 Thank you so much for coming to tonight's event, I'm Teres Dredd, Director of Education and Outreach here at the Guild and I would like to welcome you with a brief salute. Salute me, it's my birthday. Oh, yay! That's the number I would mention. I'm not just streaming across the world. Happy birthday to me. But I can't think of a better way to spend my birthday than to hear these two gentlemen tell us about their craft, their career and anything else that comes into their mind. I'm very excited. I do want to remind you to please turn off your phones or anything that might make noise. We are streaming online so we want to keep the ambient noise to a minimum. Please no pictures, please don't post a Facebook, no Twitter or anything during the event. We will have a section for questions and answers at the end so once that the question and answer period will start I will let you know and then I will take questions. Once we do that I ask that you please stand up and ask your question, that way everybody in the room can hear you. If you have any desires for people that you would like to see in future seminars, please go through to email me. And on the back of your program there is a list of the rest of the seminars for this semester. So without any further ado I am very proud to present to you not only two wonderful writers but two very kind, generous men. Richard Nelson and Michael Law. And by the way there is an article outside on the table just as you leave. I printed it out without Richard's permission. It's a speech he gave for the Laura Powell Foundation and it's one of the best and most thorough statements about playwriting in the country over the last 20 years the way it's evolved. I don't think anything has changed very much since he talked about it. In fact some things have gotten a lot worse than they were. We will talk a little bit about this as well. But it's a very good atomizing the situation for a playwright right now. How many people here are playwrights by the way? I see. Okay. An interesting group. I'll start out and ask Richard a question I've warned him about this. Who do you write for? Who do I write for? That's a great question and one that changes. I find that the cliche is the truth. I write the best when I write for myself. I find that when I try to push things into some place I write less well. When I'm just trying to please myself. I push myself as far as I can. And what the hell if nobody understands or a lot of people don't understand or whatever. That's when the work is best. But you have dramaters to help you correct. Do you always know where your play is going to be done when you're writing it? Not always, but I've been fortunate to have had a series of poems throughout the last 20 years. Where are they from? I had a home and still have it in England at the Royal Tricks Company. Which has done 10 of my plays over 20 years. And then I have had a home continue at Playwrights Rises. Which has done a number of plays. I don't know, seven of my plays or something like that. Over the course of a fairly short period of time. And I'm right now in a situation with the public theatre. Where I've done three plays of the public in the last four years. And I have three more scheduled. So I will have over a seven-year period. We've got six plays done at the public. So we'll have a play. So I have, right now for example. And I was working on it today. I'm writing a play. Not only do I know where the play will be done. I know when the play will be done. And I know who will be in it. Before I write it. Which is a really thrilling and rare case. Because there's this series of plays at the public. All based around the same group of people. Called the Apple Family. And the first play was called Hope You Changed You Thing. The second one was called Sweet and Sad. And then I'm working on the third one right now. And I've had a commitment from the public. From Oscar Eustice and the public. Which he's committed to doing the plays before they're written. And each of the plays has the exact same set. So I have the same set. I have the same actors. Same characters to put a different play each time. And then the odd thing is that each play will open or has opened on the day that it is set. So it's an extremely immediate experience. For example, the last one, Sweet and Sad, was written, was set on and opened on this September 11th, 2011, the 10th anniversary. And the next play will open on November 6th, 2012. Which is our election day. And it's set on that day. So I'm writing a play set. Right now it's set in the future. That will open in the present. And then run in the past. Are they political? Depends on what you mean. Why don't you explain? What do you mean by that? Well, no. I want to know what you would mean by political. It's a long explanation. Well, okay. We've got it now. I mean, what is the political play? It's a really important and complicated thing to think about. There are kinds of plays that which are, which we call adjunct properties, plays that are dealing with specific subjects and trying to convince an audience of people of a specific point of view. That doesn't interest me. That has value. But it doesn't interest me. And it doesn't interest me, basically, for the simple reason that I think it's an abstraction of theater as opposed to an essential element of theater. It doesn't use theater for what it really is. Theater for me, and I used to tell my students this all the time when I taught for the very short period of time, theater is the only artistic form that uses the entire life of human being as its expression. The entire life of human being. The front of live people. Live people, live people from the same room. That is the essence of theater for me. So what that means is that theater also carries with it by a very nature point of view of the world. And that point of view is humanistic. Theater is a humanist art form by its very nature, by what it is, human beings at the center. So it's not ideas at the center. It's not an ideology that's at the center. It's not an agenda that's at the center. It's the complexity and the confusions and ambiguities of human beings at the center. So when I say that a natural proper play that has a certain political agenda, I say that it's an abstraction of theater because it doesn't use really the essence of theater. It just takes an element of it, which is a presentation of something that doesn't really use really what it uniquely is. Now, with that set aside, I believe that if you have a human being and you put him or her on the stage, that a human being exists in a society, in a culture, in a world. And you want to deal with that individual dealing or reflecting or refused about that society in that world. So in that sense, my plays have a political, political place in the sense that in the sense that my characters bought my own life experience and the world that I live in, my characters have political concerns. But those concerns aren't necessarily what my plays are about, but the characters have political concerns. So is that a political player? I don't know. It's such a big issue that when we were through the 1990s and we watched the final stages of what I would say the end of ideologies. And if you felt as a playwright like I did a responsibility of somehow putting on stage a world that reflected the culture and country that I lived in, it was an interesting, dramaturgical playwright issue of how do you hold that together? How do you put a society on stage without an ideological framework? It became a very interesting question. And it's one that is still being debated to discuss, or I tempted that, that the playwright, our friend David Hare, David Hare has turned his sights in a very different way trying to solve the same problem, which is in a journalistic format, his most recent plays, most of his most recent plays, he's actually gone out and interviewed things, interviewed people, and put the interviews together to create a kind of journalistic framework, which is a non-ideological framework, but one that deals with social, immediate social issues. I've tried in this Apple family plays to make something so immediate, so in which the room is all experiencing exactly what my character is experiencing, is what's happening in this election, or how do we deal with a 10th anniversary of 9-11? That's somehow the very nature of the society and social issues are given within the conversation of that room, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I felt when I watched it that there were people who were reflecting politics without knowing they were. It was an odd exercise. It was as if you made us aware of how they were revealing themselves at moments when they weren't aware of it, which I'd never seen quite that way. Usually when you deal with a playwright who would present themselves in some way politically, they'll tell you at some point what the person represents, what the weight of their value is, and you didn't do that a lot of the time, or you did it in reverse so that the person seemed to be pointing for something, but it was really quite a different thing that you were watching them fulfill. And it was interesting, I had some people who were first read to say the first play, that's going to represent this part of the ideological issue. I said, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. You're all going to contradict themselves in this play. They don't know what they would be doing. That's what the point is. And because I directed these plays and when I talked to my actors at the beginning of rehearsal from each one of these plays, I said to them the same thing, that our job on this stage is very simple or very clear. It is to put people on stage who are as complex, confused, ambiguous, lost as anyone human being in the audience. And we will always fail, but that's our ambition and that's it, period, no more. So you see that, I'm not sure that strikes one as what a political playwright should be saying. Well, I mean, I think it's very, it could be seen as a very political position to take in a play, because it's almost the antithesis of everything Western David's been about, since the Greeks, where there's somebody in the chorus or somebody who represents the normalizing core of the audience who states what the proper position is at some point. And that way you gain what maybe our visual artist would gain by perspective, everything falls into the right perspective. But you have that, but you remember, what do you remember about these characters? You remember the characters, you remember the people, you remember Medea. I only remember the chorus. But what do you remember about rep? What is really moving about rep? It's those moments in Galileo where it's the human being. Those moments in Mother Courage, when it's Mother Courage. That's what seems to be still alive. But the distinction I'm making is, yeah, that's the memorable part. That's what you've got to reach when you've got to be a part of the people. But I think to make the audience feel that they understand the experience as a common bond, there's usually an element in the play that tells you, oh, that was a good argument, if it's you know what I mean? Everybody in the audience would go, yeah, well, without that, they might worry. And you're saying, you're taking all of that information away. So there's no way you can line yourself up. That's a political position. You're saying, we don't have it anymore, basically. Why did you start directing your own suit? I started to have to say something. I've been writing plays for a long time. I'm 61 and I started when I was 15. And I've written since then, always, many, many plays. And I always thought that the playwright should never direct his own work. I mostly still agree with that. And I even, I wrote a book with the friend of mine, David Jellian. And while making plays, I wrote the writer-director relationship in today's theater. And I said many times in that book, you know, they're actually directed play. I fell into it over a series of events. One was just a play at the Royal Shakespeare Company, a children's play that I wrote for the company. And the person who was supposed to direct it like that wrote back down a few weeks before. Something happened. And the artistic director, I do know the last of I, would do it because they already had the actors just a children's play where they all cared. So he asked me to do it. And I said, I would, if he would come to a run-through. And the artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company never come to a run-through. They just let the director do what they do. And so he came to a run-through and he just looked at me and said, see, I told you it was easy. Pretty good. Pretty good. And I enjoyed the tech. I enjoyed it. Then a few, I was in, there was a play of mine. Again, a director backed out. Another director took over. That was not working out. And I ended up taking over at the request of the producer, the production then. And I changed it and did a good job. And I began to just sort of do, sort of fell into it that way. But the main thing is this, that's just the history of it. The psychological thing is this, is that I learned, I realized something about my writing doing this personal directing thing. Is that when I write a play, I don't hear my phone. And I don't see them. And that I feel that it's all a dynamic. I work out for the dynamic. I mean, if that makes sense, meaning I could take a play and I could close my eyes and go, this happens, this is not. Then this wouldn't. And then that's it. I sort of see that. That feels right. So I realized I could go into rehearsal and even though all the actors would go, oh my God, he's the director and the writer, he knows everything, knows all the words, everything is going to be terrible. I would go, I don't know how to do this. I really don't know how to do this. And they didn't believe me for a while. But then after watching me, they would say, I didn't know how to do this. And I would just simply say, I said, look, just what I said, I feel plays. I don't know how they should be done. But I feel them. So it's up to us to sit together and try to figure it out, work together. But it's the only thing. Because I feel them, I know when they're wrong. I know when something's wrong. So when it's wrong, just trust me. I say it's wrong, and we'll try something else. That's all I ask. And so we, and I tried to break through every kind of some authority position because it was way too much authority to be in the room. So I, you know, never sat behind the tables. No music staff, never quoted a line correctly. All those kinds of things to make sure that everybody didn't think I was just pushing things on board. But I, so I felt that, so I found a way of working and having sat for 20 some years besides some of the best directors in the world directing my work. I've learned a lot and watched a lot and seen a lot. And some things I've learned good and some things I've learned. I can see where they made mistakes and always they made mistakes. The mistake was always the same. The mistake was they didn't listen. They didn't listen to the actors. The actors, the actors, they might have a bad idea but figure out where that bad idea is coming from. If you trust that actor, if you feel that actor is in the right place, just coming from the right place, not a selfish place but trying to do the play. And so I, I can't believe it. Anyway, so I started, you know, I just started directing the plays. And Rimmer, by the way, Rimmer has it because I know a lot of actors have been in his plays. It's very irritating. They all think he's the best director they've ever worked in. He's so easy. Because I also don't think you should direct your own plays but Richard is an exceptional director. Most playwrights I've seen are a wonderful crew that he shouldn't. So we talked a little bit about discussing how theaters change since, Richard and I both met in 1975 or so. I think, I know exactly where we met. You don't remember, but we met in 1978. Already critical. Yep, 1978. And we met, I was just there last week. Yep, I'm moving to Williamstown in the summer, and at the, maybe 77, maybe 77, at Williamstown and on the steps. At the Pine Mountain School. Well, first we met on the steps of the Main Street. There's little steps there. Well, a long time ago. He made an impression. Very important. And he's also just to say, I haven't said, he's an extremely generous man. You must know the mentoring that Mike has done for years and years and years with emerging playwrights. But that goes back to me. He was very generous to me. And there was one time, he was making infinitely more money than I was. And there was one time where he, that I was having some difficulty about something. And he was in England doing a movie. And he said, I'll call you. He's having a talk device. He says, you know, this is a movie. They'll let me run up this dab on his phone and I can just call you from the hotel room. And we run the phone for like an hour. I have no idea how much that costs. We love you. We're going to produce the guy. But it's just a really generous man. I also have no memory. I can't remember. So much generosity. So talk about a little bit about how you see your career. There's a theater changing in the time that you've been in the business. Well, we both, we both hit the nonprofit theater in America at the time of, and it's not quite birthed to be, but close enough to have seen the baby and the hopes of what the nonprofit theater could be and where it was coming from. Where it was being, what was driving it. And it was a reaction to the commercial theater. It wasn't attempting to be the minor league through the commercial theater. It was a real alternative. And it was our tip artists living by and large. The heads of the theaters were artists or people who certainly had the artist's interest at heart, ambitions with the, and I mean just not playwrights, but also directors and certainly actors, our efforts to creating acting companies for actors to work out a human wage to support their families, to have careers in one place that were not as perhaps not as the skeptetic had been the case. And that was the hope. And for one reason or another, I think I watched that whole thing. I think when I taught students, I would tell them, don't look at certain theaters as if they had existed forever. Look at them, look that they could collapse and start your own. Or rethink things, because inch by inch by inch, by and large, for various reasons, some decent reasons, understandably reasons, that non-profit leaders have been co-opted by the commercial theater, or co-opted into another function of which could be serving some kind of a social place in the regional theater, like, oh, we have a theater, as opposed to a theater of huge artistic ambition. And I see that collapsed everywhere. I see that collapsed in organizations, organizations like the TCHE Theater Communications Group, which has changed its focus over the last 20 years, from one of our efforts to a broad range, to more of a barrier, which is a fine, but a very different approach. I see it in where we are right now in the drama skills, where my questions are great concerns over the way in which things have changed in how it sees itself in its function. And why do you think that happened? I think people, I think there's a lot of different reasons, money is certainly, but I think slowly, just the natural institutionalization of things, bureaucracies grow and then feed on itself and grow so forth. So I think that was just not stopped. You have, you know, one of the interesting differences between the major theaters in England and major theaters here, is that in England, someone is appointed to be artistic director for maybe two terms, terms are about five years, so no one runs a theater in England for more than 10 years. So they're actually, it's sort of their watch as opposed to their theater. And what that does is regenerate, hopefully, those theaters every 10 years, someone new comes in and whatever. Here you have theaters, which have been run by the same people for many, many, many years. And understandably, those people want the theaters to grow with their own age, their own ambition, their size, they want a better salary, they want this and that, and everything grows and grows and grows, it's out of proportion, and so you lose basically the thrust. But on top of that, and this is just seriously damaging, is that we as artists have lost our voice within these theaters. They are mostly management run, and there are very few. Going back to our youth, you looked at most of the major theaters in America, which would have employed a number of artists on salary within those theaters, either as acting companies, or sometimes as a playwright working, I worked as the literary manager of drama, a few different theaters around the country. There were associate directors who were also directing all the sort of plays and various things, but slowly the artists have become separated from the theaters. And that's a tragedy for us, and we've lost our voice in terms of arguing our place in. Yeah, I think also that decision making has become a committee function rather than an individual function. I remember recently submitting a play somewhere, I don't know where, and the artistic director very proudly said, I think this play is fabulous, but we decide by committee. So your play is being read by a lot of people, and we'll decide collectively whether we want to do it or not. And he was very proud of this. You know what I mean? Are you actually saying this is a good, why can't you just say it like this? A true story, when I wrote a play called Blue Sands, I sent it to the arena stage five days later, I sent it to one man who was running the theater, five days later I got a callback that said, we're doing your play in September. So obviously he read it and just said, we're going to do this. That would not happen now. It could not happen now. And that's not good. I think the fact is, I'm going to quote somebody very high up, but he was trying to do it. He said, a great institution is the long shadow of one great man. And if that person can't do it by man, I mean in the sense of human being, that's not male. If that person can't decide, that's what they want to do, the way Joe Pat could simply decide. I think you lose the momentum of one person in charge of the operation of it. It's not a democracy. It's not at all. It should be an artistic dictatorship. I think. Yes, the argument. Once I had a group of students together and I asked a lawyer, a big entertainment lawyer in New York would come and talk. And he said something to them that just shocked me. He said, two of the young nurses, well, it's every playwright's ambition to have his play on Broadway. Now that's a very insidious comment. Because it means if you don't have your play on Broadway, you've somehow failed. And so that it means if someone who's not on Broadway is producing a play, it's basically now the minor leagues are trying to get it to Broadway. So everything becomes this channel, as opposed to an alternative to the commercial theater, which is where the nonprofit theater began and where it's giving where it is now. Another thing, if you look at Richard's article on the table there, one of the things he points out is that in modern production, they assign you a dramaturge or a committee of people to help you betterize your play. This is actually kind of an expected step. And one of the things it does, in Richard's view, is it makes every play look like a failed attempt that is now going to be improved into something that's worthy. And he makes the distinction between that and say great texts of the past that are full of incongruities and contradictions. And when you do them, you simply solve those contradictions and incongruities, that's the challenge. But I also think that the other problem is that if you're going to be writing for, you know, storytelling medium like film or television or something like that, you're either going to be doing it as a gun for hire in television or film, in which case you expect to be told how to rewrite your work. Or you're going to make a choice and you're going to get paid for enhancement for doing that. Or you make a choice to write for the theater because in that instance you're the boss, you own the copyright, no one can change a word without your permission. And you get to say what you want to. You get to see the play you want to see on stage. But another part of the corporatization I think about the not-for-profit theater is it's starting to, I think it's just out of envy. They think the films are the big guys and that model of thinking starts to permeate in this insidious way. And they think, well part of what they do is they give notes, so let's give notes. And they tell you how to make your play better. Which is ridiculous because if you can, if the theater doesn't, isn't the place where you're allowed the deepest subjectivity in reporting the world, then there's no point in its existence. I mean as soon as somebody from a not-for-profit tells me, we have a dramaturge assigned to your play, I go, I mean first of all, it's an upfront to me. Because what dramaturge can know as much as I know? I mean these people haven't written plays. They haven't been around as long as I have. And they don't get fired if it doesn't go well. Whereas I have to face all those things so I get better at what I do just so I won't be humiliated. And I think that that kind of process of not trusting the individual writer of a play to do what they want, whether it's perfect, whether it's commercial, whether it's what they want or not, it is what the writer wants to see on stage. That's the point. Then there's no point at all. I'm sorry. I have feelings about this. But that definitely has changed my work. I mean, when I first came to Back to Mainland, where I lived until 1973, then Joe Pap was running a public theater. Zelda Fish Ender was running there on stage. Nina Vance was running the Stout Theater Center. You had a lot of people who were rebelling against the system that they thought was crippling, the healthy expression of theater. And I have heard increasingly talk from younger writers now that the not-for-profit theater has become that broad way and that needs to just be swept off the map and a new generation of theaters has to come into being. And one of the things at the new school where I teach that we're doing is we're trying to train the kids there to start their own theater companies when they get out of school. So they're not looking for work. They're making a way, hopefully, and about four of them have sprung up and I hope that will either start to give not-for-profit theater a run for its money so they realize that they have to change the terms of operation a little bit or to wipe them off the map and then something new will come in. I think theater has to keep undergoing these revolutions over time. And following that, I've been pitching the book proposals for a while and I can't get it placed because it's an anthology, an anthology of articles about the theater in two different periods. One is this period we're talking about. The early days of the not-for-profit theater and the end of the off-roadway movement where there was this alternative. But it felt 50 years earlier to 1910 to 1925 in the American theater there was a huge movement at that time in the same way, arguing the same thing. For example, in 1914, I think, the New York Times listed that there were 300 books published on the theater level in the United States. It's an anthology from that time but just some titles from the 1950, 1956, and 1970, the changing drama, contributions and tendencies, the art theater, discussion of its ideals, its organizations and its promise as a corrective or present-day evil in the commercial theater. The civic theater in relationship to the redemption of leisure, a book of suggestions. The playhouse and the play and other addresses concerning the theater and democracy in America. On and on and on, there's many, many more and it's fascinating, the arguments being made. And what came out of that in the 1910, 1935 was the little theater movement or the art theater movement. And that, of course, came to Kate and Jean O'Neill and the whole, the first real wave of the great American playwright. So, my argument, our argument in this book is exactly what Michael was just saying, that maybe there's a 50-year cycle because it's 50 years, 50 years, and not 50 years later. And so maybe these things have a wave and they break and they corrupt themselves and whatever, and now because the more and more talk of we need new models, we need new ways of being alternative to this co-op thing that's going on. I was remembering a little talk I saw Jose Quintero at a TCG conference. He was a very dramatic man and he was saying how when he started that theater and did O'Neill's plays on Bleecker Street, he would go up to Washington Square with a sign and say, come on down, there's a play coming here by this guy, Jean O'Neill, you've got to see it. And he'd get people and he said it's free, you can contribute when it's over and he would go around with a, he said he'd go around with a metal pop and he wouldn't look at the people because he couldn't stand to know what they were giving him. But whenever he heard a clink, he was disappointed because that was a coin. But when he felt the kind of swishy thing, that was a dollar bill and he was very, very happy. He said we would be overjoyed when we came away with $7 for the evening. And then he looked around and this was all these in the heyday of Not For Profit at a conference where they'd pay $250 to come and stay in a hotel and hear about the greatness of Not For Profit. And he looked around and the people talked to him. He said, and you people all expect money. That was his conclusion. I realized that the difference between somebody who really gave his life to do what he wanted to do, he didn't think of it as a career, which it would be nice if it was. It's nice in Europe when you can do it that way. But I also think there's another side of this, you know, it may seem ironic coming from somebody who's been successful in the business, but my first teacher was an Indian cloudist, Susha Mukherjee. And he said when I was 14, he said, you know, listen, if you're going to go into the arts you have to understand something. It's not a career. It's a way of living. And be content with that. Find a way of living in the arts. If you try to make a career of it and you fail, you'll be very, very, very disappointed. But if you live in the arts, you can't fail. So just for what it's worth. Have we covered an hour yet? No. Just following on that. There's another press. Besides the starting new theaters and new theater models, there's something that I've been arguing for some time and gotten a little bit of traction. But it's a different way of looking at the theaters that already exist. There's a lot of people, like I was even applying a second ago, that in other countries and certainly in Europe, there's much more money given to the theater, to the arts in America. That's really not true. I would say that probably more money, more public money is given to the theater or the arts in the United States than any other country in the world. The difference is in the way in which it's given. We give, in the United States, that public money is to tax deduction. So if someone, say, if anybody still has a 30, just 30% tax, a wealthy person's 30% tax, a tax-free 3% tax, so a $100,000 gift to Manhattan Theater Club, actually $33,000 of that is our money, public money. But we don't have any say about how that money is used. Foundations, which also deal with public money because they're tax-free, also have a responsibility of dealing with public money. So it's a question of trying to make accountable, making those who actually pay a little more accountable or recognize their own responsibility to the art that they're funding. But they actually have a responsibility greater than just dealing with managers through negotiation. I have argued, sereniously, to try to find a way to put artists in terms of theater, in terms of theaters and funders and together in a conversation, which I think could actually push theater forward in an artistic way. Because I think most of these funders would be, if one should get to them, might be open to some of the suggestions and be quite surprised at how their money is actually used and how it's being protected and kept from artists, actually. But it's a way forward in terms of dealing with the organizations which we have. It's a hugely threatening way forward in terms of the managers of these theaters. And by the way, all of this, I don't think it's to brush aside the idea of having a very commercially successful play. It's just how you're getting there and why you're doing it that really matters. I mean, if you're trying to second-guess all the way so that you'll have a popular success, I think you're probably going to do yourself an injury. But I have talked to the director, Milesh Foreman, who I worked with on a number of films who came up in Central Europe under sort of a centralized government. And everything that you had relit in the movies as a student had to have in it somewhere a taste of the politics that showed you were on the side of the authorities. And so they got very good at smelling where in the line. It's a little false, but it does prove the party line. And therefore, you're going to get the head of the production to greenlight your film. And always they hated that moment in a movie, in a movie script that they had to write. They just didn't, you know, they could see at that moment you'd sold out. And they used to be shown American films like Serpico and Chinatown and they'd be told, look at how corrupt the society is. And all they would be thinking is, my God, they're allowed to make films like that. That's incredible. So it was the best advertisement we ever gave to the communists to come to America. And what he said is there was one thing they couldn't stop ever in the authorities that was popular success. They had to make a film that everybody connected to. The authorities were helpless. So their biggest revolutionary act as filmmakers was to make a film that everybody loved. And that's what they tried to do without insulting the intelligence of the public. But that's what they were going for as a kind of revolutionary tactic. And if you can do that and make a movie the way he did when he made Fireman's Wall, there was a huge success and he made tons of money but it's true. Everything in that movie is true. That's the hat for it. So my turn to ask. So who do you write for? Well, that's what I asked you. I would say it changes, but it doesn't actually. Because once I'm writing I can't control it. Once I start it just becomes me. And if I try, it's awful. So I write what I can. I mean, I'm always trying to write for everybody. But I have a bad misunderstanding about who everybody is. I think they're all kind of like me. No, I mean, I really can't. I've talked to writers who say they write very specifically from the audience. I've written one charge, play for children and I wrote for kids. But the only discipline I gave myself is that something had to happen every minute. There had to be some kind of action because they're not going to listen for long but these are for five or six years. And that was the only discipline I gave myself. But otherwise I wrote the same and actually some of the pieces that were done said that's kind of like a little twisted, you know, what you wrote there. And that's just how I write. I can't help that. So that was a children's version of it. But I don't think about, you know, if somebody said, unless it's like, write this movie for a lot of money, it's really stupid. Then I'll write a stupid movie about it. But that's not writing. That's, that's, that's toile. And so what you've had it's not easy. I know. So so what what brings you constantly back to the theater? You've got a, I showed you a book from my my bookcase, 1971 of Mike Welles Cancer. So you've long, long, long career but what brings you back to the theater besides ownership of the couple? Well, that's a good reason. It's a fact that they can't they can't take it away from you. And once it's there, it can be done a lot of different times. So even if it's not good in one production, it could be good in another one. You know, you have a lot of chances to make it through it. Right? And also, there's a certain thing. I mean, everybody hears a playwright. I mean, a lot of people hear a playwright. So you know when you get in a room with actors and you're discovering things together and then you're putting up a show and people are coming to see it. That momentum of it that doesn't exist in other meetings where you really, you know, you film, you stop, you edit, how does that take? No, let's do it again, wait, there was a shadow there's a boom mic, let's do it again tomorrow. You know, that drives me nuts. And you never get to see the the performance flow from beginning to end. The actors never get to take over and make it their own. And I like all that. You know, I like to see an actor do things I never anticipated with a line, with a scene. I like to see the thing unfolding and go, God, there's a whole scene here I didn't do. I could put it in. That's all the great stuff, you know. I like that. And I like to see audiences watching that. I like how different they are every night. You know, there's some nights where it's like the audience that ate it's young and they just sit there and they go like that. And then the next night the same play you can't even see I mean, we'll go back and go they really played it great tonight. But, you know, you don't know why the next night they're roaring and they're just totally involved in the mystery of that communion in a performance is to me a really exciting thing to watch over and over again. There's a sort of really ineffable quality about the contact that happens when it's good, when it's going right. And it's a really interesting thing when it's not to try to figure out what's not functioning What did you do wrong? What did you overlook? What have you made clear? What's not interesting? Is there something more in terms of just the form itself of theater? Because you've written plays in all sorts of forms. You've got ballads, so to speak it's sort of an epic musicals, you've written very sort of domestic plays you've written a play about an imaginary cartoonist, cartoonist they're not magic characters but so theatrically you keep going at the form in different directions that's I like to mess around and I also like to get a sound in my head a style in my head a sound or something and channel it I like the idea of pretending well you've done that you've done like old time parses but there are Richard Nelson versions of it and I like that I like to try to channel an old form or a strange form or an unusual form and see how it comes after it and then you see it develop on stage and it's wild completely that's the other thing when you write I think there's always a conscious plan when you say about writing but then something else takes over the ghost enters it if you're lucky and when you see that happen on stage the part that you didn't know was going on and you go oh my god when it starts to realize what you've actually well I mean it can be terrifying because you realize like there's a part of you you didn't know about that's really bad you know that you see it's on stage now and it's really bad and there's other times when you go man I didn't know I could do that that's great so that discovery is really that's worth living for and right and the same question you asked me in terms of public where you work in politics well you know I wanted to write political theater I really wanted to write political theater I moved to England when I was in 66 I studied there and there was a lot of very political writing happening John Arden John Osborn in a different way Arnold Wester so a lot of people like this were working and then I went to Venice for the Biennale where the Berlin ensemble company was doing uh three penny opera Cori Lanos and Artur Uli those three productions and I was four I've never seen theater like this in my life it was perfect I mean the tiniest character in the band was doing something so specific you understood everything about his life just by the way he was reacting to the speech so I decided I'm going to join the Berlin ensemble and that's my future so I found out where Helena Bible was staying I don't know if I've ever told you this story I found out where she was staying at the Excelsior hotel and I camped outside her door and they tried to get me away you know they very polite Italian you know hotel workers tried to reason with me and I said no no no I'm waiting for her to describe me so she finally came with this entourage behind her and said oh you're the American that's making all the trouble well come on and she invited me in importance and sherry and said so now tell me what do you want to do and I said well I want to work for the Berlin ensemble I'll do anything I'll sweep floors you know whatever and she said oh this is so charming this American enthusiasm of course you know German yes I said you want to know but I'm very quick you've read of course all of Marx and I'm like well we did there was one lecture in it I think I read that chapter she said well that's our language Frank you know in the Berlin ensemble so you have to be familiar with all the work and here's what I would suggest go back to England read all of Marx to learn German and then I promise when you come to see me next time I'll see what I can do so that was my introduction to political theater and of course you know the spell wore off and I got to England again although I did take German and I did learn some great poems in German and then I realized little by little I I didn't believe that that political theater per se you know David Hare was doing Tanshen in that kind of video I didn't think that that was hitting it right and that's exactly the time that I saw the fireman's wall which was playing at the Kersen cinema and it was just about firing putting on a pop if you hadn't told me it was a political metaphor for Czechoslovakia I would have just thought it was the funniest movie I've ever seen about fireman and that suddenly I realized that was great political theater because it was about itself but if you understood how to watch it it was about everything that you couldn't say any other way and I thought more and more that if I want to write plays that had to do with the form of pressure of political circumstance on people's behavior it would have to be by micro observation and by just getting their behavior right because nobody does anything that's not politically determined in some way that's what I decided and so that's the direction I work on and did you I've never asked you this there's a span of your work you're just tracking a generation different people and that sort of has continued has that been a consciousness that's just something to come out that's just coming out as you grow older you write about I think if I grew up in a family I'd write about family but I didn't so I wrote about the people I grew up with which was my cohort, horizontal that's who I just knew best what was around me but I do think if I had a family growing up I would have probably written with the same intensity about that the group was my family so I was coming to know the world through them yeah I I have an idea I do try like some Americans abroad or two Shakespeare actors an acting company can you hear about that no shout there's something about two Shakespearean actors and some Americans abroad that are placed by Richard about groups of people that he was comparing to the groups that I wrote about I mean it's when I when I started trying to find a way out of a non-ideological world you know that sounds slightly pompous I think that's what I was trying to do as a writer my conscious solution became one of looking for groups which is then I distilled into about a family and the writer who suddenly loomed and became very very important to me was Ibsen who was a writer who had met nothing to me but I found I suddenly realized that I stay like any of the people which is often seen as some kind of big epic it's about the city, about the town about the whole whatever it's really just about a family there's two families in the play everybody's either in a newspaper everybody's in the stock room that's it one other exception and a drunk and it's simply about a family realizing that the family unit or in the case with Mike servant family unit is that there within the dynamic of is our society so one way in which I have been in my steadily trying to get out of where I was or move on from where I was was just trying to find a way of articulating the complexity of the society without gluing together with an ideology that makes sense and so the blue what's really holds together is something that we in the audience with the audience in the play will always share which is the nature of a family because everybody has a family sort of another so that the family unit in terms of play writing which has become the notion has become sort of slightly disparaged as a sort of an in-show looking way of talking about the world but in fact within that family unit I mean this is probably obvious to everybody but to me within that family unit became the potential of representing pretty much every twist and turn and one could find within the society of art and that so the focus that intensity of that focus came about constantly working out those very working on exploring articulating those ever-shifting relationships as it was reflecting the society in that sense I think we should have some questions yes so yeah Terry why don't you and if I really please shout out if you can hear me just shout out I remember it's your birthday that's right don't ask how old I am you know my name is Mark Weston I've been teaching at Screen Actors Guild Conservatory writing my 19th year now helping actors use their dialogue that they they have that ability to write dialogue and many have succeeded I was blessed many many years ago in meeting a man named Dwight Taylor I don't know if anybody knows the name but his mother was Lorette and Dwight gave me something I feel the most precious thing I've ever gotten as a playwright the use of the theme the use of finding that one major theme and allowing that to take you through you know and I wondered if that hit any kind of knowledge or understanding here the use of the theme before you start writing know the root know the main area you're headed for I didn't meet him in time so I've been winging it I don't think so I mean no I mean I'm not aware of ever having a theme really I'm aware of a tone I'm aware of sort of stuff I want to say but it I don't know I'm never aware of a theme and therefore my work is probably shallow you think it's because you started in music that you hear a tone first? No I don't think that's what he means by theme I mean I know when people talk about theme what they mean it's a kind of unifying think area you know and that's not the way I unify simple question when you have a media when you have the date and you have the there and you have the actress is it easier to write at that time or more difficult? It's just different it's scary because you have a you can't get out of it you know you have to do it so that's scary and that's liberating and that sense of confidence is thrilling confidence that people have in you and the confidence you have in yourself to get yourself into that so but it's a different kind of a problem each is a different if I have the choice I'm very happy to know that my pen is going to happen when it's going to happen, when it's going to happen I'd rather go that way than simply into a book I'm lucky In view of what you were saying earlier about before you started doing it directors shouldn't direct their own play and then you sort of eased into it so to speak do you feel or did you feel that way about performance actors performing because I'm an actress performing in their own work because I've had negative and positive opinions about that I mean I would guess I don't really have much experience I'm not a performer and I know a number of performers who have written one woman or one man shows and do that sort of thing that makes sense to me because that's all in the event I totally get that to do, to write a play and then act in it is I carry with it a lot of problems, a lot of complications for the director for the other actors the question of authority actually what's going on you have a process that's about it should be about searching everybody searching together towards a goal but if you have one person in the room certainly who should be searching who knows the answers then you have the searching starts to feel bold so that's what I see that's what I meant as the playwright but I don't have the answers and therefore I convince the actors that actually it's a real search and it really is because I don't know what I'm doing and what should be and so if an actor felt the same way they wrote it but they don't know how to do it and they're willing to open themselves up to a search with other actors then I could think it would work but if they know then I think that's a problem for everybody else does that make sense? it hasn't been my experience that I know the couple of things that I've done because I learned from oh that's what I meant and I hear the other actors through me now so I know what you're saying yeah hi can you know when it's time to share the work when in a certain point in your writing it's time to share the work it depends where you're like I just have a few scenes someone's got to see it or it's got to be this certain point or it depends on the personality well when is the time to turn it over? I have a strong opinion on it I think you should turn it over when it's done that is will you know you've done everything you can I think what Mike was referring to what I wrote about earlier is this whole world where everybody who's being helped to write their play I think that's a very dangerous thing you should take hold of your own play and finish it it doesn't mean that you won't change it you don't listen to other opinions but do the best you can the moment you open up and say I don't know how to finish my play help me I think you're in big trouble and you're opening up a few cannibals that I don't really should open up that's my strong opinion I have three people I send my play over now this has taken me 40 years to find and the other thousands that I've given it to I didn't get any good information from them so I've found three readers that I've given to give my plays to when I think there's nothing more I can do and I listen to what they say I have the same I have my five people who are my first readers are they in the professional or are they a mix or they're all very advanced people you would have heard of them you would have heard of them they're all advanced people one's not in a profession there's a wide range from someone who's a designer someone who's a director there is a range when you guys started writing there was no internet there was no cable television with a thousand channels video games do you worry that theater has become more of a marginalized part of our culture and do you worry about that going forward the role of theater in American life I know it's happening but I don't worry about it because there's nothing much I can do about it and when you say marginalized I think it's a different experience that you have in those two in very fast media like twitter internet facebook and all that a certain way of communicating happens in that way but in a theater it's a totally different kind of communication and the big problem for me in theaters to reach the audience I want to be speaking to because it used to be I wanted I just wanted to get very young people in the theater to be watching my plays and when I first started writing that's who came and I was writing about them but now when I'm writing I'm not writing for the same cohort and when I meet very young people I wonder how I could possibly they would understand but I do I don't worry that I'm made you know I'm marginalized by the internet I think the art is changing it's becoming a different thing as it was for instance when I remember one as a kid like I was six or something and there was a big argument in my house because there was a huge event happening and who was going to look after me it was a big debate they couldn't get a babysitter and there was no way they were not going to go to this there was a big argument about this it was a reading by Robert Lowell and it was like impossible to get tickets to it was a rock star so I got left behind because they had to go and see Robert Lowell and now you could say is he marginalized now because we have like a rap no he's still a couple of Lowell he's still reading his work and he's still getting a lot out of it it's just not that doesn't occupy quite the same culture in each thing and I think as I was saying earlier the theater has a it's a unique thing that phrase that you said it's the entire life of a human being what that really means is that it's the only art in which human beings are talking to other human beings who are listening to what you're saying it's only and I think Twitter will fade because some other mention will come in I think the internet as we know will change the fate of some other invention but we have no new invention for people sitting in the same room and listening and talking to each other and as long as that exists there'll be theater and theater will be a significant and important part of any culture it may be buried in time but it will always be there because of what it is this is a three-part question I wanted to know on average how long it takes you each to write a full length play and I was wondering how many readings you do and then when you're directing do you make any changes to the script have you been tempted when you heard an actor maybe struggling with the line to rewrite the line or do you hold fast to the original line let me answer the last one first the the what I do in a rehearsal room is I always tell the actors that I'm throwing the playwright out because I don't want the playwright in the room and then I say then I say at night I go and I pour him a drink and I talk to him about the problems and I know he's stubborn and maybe I can convince him to make some changes if he doesn't make those changes then we just got to take away his key so I do that over and over and over again I would never, I do not change lines in rehearsal because you just think I don't change them in rehearsal because that's just too dangerous because I'm wearing another hat doing it it's just too, let's try it it doesn't work to pause not think about it overnight and come back so that's my rehearsal in terms of how long what is writing a play? the 90 pages, 95 pages something like that there's not that many words in a play physically it doesn't take too long to actually punch out a play but a play is much more than punching it out so is it where you have something in your notebook thinking about it or whatever for the last 15 years 15 years to write the play when you started taking notes specifically for something and how long there's note taking or is it when you start to put words on it I always outline it in my head or on paper or whatever before I begin to proceed so I have some sense of where I'm going and some sense of what the whole thing would be so I sort of have it all in my head by the time I actually write so the writing process is a couple of months maybe but the preparation for that is to be and what about readings, how many readings would you have like I'm going to ask when you're in the reading process is it possible then you're changing lines with the answers I think readings are very very dangerous I'm not saying that can't be helpful but they are dangerous you have to be very careful about what you get from a reading what you want to get from reading I use this in this article that I mentioned I talk about how in a reading if you have a play with two people sitting next to each other and talking to each other like this and you do this in a reading it makes all the sense of the world you totally understand what's going on but if you have a scene, much more interesting with five, six or seven people moving around getting up, who they speak to whatever's going on that's the scene you write you try to do that and the reading doesn't make any sense do you allow people to judge that or you start judging it yourself because it's not working because the format of the reading doesn't allow it to work certain dramaturgical structures then you have to be very very careful so it depends on what I'm doing I have readings at the theater and says after they've agreed to do it I will never participate in person in a reading for judgment I won't be there it's just not fair I don't want to look at people's eyes that way at my work but if they've chosen it then sometimes it's a very useful tool to begin to sort of cast without casting that you bring in people to see if they can do certain things and try certain things and it's useful that way so there's a useful element of writing of it except for these plays that I mentioned that I'm writing about a specific time that's still in the future it's been helpful for me because I know the writing process has to continue up to opening night because I'm constantly changing it to fit what's happening in the day so then I find having a reading useful to just mark the moment where I am in this writing process thank you very much well I do I have to have readings because I don't have a theater that's sort of devoted I haven't filled up those relationships which it has with theaters so if I want to interest a theater in my play I have to arrange a reading where the artistic director comes and attends and stays away from people then I have to wait nervously while they say they'll do it or not but it's always an addition for the play it's kind of like and I've had the experience actually with Joe Papp he read a play of mine years and years ago and said no I'm not interested in this and then we finally got a reading together of it and he came to that and he said smart rewrites smart rewrites I'm doing that and I hadn't touched it so in some respects it's a tool to help people who don't know how to read plays anymore realize what it is on the page and there are a lot of people who really can't read a play there are other people in this very room who read plays religiously that's what they like to do and they can get a lot of things out of the play it's a rare quality in terms of how long it takes to write a play it's exactly what Richard said but I haven't figured out yet but I've been torturing over them for I mean one of them for about almost 40 years I just can't figure out how to do what I'm seeing other plays somehow focus immediately they fall into place and you write it's just you don't know you don't know what about 50 words how long did that take well it took not too long to write it up to the last scene and then I was sort of stuck and I put it away and then you know a long time after I heard something that helped me finish it not with standing direct in your own work would you speak to the director the writer-director relationship and including perhaps when you like to be participating in any of the productions and I wouldn't give it too much I mean it's the most fragile and the most intimate I think of relationships in the theater is simply that that I know of and each one is different and each one has its own dynamic like marriage show just how odd it is this book that I mentioned for making plays came about because my friend one of the directors directed many of my plays named David Jones David and I was sitting in a bar one day and David suddenly I realized that David had never seen another director directing play and I had seen some of the matrix direct my play and then I had a zip and I said I've never seen another playwright in the rehearsal room he said he directed John Arden Graham Green Hal Pinter so he said well that's going to be our book I'm going to interview about you about playwrights in the rehearsal room and you interview me about directors in the rehearsal room and we'll put together these interviews into the whole process of the play beginning from first meeting of what the problem can be what problems have been going on and it was a fascinating journey because you see just how it's a very fluid very intimate very complex relationship that can explode in an instant and can be incredibly you know incredibly productive artistic I'm sure it's important it's really important I used to say to people you know younger playwrights I used to say just when you meet a director who's interested in your work don't be thankful don't say oh thank you for liking my play don't go like that because the director needs a play to direct so you know to be understanding, respectful, engaging find ways to understand what that person is saying you know it's up to you to figure things out let the director start to suggest casting don't you say oh I want so and so and so and so not because you don't want so and so and so but you'll learn how the director is thinking by what he's saying casting go ooh he's thinking that way that's wrong now I know I've got to talk to him about that but you need to find your own strategies for understanding what he or she is thinking about your play and the difficulty is that when you interview a director upfront the one thing you can't tell about them is what kind of a ship they'll run and that's really everything once you cast it properly when you're in the room do they create the right balance of excitement and calm that makes for wonderful work when you're sitting across the table having a drink with them they can sound great but you just don't know when that ship is out in the water and a storm hits how are they going to guide it through so you have to ask around and find out how they've done interview other people who work with them and then you have to also hope I mean I've had directors who are great but they're bad in certain ways like they're not good dramaturgically but they're good notes about when something's not working they're not going to help you very much about it so I know going forward I'm not choosing this director to guide me at all in fixing anything that's not working but they're fantastic with actors and they're going to get wonderful performances out of them and it's only one set so they don't have to move things around very much which they're not good at so for this play I'll use them but for another play which is a very poetic choreographed with a timed orchestrated that director may be not at all the right person so you have to not just judge on one quality but what you need to that play in that circumstance Do you have a question? Both sound like strong playwrights and yet you've both written musicals Could you comment about that? I started I was a composer I was trained as a composer and the first thing I wrote was a musical so I it was very kind of modern later it would all be made into a play called Malcolm but I made it into a musical I didn't have the rights so I had to call it Fred it was a big success in my school I liked it I liked the dynamic of musical and I liked writing words because I like writing words and I liked singing and dancing it was a fun thing and you could make a kind of seriousness through the fun in a musical which I liked I've done it a few times recently and now I'm doing it with Dr. Javago which is a very mega production which is kind of Broadway next year and big I mean that's the first time I've actually been part of the crew of the battleship you might say and I find that my role I gather that the experience I'm having is unusual because it's pretty harmonious but my role it seems to be of solving problems in terms of the book writing and structure basically being the therapist I'm the calmest person among them so I tend to run around and put fires out when there's like late night things and I get calls late at night and I calm them down but actually when you see it on stage and you see 2,000 people watching it even though it does feel a little alien like this is not that much to do with me it's still kind of cool I find I like it I the first 15 times I would just see it my life was musical my mother was of course so she loved musicals and so then by the time I reached 17 I was reading Arthur Miller and I was too good for musical I was playing with the musical until I was well into my 30 when the director Trevor Nunn asked me to rewrite actually an entire new book for music and when he did he took me a sign Trevor at that point was the director of Cat's Ending and he took me a sign and he said I just have to tell you one thing one thing about me you need to know he said you need to be intent on self destruction and that's been some of my experience to be and I think we'll talk to Mike again next year it's to be a book writer of a musical is somewhat of a thankless job and you are there to you are everybody's punchy back because you are supposed to solve everybody's problems and actually make it not seem in the public so your alliance what I found which made the experience with Trevor good was that the alliance between book writer and director is extremely close to me because you both involved in almost the same job sewing the whole damn thing together sewing the disparate part and when I've had my most satisfying time with the musical that I directed as well James Joyce did and that I was the book writer and I conceived it and I directed it and I was the publisher and that gave me a sense that this was my vision a strong part of my vision and I had some control that was quick but it's just a soul book writer in a machine is a very tricky question thank you guys it's been really incredible hearing your thoughts I'm curious about how you deal with or if you have tools to deal with reviews and you know I know that could be what could it be good or bad just to bring to keep your sanity and protect yourself yeah I mean I do I always read my reviews and I always read my reviews when they come out so I don't hide from them I understand people who do or hide maybe the wrong word they just don't care or decide but I find that I just rather face things and deal with them as you get older it doesn't get easier but at the same time you have some history you have a history with individuals they didn't like that either they didn't like that either so you try to organize it in your head and you're looking for people the main goal for me is to look for people who can articulate back to me what my intentions are I I said I started the very first time that happened to me I can tell you it was in 1986 in London I took all that time many many plays many shows had reviews until 1986 and never once in all those reviews was ever my intention to articulate it back to me it was very hard it was a very lonely feeling I remember the day when I was opening up a review Victoria was done and I opened a review about Michael Billington in The Guardian and I remember where I was and I remember it was opening up and I was leading against this wall in London and looking and saying so I am not mad and I'm seriously mad I am not insane because if someone can write back to me what I intend then I've gotten it across somehow so I looked for that that's a very positive thing so you can have 10 people say stupid, slow, hateful, whatever my god stop writing but some person is articulating back to your intentions not saying oh this is great great but your intention talking back to you that's what great criticism for the writer of this is talking back conversation in a way then it's really helpful and it really is thank you great thank you guys on my birthday yes I had a