 opportunity and race and ethnic and gender diversity in our theaters. So today we're here to commemorate and reflect on this moment that happened here 20 years ago. We should say that we don't plan to come to conclusions today but just to continue illuminating the ongoing themes as we look at our contemporary landscape and explore the question of where we stand today. Before I look at our first panel, I just want to take a moment to extend some thanks. These occasions are always built on the labor of many people. The event organizing committee was instrumental in bringing together the artists we're speaking today as well as the students who performed and everything else that's the backbone of this event. So let me thank Emily LePenta of the Carter Theater and Mary Young of the Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts who co-produced the events and especially Anna Morton, Pauline Allison and Brian Herrera who will moderate the next panel for serving as the organizing committee. Thank you so much. The first set of panelists, our first panel is called Ask the Ground Shifts Tracking Sizing the Changes in Race and Gender Representation. The panel's values are in your program so I'm not going to introduce them but let me just tell you that our distinguished speakers are as they find their places to sit. Here you go Mary. Our distinguished speakers are Mary LePenta, Teresa Iry, John Diaz, Emily Mann who's the artistic director of the theater in which we sit, James Williams who directs the students of the reading, and Elisa Grover. Thank you all for being here and asking how it felt today to be in the audience listening to that speech. I don't know how many of you are here 20 years ago to hear it, but I'm curious for all of you since we all have the pleasure of hearing it in person. How did it make you feel? Did it make you feel hopeful and what do you think has changed in the last 20 years? Or did it make you in fact angry at what has not changed in the last 20 years? Mary, can I ask you to start us off? I just heard how the theater on the rigidity through the order of what we have been talking over to the bar one night and very to me the speech. If you are interested in being overwhelmed with the stuff he was going to bring up, he said that the piece didn't speak for the black race in total as possible, whereas that person, because there is, but he was in a position that when he spoke, people would listen. And so he felt it was a duty to say something meaningful, say something true, that he carried along with it. So I wasn't angry out of that. Try somebody in your position to risk you a lot of, you know, accomplishment. And to say that on his self, to speak towards a lot of things that we talked about basically about ourselves. I didn't expect the world to change if I didn't expect, you know, actors and times of work. But I didn't feel about his position, where he wouldn't say anything, you know, just post on through life. He never did that. I don't believe for those who came before him, who do you see? She's true. We have a song to you. I had a really interesting experience listening to it now. So we had to marry in the same seat. I sat in. I was excited to do that. And I realized that I was, I was kind of up for two reasons. One was his issue on, well first of all, let me tell you what I say. I actually have to say, I believe then, I believe now that I'm supposed to be the greatest man that I've ever lived. I came up at the same time as I was did. He had a lot of political, his politics in mind were very similar from my being a black person, but having taken part in a lot of race work all through my life. This theater had been, well, he dedicated himself here to the world of African American people, right about that. So I come at it from there. I was mad at him for two reasons. One of them was that he brought up the issue of, you know, colorblind casting. I don't know if they were colorblind, but the idea that black people can be, you know, shaped here, or the greatest, or beautiful, or are familiar, or have not believed that one should be stopped only by the limits of their own imagination, as in our race did not. So I've done a lot of work at the streetcar, I've done a lot of work with a cast of color, I've done it just after recently, where he's featured in Nicola and Parker, and America is both in the Leeds, and I'm very much a comfortable cast all around them. You know, I think that that is a way to live the artistry and opportunities for certain actors. And so I disagreed with him on it. I understood why he said it. I wonder if he'd agree with himself today, but I understand that, understand why that would be something that's done in his role. I understood it, but as a reader, I also wanted him to do more whatever it was. But I was asking for too much in my seat, perhaps. I also wanted him to be using those theaters that were African American like Crossroads to do more of his plays, and in fact, he had to be doing the part of the comedy. So, it was a wonderful show. I loved it very much. But I was more upset listening to it then, and listening to it now, I'm thinking, a lot, we're just talking about this stage, that a lot has happened. We haven't made a lot of progress, and there's a ton more to make. But we, he did start a lot of dialogue that some people had an even front of habit, not knowing what they were engaged in with, I don't know, roadblocks, but that were clueless, and they were in fact running many of the most important theaters in America. So maybe we can unpack that a bit. I think one of the interesting things of his speech is how granular he gets about what needs to change in American theater, especially in the structure of our regional theaters. Theresa, maybe I can ask you, given your position, do you think that the Lawrence Regional Theatres have really changed at a structural level to allow the kind of work he advocated for? Well, I should say, first of all, that I was really moved by the reading today, and I loved that there were a number of readers. It was really beautiful. So thank you for that. I was also here. I was a very early career theater practitioner. I was running a theater company in Philadelphia called The Wilma, and it was my very first TCG conference. And I just, I had my mind blown by August and by everything else that happened in that conference. And what happened was they had to rearrange the whole structure of the conference because of August's speech. There were, you know, people suddenly there had to be, there were all of these meetings that took place out on the lawn and tents and facilitated discussions because it had that much of an impact on the people in the room. I am now the executive director of TCG. I think when I was at that age, I didn't really have enough experience in the field to understand the structural dynamics that he was talking about, but I'm really able to see them now. And I guess what I would say is that in terms of the amount of work that's being commissioned, the number of people like Emily, who are so committed to giving space and resources and time and nourishment to artists of color, I think that's definitely grown and changed. However, August's point that there were no, at the time he, and I want to just because I know there are a lot of community members and students here, when he talks about Lort, he's talking about the League of Resident Theatres, which is actually a 50 year old collective bargaining association that just happens to have, you know, some of the most, some of the largest theaters as part of it. But not all the large companies in the US are part of Lort. So it, you know, it's even more than 66 theaters and that's grown. There's probably 100 or maybe 125. And whereas at the time he mentioned Crossroads as being the one theater that was part of Lort or part of the large theater ecosystem, there's zero now. I mean, there are African American companies, Penumbra, where August really got his, some of his first, his work really seen and produced and is there. But we don't, we haven't succeeded as a field in really creating space for and investing in African American companies, Asian American companies, Latino companies, with the kinds of resources that would make it possible to really, really invest in artists and expand audiences. And I think what tends to happen is that there's a conversation that will happen where it almost, the failure for that gets placed on the community that doesn't have the well-resourced theater instead of placing the responsibility for the failure on our ecosystem and for our failure as a community to really figure out how we support and build an infrastructure for theaters of color and specifically in the context of this discussion, African American companies. And by community, do you mean the American theater community or local communities in which these theaters? I think both, but also those communities of color and I'm using of color even though August was close to that term. Yes. So, yeah, the local communities and those communities of color. John, could I turn to you and ask someone who's now the artistic director of a theater of the sort that Wilson was talking about. Do you feel like you've been able to make the kind of structural changes he advocated? Well, I would just say, I feel like probably like everyone here, when I looked at this speech again a few weeks ago and hearing it again now, I feel incredibly, passionately persuaded by his arguments. And his arguments are real, that is that central one is a really bold argument to do something that I understand myself is incredibly important, which is to have something in the culture that is a kind of cornerstone of that culture and is supported in such a way that can have ownership by some people in the communities. And that hasn't happened, obviously, for the African American community in the world of theater. And I just, you know, when I hear it again, I feel like, God, I get myself up like this again. And then I just get I feel really frustrated and actually kind of angry that it can't have happened that I actually don't think much has changed a lot since that speech. And that is angering and frustrating. And then I get torn, because I run this theater where we are well supported, we have managed to be well supported. And it represents, for some people in that community, it represents something about their kind of cultural selves, and they get to own that. And I think about the struggle that we do to be able to do that in the communities that we do it, and how hard that is, just to make that happen. And I think about, when I hear it, I just think about how what the call to arms that August was making, that God, who couldn't feel like, yes, we must need to do this. But nobody's, nobody, nothing coalesced. Nobody stepped in. You know, Teresa can, and actually Emily can speak to this better than I can, but way back, not way back. Way back when there weren't theaters in communities across the country that represented ourselves as a cultural place, there were big things like the Ford Foundation that came in and made it happen. I hear this speech again. I think, where are you Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, whoever, you know, who says we're going to make this really dangerous and bold thing happen, because it has to happen. So, okay, then I start feeling like, where's my responsibility in that? You know, I'm at a theater that's competing for that funding, too, and I want it, you know, for what we're doing. And it's just really complicated. But, but I then I feel like, okay, so I mean, I was glad that Marion said something that he felt a little bit optimistic about where we've come, because I do feel like within those cultural cornerstones that exist across the country, many people are trying to do things that get at more of what, say, August was trying to get at, and to give a sense of home and ownership of culture that is for all of us. And I certainly have been trying to do that at my theater in all different kinds of ways, but I feel, I feel a part of something failed, I have to say. Well, funding structures are certainly different now than they were even 20 years ago. And social structures are really different. I think I want to turn to Lisa and James, because both of you worked with ethnically or gender specific theaters at a time when it seems to me there were relatively more of them where the economic conditions made it possible to have something like, for instance, the Well Cafe. How do you see that trajectory? And is it still even possible now in this economic and cultural climate to do that kind of work? I think it's always possible to do anything, frankly. And I think, you know, the speech is so incredible and so powerful. And there's so much of it that really resonates with me. They're inside of it. There's this eternal tension in the theater that I think is worth unpacking, which is to separate the making of art, the writing of plays, which is a singular, anti-institutional, iconoclastic pursuit, and theaters, which are institutions. And they will always be at cross purposes. Producing theaters do not, theaters are made within that organization, but they, but it's the artists who make the theater. And sometimes I think that gets conflated in our minds, artists need resources and venues, although venues are available anywhere really, you can make theater, you can make a stage out of anything, which is what happened at the Wild Cafe. And the primary relationship in the theater, and I see this happening with young playwrights all the time with my students, they believe that their primary relationship is with artistic directors. And they're trying to get artistic directors to care about their work. And they don't understand that their primary relationship is with an audience. The primary relationship in a theater is between a production and an audience. And there is no other there there. It's just this imaginative experience, this collective imaginative experience that happens between productions and audiences. So, and the power of theater is that not only anyone can make it, we all have authority to express the world from the place where we stand. But the theater itself is made out of what my partner Madeleine has so beautifully named a democracy of consciousness. There's not just, there's not one narrative. There are characters, each of whom has a fully formed consciousness and who watch them come into contact with each other. So that, that is the driving force of theater. And the, and the, the thing that he describes about theater written art made by African Americans for African Americans. That was what was being made at the Wild Cafe. When I, you know, lesbian theater that was, the world was presumed to be a lesbian world. So it was a, when I, when I got there, revolutionized everything about what I did. Because rather than kinds of theater in which I was watching women and lesbians say, you have to, we're also here. We also matter. You have to pay attention to us. That was a given. And then, and then there was, was this other thing that was happening. So then there's this other thing which is, so you can make whatever you want. But then if you want those resources, if you want a larger recognition, I mean for years, that wow, nobody was paying attention to us. You know, artists who changed my life, some of the greatest artists still to this day I've ever seen, they were not reviewed, they were not written about, even when books started to be written about the East Village, they were, you know, large, not by Yuf, but still by other people, you know, largely ignored even to this day still under recognized. So Madeleine, Madeleine George and I recently, you know, the count which the statistical breakdown of who gets produced by gender and by ethnicity that the Dramatist Guild and the Lily Awards Foundation just did has been enormously useful in seeing what's actually going on. And I think it's starting to make a difference in what organizations are producing. Madeleine and I did a smaller version of that, a breakdown in the not-for-profit theaters in New York. And we went and we just had casual conversations with artistic directors, just she and I to ask them what was important to them in terms of, to show them their numbers, first of all, which were quite surprising to them often. And then to ask them, is this important to you? If it is important, why is it important? And how do you make your decisions? And what was very interesting was that each of these theaters is made around the personality of that artistic director. And those choices are very personal, of course they're very personal. They're going to, you know, take a leap of faith with this individual and then they're going to, you know, spend a lot of intimate time with them on what is going to be for that person, one of the most important events of their artistic life. I ask them often, if they saw themselves when they were making those decisions in terms of the entire field, I said, if you knew that, you know, you are, I sort of said, are you looking at the demographic breakdown? Does it matter to you if your theater is producing plays that are by exactly the same kind of playwrights as everyone else? And none of the people that we talked to, and a lot of them actually had great numbers in terms of gender parity and, you know, they were, they were, you know, these are people I really admire. None of those artistic directors was, or maybe one of them was thinking about booking their season in terms of being a part of the landscape as a whole. So in the speech, that idea of, there's a kind of an arguing with some entity or some person or some force that I think is not quite there. And so in terms of furthering this change, I think it would be helpful then to really, and I know that TCG is doing this and people are doing this, but it is helpful to look at those structures and figure out what that means. I mean, there are, there is government money that's going to these theaters, there is not-for-profit status. On that basis, it seems like we can ask, there could be a way to require some kind of responsibility to the field as a whole, because that's where the resources are for artists. All the artists of all genders, of all races, that's where we go if we want to produce our work with any kind of economic support. And so it would be interesting to see if there's a way then for the people who are getting those resources to have to have that considered. I come at this a little different way because this is a very East Coast look at this thing. I am, first of all, when the speech was given, I wasn't here, I was in that production of Death of a Salesman that was referred to me. At, you know, at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So in flyover country, this whole thing looks different. In flyover country, the company where I got my start, Penumbra Theater Company in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Marion and I met, and August and I met, and as you said, some of the greatest artists that I've ever worked with in my life who remain unknown. We started out as part of a jobs program. You know, they needed to give money to black people who didn't have jobs, and we came up with this idea of, oh, we want to be a theater. So we've always been at a different fund than what you're talking about. And then we started moving towards that fund. And as we started, as people, as other organizations found out, hey, there's money in having black people, Asian people, more women, gay people on stage. They started to try to get into this pot, too. Now, when you have a large organization, you can have interns, or you can have people who are in colleges read about your theater and want to come and work there for free to see what you're doing, or you can hire someone to sit at a desk all day and look for grants. When you are in a small company, as artistic director, you're mopping floors, you're doing everything else. As an actor, you're there, you're trying to figure out how you're going to make next week's rent, because even though you're working in a show right now, you're not being paid enough money to be able to take care of anything. There is, as artists and administrators and educators, we have to make the decision to make saving our organizations our priority. We have to be willing to come back and maybe spend that year where you don't make as much money as you want to make to make sure this institution survives, because my institution, the number is in bad shape right now, and it's in bad shape because most of the large theaters around it have discovered that diversity, now that's the next part of funds that you can get, that you can move and massage around so that you can do a show, just to give you an example, in your quote-unquote diversity slot, you can do, oh, Harper Lee, to kill a mockingbird where the African American presence is a guy sitting on a chair sweating and he's not going to jail for something he didn't do. That, you can call it that, and organizations will turn in hand you money because they can come and look and see, and that's what they want to see in the hinterlands. You know, one of the things about colorblind casting, and I will not say I'm against it, I will not say I'm poor, I will say I am for me working. What happens is you end up in situations, and I think this is part of this whole ground on which I stand, speech that we go past, is when you're inside of one of those organizations and you're functioning and you hit upon a cultural block in the road, and you're trying to talk your way past it inside of this process that happens, which is theater, which is give and take, but when you hit a situation that you know is wrong and you're overruled, give you an example. There's a play called She Speaks with Beethoven, and it is, oh, I always get the two confused, please, one of my learned it, Adrienne Kennedy. Yeah, Adrienne Kennedy, and it's a one-act play about her time as a road scholar, and she's in a world where she is so culturally isolated that the only thing that she can do to speak to someone who is her intellectual equal and cultural equal is she imagines these conversations with Beethoven. Now, I'm sitting in the Guthrie Theater, and I can say that now because everyone who is involved in this conversation is not there anymore. We're sitting at this table and we have this African-American woman playing, Adrienne Kennedy, and they hired this white guy to play Beethoven, and I'm sitting there looking, and we're in the conversation, and I say, and they can't figure it out why it's not quite adding up, and I say, well, it's because Beethoven was black, and people look at me like, are you crazy? And they go, and we do this whole reading and all these rehearsals, and then Adrienne Kennedy comes there for the reading, and they ask her about the problems of the play, and she said, oh, it's because everybody knows Beethoven is black. Now, I'm in there arguing, but who am I? I'm this actor who I have a dramaturg, a director, an assistant dramaturg, an assistant director, and all of these people who are looking at me like, you must be crazy, and it's like, no, I just know my history. I know my culture. When you hit those things, those times, those are the challenges for me inside of here, where you hit things, and you know that you know that you know, or you're in a show when something happens, and you know, that's not culturally right, but then someone tells you we need a laugh there, and you go, okay, and then you go out, and the show happens, and it hits that moment, and actors can hear, and when you hit that moment, and that laugh happens, you hear all the laughter is white, and you hear the blacks in the audience go, and you know what that is, and I've gotten so far off the subject. No, actually you haven't at all. But what this question raises for me is, really, Wilson called his speech the ground on which I stand, but throughout it also kind of begs the question, is there a ground on which we stand? It's very much about the perspective, which I think is partly what you're saying, James, and Lisa, your injunction, can we be responsible as a field as a whole? Is there a way in which we truly can see a we here that can be more capacious and more pluralistic, for lack of a better word, that would look from different perspectives when we think about funding, when we think about structure, when we think about artistry? John, you're shaking your head. Well, yeah, I was gonna, that's the optimism that I feel when I hear the speech, that he does speak in a very, as I say, a kind of call to Armsway about, Armsway, about from where he's coming, from where he's speaking about a culture that he knows well, and a culture that he feels is not represented in all the ways it should be, and at the same time, I think he does optimistically speak about us as a big American culture. And you know, I mean, from the beginning, it's just been this struggle amongst ourselves all the time to understand how we are this big we, and I do feel optimistic some days in my theater in my life that that's changing a little bit. I find in, you know, I've been at the theater where I am now for coming on six years. And before I got to the theater, which had been in operation for about 15 years, I guess, they'd only ever done one, maybe two shows that in any way represented anything about African American lives. And the first play that I programmed, when it just happened to be the first thing that happened, was one of August's plays. It was a production of Jitney that Ruben Santiago Hudson directed. And I was surprised by this audience, 40 miles outside of New York City, a solidly loyal audience that was coming to this theater for many years. I'd say 90% of them didn't know who August Wilson was. Did not know. Did not know. And now, and so then in Ruben, I've been fortunate with these artists I've been working with, who want to come back and keep doing August's work there. And now, this five years later, I get letters clamoring for more August. And when are you going to commit, when are you going to say you're doing all 10 of the plays, right? J-Dub's done, done some, been with us doing some of them. And at the beginning, I got some angry letters from people, you know, feeling like, hey, this, this is our theater. And, you know, that's not what we signed up for. And now those same people turning around in clamoring. I mean, that's my little hoped for moments of optimism, that something is changing. Emily, did you want to say something about Theresa? Well, I just, you know, I was going to say John does such beautiful work and beautiful programming. And so much of it seems to be, well, at least it was saying, you want to do something, you do it. And at some point, you know, we are getting some public funds. We are the American theater and what is America? I mean, I'm lucky in one way in that I was brought up by two extraordinary historians. One, John Hope Franklin, who was the pioneer of African American studies. That field really was formed by him. And my father, who was an historian of America in terms of ethnic groups and immigration. And between the two of them, my idea of what America was was not all white men. It was that there is a huge diversity of what it is to be an American. And it's something that August started the speech with, which I found very beautiful. And he said, I am an American. I came here centuries ago. My people came here centuries ago. And this is the ground at which I stand now. Now, he keeps saying, you know, with African Americans, you know that or black Americans that, you know, everyone comes out of the slave houses. In fact, we know that's not actually true. There are so many African immigrants in this country who's in Blah Boy in Nigeria and Ghana and Mali and all that. But yes, the majority of African Americans share that heritage. And whether it was south or north, that is a shared culture. But there's also a shared culture in a Jewish community and a Korean community. And I'm seeing it in the generations coming up that the young writers I'm reading are mainly women and people of color. They are not, I don't mean to be disrespectful to the white men writing. A lot of them are writing some very good plays. But the excitement right now that's coming into our literary office is very simply that. And if we want to be reflecting, if we are holding up the mirror as August said, quoting Shakespeare, of what our country is, it can't be all male and all European subject. It can't be. So I'm very excited that I'm not the only one who thinks that way, that that idea has finally gotten out. I remember when I first arrived here and went to the New Jersey State Council for the Arts and the head of that dear friend of mine asked me, you know, everyone's talking about this word diversity. What does that mean? That was 1929. He was like, really? And I felt pleased to be able to explain it to her. But it's changed now. That's on everyone's lips. Everyone knows at least that you should be thinking about that if not doing something about it. And there's not a big leap between consciousness and action. It's the point is to do it and to do it wisely. And I think we do need to look at the funding sources. But you know what? Doesn't cost you any more money to produce a play by an African American author than it does to, you know, what are we talking about here? It doesn't cost you more money. It's just the choice you make. So I would like to, you know, put the charge out to those people who are in positions to make choices, to start looking at the incredible opportunities out there for choices of people who come from all different cultures, races, ethnicities and genders. But I think there's another piece of it, which is to say who's in the audience is a crucial component of this. And you know, you think about like plays by the five lesbian brothers, what those, how those plays, which was the company that I am a co-founder of and worked with for many years. And if what those plays do in front of an audience that was primarily lesbian or mixed is very different than what would happen if they were only, if they were done for a completely straight audience, in which case they would become the opposite of what we intended. Right. And so I think, you know, it's, you know, if money theaters start to put on, it's not what you're doing, but only putting on plays, then you have this kind of a, you know, there's a sort of specter in my head of a kind of a national geographic kind of come see this culture, come see this culture. And I just think that also looking at who's in the audience, you know, I'm so inspiring to me over the past couple of years has been what Michelle Hensley is doing at 10,000 Things, which you don't know where she's in Minneapolis. And, you know, doing, I think most, she has been doing mostly Shakespeare in the Greeks, partly because those playwrights have a class difference in their plays. And she felt that contemporary playwrights, certainly maybe not so much right now, but for a while, you know, there were a lot of plays about wealthy or upper middle class white families. And then she takes them to where people are. She does, they do them in their theater, and then they also, they do them in homeless shelters, they do them in prisons, they do them in schools, they do them all over the place. And everybody comes to see them. All kinds of people come to see them. And the excitement, the dynamic, the dynamism of those productions. I mean, her, Lear de Bessonay, who studied with Michelle, among other people, did a production of Good Person of Sichuan that I was in. And Melanie Joseph, from the Foundry, who produced it, did that same thing. I have to say, performing for those audiences of all kinds of different people in a play in which the people on stage were also all kinds of different people is the, was the most exciting, some of the most exciting experiences I've ever had on stage. But, you know, just going on into the audience thing is, I did an Antigone with Michelle in the prisons. And that was just mind blowing. It was, it was amazing. But that's a model that's really exciting of taking the work to other people. Your model, the five lesbian brothers, was an interesting model. Just as Crossroads, well, no Crossroads was not just African American work for African American audiences. It was for whoever wanted it to come. But I find that when we do something that is culturally specific, that audience shows up. So, I mean, for example, whenever we've done a play by or about African American American people, we are, we have a huge African American audience. I always want to make sure they'll then come to the play. There's a comedy about Jews and not necessarily the same numbers show up, I must say. But at the same time, you have a mixed crowd. Now, to have it solely one crowd, then you do have to say, I'm going to set up a theater that is specifically oriented for that. These, you know, the Lord theaters aren't set up for that. But that's also another way to go. That could be very exciting. Tracy, go ahead. I wanted to talk a little more to your question about the ground on which we can stand together. And one, really just two points. One, I wanted to reference back to or refer back to Lisa's question about whether artistic leaders and people who are in decision-making positions, no matter what size theater they're in, could talk about the artists that we are featuring, producing, whose work we're developing in a way that thinks more ecologically. And I think that is actually very doable on a local level, because often, you know, artists are locally based and are working in their communities. And it is possible for some, potentially, some collaboration around a discussion about not what are we producing for our audiences, but what are we producing for the benefit of our artists, our actors, our playwrights, our designers, and how does that puzzle work, really? It's a little more difficult on the national level, but I would love to see sometime a discussion among artistic directors just about what are we doing, you know, what are we producing our seasons, how are we supporting the artists in our country. And if everybody's doing, everybody's really focusing on one artist in one year, for instance, like maybe we need to just be thinking this year and beyond about how we're supporting artists and presenting their seasons. The second thing is just there is an increasing discussion that's happening around equity, diversity, and inclusion in the theater field. And TCG has been really working on this and trying to, I think people because, you know, the ground on which I stand speech, we hear it again today and say, oh my god, he was prophetic, it was then and it's now. Well, people, we need to educate ourselves about our history, about the discussions we've had in the past, students need to be made aware of these, students need to be reading all of the playwrights who are writing today. We need to be educated, but then also really look into, I think there is starting to be some awakening about the really deep structural inequities and racism and sexism that exist within our theater ecosystem and trying to find ways to have discussions around that, to have allyship within our community. And I just want to recognize Rob Weiner, who's here from American Theater Magazine, who's our new editor-in-chief, who's really dedicated to covering stories around the plays that are being produced around topics such as color-conscious casting and cultural appropriation. And also, I think Dayfina McMillan might be here somewhere who was at TCG and is now at Bloomberg Philanthropies, who really has taken big leadership on behalf of the theater field in terms of making sure that there are really deep and long conversations happening within theaters around the inequities that exist and how to really, really break through those for the long term. I think, John, you had something? Well, I was going to pick up on what Emily and Lisa were saying too and sort of mix in what Teresa is saying, but just to say, Emily's comment about it costs the same. I think is true, but also not true. And a little bit, I think because of what Lisa's saying too, because in my experience what's been equally important for me at the theater as we are engaging with artists who are doing work that reflects the community in which I live, we live there, there's been a huge amount of effort and it takes effort to develop that audience. And just to develop audiences generally in the theater, we know. It's not a dying art necessarily, but it's an art that constantly to be rejuvenated, right? And we, the practitioners are charged often with doing that. And one of the things I've been grateful to the larger ecology and Teresa has been part of this in terms of the economics and funding is there's been a lot of, and we got a couple of really great grants from some big foundations for doing that very thing, to look at both the art and the artists in their relationship to audiences and audience building. And that takes a lot of resources to make that happen. And then just another way in which I would disagree with what you're saying, that many of those plays that are representing communities that don't often get represented are being done so by writers who are up and coming or coming from places where their need for support in their work and the growth of their work and the development of their work takes a great deal of resources, important ones for us to, you know. So just to say, I feel like, because you said this, the models, these are the models we're dealing with. So if we are kind of stuck with these models that I'm in the midst of, that we're all in, how can we, you know, because I think it's just true. I think we'll never accomplish what August wants us to accomplish. That just, I hate to be, I just don't know that that will happen. That, you know, well, that there'll be, that there'll be a thriving cultural African-American institution in every community where that should be, and one for Latinos in every community where that should be, and one, I don't know. There's an interesting thing in that though, just from an artist's point of view, which is that, you know, I have been asked a bunch in the past year, different interviews, you know, what's next? After, after Lesbians on Broadway, what's the next thing? It's the end of history, I don't know. And, you know, my answer is I don't know. I don't know because culture is made on the margins. The reason that, you know, that playwrights of color, even though we, and women are, we're interested in those voices right now, is that those demographics are getting to define something. They're moving forward into the culture and creating language that hasn't existed before in the way that in that profound speech, it's so striking how women are erased from that speech when he's so specific about linguistics because all of us, we can see this and we can't see that. And so what's gonna have, you know, there, whatever we fix, there's another thing out there that we don't see, and that's where the new theater is gonna come from. Those are gonna be the next voices. Don't get gay African Americans started on August Wilson. But see, I see this, I see the speech as a yes and speech as opposed to a yes but speech. Because we have, at this period of time, African American men were lifted up. That doesn't mean that we have to drop this to lift something else up. Yeah. Because to me, that's the thing that leads me to look at a theater and go, okay, here's the question that I want to ask you. I want to ask you if the highest grossing play that you have ever produced is a black play. Why have you only produced one? Why, if I had a product, as a businessman, I had a product and it sold well, I would want to sell more than one. And I don't understand why that happens because this is in flyover country, I'll safely say. This is the way we do things. We do things where we say, okay, we've had one of those. Now it'll be three years before we get to the next point because we have to take care of the Latinos, the Asians, and we have to pump them in there. It's, that's the thing that is so, when we start saying, yes, we're doing well, but if we can't do this and we can't do this and we can't do, why can't we do them all? And I know that's a very simplistic point of view, but the thing that as an African American artist becomes disturbing to me is more and more as I look at, I'm not going to lie, I would get the American theater, I'd look in the back of the book and I'd go to see how many black plays are being done, you know, because I know these are opportunities for me to work, these are opportunities for other things to happen, but it seems like the ground we gain, we have to give up so that other people can gain ground while still there's a production of Harvey, there's a production of all of these other plays that just never seem to go away. We just have a couple of more minutes and obviously our conversation is going to continue, but I wonder if anyone wants to speak into the social movement, Wilson's speech talks a lot about the Black Power movement, you know, it's grounded in a sense of his own history as a deeply political person, I'm wondering if any of you feel that contemporary social movements might outside of the theater like Black Lives Matter might help push some of these issues to a different place, I know they're certainly pushing us on college campuses to think about what we're teaching, how we're teaching, do you see a kind of hope that those discourses will also influence one another? It depends on how welcoming the theater institution is, I mean for one of the reasons that Black people don't come to the theater, you hear that whenever you're trying to get it, it's because there's no invitation, you know, there's just enough to get the funding and I got the funding, now I only got to do one, maybe I can do one with three people, be like Harvey, you know, the thing that I mean who's making the decisions, you know, I would say that I think there are more Black playwrights working today than the speech happened, but I also know that they don't have the autonomy that he had, they can't pick to the director, and that's key, that's a key relationship and I don't for certain that there were good times where I worked with somebody and built a relationship with somebody just to have the artistic director give it to a friend or something, you know, one gave the wrong director to hurt the show and, you know, the artistic assistant wonders why. It's all about the funding, you know, Black Lives Matter can pick it, although it's not even really on the radar, you know, they go into places that matter, and the American theater, it's a place of professors that are with audiences, how much are you leading the audience with your art and how much are you just giving them what they already want, it's already familiar with, and then the art becomes stagnant, you know, you look, there was a time when you would look at the back of American theater when they had the seasons listed and everybody doing the same place, it's like they sat down and worked out you do this, you know, the model is the problem, but the model gets funded. Well, since Marian had the first word, we're going to give Marian the last word because we're going to give you all some time for coffee, which is in the lobby, then we're going to set up the next panel, but I think we've laid so many important issues on the table, funding, structure, accountability, yes and optimism. Join me in thanking these panelists for their remarks. Thank you so much, and we'll start back up here again at three o'clock, so just a few minutes out in the lobby. Thanks. Okay, that would be why. Okay, so my name is Brian Herrera, and I'll be moderating the next panel. Before we get started on that, though, what I'd like to do is to sort of do a little bit of a framing for what comes immediately after this session. On your program it lists reflections, and that's what we will be inviting, but it's a participatory event, so we'll begin in this room where folks will be asked to reflect back some of the things that are most resonant, things that have stuck out to them through the day, and there'll be various folks around with microphones, not so much questions or comments, but more sort of holding on to distilling key thoughts, key statements that you want to take forward. I'll reframe that as we enter as we get to that moment, and then, of course, that will take about 25 minutes or half an hour to do that, and then another half hour which will be in conversation, mingling with the panelists and the other folks in this room to sort of continue the conversation as we bridge it outward. We're not looking to bring anything to conclusion. Indeed, we're just stirring the pot again and again and again and seeing what energy is conjured on this event that is both a memorial and a celebration. So without further ado, I would like to turn the attention to our esteemed panelists. I did not practice current affiliations, so I will just say Vivian Benish, Brandon Jacob Jenkins, Ray Patmott, Polly Carl, and Jade Power. King Carol. King Carol. Okay, sorry. Jade, I hear Jade. And so what I'd like to do is to start, I mean, we're already in the space of having had two remarkable experiences already happen today with whatever we were thinking about coming in, but what I'm in some ways in thinking about this panel, I was really interested in the question of how has this speech's reverberations informed your day but also your journey in the field? You know, what have been the points of, like, was this speech on your horizon as an emerging artist? Is this something that you grappled with? Were you here? Were you in the room? What are the ways in which this speech has been a touchstone or a reference point for the last 20 years in your work? And if anybody has a particular story or anecdote to get us started, but also thinking about reverberations more generally? I was just telling everyone backstage that I went to a local college across the street, and I realized only here today, actually, that I wrote my thesis on the ground in which I stand, and the opening scene of that thesis, I was sitting on this balcony watching Jim evocean with my father, and he, me and my dad was not a theater going in by any stretch of imagination, but I like took him to Jim evocean because at the time I thought I was a theater student, and I guess I was a student of theater, but he, and I was sort of just like, dad, do you know who August Wilson is? You know, and he was like, of course I know who August Wilson is. He's like, I've seen all of the plays, you know, and we had this amazing conversation where he was like, yes, in my community, if a black thing came to the theater, everyone went to see that thing. So, in fact, the only theater he had seen was August Wilson. And then we go through the line, we go through each play when I won, and it was sort of this revelatory moment of all the plays that he remembered and enjoyed were never the ones that were taught, right, that there was this idea of Wilson as a canon figure, canonized figure, and there's Wilson, the artist living in his time, making his plays for audiences who are live then, you know, and that sort of division of taste, or that pluralizing of taste, ultimately became like the complete underpinning of my argument, right, and that oddly is like the abstract ground in which I probably stand in terms of how I make my theater work now. So there is this weird like part in which that weird like essential part that the speech has been playing in my career narrative as I've experienced it. Thank you. I was just struck a great deal by receiving that speech in terms of a wonderful set of contradictions that just keeps going, and keeps going because of all the specific issues that he brings up, but then his enormous humanity and truly embracing the ground that we all stand on that way. And I was also moved, very moved today, and I just said this to Emily, but just to be standing on the shoulders of many of the people on the panel that just preceded us, and sort of in the same dilemmas and arguments, and, you know, I just became the artistic director of Playmakers Rep three months ago in North Carolina. So boom. A deal. Well, welcome. And I thought I remember years and years ago when I worked here as an actress, Emily was directing me in The Matchmaker, was one of my first shows out, and as an actor, and I remember her saying, and I don't remember the exact percentage, but she said something to the effect of it. My first few years here, I remember I had to lose 40% of my audience to gain 60, and it took a long time and to do that. But the bravery that that took, and that has stuck with me, and I put that together listening to the speech and thinking about that and then thinking about my responsibility now and how much, how seriously I take that and how brave we have to be. And more than ever, the thing that I've, and then I'll, notice is that on the other side of that is that our audience is changing. So that's one of the huge differences is that our audience and our young people and how they see race, how they see gender, how they see is actually changing. And that's a really hopeful, hopeful thing, except that we have to figure out how to meet that audience with the theatre that we do. And that's, that's what I see as my challenge, like how do we actually go and meet that theatre because currently we are still at the tail end of an older white audience sustaining the model as it exists now. So these are, I could go on, but that's so all of those things and all of those challenges presented themselves as I listened to that speech today. I grew up in, I grew up in the theatre and watching theatre and watching a lot of African American theatre and was inspired by this theatre and by Emily to become a director at a very young age. And remember the 80s and being at the public and being a little girl when McDonald's would sponsor something. There was money to do huge black musicals that were new, that were daring, that were exciting. And I thought that's what life's going to be. And it's, it's our, everything has shifted so much. Just what it is, just what it is, just to be, I stand on, on much different ground just who I am than August stood on and chose to be an artist and chose to be a director because I wanted to be heard, not looked at. And I think one of the reasons, one of the reasons I stopped acting was, it's like, wait, I have a bigger voice than this. You're, you're putting an experience on me that isn't mine. And, and I love all of the work that I get to do, but I'd love to do, I'd love it to be more, more expansive. And I feel like I, I don't necessarily, I don't, I don't agree with, with some of the points in the, the speech in a different way than I did. I read it in college at 20, at 35, I now have, just because I've experienced more life. Yeah, I mean, I've been thinking about this speech for a long, long time. I didn't, I didn't see it alive, but I've been reading it and teaching it and, and, and thinking about it. And I think that the thing that, you know, kind of 20 years into my own career in the theater, the thing that I'm so struck by is this, in the earlier panel alluded to it, which is this, the I, the I, the ground on which I stand versus the ground on which we stand. And I think there's always such great desire to get to the we. And yet, you know, what I see in my own work is that so many people have been left out of the I still. And that that sense of otherness that the field has created so substantially. And I know, you know, from my own experience, I mean, I'm 20 years in and I had my very first experience as a transgender person working on a show with other transgender people four weeks ago. So the grant, so finding like my own ground on which to stand on, and then also wanting to stand in a we, I think that's the real, that's the real struggle. And I think that's the real call of that speech is to figure out, it can't be one or the other, it has to be, we have to be aspiring to one. But I mean, really truly making space for all of the people that we have left out, particularly at the level of, you know, who's on our board, who's in our audience, who's in our organizations. I mean, that work, we have so much ground to cover for us to even begin, I think, to think about what is the ground that we stand on. And I feel like that for us, what I felt like today in hearing that, again, was just the deep, deep listening we have to do as a community to the things he's saying, the things that others are saying, that keep, why it keeps echoing, and how much listening, how much more listening we have to do to get closer to we. This is sort of related to what you were saying about Exclude, you know, the idea of Exclusion, but from a more personal view, I first read the speech, I studied it when I was in graduate school, and I went to grad school for play rating. But was, you know, I sort of, I read the speech, and I'm embarrassed to say in front of all of you, that I was like, you know, there, there, you know, there was nothing Asian American about the speech, right? There was nothing queer about the speech, and I was, you know, from a farm in Michigan, and I was writing, you know, things that didn't necessarily depend on narrative structure. And so I just sort of set it aside and was like, great, that's great. And when I was asked to be on the panel a few months ago, I was like, why are they asking me to be on this panel? And so I looked in the email, I reread the speech, and I realized that, you know, a lot of the position that African American or Black theater was in then is so relevant to where my career has been situated just within like the past four years and critical response and, you know, an inability sometimes of critics specifically to allow me to be the center of the stories that I write. And, you know, and so I, yes, and then I said, yes, and here I am on the panel. Well, and I do think that that, the tag to critics is sort of notably, sort of, we haven't talked, we talked about audience, but we haven't really talked about the other apparatuses that can contribute to visibility and invisibility, illegibility, illegibility. And in some ways, this, these questions of how is the work understood as an I or a we? I love the way that Lisa in the earlier panel framed that the paradox of theater making is often a writer doing something very independent or artists sort of, and then coming to this peculiar collaborate, it sort of, it needs both in order, like, there needs to be the individual vision that comes together to the collective vision, like that is in some ways the paradox of theater making perhaps among many of the arts. And so there's all these points of encounter that are seem to be the, the tricky part. And yet I'm intrigued by this notion and part of what this panel is, is there's directors, there's artistic directors, there's writers, is how do we balance that individually as artists wanting to be taken seriously, but then also that question that Lisa raised too of the speech has often been brought up to ask us to think about our ethical responsibility broader than our own work rather than our own career and sort of has sort of remained one of the most enduring provocations of like, where do you stand ethically in the work your work does in the world? And so I'm interested, and that's not a burden every artist feels, but I think in some ways when we built this panel, it was sort of understanding that each of you in your have, have taken it on, have taken on that opportunity to sort of think about like, okay, I'm doing my work, but I'm also trying to do work for the field. I just, I'm curious what people think as two things that come to mind in terms of how the ground has shifted. One is that we've gone from critic to blogger. And I mean, in the 20 years, if you think about the eye to the we, in some ways, our social media and blogging and all of that gives everyone the opportunity to be an eye in search of a we, you know, it's like, it's that, but that's, that's really shifted a lot about how we think and I'm curious from a writing perspective or directed like sort of how that, if it has influenced at all. And I'm completely forgetting the second one, so I'll just talk about, I think there has been some interesting work in the last few weeks, a few months about sort of asking about ethical responsibility and criticism, especially around cultural, like questions about cultural legibility and the assumptions of what is being seen and not seen. And like the Latino theater commons authored a piece about microaggressions and reviews about a piece at, at Two River, you know, so it's sort of, it's close, it's hitting close to, in which experiences that you, your piece Ray got, you know, so this is coming pretty close to home here in terms of the ways in which the, the we, the we sometimes tries to get rid of the eye, you know, it's this paradox, this paradox in the way it lands. So I'd be interested if we could hear a little bit about this, the turn of what is the voice of the, the other figure in the audience, the critic or the audience member? I mean, I will say, I mean, I worked for critics for four years, still very close to a few of them, I was a critic. And I think it's important to know there are only two major black theater critics in America writing, right? So I think it's important to just like clock demographics in that regard, you know, they're all generally of the same generation. I think the bloggers are younger, you know, but we're experiencing a baby boomer induced congestion professionally across all fields. And so people aren't rising to the ranks and becoming the first stringers and ultimately the ones who are quoted by the New York time, you know, on the billboard for the Broadway, what, you know, it's like a whole kind of like this, this idea of structural dynamics, which the last panel talks about a lot exists. And it's important to remember that critics are a significant part in marketing department. Every theater has a marketing department or they have a lawyer department, you know, so it's like criticism is a significant part of the industry of theater making. And I think to pretend that it's not is actually an incredible mistake. Number one. Number two, I think that this where this ties into August speech and where I think maybe I'm going to be the first person to throw a stone for no reason. But you know, he, you know, the big critique I've always had of the speech is this sort of proclivity towards an essentialism along affinity, lines of affinity, right? That he can have a speech in which he says we and speak for an entire black culture, right? Which, and I love that story that Mary just told where, you know, he knew that he wasn't speaking for everyone, right? But politically he had to make a choice to speak for everyone, right? But the reception of that, of course, and you look at any playwright, African-American playwright, what happened is that everyone did August Wilson plays for 10 years, right? So, you know, and suddenly we have this thing where we think of August as having written a cycle of work about the black experience in America, right? Nine of which are set in Pittsburgh, right? So, but just to give him like a sidebar of credit, I think it's important to clock that first play, My Rainies was set in Chicago, right? And interestingly enough, the last three plays are all set in the same house, you know, because it's all about on Esther's house. I think even he was sort of wrestling artistically with how to have the specific and the political and the social kind of coexist, right? Well, I guess what I'm saying is the side effect of that speech, though, is suddenly people felt that we could have plays of about about people, right? It gave permission to be like, okay, it's great. If I program August Wilson play, I'm giving black people a reflection of their experience on stage, right? And that I think this is sort of what maybe Jade is sort of tapping into, right? And we look back now and every black actor who comes through my through my additions has like reams of Wilson, right? But like no Kennedy, no Bollins, you know, now they're all coming with like reams of Terrell McCrainy, right? On their resumes, you know, but it's like part of why August was so important in that speech where people listen to that speech, you know, that wasn't, he didn't get that speech from an empty audience, auditorium, right? There was an investment and he was an economic force at that point. He'd won two Pulitzer prizes and his work was being done everywhere. And he built an infrastructure that fed and grew an entire generation of black theater artists and sustained them. So of course you're going to listen to him, right? He was bringing millions of dollars into the industry suddenly, you know? And so now that he's gone, there's a sense of us all now reckoning with the ghosts of that. But part of that was also a critical apparatus that was adopting that language to apply to other artists, right? And assuming that the politics of a young artist writing today would be the same as the artist rather than like keeping up with the times doing the work of educating oneself, you know, to kind of like evolve with the politics. So in some ways that's like the kind of shadow under which the good and the bad of like what that speech means in just terms of the economy of the industry today. I just want to go back to that, I mean, I just want to go back to that ethical question like what becomes your responsibility in the context of understanding that you're fighting, you know, with all your might for the sense of the ground on which we stand on. One of the things I see in the field that's been so interesting to me over time in the Latino Theater Commons, I just came from Seattle and the Latino Theater Commons was meeting a Seattle. The Latino Theater Commons has been a movement of Latino Latin acts, I should say now to get that right. The practitioners who have been organizing for about four years to update the American narrative to include plays by Latino playwrights and work by Latino directors. And so it's really been and it's been a substantial movement and it's changed the game in a way that I have never seen a group of people do. But one of the things I was so struck by this weekend was that there have been people that it's a group of people that are bringing all of their resources to the table to make that happen. And they can't just think about that group cannot just think about being artists. They have to think always about being advocates for each other and for their community. And so the amount of volunteer work, and Brian knows this because he's been involved, the amount of volunteer work and some of the folks have been there for four years and regular convenings, regular festivals, it's just it's so the amount of generosity, the amount of ethical principle that those artists are bringing for the sake of something so much bigger than their own careers. And you see this all the time with communities that feel that they don't have ground on which to stand. And it's a tremendous amount of work and the work that I do in my whole round job, which is a community of that is exactly about how to be a part of the shifting demographics of this country and make sure that all voices have a ground on which to stand. You just don't see people of privilege coming to organize around those same issues or coming with that same sometimes sense of that they have to do all this volunteer work around what they believe in ethically. It's not the same kind of energy. And so I think there's something about that expectation that we have really of putting so much on communities that already are under resourced to in a way solve their own, to find their own ground. And so I just think about that a lot. When we did the Yellow Face series for HowlRound, that was actually one of the reasons that there's been this persistence of the use of costuming white performers as Asian characters. And right now we're seeing a lot of it in this week with Ghost in the Shell and Doctor Strange, those movies. And we had spent so much time dealing with this Mikado thing in Seattle. And then the Mikado happened, and I announced a Mikado that was going to play at NYU in New York. And it was one of those times where, I'm the co-director of the Mayi Writer's Lab, all of a sudden everybody had to take three months off from life, not just work, not just their partners, not just like just three months off from life to stave off racism, basically, and stave off the disintegration of where Asian Americans stand in the American theater, or Asian stand in the American theater. And I just remember it was such a, it was really the first time that I understood, not just in terms of resources, how difficult it is for artists of color, but in terms of getting resources together, but also the devotion of energy and time. Because you cannot, you actually can't, I can't not be a political figure. The existence of me within the American theater is so tiny that even if I write just my little family play, that any playwright could write any little family play, like my little family play is political regardless of whether I want it to be or not. And so then even just encountering issues like when the whole yellow face thing was happening. Yeah, it's just the amount that it taxes you. And you have to be politically engaged, otherwise you'll be erased. And I think that's one of the places where we is really an interesting moment of when, and that's what the Latino theater commons in a peculiar way sort of has leveraged the digital opportunity to sort of build a digital we, where like sort of even of, and coming together in real time in real space at occasions, so that you can actually be in the room together on an annual or semi-annual basis. But then also a lot of the work can happen where when somebody, when somebody's review comes out and it has that slam that there's a whole bunch of other people who are in part of something together that can then step in as the we. But that sort of question of how do we activate those networks in a different way? Because it was just a peculiar phenomenon of the Latino theater commons. But it is a kind of, with so much of activism and organizing, it does happen in virtual spaces as much as it happens in shared air spaces, which is not always easy for theater artists to adapt to, because we're really often in the room, or by ourselves we're in room with people. This idea of this sort of the abstraction is a little bit different. But I do think that's what's been very powerful I think about a lot of the work that's been happening is it's been able to be benefited by the digital point, the senses of digital connectivity, like these networks of solidarity that we feel out in the field that might not be in the town we're in right now, and how to tap into that for us to sort of keep the strength going when it's not in the sight of a town or a production. So one of the questions that has also come up in this way in the eye is the thing that in college campuses we call intersectionality, this question of simultaneous identities, multiple identities, the way that identities come together. And in some ways that's what, when I listen to the speech, that's what feels very 90s to me about the speech, is the security of inhabiting an identity position. And even then the gender stuff was being called out, the queer stuff was being called out, but it was, it worked on a certain level in a way that I wonder if today we would press, that the speech would need to be pressed in these other kinds of, so can we talk a little bit about what are the, what are identity categories today in this, like is there that sense of I, we around identity categories, or is it a different kind of political affiliation? I mean you mentioned Polly, the certain communities that are still finding the way to the I, and then there's other communities that are, you know, sort of moving in different directions in terms of diversity within themselves. I mean I definitely love the school that there's nothing more exclusive than community, you know, that communities are defined by boundaries and borders and sort of negotiated politics, often suppressed, negotiated politics within the communities about who is really in this community and who's not, you know. I think that's something we're infinitely more sensitive now, 20 years later. I do think it's important to clock that like he is in that hotspot of like the, we're coming out of Reagan, you know, there's a resurgence of like people needing to be identified, who've been silenced, you know, and of course that's the ground on which we're standing, right, it's like now that we've got everyone's attention, what do we got to say to them? You know, I think that's part of, part of what that's about. I think, you know, there's a comment made on the previous panel, like don't get black gay artists started about August Welford. And that's, you know, again a product of that speech, that era, right, where we're going to say that all black gay artists who are roomful of people all feel the same way about him, right, as opposed to being able to claim him as an influence or approach him with a certain kind of like complication or sensitivity or recognize this is a man just trying to say something in 1994, you know. But that's sort of, those moments always kind of get my back up just a little bit because I think that what we're ultimately, what he weirdly is, what's really at stake in that speech that's so important now is he's talking about like nationhood, I mean that's literally, when he's talking about the ground on which we stand, he's talking about literally the ground, like he opens up what they welcome to America, you know, and it's like, and he claims that country as his, right, and that project was about reclaiming time, American history for black bodies, right, which had been absent from the canon, right, during the Erebo debt or whatever. So I think that there's a kind of a need to like build a muscle of constantly checking one's privileging of one's point of view, you know, like my friend Ray here telling me that he put it aside because it was a black guy, right, but you figured it out, right, there's something about, don't be, you shouldn't be there, that's not an uncommon thing, right, that is actually, you know, like they revived piano, I kept thinking while everyone was talking about how they revived the piano lesson the same time they revived a good person that same season, amazing, two incredible revivals, right, and the average person, I mean, these are the must-see shows of that season, I think, and I will talk to people constantly and they will have all seen the break, but not the piano lesson, right, and that's, you know, and people, I've seen people, I began being online, I'm haunted by this Amazon review, which I read in like 2004 of a really famous black novel, sci-fi novel, where one of the reviewers says like it was overwhelmingly African-American, right, but there's this, but this idea that African-American is A, a thing that can willm you in proportion, number one, but like, but that, you know, but that it's a thing that like you feel attacked by when you encounter it, do you know what I mean? So I think that there's, there's like a work that we're trying to do, I hope, you know, as a, as a country, right, and we're all watching this play out on the news and the election every day, right, we've been watching you play up with the last three election cycles, at least, right, there's this sense of like, what are we, who is the we, right, and what does it mean to be a we in this country, right, and maybe it doesn't mean consensus, but it does require a politics and ethics of being together, and I think that's what he's ultimately really trying to advocate for in 1994 with what he's got, you know, I think that's for, and the other historical thing is the, I think what's the, because when the, when the speech is often referenced, it's often referenced into the sort of the, his critique of color, what he calls color blind casting, and that was also not, it was like part of the cent, like the non-traditional casting process project reactivated 1986, so it was 10 years of different companies experimenting with this as both strategy and style, and he's offering a comment that I think is a very lucid reflection of some of the, both the positives and the negatives of that thing, and yet it becomes in a way that often happens when a person who's marked by some marker of difference speaks in a loud, forthright voice, it becomes a sort of a pronouncement of a verdict, but how would that fit with what August Wilson says about color blind, but how does that square with what August Wilson says, would be allowed to say this, this kind of, this kind of sense of the overwhelmingness of when, like you say, it's a very personal speech. The thing that I always grapple with is my, I, I wrote a master's essay about the dust-up between Bruce Dean and I had to revisit that, but it, whenever time, the last two times I've heard it, because we, we heard a version of it in one of my classes this semester where the students practiced the round robin reading in my class, and that was sort of, before we decided it was a strategy for presentation today, and both times it was so much like having never encountered August Wilson in person, hearing it aloud made me get a sense, a better, a different sense of there's an intimacy in this speech that is also one of those ways of often bodies of color are not allowed to be individual or specific. They become this totalizing vision of the African American experience, a perspective, and I think that that's something that I've seen everybody in this panel have to negotiate in different ways as I've observed your careers. It's like this question of how do I stand in being both responsible to my community, but also not locked down by my perception of being part of, part of whatever, or my multiple communities, that paradox, and that is an additional kind of uncompensated labor in a busy, hard career. You know, I had an interesting conversation with my class of students at Emerson College, who are just a tad bit younger than I am, and I was in a conversation with an artistic director about doing a play about transgender lives written by a non-transgender person, and when I hear August talk about colorblind casting, would I really hear in all of that? I don't know why, maybe I'm just reading it my way, but I really hear him saying, we need to tell our own stories first. Before we just start casting people willy-nilly, and we actually need stories that cast African American people in stories about their lives. I feel like that's what he's really saying. It was really interesting to me, so I get a call from an artistic director asking me, he's casting the play with all transgender actors, but it's not written by a transgender person, and should he do the play, still he's getting flack about whether he should do the play, and you know, I kind of came across a bit like a moderate Democrat in that moment, where I was sort of like, well gosh, I really feel like you should still do the play, because the idea that a bunch of young people would go to your theater and see these transgender actors in a transgender story, this seems so critical to me, and so I ran this conundrum by my students, who all said, you know, pretty much to a student, oh no, no, he can't do that play, that's not somebody else's story to tell, and so it's an interesting moment, and I'm sure that I like, I have the kind of mentality that there are no right answers in these scenarios, but I could be wrong about that, but I feel like, you know, we're in that moment of, we're in a moment, and he was in a moment, and I think that's, you know, the part, whatever part of this is depressing is that he was in that moment, and we're still in that moment of who gets to tell whose stories, and what is it, and then what's just our need for story in general, what the theater does well is tell stories, and a bunch of people are going to go see a show in a flyover state in a week from now, and their lives are going to be transformed, I know, by the fact that that show's been done, so I feel like he's in that terrain somehow in that conversation, yeah, so. So I appreciate that just in terms of like programming, you know, trying to program and taking risks, and in a lot of ways I will admit that this is, in some ways, it's a scary time to be responsible for programming, because you feel like you can't put a foot right, you're going to make mistakes, you are not going to please everyone, and that's always been true, but it feels even more true, because between the watchdogs that are all over, because of social media, the watchdogs in one hand in a great way, for the most part, of keeping your conscience clear about where you're going, but also triggers, and where we are culturally with young people, and sort of programming and being sensitive to triggers, and giving, if you are programming things that are going to be sensitive, whether it's culturally, racially, in any way, to really be providing context enough for your audience, and that's become a whole new part of the job, and part of the responsibility, and so in a lot of ways, I thought about that other thing that I've forgotten, which is that the keyword of diversity has now, it's still there, looking for diversity and inclusion, but community engagement has become the new intersectionality, and community engagement are the hot, the hot button words, and just relate to this, because those, those audiences who are going to experience something next week, they're, what do they do with it after? What's the thing that happens after, and can communities and can theaters be there for the continued conversation, and it's starting to become more and more of our responsibility to be there for that, for the preamble, and the post. Can you talk a little bit about, but Jay perhaps can have, I know just in terms of being at Chautauqua, that's a big part of the, where you were for years, like that whole idea of sort of this experience of an audience both before and after, and that's sort of the sense of, of like, but then moving to sort of a normal theater, like what is that, but then also as a director who's like a regular, like when I say normal theater, I mean a theater that has just traditional program, like people show up that night, they're not camping out for the week, you know, it's, and, but then as a director who has, often has to sort of move into communities and out of communities without necessarily having a whole lot of time to tune in. That's actually what I was gonna jump in and say, because I think that's my favorite part about working regionally, which, which is not why I started doing it, but I jump into all these different communities, and I was thinking about what J. Dubb said, and, you know, grew up in New York State, in Woodstock with two artists as parents, you know, and then you kind of go, the first time I directed down south, I was like, oh, what, what's this? I'm not supposed to, I'm the first black director, it was, I was the first black director of a theater that had been around for 52 years, was a new artistic director, and they decided to take some risks, and they, and they programmed Fiddler on the Roof, which was running and piano lesson, which was, which was truly risky for, for the community I was in, and I went and saw Fiddler on the Roof with my piano lesson cast, it's like the most, you know, during a first preview, and the conversation, you could, you could see some people being very uncomfortable and, but if you're really, if you're really specific about the culture and really specific, there's a universality to great plays and to theater, and what it is to share a breath with someone in the audience that wouldn't have happened, so the conversations, the best, the best part was the community, they said, oh, the black people have never come to the theater, there's, there's no audience for this play, you know, the board was, and some people actually quit on staff when I walked in after that first production meeting, that they were going to listen to this northern black young, not that young, but woman, they quit their jobs, but then the conversations that happened in the bathroom stalls between people that had been living in the same towns and different parts of the same towns that had never talked to each other, it's like, that's, that's why we do it, that's exciting, and, and, and their piano lesson made more money than their Christmas carol, so, can I sort of speak to these last, can I speak to these last conferences in actual history that I think is important, because I think Paulie Carl's comment about like this, yeah, this anxiety about like, can I tell this story, you know, which just feels very new, right, is, and this sort of comes out of this as well, is, is related to, and I constantly get people sending me plays and like, is this racist, and it's like, well, maybe it is racist, but you should just try to do it, right, and see, and like, see what happens, like maybe you know, but what that does is that weirdly shows, and Lisa kind of talks this beautifully, that artists are disembodied from the idea of an audience, right, and yet the Lorde theaters, right, and the regional theater movement is rooted in the WPA movement, right, which is that there were a ton of abandoned vaudeville theaters around America during the impression, and the depression, oh my god, the oppression, well, depression for some of us, but there is something about how, there is something about how the government was like, we got to put people in these theaters and like, why don't they all just like, read the newspaper out loud, right, you know, and that sort of laid the groundwork of what became regional theaters, right, and again, that is about that, and what, I guess to see the polygons, ideas, like, whenever people say to me like, is it okay if I write about the people that are not, it's like, well, theater can't be about anyone but who shows up, right, you can't make theater about, that's the kind of like, creepy national geographic ethnography part of it, where it's like, you think that five actors who all went to Yale are going to sit there and tell you about what it is to be poor in Pittsburgh, whoa, okay, like, whoa, check yourself, right, but the point being, right, let's clock it again, that August was an incredible economic force, right, the power of what he did is he, he had his people in the regions did his plays and made more money than they ever made, because they realized that there were black people in the town who had money who wanted to see theater, right, that is like the significant thing to clock about him and why he could do this in some way, so it's funny that now, you know, now it's about kind of this question of like, well, you know, community engagement, it's like, well, you can't engage with the community that's not there, if you don't have a transgender community there, you can't engage with that community, so why are you making work about a transgender person, that's like, that's the first question you should be asking yourself in some way, right, in the same way about like programming black work in February, which just happened to me every year in my life, right, so you know, there's something about, there's, again, like there's these weird, weird way we felt like August's speech and the kind of discourse around it, which is really about like Tony Morrison, how all these black artists who came in the early 90s, right, they somehow gave us this cheat sheet to diversity in America, right, we suddenly didn't have to engage, we could just be like, well, Tony Morrison said we should just buy more black books, you know, and we're doing our part as Americans, right, as opposed to feeling like, again, I'm just, oh my god, brand of self-talking, but there's something about, there's some, believe me with this crazy quote, where I remember reading the thing that Bruce Norris, when he, Bruce Norris wrote Claiborne Park, which was the most produced play in the 2000, but not 10 season or ever, he has this quote where he's like, the reason why he wrote that play is because he would watch Raisin in the Sun and feel that he was not allowed to identify with anyone but the white character, that is profound, right, that he felt incapable of seeing a black body on stage and identifying with it, right, and that's what's at stake politically in this conversation, right, it's like, how do we build a culture of empathy, right, that allows us to communicate and share and feel the same thing at the same time, right, if we're only going to see each other's bodies as like the border or the boundary through which we can perceive souls or ever, or, you know, feeling or humanity, you know, that's what I've, anyway. Which is why I call on the side that Emily was talking about, about color, blind color conscious casting, is that at some point you've got to reflect what's actually the makeup of America, not necessarily the community, the theater you're presenting for, and that will catch up. And working in a university context where these questions come up in their own, their own vocabularies, you know, I think we can't do that play, you know, we can't do that play because do we have the actors for that play, you know, the version of that that comes up in university departments all the time, and, but I'm also like having studied this question off and on for my entire career since starting college as a student is the question, well how would you know who's there if they don't get a chance to be seen, you know, and so in some ways like it's that kind of that commitment of like, of creating a, building a pipeline, right, of just sort of saying we're going to do this play and we may or may, we'll have to figure it out, we'll make mistakes, but then we'll, then the question then becomes, are you going to do another play in two years, which for Latino plays it sort of becomes that kind of that cycle of like, well we did an Asian play and we did a Latino play and we did a, and so in a college context that really underscores the problems of that because you have a generation of four years where somebody might not get another chance to, to participate in that, and I think that there is a power that theater has to conjure community as well, that it's, it's a, it can be a community, community making exercise as we've sort of named, like a lot of these touting how many dollars are made at these theaters is because an audience revealed itself when the invitation was presented not as expectation but as invitation, and I, I'm, I'd be interested to hear what happens with your colleague in, in the production, whether if they proceed like what those students learn about the community that they, that reveals itself when an invitation is presented and I think that that is again part of I think an interesting paradox is as a, as a historian who's been looking at a lot of this stuff recently it's amazing how an average moviegoer is invoked so consistently as the reason why we shouldn't do something you know the average moviegoer, the theatergoer, the average theatergoer will not, the average audience member, whatever the language is is, does that thing of like well we can't do that because our average audience member won't accept this, you know and it's like who is that person? Do you, can you give me a name? You know it's always that, it's a, it's a simple invocation of like do you really know? Maybe they won't like it at first but as we've heard like from Two Rivers Experience the first year they were a little bit freaked out but then a few years later they're, they're in and so the question of what is the role in sort of pushing that risk and but of course then you could be one of the people hired to be the risky season you know you know that's the trick is, is it takes a kind of risk and a risk of making error and so. And the first step is not checking the box. Yeah. I think that's the first step. Yeah. You got to program it because you love the work, you want the voice heard, you want to make a commitment to that and it's the balance of artist and industry. It's like, it is about the relationship with the audience but it's also about what the artist wants to say and why and I think that's like the, the name of the book. The point from where creation starts can't be about how it's going to be where it can but to me that's not the artist I'm interested in in being. It's why, why a story is being told if it's a good story you know and starting from there and then of course you have to look at the business side of it and you know but I just think the seed starts with the why and the want of the eye. Yeah but also I think this, I'm always asking my kids like who asked you, my students, you know who asked you to write this you know we can, we can all express ours, everybody here can express themselves but like why should a theater which is taking government money right and that's other than the clock about August speech is really he's talking to a room of non-profit theater you know he's saying like you know again the nationhood thing it's all about this idea of the American theater that I think he's ultimately fighting with or fighting for right because all Americans pay taxes right so why do you get the tax money oh my god half of you probably pay your tax today it's tax day by the way but you know I didn't pay my taxes that's not about it but um but this question of like what you know what there are black people in this town who are paying taxes that goes to your theater right and you're taking that money so what is your obligation to those taxpayers who think of themselves as Americans in a localized community right what is the how does that work actually like touching them or you know well and then to that question I mean I think that that question of average audience member which drives me insane I have no idea who that is um but the um but that question of average audience member like when I think of audience I mean I don't think of like who's coming I think of who's not coming like and so I mean I feel like that to me like I think of the audience as you know every neighbor I program and curate a season in Boston and I think of every single person in Boston who doesn't think they can come to downtown theaters as my audience right and so then I have to go okay how do I program to that audience that I don't know right and that I I mean the phrase I always use is it's a curation of listening right like it's actually you have to listen you know and you're not listening to the people that are standing it they're already sitting in your seats like they're there and they're they may go they may stay but your responsibility is to be a reflection of the city or the community that you live in and if you're going to be a reflection of the city or the community that you live in and you really clearly care about what August Wilson is talking about you're going to have to do a lot of listening you're going to have to you know imagine people that you don't already know and then think about how you're going to program a season in relationship to the unknown and I think that work is terrifying if you're trying to count dollars at a box office but I think that's the only way the American theater will be vibrant into you know the next you know I mean when you know what as as we are now in a completely changed demographic reality that's the only way theater is going to stay real you know so we're coming up we're coming into the end of our time and I'd be interested if if we could maybe model I'm going to put you all in the spot if we could sort of model what the reflection exercise is going to be is sort of ponder if there's any particular takeaways any for phrases or any sort of feelings or any experiences today that you would like to hold on to that you would just have that you would like to make sure that you don't forget and maybe use the opportunity to share it in front of a group of people to sort of anchor it in your mind the sort of the most treatable moment the the the the thing that reverberated for you or the thing you discovered about your own journey in the field just some takeaway moment and of course if none of you speak up we'll have a moment to collectively ponder so the rest of all of you can ponder that as well but if there is anything from today that you want to hold close to as we step into the next phase of mingling and conversation I think I'll probably hold on to Mary in slow behind the scenes August at the bar choosing to speak for that feels like a very important thing we should all remember that person lives behind every person who gives a speech that person lives behind somebody there's a person who's making yeah making choices about what that speech means and who that's for thank you I mean the thing that struck me was when Lisa was talking about the wow cafe just because as co-director of the my lab like when we started we just you know we thought nobody would ever do our work ever like that was actually the beginning of the lap is that no one is ever going to do asian american playwrights ever so we can just do whatever we want and it was such a freeing idea that you didn't have to write to an audience or to whatever you know we were just hanging out in a room writing plays and now you know we sit around every quarter and make a list of where all the labvies are and where all of their plays are being done across america you know and how you know and uh and I think that that um hearing hearing that about the wow cafe and really understanding the freedom that you find in these affinity groups and how how you know you do it thinking that it will never have a larger impact and then all of a sudden lesbians on broadway three labvies that you may or not you know what I mean like it's just yeah the first panel in a while that hasn't brought up Hamilton oh my god I literally was timing it four minutes to the end I was like oh my god but it's a it's a kind of ice that does need to be broken because otherwise it does something else so thank you for that put it on the table yeah but put it on the table in the context of the last stretch of his speech about what colorblind casting is what's at stake in it right yeah put those texts in conversation and how identity has I guess for me how identity people the way people self-identify has changed in the past many years like New York theater workshop even changed their the name of their grant and and um I don't know belonging and a bigger bigger sense of of being able to belong somewhere I'm rambling but where we'll be in 20 years how people will be identifying yeah and the thing I hold on to for today I mean the thing that I always hold on to in that speech is that whole conversation about excellence I think we're going to circle around that question of the context in which excellence lives for a long long time and so that it's still resonating after the reading of it I think I'm going to think a lot about Polly's story about your friend and the transgendered story and and just thinking about how maybe we live in an era of self-censorship right that might be new and that's actually preventing us from taking the risk of being wrong or being honest or presenting an honest self and to flip that in some ways contradict that is I think the question of how does our moment where this sort of the specter of stepping wrong or centering or all of this actually how it does have antecedents in other moments just the vocabularies in the hot spots might have been different but in some ways I think that's what's most active about the connection for me between 1996 and 2016 is that there is some ways that there was a lot of concern about doing it right and doing it wrong in 1996 the vocabularies were different the sense of fluency with what difference was was different but in some ways this is a cycle that returns and so we will probably find ourselves in similar panels in the future asking similar questions but indeed we have moments like this and moments like August Wilson's speech to sort of go back to to think what's is it are we thinking about progress are we just thinking about change over time history is not always about progress but history is always about change over time and so sometimes that can be its own sustaining force so I'm excited for the canon to shift I think it is that's like one of the most positive things that's happening I think is that these 50 years and 50 past years and 50 years ahead what we're going to be looking at as the canon of great let's just call it American theater let alone global global is really going to shift that will accumulate in a really exciting way excellent well thank you so much for those reflections and for this conversation and I think so as I mentioned we are turning to our opportunity for reflection now and what we will be doing is we'll invite all of you I think the house lights are going to shift a little bit but what we will invite there's Paula and I think at least one other person has a microphone and so to the best of my ability if you can raise your hand or stand up to let me know that you have something you'd like to reflect and we'll use those to begin our conversation which then in about 15 or 20 or 30 minutes we'll move to the outside so I see one hand in the center of the house right now are the other hands that know they want to say something so we see two in the center of the house nothing like being first there was a reference made to the internet and to blogging which is certainly something that was not around 1996 when August Wilson's speech was made and I'm wondering from the standpoint of directors or individuals who bring particular plays to particular theaters what the effect of the anonymity of blogging has on the plays that they tend to bring to theaters because that is not something you know it was referenced to but it wasn't really addressed so the question of the critical context in this space in which my blogging and micro blogging like tweeting or something like this can create the context of a new work in a way that we might not know how to be mindful about thank you yeah um thank you for the for the day um the thing that I mean a lot of things popped up for me but Brandon's last point about Bruce Norris not feeling there's anything he could you know respond to in raisin I'm actually finishing a master's in NYU this semester and my thesis is actually on empathy in theater and live performance and you know with it's that just really struck because if you look at raisin one of the fundamental themes in that play is a young man coming out from under an overbearing mother you know so that would meet seem to be so universal like you know maybe just my mother I don't know but that's a very universal thing and I've been an actor in Norris's in his in one of his plays on the west coast and I just that just really struck me that because the people the characters didn't look like me I automatically can't have any kind of resonance unless the person looks like me yeah and um there's something about that and it's always connecting out to Holly's Holly's point as well about like circling around these questions of the universal and excellence like what are the what are the things that draw us beyond an immediate identification but can empathy and what are those things and these are as enduring questions and in some ways following Holly's and Holly's point about we're going to keep circling around this this is going to keep coming up in different shapes yeah sorry um thank you for this this has been a really great engaging thoughtful day I just want to I don't know if anyone else in the room was clocking their phones at three o'clock like I was but I just wanted to let everyone know who doesn't that Brenda Jacobs Jenkins was just shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as the final list for Gloria so I don't know if he even knew that when he was up there but I told it's awesome so we are in the room where it happens yes I just wanted to thank everyone at the McCarter for I think doing this I think this is something that was extremely important to not only see but be a part of as a young person in the arts so I thank everyone here for that I just want to say the one thing that stuck with me was when the panelists were talking about the in Wilson in Wilson's speech with the eyes and the wheeze and how important it is to realize that not enough people know their story of the why they are the eye which makes them not able to figure out who we are as a we and coming from you know the rehearsal room where we read the speech and we all shared our personal experiences with it it was one of those moments that sitting here I was like wow that's something that I didn't even think of that I'm glad someone brought up because it turned the entire experience around for me so that's what stuck with me the most I think thank you it's coming it's coming uh first of all amazing afternoon one thing that stuck with me was uh when Brendon brought up that at this time August Wilson was a big economic factor and that he was bringing in millions of dollars and that he took this position that he was in to say something that maybe you know other people wouldn't in that situation and you know talking about you know how he had read the speech to his friend before he had gone up there and how it inspired me as a young black artist to one day strive that kind of position and what would I say if someone had given me that if I was that big economic factor if I was something that was bringing so much attention and it just kind of had me thinking about when I have my voice bigger than this one that I have now what will I say that's when it kind of stuck with me thank you okay so we've got one in the back and then we'll come up here in a moment yes okay one of the things that stuck with me is the fact that if we do not have courageous and bold artistic directors who challenge the status quo and make the changes whether it's politically correct or whether the funding will come then the situation will never change and so I'm hoping that some you know really courageous people would take that move and we have to think of the future not necessarily what's happening right now thank you and it's also a bit to support the courageous artistic directors we see working in our midst to let them appreciate their work I didn't want to mention my favorite but since you said that I'm gonna have to please but I think that Emily Mann's doing a really great job here at MacArthur and the important thing is yeah to bring in new audiences you know people who might not necessarily have come out but will come out because something spoke to them and I think that's even more important because as we hear about the changing demographics in America as a whole those that we rely on to be a regular audience are going to disappear so what's going to happen then you know so thank you thank you yeah okay what came up for me essentially was several things what I find very interesting is why is theater so important you made a point when you said movie and then you said theater a lot of reaching an audience is more community theater is more a communal thing and as we become more techno savvy we're moving away from those interpersonal interrelations another thing comes up for me august speech and likening it to when the supreme court has to deal with what did our forefathers mean you know the interpretation and I mean essentially art in this country and in Europe has always been secular it has always depended on the largesse of a group that has the money now the thing is how do you change that model so those are the things that are coming up for me you know I find the dearth of August Wilson's he was serving his own needs and it was it was very great to see those stories you know portrayed there were a lot of very strong women characters even though he does not allude to that he uses you know the term overarching man as opposed to human kind but the thing is women got to see those things you know those characters but then it was also in tasaki shang gay who actually brought those characters to the fore that women kids have a voice you know so it's constantly changing and then my question is why is theater why do we you know invest so much in theater surviving you know when the way the world is going it's about technology everything is techno driven and everything is reaching global eyes and ears you know as opposing to the community which is really important because we as a as a species we do operate in community we don't operate outside of a community but commoditizing things so that money can be made and that's what we're talking about money we're talking about the importance of some sort of economic structure to uphold theater theater is important because you get to see somebody on the state that's living and also can resonate with you be it fiddle on the roof because there are cognates in fiddle on the roof social criteria that deals with all humankind so that's well and i think that that's a really the the paradox between the mediation and the priority of community like this question of goes back to that question of there is a we in this room of the people who felt compelled to be here so so in some ways maybe one of the points of conversation as we move out into more mingling over coffee and cookies is who is the we the tear and why do we care about this story and why do we care about theater um do i see another question yes i wanted to first of all say thank you for revisiting this moment in time um what i take away from it is that it was a moment in time and that it was a speech and not a conversation and um given the opportunity you know if it was me given the opportunity for a finite amount of time to say whatever i could say within those moments what would i say um certainly today we've heard that a lot more could have been said um and that there were questions even 20 years later about why certain things weren't addressed but again i'm thinking it was a speech and not a conversation i'm sure that had questions been asked at the time we might have had some of those answers today but i am appreciative that he did speak these things at that time uh because as a lot of people agree today they still resonate uh we we still see some of these things as problematic and we still are finding that we need to continue to address albeit maybe in a morphed way when looking at the problem but we still need to address these issues so i i thank you for revisiting the speech and generating the conversation okay here's how i it hit me yeah he's your teacher sorry um the one part when i was listening to the speech and i remember 20 years ago actually when it hit me and i was in grad school in st louis is remembering that august wilson when he was like 14 15 actually had to leave high school because he was accused of plagiarism and if can you all of my students say hi okay these are these 14 15 year olds that want to be artists and do you want to know where the bottleneck for all of that for a lot of this opportunity that they're missing of saying something starts because it starts right there at this age they need funding and resources and the opportunity to get into those colleges because if they don't get into those colleges they can't speak so honestly august was such a strong force that was able to sneak past that and managed to overcome those obstacles but they're still there you know and i look at all of the panelists and i see yale and enguayu and julia and all of these colleges 60 000 a year can you stand up the minority students in my in my classes just for a moment they can't afford it and they want to be artists how can we help them that's that's what i got i'm so glad you said that maria because the words in my ears today um for mr wilson abuses of opportunity and then the word proximity and the word invitation and to put our artists in proximity of a career in the arts we have to invite them and we have to put our money where our heart is and where our mind is that's all thank you and i'm going to take that as an opportunity for us to meet each other i think this is a great opportunity an invitation for if you are sitting behind or in front of somebody you don't know say who say hi who are you meet some of these extraordinary young artists and take the conversation continue the conversation about why theater matters and why you care about theater as we go into coffee and cookies for the next half hour or so but once again thanks for being here thanks for making this conversation today what it is i i do i'm so sorry i do have one last invitation to all of you who are able to hang out in princeton a little bit uh longer there's an embarrassment of riches of opportunities uh today and one of them is the 2016 tony morrison lecture which is happening at 530 in macawsh hall um the guest speaker is noble laureate professor willis so so yinca you won't want to miss that opportunity you're invited to it as well and if you need someone to take you over to macawsh at 530 i think we've decided that there will be people in the hallway and it might be me and i'll find out where macawsh is and i'll bring you over there myself so please know that you're invited to this other amazing opportunity today thank you so very much and brian thank you