 And so we're stuck with what comes. And the fourth person on the panel, is Anna Joyce Hoven, who is the artist's mage on the Playwright Center in New Orleans. So she can talk a little bit about it's to be a writer to the social network. And we are streaming on HowlRound. We are sent any questions at hashtag hfest. So we'll put them all under and on the phone. Any minute if there's any mistakes. Or maybe you're on the back there. It's an hour 20. OK. I don't have time to say it. That's right. Oh, I can see. That's my back. I just assumed that's what that beautiful lens. Oh, no. This is real, this is real. Old-fashioned bad. I can't hold it. I can't hold it. I can't hold it. OK. So I will just have my phone open and it's ready. OK. I'm not exhausted. That's fine. No matter who we have, it's taking the same. Yeah. We don't need to name names. I don't think it's about 20 fingers. And I have to tell you, we're out. It's not really happening. I don't know a little bit more about the architecture service and so forth. Well, I started a community work, hopefully. That's what I thought. No. I'm holding the writer. How is everything Annabelle? I'm so sad. Do you have a program? Are you putting in people's bios or just their names? OK, good. Hello. How are you? Good. Thanks. Good. I'm just going to hit the John. Right back. Somebody's bringing John. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? You're great. How are you? How are you? How are you? Can I call you back? I'm the engine that I was. I'll call you later. OK? OK. Thank you. You're finally. I know how to work. It's why I wanted something like that. Do you know that this point will be doing a live tweeting? To ask you questions? Yeah. To change stuff? I think we should introduce ourselves because I think that's why we're in this. Okay, so even though I appreciate your hair, I will just get it, or do you want to start it? I probably will start it. I'll just enter my camera. Yeah, I'm gonna make it easy on you this time around. I will tell you how's your audio? How's your audio Annabelle? Check one to check one to check, check, check, check, check. We are live streaming for the interest. This is my favorite part of the whole thing is that we're on the web this year, right? Look okay. I didn't do anything about my good. Good morning everyone. Did you get one for Just a minute, please. Just a minute, just a minute. I don't think it's going to be an opera. Are we trying to end a little early or is your part here and you're just going to jet with Donald That's okay. I think that's perfect. I was going to take him to introduce him. I'm just really nervous. Good morning. You're going to sit somewhere. It's pouring rain. It's pouring rain. And you got the earlier shuttle, Jeff. I got the lift from Jackson By the way, you are going to be in the land in the house again. See if you can find my jacket. Judy is going to take you Judy. Hi Judy. It's going to be three or four people who are here. Should I sit at the end? You sit at the end. We're already audio. What's this? The audio is already live. We should each introduce ourselves. You're doing your piece. Where is that? In the fine arts building. The one where the drive circles up to. Where all of your books are piled. They're fine now. It's too expensive. I bought it. I should have brought it. You're the one. I'm waiting to release it. You did. Really? No. I bought it when you talked to Brown. I don't think he... I bought it that much. It's a wonderful school. He's created. My son's had a great time. It's too heavy. Annabelle, are you good? Close the doors. Who knows how many people out there. At least we can have fun. Yes, we will have fun talking to each other. Annabelle, are you good? Annabelle, are you the technician? Are you helping us with life? Are you an interested party? Are we officially launched? We are officially launched. Thank you to HowlRoundTV for having us. I'm Jeff Sweet. I seem to be moderating this. I'm Karen Carpenter and I'm acting as the interim artistic director. I'm also on the Inge Festival Foundation Board. It's my pleasure to be here this year and to get to honor a playwright that is profound to me and also extremely entertaining. Deep and have a lot of fun. I'm that person. Thank you. I'm Maria Mazer. I'm a freelance theater director. I have the delight of being a director in the festival directing a reading of Donald Marguerite's play, The Country House. And I'm Hannah Joyce Hoven. I am the membership manager at the Playwright Center. So I guess the topic under consideration here is development to production to premiere and whatever and the various different problems that we face. And we were chatting a little bit beforehand about there seems to be still this dynamic where theaters are generally interested if they are interested in doing premieres, but they're not terribly interested in doing second productions of plays unless they've been validated in New York. So we've got this situation in which if you have a production in a regional theater, a premiere in a regional theater, if it doesn't from there go to New York and get validated by the national press it's very difficult to get it out into the general repertoire. Does anybody want to either endorse, amplify, refute or tap dance around this subject? Let's tap dance. I'm very good at tap dance. I think that's largely true, but there are always exceptions. Give us some exceptions. Well, something like Almost Main, which is a play that did not get wildly reviewed in New York. Modestly produced and it is the most produced play in the country and it has been the most, I mean hundreds of productions a year. I know this because I'm on the Board of Drama Displacers Full disclosure. So that is a phenomenon. I can't explain why these things happen. I don't know why a play that had a modest reception would have attracted this kind of viral approval. I don't understand it. Good for John Cariani. I think all playwrights would love to have that kind of acceptance. But I don't really understand how something of that scale happens without the imprimatur of the New York Times. I think it's a situation where it meets the production needs of a lot of companies. Well, it does, but a lot of plays do that don't get that kind of life. So how does something catch fire? How do you think that caught fire? We were talking the other day about, she and I have both been stuck in this boat where we've worked very hard with a writer on a play and we've done a developmental production of some sort, some kind of sort of a staged workshop or what have you, and something is written about it and once something is written about it, no one else will touch it because they won't get the press for it. So is it the press that kind of helps those things continue like almost main, do you think? I don't know how much the press had to do with almost main. I would have a hunch that one of the things that might have to do with that is that there are a lot of self-contained scenes which probably get done in a lot of acting classes and workshops and just as the Fantastic's got started because a producer saw a scene from an acting workshop, but sometimes acting classes and workshops become the seeds of people. Oh, have you seen this? Have you heard that? And that's a way of something getting around. I think we underestimate the degree to which getting stuff done a lot in acting workshops across the country pollinates. No question. And those scenes lend themselves to precisely that, but that seems to be very much you mentioned that as one of the few exceptions. Yes. That I'm aware of. Yeah. There's also, you used the word viral, I think something that's quite interesting that's happening today is that anybody can review anything. Most of many theaters, especially smaller theaters, have websites where they let their patrons just comment on every show. They might curate it a little bit, but there's a pro and a con to that, but one of the pros of it is that sometimes something can really catch fire with audiences that isn't necessarily catching fire with critics. We're also faced with, I think, the problem of there are very few critics with any national credibility or muscle anymore, because the newspapers are cutting back on arts coverage. Donald and I had the good fortune of encountering a critic in Chicago who I think was one of the last people who had that kind of muscle. Richard Christensen. Richard Christensen, who more than any other single person was responsible for the Chicago theater boom. And Chris Jones to some degree is still doing that, but I can't think of who in Philadelphia is doing that. I can't think of who in most other cities has got that kind of energy, credibility, or commitment. I mean, I know in San Diego when I was running The Old Globe for Jack they shuttered the theater criticism and essentially, I actually think it was a woman who was reviewing dance was covering theater suddenly. And I remember having conversation with her in which she felt she was sort of ill-equipped to have any kind of rigorous comment about what she'd seen. Well, part of it is an economic thing because the newspapers don't make much money out of theater advertising and they don't think that much of their audience goes to see it, so why should they spend the resources to, which is I think so short-sighted because the identity of the town is so frequently fixed by theatrical representations of the town and those plays go out and become ambassadors for a town. I have to sort of take my hat off to somebody who is doing very hard work. I don't always agree with him by any means, and that's the Terry Teach out at The Wall Street Journal who has maintained a ridiculous schedule running around the country seeing stuff in small theaters all over the country. The fact that I don't always agree with him is nonetheless he's doing work that very few other people have the energy or the emotional commitment to do and it is working very conscientiously to see shows in small theaters when he shows up the Writers Theater which was a 100 seat theater in the suburb of Chicago and that's kind of a big deal. I don't know very many other people doing it. And alas, these people are the people who give our plays frequently their second chance. I mean, I think one reason I wanted to slate this panel is to address the issue that I was confronting when I was programming for The Old Globe that I have no doubt every producer faces which is that we've weaned our audience on a diet of premieres to expect your season to be loaded with premieres or stars. But we've done that. That has happened we've met the culture in that way or we've maybe even created the culture to fall in that direction and that is one of the biggest problems I think to me because you are someone who's had premieres and were not satisfied not to cast his versions on it but it didn't somehow deliver in the way that you wanted and the plays needed more exploration But that was always my intention. Having a premiere outside of the glare of New York used to be a way to develop a play. Now you're not safe anywhere because of the pervasiveness of the Internet for one and also because the New York Times will go anywhere to see a new play will certainly have mine and it's a mixed blessing. Once you have a certain profile they'll hunt you down wherever you are. So the reason that I would premiere something at South Coast Rep or at the Geffen Playhouse would be with the foreknowledge that I'm going to be developing this play. This gives me a first opportunity to see it with an audience and to develop it with a director who for most instances will take it to New York. It's not my process but what happens now is that the process is under scrutiny instead of it being a final product. Now the critics are for better and for worse invite themselves in perhaps prematurely. What is your experience like in Minneapolis? I'm curious. There's a blend and it's really interesting to hear you all talking about this because sometimes it's less for people is as far as they get and sometimes they don't get further than that. Making relationships with producers, directors and we're trying to address both there and sometimes it's bringing people out to see a work that's in development and meeting someone but I think having a safe place in a way what you're talking about. A safe place to develop to workshop to be the director of your own development workshop and to not have to show it to anyone if you don't want to is something that isn't happening everywhere and is really crucial I'm not a playwright but just from what I hear from playwrights who get that opportunity to just be with their play and have what they need in the moment and not have to present it before it's ready. They aren't answerable to a given like this is always the way. But when they're ready if there are organizations or people out there who can help them take the next step to meeting the people who need to see their play. I know here we host two playwrights every semester at the Inch House for eight or nine weeks or so and it culminates in a developmental workshop and the history here has always been that something is presented at the end of that week but I know we had one of the writers from the playwright center here this last semester and she wanted to spend her time here researching a local history story about the circle mine in Oklahoma where the EPA has poisoned and so she really needed the time to research and do all that legwork and then she started to write and I think we wasn't here yet but I think there was an obligation felt by the Inch Center to present something of hers but I said to her it doesn't have to be, it is completely up to you how you use that time and those resources because it really is for you. We are a resource for you. How was it dealt with? She did a few scenes because she wanted to hear them and she had the actors and she had the director deliver them because she wanted to get a read on how they were doing but I know something about your process having interviewed you a bit for this that when it's been told to me that when you write you'll write some dialogue and then you'll say something else happens here and then you'll write another bit of dialogue or something like that and you need to have that, you need to have that space and that time to let it come to the page. I have heard it enormously from readings of plays and Jeff would know because he was there literally at the beginning because we started out together for purposes of full disclosure. Jeffrey and I met 37 years ago. 37 years ago. When you were 12. Yes, thank you. But what I do to this day is that when I'm working on a play in the audience today was present at the creation of collected stories and let me just cite that as an example of my process if you're curious. I had a commission from South Coast Repertory my friend Jerry Patch was the dramaturge literary manager there and I was rather sluggish in my delivery of a play for South Coast. This was after the success of Site Unseen. This is early to mid 90s now and Jerry at that point was running the Sundance Playwrights Institute and he said why don't you come to Sundance with the play that you have? I said Jerry I have like 15 pages. He said bring the 15 pages. He said who do you need? What kind of actors do you need? I said I need two women. I need an older woman, younger woman and I think it's going to be a two-hander. I wasn't even certain at that point. So Candice Chappelle one of the best unheralded actresses in America was available to me. I never met Candice and she was there at the first reading of the 15 pages of the play that became collected stories in Provo, Utah in 1995 4? Something like that. And what was so galvanizing about hearing the play read by two committed actresses, Lisa Peterson was the director, she was there from that first day, is that I was given luxury of hearing what I had, getting feedback and not even so much feedback but hearing it for myself. And then I went off to my little cabin and eight days later with interim rehearsals I had an hour and 45 minutes of collecting. Wow that was fast. It was one of the most exhilarating writing periods of my life. I don't know that I'll ever replicate that but it was thrilling to begin with 15 very rough motley pages and then at the end of the festival I had almost the entire play. And so you wrote a little some every day. I was on fire. It was a thrilling time for me. But I needed to have the first kind of thing like that. I think it probably was the first time that I am a poster boy for development in American regional theater. Because sight unseen began as something very different. It was something called Heartbreaker. It too was a commission from South Coast actually my first commission from South Coast. And it became sight unseen only after a very arduous humiliating process of development where it became clear that the play wasn't very interesting. And I put it aside but there were two scenes in the play that were of particular interest. And I realized that the play was lurking in those scenes. Which scenes were they? They were scenes involving a character named Jonathan Waxman who was a struggling artist in the original version who visits his former muse and college girlfriend. And those were clearly telling me this is the play, Schmuck. I remember because Donald and I were members of a group that we essentially created called the Writers Block. And I remember we set aside a whole session to read Heartbreakers. We did? You did. Oh wow. We set aside a whole session to read Heartbreakers. I remember. Heartbreaker, Singular. And that at the end of it was always a combination of candor and kindness. Which is a difficult... Perfect mix actually. But we basically said this isn't war. But that's the scenes there. Really, really good. And we, those were the scenes that we pointed to. And it became glaringly obvious actually. Because we did a workshop at South Coast of Heartbreaker. Did you read it publicly? Yes. It was rough. Did you know already? I did. I had already fallen out of love with it. I think you did. One said that it was the only case that you know of were a bad play turned into a good play. Well, but I didn't know it at the time. I was just humiliated. I didn't know that it was going to turn into a good play. But you couldn't pull the plug on the public reading? No, no. I needed to have the full throttle public humiliated. If you go back and take a look at the way August Wilson worked at the O'Neill Center, the first reading was always the complete thing he brought. And the second day, 45 minutes would be cut. Maybe. I was his stage manager for five years, so I could say that. Only because it was hard for him to cut. But the story of Ma Rainey, literally between the first and the second day he cut 45 minutes. And the second day he had the good luck that Frank Rich came and saw it. And that's how his career was lucky. The second day. If you've seen the first day, maybe it wouldn't have happened. But he, you know, when they were in rehearsal with Ma Rainey, Michael Feingold and the original director who I think maybe was Bill Parkland, said these are, here's where the cuts are. And August said, you may very well be right. I have to hear everything. And he heard everything. He said, okay, let's put the cuts in. That's interesting because Lloyd, I did Joe Turner piano lesson in Two Trends Running as the PSM for the two of them. And I remember Lloyd telling August, you have one scene too many in one of the plays, I won't say which. But he didn't say which one. He said there's one scene you could lose in here. Which I actually think that's more my way. I think it's really your story. Because I think directing is interpretive. Not the creative act actually. Except the thing that was fascinating about Lloyd, and since I've written a book about the O'Neill Center, I'm now writing a book about the O'Rap. I'm getting to know Lloyd better now than I did when I knew him. Was that he had a very strong dramaturgical hand. You go back and read about the development of Raisin in the Sun. Did you know that the original second part of Raisin took place in Clybourne Park? Oh yes, yeah. And Lloyd said, I think that all takes place in the apartment. So why don't we just make that the play? Without Lloyd saying that, I doubt if we would have Raisin in the Sun. And Lloyd always had that effect on August looking for clarity. But Lloyd also, which was a shot to me when I was researching the O'Neill, which is my book about the O'Neill Center, was that I hadn't realized that Lloyd hadn't directed any of August's stuff at the O'Neill. He assigned white directors who felt very, why am I directing this when they, but he felt that they would come in with a colder more objective eye and be more useful to August. Precisely because they weren't invested in the same way in the material and could come at it more objectively. And August was always very articulate about what he felt he owed Michael Feingold. I think many people would concur. But one of the things that I think we can I suspect you might agree with me on, which is that rather than looking around for what is out there that is useful to us, Lloyd's rights could take a more active hand in the development, in what they need out of their development. I think that's true, but to each playwright, these are her process and they need to discover that for themselves. I remember when Richard Nelson came to Yale and we met for coffee, he told me, he said, I'm not going to have any readings. I said, what do you mean? He said, I hate readings. We're not going to have any. I said, wait, that's sort of a personal decision, isn't it? They didn't have readings. So he projected his own prejudice on a system that might have been useful to other writers? Yeah, I mean, I have, as I said, learned tremendous amounts of my own abilities and my own skill set by seeing readings at different stages of development. Just to finish up the heartbreak story for a second, we did have this workshop at South Coast. And I met with the artistic directors, David Embson, Martin Benson, and Jerry Patch, the dramaturg, after the reading of Heartbreaker. And they were very uncomfortable with giving me their feedback, because clearly it wasn't hitting the mark. And I said, guys, I don't want this to be my commission. Let's put this aside and let me start over again. And they said, oh, thank God. And I said, you know, I don't feel, I don't want to, I could have said, okay, here's my commission. Goodbye. And I'll move on to my next thing, but I didn't feel right about that at all. And I said it aside for what turned out to be maybe a few months, and I revisited it, and I made the crucial choice to make Jonathan Waxman a superstar artist as opposed to a struggling artist. And by doing that, I disassociated myself and my own autobiography and where I was at the point in my development so that I could then objectively create a character named Jonathan Waxman who bore some resemblance to me, but was not me and was not living my experience at all. I had to project a great deal onto his experience. So it was a tremendous learning experience to go through that process. It speaks to me too of the imperative need for time and for people to allow playwrights to take risks and also give them the resources of collaborators to do that. I think writing is so often such a solitary thing, but of course we know it's imperative to work with other collaborators in the theater and how much time is so hard to come by because of money or life or whatever. And it speaks to me of how important these residences are and these opportunities to just focus on the writing and the time and the risks. I think it's also very much, it's kind of a paradox because we do our writing largely in private, but theater is a social form and at least I have found I need community in order to do the job properly. Donald and I had the benefit in the group that we founded being together about 10 years. We met every week except over the summer. We met every week we had no... Every Monday night. We had no foundation support. We had no we never filed a not-for-profit. We just met in each other's living rooms and sometimes donated space. And you had actors that also felt to say. They were part of the core group. And in fact, one of the people who came to us as an actor, I started the group because space became available because I was disgusted with some groups that I'd been in which had been run like the Ben Hurd chariot race in which all the playwrights were competitive. And I thought there has to be a way in which we end up being friends and wanting to have coffee after the sessions. Because one group I was in, as soon as the session was over, people scattered like roaches when you turned the light on and nobody went out for coffee. I thought there was an index of dysfunctional group. And so I met Donald because we had a mutual friend named Julius Novick. And I was calling my friends to find out what writers were laboring in undeserved obscurity. And he said, well, there's this guy, he hasn't written more than 15 pages yet, but I think he's really got something. Well, I have little... Oh, maybe a bit more than that. What I read was what later became the first exploration of what's wrong with this picture. No, no, I think it was pals. No, I remember... We're going to do our Larry David. Anyway, but also at that point I was friendly with David Mamet. And I said, who do you have to recommend? And he said, I'm not going to recommend a writer. I'm going to recommend the smartest actor, young actor I know. There's a woman named Jane Anderson. And I remember sitting with her in a coffee shop. And after 15 minutes of hearing her talk, I said, I think you're a writer. And she told me what I could do with myself and how violently I could do it. She said she would come and she would try to be as full as an actor. And she came in and after three sessions you turned to her and said, you're a writer. No, it was exciting. So we have you to thank for defining gravity. Both of us. But what happened was that she looked at you and she looked at me and she thought we were in collusion to embarrass her. And she said, I'll prove I'm not a writer. I'll write something. And she went off and she came back with the monologue the next week, which was staggering. We said, you're a writer. We're not going to be too old for talking about the writer's block. We're going to stop. The point was the pressure of community meant that we felt like schmucks if we didn't have something to bring to the next meeting. Yes, but the larger pressure I was trying to make here is that they were non writers in a writer's group. We had directors, we had people who produced, we had actors, so that writers acted for the first time by reading each other's work. And actors wrote for the first time because that was part of the that was part of our ritual. We began with something called six lines every week. At the end of each session we would throw out a topic for next week's six lines. And six lines was literally, I likened it to a haiku because originally it was two actors, three exchanges each. A-B, A-B, A-B. And it would be like a little snippet. And everyone, people who had never written, would bring something in. Nobody could not write six lines. It was absolutely compulsory. Everyone did. So that actors who had never written did. Jane among them. And it was thrilling because then what it did was, and it's something that I think is a really strong marker for creating a cohesive group. It made everyone committed to the group. Because I had a similar experience with writer's groups before Jeffrey and I met. Which was that everybody's there for their own purpose. And then they leave. Or they only show up when they have something to present. Which is a lousy way to create a trusting environment. But what was great about the block was that people said oh I can't wait to hear my six lines this week. Or you're writing it for particular members of the group. Whether they were actors or writers or actor writers. And so many of my early plays came out of those six lines. Where they were just exchanges between people whose voices were in my head because I was hearing them every week. And trusting them. And so many of my early work came out of that. We started to cheap it. It ceased to be six lines. It could be anything under two pages. And the other thing was that nobody criticized the six lines. Right. We just went around the group. There was no feedback. But it meant that everybody every week was involved. So it gave everybody a reason to show up every week. And this was not done with any conscious oh if we do this, that will happen. This just happened. It did. And it was a miracle. It was an incredible group. But that sense that the thing I was trying to say was the dichotomy of writing as individuals but having the access to and regular pressure from and expectation from a community was I think key. And the community lasted for a long time and was only essentially broken up by the number of people who then moved to Los Angeles or in one case New Haven. Right. And that was basically it. I host a group once a month at the playwright center and what has become really amazing is that with technology people can join from afar via webcam. Right. So we'll have a group of 10 or 12 people in the room and then another six online. And similarly it's a group of writers, member writers who meet and we take turns reading each other's work and discussing it. But what's amazed me over the years that I've been there is that whether we're reading people's plays or not people keep coming back. The same people keep coming back. And they're reading the lines as actors even though most of them aren't and they're, you know, writers. But they like the community and sometimes we won't get to their play for six months. But they still keep coming because they just want to, they want to have people they can identify with who are in the trenches like they are who may or may not be having these same experiences and they're at all different levels. Some of them are very early writers and some of them are much more established and have had work produced. So if I may, we are streaming right now on HowlRound. Can you, would you share how can people become a part of that? Yeah, so this is at the playwright center and anyone can become a member. You can join online. But whether you're a member or not you can join this group by emailing me and you can find my email address at the playwright center. So that's the other wonderful thing about it is that it doesn't have to be a member playwright. We won't read your play if you aren't a member but you can certainly sit around the room and have a conversation. It's been wild that that community has grown even though we're not always focusing on those people's work. And do people have to submit work to become members or do they just submit to? Yes, submit to. But to get to the other aspect of this which is, okay we've talked a little bit about development and there are various different methods for development, various different groups and stuff. The problem of A, launching a play and B, once the play is launched if it isn't instantly embraced and becomes August Osage County, what the hell do you do? I think one thing which has been lucky which I've had luck with and I can't prescribe it for everybody because it means you have to have access to certain people. I had a play which I wrote in the block in which Donald read the lead for me as I was writing it a play called The Value of Names and I had the great good luck many years later the Jack Plugman became obsessed with this play and whenever anybody asked him to do something he said no but how about we do value of names and he ended up doing six productions of it and I can tell you that people weren't doing the play necessarily because they wanted to do my play but because they wanted Jack Plugman and I didn't mind that in the least. How did you meet him? There was a guy named James Glossman who's a director who's absolutely shameless and James will contact anybody and he doesn't care who says no to him and he'll get through to them and he That seems to be what it takes from the director's point of view. You just have to keep bashing at people until they really look at the thing. He will just keep going until he gets them and I remember John Astin ended up doing three productions of one of my plays because of James and Dan Lauria and James And you never asked me. You never asked me to do it. You're now about the right age to play the part. But I have to just interject you because I have a Jack Plugman story. He told me his version of it. Well Jack at this point had no voice left. God bless him. He called me. I'd never met him and he said that player has collected stories. You ever think of having two guys? I said no. He said would you think about it? I said no. I said Jack it's a completely different play with two men. But it was very funny. He was always trying to figure out something. He was on stage and he just... Dan Lauria. Dan Lauria is somebody who really cares about new play development. He will dedicate his time to it. He will give himself generously A long record of having readings of new works out in Los Angeles. The biggest piece of advice that I have and not the biggest but one of the biggest is to new writers is find a passionate, smart director because the director will be more used to you than an agent. I guess I'm not well connected enough yet. I'm talking personally about the things like... People bring you plays and you as a director slash producer how are you able to... You know I think it's an art for sure of trying to figure out which new plays that you're passionate about with where they might consider doing a production and each theater has its own mission and mandate and I know as the playwright center is often in this position as well of trying to do this kind of matchmaking where the theater will say well we do new plays but we don't do premieres. We want the play that has been done in New York but is not a premiere but is less than five years old but they have all of these stipulations and then you're thinking okay what are the plays that I'm passionate about that might possibly fit all of these criteria and they have good reasons for those criteria as Karen said I do think we've kind of trained our audiences in certain ways to expect so if you would live in a midwestern town you might expect something that's premiered in the last five years in New York. Because we've trained that expectation then the artistic director is trying to fill that expectation but there are only so many plays that have been premiered in the last five years in New York as a director a lot of times the next production will be directed by the same person who premiered it in New York so I might look at it and go well I probably can't pitch that play because that one's probably spoken for but maybe this one that What I'm wondering though is the phrase premiered in New York sort of a euphemism for well received by the New York Times? Yes, yes definitely. And also more often than not the plays that have been so called premiered in New York have in fact premiered in New York but they've been grown someplace else and then brought to New York. Well I did a premiere a New York premiere of a play Jason O'Dell Williams Handle with Care off Broadway about I guess it was a year and a half or so ago now it had been developed at the kitchen in Ithaca it had been developed at Florida studio theater I think I'm sorry Jason if I'm getting the name but theater wrong. But Handle with Care was this beautiful play that luckily there were a couple of commercial producers that were willing to commit to doing it knowing it was this beautiful story that would play very well with audiences in New York. Committed to doing it even though it wasn't technically the world premiere of the play. And I was not the original director of those other two productions but I have empathy for the people who did direct those productions because I displaced them because I had some notoriety because of Nora's work the work of Nora and Delia. But that play could have never been done in New York it could have easily fallen in one direction or the other. It's great if you have somebody who is an endorsing figure. If you don't have a profile yourself if you have either an actor or director who's got a profile and will get people interested in something I think you almost have to have that you know and the person who endorses you the higher they are placed in the industry. They're the people who are going to get the phone call answered you know they're the people that these theaters want to have come as it would be associated with their companies. So that means what I was saying before that the playwright has to be a social figure and has to know these people. I'm sorry it's not enough to be a good writer. Half the job is being part of the community which means being interested in other people's work. Since if you aren't interested in other people's work why should anybody be interested in yours? So being out there and in the thick of it and you know attending things like we're all here. And becoming familiar with potential directors and potential actors that you want to work with. And also I feel a great responsibility to see as much work as possible now wherever I am. After the festival I'm going up to Kansas City to see whatever is being done in Kansas City. But let's remember we're here at the Inge Festival. Let's remember how Inge's career got started. It got started because he interviewed Tennessee Williams. They became friends and Williams endorsed Inge and brought Inge to New York. You know there are countless acts of generosity of artists to other artists. And a lot of this depends on kindness and generosity. And I think most of the writers that I know have that. There are very few that I know that operate on the Ben Hurd principle of running each other off the road. I think writers have been among the most generous and supportive of each other. People that I know. I'm ready to know the director is much more important I find than having the right agent. Well you know even though my career was up and coming 30 years ago Claudia Weil was the director who heard about me or something. Maybe even through the Writers Block I don't remember the series of events. But I gave her my play Found a Peanut. It was Claudia who took it to Joe Papp. I mean Joe my agent could have sent it to Joe Papp but it wouldn't have had the same value if it had not been handed to him by director that Joe at that time was cultivating at Claudia. Who had already been. She had made her name in independent film at the forefront of independent film really and was sort of had already been burned by the studio system and was looking to get back into theater which is where she began. And we met in the early 80s. We met probably in 82 or 83 and Found a Peanut was one of those miracles where Claudia fell in love with the play and said can I show this to Joe Papp? I said yeah. But of course showing something to Joe Papp meant showing it to Gail Papp. And Gail, thank the Lord, loved the play and kept on saying Joe you have to read this. You have to read this kid. You have to read this. We had the reading of Found a Peanut for Joe and it was after that reading in his office that he said I love this play I'm going to do this play. That doesn't happen very often. This is like the stuff of Warner Brothers musical. This is something else which is that most producers don't know how to read and so to have a good reading to that is essential. But what I'm getting at is that if Claudia hadn't brought it to Joe I might never have gotten his attention. So getting to know directors and having a good relationship with good directors enormous number of the productions I've gotten have happened because directors have taken place. Two artistic directors rather than my submitting to a theater. You submit to a theater and you end up being handed off to the readers that the literary manager has. Not that we have anything against those former students of mine. Yes no we love them. But that was true at the old Globe. We had so many scripts that we had to have a committee reading. You're looking for the most direct route to the person who can make the decision. And the most direct route to the person who can make the decision are those directors that that artistic director likes to work with. And it means you have to do the research and find out who those directors are. You can get to them or you can have some sense of who that theater wants to work with. That can be matched with an artist that they want to work with and that's your best shot. Which means you have to be aware. You have to do your research. And also the play has to fit the mission. Whatever the theater is about. I mean I've had the great good fortune having developed the festival and honoring you this year and honoring Jen Silverman another wonderful wonderful writer who is getting the Otis Guernsey New Voices Award this year. I've gotten to interview many of your collaborators. Some of them have been producers. So you know then I get to talk to them about their curious about what I'm up to. I hope producers and having been one I think I can say this and being one at the moment also have to develop a healthier curiosity about what's not in their camp at the moment. Because there are many other writers out there. I mean Jen Silverman is very young. She was awarded the Yale Prize last year for a play still which was I think a thousand scripts were submitted for that competition. And she was a peer chosen. This was a peer chosen award the Otis Guernsey Award here at the Inge Festival. Jen's a young writer and she's gotten several things that happened in this year. And she's you know she's in her 20... I mean she's young is the point. And I hope that director that producers will look at her work. But I don't think they'll look at her work until she's as she is right now premiering at Humana and this is happening and this is happening and she's in sort of the zeitgeist. But that's how careers are built. You know and it's an accretion of these kinds of events and these accolades. People begin to pay more attention. I think that you know and this is true in any art form. That you need the imprimatur of some notable marker. An arbiter of taste. In order to validate the work that you then oh well we should take a look at that. And it's been under your nose all along but wait no it didn't get that rave review from Charles Isherwood yet. And that's why you know the public private dichotomy of being an artist in any genre is such a confounding one because you need to do the work and you also need to as Jeff says you need to be out there and I don't mean in a political way. I mean you need to absorb it. You need to be seen. You need to meet people. You need to be stimulated by what's in the marketplace and you need to have reality check of what is marketable. Because we're not just doing this for ourselves we want to have careers in our field and you have to get a sense of well what are people responding to. I don't mean to suggest that you're pandering but you just need to know you're writing because you need to write something. But you'd also like to make it your life's work because it is something you'd love to do or it is the thing you love to do. And the thing you're gifted for. But yeah I mean I had Julius Novik in my life when I was a 20 year old visual arts. Did you see him out? Well Jay taught dramatic literature at Purchase. I was a student at SUNY Purchase in visual art. I have a BFA in visual art. Period. I don't have a masters in anything. And I was interested in playwriting and I knocked on Jay's door and introduced myself as a visual art student and I would love to study playwriting and would you sponsor me in a playwriting tutorial? And Jay said have you ever written a play before and I said no. He said I'd love to sponsor you in a tutorial. So we developed this instant rapport of meeting with Jay at least once a week and I wrote like a house of fire. It was really thrilling. And Jay said you're good at this. You should do this. Now I think any 20 year old kid who's trying his or her hand at an art form being told that by a mentor that's gold. You know I think it's life changing. Would you talk a little bit about if you would your experience with you know when you first were starting in New York you did a play off-off Broadway as my understanding before found to be that. Yeah. How did that come about and what was your experience with that production? The first production I had in New York City was in 1992. It was a commission from the Jewish Repertory Theater. Someone named Ed Cohen. Edward M. Cohen was the literary manager of the Jewish Repertory Theater. But he was also reading scripts for Playwrights Horizons. And I had submitted a play of mine called Pals, which Jeff was very much a witness to during his development because it came out of the Writers' Block. And Pals even though it was never produced got me a lot of attention and you know it's sort of a Brooklyn luncheonette genre play. But it got me a lot of attention. Even though it didn't get me productions it won me some advocates in literary offices in New York. And Ed Cohen had read Pals. We met as a result of that. And it was at that time that he and the actress Florence Stanley, the late actress Florence Stanley were putting together a bill of one act plays by Delmore Schwartz who would figure as an off-stage presence in collected stories. And I read Schwartz's... Jewish Rep wanted to commission an adaptation of a Schwartz short story to be on a double bill with Schwartz's own obscure play called Shenandoah which was about the naming of a Jewish child. His parents are so desperate to assimilate their child, they call him Shenandoah because it seems like a quintessentially American name. And it's a novelty play really. It's a curiosity. And they wanted to produce that because it had never been seen in New York. But it was only an hour long or 15 minutes long. So I was commissioned to write an adaptation of a Schwartz short story. I read the collection In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories. And I fell in love with the story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Which is just an astonishing story about the young Delmore on the eve of his 21st birthday is having a dream in which he imagines his parents' courtship in Coney Island that led to his and his sister's birth. And it was a disastrous marriage. And it's this little story and it's a beautiful conceit. And do you want to share that with us? I'll tell you in a second. It's just a question from the web. We're getting questions through this. So I ended up adapting Luna Park from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Luna Park became my first New York production in 1982. I remember going to it. Yeah, I bet you do. And it did nothing for my career. I mean just in terms of the building blocks of the career was very important for me in terms of confidence and having a play produced. I remember the dear Marion Saldis came to see it. I remember her bowing and welcoming me to the American Theatre because she was such a delightful character. That was part of her official role in the American Theatre. Yes. She went over her arms and I was quite great. When you say it did nothing for you did you? It didn't lead to anything. Did it was it, did critics say it? No. No. Okay. No. I Joe Hurley who wrote for a third of the movie East Village Paper gave it a nice little capsule review and I think that was the only review that I got. The New York Times didn't come. It's a beautiful play. Never really produced. Students do it. But I haven't had a production of that play since 1982. So what was your first play that was critically reviewed in New York and what happened? First play critically reviewed was Gifted Children, another play that came out of the Writers Block which was produced with Zora Lampert and Dinah Manoff. At the Jewish Rep they produced my first full length play in 1983 and I had the misfortune of having Frank Rich come to see a play that he shouldn't have seen and he gave me a very disparaging review and that was my New York premiere. That was your baptism in a way. Yeah. And then six months after that Joe Papp produced Found a Peanut and Frank Rich came to see that and gave that a very meh review and then six months after that I mean things were happening. Yes. Yes. But I wasn't getting, I wasn't arriving I was always sort of pulling into the station and then driving on and then what's wrong with this picture was already, there was a commitment from Manhattan Theatre Club to do what's wrong with this picture. We had a production Claudia Direct with Evan Handler and Florence Stanley and Bob Dishy and Madeline Kahn God Bless her and Marcia Jean Kurtz, Salem Ludwig and it wasn't working. The production wasn't working and some of it was my fault, some of it was a casting error and I just felt that if I'd opened the play to critics I would have signaled the end of my New York career. Not that I would have thrown up my hands and given up writing. I probably would have moved to Los Angeles and so I didn't open the play which was a very controversial decision. You didn't open it meaning you still had public audiences. It was part of the subscription of Manhattan Theatre Club when they were still on 73rd Street. We played our run we lost a week to cast illness which was part of what plagued that production and I didn't open it and went into a depression after that That's huge. And also that Lynn Meadows supported that idea. She did. There was not without controversy. Of course, of course. I'm sure she meant the difference between it running just for subscription or being extended or whatever. Lynn and I have had a fabulous, very long, complicated relationship. An amazing relationship. You have many homes. You must be a home kind of guy. We have a question from the internet. There's somebody out there. By the way, if you want to submit a question to us, you can do so at hashtag inch fest. All lowercase letters this is a question from Robert Mena. It says for an emerging playwright with a breakthrough play giving the premiere to a tiny theater for development versus time spent trying for a larger production. Can you, being our writers at the table, can you talk a little bit about that? It's not just a question of size. I think it's if you feel that you found somebody who's a good artist who's a good collaborator. That's the thing. It's not size. My breakthroughs came with people that had never received any particular coverage at all. So you would say go to production. Whatever production you can get. Whatever production you can get. I'd say go if you have the confidence that you're working with good people and somebody that you're going to learn from and somebody who's going to do good work with you. Don't just do production for the sake of production because that's likely to be disastrous. But for the quality of the people and don't worry about the future. See if you can work with good people and learn something from them. I think that particularly for young talent, I think that and particularly in this age of Lena Dunham, I'm only using her as an example of overnight stardom. She really was and she's phenomenal. I think she's tremendous. But she's set a pattern that people she has set as a teacher of young people. She's very much on the radar of young people who want to leave Yale University with a spec script or a producible play or whatever. It's created a sort of false expectation. And I think that what happens is and I could speak as a warrior who was supposed to have arrived at least five different times before I arrived. And then I didn't even feel that I arrived. Because you have to constantly prove I arrived. But anyway I think there's far too much importance placed on the overnight success. And I think it's very important for young talent to see their work, to work on it, to learn how to do it. It's like falling in love and having sexual relationships. You have to learn how to do it. You don't just do it. It takes practice. It takes experience. And I think there's too much impact is placed on being that overnight success. So that I think that a young person may have something that may truly be talented may not be his or her ticket. And they should at least not deny themselves the experience of working on it with people in a real environment. I also think talent wills out. I think if the play has power and if there are good people working on it it will prevail. It will pass fire. It will tend to. I mean I know people who I thought were gifted who just didn't have the sensibility of applying themselves as Donald is talking about. Well I tried it. It didn't work. And they bailed out. And tenacity is part of it. But I think if you're focusing on breaking through and making a success you're focusing on the wrong thing. If you're focusing on learning what you need to learn as a writer and working with good people frequently the byproduct of that is that other people will know but I hate to say it's a Zen thing but it is. Let me just add a caveat to this young writer's question. Don't sign away the rights to your play to a fledgling company because if the play does go anywhere else you are in comfort to that company which will make it less attractive to another established company to pick up that play. So be really cautious about that. You should become a member of the Dramatist Guild if you aren't already because the Guild is designed to protect writers from these situations. So on one hand don't deny yourself the experience of seeing the play done but also don't sign away its future. Don't mortgage its future on that experience. But sometimes wonderful productions happen in smaller theaters and those can often have an ongoing life. I'm thinking of most recently the Boston Court Theater in L.A. did everything you touch Sheila Callahan's new play which then moved to New York in not exactly the same production but with the same director and a lot of the same team did well there. So I think that can happen and it's certainly better to get a production at a smaller theater than to have your play sit in reading hell which can sometimes happen where you have reading after reading after reading in workshop after workshop and it kind of self perpetuates. You become the playwright who does reading. The smaller production generally has less money involved in it so the larger the budget the more pressure on you to change things to commercial pressures to change the play to make it more palatable to a larger audience. The happiest times I've had mostly have been places where the budgets have been the smallest in which nobody's bankroll is riding on the success or failure of the play. That's a really important point. Those are the plays that ended up actually being the ones of mine that have ended up being the most produced or the ones that started off in the lowest budget productions where there was no pressure to do anything except good work. Right. You can take greater risks too. Well, yeah, I mean my breakthrough was a 10 minute play called porch and it was done there was a small off Broadway theater devoted to musical theater called the encompass theater and they were doing Mark Blitstein's Regina which is the opera based on little foxes and I had forgotten that there was a scene in Regina that took place on a front porch and as they were rehearsing I saw this porch set and I said wait a second for 50 cents more you could do my show on the dark nights and the producers were 50 cents. Yeah and Nancy wrote said if you can figure out some way to rehearse it so it doesn't cost me a dime she says I'll put it up so because of that accident it was put up and because I had published a book about Second City that Richard Eater had read and liked on a night when he was free he came and I got a review from the first string critic of the New York Times on this thing that had been rehearsed in a loft and it cost nothing to put up and that was my breakthrough. It was upstairs from a strip club which is where the writers block first and that's why we met was because yeah the same room but there was no money involved and there was no expectation that we were going to get covered So you also weren't under pressure to as you said like to change the play It was of your own making? No actually it was very very funny because the cast and I had a tremendous cast said don't tell us when the critics are coming and one night they were performing and there was this guy who was leaning into the light and had a yellow pad and was writing things in the yellow pad and they were furious. They thought who is this shmuck who's being so rude that they're disrupting the performance and afterwards Polly Adams turned to me and said we almost stopped the show and said do your homework at home I said well I'm glad you didn't do that because that was Richard Eater of the New York Times and Eater gave it the review that essentially got my career started. I also think we should talk a little bit about the National New Play Network. I know Nam Barnett spent to the Inge Festival and I think this marvelous this idea of the rolling premieres. I remember a TCG conference in which I think it was Che You and I were sitting together and it was this brown bag lunch about this very thing about new play development and Che and I were sort of side barring while the thing was going on because it was a huge group of people. Everybody was in that one big lobby area and he said my problem is the second production always. This was before the National New Play Network came into being and I kept thinking about having worked on August's work with Lloyd over the span of five years and each of those plays had years in production. In rolling from one regional theater to the next and this is Ben Mordecai, brilliant Ben Mordecai was our executive producer. His idea to do this jointly produced regional production that went from to Arena Stage and then to the Huntington and then to Seattle Rep and then to the Old Globe exactly and then rolled on to Broadway but there was actually no plans to bring it to Broadway when that began. That was about really sounding the play out. Lloyd said I want to do it over a span of time and those actors and those companies were together for a year, a year and a half, two years and their work got incredibly rich and deep. And the story was that every stop of August cut 10 or 15 minutes more. Sort of. He never wanted to decide on the ending for the piano lesson. I think that was the biggest cut. But in essence what he was doing, what they were doing was recreating in a non-profit world what used to obtain in the commercial world which was the out of town tryout where he would go from city to city and what you saw in Boston was different than what was seen in Detroit and was seen in Washington and plays were made and saved on the road in front of audiences and you can't do that anymore. Nobody has the dough. Well with the new play network to some extent you can I think and I think it's a wonderful, wonderful program. Could you talk a little bit? I don't know extensively about it but I know that I saw Octavio Solis's Sayama Cristina in the L.A. production I know it was also done in San Francisco. I'm not sure of all the other cities. Is it a consortium? Through this program there's three. Karen maybe you know better than I. Three companies have to agree to do the play and then it gets separate premieres and what I have heard about Octavio's play was that the premieres were extremely different. Yes they usually are. The production in L.A. had this fantastic conceptual sort of set that was done by the artist Grock and it was done in a completely realistic production elsewhere. His play is very poetic. You could see how it could go in different directions. So this network was developed where a bunch of sister theaters or brother you know whatever a bunch of theaters were developed into were consciously developed into a network that would agree to all say this is the rolling premiere of this work and it's kind of slightly different than the August Wilson plays which were a production that travels a company that goes and the production that goes but in this case a different director in each of those theaters a different interpretation. That was essentially also go back to ancient history but that's what happened with the history of the American film which was done at the Center and everybody wanted to do it and Duran and his agents had the idea of having three different productions one in D.C. one in L.A. and I can't remember where the third one was and then Chris and his people mixed and matched for what eventually opened in New York and was underappreciated in New York but he had the experience of seeing three different productions entirely separate productions that he cannibalized for the final production. What's beautiful about that also is that getting back to this question of the developmental process I think you probably agree that playwrights sometimes need readings and certain playwrights very much respond to them but some playwrights feel like they really need to see their work fully produced. Some plays are just more conducive to production than readings and I think his play in particular which I also saw as a reading Octavio's play was really hard to get from a reading it's very poetic, it's kind of abstract and you know it's kind of like listening to a reading of Godot. You're struggling to figure out what this would be saying. The table reading of Godot would not reveal what that play is. Yeah. But I think one of the things you're saying is that it's not that we need to find a process that there's no one process that's going to work for every script. Every script has to be developed according to its own particular attributes. One of the things that I'm heartened by is that the O'Neill Center did very well with this or one size fits all for a number of years but what Wendy Goldberg has been doing to change that is to say well different plays require different things at the O'Neill now and we're going to tailor it more Lloyd used to be adamant about not having any props in the readings and you practically had to go to a review board before you allowed a prop and Wendy's a little looser about that. She'll even occasionally allow real furniture on the stage where Lloyd said no, cubes only. Well, and I think it just recognizes that different plays require frequently different paths to development that one size does not fit all. But also that you should consult the playwrights in figuring out if there's something that bugs the hell out of me and I don't know whether you've encountered this probably not lately, but the infantilization of the playwright or the assumption that the playwright is too stupid to understand that somehow you've given birth to it and now other people are going to protect the play from the playwright. Right. Well, I see an awful lot of that where you just wrote it, you don't understand what it means and you don't know what it and this assumption that the playwrights are not adults Well, I think yes, I think that is true particularly early on in one's career there's far too much of this infantilization as Jeffrey calls it that playwrights have to be nurtured. I bristle so at that phrase. But I do think it is a matter of self-knowledge. You begin to figure out what do you need what do you need which renders the playwright more active and less passive and less susceptible to negative influence. But I think also there's a strain in which a lot of artists, certainly actors are like this too, think that they have to wait for somebody to give them permission to work and I think that that's just death. You just sit around lolling around on a lily pad trying to look attractive waiting for somebody to say you're the one. Well, no, start your own process. If there isn't a process out there that's stepping up to bat then put together your own bloody reading and it doesn't really cost that much to create your own developmental process and for that matter actors and directors are always looking for something to work on and something to value the work on. They're very generous people. Yes, but you have to be in the world in order to do that. Yeah, you have to have credibility and part of it is by being interested in other people's work and being part of the community. You have to make your own world like you did with the Writers Block. Yes, but we were absolutely interested in each other's work. The Writers Block what did you say, it's 37 years ago that we did the Writers Block? Stop with that. Even though it's been atomized and we've gone to different corners there's still a connection between most of us who were there together. Yeah. Donald and I are still friendly with Jane Anderson. Jane is one of my best friends in the world. We're still, you know, I saw her in Los Angeles three or four weeks ago. But you were nobodies. You were nobodies when you started that, right? Absolutely. Well, the only somebodies in our group were Ann Muir and Jerry Stiller. Were the nominal parent figures in our group. What happens, I've written a book about second sitting improvisational theater and I invited Mark and Bobby Gordon who have been members of the Compass Players and Mark and Bobby said hey, our friends Jerry, Stiller and Ann Muir would be interested, do you think you'd be interested in having them? Sure, invite them all. I said no, absolutely. But they came in and were absolutely, we had the benefit of having four bona fide well experienced adults. And incredibly generous people. Yeah. Ann and Jerry and Mark and Bobby were still one of the greatest chunks, I've said this to you before, one of the greatest experiences I've had seeing something at play was when Bobby and Howard De Silva did that extraordinary scene of what's wrong with this picture at New Dramas. It just was jaw-dropping. It was electric. It was fantastic. And was the play, had you written the entire play? That play was under-option by Ronnie Lee. Ronnie Lee, no mind. We were optioned both of our plays. And New Dramas, would you talk a little bit about that? But that wasn't part of the New Dramas project, they simply led us to the space. I think they rejected me six times. Yeah, we both were rejected five or six times. They did rejected me six times. So tenacity again. So let that be comfort to you out there. But you did, you persuaded them to loan you the space for a little bit of time? You know, it was because Ronnie was on the board. That may have been it. I was not yet a member. You knew someone highly placed. I would not be a member for maybe eight or ten years. After what's wrong with this picture? Yeah, what's wrong with this picture became sort of a cult failed play that a lot of people love and to this day they go, oh, what's wrong with this picture? Yeah, well, it was killed on Broadway. It deserves an appropriate new production to redefine. I volunteer. It's just like Lady from Dubuque the first time I got killed and when it came back to the signature people said, oh, but this is one of all these major plays. Well, we'll see if I live as long as Edward. But anyway, to speak to the thing we had four adults four bona fide grown ups with major who showed up every week and were generous and enthusiastic and did they help you learn how to voice people more mature than yourselves? Was that a part of hearing their voices? They contributed to the work. They were told to read for us. It was never did it become didactic because of their experience. They were incredibly generous people. They were writing. Anne was coming partially to get up the courage to write plays and she wrote two plays that one which became very successful after play became very successful. They use the block as much as we use their experience and Anne and Jerry gave me my first paying job as a writer. Oh, yes? Yes, 35 years ago. They had a program sort of an infomercial kind of program on a little fledgling network called home box office. They've been putting them up. They've been putting them up on the web. You can find some of the short or they're doing them again maybe. Jerry and Anne. Ben was shooting those little things that they do, those infomercial. I think Ben was shooting them. You can find them. It was called HBO sneak preview and Anne and Jerry would say, next month on HBO, John Travolta. They needed a writer. They liked me. They liked my work. At the time I was working as a graphic designer. I was doing fine as a graphic designer but I was a playwright in training. They set me up for an audition. I wrote a spec script for the producer in HBO and I got hired. They needed a writer who was not a member of the writer's guild. Well, I was nowhere near being a member of the writer's guild at that time. It led to a paying job that enabled me to quit my day job as a graphic designer. Wow. That was 35 years. I owe that to Anne and Jerry. It was a remarkable group of people and the fact that we stayed together for 10 years and so much that came out of that a lot of that is in the canon. A lot of generally produced plays, a lot of those. So make your own I have to agree with that. Make your own opportunities. I think that's the nature of theater as an art. It's an art as well as a career. If you get too focused on the careerism of it, you're going to lose heart very quickly. I will unite communities that will support you and that will be in the trenches with the women. My experience is very similar. I mean I founded a small theater voice and vision which developed the work of women writers and directors and that's, you know, we worked with Lynn Nottage and Keith Orth on a lot of things. And this was you had just finished a gale. I started it before I graduated. Basically because I looked out there and there weren't very many women directing. I didn't think there was going to be a lot of opportunities for me to direct. I wasn't sure. So I just started something. I wanted more women playwrights to have their work developed and it was wonderful. Our philosophy was similar to the playwright center in the sense that it was whatever the playwright wanted for a process. We had a two week retreat at Bard College in the summers and if they wanted to just write, they could just write. If they wanted some actors and they wanted to play with those actors. If they needed some tech elements, we tried to provide them with the resources that we had. And from that I also learned, as you said, that every playwright works very differently. Some people really need those elements and other people absolutely don't want to have them. And some people come in very finished, polished with their play. Really just want to hear it. Don't want to make a lot of changes. Other people you know it's a different play by week two. And some people really feed off the audience and other people really didn't want audience. And I thought one of the things that was really beneficial about it was having the option to not have audience. And having the option to, you know, I'd like a few people to come in and give me feedback. But I don't want a big audience yet or I want, you know, quite a bit of audience then we would open it up more to the community and have more people come in. And one thing we try to do here that I think is really important is when we do open it up to the public to hear the play read or to respond to the play. When we do the post play discussions, I think it very much should rest in the hands of the writer what they want to hear, what they want to talk about. I've been to several things of that ilk where the writer was not in control of the talk and there are things that you don't really need to hear from other people. You're about something else or you're trying. That's how I conduct my classroom. When the presenting student has presented her work that student presents the first question. To at least give us some direction to take this in. Now they are so well trained that when someone presents the work I just go and they say, well, you know, I'm really having trouble with, did that come clear? So instead of people saying, I just didn't really like that. I've seen that too. And that's really not helpful. And then you get audience members recommending plot twists from what they saw on last night's CSI or something like that, which is not useful. Because you know what you're about. You can at least ask the question, did you understand that she is his niece? No? Okay, I've got to change that. We are creeping up on 1050 and you have to be someplace else. Do you have any questions out here in the audience? But I think you've got to be someplace else entirely in 10 minutes. This is true. Is it 10 minutes? Yeah, that's all right. My ride is here. Your ride is here. Judy's going to take you. So, Elvis is going to leave the room. Okay, we're good. What your writing process was on Dinner with Friends? I went through the trauma of seeing many couples in my life break up. That was the process. And it, you know, it's I pretty much knew what it needed to be. What I go through in my process is not having a clue what I'm doing and just sort of writing, hoping that the play will announce itself to me. And then other times I know what to do. Dinner with Friends I knew what to do. And once I figured on the structure of Dinner with Friends, structure is very important to me. I need some sort of armature on which to hang a play. With Dinner with Friends I knew that the first act would be a triptych of scenes. I knew the second act would be a triptych of scenes. And then I realized that the way I had constructed it, I didn't allow for a scene in which all four characters appeared. And at one point I thought maybe this is a three act play. But no, it wasn't, I didn't need three acts. I needed another scene in the middle of those two triptychs that showed us the four of them in happier times. Otherwise, I think without that scene, they would be no emotional resonance because we wouldn't know what was lost. That was a crucial discovery. And but it's part of the fun of doing this. Well, I want to thank you. I want to thank everybody. Thank you for joining us. We're streaming live at 2 o'clock and at 3.30 Central Time. Ralph Loss, Inge's biographer, will be talking at 2 o'clock Central Time. Within the Inge Collection, showing Inge's archive and at 3.30 we're doing a panel about joining the digital age. So please join us on our round. Thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you. I'm staying here, I guess. Oh, oh, okay. I'm excited about what Jenny mentioned when doing Jenny, David's play.