 Christina is in the band. Enjoy? I think you can see. So I believe you're waiting for Christina. I hope she didn't leave. Anyhow, I think I'm just going to start by introducing our wonderful artists. Kiki Brokou, director of Jonathan's play. Kate Benson, Lisa and Evans, I think she already left to direct with Kate's play. Then we have Tiny Little Ben, Jerry Lieblich, Ben Williams and Christina Masiati. So wonderful. There was all four presentations. Really wonderful. I'm really, you know, kudos to all of you. I would like to start with a question. So I would love to ask all of you to talk a little bit about the evolution of your pieces. I guess I'm closest. Yeah, so my day job is social work. And that was never my trajectory. And I think on my job, I was introduced to a specific type of community that doesn't get the attention they usually, you know, their stories aren't told as much. And I think what was exciting to me was I was introduced to this sort of different idea of what a love is, that it's wider than I imagine, because me and the staff, we seem to sort of laugh at the strange relationships that happened. Because I worked in housing, I should say. I worked in housing, and it was a tight community there. And the strangest relationships came about. And we sort of laughed at these weird couples that were coming about. So being on that job, I was exposed to a sort of wider idea of what a relationship can be. And I think that's where the play began to percolate for me. That semester at Brooklyn College, and I had a kind of monkish experience at Brooklyn College. I found myself just kind of wondering what romance was for, and also being really irritated at the women's roles in Judd Apatow movies, for instance, which are completely entertaining, but the women are dull. And I heard about a reading of this screenplay of American Pie, in which all the genders were reversed, and the men were complaining that their roles were very boring. And I thought, yes, it's time for me to write a love story, because I don't believe in love. And I'm tired of the usual progress of it. And then I couldn't start it any other way but with a discussion about making sausage. So it developed into this bar play about food and sex, and why we go to bars, and what we want out of our urban environments, and where we look for pleasure. And what happens when we find pleasure, and is it all good? And, you know, no. Our thing came out of, a while ago, Steph had gotten really into reading biographies of, like, tech startup people, like Steve Jobs, and there's a book about Twitter, and... You're doing great. Oh, thank you. And it just got us kind of talking about the idea of success as it exists in our culture right now, and kind of got us thinking, you know, about life and stuff. And also it got us thinking about mythology, and kind of the way that, like, success stories are sort of the type of mythology that we have in present day, and that they give kind of these models for what a good life looks like. And so our process, we do kind of a lot of experimentation with actors, and a lot of playing around. We try to find a feeling that feels essential to what we're talking about, so in this case we were looking at kind of the idea of specialness, or, like, when somebody seems like they have that kind of very special something, or removing that, which is really related to success and failure. We kind of do all these experiments around creating this feeling in a theatrical context, and then kind of based on all that and lots of discussions, I'll go and write something in response. And this piece is kind of smack in the middle of the play, and it's, I think something that we've talked about a lot is that to succeed is in a way, like to have the metric of success and failure means that there's some kind of image of what it is that you're trying to succeed at, because if there's an image, then you could fail to achieve it. But there's kind of always this push and pull of, like, well, one way to not feel like a failure is to abandon the image, but, you know, the person that we see is kind of stuck in this thing of like, oh, it's just that I need a better image. So, I don't know, we're trying to figure out something about what it is to be a person in that kind of construction. You did great. Thank you. This is our partnership. So I was riding a train home with Ben Williams after a show last year, and he was just talking about his experience as a shoe salesman, and he just made this statement, women and hats, they never buy. And I would just start taking with, like, just the grossness of sales, you know, and how it exploits the vulnerabilities on both sides, and just this image of a luxury shoe store as a manufactured image trying to be something it isn't, making you want something you don't. And then the parallels with this young combat vet, who's like trying to convince you he's someone he's not, like his life is riddled with false narratives. So those two things together sort of sparked the project. And how about the directors? How did you get involved with the project? Well, Jonathan had the opportunity to workshop this at Playpen this year, and so I was brought on to direct it there. It was a fascinating process. And so we've continued to work on it a little bit. I think the main interest for me in this is the issue of displacement. I'm really interested in that and that Jonathan is. And so you just saw the very beginning of it, but that ticking is in there. Jonathan's written it in, but we've actually put it in, because this is sort of a countdown to them being pushed out of their homes. And so that context is really fascinating to me. And it's also just a really juicy play to work on. It's like who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, like someone said the other day. So it's been really fun to work with actors on it. Yeah, Kate and I have been working on Porto for like a year. It's our second project together. Yeah, I've just been talking a lot about that food and pleasure stuff. And it will go up at the push and start, right? Yeah. We're a company, so I was there at the inception. I was the inception. So I've been with it the whole time. And now that he's written it, we're trying to make it. And it will go up at Abrans up like us in February. We're also at Abrans. And as you heard, I was there at the train station talking about the old job selling shoes. We put the festival together. We knew the model was failure, but the artist that we choose in the project that we choose, we did not look for, that was not an umbrella that any of these projects should fit in. Now, having seen all of the presentations today, it weaves through in some way, right? Not necessarily failure all the time, but expectations and, you know, what do you live up to? Expectations other people have on you. So what is your, what's your, did you think about this? Was there something, what's your relationship to failure? I guess as a human being, I have a lot of relationship to failure and a playwright. But I think specifically, yes, the play is centered around institutional failure, and specifically on the job I work. A lot of the people I work with are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and the stories are, the stories I hear are all directly related to some sort of institutional failure, family failure, relationship failure. So it was interesting to explore these stories in that way. There's a, there's something that happens like very soon after you stopped watching today in this play, which is sort of the heart of the play, which is they start talking about this baby that they had and the baby died probably because they killed the baby accidentally in some way. And so that, that sort of parenting failure, but as an institutional failure, like these, that these people failed, sure, but that they were also failed. And that's like a really deep part of this play. And it's a thing you start to see at the beginning, but it sort of doesn't really unfold until a bit later in the play. Yeah, I suppose maybe every, well, I was going to say every place by failure, but I don't think that it is. But I think, I think there's a, we fail to remember where our luxuries come from in the moment that we consume them, I think, because otherwise how could we? You know, I've eaten, I'm a barbarian. I have eaten a live sea urchin and it was alive and then I put it in my mouth and I killed it with my teeth and I, and it was delicious. And I can't, I can't really understand, I fail to understand my own human animal in that way. I can know that something is bad for me. I can know that something is terrible for the world. I can understand that, that restaurant that I really like is partly responsible for the displacement of people who used to have a community in the Fort O'Rent. I can understand that the animal was probably tormented, if not fully tortured in its preparation on its way to my plate. And yet I still, you know, sit there and say, oh, I really, I'm going to get a steak tonight. And so our failure to, I suppose, live up to our own ideas about what our values are supposed to be and our failure to understand ourselves as animals and our failure to incorporate some kind of rational care for each other into the systems of the societies we make is a puzzle to me that I, I, you know, it sort of makes me feel like I have the brain of a very, very small insect or at least the memory of a very, very small insect. So, back. How do you follow that? Well, we started to work on the show when I was 29 and I was headed to 30 and I was really having a moment of like, what have I done with my life or what am I doing with my life? Do I want to keep doing what I'm doing? And so I think in some ways our show started from the point of possible failure or like, even like, can failure exist if you don't want it, if you don't want the version of success. So, yeah, and that feels like super at the core of our show is the dichotomy between failure and success and how you take on those two things or whether you have to take on those two things and sort of how to move forward when faced with the severity of those two things. Our central character, Dennis, has failed by every system that's supposed to be a place to help him. He spends a play trying to stop failing himself and his choices. And it's also the place very much about the struggle between this guy and his subconscious and his kind of primal things that he can't really control. A lot of that is also because it's a product of the Iraq War, which, boom, there you go, failure. Well, do we have any audience questions, perhaps? There's to be a wonderful thread between all of your pieces, Dennis. And I sense this socialization issue that we all have to deal with as men and women and soldiers who come back yet and people from prison who come back. And it's only, it's just fucking war that they all gotta leave. Through the failure you can find success sometimes. So I guess the question is, what did you learn? I actually, I moved home to Detroit for a year in the process of making this show. And I think in some way I learned that it is, that there's a lot of construct, a lot of the things that we think we want or don't want or think are failures or successes. They're things we choose to buy into and we don't have to. I think that's what I learned. And I think on that, it's like, yeah, that process of acculturation, it goes on with every person at every moment. And I think realizing that these ideas of success or what a life looks like or feels like are constructed, is so helpful and at the same time, it's so scary to try to abandon that. And how do you abandon that? Knowing that what am I if not the things that I define myself as or the things that the culture, the world that I live in defines me as, is a scary to precipice to jump off of. Well, thank you all for coming. 6 p.m. is the next, we have a conversation at 6 p.m. So I hope you'll stay and come back. Thank you all for participating and for really, you know, presenting amazing work. So we're looking forward to seeing your shows. Thank you. Thank you.