 This is the first time I've seen a person like this. Yeah. I'm a little bit too late. I feel like I'm not going to be there. Why not, ladies? We made a good one. We're all about to get started. First of all, what is this? 20. I love all of that. Sorry. Oh, yeah! It's like super low. It's my mom and I. It's my mom and I's. It's our Labor Day tradition. We're going to react to it. That is a no-brain answer. Yeah, it's a no-brain answer. I'm in Toronto. Oh! Oh my gosh. I'm here. I did not know what I was saying. I did not know what I was saying. I didn't know what I was saying. I didn't know what I was saying. Yeah, yeah. That's how it works. Yes! Oh, yes. I love that. And it is a very good morning. I've been walking around in these sessions and I try to take them all, But I only got like 15, five minutes of each session. Oh man, and I wish I had gotten all two hours of each of the sessions a while ago. Well, we are summited. One of the things that happened in Summit is that we have conversations, the ground underneath us starts to move. Our perceptions and our understanding, you know you're changing when what you come in here with gets challenged. If you're walking inside of this summit and you are doing a cakewalk, and this is a very easy dance, then there's not much happening. And if you're walking through the summit and you're like checking off the box, I got that knowledge, I got that knowledge, I'm about to go out there and change the world. I am going to tell you the truth, it's been 22 years in this business and it ain't going to happen. Okay, and I'm 37 and I'm very proud to be 38 in two weeks. It's not going to happen. So I just want to say that we are in, this is day two and day one and a half, and this note, I just want to, I'm going to introduce this panel, but I just want to say it's about to get really real. And at this time, do you remember those group understandings? As you listen and engage in the next level of dialogue, I want you to make sure that you can at least touch somewhere, either in your mind or in your hand, on those group understandings, because now that it's about to get real real, we're going to need the group understanding. One group understanding that I want to say, and this is not to shut you down. Actually, this is useless if we're shutting down. However, do not shut down. But I wanted to acknowledge a thing called step up and step back. If you feel that you know that you can express yourself and you felt a sense of play, you know what that feels like. There are some people who are not as quick to step up. So let's give other people that experience that you've been having. If you've been having an opportunity to really express yourself, step back a little bit so that those who tend to not step up can experience what that feels like. If you are someone who is listening and waiting for someone to say what's on your heart, I want you to experience what it's like to put yourself out there. Don't wait. Step up. So if we can just employ that a little bit of step up, step back, because this conversation is about to get real. We go into the pinnacle and that's about to get real. And then I want to say something. Pace yourselves. Because we want to use patient. Pace. Think about this. With that, I'd like to introduce this next plenary. This plenary is a plenary on successive leadership and I want to introduce Martha Richards. She is the founder of Women's Arts in San Francisco. We can now say this in biology because they will tell their biography in the session. Connor Sharif is the Associate Artistic Director of Center Stage Theater. Liz Diamond is the Director of the Directing Program at Yale School of Humanity. She is moderating the session, and we members of the staring committee will help to facilitate the Q&A. Wonderful. All right, so I'm going to get over my stage fright, right? And remember to breathe as we go through this. It's a tremendous honor and privilege to have this conversation with Martha and with Hannah. We had a chance to brainstorm a bit last night about how we wanted to structure this, and I'll just share that with all of you before we launch, and that is, by way of getting to know one another, Martha and Hannah shared what I came to realize were their creation stories and they're so extraordinary and so full of, I think, if you will, inspiration and lessons and interest, that that's how we're going to begin. Martha, who is moving toward the next chapter in her life, which we hope will be full of pleasure and adventure, is looking to create a succession for herself in the remarkable organization she's founded. Hannah, who has, as we've all, I think, had an opportunity to discover, is a rising leader in the American theater, whose time has surely come. And to hear about both of your journeys so far, I think it's going to be a great way to frame the conversation that follows. After that, I think we're going to talk about, you know, invite people to talk about what are the challenges that you're facing. Martha, as a woman of a certain age, trying to move into the next chapter of her life. And Hannah, as a woman of color, who is a leader, absolutely, you know, ready to take the raise, what are the challenges that you're facing as you approach the next chapter in your life. And we'd like then to open it up to thoughts and questions with perhaps an idea or a, as you listen, it would be great to have you begin to think about what ways we could imagine structures that would help these women, and women who may find themselves in exactly these positions as we move forward in life, to make those transitions easier and more creative and less fraught with obstacles. Okay, so, let's roll. They're on. I'm going to stand up for this. Tell us about yourself. Yeah, that's awesome. Hang it on. It's even the way, no, it's not like, my birthday is in December, I'm going to be 68, so I'm 30 years old. I've been doing this a long time. So when she asked me to tell my creation story, as I was thinking about it last night, there's really two factors I want to emphasize to you. My life has been about economics, and it's been about identity politics, and that's what's really shaped the creation of women arts. And so I want to speak to you about that. So when I was, I started out, I graduated high school in 67, the summer of love, and the National Endowment for the Arts was created in 1966. And around that time, there were a bunch of different studies that were done talking about the arts and what we were going to do about the arts. The arts had been sort of focused in just New York, here, world particularly. And there was this desire to spread it around the country. And also I actually was an economics major undergraduate at Berkeley and did my senior thesis on a book by William Bowen and Balmo about performing arts, the economic dilemma. And the thesis of that book was that Hamlet took X number of actors and three or four hours to produce back when it was first written. And then all the rest of the economy had gotten much more automated. And so by the 60s, we were seeing that everything, you know, car industry, everybody else, radio, television, there was ways to produce that reached much larger audiences with much less labor, but theater was still very labor intensive. So in the 60s, late 60s, with the creation of the National Endowment, what the country was saying, what the federal government was saying, was, gee, we need to preserve this art form. It's an important cultural tradition that we care about and we can see from the economics of it, there's no way it's going to make its own its own. It must have government funding. It must have more support. We can't expect, if we're only going to have commercial theater, it's only going to be in New York and the rest of the country will be erect. So that was my senior thesis about this book. And that attitude has shaped me throughout my career that in fact government funding is essential. The regional theater movement, a lot of the regional theater started in that period and it was because we had this idea we were going to be enlightened, we were going to be like Europe, and we were going to make the arts accessible to everyone. So it's kind of a sad scene. We were like, it's all white, upper-class people, upper-middle-class people that can afford to go anymore. That was not the original intention at all. And in fact, so one of the big inspirations in my career was Nancy Hanks, who was the second one to run the National Endowment for the Arts started at Head Roger Stevens. Then under the Nixon administration, Nancy Hanks was the chair of the National Endowment. She raised the budget from $8 million to $114 million. Under Nixon, mind you, a Republican. Nixon played the violin, he loved classical music. And in fact, all of the major art institutions were supported by conservative Republicans. I mean, Nancy had no money, Nancy was supporting all this stuff. It made sense that it was a Republican cause. So you can see that that's completely flip-flopped during my lifetime, which is really weird. When you think about it, I mean, those donors and one of those major institutions. But for some reason we've gone, you know, so Nancy Hanks' approach, because she was trying to get Congress to support the arts and get all the congressional leaders to vote for bigger budget allocations for the National Endowment for the Arts. And what she did was said, we want this money to go to support your community. So she persuaded the people in all the different states that the National Endowment for the Arts was a good idea by saying, because we're going to fund your theater in Minnesota or in California or in Nebraska or wherever they were, you know, we're going to support arts in your community because we believe in access for everyone to the arts. So that's been a big theme in American arts management that's been sort of lost in some ways. So, but that was, when I was starting my career, that was what the key thing was. So the other thing that was happening, so my first archery, I actually went to, so I did my undergraduate, then I went to law school and then we can talk a little about the identity politics there because at that point I was coming out as a lesbian, I was kind of a late mover, but in my 20s I was coming out as a lesbian and I was in San Francisco. But it was clear that that was illegal. As part of my law school training in criminal law, they said, well, we have to go spend an evening driving around in a cop car. So we're driving around the car with me and a female classmate and the police turned to me and said, so you know, you want us to go bust some packets for you? We thought you might. So I don't think that's a good idea. But it was really clear. I mean, it was already clear to me, it was illegal. Like when we wanted to be gay, we went to a gay bar and a lot of people was drinking problems because society was not accepting us at all. So it makes me kind of dried about this. A lot of my friends who were teachers could not come out because they would lose their jobs. It was a problem. Stonewall had happened already when the police were making that question to me, but it was still clearly a problem. I can remember going to bars and being afraid that the cops would come and bust a place because you could just lose your entire career if you got caught and arrested in that situation. But also learning about the law, you kind of learn about ways you might, the civil rights movement had been moving forward. A lot of things had been illegal around other groups and we were kind of pushing those laws, the gay rights movement started. So I was kind of shaped quite a bit by that. I was also shaped a lot by the women's music. There was a lot of the second wave of feminism was happening in the 70s and there was these huge women's music concerts where it was mainly lesbian performers and lots of lesbians in the audience that you could talk to and say, you know, it wasn't a bar, so it was very nice. So I realized the value of culture as a way of transmitting values and bringing groups together. And I think that's also shaped me quite a bit, those early experiences of art that settled. I love going to theater ever since I was a kid, but there was always this slight disconnect that the stories on stage were not about me and when I was seeing the lesbian musicians and I was singing about being in love with another woman, it was very moving and deep to me and it really makes a difference if the art is about you or about your experience. So I finished law school, I got a fellowship to go to center stage while I worked for three years in a small theater in San Francisco, a 1990 theater, and I sort of did everything. And then I got a fellowship from theater communications group to go to center stage in Baltimore. And I was under the wonderful Peter Cummins for a year. I'm standing right next to you. I'm both Catholic actually. And it was a great experience because I was learning about how theaters worked and all and I was sharing this story with Liz last night that Peter was coaching me and so he was saying, you got to learn to work room better. When you have a party with these donors, you got to learn to go shake all our hands and stuff and be outgoing. So I was working on that and at one point he had said, well, you really probably need some better clothes because I would still sort of be here in San Francisco. So I went to the costume shop and had one of the women come. And then I said, well, I have a budget for this costume. He was very entertained. But anyway, it was so great. You got Peter to pay for it. Yeah, I asked him to pay for it. And you got to talk, you got to do the shape your legs look. Yeah, that's later. Spoiler alert. So Brooklyn College, I go there. I got a job at Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College. It's a big facility on campus with four performance spaces. And so we did something like 300 shows a year. So it was a producing show, an entity rather than a... No, a presenting entity rather than a producing entity. So instead of you build the show and you put it on with your own team, it was you booked shows in and out constantly. And so that was a lot of fun also. So it was kind of like nine years of holding the phone like this while people scream at you with different accents. But at any rate, I was kind of whooping my eyes. I started as a business manager. And at one point, one of the woman board members sort of told me, it's like, you know, you're really smart and I think you could really advance, but you really need to think about, you know, how you look a little bit more and, you know, how you dress. And I'd been sporting a necktie part of that time. I was telling Schaefer. I'm kind of the bookend to his story that, you know, I was sort of a poor lesbian. Feminized myself in order to get the jobs. But so they... So I... Shortly after that conversation, I said, okay, I'm going to give up. I'm going to start wearing skirts and stuff. And so I shaved my legs and I told Riz that like the next year, I got promoted. So my sad joke was that I started shaving my legs. My salary went up 20 grand. Anyway, so I continued at Brooklyn. You know, I started as the business manager at Brooklyn College. So my line was that I worked up from being business manager up to executive director of Brooklyn Center for the Arts at Brooklyn College. And I was doing that for three years. And then I was trying to get a regional theater job because I really loved theater and I wanted to get back into a producing organization. And so... And I was, you know, going around and I was just sort of realizing it wasn't working. And I also, I weighed about 50 pounds more than I do now at that point. So I thought, well, you know, okay, I've got to... I've done everything else. I'm wearing the skirts. I'm trying, you know. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to take a year, you know, my best friend also given the identity policies, you know, my best gay friend from college was dying from AIDS that year. And many of my friends died from AIDS during that period, actually. So I just thought, I have to be healthier. You know, so I lost 50 pounds. I spent one year losing like a pound a week. And then I went out for job interviews and then I got the job at Stage West. So I was running a regional theater. Stage West is in Springfield, Mass. It's a Lord's Sea regional theater. But then what happened was I had gotten a job and I'm 50 pounds lighter. So nobody had known me as a pat person. Nobody had really known me as a butch lesbian. And so I'm in this theater and I was thinking, oh, you know, hooray, I can pass. And it was sort of like, yeah, I respect to pass all the time now, which was really hard. And the... And the fundraising, you know, the thing I think for lesbians, if you are a lesbian, please feel free to come up and talk to me about this afterwards. But one of the challenges is, and I think it's actually a challenge for people of color as well, is the fundraising structure in a theater like that. You're expected to be, if you're the managing director, you're the lead fundraising person, you have to go to these events and talk to the straight people who have the money and try and get it out of them. And you have to be charming and you have to work the room, as my friend Peter would say. You know, and it's stressful because you're very conscious of the fact that you're completely, you're playing a role that's not you necessarily. And some of those, like everybody on the staff who I was gay, I have a partner that I live with. But with the donors, it's sort of like, they see what they want to see. You know, if you look like you're a straight person, they don't make any other assumptions, they don't think about it, they don't... You know, it's just weird. But you realize that you're constantly editing what you tell them or what you say about yourself. You know, and they're talking about their family or whatever and you're really not talking about your family. So... Is it 10-time? No, I just want to give you just a heads up. Yeah. Two minutes? Just a few more minutes. Okay, so... So we're... So at Stage West then, I was there for five years. I managed to bring the deficit down from 750,000 down, accumulated that down from 750 to 85,000. You know, so I had done a good job. But I decided it just wasn't right for me anymore. I needed to go and I needed to start Women Arts, which is the organization that I've now run since 1995. And it's... Women Arts is the mission of it. I've been in the field then at that point for 20 years. And our mission is to increase the visibility and opportunities for women artists. And we started as a grant writing agency, basically. So for the first 10 years, all I did was write grant proposals for women artists. And I structured it so that I was getting money being paid by other people so that I could help women who were working independently. Because what you realize is if you're in a big institution like Stage West or Brooklyn Center, there's staff all around you, the artists. Like the artistic director at Stage West would say he would have to pick the show and he would worry about the casting. But there was other people doing the fundraising, doing the marketing, doing all sorts of other tech stuff. When she stepped outside, there was all these women artists who were very, very talented, but they're expected to do everything themselves. They're expected to write the grant proposal. They're expected to write the press release. And if they can't do it, people sort of say, oh, they're just not realistic about their goals. They just want to spend their time doing their art. What's the matter with that? They should take a couple more grant writing classes or something they grow up. And it's ridiculous. And you can see how from my background of believing in government funding for the arts, believing that artists needed to be supported in general, why I would start an organization that was dedicated to helping them raise more money. And maybe I'll leave it at that and we'll kind of talk about the challenge. I can talk more about the march. Does that sound good? That sounds great. Great. Hi. I just want to say thank you for sharing. I've had the fortune over the last couple of days of being able to talk to you more. And I just am so honored by your journey and understand the pathway that you have paid for all of us who are younger than you coming up. So my creation story, I think mirrors a lot of what many of us in this audience have been through. So I recognize that my journey, though specifically I present in the body of an African-American woman who self-identifies a black woman in America, I think that the journey for me is very much emblematic of the journey of many women who are in my peer group. So I like, and actually listen to a show of hands, how many people started with their own scrappy theater company with their friends from college? Wow. Yes. So that's my story too. I went to Spelman College undergrad and actually what sparked it was, we have this beloved head of department, her name was Glinda Dickerson and she actually, I was starting college right after the Atlanta Olympics or during that time she had led all of the, the Olympic opening. She was the director of that. She's an amazing, amazing artist. And she had an MFA. She was running the program and Spelman College decided that they actually wanted all of their head of departments to be PhDs. And even though an MFA is a terminal degree in our field, they wanted to up the numbers of head of departments that were PhDs. And so she, you know, basically made the decision that she didn't, she could go somewhere else and she did. She went to University of Michigan to run their theater program. And so we found ourselves, those of us who were in the theater department who came to work under her tutelage in this time of transition. And to the extent that when I graduated from college, and I would just say Spelman was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I was a dual major so I had another major that was quite stable and amazing. But when I graduated my senior year, there were no professors left in the department that had been in my freshman year, right? So if you're a theater major and you're learning, you have no one who's actually tracking your trajectory of growth. So during college, a group of us, including like Brandon Durden, some of you guys may know, one of my dear friends, we kind of got together and were like, how are we going to make sure that we're still getting what we need out of this collegiate experience and how are we going to create opportunities for ourselves. And so we had a lot of brainstorming sessions and we birthed a company called Nasir Productions and that was actually the beginning of my professional theater career. I consider myself a multi-disciplinarity artist. I'm a playwright, a director, and a producer. So I think of myself as a generative artist, an interpretive artist and a curatorial artist. And I would say that that began when I was running that small theater company, right? Because we know that you end up wearing 15 hats and that's what you're directing, you're writing grants, you're fundraising, you are, you know, sometimes doing light designs, that design, costume design. We were still in the university when we started our company so we did a lot of liberating materials. I remember our first show, we needed a really, really nice couch and we were producing it in the Rockefeller building on campus which is where the president's office was. This is being live streamed. Many apologies to anyone a long time ago. But we would go in every evening after the cleaning crew had finished cleaning the president's office and borrowed her couch. We'd bring it down four floors and put it on stage. We would do our show and then afterwards we'd make sure there was nothing on it and we'd take it out. So that was the beginning. It was exciting. It was fun. We were doing the work we wanted. We were re-envisioning classics. We were playing with form. We thought this is what we're going to do with the rest of our lives. Right? And it was exhausting and it was wonderful. And after five years of running that company I had a vision of myself and I said you know what I could do this for another 20 years and we would probably be in a very similar place. I might grow the budget and maybe we get to be one of those small theaters $500,000 but I'd probably still be wearing 16 hats and we're flying by the seas of our pants. We started this in under red. There has to be best practices that we don't know because we were just making it up as we went because no one told us we couldn't and we were young enough to believe that there's no reason why we can't do exactly what we want to do. So then I was like okay well I want to know how the people with multi-million-dollar budgets do it. I actually want all of those best practices. I want to go in and see how they do it and then I want to take it home. And that's what made me move from my small company into regional theater. I went to grad school, got an MFA and then I went in pursuit of best practices and excellence to take back to the theaters that were doing the kind of work that I believed in. And I was in what I like to call Choose Your Own Adventure grad program that was really incredible because it introduced me to some of the biggest mentors of my career interaction. So Edward Albee was my mentor in playwriting and a great gift in my life. So Peter Hall was my mentor in directing and as I was leaving grad school and I was going to go to the East Coast and I was like oh I'm going to go and intern at the public. That's what I really wanted you. The head of my department said well while you're going to the East Coast you should stop in at Hartford stage. Michael Wilson was the artistic director there at the time. He used to be and you know I like him a lot tell him in my regards and so I went to Hartford to do an interview for their internship program and the first person I met was a man named Christopher Baker who at the time was the associate artistic director and we were supposed to have a 20 minute conversation. Our conversation lasted three and a half hours. And then he introduced me to Michael and Michael and I had like a three hour conversation and at that point I knew that I was going to have a 20 minute conversation and then Michael introduced me to one of my mentors within the Lord system and I offered that Michael gave me one of the greatest gifts of my career and my first year at Hartford stage he made me the liaison to every single department so anyone who's working in a Lord theater and you have the opportunity to bring up a young producer and then became to articulate to the artistic director the concerns and tensions of those departments so that he had understanding of them and then my other job was to be able to articulate back the singular artistic vision to each of those departments which gave me a facility with being able to speak to those departments in the way which they understand and it's a very different thing to talk to carpenters about the artistic vision than it is to talk to the finance department my first year I started building that skill that's been I think one of the hallmarks of my career is the ability to move between all aspects of what we do and articulate vision and understand and reach for and nuance the concerns and tensions that could explode if they aren't handled right so I grew up in the business at Hartford stage I started as the artistic associate and 10 years later when I left the company I was the associate artistic director and director at the time it was hard it was challenging I was the only woman in my department I was the only woman of color full-time at the staff and you know I would say that every five years I have a mini existential crisis where I go what am I doing if my life is this going to be is this still enough in a community in a society that's continuing to change is what I'm doing transformative enough because that's why I'm in this business but at the 10-year mark there is this existential crisis for myself when I started at the company I was in my 20s and I had this dream that I had been chasing and 10 years later I was in my 30s and I had had my first child and those of us who work in theater know that when you're in the thick of it there's never enough time to breathe or to be really self-reflective about your life you're in the process of doing and putting out fires and there's very little time to actually take the me time to say as a young 20-something still my dream and I felt that for myself it was incredibly important that I take the time we had transitioned leadership Michael had left I stayed to help Darko Tresnick whom I loved he was a great leader for Hartford stage I helped him transition in and I was really clear I need a moment to remember I'm an artist because while I was playing artistic associate and artistic producer and associate artistic director one of the things I had to step away from for five years and I knew it when I went into the regional theater was that I wasn't coming in as the freelance director that was hot out of New York that everyone wanted on their stage I was coming in to learn and to master those tools and that craft right and so after a few years I had to then start fighting my way institutionally back to the stage I had to take and this was a really big lesson for me so when I started and you're that multi-discipline artist and you're doing all those hats no one tells you that you're only supposed to do one or that once you get into mainstream theater that whatever their introduction to you is is the box they put you in and that it takes time and resources and a lot of ingenuity to break your way out of that box and to add another box and so for me it was I'm a great producer everyone recognized I'm a super producer but don't forget that I'm a director in a playwright too so how do I get you to see me if you've been introduced to me through the lens of producing actually I'm as great as those freelance directors that I'm in charge of hiring and that you should put me on the main stage too and so that was part of my journey was to get my artistic director who loved me who supported me who was a mentor to me to see me outside of the lens of how I was most valuable to him in that moment in order to serve moving my career forward and fortunately for me I was able to do that before I left but for me I felt that I needed in that moment to get really clear about who I am what is most important to me how I was going to move forward as an artist and so I said I'm going to take two years off I'm going to raise my daughter I'm going to write plays I'm going to be an artist I'm going to be free my husband took a job in Boston we moved from Hartford to Boston the idea of not working for an institution lasted all of two weeks because David Dower who some of you know someone told him I'm to Boston he had just moved to Boston he called me he told me in Boston I said yeah he said okay come on out I've got a job for you and I said oh no no no I'm not working for an institution he's like okay yeah great come on out and so at the end of the conversation I had a gig at Arts Emerson which was great fun but also because he did understand and respect where I was in my life they gave me a lot of flexibility so I was running a research program looking at barriers to inclusion within the African-American community in the greater Boston area and I was also producing the playwright residency program we had Daniel Beatty being introduced to the community and so that was the job that I did during the time I was in Arts Emerson one of the big surprises for me during that time because I knew what freelance directing was I had done it I had hired lots of freelance directors but what I didn't know was that creative producing was actually a thing that you could be freelance producing I didn't know until people started calling my phone women I met at smaller companies throughout the years at TCG heard I'd left Hartford and wanted to know what I was doing they said oh I'm launching this program you know I don't know how to build my back office for it would you be willing to come in and consult with me there was a group called Progress Theater that I ended up doing a lot of work with who was rebuilding their ensemble they were an ensemble based company most of their ensemble had scattered the company the core company wanted it to continue but they needed to bring in new blood and they needed to launch a tour and they wanted to break into the regional market so I came in as a manager and a producer for them to help them rebuild and relaunch their company which for me was incredibly gratifying during those two years because remember I never intended when I first went into Lord Theater to do ten years I intended to go in grab the master's tools and get out and this was an opportunity for me to actually leverage all the things I learned for the companies that represented the type of work that I had started out doing I did give myself time to do a little yoga and play with my daughter and also reevaluate and reassess what I wanted for myself and my career and where I felt that I could make the most impact we can talk a little bit later about this but there were times when it was really hard and hard for it that I wanted to quit where being the only woman and the only black woman was hard and every time I had those moments my phone would start ringing and there would be playwrights going you're the only one in the entire country in the position that you're in and you're opening a lot of doors just at your theater but you pick up the phone and you call McCarter you pick up the phone you call Arena you pick up the phone and you call Longworth and you get us in those doors and if you leave who will do that work for us and I have to tell you those calls are the reason I stayed and that I made it through 10 years in what at times was difficult in addition to the fact that I was learning and growing and all that wonderful stuff the fact that I felt very clear about the fact that if I left I would not be hiring another person who looked like me necessarily and that that advocacy that I was doing was bigger than me that was part of what I needed to do for the field and so at the end of my two years of self-recollection and evaluation and all the work that I was doing I made the decision that it was still important to me to break through the glass ceiling and to become an artistic director of a major regional theater and to continue the work of helping transform this industry which is desperately in need of it right we know our audiences are dying we know that our numbers are dropping theaters that used to be playing at 70% capacity you're now playing at 60 or 55 or 50 and God help you even below that but there are some who are struggling to survive and that we haven't quite figured out how to reach those new audiences because we haven't filtered through all the new ideas and there's a whole generation of women who like me have been number twos in helping build up other people's artistic visions for the last 15 years who are ready and willing to take the reins and so I said okay I've got to go back into Lort system because that's still my goal and I would say that the universe does what the universe does which is as soon as I made that decision my phone's ringing and I had was looking at two different job offers as associate artistic director at two large theaters and then I got a call from a search agency saying well would you consider coming to Baltimore now Baltimore is a 7.5 million dollar theater Hartford was an 8.5 million dollar theater it felt like a lateral move versus these other theaters were kind of twice the size but as we know when a search agency calls you you pick up the phone and you say hello you have the conversation right because even if that's not the right job for you they're probably going to be the people with the right job next time so I picked up the call Kwame also was a friend someone whose work I deeply respected and I thought I owed him the courtesy of like a conversation about the job and the first conversation with Kwame was illuminating he said I want you to come help me transform this theater into a 21st century theater this is a dynamic theater it has a great history but where we're trying to go is to be a thought leader among thought leaders and I need and want you and I said to him I love that idea and I believe that I can help you do that here are the things I want and need right so in Hartford I was only I was directing the manifestation I love the work that I directed but I was exclusively directing black work and I recognized that if I wanted to be an artistic director of a major regional theater I needed to diversify my directing resume I needed to have classics I needed to have large scale shows I knew that I could do them I'd done them in the past when I was running my own company I wasn't the one who needed to be convinced I just needed to make sure that I can make impact on that size stage with that type of work I had a young daughter and I needed to know that she could be at work with me at times so my daughter has an office inside my office and what Kwame said to me in that first meeting was your daughter was like I don't do dogs but I love children so I tested it my first day at work and I pulled up with my car full of my stuff and Kwame Coyne Armady the artistic director came down helped me unload my car and carried my daughter up to the office as we started to put my office together but I was really really clear going in that if I was going back into the regional theater I needed to make sure that I in addition to get and to leverage my talents and my resources to build out the vision of the theater that the theater also needed to be feeding me in a way that allowed me to continue to move towards my dreams and it's been exciting work I've done for the last four years in Baltimore we have done incredible transformative work in our city I am proud of it it's been a great great ride and I'm excited about what the future holds but I have deep concerns also about what it means to be a woman in this number two position in Trump America during the most seismic leadership shift in our industry since the beginning of the regional theater movie there are 21 open artistic directorships right now by the time the dust settles in the next year or so because we imagine that let's say at least half probably more than half we'd be filled by people who are currently in executive leadership at other theaters then those theaters will open up so in the end when the dust all clears if the women in my generation our peer group who have who are number twos all across the country at the largest theaters in the country are not able to break through that glass ceiling I guess that moves into the second part of this thing there's a question of what happens I'd love to turn to the question that we asked about last night I want to invite you Martha yes I'll I'll restate the question so that the room knows what it was but as a woman of a certain age facing the next chapter what is your dream transition for your organization what are the challenges that you face as you move into this chapter so I'm going to take a slight riff off of this if I ask it you all question which is if you had ten million dollars today to spend on gender parity and fixing the problem what would you do with it and and if you think about ten million dollars I mean she just said like one theater has a budget of seven and a half million I mean there's theaters that have budgets of twenty million or even fifty million for roundabout evidently so ten million dollars a year would not be an unreasonable amount to spend or twenty million dollars a year to actually fix this problem because I feel like I've been treating four staff people at the top you know and now it's kind of like computer but you know we're trying to solve a major societal problem here with little toothpicks and I think I want to encourage all of you to think much, much bigger about the problem and what it's going to take to solve it it's not you know I think each individual artist can try and get into the institutions and transform them a bit but there is going to still be the barrier of the funding structure and you know we need to be working on politics we need to be working on the whole different ideas of how nonprofit works might be structured we need to change a lot of we need to change the basic attitudes about women and what our stories are and that our stories are important which might that might imply changing the educational system starting with kindergarten up through high school and college and to produce the plays by the young stuff that you were talking was important so you know I think we need a whole movement actually to solve the problem and I think it needs to be funded if I look around the country at the other women's organizations working on gender parity hardly anybody is giving a full-time salary to address this issue and you know every time I speak women come and say oh I really want to devote my life to this that's our key challenge is how are we going to fix that so just to kind of continue on with women arts we've done and kind of get to my answer for that question a little bit the one example I want to share with you though is something called prosperity together so it's a group of 29 women's foundations that got together and decided they wanted to address income insecurity for women in poverty really ended up dollars a year for the next five years between all those foundations but I think that's the kind of model we've got to be thinking about is can you get a group of people together and we're going to like push forward on this issue and it's going to take a lot of us it's not going to be one person so with women arts we were doing the grant writing as I was saying we kind of gradually had to morph away from that because women are still you know still important yes they still don't have the money so we morphed for a while in a sort of web thing where we have all these newsletters and women arts and media coalition in New York has now taken over our funding newsletters but we did those for 10 years we thought we would provide free newsletters once a month that would give women all the funding deadlines and they know about different opportunities coming up and we created a lot of other resources on our site and we've been kind of morph into more of an advocacy group but the one thing we did 10 years ago was create something called support women artists nowadays because I decided the one thing that the world needed was a holiday celebrating women arts I've been watching why not so we declared it it's now been celebrated by about 1700 different events all in 36 countries because of the wonders of the world and the reason I had started it was I had been watching Eve Ensler's model of V-Day and the thing about that is that she started with one performance but it became a fundraising tool for people where organizations all over the world were doing these V-Day events and raising money for battered women shelters or other kinds of groups fighting domestic violence and it was raising like four or five million dollars a year from all these little events and I was thinking you're also off to somebody else you're doing fundraising events so it was very decentralized way of distributing the money and I thought that's terrific so we started Swan Day and we haven't had as much success in terms of women doing fundraising events but we have had events it's a great community organizing tool where in the towns where it's taken hold which include Connecticut and Nairobi and there's about and it's become I think where the women who are involved they network with each other especially women earlier in their careers or mid-career women who don't have an institutional job they get together they create other projects with each other because they've seen each other's work in a Swan event so to give you an example the one in Connecticut it's all about women musicians it was a woman who had her own rock band that was very annoyed at the way she was treated whenever she came to an event so she created an event where it was all women rock stars rock musicians that would perform together and do an evening of performances in Nairobi it's a very political event where they'll have poets and singers and then a woman speaking about general mutilation or something so it's a very much more politically engaged thing that group is now in the process of trying to buy a little piece of land in the outskirts in Nairobi just set up a women's center it's all because the Swan event they created connections and trust so getting back to my other question so also early on in women arts in the early 2000s I raised an endowment so we have like $480,000 endowment at this point which kicks off about 20 grand a year and then we also have some cash reserves so I'm getting ready to retire and I'm trying to figure out how to pass women arts on I'm not entirely sure it's viable as I don't really think it's right to have it just be like the one is use that money that we have our half billion dollar endowment our cash reserves to launch something much bigger that we could somehow and I'm hoping women in this room we're going to take on this challenge figure out how to do it like we need somebody with slightly different personality like I'm really good number crunching and stuff as Peter noted early in my career working the room you know as a lesbian as a whatever you know I need working on the mechanics of solving the problem of gender parity in this country but I think that's what we need at this point and that's what I want to try and figure out how to stimulate and I haven't quite got the you know one thought I've been having that I've been talked to my board about is we could put out a request for proposals and people could put in their ideas if you were going to want to run swan day if you were going to try and build the next stage of this movement so that's kind of what I'm thinking about for now and like over the next two years like I'll be 70 two years from now I'd kind of like to be done by then but you know I'm happy I'm sure I'm going to still be writing or carrying on but hopefully not running a nonprofit anymore but the but that's my challenge to you really it's sort of my challenge but it's my challenge to you as can we as a group about women artists work out how we're going to build a much much larger organization to address the issue of gender parity and race parity because it's closely yeah so to get all of the challenges out on the floor let's Hannah would you like to address the question sure let me start by saying I've had again great mentors in my career but the overwhelming majority of the mentors have been men and and white men who open doors and you know so I think you can find mentors anywhere the greatest mentor of my career has actually been Amelia Katchaparro I met her when I was very early in my in my time in the regional theater and I got into the TCG new gen grant and that grant changed my life because it brought her into my life and she has been an angel and I know that there are so many I've never entered into this where I haven't brought her name up and had all of her other children raise their hands and say yes me too but I I cannot overstate the influence she has had on me and my journey in this business and if if for nothing else than reminding me of my responsibility who is she Amelia Katchaparro is the head of artistic programming at TCG theater communications group I know we have some TCG folks here who know that she is brilliant one of the most fierce women I've ever met and I've had the pleasure of traveling internationally with her and watching her take on what feels like the UN room at ITI she is an indomitable spirit she cares passionately about our art form and about artists and she has invested deeply in hundreds of us that are now leading and she's like my favorite godmother and I love her so much but I also recognize that she understood me and my challenges in a way that my male mentors didn't and how important it is for anyone who's in any position I don't care what your position is at the theater or the theaters that you work at to think about how you're opening the door for more people who look like you to come in how you're helping to navigate to learn on my feet about how to navigate all of the keywords we use around what it means to be other in this business and so I feel a tremendous amount of responsibility and I am constantly looking to hire dynamic women that I see potential in you don't have to have all the skills I have to believe that you there's something in you that's ready to explode because I can give you the brass of how to move to space if you have the mind and the passion and the drive for it and so I as we're talking about passing the baton I just would say that in the capacity and to the extent that I can in the business that is what I am committed to doing and I'm also you know but we know that fundamentally real change real transformation comes from these key stakeholders and those who are in executive leadership we've been through sessions this weekend we've heard the numbers right for women those numbers get exponentially harder when you're talking about being a woman of color right so there has never been except one woman of color who has been an artistic director of a Lord theater in this country there is one and she's brilliant and most people don't know she's a woman of color right there's never been a black woman to lead as an artistic director and we're in this moment we talked about the seismic shift in the field and when I talk about my peers you know there are different narratives that we hear one of the narratives is oh we just don't know where to find right there are no people of color in the pipeline that is not true not just because I exist but if we look at three of the largest theaters in our country OSF $40 plus million budget Denver theater center $70 million budget the public theater however many Google apps a million the number two is that all of those institutions the women who are manifesting the vision of executive leadership at those institutions are women of color so you cannot tell me that we're not qualified because we wouldn't be in the positions that we're in you would not be leaning on our talents and our expertise if we were not qualified we do exist and there are many many other women who are in these positions around the country who are doing this work but for some reason we are not breaking through we're not even fracturing the glass ceiling when it comes to executive leadership there are no people of color in managing director positions at work theaters in this country right with the exception of Debbie Chen who was at Baltimore Center stage you're now the opera so you're not in the work system currently but you're the first and only in the history of work there's a generation of managers coming out of these great grad programs who are associate managing directors and general managing directors and I know that I'm here to talk about the art but I just want to throw a little lids on that managing director I didn't fully understand I went to a work conference a couple of years ago and what 80% maybe more than that of the managing directors were white men but like 90% of the GMs were women that's not a pipeline problem at all because everyone qualified to lead is right there you depend on them every day but they're not getting the looks for those executive leadership positions and we're finding the same thing is true on the artistic end there are few more women that have made it through the glass ceiling but they're not women of color so what's the question what's the issue I will say this I've spent the last 16, 17 years of my life doing great work I believe in the American regional theater we are in the seismic shift in leadership if at the end of this shift there are not more women and significantly more women and women of color that make it through that glass ceiling what happens next and I will say now I'm going to let you into a really private conversation the conversation I'm having with my peers is do we stay in this industry do we continue to leverage our skills for another 20 years fulfilling someone else's artistic vision or do we find a way to transition into a field that already has fractures in the ceiling and has the ability to recognize the excellence and what we bring to the table I put that out there because I also think that those who are in the position needs to think about what the American theater looks like in that generation of women who are in the secondary leadership positions who are manifesting vision decide in mass to leave the field what you got that second we're at five minutes I told you this conversation was going to get real we're at five minutes to lunch right we can make a decision to go a little bit into lunch and do about about a 10 to 15 minute back and forth with the audience but I do want you to remember you must be so how do we feel yes all right oh thank you thank you and I keep it feel free to just you know like call time yell at me all right so wonderful provocations put forth you know how do we take advantage of this extraordinary moment what do we do if we don't bust through and Martha's tantalizing inviting inviting invitation to for ideas or what to do next with this legacy that she's created let's hear from folks comments and questions and I'll try to be as rangy around the world as possible think about it all right yes I think this is really just a logistical question are you are you thinking of women arts staying as women arts or are you thinking of money going and creating new things they could create new things I mean like my board and I have been talking about we're open to it actually women arts is a great name but you know we could pass it to somebody else we trademarked it so but you know the point is the endowment we have to figure out where to put it you know one solution if we can't find some women's groups to take it you know we've thought about what we could give to another women's arts organization but we want to find a stable place where we know people will be able to build it we could also go as part of a college program or something I mean in some way swande would be a great experience for students if they we could figure out who needs fundraising advice you know so there's those kind of possibilities as well so no we're not tied to it doesn't have to say in California it doesn't have to it's just it's the idea and the the cash base Julie so one of the things that I would suggest is you know we EDs managing directors get asked by recruiters and there are executive recruiters for those in the secondary positions you should get to find a way to talk to managing directors so they can recommend you because I get asked all the time who's next so that is a way to at least get the pipeline opened up in many ways because recruiters only know the people at the top right but we have to just penetrate a little bit deeper and network to managing directors in your organizations or people that out of the organizations because recruiters kind of go and they sniff around for people that are not necessarily the usual suspects so I would really suggest that we take that approach as a way to kind of get the recruiters attention and there are executive recruiters here who I think need to be aware that they need to go deeper when they explore the prospects thank you very well I want to honor what I just talked about and the thought of leaving this field and I as somebody who's been in the field for 30 years have spent a lot of this last year wondering if my work matters and it has mattered and not really believing that perhaps it does I'll get back to that but I think this is a moment for theater and for all of us to live in our discomfort when we're talking about intersectionality when we're talking about privilege when we're talking about cisgender lenses that we're looking at the worker and when we're looking at the lack of opportunity for our colleagues of color that it's not glass ceiling it's the freakin bulletproof thing they put around the president's car right you can't permeate it so what are we doing because we all know how important theater is but this weekend as I've been talking to younger artists they're not even self-identifying as theater artists they're like I'm doing multimedia I'm immersive I'm doing other things because we're not creating space so I you know I think when you are a person who has the hair color I have you have a secret power because you're invisible to the world and so I'm going to just walk right through walls and say this is bullshit and I think that's we need to live in this comfort right now and own it and not change that conversation that an amazingly talented fabulous person is considering leaving this field and then lots but that's going to be alright so that's our job is to say we can't let that happen if we really care about the feel or we all need to call it something else I know you're the woman in the front but they're not Hi my name's Ty first of all I want to say to Martha thank you so much for Swan Day a play that I co-wrote with a female friend of mine just closed last night in Washington, DC and Swan Day was a central and developmental process I also wanted to say this is going to go on what you said about to Myron Horner anything like that I hope that it gives some reassurance but too girl but I started a theater company last year in the Washington, DC area to as a direct response and to directly address the issues of gender disparity and racial disparity that we have in the American theater it's called Ally Theater Company and I mean that in every sense of being an ally that as the artistic director I my passion is learning opportunity I'm an extremely tenacious person and going out and finding the artist developing them bringing them to our stage no matter how whatever phase they are in in their career if their voices have been unheard I want to hear them and so we just finished our first season last night and it's terrifying and tremendous but that is happening and that's been my response to the problems that we're having in the American theater so I want to say that I first of all could not understand and sympathize more why all of these bold and really innovative women would want to use their precious time on earth to actually have an impact and not serve others' vision but I also feel just this surge of anger because I want to say that this this field was built upon a tax subsidy that came from all of us and they don't fucking get to have it and so we are in this moment and that was so beautifully articulated like leadership that you show and just your ability to describe where we are and what we are facing and what we need to go from here is incredible and shows that you have to get hired in one of these positions but we are in this pivotal moment this seismic moment what happens in the next 18 months is going to shape five years in the field it's going to shape whether or not we sustain patriarchy and white supremacy as our widows operate and so and I feel like we have a lot of brain power and a lot of power power actually in this room and I think that we should continue to meet in some form online virtually I think we should engage I think we should divide an intervention that ensures that we can't just like the field can't just go by the status quo these invisible barriers and I don't know what it is and I think different but like one idea could be could be crowd source all I've heard I know every one of us heard so many fucked up comments that women leaders have gotten in these search processes right and there aren't that many search firms and you know it's interesting that the search firms that are here are actually not like the most commonly used ones and I think that speaks to something about the nature of the most common search form firms in the field of theater so could we crowd source all of the comments that we've heard that people have been told anonymously or whatever could we and could we create this massive list and could we all I don't know print it out on like six foot pieces of paper and then gorilla like pasted on windows of theaters around actually thinking maybe we should try board members at the theaters or maybe the managing director or whoever else is in place and do a letter writing campaign or something and so it's really important to you know it occurs to me and this may be something that the organizers and leaders of this conference this summit have in mind but a summit is you know a view from the mountaintop of the world it gives you a chance to have a global perspective on an abiding problem and the problem that we're talking about at this summit is the problem of adequate opportunity for leadership for the extraordinary women who are making up this field and who are tired of waiting and I wonder whether and this may not be before and it may be that this afternoon there will be a forum for this but it seems to me that we should come out of this summit with an action as a summit and that that action could appropriately take a campaign but of a unified statement from this summit to the boards of directors of the major lord theaters to the board of directors of TCG lord etc describing what we perceive to be the problem and are you know the end of our patience with regard to taking action for it God hold on one second I saw a hand here and then you go to Shandri because we only have two more opportunities for two more voices from the audience thank you let's fill the conversation into lunch and remember we're at time one here one there so for the young women of color who are coming into these these spaces where people who are above us are mentors are talking about the struggles and challenges that they're having it's kind of hard to continue to have that passion to be there and to be excited when I hear you say I should leave this field and I want to hear from you all what how can these young women of color break break the mold of being put in the same boxes again and again again how can we as peers as a collective break into the minds of the executive directors managing directors for search forms from your perspective it's a very good question I think that you know I here's what I'll say even though I did the big like what happens if we all leave I was I'm incredibly passionate about what we do I wouldn't be here if I wasn't I would not have been in this business this long investing as much as I have if I didn't believe in it and even if I make the decision ultimately you know if we find the end result of the next two years is the the complete re what's the word I'm looking for re-supporting reaffirmation of white supremacy and patriarchy I would not leave my heart or my work in supporting other artists who are still in the trenches right I think that you have to determine it's a question I ask myself all of the time and I think every artist is valuable to take the time to check back in with yourself right because your answer one year may not be your answer four years from now right why are you in this business why do you make art why is this how you are choosing to serve humanity right and that's part of my own personal that everyone has put on earth to serve humanity in some way and that this is the vehicle theater is the vehicle that has allowed me to feel most liberated in that art and in that work of serving humanity and so asking yourself what are you in it for why are you doing this work I think the entrepreneurial spirit that I see in young artists is absolutely inspiring I think actually when we talk about the future of the American theater I think that the American the structure has some big questions to ask itself about the future some of it will be answered in the decision and the choices that are made so if the if the community at large responds with white men taking 90% of the open positions over the next two years then the message it's saying is that that industry as it currently stands is not sustainable because that's not what the world is the demographics of the world are shifting so I look at a young and I say okay don't try and don't try and get into that machine what's the machine you're going to create how do you guys begin to collaborate with each other how do these small companies begin to pool resources to create larger more nationally impactful artistic experiences that begin to challenge and shift the financial strings because really the power of the structure is that all of the funding is isolated there and it's hard to even get a conversation if you're a smaller theater with the big foundations that are actually doing the funding right but if you start to collaborate together you start to pool resources if you start to put on programs that move across the geography of the country and you're able to do something that has national impact you can get their heads to turn and if you can get access to them you can get their money right so I would say that there are ways that you can think differently about the work and make sure that it's aligned to your mission and your focus and your passion why you're in the business that's what I would say for young artists is that I'm waiting to hear as someone who's been working within the machine whether the machine is willing to make space for me after I have supported it and invested it and manifested its vision and that if you're not in that machine you can take a look at what the answers are and make decisions for yourself about how you will take your passion take your energy take your art and create something very, very new I think it's our responsibility to look at this problem and say jeez we've got to solve it we've got to help solve it women arts over half of the artists that we've served have been women of color in terms of actual grant writing and funding and it's because that was my decision is that that's where the biggest need was was to help get those voices forward and so it's been a key element of my work for the last 20 years here thank you I just want to thank you so much for creating space for this conversation this is very important yes we are very important times I think Liz I want to take kind of your idea with all of you all of your ideas and I think that yes we should not leave here without being committed to an action plan but I think it needs to be bigger than a letter I think it needs to be like we will not go to your theaters we are willing to stand with you because I'm like if this wonderful woman right here this is not an artistic director in the system that she dedicated her life to I cannot I will not stand by sister I will not and support the system so I think that we have to be willing to say it is not just our responsibility as women is our responsibility as women as human beings to say we are not going to wait any longer you know we will not and we need to think of an action plan at this time in the beginning of what are we going to do to dismantle the system we know what the system is so how can we dismantle it so we can we deserve to be able to work and have passion and to have a livelihood that's you know we deserve it it is old to us because we are the theater makers we are the leaders so we cannot so I just want us to all just start I'm not saying we're going to save the world maybe you already told us we were not but that we can start thinking about an action plan on what are we willing to do we're willing to give up because none of us would be sitting here and someone had not thought that for us and I'm happy I think so that if we made a concerted effort to figure out where are all these jobs who do we know on the boards of those like women are on the list of 12,000 people on our email list we could send out and get people we have people in every state of the union we could figure out who do we know on those boards and let's write to them on those boards there's a whole other movement that's the women's funding movement like there's now women's foundations in basically every state foundation is dedicated to women and girls could we get the board members of those women's foundations to support and a lot of the time those board members are also on their local theater boards because it's the wealthy people in town can we get the women's foundations to support the idea that we need there's other women's organizations we are not discussing culture or art at all I mean they're having a concert but we need to make that bridge that we are part of that same movement that they are and I think we need a very targeted effort in terms of these particular theaters just writing letters calling people going to the theater and talking to them about talking to the boards talking to staff members about the importance of this moment I mean I wish I could kind of send her around but we can get the message out Excellent Regarding action so we're going to have some lunch and then we're going to come back in here for the final conversation and it's called the Pinnacle Conversation because as Liz said we stand at the top right and we're looking out interestingly enough it is a clarion call for advancement in your program and throughout your working groups you have been prompted to write your own personal manifestos I just want to encourage you to look at that over lunch to look at your to take a look at the program and the template there and to just imagine those three bullet points that you are determining for yourself and there will be an activity during the last conversation for that so I just want to actually not ignore that because that's an action that we're actually putting the call back on you so with that we're going to break for lunch and then what we should do is do our very best to get in here at exactly 130 because it gets even realer