 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm sure everyone has had different meetings or sessions that they've been in in the last hour or so. And the session that I was in was a debriefing session, a checking session from our identity affinity group, which we're new this year. And I have to say, it was one of the most exhilarating conversations I've had in a long time. And there are many exhilarating conversations that we have together. And it really tied back to our first session and to my presentation on Thursday about TPP's diversity of inclusion and equity work. And I just want to say, I think people really feel us moving forward very definitively towards the idea that we are a theater field that believes in inclusion and equity, and that we really want to be careful not to create a new divisiveness, but that we all work to be allies together. Thank you. And we're having great conversations, but we've also only scratched the surface. We have to go deeper and recognize the complexity. So we will keep doing that. And I'm really excited to continue sharing those conversations with all of you. So before we begin our final session, I'd like to recognize a few important groups here. Yesterday you were introduced to all of our TCG board members who serve us with great passion and dedication. There are also a number of you here who are emeritus board members, people who have served over the last decades. And if you're here now, can I just ask you to stand up so we can thank you for your work? There's also another group which are the trustees of our theaters who are not practicing theater day in and day out, but I think they think about our theaters day in and day out. And they've made the time to be here with us over these days and have contributed so profoundly to our conversations and I hope have learned a lot themselves, met new people, and have hatched new potential collaborations. So can you please stand for us, trustees? On Thursday, I thanked the amazing Lanelle Lynch from La Jolla Playhouse, who's been a really fierce advocate for us here in San Diego. I also would like to extend a very special shout-out to Ralph Bryan, who is on the board of the La Jolla Playhouse, but he's also a board member of TCG. And he has been just an amazing friend to us and really worked so hard to make this conference possible here in San Diego. So I don't know if he's in the room, but let's just give Ralph a big hand. Ask the volunteers to stand, please. Thank you so much for your generosity, for giving us your time, for helping us find our way, for everything that you've done over the last few days. You've really helped show what makes San Diego such an exciting theater town. Thank you. And now, last but definitely not least, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to the TCG staff. You know, the main, everyone on our staff, this is like our big production every year that we all work on. And it is led by Dayfina McMillan. I will mention her direct staff, Devin Berkshire, Gus Shulenberg, Julia Freary, and Hannah Fenlon. Because you were all standing, you didn't get to see. Can I ask all of the TCG staff who are here to please rise, if you're not risen already? And it's now my honor, my great honor, to welcome Robert Hooks. The actor and director who, in his long and storied career, has found success in film, in theater, as an actor and director in film, theater, and in television, where he was the first African-American lead on a drama with the original NYPD. Mr. Hooks has himself received many honors, from Tony nominations to the NAACP Image Award for Lifetime Achievement, to being inducted into the Black Filmmaker's Hall of Fame. However, Mr. Hooks is here today to honor his co-founder in one of the most important theater companies to emerge in the past 50 years, the Negro Ensemble Company. Please join me in welcoming Robert Hooks. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think Douglas and I are the only ones wearing suits. Anyway, thank you all so much for asking me to come and bestow an award to a gentleman, an artist, a brother, and the dearest friend that I have in all of this world, Douglas Turner Ward. So I thank you for asking me to come and give him this Practitioner's Award today. The year was 1959. And I was a dedicated but struggling wannabe actor in Philadelphia, studying and living in Philadelphia. And Philadelphia is a tri-out town for Broadway plays. And I would second act, I don't know if you all know what second acting is, but I would second act every play that came through Philadelphia to go to Broadway. And most of them were plays written by white writers with white actors. I never, ever saw, I don't know if I saw two or three black actors on a stage in all the plays that I saw in Philadelphia on its way to Broadway. But one night, a play opened in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Theater. It was called A Raisin in the Sun. And I bought a ticket. I went through my thin wallet and I bought a ticket. And I knew exactly where I wanted to sit, because I had been in that theater a lot of time. To see this play with people like me, written by people like me, I had never seen this before. And that was in 1959, and I was 22-year-old. You do the math on that one. I saw the play. I sat there. And I literally cried watching these eight incredible actors on the stage doing things that I thought I'd never see. Afterwards, I went backstage after I got up my nerve to do so. And I actually knew the doorman, so there was no problem getting backstage. And I went backstage, and I went from dressing room to dressing room. I couldn't get in to see Sidney Poitier. There were just too many people. And the same with Ruby D. And I went down the hall and I went into the men's dressing room. And I met Lou Gossett, Ivan Dixon, Ed Hall. And I met two men who I thought were just actors at the time, turned out that they were really moonlighting as actors. They were both brilliant writers and playwrights. And that was Lonnie Elder, the third. I'm sure most of you have heard of Lonnie, who's not with us anymore, and Douglas turn award. And these guys instilled in me a confidence. And they were on their way to Broadway with this play. And when I left that theater, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to save up as much money as I could. And I was going to move to New York City. I moved to New York City a few months later. The play was a big hit on Broadway. Biggest hit in a long time. Certainly the biggest hit of a black play ever. So as fate would have it, the first Broadway play I did, the first job I got on Broadway, was in the play that prompted me to move to New York. And that was A Raisin in the Sun. And re-met my dear friends. And then we closed that. Douglas was in the play, playing a small role at the end of the play, but understudying Sidney Poitier in the role, which when we went out on the road with the play, Douglas played the role. It was absolutely brilliant in the role. So we became even better friends. Some would say that Lonnie and Doug and I were the three musketeers. And the mothers and fathers had to lock up their daughters when we came through. When we came through those towns, it was the first time I was on a national tour. What do you want? It was the first time. And it really was the first time that I was on a national tour. So anyway, what these two guys were doing, they were writing while we were performing and traveling the country in the A Raisin in the Sun road tour, the national tour. When we got back to New York, Douglas Turner Ward, who had gone down south and done some research and all, finished a play, two plays, actually, Happy Ending and Day of Absence. And we tried to get those plays done. Lonnie and I were in the plays with Doug and Francis. I guess Frenchie was in it and Esther was in it, reading the plays, trying to raise money. Couldn't raise any money. Now in the meantime, I had gone and done another play called Dutchman. And it was a big hit play. And I had moved into a nice little Chelsea apartment. And I started a young teenage acting workshop with kids off the streets of New York. And people were wondering, what the hell's going on? And Robert hooked his house so these kids are running in and out and making all kinds of it. Turns out that we had to prove to the community that we were going to do something special. And I decided, along with Barbara Ann Tier, and I know a lot of you know that name, Barbara Ann Tier, who was co-founder of this new group theater workshop that I started. And I asked Douglas if I could do one of his plays, Happy Ending, the shorter play. We did that play in a workshop just to show the people in the community what we were doing. And Jerry Talmer from the Washington, New York Post, rather, was there that night. We didn't know he was coming and wrote this great review and highlighted the review with a wonderful review of Douglas's play, Day of Absence. I mean, Happy Ending. So I decided to ask Doug if he would let me try to produce the plays. And he gave me the, okay, along with Sam Engel, I think Sam had to say yes. So I went and I raised the money and I produced the plays. And as Doug was saying, as I would say, the rest is history. They were the biggest hits off Broadway. The New York Times then asked Douglas to write an article for the New York Times. And he did. It was called Theater in America for Whites Only. And it just had the theater buzzing, theater crowd, the three to circle buzzing because it was a scathing indictment of theater in America. So anyway, well, I'm going on and on and I shouldn't be going on and on. But Douglas and I, after the plays were successful, ended up starting our own theater company, a theater company that we put everything that we had into and we understood what we needed to do. And we did it. And the rest is history. It has been called the National Treasure and the Negro Ensemble Company lives even today, but then it was the cream of the crop with all of the wonderful talent coming through. So anyway, when I was asked to come to San Diego and give Douglas this Theater Practitioners Award, it's really a lifetime achievement award, I jumped at the opportunity and I'm so happy that I did. And I love the fact that this place is full because Douglas Turner Award deserves not just this award, but accolades for a career that has been a stellar career as a writer, as an actor, but more importantly, well I say more importantly, he probably wouldn't, as a guiding light at the Negro Ensemble Company as the artistic director creating opportunities for writers, designers, producers, directors, you name it, Douglas was right there creating opportunities for them. So it pleases me to know him. And I'm so happy that I was able to come down here and be with you guys to share this award with my dear friend, my brother, and the artistic director of the Negro Ensemble Company, Douglas Turner Award. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you all very much, just an honor. And it's an honor for me and him to be together. Whenever. Yeah, because we now live on different coasts. Our main in New York and he's in Hollywood. Well, I'm in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, yeah, that's it. And the starting point of what he said is what we did with the Negro Ensemble Company, a legacy that I think would be embarrassing. And I would like to accept this honor in the name of our dear departed colleagues and fellow artists who are no longer with us. Started with the original company of actors. Moses Gunn, Francis Foster, Esther Rose, Robin Cash, Graham Brown, Adolf Caesar, Edmund Cambridge, who's our first stage director and the director of several of them, and the whole man. The playwrights, Lani Elzer, Julian Mason, Leslie Lee, who recently passed, also Ray O'Rana, who recently passed. And the great Peter Weiss, who gave us our first play that we started with, song of the Luchitanian movie. And more recent, the actor Chuck Palacen. And also, lastly, our loyal supporters, Adi Davis, Ruby G, who passed a couple of weeks ago and Paul Wilson Jr. It is all of these people and thousands of others, the actors who are still with us. The one, the famous ones who you know, Denzel Washington, Sam Jackson, Felicia Rashard, and Natalia Richardson, who's recently nominated for an excellent work in Broadway production of Raising in the Sun, where she received a Tony nomination and she was excellent in it. So it is not just me who deserves to be here. It is all of those people who made it work. And as I always tell them, and I tell you, is that the proudest thing is that we did it. So thank you very much. Thank you, Robert and Douglas. Robert actually said that he remembers when TCG was founded and came to conferences back in the day. Thank you so much. We're so honored to be able to honor Douglas Turner Ward and I appreciate his generosity in talking about all of the people who contributed to the success of the Negro Ensemble Company. We're going to now reconnect with that original vision and the founding vision of the Negro Ensemble Company as we launch into our final plenary session towards an ideal theater. To help me, I'd like to welcome the editor of TCG's recent compilation of words from our movement's founders, an ideal theater, founding visions for a new American art. The, until very recently, don't go artistic director of new dramatists and now the executive director of University of Washington School of Drama, Todd London. This is my posse here. I'm sorry, I just have to take a moment before we start to say how awe-inspiring it is to follow you two gentlemen up here. I'm sorry I didn't wear a suit. Now I feel I should have. But your work has been a huge inspiration and I think often about the workshop beginning in your apartment, Robert, and how you started there and then what the company became and the vision of the company. We're gonna hear a little bit about that but I'm just kind of geeking out that I'm following you guys up here and we miss Leslie, our dear friend who died last year and one little piece of lore that you may appreciate. We found out very recently that Lonnie Elder was the new dramatist observer on the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof which was a really cool thing. I loved what Malika Wilbur said in her early remarks in the first plenary. Her phrase in acknowledging our elders and ancestors, I raise my hands to you and that's a lot what this is about and that's what this moment is with Douglas Turner Ward and Robert Hooks, too. So in planning this final session with the folks at TCG, especially the wonderful, generous and tireless Gus Schuenberg and Defina McMillan, we grappled to find the form for what we wanted to do. It wouldn't involve speeches or a panel discussion, wouldn't be a demonstration. At New Dramatists where I still work for three more weeks, we hold all writers meetings twice a year and it's become customary at those meetings that one of the 50 playwrights stages a closing ritual for the meeting. We wanted to do something like that today but since we haven't done it before at a TCG conference, it can hardly be called a ritual. Also, as Taylor Mack told us yesterday, ritual requires sacrifice and we're all we're asking you to sacrifice now is about 45 minutes of your time. What we really intended to do is to acknowledge what it means to be in this room altogether. The preciousness of our annual moment with each other. So we want to acknowledge this moment with all its abundance and frustration, all its hope, complication, ambition, struggle, confusion, accomplishment and joy. To move toward those 10 positive emotions that as Jane McGonagall told us yesterday, lead to resilience. And we want to find a way to acknowledge both the newness and the longevity of this theater tribe of ours, our roots and branches. In other words, we want to find a way to celebrate our past, present and future as they coexist all overlapping, continuous and evolving, superimposed upon each other. At our first group gathering on Thursday, Sarah Bellamy asked us, how big do we dare to dream? It's a great question and a great dare. Maybe it's just my own limitations, but as someone who alternates between enthusiasm and outrage about the American theater, I often feel that my own dreams are too small. As a result, I've started looking backward and forward at the same time. For inspiration, backward to the people from whom we've inherited this field and forward to those younger than I am who haven't yet hit the wall of discouragement or learned to diminish the scale of their expectations. This is, as Rock Shulfer told us yesterday, a young, young field. We represent the first example in history of an unsubsidized, non-profit arts profession growing up in the heart of capitalism. No generation of theater artists and administrators has ever faced a moment like this before. Is it any wonder that we don't know how or don't agree on how to proceed? So for me, Sarah's mountaintop represents the hope of perspective and passage where we can look to the past and future at the same time, like Janus, the Roman God who, as I understand it, by looking in both directions marks change, transition, passage, new beginnings, endings, and the movement of time. At the summit, we can make a clear-eyed sweep of the world behind us and with attention paid to the people who cut the path that led us here. Simultaneously gazing ahead into the unknown, we can do our best to embolden those who will take us there. That's what we're gonna try to do in the next few minutes. We're going to do this in a way that theater does it best through what Chris Diaz called a multiplicity of voices. Each voice an angle of approach, a perspective on where we came from. Each voice here, now, in this room with us. This final session is a kind of unrehearsed community reading with a cast of something like 35, culminating in a little closing action that will ask anyone who wants to participate in. Ready? Okay. So we're gonna start where we just left off. We just had the extraordinary privilege of hearing from Douglas Turner Ward in 2014. Here are some of his words from 1966 read by Daniel Alexander Jones. For a Negro playwright committed to examining the contours, contexts, and depths of his experiences from an unfettered, imaginative Negro angle of vision. The screaming need is for a sufficient audience of other Negroes. Better informed through commonly shared experiences to readily understand, debate, confirm, or reject the truth or falsity of his creative exploration. Not necessarily an all black audience to the exclusion of whites, but for the playwright, certainly his primary audience. The first persons of his address. Potentially the most advanced, the most responsive, or most critical. Only through their initial and continuous participation can his intent and purpose be best perceived by others. If any hope outside of chance, individual fortune exists for Negro playwrights as a group, or for that matter, Negro actors and other theater craftsmen. The most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential, active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least off Broadway size and dimension, not in the future, but now. A theater evolving not out of negative need, but positive potential, better equipped to employ existing talents and spur the development of future ones. A theater whose justification is not the gap it fills. But the achievement it aspires to work. No less high than any other comparable theater company of present or past world thing. Duckless Turner Ward Negro Ensemble Company founded 1966. Hello, I'm Marissa Wolff. We converted the fish house into the Wharf Theater, a place where 90 people could see a play if they didn't mind sitting close together on wooden benches with no backs. We gave a first bill, then met at our house to read plays for a second. Two Irishmen, one old and one young, had arrived and taken a shack up just up the street. Terry, I said to the one not young, haven't you a play to read to us? No, said Terry Carlin. I don't write, I just think and sometimes talk. But Mr. O'Neill has got a whole trunk full of plays, he smiled. That didn't sound too promising, but I said, well, tell Mr. O'Neill to come to our house at eight o'clock tonight and bring some of his plays. So Gene took bound for Cardiff from his trunk and Freddie Burt read it to us. Gene staying out in the dining room while the reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining room when the reading had finished. Then we knew what we were for. We began in faith and perhaps it is true when you do that all these things shall be added unto you. I may see it through memories too emotional, but it seems to me I have never sat before a more moving production than our bound east for Cardiff when Eugene O'Neill was produced for the first time on any stage. There was a fog just as the script demanded, a fog bell in the harbor. The tide was in and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavor of the sea. While the big dying sailor talked to his friend of the life he had always wanted deep in the land where you'd never see a ship or smell the sea. It is not merely figurative language to say the old war shook with applause. The people who had seen the plays and the people who gave them were adventurers together. The spectators were part of the players for how could it have been done without the feeling that came from them, without the sense of them there waiting, ready to share, giving, finding the deep level where audience and writer and player are one. Susan Glassbull, the Provincetown players founded 1915. I'm Abe Rybeck. When I was in conventional theater even when I was going to school people thought my acting was too broad, they said. So I had to create a theater where I could exist. I had to create for my own survival a world where I could take advantage of my talents. Through training with Stanislavski teachers I realized they wanted me to behave in a civilized manner in a room not to do anything extraordinary. But everything I'm interested in is extraordinary. We began in 1967 with a freewheeling approach to the theater and we did everything in a defiant way. Radically wrong, you might say. I mean, it was a newfound freedom. We threw out the idea of professionalism and cultivated something much more extreme than amateurism. Actors were chosen for their personalities almost like found objects. The characters fell somewhere between the intention of the script and the personality of the actor. The textures of meaning were amazingly rich. Everything contributed to the effect, the script, the performers, even the accidents which were always happening on stage. These off-off-broadway things were thrown together. Casts were thrown together and then busted apart. I wanted to create an ensemble. I found some like-minded people in the theater in underground movies, friends, how people I met on the street. I'd invite them. I created, invented my own stars. I was building something by discovering people and creating a continuity for them. Our art was to bring everything in, to include everything until we finally admitted that the world was our work. Our goal was that the audience would become part of the theater and then that the theater would expand to encompass the world. It was almost a religious idea. Charles Ludlam, the ridiculous theatrical company 1967. Good afternoon. I'm Seema Sueco. The immigrants in the neighborhood of the Hull House have utilized our little stage in an endeavor to reproduce the past of their own nations through those immortal dramas which have escaped from the restraining bond of one country into the land of the universal. A large colony of Greeks near the Hull House who often feel that their history and classic background are completely ignored by Americans and that they are easily confused with the more ignorant immigrants from other parts of southeastern Europe, welcome an occasion to present Greek plays in the ancient text. With expert help in the difficulties of staging and rehearsing a classic play, they reproduced the Ajax of Sophocles upon the Hull House stage. It was a genuine triumph to the actors who felt that they were showing forth the glory of Greece to ignorant Americans. The Greeks have quite recently assisted an enthusiast in producing Elektra while the Lithuadians, the Poles, and other Russian subjects often use the Hull House stage to present plays in their own tongue which shall at once and at the same time keep alive their sense of participation in the great Russian revolution and relieve their feelings in regards to it. There is something still more appealing than the yearning efforts the immigrants sometimes make to formulate their situation in America. I recall a play written by an Italian playwright of our neighborhood which depicted the insolent break between an Americanized son and the old country parents so touchingly that it moved to tears all the older Italians in the audience. Did the tears of each express relief in finding that others had had the same experience as himself? And did the knowledge free each one from a sense of isolation and an injured belief that his children were the worst of all? Jane Adams, The Hull House Dramatic Association, 1897. Good afternoon, I'm Ben Moore. Number one, whereas the United States is the only country in the civilized world without a national conservatory of theater art and there is no immediate likelihood of one being created within our existing theatrical structures. Number two, the commercial theater is so heavily burdened with the pressures of immediate projects that it cannot be expected to provide development and training for theater artists. Three, such training as exists in universities and professional schools often suffers from inadequate standards and is often limited by the highly individualistic stamp of one teacher or method. Four, there is no consistently available link for young professionals of these schools and the competitive commercial theater. Five, the creative artists in many professional theater structures often find their work limited or dominated by institutionalism, financial or pedagogic interference or the personal whim of a proprietary interest. Six, the theatrical trade unions generally refuse or unable to use their power to initiate constructive programs toward revitalizing the theater. Seven, the metropolitan theater audience consists mainly of hit followers. The minority of thoughtful theater levels is offered little in the way of a sustained meaningful repertoire. Eight, a handful of drama critics find themselves in a position to shape the cannons of theater art and the tastes of the entire nation that their mere opinion may make or break the self-esteem, progress and longevity of an artist or company. Nine, the exaggerated values of quote, fame and fortune, end quote, and the panicky competitiveness accompanying them have intimidated most theatrical artists to the point of paralysis. These myths have misled others in the conviction that their work has achieved an incontestable excellence, that their venerated talents are no longer in need of training and extension. Ten, every day innovators announce new theater projects, each determined in its own way to solve the problems of today's theater, but lacking valid experience and research, they are frequently unaware that their formulas for tomorrow's theater have already proven yesterday's mistakes. Therefore, we resolve to found the American Conservatory Theater, William Ball and Company, ACT, 1965. Thank you. Good afternoon, my name is Andre De Shields. I came to New York in 1950. Sundays I'd go on the subway and go anywhere exploring the city wherever I got off the train. One Sunday, I discovered Delancey Street and all those little shops with clothes and fabric. I wanted to be a dress designer and there was all this wonderful fabric. You could look at it. You could look at anything you liked. You could try things on. No one said anything to you. And this little man, my Papa Diamond, came out of this shop. He was wearing a little black cap on his head. He tried to sell me some fabric. I told him I had no money. He said, come inside. Maybe you'll see something you like better. Finally, he understood I really did not have a sense. Also, that I didn't have anybody, no family in New York. It was love at first sight. My Papa Abraham Diamond. He adopted me on the spot. I became the artist daughter. Every Sunday, I'd come and spend the day with his family. When I left, he'd give me a piece of fabric and a package. I'd open it when I got home. I had this little sewing machine in my room. Every week, I'd make a dress or an outfit and wear it to Delancey Street the following Sunday. He'd show me all around the street, his daughter, the designer. Now, at Sox Fifth Avenue, the color had to wear blue smocks at work. The white didn't. So there I was like Cinderella under my smock. It all happened very fast. I had come to Sox in May. With the interest in my little home made clothes, by August, I was one of the executive designers. In the meantime, my Papa Diamond told me that when he came to New York from Romania at age 11, he was the first to push a push cart in the Delancey Street area. He said, I should have a push cart too. And if I pushed the push cart for other people, it would take me where I wanted to go. I decided my push cart would be a little theater where my brother, Fred Lights, and Paul Foster could have their plays performed. That's exactly what I did. And that's why La Mama is often referred to as a push cart. Ellen Stewart La Mama Experimental Theater Company 1961. Hello, I'm Abigail Adams. The dream of all serious theater people in the United States in the middle of our 20th century is the establishment of a national theater in which playwrights, actors, directors, designers, technicians and business managers can find an expression for their art and craft, as well as earn a livelihood and which will provide audiences with beautiful plays. If this dream has not yet become a reality, it is mainly because of the economic problems involved. But a solution is imperative, lest all the wonderful ideals remain in a misty realm. Dreaming is a great human experience. But unless you could make your dreams come true, you cannot be of much help in creating a great theater in America. Dreams and ideals must be combined with practical thought and action. And I firmly believe that this can be done in the theater. If you add achievement to idealism, you prove that this is not only spiritually compensating to be idealistic, but it is also smart and profitable. We must create the theater of tomorrow today. We cannot postpone our dreams and ideals any longer. Our potential audiences all over America are waiting for the theater. We have been promising them. They are eager and ready to see good plays well produced. And we must not disappoint them. Let us stir up the practical realization of a potential, of a dream, of an ideal. Margo Jones, Theater 47, 1947. What's up? I'm Michael Jangarsis. At 9, 40, dear friend, at 9.45 p.m. one week ago today, we pulled into Norkator, an agricultural community of 190 people in Northwestern Kansas. At the city limit, we were greeted by a large hand-painted sign that said, welcome Cornerstone, a good omen to lay ahead. We now live in what used to be the Norkator High School, which was closed in 1970. Senior class pictures and sports trophies dating back to 1926 still decorate the locker-lined hallways. Our bedrooms are 10 classrooms with wooden floors and blackboard walls. Our office is the former sewing room, our kitchen the former home ec room and our bathrooms the locker room. Our theater is the gym auditorium, right smack in the middle of the building, a realization of a Cornerstone fantasy. We are rehearsing and performing a show in what is essentially our living room. 100, oh, 100, I'm sorry. And 75 people came to eat pancakes and sausages and look at slides of past shows on Monday night to get acquainted with Cornerstone, that's upper. On Wednesday and Thursday, over 80 people came to audition and sign up to build, paint, sew, usher and do just about everything. Last night, we performed our school assembly I Can't Pay the Rent to all in all ages audience of 200. We are now in the middle of auditioning for our show, Tartuffe or an imposter, Norkator, and at Christmas. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Thank you. Cornerstone Theater Company Newsletter, 1986. I'm John Mosconi, my purpose is to talk up a revolution where there are rumblings already, I want to cheer them on. I intend to be incendiary and subversive, maybe even un-American. I shall probably hurt some people unintentionally. There are some I want to hurt. I may as well confess right now the full extent of my animus. There are times when confronted with the despicable behavior of people in the American theater, I feel like the lunatic leer on the heath saying, wanting to kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. Herbert Blau, the actor's workshop, 1952. Hello, I'm Amy Hayes. The Civic was founded in an attempt to provide the people of New York with a popular priced classical repertory theater similar to those that have existed as a matter of course for many years in every large city of Europe. The first 16 years of my life were spent in countries where such libraries of living plays were considered mandatory. These theaters were as important to the mental and spiritual well-being of the people as bread was to sustain their bodies. Their presence in no way precluded sensational forms of entertainment, which it is also the function of the stage to provide. But in European cities, the theater was not limited as it is in our country to the best seller of the moment. It was this limitation of an art which I had been brought up to consider on a par with poetry, music, and painting, and which can be in its finer aspects a synthesis of all of these that shocked and startled me as it does so many newcomers to our shores on my first arrival in New York in 1915. There was plenty of cake in the showcases of Broadway, but the bread was missing. Eva Le Gallienne, the Civic Repertory Theater, founded 1926. Hi, I'm Blake Robinson. We sometimes give you a piece of bread along with the puppet show because our bread and theater belong together. For a long time, the theater arts had been separated from the stomach. Theater was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. The old rites of baking and eating and offering bread were forgotten. The bread decayed and became mush. We would like you to take your shoes off when you come to our puppet show and we would like to bless you with the fiddle bow. The bread shall remind you of the sacrament of eating. We wouldn't get to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce that you think it is where you pay and get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It's fun. It preaches sermons and it builds up a self-sufficient ritual where the actors try to raise their lives to the purity and ecstasy of the actions in which they participate. Puppet theater is the theater of all means. Puppets and masks should be played in the street. They are louder than the traffic. They don't teach problems, but they scream and dance and hit each other on the head and display life in its clearest terms. Peter Schumann, Bread and Puppet Theater, 1962. Oh, my name is Megan Schuckman. We were kids starting a theater. None of us made any money. We had our day jobs and then we'd go to the theater at night and work until the wee hours. We did everything ourselves. Sell tickets, build the sets, clean the toilets, everything. If we weren't in the play, we'd do something else. It was not about money and fame to us. It was about having our own thing. We could decide what we wanted to do. The thing about being trapped in a suburban basement isolated from theater life is that we were alone without distractions, movies to audition for, other theaters to audition for. It was our private club to do whatever we wanted. We were a family and we became very uninhibited and comfortable with each other. We liked to entertain each other. We could always make each other laugh. I think that's one of the reasons we stayed together. We just enjoyed each other's talents. The more we worked together, the more supportive of each other and freer we got with our choices. It seemed like nothing was sacred. Nothing was inappropriate. There were no restrictions in the basement. All we did was step and walk. We had no money, just each other and the theater. Gary Sinise, Steppenwolf Theater Company, 1974. Mrs. O'Neill, don't call me Mrs. O'Neill. Call me Carlotta. Mrs. O'Neill, Carlotta, I know she interrupted. You want to talk about the Iceman comic. I can see the anxiousness in your eyes. Now, you remind me of the first time I saw O'Neill. I was very beautiful once. The kind of people I came from thought being an actress was a disgrace. But I went down to Provincetown Theater to the Harry Eighth when they moved it uptown. And I went to the Harry Eighth and then when they moved it uptown and I took over the female leading role, we were rehearsing and one day O'Neill came and sat in the empty theater. Somebody pointed him out to me. You know, he looked. As I said, there was a time I was worth looking at. You still are. Thank you, kind sir. But never mind what I said. Iceman broke his heart and mine too, which was not any new thing. We broke each other's hearts time and time again. He thought that I broke his more than he broke mine, but he was wrong. Sometime I would like to tell you, but not now. I'm sounding morbid and you didn't come here to hear a sad tale. You came here to get the rights for the play. Yes, I said. You can have them. I trust you. I like you. She said as she stood against the sun setting through the windows, looking very beautiful with her short black hair and her flawless skin. I hope it turns out well this time, she said. Not only for O'Neill, but for you also. Thank you. Will you come and see me every once in a while and tell me how it's going? I get so lonesome here. Jose Quintero, Circle in the Square, founded in 1950. Hi, I am Lydia Fort. It was out of the urge to realize a new dimension in theater freed from this tarnish of conventionalism that a triangle of insurgent theater groups had emerged almost simultaneously out of several corners of Manhattan. All manned by amateurs and unknown to one another, they had begun their independent careers not in a revolutionary attempt to upset the existing order, but merely to voice another image of theater. Confronting the Goliath of Broadway, they were as unprotected as the boy David with his sling. But what a sense of freedom there was, unshackled by what ought to be, unconscious of anything but the image that moved us. And there we were, the third corner of the triangle, in the lower depths of Grand Street, experimenting toward a synthesis of expression. We were searching for a root, or as one might say, a trail to blaze that inner world of reality which is the source of drama. We held the value and need of the lyric form in and of itself as a stimulus to imagination as well as in guiding us to mythological values as, for example, through the early religious festivals and the know. Our tasks seem to lie in developing forms not of the traditional theater which might be released with the simplicity of means. Theater meant to us a pilgrimage. Alice Lewis and Crowley, the neighborhood playhouse, 1914. Hello, I'm Randy Reyes. It is our hope that gradually, as audience and management become mutually better acquainted, the audience will begin to create the sort of theater which it wants, which will be an expression of itself. Only thus can the intention of this project be fully realized. It is much more than merely building a theater and creating a series of productions. The ultimate aim is to attract a creative audience. The three greatest periods in the history of the theater, the Athenian stage of Escalus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Elizabethan stage in England which produced Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and half a dozen lesser but significant poets. The French stage of Racine, Cornet, and Moyer, all these could not have happened if the writers, actors, and craftsmen had not been fortunate enough to live in an age and place where a highly intelligent, lively, and demanding audience had helped to create a theater which was far more than a commercial business and far more than frivolous pastime. Neither the artist and craftsmen nor the audience can do this alone. It is a shared process of creation, a fruitful union. Tyrone Guthrie, Minnesota theater company founded in 1963. My name is John Rankin. I do not like the Broadway theater because it does not know how to say hello. The tone of voice is false. The mannerisms are false. The sex is false. Ideal, the Hollywood world of perfection, the clean image, the well-pressed clothes, the well-scrubbed anus, odorless and human of the Hollywood actor, the Broadway star, and the terrible false dirt of Broadway, the lower depths in which the dirt is imitated, inaccurate. The living theater is at best an imitation, feeble, longing, corrupt, power principled, dictatorial, arrogant, uncomunal. It yearns for the day when it will wither away. In this, it is only opposition to Broadway, demon of the upper world, demon of the money changers who seek to improve the value of the dollar, who accept a world of premature death. All niceness must then be exploded. Julian Beck, The Living Theater, founded 1947. Good afternoon, I'm Marshall Jones. Today, as the renaissance of art comes among American Negroes, the theater calls for new birth. The movement which began has the movement which has begun this year in Harlem, New York City, lays down four fundamental principles. The plays of a real Negro theater must be one about us. That is, they must have plots which reveal the Negro life as it is. Two, by us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth the continual association just what it means to be a Negro today. Three, for us. That is, the theater must cater to primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. Four, near us. Theater must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people. Only in this way can a real folk play movement of American Negroes be built up. W. E. B. Du Bois, Prego Players, 1926. I'm Karen Hartman, March 20th, 1949. Dear Mr. Lindsey, during some 12 years working in and about the theater, sometimes as a play reader for producers of films, other times as a drama editor or film and play reviewer, and when there was time as a struggling new dramatist myself, I have become intimately acquainted with the problems baffling and frustrating the unknowns trying to write plays today. Being unable to afford theater tickets. Trying to write for a professional theater whose inner workings from the beginning to the end of even a single production too few of us have ever experienced. Too much working alone with no adequate or stimulating exchange of craft information possible and never being able to see our own early plays in any professional test action short of a full Broadway production. I suggest, however, that much can be done to change the scene for the whole theater by first changing it for new dramatists of proven potential. I believe it can be done by organized theater-wide action under the comprehensively designed plan for playwrights. May I send it? Very sincerely, Michaela O'Hara, new dramatist, 1949. Hi, I'm Bob Hupp. Along about 11 o'clock on the morning of June 13, they did start to come. Farmers, teachers, shopkeepers, tourists. I've talked to many of them since and I haven't been able to find anyone who remembers much about the play itself. Most of them don't even remember the title. What they do remember is on that June day in the Highlands of Virginia, in the teeth of improbability, magic began to happen. It began happening long before the old roll curtain of the old Opry House, complete with its advertisements for snuff and patent medicines, went up on our makeshift setting. It started, I believe, when an old farmer plunked down two heads of cabbage on the mayor's desk and asked for a ticket. It went on to the moment I traded a season ticket for a very small calf, dashed back to pull the curtain and hurried back again to the front of the house to put in chairs for an overflow of guests. It hovered over the head of my father, sitting in the forefront of the audience, giving him the first inkling that my play acting might possibly bring pride and not disgrace to the Porterfield family name. It went right on through the absorbed, well-mannered attention of our patrons, interrupted only once or twice by the cackle of chickens from the box office and up to the triumphant curtain calls at the end. Living, breathing, professional theater had come to the Virginia Highlands, Robert Porterfield, Barter Theater, 1933. Good afternoon. My name is Luis Alfaro. The motives, aspirations and practice of U.S. theater must be readapted in order to teach, direct toward change, be an example of change. To teach, one must know something. It is necessary to direct toward change because the system is debilitating, repressive and non-aesthetic. The guerrilla company must exemplify change as a group. The group formation, its cooperative relationships and corporate identity must have a morality, a morality at its core. The corporate entity ordinarily has no morality. This must be the difference in a sea, in a sea of savagery. There is to be no distinction between public behavior and private behavior. Do in public what you do in private or stop doing it in private. For those who like their art, pure of social issues, I must say, fuck you, buddy. Theater is a social entity. It can dull the minds of the citizens. It can wipe out guilt. It can teach all to accept the great society and the American way of life. Just like the movies, ma. Oh, or it can look to changing that society. And that, that is political. R.G. Davis, the San Francisco Mime Troop. 1959. I'm Tim, I'm Tim Samford. I am trying to build our theater on the bedrock of municipal and civic responsibility. Not on the quicksands of show business economics. I'm interested in a popular theater, not a theater for the few. I'm interested in establishing a classical repertory company with a guaranteed annual wage for performers. This is impossible under the president, present conditions on or off Broadway. We are not ready to adopt the point of view that human being, nature being what it is, people must be made to pay for something to appreciate it. A theater will create its own respect on the stage. How many plays have we seen for which we have paid lots of money and disliked, much less appreciated? In fact, it was worse when you paid for it. The only practical means of ensuring the permanence of our theater is to tie it in with civic responsibility. The public library, an institution for enlightenment and entertainment is a case in point. No charges made for books. If people had to pay, most of the books would gather dust on the shelves. I know that if I had had to pay for books at the Williamsburg Public Library in Brooklyn, it is doubtful that I would have read the plays of Shakespeare. Joseph Papp, New York Shakespeare Festival, 1954. Hi, I'm Mark Valdes. Hi, I'm Mark Valdes. Our new group began meeting once a week and then twice a week. It was a very transient situation where people came and went. We took a long time to see if we could trust each other and given the way we defined the questions we found we couldn't. There were a number of experiments within the classroom and working situation. Some of them were attempts to relate and understand certain Brechtian ideas. Some of them were political. Some of them were ideas I had for a long time and wanted to develop with other people. And a great many of them were simply to take away the wall, the boundary, the limit we felt through our training. We began by doing things like tying up our hands and legs and trying to perform a task with another actor, trying to find some other way than using naturalistic mannerisms. The internal questions were what direction should we take and do you think we can get along with each other? At this point there were two schools of thought. One that we felt we should basically be a communal group doing theater and the other that felt we should be a group of theater professionals. These questions occurred again and again and then we said, well, what name should we give ourselves? I liked the Open Theater because it was an unconfining name. It implied a susceptibility to continue to change. The name would serve to remind us of that early commitment to stay in process and we called ourselves that. Joseph Chacon, the Open Theater founded in 1963. Good afternoon, my name is Christopher Acebo. First, what it should not be. It should not be a play thing for a group of stage-struck youngsters. Two, it should not be an exclusive watering place for the socially ambitious. Three, it should not be a platform for the exploitation of any single political, social, aesthetic or religious thesis. Four, it should not be a theater in which the talents of any one theatrical artist are exploited to the detriment of either the audience's enjoyment or the playwright's intent. Five, it should not have the clinical aura of academia. Six, it should not be a museum. Then what it should be. It should be a people's theater. That is, it should belong to its audience. Two, it should be a theater operated by professional theater experts. Three, it should have a clear, thoroughly efficient internal organizational structure. Four, it should be a theater which presents its audience with a wide variety of theatrical experiences, including those provided by the world's great playwrights of all ages. Five, it should be exciting. Six, it should be unique without being quixotic. Seven, it should be solvent. Eight, above all, it should be an instrument of communication utilizing trained artists in a theatrical environment to entertain and at the same time to make clear to its audience by means of visual and auditory data, ideas and emotions concerning the interrelationships of man and man, man and his environment, and man and his gods. This list is far from exhaustive, but I think it presents the nub of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival idea. Angus Boehmer, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, founded in 1935. Hi, I'm Laurie McCants. Emily Sprague Wurl is a Wisconsin writer who has been writing plays for a long while now, without very much to show for her work. The Emily Wurls are extremely important to my grassroots theater, for in them I see the chief hope of its coming into being. They are the talented ones. The ones whose expressiveness is a little beyond the levels of small community appreciation. The ones who are having a bad time of it, spiritually, because they cannot understand why they are not made a part of a vital native theater movement. They are ready, but they see little in their communities that is apt to change in favor of sincere, homegrown playwriting, yet they never quite give up hope. My search for a grassroots theater is forever a search for the Emily Wurls. And my search is also for ways to develop the responses of the region, responses tuned to the idea that fine living theater can be created by playwrights, who have no desire to take their plays far away from home. Robert Gard, the Wisconsin Idea Theater. 1943! Hi, Christopher Ashley. I firmly believe that the thrust and force of our operation in the Mark Taper Forum is in the area of new work, not just because it happens to excite and stimulate our senses, but because I have a tremendous sense of obligation to the writing talent in this country, to provide them with responsible and high professional atmosphere in which they can create. It's a large responsibility, but inescapable. We have not even begun to scratch the surface in our community or in the nation. Not every play, especially not every good play we get can be produced, but in some manner, informal reading, staged reading, modest productions, more plays must and will get done in the mornings, afternoons, or evenings throughout the year. In a little over one year of operation, Center Theater Group has presented the work of 26 playwrights. I've always believed theater to be a total art form wherein every element must be in place and all of it related somehow to life. Once created, this type of total theater must then find its own special identity, its own statement and stance of timeliness. The forum provides a unique and challenging opportunity to create just such a theater. Its very name, Forum, suggests a sharing of ideas, a spirited dialogue existing between audience and artist. Out of this, both the artist and the audience can experience provocative thought, perception, and ultimately the excitement of mutual expression. Gordon Davidson, the Mark Taper Forum, 1967. My name is Samuel Roberson. Doris Derby, John O'Neill and I, Gilbert Moses, met in the winter of 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, where they were field directors for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and I was writing for the Mississippi Free Press. All of us were black. All of us had been involved in theater before we came to Jackson. After we met and first talked about the need for theater, we got to where we felt we could put down a good case for a free Southern theater. We wanted to open Jackson up to bring people there who normally were outside of state control and police authority. We wanted freedom for thought and involvement and the celebration of our own culture. A general prospectus for the establishment of a free Southern theater. We proposed to establish a legitimate theater in the deep South with its base in Jackson, Mississippi. Our fundamental objective is to stimulate the creative and reflective thought among Negroes in Mississippi and other Southern states by the establishment of a legitimate theater thereby providing the opportunity for involvement in the theater and the associated art forms. We theorize that within the Southern theater situation, a theatrical form and style can be developed that is as unique to the Negro people as the origin of blues and jazz. A combination of art and social awareness can evolve into plays written for a Negro audience which relate to the problems within the Negro himself and within the Negro community. Through theater, we think to open a new area of protest, one that permits the development of playwrights and actors, one that permits the growth and self-knowledge of a Negro audience and one that supplements the present struggle for freedom. Doris Derby, Gilbert Moses, John O'Neill, the Free Southern Theater, 1963. And I just want to read one more thing, a brief letter we just received with a wish from John O'Neill to the future leaders of the American theater. My one main wish for the next generation of theater leaders is that we continue to join the effort to embrace the sacred goal of doing the best we can. Separately and together to effectively make the world a better place in which all who live can improve our quality of life for now and into the unending future. We make theater for the audiences that we serve. Artists who do their best put the interest and needs of their audience first. May we remember the Malawian proverb, he who thinks he is leading and has no one following him is only taking a walk. I'm Michelle Hensley. We also ask some other living founders of our field to speak directly to the future leaders of our theater. This letter came in earlier in the week from Judith Molina, who in 1947 founded the Living Theater in Greenwich Village with her husband, Julian Beck. Judith wrote from the Lillian Booth Actors' Home in New Jersey, where she's living, and from which she commutes into New York City to continue producing work with the Living Theater 67 years after it began. Here's what she wants us to know. I try to encourage all young people in the theater to work only for your highest vision of theater. To articulate what it is you want to contribute to the art and to the usefulness of theater and pursue that goal with all your creative strength. If you don't know yet what your vision is, wait. Study till you discover your unique message and pursue it with all your might and all your capacities for the rest of your life. This doesn't mean that you can't play villains. Charlie Chaplin played Hitler. If every theater worker, director, and technician speaks the truth of their hearts, we will have a great theater and we will change the world. Judith Molina, the Living Theater, founded in 1947. Hi, I'm Olga Sanchez. The future belongs to those who can imagine it. Next year, El Teatro Campesino will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Born on the picket lines of the great Delano Grape Strike in 1965, our Farm Workers Theater's half century of creative activism has been incredible, particularly since I never expected it to last more than a couple of years. In many ways, it's also the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Chicano Movement. I can't help questioning how much social progress we have actually been able to achieve, but much has changed. When imagining an ideal theater in America, one can never forget that all our self images are in a constant state of flux. Some of us may go with the flow, others may resist it, not all of us are living in the same century, yet the future is always in conflict with the past, forging the shifting contours of the present. 100 years ago, as heavy waves of immigration landed on our shores from Eastern and Southern Europe, there were howls across the land, decrying the desecration of the nation's racial and cultural purity. We hear echoes of the same fears today. The fact is that America has always been subject to change. Born of the fusion of the old world with the new. Here in San Diego, TCG has come together to convene in the borderlands the cusp, not just between Mexico and the United States, but between Americas. Today, new immigration is redefining the priorities of the so-called new world. After 500 years of slavery and human struggle, now in the 21st century, thanks to the civil rights movement from which we all sprang, the ideal theater is outgrowing the black and white paradigm of the past, embracing a multi-colored world. Whatever we call ourselves, Latino, Asian, Anglo, Pacific Islander, Jewish, Muslim, African American, Native American, what have you? As women and men, gay or straight, LGBT or Q, we are the new Americans, equally endowed with the power to change the world with our imaginative genius. The ideal theater must be true to this new America, for as our ancient Mayan ancestors imagined, to believe is to create, si se puede. Luis Valdez, El Tatro Campesino, founded in 1965. Hi, I'm Robert Foxworth, dear next generation of theater leaders. I have long thoughts to fit into a short space. How shall I do this? In brief then, I would like it if you would consider a theater as an artwork, even as a painting, a symphony, a building, a wood carving, or artworks, and that you as artistic leader are the primary artist of the theater and around you are other artists to fulfill the mission, the inclination, the point of view, the theme of inquiry, of this collective artwork. For a moment, keep to one side all the paraphernalia we usually concern ourselves with when we run a theater. For a minute, forget about buildings. You can always draw a chalk circle on the pavement and gather people around it. Let's slide for an hour or two the anxieties stirred up by budgets, fundraising, grant applications, board meetings, and so on. Forget even the repertory that you so carefully each year put together to surprise and move the audience. Concentrate on exactly why you are taking on this difficult task and what has drawn you to it, what holds your profound interest, your passion, your deep commitment, perhaps for decades. I share with you this Burmese poem to think about. The fish dwell in the depths of the ocean, the eagle on the sides of heaven, the one though high may be reached with an arrow, the other though deep with a hook, but the heart of man at a foot's distance cannot be known. What I and a small group of other leaders tried to do in earlier time was to traverse that very foot, narrow and deep and dangerous as it was, and the place to begin seemed to be within ourselves. Inside each of the artists and as leader deep within our own self where all art begins and surely the most human of the arts. We live in a different time and whether this thinking still holds up is up to you and what is possible within your contemporary circumstances and how strong your will is to take this path. This is how I see the core of it. As each artist's creativity expresses itself in outer form, it links up with, responds to, and stimulates the interior of the others. As a result, there is created the living experience that we share with an audience, hoping to awaken them from the routine of life to widen their understanding of themselves, to connect them to their world, to have them leave the theater changed. Theater, the Greek word is teatron. It translates to a place foreseeing. Zelda Fitzhandler, Arena Stage, founded 1950. A single sentence. We must help one another find our common ground. We must build our house on it, arrange it as a dwelling place for the whole family of decent humanity. Harold Clerman, The Group Theater, 1930. Can we thank the readers? And I know we're running late but just a couple more minutes if you would indulge us to join in a little closing action. We've heard the voices of our founders, some speaking directly to us. And I know that many of the people in this room have ideas about where the future lies. And we can't wait to discover what these future leaders will do and where they'll lead us and what the theater is that we can't yet see. So we'd like to ask you if you're moved to, to come to one of these microphones in the aisle and perform a simple act, just say a name. It should be the name of someone whom you believe in, someone who you believe will help build, help build our theater's future. They don't have to be young, but they might be. We talk so much about leadership and we've done so much as a field in large part through TCG to cultivate future leaders. Now we want to ask you to name them, put their names into the air, into our ears. Let this be a call to the future. Let your belief in these artists and artistic administrators embolden them whether they're here to hear you or not. You might name as Kwame did earlier a mid-career artist like Liesl Tommy. Or you may do as was done in Peter Zeissler's memory, name an uncategorizable artist like Taylor Mack. Or you might want to name one of the teens with us, one of your students or colleagues or even someone you've never met whose work you admire. It's not about age. It's about who will lead us into the future. I'll start. Lear de Bessonay. Patricia McGregor. Cerita Coombs Canada. Nicole Salter. Kenan Valdes. Graham Gillis. Susan Laurie Barks. Sam Roberson. Dominique Morseau. The Kilroyz. Jonathan McCory. Jacqueline Lawton. Snehal Desai. Up here. Abraham. Lisa Cron. Daniel Alexander. Daniel Alexander Jones. Frank Chin and Mako. Linda Perez Belli. Maya Milan Gonzalez. Ed Waterstreet and DJ Kurz. Karen Hartman. Mark Pinate. K.J. Sanchez. Justin Vivian Bond. Merope Pepinaitis. Ty Defoe. Alicia Harris. Peter Cuo. An Nguyen. Kimi Maida. Maya Boateng. Kirsten Greenidge. Hanna Sharit. Akiba Abaka. Allison Dela Cruz. Katelyn Sullivan. Ashley Walden Davis. Amanda Delheimer Diamond. Mina Natharajan and Sean San Jose. Nigel Porter. Dipankar Morgamorgi. Defina McMillan. Min Kong. Trey Garrett. Katori Ho. Kenesha Foster. Rob Melrose. Melissa Lee and Gibson Joseph. Tui Asal, Moses Goode Jr. Felina Hassa Houston, Roberta Uno. Al Hartley. Tara Wibberoo. DJ Gray, Roy Scheidt. Laura Kepley. Taral McCrany. Muriel Miguel, Spider Woman Theater. Larissa Fasthorse. Mark Bermude Joseph. Sarah Bellamy. Thank you. And one last thing and you can keep naming in your heart. If you would all stand, please. And I wanna follow up on Jane McGonagall and Max Levinfall yesterday in our breakout. Please hold hands with someone near you or everybody near you. You don't have to thumb wrestle. Close your eyes. Name and name to yourself. Imagine a way forward. I'm going to read a few final words and then when you open your eyes, Teresa will be here at the podium to bring us home. This is one of my favorite passages from the writings of our art theaters pioneers from a man named Morris Brown who founded the Chicago Little Theater in 1912. The inhabitants of the third bohemia seldom know where they live. They are too busy making beautiful things which they give to one another for they have no money. They have however wealth and health for the deeps which surround their shores and are rich with treasure of many colors and the tides are strong and they're tang savory. They are fisher folk, those inhabitants, fishers of men and of their own hearts and they dredge jewels from uncharted seas. Please open your eyes. Thank you all and thank you. Thank you for giving us your names. Thank you Todd for organizing this session and for the decade of work that you put into an ideal theater and for your leadership all of these years. Our closing is from Hallie Flanagan, the director of the short-lived and ever-enduring federal theater project which lasted only from 1935 to 1939. Flanagan as much as anyone saw what was possible in our country's theater and she laid the groundwork. In her words, the federal theater project was a pioneering theater because it is part of a tremendous rethinking, rebuilding and redreaming of America. Not merely a decoration but a vital force in our democracy. I wish she could be here today to see what we've made of that pioneering effort. Here again from Hallie Flanagan. The entire history of federal theater points to one dynamic fact, profoundly significant for the future of the stage, that the theater often regarded even by members of its own profession as dead or dying, still has tremendous power to stir up life and infuse it with fire. It is probable that during the last four years more discussion of the theater took place in the House and Senate and in congressional committees than in all the other years of our congressional history put together. Scenes from federal theater plays were enacted on the floor of Congress, eloquent speeches were made for and against the theater as an art and as an institution. Shakespeare came into the discussion and Marlowe and Aristotle. A senator who fought for federal theater told me that months after that institution was ended, fights about its merits and demands were still going on in congressional cloak rooms. No one fights over a dead art or a dead issue. The federal theater ended as it had begun with fearless presentation of problems touching American life. If this first government theater in our country had been less alive, it might have lived longer. But I do not believe anyone who worked on it regrets that it stood from first to last against reaction, against prejudice, against racial, religious and political intolerance. It's strove for a more dramatic statement and a better understanding of the great forces of our life today. It fought for a free theater as one of the many expressions of a civilized, informed and vigorous life. The President of the United States in writing to me of his regret at the closing of federal theater referred to it as a pioneering job. This it was, gusty, lusty, bad and good, sad and funny, superbly worth more wit, wisdom and imagination than we could give it. Its significance lies in its pointing to the future. The 10,000 anonymous men and women, the et cetera's and the and so forth's who did the work, the nobodies who were everybody, the somebodies who believed it, their dreams and deeds were not the end. They were the beginning of a people's theater in a country whose greatest plays are still to come. Hearing all of these names, looking out at the extraordinary people gathered in this room, I believe along with Hallie Flanagan that our greatest plays are still to come. Thank you for joining us here in San Diego and we'll see you in Cleveland in 2015. Woo! Party! Party!