we just pretty much, it basically between her night shifts in the emergency room, she would just gobble up as much theater as she could while she lived in London. And we emigrated from Ireland to Pittsburgh. When I was nine, we weren't big into theater there. We weren't, I went to high school in Georgia. We weren't big into theater there, but I would hear these stories about her and she was like a wave of a woman and how she always had to choose between, did she use her money to eat or to go to the theater? She's tiny and she always go to the theater. So that was just an appreciation. And then when I was a senior in high school, my stepfather moved to New York to Brooklyn and then my mother followed when I went to college. And once she was here and now she was a physician and she had the resources, forget about it. There's not a show in New York that she hasn't seen and so she just dragged me along and just with every single, I mean she works at Mount Sinai, she's a kidney doctor, she's a tremendous athlete, she's, I bring her down to the security council when we're doing something cool. She's an omnivore in terms of politics, but she's like a movie class in the morning and a squash game in the afternoon and she's nuts. And so I have taken like one small, tiny piece of her passion and I think being in this job and having the privilege of this platform has given me a new, I take what I took from her and now I've lived it and I've seen the effects on people. And I've never been a person who brought people into theater, go to the theater and I'd be moved by the theater, but what we've done together with Oscar and the public has allowed, I've got like the zeal of the convert. You all probably had, but I heard Michael had when he was six years old, I'm having in my 40s watching its effect on those I'm trying to move. So in that sense, I'm more like what you're doing as you watch your audiences. Excellent. I have time for one more question I'm afraid before we run out of time. I believe you have the microphone, but I'm going to also, I'm gonna say that I saw Ari put his hand up 10 minutes ago. So forgive me, I'm gonna extend it to two questions. Thank you. Sure. Thank you for this conversation. It's really fascinating. I would say it's something I would love to extend in whatever brief answer for all three of you. One of the great beauties of these conferences I think is giving us a chance to sort of envision a better future and envision an American theater moving forward. And so I would love to hear your thoughts about how you see American theater working both as a global citizen, but also recognizing that we're hyper-local and what you feel like are the great things that we have yet to achieve. Oscar, I've heard you speak about more theater that directly addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I would love to hear from the three of you what you feel like are the issues or even a vision of what theater can be that does not yet exist, but you hope to see. I would have a hard time answering that question just because I'm so in my knitting. Like I, in terms of ISIL and the Russians and, you know, so. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. To be like, to have that extra sliver of bandwidth, it just goes to my seven-year-old, my three-year-old. And so when I leave government, I will come back and I will have a better answer. I like to think that Samantha actually can't answer that because she's getting everything she needs from the theater from coming to public. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha that must be it. Look, the thing that I feel particularly passionate about these days is the question of expanding our reach. It still feels to me like we are reaching way, way fewer people, a much smaller percentage of this country than the theater should be reaching. we have something that is needed by everybody, and it goes to about 5% of the population. So figuring out how we change that, which isn't just a question of mobile units. Mobile units are good things. It's been fantastic for us. But it's also a question of reimagining what the form can do in order to make sure that it matters to more people, in order to make sure that we can actually place it at the center of people's lives. And that's fairly general. But I think we all know what that means. We don't know exactly how to do it, but the biggest thing I wanna say is we can't cut our ambitions short. We shouldn't settle for what we have. We should be aggressive and ambitious and not self-satisfied about what we're currently doing. The other thing I wanna say is, yes, Israel-Palestine. But just in general, the experience that we just had with Eclipse was really extraordinary. And being able to speak about an issue and reach tens of thousands of people. And again, to say that the theater is a way of bringing home sexual slavery, the problems of the civil wars in Africa, the problems of female soldiers. Bring that to a visceral reality. That's something we can do. That there are not many forms that can do that. But in order to do it, we have to say, yeah, we're gonna tackle, we need to speak about these issues. We need to tackle them. If the plays aren't there, we have to figure out how to bring them into existence. And again, I just wanna argue for our ambition and that how large our ambition should be. And I would simply echo that by saying, I would love as an artistic director to see less plays that use the metaphor of the American family to discuss politics and more about just hitting it straight on with great skill and structure and allowing political theater to be something that you don't have to run away from or cover over. Just to press forward on the Israel Palestine question, Ari Roth from Mosaic Theater with huge props to both of you. How can this collaboration as it were between the United Nations and the public theater help to reconvene conversations about peace in the Middle East, particularly with respect to Israel Palestine. This conference, this international pre-conference invited the Freedom Theater of Janine and the Playwright Multilearner for a first ever encounter between artists who could have and should have been speaking to each other but because of the real politics in the region never did for over 15 years. This conference achieved that dialogue thanks to the Lab for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown and its collaboration with TCG. What can the great public theater do in collaboration with the United Nations do to do something that the politicians can't? This is the hardest issue that I have faced in my professional lifetime. I have found it more difficult to figure out how to fully address this issue than any other. And it is a issue where as well you know, Ari, that is one of the few places where the difficulty that the theater has in speaking about engaging this issue mirrors the difficulty of our society as a whole. And all I know is we have to do it, we have to do better. We have to push the boundaries of what is acceptable to talk about. We have to push the boundaries of who gets to talk about it, of who has agency. It's also one of the very few issues in which I think New York is the hardest place to talk about this. But we have to do it. I have never actually asked Ambassador Power how she can help me. But now that you've brought it up, you don't necessarily have to answer in public, but we should talk about it. I mean, just to echo what Oscar is saying and then I want to maybe at least my part end on a more upbeat note, but this issue, it's like polarization all the way down, turtles all the way down. It's within the UN community, it's very hard to create shared spaces other than in the UN Security Council itself, which is such a performative venue and such a divisive one. Fundamentally, everybody coming with the strongest version of their argument for why nothing on the other side is right. I mean, just it's a non-listening venue by and large. And I mean, culture and art should be the vehicle. And so many of the other issues we've discussed, it has been, and it can be a vehicle. But on this, it's just the ways in which strong views on all sides kind of look to see what is the sign of bias on the other side and that that then becomes a disabler. And so it's like, what is the way to give it a second chance to make, to give any piece of art a second chance to make a first impression if one is already looking with such suspicion to put it in a box or in a slot. And that is, so Oscar and I will take this and talk about it and think about is there a way to do that in an ideal, in order for it to work properly, the way I think about it is that, I think about it as a US government person and I think about it as somebody who gets to interact with diplomats from other countries, including the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli ambassador. And to imagine, is there anything cultural that we could do together as a starting point? And it's just, it's particularly in the current climate without talks and without things progressing. It's like culture should be the, can and should be the Trojan horse through which you can move the other, but absent progress and movement toward talks, it feels at least in my world frozen on lots of other fronts. The more upbeat thing I just wanted to add was Oscar mentioned Eclipse. And we, of the 193 countries who are represented at the UN, there are 36 women ambassadors. So 36 out of 193. It's a little strange in 2016, but it is what it is. When Eclipse was off Broadway at the public, we invited the 36 women ambassadors, again through working with Roslyn and Oscar to attend Eclipse. And one of the women ambassadors who was there who's now the foreign minister was the Liberian ambassador to the UN. And she said after the show, it's again this privilege that I have of sitting and watching the play, but also watching my colleagues watch the play and watching her watch the play. And she said, you know, this is my life. This is what I've lived. I knew it was happening in my country, but because I didn't experience it myself, I don't think I've ever really understood what my country went through before I saw this play. And she's now the current Liberian foreign minister. So that's the power of art. You know, you can hear about it as an abstraction, but living the experiences of those women up close and personal, she said it's the first time she understood sexual violence in Liberia. And all that now, she had a responsibility to go and do as somebody who was just promoted to become the minister, you know, grows out of the emotion, the heft of that piercing. So their ambassador was the straight line we were talking about at the very beginning. Thank you, ambassador. Thank you, Oscar. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, TCG, for inviting us and having a bloody brilliant conference. Hey, everybody's all on Twitter now. 862 references to Hamilton. Kwame, Oscar, and Ambassador Power. You know, their talks so beautifully reflected so many of the strands of thought that have been flowing through this conference and I think it's really just, man, given us a lot to think about and talk about going forward. Here we are, we're in our last moments now. I'm gonna take a few minutes right now to give some thanks to people here in the room. And I really wanna start out by recognizing the volunteers who have been helping us throughout these days. And I just wanna ask, volunteers, if you are able, could you stand? And if not, can you raise your hand? Thank you, thank you. Now I wanna ask our host committee to please stand and be recognized. These people are like honorary TCG staff. Speaking of TCG staff, I know you might all be staff. Are you out there? You're probably asleep in there. How could they be asleep after that last panel? If you were able to stand, please do. We'd really like to give you all a huge, huge round of applause. And I just wanna say, because of their deep commitment to teamwork and shared leadership, they would never give themselves this credit, but I really must recognize Devin Berkshire and Gus Shulenberg in particular for their incredible leadership. Another TCG staffer who I'd like to ask to stand again. It's Amelia Katchapero. Please let me explain. It's Amelia's 25th work anniversary at TCG. And we really believe that attention must be paid. Amelia, can you please come up here and join me on stage? That we've been talking a lot about how our impact in people's lives ripple out and touch people we don't know. And we may not, and so watching part of John also listened to Nicole saw feeling with Owie and just a few ocean water at me equity. So we're gonna wait to think of very, no, touched by Anbrie. That's what I said. So we are at the end of our time together about to run off to our trains and planes and automobiles, but I do wanna share just a few that day, Thursday, that was really just feels like about two months ago of how Anna DeVier Smith rattled the ground on which we stand and urged us to move if we are moved. I'm thinking about John Meadah and his call for creative leadership daring enough to jump off hills. I'm thinking about Steven Karam and Nicole Salter holding us accountable to telling the truth. And I'm thinking about Samantha Power and her advocacy of the power of theater and her constant reminder to live our lives forward. I'm thinking of a flood of moments in breakout sessions in affinity groups on the hill and at the bar where a moment of connection happened and something new became possible. But above all, I'm thinking about the sounds of those kids laughing in the halls, the contagious energy of the teens who were here in attendance, the voices of young refugees telling their stories, the exchanges between Lorde leaders and local students and the reports of an intergenerational leaders of color meetings so big it kept running out of chairs. Yes. You know what? Yes. The voices of our legacy leaders who are here, the voices of those who are not, the voices of the indigenous peoples on whose ground we stand. I think of all these people communicating in English and Spanish and Korean and ASL, across borders of conflict, across borders of time. And I think if there is a theater nation, these are its sacred documents, its constitution and Bill of Rights, written not in moldy documents but in living bodies, bodies moving, jumping, truth telling, connecting, laughing, weeping, singing and signing a declaration of interdependence carried in bodies from one generation to the next, bruised but unbroken. We leave each other now but the work continues and before we know it, it'll be June 2017 and we'll gather together again in Portland, Oregon to reconnect with our theater nation, our theater family. There it is. Thank you for being here. See you at the party and see you next year.