 I always love that part, the meeting is being recorded. All right, gang's all here. This is Watch Me Work. I'm SLP from my mother's house today. We've been doing Watch Me Work for 11 years from the lobby of the public theater mostly and we've also done it all around the world but we just wanna give a big thanks to the public theater for supporting this show, this project, this experiment that I've been doing for the past 11 years and we also wanna thank HowlRound who came on a few years ago to help us live stream and from the lobby of the public theater and recently has come on to help us create this beautiful online community through the COVID crisis. So we're very appreciative to both those organizations today, today we're not just gonna work. Today we have an incredibly fabulous special guest. We have Chiara Alegria-Hudis and she's amazing and she is going to take your questions but first I wanna tell you about her. You know who she is but we're gonna tell you all about her anyway. She's a writer, a strong wife and a mother of two, a barrio feminist and a native of West Philly, USA. She's hailed for her work's exuberance, her work's intellectual rigor and rich imagination and her plays and musicals have been performed all around the world. They include Water by the Spoonful which is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, right on sister, In the Heights which is the winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical and a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue which is another Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her most recent musical, Miss You Like Hell was not only beautiful and gorgeous, I saw it. It appeared off Broadway at New York's Public Theater and Hudis wrote the screen play adaptation for In the Heights. Oh cool, we gotta talk about that. So she was originally trained as a composer, dig that, and she writes at the intersection of music and drama. She's collaborated with renowned musicians including Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Cleveland Orchestra. So Hudis recently founded emancipated stories which seeks to put a personal face on mass incarceration by having inmates share one page of their life story with the world. So we're thrilled that you're joining our Mary and Hardworking group today and what we're going to do just so everybody knows is we're going to work together for 20 minutes and then we're going to talk with Chiara about her work and then she will answer your questions about your work and your creative process. So that's how we're gonna do it today. And if you should have a question, Audrey's gonna tell you how to get in touch, go Audrey. Thanks SLP and welcome Chiara, we're so glad to have you. Blessings, thank you. Yeah, everybody, so as a reminder, if you're inside of the Zoom and you have a question, all you need to do is click on the participant tab. It's likely on the bottom of your screen if you have a laptop or the top of your iPad or a tablet. You click on that participant tab and inside of it is a little raise your hand button. Click on that, a little blue hand appears and I'll call on you if we've got time. And if you're watching on HowlRound.tv, you can tweet at us at at watchyworkslp with the hashtag HowlRound H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D or you can tweet at Public Theater which is at Public Theater NY or you can write the Public Theater's Instagram right into our messages and that's it. All right, all right, so here we go. We're gonna work for 20 minutes and then we're gonna talk to Chiara about her work and then she'll take your questions. Here we go, ready Audrey? All right, all right, here we go. Hopefully you guys got some work done in those 20 minutes and we're gonna talk to Chiara about her work first. I wanna know Chiara, what you working on right now, sis, what's happening with you? Hi Susan, SLP, what a thrill to be here and to talk about the water cooler. Here we are, this is beautiful, this is really beautiful. I'm working on a memoir right now. So it comes out in April of 2021. So we're in the final work, copy editing. So we're in the very final stages of the writing process. So you're writing lots of different kinds of forms, huh? Yeah, you know, I needed a little break a few years ago so I hit press pause on my beloved theater for a few years by just unpressed pause recently. But in the meantime, dug into this memoir, yeah. You also write for the screen. I mean, one thing you adapted in the heights, amazing, yeah, yeah. It's coming out soon, right? I mean, did I get... We passed the date that is supposed to come out and so we have moved theatrical release to next summer. They really wanted to do a theatrical release and not do a streaming release. So we decided to wait, be patient and wait and hopefully there will be movie theaters open next summer. Yeah, there will be, yeah, I'm praying for that too. Which do you have a preference? Do you like writing for the stage, writing memoirs, writing for the screen? Do you have a preference on which you enjoy more? It's all very different, right? And for me, the process is different but the process with writing different, like every play is different too. For me, the difference is more just personal and so for the screenwriting is really fun. I will, for me, the screenwriting is just joyous, a fun job. The theatrical work feels a little bit more like spiritually informed and purposeful and intentional in terms of creating a body of work that I think is important and that I want to exist in the world. And I found with my first book working on this memoir that what I just described in theater because it's a memoir, because it's about myself feels even more heightened and high stakes because I am doing that process internally. Like I'm the script and the audience and the performers on every part of that. So, yeah, that's the difference for me. How about, how does that all compare to writing a musical? You know? Yeah, you know, I've written a few different musicals. I did In the Heights with Lynn, so I wrote the book on that one. That was his baby and his vision and I only said yes to doing that project with him when I felt that I could bring my own vision and my own deeply personal touch to kind of walk in concert with his when we had an initial conversation and I remember thinking like we could be cousins or something, there felt like there were common goals of the heart and sociological goals and society goals and all those sorts of things. So, there was that and then it was really fun. We became very good friends. So that was extremely fun. I did a kid's musical at the Kennedy Center and then more recently I did Miss You Like Hell at the Public Theater and those all feel different. The main difference for me between, it's so different writing a play and writing a musical and for me, the difference is I feel a little bit more careful and possibly a little bit more inhibited when doing collaborative work than when I'm just playwriting. When I'm playwriting, I'm always challenging myself to take off the armor as much as possible to just put that armor aside and trust. I wanna challenge myself to be as wild as possible when playwriting. I do those things when I'm writing a musical but because there's other artists involved, it's slightly different. Like the work is always in conversation with someone else and so I think the challenge of that is to honor someone else's vision while keeping your vision very specific so that it doesn't become like a watered down version of a number of people's vision. So it's a little bit in some ways like more strategic and I never get into like a play with it in the musical because if I get into that dark zone and that dark place with it, I have someone to hand it off to and they'll take the baton and they'll run for a week or they'll run for a day or they'll run for a month. Whereas with the play, I'm going on that journey. Like I'm packed my back pack, this is all I got. It's just me. So when the storm hits, I hope my tent keeps the rain out sort of thing, it's just all on me. Right, right, right. You talked about being on the same page with Lynn's Sociology or just politically, I'll just say, talking being on the same page. Is that always important when you collaborate with people that you need to feel like you're on the same page with them? Not fully, but I think there has to be a common interest, a common goal. For me, that common goal that exists more than just expressively and artistically, I haven't yet written a piece that I feel like I'm only writing it to be expressive and to be artistic. Every piece that I've written so far, and it could change, who knows, but I have felt also inside like a very specific and articulated urgency inside about why I think it would be a bummer to not have that piece exist in the world. Lynn and I are very different politically too, but I think there was a commonality of an urgency, of a desire that was critical that we had with that, that was exciting, so that you can always return to that. If you get really lost, it's like, okay, well, what's our goal here? Let's go back to our goal, you know? The difference in a thesis, it's not like we're not writing an essay, it doesn't have a thesis. I just think that fire in the belly has always not just been purely expressive for me. I hear you. That's really great. Do you want to take some questions from our workers here? Definitely, this is beautiful. I'm scrolling through, I'm like, I love, look at all these faces. I know, the beautiful faces here, and the beautiful work, yeah. What do we got, Audrey? All right, we've got Melania up first. Okay, girl, go ahead, Melania. Hello, hello everybody, I'm Susan Chiara, thank you for being here. Hi, Melania. Hi, nice to meet you, and I am so happy and honored that you are with us today. Thank you for coming. I would like to first to share with you and everybody something that was very nice to me, a discovery that I made this morning, reading my work. I was having problems with some notes of a workshop that I was doing in Argentina. I am from Argentina, and I was writing and Susan, Laurie helped me a lot and all our group. And she said to me to leave the work, and she always said, not to us, that when we are having these problems, these struggles, we can leave the work, let it rest, and then come back. So I did that with this work from the workshop. It's a theater play for children in Spanish. Suddenly today, I said, okay, I'm going to take it. And when I took it, I began to read, and I found myself laughing at what I was reading. This is fun, and there was a moment like this. I wrote this, and that was so, so nice. So first I wanted to share this with Susan, with you, with all my classmates. And after that feeling that I have, make me think about something that I would like to ask you. And it's about our own voice, my own voice. How to find and how do you work with that? Because I saw something there in some part of what I read that I said, wow, this person writes very nice, but I didn't recognize myself. And I said, wow, this is me also. So what I would like to keep doing with my work is to find these voice and these things that I want to tell the world. I come from Argentina. It was not easy for me to come here and in love with my husband and a very nice life, three daughters, but at the same time, so many new things that I feel that I have something in me that I want to express. And I am trying to learn how to do that. So I show up to my work, as Susan Lurie always says, and I try to do that, but I would like to know your experience in finding your own voice. And if you have any suggestions to me to keep doing this work. Yeah, I mean, that is ongoing. So as long as, I assume, I mean, I'm 42 and so I'm that many years into showing up to the work. And of course, my process changes over time, but the process of finding the voice is ongoing. That's the daily work actually, right? Because admittedly, some people are probably more self-aware than I am, but I know in the process of writing my memoir, for instance, I thought I knew who I was and I thought I knew what I wanted to say. And I did, I knew this part of that, but then I realized, oh, but that's kind of covering up this other thing. And actually that's kind of covering up this thing. And then I started getting to layers that were so much at the core of me and my voice that I had never really told myself or put on the page or articulated. And that's about the story, that's about the themes, but that is also about the language too, right? So you found yourself being delighted by your own voice and surprised and saying, oh, this person really, this person really nailed it, but wait, that's me. I love because we're, you know, if anything, we're very complicated. There's so many lives within us. There's so many stories within us. There's so many, I feel that my characters, my family members are me also. So there's so many people within us. There's so many languages within us, you know, especially like how do you, what is language on this street corner for you? What is language with that at that family's house for you? What is language when you, you know, go to apply for the job for you? What is language when you're unfamiliar with, you know, even like there's, we have so many languages in our lives. And so you have all of that to access, right? As you are creative and as you continue to find your voice, but for me, that's not an arrival. That is a continued path, the voice finding. Okay, that's great. Thank you very much, Kiera. Thank you. Sure, good luck. Thank you, you too. Thanks, Melania. We're gonna go to Carla. Hello, hi, Susan. Hi, Carla. Hi, everyone. Hi, Kiera. Nice to meet you. I was gonna start by saying, so I saw Ms. Yuleiko, I showed out the public. And I was working the first time I saw it. And I had to leave before the ending, even though I was working. And I looked at my manager and she was like, and I was in full tears crying because I'm Puerto Rican and I have a lot of mother-daughter issues. So I came outside and she looked at me. She was like, I know. There was complete forgiveness in terms of like, I know you can't do the work right now, it's too emotional to like look at this every night. It was incredible. And I guess my question has to do with that because I'm writing a lot of things. There's a problem that I'm writing now that has nothing to do with my life. But when I first started this writing process, I started writing about that relationship, that mother-daughter relationship, that's personal to me. And it's so hard. So hard, much like how I felt at the end of Miss Yuleiko, just in tears, it's just so difficult to kind of write it down. Even though it is encouraged, and I'm doing therapy and stuff about it, but like to sort of try and detangle all those emotions and feelings, but it's so hard. And so I'm wondering how you and Erin sort of did that and how were you able to detangle that and sort of put it on the page in such a way that was at least to me so raw and emotional that I, you know how, because I wanna see it in some way like that and understand it myself in my own experience. But I don't know, sometimes I feel like I get cut up and then emotions start going up because it's, I guess, my own experience, if any of that makes sense. But yeah, I just, anytime I try to write it, it's so difficult. And like I've been going to other things and other projects like the one I'm working now are completely different, but it's just so difficult to kind of dig into that. You were talking earlier about the older layers and getting to certain points where it's so hard to kind of face that I just feel like I get stuck writing wise and sort of hit this wall of like, ah, it's too much or too much emotion, too much situation. So I don't know if you've ever done like that in terms of writing for at least the Hispanic community like ours, so I don't know if that's the question. Yeah, you know, it's, first of all, Erin and I, Erin is the composer of Miss You Like Hell, just so everyone knows the musical that I did at the public theater a few years ago and we wrote lyrics together. So I did book and lyrics and she did music and lyrics. And we, she and I have very, very different relationships with our mother and I don't want to speak too much for her, but she was like constantly triggered throughout the process. It was very hard for her. I did not, I don't have that fraught relationship. So it was not so triggering for me or so complicated for me, that particular component of the story, but I think writing out of difficult relationships and especially difficult relationships that remain central to your life, that's a very big challenge because you're potentially, for one thing, it's very close to you. So it's hard to gain any sort of perspective on it. And for another thing, there's also perhaps the fear that this act of writing will jeopardize an important relationship in your life. So those are two things that are working at the same time. And in terms of the first one, in terms of it being too close and not having perspective and getting too caught up in the difficulty, I've definitely been there and experienced that. And I've done writing in that state that I have been displeased with and don't like very much and I've done writing in that state that I feel very good about. And I could say the difference is that when I'm writing about other people or other characters, I feel I can be right there with them and I can speak for them. There's this kind of like possession vibe or advocacy vibe. If someone comes at you and is insulting you, it's one thing. If someone comes at someone you love and is insulting someone you love, it's like, I will take you, I will take you right now. You know what I'm saying? So it's easier for me to be there with someone else when it's close to me, what I have found is that like to step outside of myself as a spirit, as a conscious being and observe myself in that relationship. And just to note, this is a process thing. This is an everyday thing. What do I observe about myself? What do I see? Just be very descriptive and honest. What does it feel like in this relationship with my mom or going through this memory with my mom or trying to write this theme with my mom? What do I observe in myself having that experience? And so trying to have a process where you can incorporate both of those states of consciousness, being in the relationship, that's difficult and observing who you are and what that experiences, that could be very helpful because then you can spend a day as the observer. You know, you can spend a day. I was, I was, I was looking through my journal during this. That was my, that was my work for 20 minutes. And I talk about being the sentinel a lot in my own life, like holding watch, watching out over my own life. That gives me a little bit of a move. And then I can step back into the complicated mess because you have to write from the complicated messy part to where else it's not going to be real. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Wow. Well, thank you so much. That's really helpful. Cause I feel like I've been so kind of in it. That I just haven't stepped out of myself. And that's a, that's a really good point. Therapy is a great place to do that work. Therapy, I use meditation. I use prayer. I use hiking. I use just breathing, just sitting and breathing. So I, I have different, there's certain music I listen to that is like spiritual music from a particular practice. And so all of those things help me get into a space where I'm either feel brave enough to be in the difficulty or I feel enough clarity and peace to be observing those things help me on just a kind of nuts and bolts level. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. And thank you for your work. Both in the heights and this like how as a Puerto Rican, I have this beautiful work. So thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Up next, we've got Kimmy. Are you there? Oh, sorry. Oh, there we go. Can you hear me today? Yeah. Hi. You're great. You're good. We can't see. Oh, there you are. I'm strolling through. I like just so I can potentially see your face. Kimmy as, as you talk. The shortest one. I think if you go back to the main page, Kara, she'll pop up underneath underneath you because she's talking more now. Yeah. I'm out of everybody. I'm four foot 11. So I'm pretty sure I'm the shortest one in the class. Okay. Let's see. Let me get to speaker view. Maybe that will help. Yay. Okay. Great. Thanks. Hi. Thank you so much. I really am honored to have the opportunity to speak and always with SLPs class. So thank you. I, I have no representation. I have a play that's burning a hole in my. And I also just because it was in Lori's class and everything, I finished a pilot. I got an idea for a pilot. And so now I have to do the pitch deck and all that fun stuff, fun stuff. And. And so how does one go. Get past the not representation. And you know, I'm fit. And I've shown my work to a lot of people in the industry. You know, we did readings and stuff with some really classy actors and things. So now I, I'm kind of stuck on my next step. How to get it in somebody's proper hands. I don't know. Are you asking this about the play or are you asking this about the pilot that you finished? I don't care which, which. Answer you give me. More than I know. Whatever, whatever help you can provide me with. Like, do I, do I take my play? I do it on the bathroom wall and some. You know, I don't know where people will see it or how do you get it out there? Yeah. So I didn't get an agent until I had my first production. And then when I had my first production, then I had a contract that I needed to deal with. I was like, I better get an agent now. So I didn't have an agent to help me get that first production. It kind of the other way around. And. You know, I, what I did was. I did two things. One is I self produced. So my first production. And in doing that, I met, this was when I don't live in Philadelphia anymore, but I'm from Philadelphia. At the time I lived in Philadelphia. So I met. Like I joined a local acting class. I, no one could have less acting aspirations than me, but I joined it to meet local actors. And I figured like actors direct a lot too. So I figured some of them would be directors and in doing so, I met a director for my piece. I met someone else who wanted to start their own theater company. So they produced it. And so I didn't self-produce like by myself, but I did it kind of on the ground level with, with people that I met. And so I didn't feel like I had to sit around waiting for someone to like read it and decide it was worth putting on a main stage or something like that. That was great. And those are connections I still work with to this day. And then the other thing I did was I also sent the script around to different theaters. But how I did that was I Googled the, I Googled the plays that I felt like most closely aligned with what my piece was and saw where they had been produced. And then like I Googled. And I thought that was a little similar because it was more of a poetic structure. It didn't have like, you know, a beautiful Aristotelian arcs. And so I was like, okay, maybe a theater that did this crazy piece would be interested in mine. And then I looked at the websites and I saw which of them accepted like 10 cages versus a full play. And I sent out about, you know, a bunch of plays that way. And a very, very small theater. In Portland, Oregon, picked it up and was like, okay, we'll do it. And we'll pay you, you know, $70 and blah, blah, blah. But that again, like I worked with them for years and I, that was really important for me to do that work. And you know, could I have paid my mortgage off of that? No. No, I was working other jobs at the time. That being said, like there was also like oddly more freedom, artistic freedom in those kind of scrappy endeavors. And so then I had a, like, I had like a one or two page letter of contract from the theater. And I found an agent who didn't take me on, by the way, but was like, I'll look at your letter and see if it's okay. Said the letter was okay. And then I went back to that agent when I kind of kept pushing my stuff from there and sent some reviews around and got like a, like a real, like, The other thing that I did was I don't know if, do people still send like rejection letters in the snail mail? Or is this all done over email now? I don't know. I have no idea. I have email. Yeah. Well, back in the day, I did this thing where it's like, I got, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, as well back in the day, I did this thing where it's like, I got a lot of so many rejection letters and some of them were clearly, so clearly form letters, like this person either didn't read my play or read two pages of it or read the whole thing and decided that. It just, they had no interest in even making a comment on it. So not their cup of tea. of rejection letter that was like, here's what your play made me think of. Like that was actually like started a little bit of a conversation. So I kept those theaters in mind saying like, okay they actually read and thought about the work. I'm gonna send them like my next play or send them an update if this play gets done and like gets a review or like gets mentioned in some way or gets a production. Like so I kept those people updated and some of those five or six years down the line did end up turning into a production or commission. That's wonderful. Thank you so much. Those are great answers. And what a scrappy little way to figure stuff out. I love that. I'm a stand up comic and I started producing shows myself because I could never, I didn't want to drive two hours to LA for five minutes of time, you know? Yes, yes. You know, I couldn't answer that so much for TV because it's not so scrappy in industry. And I don't know how to like break. Yeah, that's like break into that industry in the same way. I'm grateful. Thank you so much. It was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we've got about eight minutes left and we are gonna go to Mary. Hi. Hi, Mary. Hi. Okay, so this kind of piggybacks on Kimmy's question and it definitely piggybacks from a couple of weeks ago, Melania asks Susan Lauria a question or Susan Lauria's response is similar. So it's about copyrighting and when you are asking other people to read your work. Okay, so here's my situation. I'm working on a play. I've been working on this play I've been working on this play. It's just been getting bigger and bigger over the past probably three years, two and a half to three years. And the people that I have shared it with and received feedback from have really nurtured and been supportive and I've gotten wonderful critical feedback from their perspective. And a few months ago, I met somebody who might, it was like a, you know, here's two people I think you guys should be friends. You know, you're both actors, you're both in the theater and well then the pandemic hit, I don't really know her. But she's connected to other people. She's like, oh yeah, we should read your play. We should all get together and pandemic hit and we sort of lost touch. But she has access to a lot of professional actors. I live in central New Jersey and in a small university town. And it's, I don't, that pool, it's hard to get together with people. I don't know as many people. But in terms of trusting people with my work, at this point it's unfinished. So that's a question of mine. Like, you know, how do I own it but also get, expand my pool of feedback and how I hear it. And so come finish. Wow, yeah. I mean, I really think you could ask 20 different playwrights this question and you would get 20 different answers. Because in my experience, all of my playwriting friends have very different relationships with receiving feedback. So I only say that to say, take my answer with a grain of salt and maybe ask a few other playwrights. There are thoughts on this too. So it's completely normal to send out a play that's in progress and that's quite any level of unfinished. And to ask for, to say, can we gather and read it? Would you check this out? Would you be interested in that? I think to protect yourself and like your ego and also just to create a clear boundary and let them know what's going on, always say, this is a very early draft. This is a work in progress. Just make it clear what stage of development is that for you. You know, the actors should have familiarity with reading a script that what I call a skeleton draft. So oftentimes my first draft of a play is 40 pages and it will become a hundred pages. You know, where it's like the scenes are really short but it kind of has the essence of the play sort of thing. And sometimes I need to, sometimes I don't need to hear those out loud but sometimes I do because sometimes I get to that like skeleton draft and I'm actually not totally sure the basic idea works and hearing it out loud will help me answer that question. And I've even done that in front of like an audience which feels very vulnerable but I really was wondering with one play like, is this even a play kind of thing? I think for me what's important at every step but especially early on if you're like still feeling vulnerable about it is to decide very early on what kind of feedback you want and make that really clear to people. So, and also like actually be really honest about what kind of feedback you want. So I say that to say that like my tendency can be towards being more of a people pleaser and that has shot me in the foot a few times where, you know, I thought within early draft and as a playwright like my job was to be like I want your feedback. Like I need it, like help me develop it. And then I kind of realized a few years until like, no, I don't like, there might be a question I have but do I really want to hear from seven people? There are different opinions and answers on what that should be or do I just need to know that question for myself? Listen and force myself to answer the question. You know, and so all that is to say at the beginning of let's say you're gonna do like a Zoom reading of the piece or, you know, a socially different reading like with grace and gratitude for people joining, you know, to help to just lay out exactly and clearly where you are, you know, say this is the first draft is something that I feel I might have another year of writing on I might have another six months I might have two breakthroughs of writing ahead of me. So I just want to hear it and I think I don't want any feedback but I brought you guys pizza or, you know like I'll make a donation to your favorite thing or say like, I do want feedback but only about this one particular plot question I have like just be really clear at the beginning and that will also help them. They'll, if they hear you say, I don't want feedback they'll just read the thing and be into it. If they hear you say, I want feedback about this particular thing they'll read with that in mind, you know so that will help them direct their energy during that too. All right, thank you. Thank you, Kiarra. Thanks, Mary. So we actually only have about 30 seconds left but it doesn't feel like enough time. I'm so sorry. Thank you so much for being here with us. This was wonderful. Thanks, Kiarra. You were great. Come back anytime. Thank you so much, thank you. This was a real blessing, a real pleasure. You're a real blessing. As a reminder, everybody please sign up by 3 p.m. Eastern every day Tuesday to Thursday and we will get you a link between 3 and 4, 30 p.m. Eastern. Thank you so much, Kiarra. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, SLP. Thank you. Thanks guys. Have a great evening.