 Will you raise your hand? Oh, fantastic. I welcome. What we're going to ask you to do when we finish is to raise your hand again. And so we're going to ask someone from LMDA to go introduce yourself to someone from Directors Lab North because it's a missed opportunity if we don't connect our two groups while you're here today for this fantastic and much anticipated conversation. So I would like to bring our conference chair, Joanna Falk, up to the stage. Hello. Wow. What a full house. Hi. I'm Joanna Falk. I'm the literary manager at the Tarragon Theater. And I'm the conference chair for the LMDA conference. Hi. Welcome. One of the pleasures, one of the many pleasures of being a conference chair is that you get to curate conversations, invite folks that you always wanted to talk to. I said to someone yesterday, I feel like I've curated this entire conference mostly for myself. So I'm glad you're all here enjoying it with me, hopefully. It's my pleasure to have Ankitanio and Sarah Garten-Staley here. And we're going to just have a big old conversation about directing, dramaturgy, leadership. I'm going to open it up to questions near the end. So yeah, let's get started. We've got about an hour. Do we like how we see this? Do we like how we see this? Directors. I'm going to read their whole bios. I'm just going to read the first few lines of both their bios and you can Google the rest. Ankitanio is the dramaturg of the Lincoln Center Theater and the creator and head of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. A three-term past president of literary managers and dramaturgs of the Americans. Americas, she is the recipient of LMDA's first blessing award for lifetime achievement in dramaturgy. Originally from Montreal, Sarah is the associate artistic director of English Theater at Canada's National Arts Center. She is the creative catalyst for the spider web show and performer AD of Buddies in Bad Times Theater. Sarah was recently awarded the Elliott Hayes for her dramaturgy, for her work on the cycle, focusing on the indigenous body of performance work in Canada. Wow. Well, as I said to both of you, this is really meant to be a conversation. I'm just going to loft some softball questions at both of you and I'm happy for you to just take them and run. The first one, I'm always curious about people's origin stories, how they came to theater. So what made you decide you wanted to make theater your profession or when did you know that you wanted to make theater your job? That was an easy one. I just have to say that I'm such a fan. If I'm looking nervous and weird, it's partly just the first time we've actually met. And I tend to avoid people that I'm in awe of. How do you think I feel? I always wanted to do it from as far back as I could remember. Probably for the first time I was told when I was five that I was terrible from a perspective of gender that I didn't fit into the roles that were intended for little girls doing little things and I think anger, it was a very angry kid and I think that theater and the expression of created states afforded me an opportunity to come into the world. So I think I knew from a very early stage. When I was five I called around to a lot of ad agencies in the yellow pages and asked if they could hire me to be in the commercials, but that didn't. So acting was kind of the first thing you thought I'd like to be an actor? Yeah, totally. I had no sense of the others. And then when did you think, well maybe not acting, maybe something else? After you were fired from your first job. It's sort of a consistent thing. I mean I do perform but I don't act now and so I think I'm just not good at it. But I think also the theater again allowed me an opportunity to create spaces where I could control chaos and I think that's something as an actor you can't do. You have to I think really embrace your participation in that chaos. So yeah, I'd say from a very early age. Well I've never been asked this question. And I would, the reason that I have never been asked it or have wanted to answer is that I really, but I will, I don't think it's a very useful question of the genre and I would refer all of you guys to a person I learned about only in the last couple of years. A dramaturg named Kurt K. W. R. T. Hirschfeld H. I. R. S. C. H. F. E. L. D. who was a dramaturg of the Zurich Schauspielhaus. He came from Berlin, he was Jewish, got out in 33, went to Zurich, couldn't get a job running a theater because you know he was Jewish whatever. So he worked in an operetta house that was the Zurich Schauspielhaus for this guy who was you know the artistic director who had a board or wherever he had and could socialize and proceeded to rescue every Jewish actor who had to get out of Germany and for the next 30 years perform world premieres of you know mother courage, life of Galileo, introduced the entire German repertory. I mean excuse me the current German repertory introduced Miller, Albie, Elliott, Lorca. I mean what this guy put on Zurich sort of behind the back of his artistic director with this incredible acting company starting in 33. When he found some local writers who turned out to be not too bad, we encouraged right for the stage, Friedrich Dernmath, Max Frisch, and at his birthday celebration when he turned 65, he's passed away now a long time ago, he said there's something about the anonymity of a dramaturge that he must be feeling awkward now to be asked personal questions because it's not that he's not a colorful person but all of his energy has been poured into his work. And I felt bad that I didn't know about him. I'm writing a book right now and that's why I'm doing a big thing on him because boy did he change the course of human events. So just to do my quick story, I grew up in California. I did not want to go to college so I went and lived in Europe for you which is the reason I speak some languages. I went back, I went to a women's college, I was a physics major and when you are a physics major you have to take physics one, organic and calculus five days a week at 8am and like in the June of the end of my freshman year after some long weekend in Berkeley I came back with a hundred calculus problems to do and they thought you know what, this is just not going to be the way it's going to be. So I had been interested in, you know, I've been interested in music and theater and it was a time, this is obviously, you know, Berkeley in the late 60s a living theater and you know, there was a whole bunch of really interesting stuff and I had no real interest in the production and the performing but I certainly didn't want to act but I really liked it and I liked the literature and so after a couple of years which are not too important I realized that was kind of it but it was not at all from a production point of view it was from a literary point of view and then I started getting work in theaters as assisting people and that eventually led to studying. I didn't know what to do because I knew I couldn't and didn't want to act so I was actually trained as a drama critic. I mean I worked as a drama critic in San Francisco for all of the underground papers you know the Berkeley barb and the San Francisco coutons. I would have to like wear jeans and drive over and deliver a copy to a commune and they would say things like, whoa this guy like Moliere, like who was he? I would say he was a real revolutionary. You know the king and he and the king had this thing and he got banned. Okay, we can print that one. And then I was lucky enough to get a job for Ed Hastings who was the second in command at ACT. The difference between the commune and ACT where no one had ever smoked dope, they only drank Manhattan's at a bar. I don't remember Manhattan, I don't think I ever had a drink in my life. It was the beginning of my entrance to the theater in the end of the story so I still embrace the commune and I still embrace ACT because they were the beginning of my first year in the theater. Wow, was directing ever a thing you thought about doing? I did direct plays, I've directed maybe four or five plays and I found myself and I love actors, they're all my best friends. But I found myself at 12.30 at night and all of you who have directed plays have done the same job taking a phone call and saying, but you're wonderful. Don't you do that with playwrights? Well, I'm usually not at 12.30. Somehow that's different. And I just thought, you know what, I just don't want to do this for a living so I'll let somebody else do it. And actually the great dramaturgs of Germany who I knew, the Chavez people, they considered themselves, I mean they would not want me to say this, above the directors, like let them deal with the 12.30 phone calls. You just come up with the ideas. And does your physics background, no? I can't get a shot. No, it is weird, it is weird now. I just find so many things weird now. I mean, it's not that hard passing calculus one. Anybody here in this room pass calculus one? Okay, I mean come on. Well, sometimes I'm glad to hear that. Because sometimes it gets a reputation like, oh my God, what is this? You know, I'm about to do Tom Stoppard's The Hard Problem, which is a somewhat science-based thing. And, you know, it's not that hard, I mean solving the hard problem, of course, is impossible. But what it is, but there's really become a divide and I'm glad that it's not in this room that there are those of us who can read and there are other ones who can add and the others don't read, which I think is really false. So, you know, I always try to encourage other people, like, you know, take a math class. I mean, meet different kind of people and, you know, go learn something. I mean, I did keep my calculus one book and it might as well be written in, you know, I don't know what language. It's completely incomprehensible to me at the time. So one of my favorite sessions at LMGA conferences is the Hot Topics, which we had yesterday and there were some pretty hot topics, I think. So I wanted to ask you both, what is your Hot Topic right now in terms of theater? What are your burning questions? What are you thinking about? Race, class, and story. Can I ask you all to just speak just a little bit more? Sorry, yes. I don't want to miss any words. Yes. My answer was race, class, and story. And where we center the story at this moment in time with the intersection, particularly those two questions, there's other parts that come into that intersection, but that for me is what I spend most of my time thinking about. I'm in the nightmarish process of finishing a book about how to be a dramaturg. It's horrible. It's like 80,000 words. It's coming out. I have to turn it in in September. So I have been thinking about this question. And to me, which I didn't know until I had to write all this down, to me I think the really important, most important thing that I hope I can leave as a legacy is really one that is a social model, which is the way that theater people collaborate. Theater is a world that deals with emotion. And it deals with very usually, if you look at the Greeks or Shakespeare, a lot of writers say very dark emotion, very dangerous emotion, it's not like a sanitized place. And over 2,000 years, there's been a relatively unchanged way of people coming together to figure out a way of working with that emotion in a way that is free and uncensored, that's definitely guided by the group until about 200 years ago when directors were invented and then directors sort of guided it. And then that emotion, what it is distilled into, starts to work with an audience. The theory of motor neurons and people's hearts beating together while they're in a room together. But I think fundamentally, what I hope to note in this book is that this is relatively unique, that people from many different backgrounds, many different ways of life, I actually note in the book, because this occurred to me one day, you turned on the work lights and the bowmen on a big show and you asked everybody in that room to stand across the proscenium. You would have a complete cross-section of society. You would have actors, you would have dressers, you would have ushers, you would have directors, you would have box office people, you would have, you know, you would have a wardrobe I spent years with sewing and wardrobe. It's not one social class it's represented, it really is like a microcosm of your city. That's what it's always been. And everyone is working harmoniously together. And if that can be then opened up to include an audience, so it's not just playing to itself, it's not just playing to others, it's playing to everyone. That's when I think it has its power and I think that freedom and compassion that allows you to listen to somebody else and allows you to change what your ideas are, how you're feeling about things so that you can work together is something that we as theater people have that's quite unique. I wish we could make everyone in Congress put on a play, you know. And they might learn something from us but they're not interested in us. But somehow that I see as a model that it's worked forever, that's why we're still going on even though the theater's died every 10 years. I don't know. I don't know if I entirely agree. I don't entirely agree. I feel that we're at a particular moment where this idea of what theater is is based on a set of agreements. I wouldn't even say conventions, it's agreements that we show up to it with a certain set of presumptions, assumptions and language. And that once that collaborative space is launched, it's based on an idea that may not be held or valuable to some of the people who are standing across that stage. And for me, that's why race, class and story. What are the stories that we show up to? How do we make those agreements? I think it's the first part of my question when I think about that image because it's still somebody out looking at it from one perspective and we're in a breakdown of perspectives right now which I think is both exciting. But for the theater, it's deeply challenging. I'd agree that we're the place to do that. We're the place to engage in that conversation. But even by saying the we, I'm speaking already from a very particular perspective. So I love that as an ideal but I do feel that we're in a place where we're just undoing a lot of those basic ideas about how theater can operate and what collaboration actually means. Well, I mean, I agree with you because a book that I have found very influential lately and you probably know it is Todd Mundan's book, An Ideal Theater. We had the brilliant idea of just taking the mission statements of something like 55 theaters or 65 theaters in the United States from the last, you know, 200 years, right? Where's Mark Lai? Who knows more than I do. 200 years and all like that. I mean, some of them you know, there are regional theaters that still exist but some of them you don't know. Some of them don't exist anymore. The free Carolina players or Karamu or the Guthrie or whatever. But I mean, if you, what you're describing is sort of inevitable the march of history. I mean, those, the group theater, you know, got somebody to donate a farmhouse up somewhere in Kingston or something and they didn't even know who the playwright was and who the director was and who the actor was and they had to talk, you know, Clifford Odette's into writing and talk Amelia Kazan into directing and stuff. So it isn't like you go in with a model and you have to figure out is it a collective, is it a, what's the hierarchy and then most importantly, what are we playing? You know, who are we speaking to? What's the connection going to be when we finally open to an audience? And I think what you're saying is exactly what I'm saying is just the next, that's what it keeps evolving. We're certainly not making theater the way it was made in the past and we shouldn't. But if we are open to each other a structure will emerge as well as a production. A structure of creation will emerge. Yeah. Can I keep going on this? Absolutely. I think it's, because I have been thinking a lot about this with respect to opening. Like what it means to be open to one another and how many people that I have, in the last number of years, had the opportunity to collaborate with where the expectation of the timeframe for that opening has shifted enormously because what I've come to realize is that to truly collaborate across difference means changing all of my considerations about the space that I hold in the conversation and that a lot of the work is earning a space to engage in the conversation and flipping the paradigm of position in that conversation. So that's a real challenge to the way we make theater now. It's a real challenge to the idea of theater being something that can employ us because it's a community engaged model ultimately that makes it really difficult for people to feel confident in a mass way to show up to buy a ticket to see a piece. And so I feel like in this moment where theater is so exciting to me is that it's really working through this troubled time and coming up with new collaborative ways to engage. It seems like yesterday, but 25 years ago I started this director's lab and now there's like director's labs. I've just got a what's app from my newest which is a Mediterranean lab of people from countries bordering the Mediterranean. They're meeting to write their applications starting next year. I'm very interested in the last five years in people who are working in communities because that seems to me to be a really interesting challenge. Who are you playing for? And how are you engaging them? And what kind of spaces are you working in? So I take a lot of people in the lab now who are not... I mean, I take New Yorkers obviously in the New York lab but I've taken lots of people who are starting theaters in Walla Walla or Los Cruces or other places and it's very successfully because it isn't like you have a huge equity base in Walla Walla. You've got to figure out who are your actors. I mean, it's the same question that you had to figure out in London in 1593. So that's going to move that forward and there is so much happening in this country along those lines. So it becomes interesting to me to really... I'm not pushing by any means in New York models especially now. Broadway has just turned into a very successful sort of tourist hub. Most of the new plays are not able to be funded on Broadway. So I think it's inevitable that that's where it's going and I think it's good for the country. And in a way when I started in the theater in the 70s it was regional in nature. There were the western writers like Sam Shepard and there were the southern writers like Sam Art Williams and Beth Henley and there were the Philadelphia gang Bill Gunn and Albert and Arano and Charles Fuller and there were the Chicago people. You really had a sense of different deep tests in Chicago and different regional fields to things and I think that's a much healthier situation than when everyone just looks at the top five plays that have won the same prizes and produces them. It's better if it's much more disparate but that's kind of where we are now. I wanted to follow up then talking about collaboration because you both also teach. So what do you teach your students, be they playwrights or directors or dramaturgs about collaboration? Well I don't really teach. I teach at Juilliard. I just teach at first year actors theater history. So it's a very weird, I mean it's a very specific thing. What do you have to know if you're an actor about particular plays? Like if you're playing a part in Shakespeare and you're the second son, you've got to know what that means. Is that kind of information? It's not really useful in terms of discussion. What about the director's lab? Well the director's lab is definitely not a teaching lab. I gather everybody and then I leave. I totally want to pick up on that because I don't teach anymore either and I really just don't feel like having to teach. And it's taken me a long time to just come to the point where I just felt like I was just writing on like please like what I have to say and just feel like what I can't offer is my fandom. Like I feel like I'm a fan and that love that I can offer artists and appreciation and acknowledgement and being present for that is amazing. And I agree like I just try as best as I can and the collaborations that I curate at the NAC is entirely based on that. It's just like I just, yes go do, I'm going to love it, I'm going to love it. No matter what I'm going to love it. If you're doing it and you love it and you can prop it off of me loving it and us loving it, so for me that's the most powerful thing I feel I can do. Yeah I mean and I would just add to that I mean I think the downside of being a dramaturge and I know I'm talking to directors and dramaturges but the downside of being a dramaturge is that there's just too many opinions in the world nowadays. You don't need more opinions. We, you know if you have a relationship with somebody over time they're going to talk to you you're going to have conversations with them etc. But what we can do is just say yes we can support, we can say you can do this and so many writers I, you know, talk to, I mean just this week I've gotten things. It's like it's so difficult to write a play that just saying keep going you can do it. I mean I hear this over and over again. That's what's needed. So in some ways in production I don't really have an opinion about things. I try and kind of suss out what people need or what people want or what they don't know or what would be useful and can I help you get it or can I help you write it. But I'm not going to say wrong, right, you know. I mean in a way in production that's the director's job and a good director will allow, again as I said from the very beginning, people to feel free to really be, to try things as you know in your own theater and dealing with the material that we're dealing with you need to feel free because the material is not, you know, life and joyful in the theater. It can be very dark. So figuring out how to deal with it individually as artists, as actors, designers and then how to channel that into the vision of the creator, whether that's a collective creation or whether that's an individual creation. That's when you can begin to say, hmm, that seems better than, but not to have such quick opinions about things. And I think playwrights resent, I actually, in the end of a particular chapter I asked all these writers, what is the most helpful thing that Ramaturg has ever said to you and what is the least helpful thing. And it always boils down to opinions, you know. You can't write a comic scene after a trial. You know, it's like, who said this? So just saying yes will get you further, even if you think you're selling an idiot, than having too many opinions. Which thought that you shouldn't have them but you need to have them at the right time at the right moment with the right person. The word gatekeeper or gatekeeping has come up a lot in the last couple of days in terms of folks who work in institutions. And I'm sort of less interested in what you're keeping out, but what you're trying to bring in. What voices or what do you feel like you're wanting to bring into your institutions? Well, I mean, the gatekeeping thing is very critical. It's gotten much more critical and much worse over the years. What do you mean, sir? What do you mean that it's gotten... Well, I was frightened to print my book out because I haven't read the whole thing together, because I thought it would be so terrible. But when I did print it and I brought it to Toronto and I went back to read my first chapter, which I finished in August, there was kind of interesting things in it and I couldn't believe it. But I was talking about how the whole profession began and in the United States, the first regional theatres were built in the late 60s by Ford Foundation money. Not the Guthrie, but the arena, Houston, Lincoln Center, the alley, etc. In the late 60s the buildings were finally done and then the question was going to be who was going to work in them? What was it going to be? So the thought was that they would be like European theatres. They would do classic reps with acting companies, but then the acting companies never materialized because the actors had too much work in Hollywood. And this corresponded with this incredibly powerful, almost Elizabethan, I would say, wave of playwrights. If you look back, the range from Landford Wilson to Zaki Shanghain to Tina Howe to all those other people I've mentioned, I mean, it was David Mann and Shepherd. It was incredible, the quality of writing. And none of these people had ever gone to college. I don't know why they all started writing plays because there was no training at that point. And they all came into these new theatres as unsolicited manuscripts. So someone had to read them. So that's how many of us got our jobs because we're like, who's reading these? And there were no agents. Audrey Wood was the only agent in America, and Helen Merrill, there were the only two. And so we all, whether we were all friends, Morgan Janesse was at the public, Rod Merritt was at Circle Rep, Steve Carter was at the NEC, I was at the Phoenix, Andre was at Playwrights Rises. We would read like 50 plays a week, and they would be amazingly interesting playwrights who now you've heard of, and the usual unsolicited things. So there was no winnowing down from that, and that was like the best thing because as I always say, imagine being the first reader of Waiting for Godot. Luckily it was Roger Blunt, thank God, because it doesn't look like a play. It doesn't look like anything that's come before it. So if you read that play for the first time, especially if, which I just hate, especially if you only read 10 pages of that play, which some people at theaters do, you're just going to reject it. It's going to be so out of bounds that you won't even understand what it is. So taking the time, you know, as editors and publishing houses do, as casting directors, how many bad actors do casting directors see in routine auditions on a yearly basis? But if you don't live in hope that the next person who walks in the door is going to be, you know, Audar McDonald, then you should get out of the business. You know, just reading and reading and reading and reading will help you understand what's going on. So where we are now is everyone has an agent. Everyone has agents and managers. You know, the same five people win all the prizes. You know, it has gotten to the point where there's so many gatekeepers that it's very hard to function. I mean, it's almost like you want to get rid of that and just start the unsolids. I have pictures of my cats lying on piles of manuscripts. But at least people feel like they can have access to things. And, you know, it all has to do with money. I mean, I found out a couple of years ago that agents get a statement right before Christmas every year which tells them how much money they brought into the agency that year. And they're obviously not going to have a big number of, you know, shepherding all their clients into theater productions. They're going to have a bigger number of their shepherding all their clients into writing their TV shows. So there's so many forces at work that are cutting people off. And when I asked this question for the both, what is the best thing that the director said, you know, the dramaturgist said to you, Bruce Norris, I think it was Michelle Tappenbaum as a friend of his. I can't remember who told him this. He said, always put three things in your play that after the reading you can say to the dramaturgs, you see, I took your advice and that will help get your play into the theater. I think you all know the news stories. That's so cynical, but that's sort of true. And it's horrifying that the dramaturgs feel like they have to have this gatekeeping position. I don't know quite what to do about it. I mean, you know, like when I think about it, it's really interesting to hear the kind of historical context on that because... Well, there's one last thing I just forgot to do. And when the NEA started, I mean, when the Ford administration started, do you know what the percentage of people in America who had been in a theater was? This is like 1966. Five percent of Americans had been in there because we're a nation of immigrants. So it was not like starting theaters in Germany and people had no idea what theaters were. Very few people in America. And look at the number of people who go to theater now. It's absolutely incredible. So it's had an effect. No worries. I think it's a... I'm not good at math, but the population has exploded. And so the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of directors and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dramaturgs now and thousands upon thousands of actors can continue on the exponential. I think that at the beginning for Canada anyway in the 60s, the amount of people who are working professionally right now would have made up a lot of who the core audience were in terms of who actually was in love, amateur, wanted to be engaged in this thing. And I feel that the gatekeeping, a friend of mine went back to law school about 10 years ago and he said, oh yeah, we just go to the website now and we read summaries of all the court cases. That's how we get through all of the reading required to get our law degrees. And 20 years before then, you couldn't have gotten through law school unless you read the whole thing, right? So we're having... There's so much data because there's so many of us now and we're all trying to control how many of us there are and how much data that represents that I agree that we are in this place of it's broken in terms of relying on systems to build. Your idea of just randomness or conversation or saying I love it. I just love it. Why do you love it? I don't know, I just love it. And yet we don't have a place in the financial picture to kind of fold that. I've just been working on a piece and the requirement that we knew what the piece was from a budgetary and marketing perspective before it was created, even though everyone understood that we were creating it as we were literally doing that. And within the room there was discord amongst the company because they felt that it was made sense that we should know what it was before we knew what it was. And I think we're caught in this kind of looping and so the gatekeeping I think actually speaks to that because we're all trying to find ways to open things more and by doing that I think we're also helping to shut things down a bit more. You know, we're in this back and forth. Well, yeah, I mean, you're right. But on the other hand, I've been being this director's love for the summer and it's quite an interesting group. I mean, I have a stateless person from Kuwait coming in. I have people coming in from countries in Africa who have absolutely no way of even paying the fees. Everybody has problems. And what you're describing is exactly the way that theaters operate. And at some point you have to just suck it up and have everybody dislike you and say, this is just not the way it's going to work. It's just not happening this way. This is what you think because you're working in marketing or you're working, you were trained and, you know, you have a degree from some college in theater management but you are not allowing this work to happen. And unless you just make yourself really disliked then it's not going to happen. I mean, you just have to develop a skin where you just, because it is a problem but it's not the same problem as an N17 Kuwaiti passport, you know. Someone making theater with that. I mean, it's all kind of relative. And I'm not discounting the problem. But again, this Todd London book, when you look at what people had to go through to start these theaters in certain times with no resources, no buildings, but ideas, art and community that they contacted, it puts it in perspective. I mean, I also have come to be a big believer in, I don't know if this is going to sound weird and it's not even a question of audience size but I've become a big believer in popular shows and maybe they're popular with a smaller audience or a theater popular with a big audience but plays that play to the converted while they might be fun. I mean, the current example that we're all quoting is Hamilton, you know. I mean, look at what that play has done. That musical has done. It's absolutely incredible. And, you know, if you look at the group theater, if you look at Stefan Mulfi, the Moscow art, you look at Shakespeare and the population of London, you know, 1600 is something like 350,000. The Globe Seats, 2,000 people. A lot of people saw those shows and they saw them for different reasons. Some of them just wanted to be entertained. Some of them saw them with political analogies. Some were, you know, it doesn't matter, you know. But something about connecting with a community, a city or a community of a zeitgeist or a time so that it doesn't just become theater people talking to theater people. So I think what you were saying is absolutely true that everybody who studied theater is now the audience for theater, but it's your law school roommates who are reading those summaries that you want to sort of bring in somehow either on board as board members or as audiences or somehow. That seems to be, to me, the next interesting task. I want to open it up for questions. Anyone have a question? Who's going to start? Yeah. I think it brings together two threads. Because you mentioned narrative at the beginning and your interest in disrupting narrative. And I'm thinking a lot about that and how conventional narrative is generally focused on one individual and how hard it is to tell stories that break that up when you want to appeal to a popular audience. And the reason I'm thinking about that is because I think that dictators manipulate narrative in that way by focusing on only one story. So I guess I'm thinking about this, wow this is not very organized, I'm thinking about this in connection to the broader social narrative and how theater simultaneously disrupts it but also supports it. And I guess I'm just wondering if you're thinking about that. I think you're making a lot of assumptions that I wouldn't agree with. One of the most oddly, one of the most popular writers of the last 100 years. Just popular in terms of regular people who like to see their work is Beckett. If you're ever worried about your theater not attracting an audience, do a Beckett play. People love Beckett, I don't know why. I know why I love Beckett but you would not expect that crowds would come to see, you know, I'll go on whatever. And similarly, the dissolution of former Yugoslavia started at a theater conference. So theater has many roles and the assumption that you're making is that traditional narrative attracts and supports a traditional governmental, let's say, structure. I don't know if that's true or not. And I think theater of many kinds you know, traditional structures, non-traditional structures can do different things. I have not noticed that correlation. Sarah, do you want to talk about the show you have on at Luminato? In terms of narrative? Or not? Yeah, no. Yeah, it's a verbatim piece about a woman who looked out her window and saw a man beaten to death by the police here in Toronto. And its first half is told through sort of a parallel structure of storytelling. There's a live artist who works throughout the story to the first half to render a subject into being. And then there's a more conventional from a Eurocentric sort of storytelling position a narrative that starts at the beginning and moves through to the end. The second half of the show is a deconstruction of that. And I think the intention, the attempt that we are investigating with this piece is it possible to tell stories from a multiplicity of perspectives in a shared time space as opposed to consecutively. And I think there's moments that are successful and there's moments that it's very different responses from very different people on how the piece is being told. But the audience is an important storytelling agent in that piece and the audience is different each night and so too is a particular speaker each night. So, you know, and to your sort of stark points, say the group or whatever, the traditions that have been around for forever in traditions that I know about for forever and I think in many other cultures probably similarly there have been these different ways of gathering storytelling for forever. But I am interested in that question of the sort of the tyranny of a one perspective narrative and I do think that it is a dislocator for certainly many, many people in this country and in particular from the perspective of, you know, indigenous which has many, many 600 plus governing nations within that but many different solo perspectives. One of my people who inspire me greatly, Jen Derbyshire always talks about how one means one. One size fits one, I should say. Not one size fits all. And I think that that has a real, that's a really challenging perspective for the theater and it's one though that I'm really interested in bringing to the theater is what does that mean? Like what does it mean to, at this moment when we are so segregated in our digital worlds where we are becoming more part of a sort of a data kind of mind field without our consent what does it mean to to ask audiences to come to the show out the window is popular but it's not a big, it's not a it's not a huge house but it is popular. However, were it not I still think that it's the kind of work that could lead to it being more popular somewhere down the road because it's engaging in conversations that aren't necessarily happening. So, I don't know, like I, yeah, so many feelings right now. Yeah, in the back there. I just have a question. You both made reference to the sort of popular about a lot of different work and the heading of popular vote I think I know for myself. I think the complaint popular with what we would call like big B pop and I'd love to hear from both of your perspectives on what makes a popular theater perhaps small P because you're bringing in Hamilton and Beckett and have put it up in this field of pop and so I think it would be really interesting just to really both kind of break down your definitions as part. Well, I don't think it, you know I don't really think it ultimately has much to do with audience size. I think it has more to do with reaching into the community whatever that community is. In other words, if theater is only being made and played to theater people I think it's a problem. And I always say to the directors in the lab on the first day after that I'm again gone. If you all think about your aunts or your uncles for that matter what would they feel? What are they interested in seeing? And there's usually a groan at that point but I mean you want to be able to have theater function in society in some way that isn't so self-referential. Theater was never a profession that had academic training. I mean everyone was trained up until then really in the 60s as apprentices they carried spears they started in the costume shop and then they kind of worked their way up. So now everybody's gone to college they have student debt and they have to make theater for other people. And that sort of puts theater in a box. So I'm saying if the theater is good and can address issues and create a forum that's exciting and speak to people whoever they are who aren't exactly the people that you've studied with that's what I mean by popular and it could be a large number and it could just be I mean again these theaters that are in small communities that are really speaking to whatever the issues are it's almost like town hall meetings or something. That's very valuable. So I think again this Todd London book is very interesting because a lot of these theaters were not you know they're not performing in the you know in the Helen Hayes Theater or something. They're performing in small in smaller venues but were very important to the communities and some still are. Did you want to answer that? No, I'm good. Yeah. Thank you. Ariane Van Buren a doctor in New York. I would be curious I'd like to know your perspective on to what extent to be popular in the United States and it's probably different in Canada does the story need to be self-ferential to that community and that country or whether it can be open to different forms and different politics and different humor from abroad. I've just been reading on the stuff that fits Gerald you know who had a very charmed but difficult damned life in some degree you know and I think unlike maybe television or you know I think it's so difficult to write a play it's difficult to write a novel especially one that is you know artistically great that it's almost like you're barely in control of it it's in control of you and when you know you all the writers and you know you speak to them it's trying to come through you in some way that you're trying to perceive and you're trying to master and you're trying to focus and edit and figure out and then later with an editor or a dramaturg maybe you'll finish it but it isn't a question of like going to a restaurant and ordering up I'm going to do a play that does this it's sort of like that's what you have to do you know I mean we're living in a different time now it's the same in art you know if you're an artist you know Van Gogh saw that's how he saw it he painted what he saw nobody liked it nobody could understand it and then thank god his brother saved the paintings and took them along and then other people said oh that's interesting but I don't know that unlike you know we see in TV where somebody says let's do a series about it and let's find some writers so I think it's sort of out of people's control and the job of a dramaturg and a director is to go to shows to read shows to read plays and to find a certain sympathy with voices and say I love this I mean I just read Maxwell Perkins can you imagine this his letter when he got the manuscript of Gatsby and he was so generous to Fitzgerald he just said this is the most what was the word he used the most spiritual book I've ever read I mean it was like it was a letter that any writer would dream of getting and Fitzgerald just like exhausted crossing the marathon finish line collapsing you know I mean that's your job is to find that and I always suggest to the directors in the director's lab you know if you see something and I'm not talking about doing this to you know Kevin Klein or you know to Susan Lowry Parks or somebody people who are already very famous but if you see a play or you see an actor or you see a designer working at a small theater whose work just really turns you on write them a note and leave it at the stage door and no no director or designer or young playwright you know a small theater is not going to open that envelope and just say I'm just a young new director but I really respond to your work and if you ever you know want to have a cup of coffee and that's how you begin to build these relationships so I think art is something that's bigger than us that's out of the control of the people so you have to kind of find the people whose work you like and then help them in some way you know support them maybe financially if you can find the money or once yeah yeah so as an artist of color I do think that gatekeeping is very real and that's part of the reality of the situation and likewise I think we're living in a world where the goalposts keep changing where it's like you know what you need a little bit more experience so you get the MFA and it's like we want you to have more real world experience so you're a little too too advanced and so my question to you is how do we dismantle gatekeeping when it's the funding structures that perpetuate it that question you know put your shoulder to the wheel that's all I can tell you I mean I am so old there are a few people with their moors old the things that I encountered when I was starting out when I talk about them and I'm not going to they sound like I'm from the middle ages I mean it's like this stateless person who's trying to get here you know there are obstacles there are obstacles there are obstacles constant obstacles they are personal in nature they are the play closing the theaters in England for two a year and everyone couldn't work because you couldn't gather in theaters and the obstacles now are just as bad as the obstacles were then and you just have to create you have to persevere you have to have good ideas you have to make friends you have to support you have to you know write things believe in things find people who are writing things depending on your position make things happen talk people into doing things for free you know that's how you begin it is it is not changed ever and it's a comprehensible state but if I could tell you that there was a simple solution where all would be possible I would be delighted to do so I think better things are happening now in the medieval period when I started but I don't know if that's going to end you know I don't know you're ending it I think a lot about policy which is you know anathema to creativity however I went to Australia about five or six years ago when I went one of my friends said that actually you know this person Yvette Nolan she was here yesterday anyway Yvette said there's like four in terms of countries at that point in her thinking Australia was was was was the third so it went New Zealand Canada Australia and the United States in terms of there being an acknowledgement and appreciation of the sort of the colonial sort of genocidal impulses in all manners in all four of those countries and Jill Kiley the artistic director of English theater and I went to Australia and every single theater that we visited had a policy statement in each of their brochures and on their websites at that time that recognized and honored the first peoples of Australia at that point and it was brand new at that time and I can tell you that in the five years since it's been an enormous shift like huge shift in terms of the amount of work the amount of funding for that work the amount of international work sort of cross-border work that's happening and sort of a cross-indigenous kind of collaborative model the amount of festivals working into South America it's like it's really extraordinary so I think there there are certain ways in which getting those statements out and Sarah Ahmed talks a lot about how you can get the statements out and then kind of walk away from them you know and it's said that you know we're completely a non-racist organization there it says it in our wording so everyone can go and do whatever they do usually but but she would also say and I would agree that getting the statements there and then having opportunities to reread and revisit is really really important and I think it is different in Canada in terms of how we maybe it's because we're smaller and less powerful and possibly but I think that we're a little bit more open to policy and to sort of social social policy as ideas for improving particular issues, social issues yeah I don't know if that's I just want to say I was reading the local paper at the Daily Mail yesterday and there was a editorial complaining about having opened the floodgates for indigenous respect and everything and I didn't know this was all happening being an American and I was delighted to discover it but then to immediately see that there's an opposing camp oh yeah no surprise but it makes me think to everyone here including the young dramaturgs that every achievement to move things forward it's frustrating but it has to be fought for because there's opposing forces that are trying to take it away all the time it's ridiculous but that's another part of the tough reality that these obstacles we have to deal with societally and they intersect with everything we do including theater yeah I want to hi I want to write a scene in Boston and I've heard you say so I've heard a favor ask specifically it seemed to me to be asking about gatekeeping that keeps out people of color artists of color systems that are really set up in oppressive supremacist ways and I feel like I heard you say work harder and I just wanted to know if that's indeed what the answer was or if there's more you want to say about that well I mean I think I think you know I agree with you I think things are really changing and that's because people are doing things I mean the change comes from the people who are doing things and when plays come along or productions come along or ideas for organizations come along I think that they will find reception the people who say no are not the creative people they're not the people who are going to think of the solutions to the things so it's it's the it is the change is going to come from the people who create and I believe that it's always come from the people who create and it always seems slow but I think it's you know look at the American Revolution I mean it took a while to do that to get done I I believe in the force of creativity and I think that if you create with a group of writers or collective or whatever and it's good you'll find your way and I think you have to have that I think you have to have that attitude and I think I don't know I mean I think there are many examples where well forever but recently as well where people really respond to that it's not you know it may not be the gatekeepers it may be other people who respond to it and then the gatekeepers going oh there is a market for this or oh there isn't you know not everyone has the same degree of imagination yeah there's a class and story and then you were saying that at one point I understood that as you have worked and you know deadlines are changing you have to put your opinions because how the creation is evolving is truly going to listen is changing and and you know you make the comment that we would we make ourselves all out of you know ideally we make ourselves out of job out of work and I'm very interested in that and I'm wondering how if you could articulate more on that in terms of of of that concept and where the work that you've been doing or this discovery this can you speak more to that sure I mean first of all the we is a really difficult word to use because who will be put out of work the we that includes I'm in my fifties I'm white I'm queer and that's probably maybe not the queer part but that's probably who I'm speaking about in terms of that that there are millions and millions of people who have stories that are not being valued not being heard easily paid good money to see those stories told and and so the question of gatekeeping went back to sorry my mind's all over the place but went back to that because it connects it's it's quite simply that we're the population in the world has significantly changed it was already not the way we were told it was like the story of colonization is a really great story that's just one I grew up believing it was the story like it was the Bible and colonization it was like that was the world you know so with respect to the ways in which we create story the timelines are part of that original idea and and that's tied to capitalism and that's tied to the ordering of the chaos of the world it's a really great it was very, very brilliant to do one thing it's also deeply damaging and negates the stories and voices of so many other people so that I think impacts every way in which this country I hope in Canada will start to tell different stories and so the work that I've been doing in particular the National Life Center and the opening of an indigenous theater department there for me it's so critical because I think that that's the center of our story that's where we need to stand in this space we need to look to those traditions to the people who were here first and let a new kind of story and a new way of processing collaboration to emerge from from this ground from this land not from an import of an idea which has those trains running on time you know thank God the trains ran on time like I love trains running on time because I grew up in that tradition I'm attuned to that I will fall back to that and so all I can say is be as uncomfortable if you're a white person be as uncomfortable as you can be at any turn put yourself in situations where you're not sitting on the stage and speaking about what you know try to find ways to turn that around so that yeah yeah Amy, yeah Hi there Amy Brooks Roadside Theatre and I want to thank you for all the talk you've done about community and arts and I really appreciate that Ann and shout out and I do a theater and I do a roadside theater as well I feel it but I do want to lift up what Friedra and Alana have been saying about arts world in the quality because I know for the early career dramaturgists it's something that the artists who are going out into this world are facing an economy where arts we know from Jeff Chang and Andy Horowitz The Atlantic and the Hill and Countdown it's worse than U.S. income in a quality right now and I just want to throw out a couple of figures of every foundation dollar 11 cents goes to the arts 5.5 cents of that goes to arts organizations with budgets of more than 5 million who make up just 2% of all the arts organizations but only once in every foundation dollar goes to arts organizations half a cent goes to arts organizations doing what they call social justice work so it's not I just want to kind of uplift this idea that I really don't believe it's just a well be a livable force of history and artists will always have to push back there's a real machine in place now to disempower artists from marginalized communities and that's a different city problem that's a rural working class problem so my question for you is as allies who are on different sides of the economic spectrum how can we connect our communities to realize this beloved community that I believe we are all working for we are I mean it seems like a no-brainer to me you gotta do it I mean when you say you do you mean me? no I mean you no this room I mean the artists have got to do it the government is not gonna do it I mean look at the United States right now are we expecting members of congress to come enlightened and do this I mean and I don't know that's really there have been advocates in past decades that have understood this but it's not coming from that end it's coming from people creating things that people want to see that become a phenomenon and maybe it's a phenomenon of 80 people a night or 70 people a night or neighbors or broad or whatever but it comes from it comes from the ground it's always come from the ground it isn't asking people who you can't access and have no interest or understanding or appreciation of it to change they don't get it they're never gonna get it they never have got it it's created by artists no one you know has ever appointed any artists any playwright you love to anything nobody gave August $100 and said create you know a cycle of plays he just started writing I mean so that's what I'm saying it's you have agency it's up to you and it's your collaborators your mission your belief you're talking somebody into giving you a space you leaflet things people to get people to come I mean that's how it's always been and it's usually because you don't like the theater to check off you know they hated Salvini so they started you know the Moscow Art Museum and I think that that sense has not changed through the history of theater it's up to the artists who don't like what's going on to change it and they are I'm afraid I'm gonna have to wrap things up now but thank you both so much thank you Ann thank you Sarah