 Welcome to this weekend's panel discussion, the Scribe-Speak, excuse me for reading this, there's just a lot going on. In the inspiration of the playwright's voice, we've assembled a panel of writers to discuss some of the issues and questions most pressing in their minds today. The initial inspiration for holding a forum that features playwrights grew out of an initiative during Actors Theatre's recent leadership transition. The theatre gathered a national playwright advisory team comprised of seven festival alumni to weigh in at several key points during the artistic director's search that led to me being here. Participating in the interview process and also to engage in candid conversation about the festival and the field with our artistic staff, hearing their thoughts was incredibly valuable, well it was to me, and we wanted to open that door a little wider and keep listening to playwrights in a different, even larger context. Though today's conversation takes us in another direction, several of today's panellists have served as our advisor, and we thank all of these wonderful writers for lending their voices to this panel through artistic development and dramatists, and she's the moderator for this discussion. So today's panel is being streamed live on the internet through New Play TV, a project of HowlRound.com, and we'll also be taking questions live via Twitter. For those watching this at home, please tag your questions with PoundHumanifest, and after the panel we encourage you to keep your conversation going by finding us on Twitter, Facebook, or logging on to ActorsTheatre.org. And that's enough from me, and over to these guys. I'm going to try to do this without a mic, if that's okay, or maybe if this is enough. Can you guys hear me? Great. So thank you, Les. Good morning. It's an honor to be here. First of all, I was a literary dramaturgy intern here in 1990-91, so attending the event today feels like a homecoming, and second of all, who wouldn't want to spend an hour with these accomplished, innovative theater artists in a company of all of you having a conversation about leadership? I'm going to introduce these wonderful people. You have bios, and you can read about them and follow their work, please. But for purposes of now, to my left, I have Stephen Sapp. Among his many credits is the co-founder of the Point Community Development Corporation, which is dedicated to youth development in the cultural and economic revitalization of the Hunts Point section of the South of France. He's also obviously a member of Universes, which is a wonderful ensemble company whose work has been produced here, among other places. We have Anne Washburn, who's played at the Levelle Mune premiere at the 2011 Humana Festival. In addition to her numerous bio-credits, Anne has been a mentor to many early career writers. She also originated the Path of Physics playwriting workshops at the Blee Theater, which are intimate four-session intensives for new work and new ways of working led by master playwrights. Then we have Molly Smith Metzlers, whose sharp comedy, The Element of Pia, was featured in the 2011 Humana Festival. And additionally, I found out by reading an interview with playwright Adam Synkowitz that she and her siblings started a theater troupe as kids. She was also one of the producers of the early awards. Greg Kodis played Michael von Seepenburg, Ralph Stuth, who was the first to appear in yesterday at the 2012 Humana Festival. His career was defined by his involvement with the Carniff Giant Theater Company and the Neo Futurists, both ensemble-based companies based in Chicago. And then of course, at the end here we have Adam Graf, whose play The Edge of Our Cities was featured in the 2011 Humana Festival. He's also a director of his own work and the work of others, including film as well. So to start us off this morning, as Liza mentioned, I work at Udramas, which is an artistic home and laboratory for playwrights located in an older church in midtown Manhattan. We support playwrights through free seven-year residencies, during which time each writer drives their own artistic development. For seven years they have unlimited access to space, time, artistic collaborators, advocacy, free copies, and of course each other. We refer to them as the artistic directors of their residencies and because of the variety of artistic and career goals, working style, personalities, curiosities, that means the organization is supporting about 50 different artistic directions because that's about how many resident playwrights we have at any given time. We also foster peer and community involvement as one of the founding principles of Udramas, that playwrights are each other's greatest resource. Unfortunately the organization is nimble enough to be responsive to the individual as well as the collective needs of our playwrights, and in fact the playwrights are in many respects the policy makers of the organization itself. We have a writer's executive committee to whom we take organizational matters for their input and often decision making, and four members of the writer's exec also sit on our board of directors and act as liaisons between the board and the artistic community. A topic that has been brewing at Udramas of late is playwright leadership, and what does it mean to be a leader? Not only of their own work in development, but a field leader as well. And as itinerant artists, playwrights have unique perspectives on the field. They've worked in and experienced their work in a variety of venues in front of diverse audiences across the country, and that's why it's so cool that the playwrights were part of the search committee for the new ATL, artistic director, right? I mean, they know what they are doing based on their own experiences. They're also creators of worlds, so taking that creative impulse and tapping their wisdom, I've asked them to apply it to the field and imagine their dream theaters. What would their theater look like if they could build or run one? What is their vision for theater, programming, space, community, audience? They're going to talk about that? Yeah, see you then. I have one of the mics. Oh, here, here. They're rock stars. That's one of these things I want to go first, but I mean first. You know, I feel like I've created my own dream theater. In 1993 1994, myself and three friends of mine we were working in social service teaching reading and writing to the community in the South Bronx and we used to walk by this abandoned building every day and it was an abandoned bagel factory. When I mean literally, when we went into the building, they were old, fossilized bagels. But we decided to, that it would be great if we had, because there were no theaters in the South Bronx or in the Bronx really at all. So we decided to take over the building. We went to the landlord and we said, look, you're paying company tax on the building that you're not even using. So he said, well, you guys can come in and renovate if you want. So he gave us a year to renovate the space and have stuff going and raise money. And if we didn't, then he would take the building back and whatever we did, we would basically lose. And we said yes. So we went into the building and took us a year to renovate the building. But what was amazing, what happened was the people from the community got very curious about these crazy kids that were in there renovating this old abandoned bagel factory. So the woman who lived next door threw her holes over the wall. So we had water for her. The kids from the community would come and help us do cleanup. There was a guy who worked as a mechanic. He would bring old hammers and screws. We went to the Pratt Institute and they came and they pro bono. They sketched out the building and then he literally drew on the floor where the walls would go. It looked like a big giant jigsaw puzzle. And we hired one general contractor with our own money who hired two guys off the books. And then us, and I know nothing about sheetrock walls, but I know now, and we literally renovated the entire space. 12,000 square foot building, 4,000 square feet of it was the theater itself. The other, the rest of the building, we turned into businesses. So we had a restaurant, and all of them was run by people from the community. We had a restaurant, we had a barbershop, we had a working store, we had a computer center, we had a dance studio with the back. And we had one anchor tenant, which was a social service agency in Hunts Point. And between them they paid the rent. So the theater itself did not have to generate a huge amount of funds to function. Light was paid for, we had free food from the restaurant, and we ran programming. So for me to interact with the community, I needed to know, besides just doing the theater stuff as a theater person, what else needed to happen going on in that space to connect with the community? So literally we had Gaiman and the Bronx had their whole balls going on in the space. We had poetry meetings, we had comedy night, we had besides doing theater runs, one woman who lived in the community, and she came to me and said, you know, my daughter is getting married, and I don't have any place to have the wedding reception. And I was literally sitting and going, please don't ask me to put the wedding reception at my place. And she said, well, you know, is there any way? And so we kind of worked out something and literally the space turned into that also. So we had, I've had to be 16s in the building. But we ran that space sort of as you would, you know, literally dealing with the community in a variety of different ways that people would interact with us as a space. And to see the businesses operating was a really nice beautiful way to kind of interact. And I really feel like a lot of times when I travel nowadays, you go to a lot of theaters and they seem like museums. They just feel like they're always a step behind and so sort of sacred, or the regular kid from the block who live in certain communities would not come to a show because they don't feel connected to it at all. I don't, and it happens all the time where you show up somewhere and all of a sudden all the quote unquote hip hop flyers go out to all the black and Latino communities and they start running to the theater begging these students to come see a show, but they've never come to your space before. They've never interacted with you before that way. But here you come now running like this and expecting to show up. So for me running that space, we made sure that what was going on around us was in the space and then artistically that the space had to be run and look like a professional space. So anyone who came from the downtown scene or the theater scene would walk in and they're like, oh shit, you guys have real stuff. And I'm really, so for me that was my sort of, that was my ideal to dream space and it's still running now to this day since 1993 and the South Bronx is still running. And also see theaters try to stretch how they do programming and how they interact with spaces the same way. I was going to try to modify for this. I wanted to come up with something a little less particular, but I found that I kept thinking obsessively about black boxes and second spaces and so take it sort of out like it's a secret dinner theater. I'm going to talk about the dinner part of it because that's sort of complex, but it's basically an intimate space, no more than 150, maybe 99. The whole thing of it really is to get an audience that is as alert and active and interested and engaged and engageable as possible sort of a way to create the ideal audience which every playwright needs to balance their play against. So the theater is by invite only you can apply to come be a subscriber there's very active recruiting. The goal is to get at least half of the audience people who are not regular theater goers because that's just a different kind of attention. Half the audience people who are regular theater goers, but people from really all over the place and there's a lottery money funding aspect to it so that ticket prices are all over the map, but also affordable. It's a season of five playwrights, some of which are extremely established, some of which are very much emerging. The playwright I come from a theater collective called 13P and at 13P the playwright is the artistic director for their particular show. They select the director, they can control the marketing if they would like, they can select the poster design and that's been really inspiring and I think it's actually worked out very well. Each play is such a particular ethos, really the playwright in a certain sense as the person who maybe has a sense of how to communicate that all the way down the chain. So that would very much be part of it. Playwright posters would be very much different for every show, really reflecting every show. You would come in, you would do your dinner thing which I'm not going to talk about, you would see the play, you would not know who the play was by, you would not know who any of the plays were by. At the end of the night you would begin a program with the director and the actors but not the playwright. You would never know who the playwright was. The show would not be reviewed. Simultaneously for emerging writers to get a really good production without the pressure of critical response, it would also be a way for super established writers to test a show out without that kind of something that maybe is not what they normally do or just a way for them to see it and then they can go up later on. So if you're an audience for this theater, you might recognize later on and find out at that point who shows her body what you might never know. It also means the audience has to bring a kind of attention to it knowing that this could be a play by anyone. It could be a play by someone super famous, it might be a play by someone super new, you just have to really pay that kind of attention to it. So that's the basic just third minute details. So my lottery theory, I think if I won the lottery I'd give it to Anne Washburn. I like going to my head, had to devise what to do with the money myself. You know I've just had my first New York production, which is a very different thing. And I've had wonderful regional productions and had great experiences. So what's on my mind a lot these days is New York and ushering plays to New York in a way that protects plays and makes them positive and also makes them playwrights centered. And so in that vein, I think what I would do with the money is start a regional theater that has a deep wonderful relationship with the New York theater and that they would work together in partnership and the idea would be to commission a handful of writers for a four year plan. The first year is just I'm going to commission you, I'm going to salary you and give you health insurance and you are now in residence at your will if you want to come to the theater. You can also write in Alaska, but like it's up to you where you write the play, but you are an employee of the theater, of the regional theater. First season I would do a reading of the play, second season I would do a workshop of the play, third season I would do a production of the play, and fourth season I would bring it to New York. All with the same director so that there's a sense of getting that play right, nurturing that play, getting that play into New York in a positive and comfortable and like really great way. So that's what I would do and I would commission four writers a year and so that there's always four going. Anyway, so that's kind of practical, but my other thing I'd build theater right next door, which is just for comedy. I'm a little dramatic comedy or beautiful plays of the little comedy in it. I mean like capital C comedy like, you know, Boulevard comedy farce. Like where are these plays going? They're getting demolished in New York and then no one does them and I'm really worried. I feel like Wendy Wasserstein and Neil Simon and Chris Durant, they would not get to have a career today that they did then. It's just sort of comedy is really changed. So I would find all my funniest friends, commission them, and take them to my theater and really support capital C comedy. Improv scene in Chicago. That was a big part of my experience and my formative time. And there are things that happen in the improv comedy world in particular I think of the Annoyance Theater in Chicago who knows that company. Second City is the most famous established institutional improv based theater and in New York there's the Upright Citizens Brigade, Magnetic Theater, People's Improv Theater, that kind of stuff. And the thing that they can do which is great is that they collect a large community of creators. You know as an improviser you go up and you do a scene and you are the author and the performer of the scene simultaneously and they have shows going constantly. They have what you could call original theater pieces and every hour of the day sometimes into the late evening. And the heart of each of those theaters is the community that is sort of collected around them starting with what might be a main stage ensemble and then other sort of, I think I forget what's called Second City but they have like a second stage and they have touring companies that also have lots of classes. You know it's really a school of that kind of performance. So what I think would be great and I don't even know if it's possible or not but if it's somehow possible to marry that kind of energy and that kind of inclusive I don't want to say disposable but just sort of careless reckless sort of creation of new work together with the production values and broader aesthetic of the theater world, I guess the legit theater world, that could be great where you have classes going on all the time, people learning playwrights at every level writing and creating scripts and that you have runs of plays for whatever short periods of time, long periods of time doesn't matter. So anyway if the logistics are complicated but the culture of the improv world I think has something to teach the culture of the theater world in terms of just the rawness of it which can be really fantastic and really great. And then to be specific I think my theater would be on 4th Street in Lower Manhattan, just because I love that street. Well it might be at the 2nd and 3rd where the workshop is and I did a play at the New York Fringe Festival this summer and we were on that street and the great thing is you go, you see a play, you walk out of the street and there are audiences spilling out from all the other plays that are happening simultaneously so that commingling of all the different audiences on that particular street in New York is really exciting to me or if there are other streets like it then I would like to be on that kind of street. Sorry. I'm always really deeply concerned with where the new audience is coming from and having left New York for the last 20 years and having been in a band and having written plays and written books and stuff. There's an energy and a vitality to certain kinds of spaces and we've all kind of touched on that a little bit. One of my favorite spaces in New York that doesn't exist anymore where it used to be was called the Knitting Factory and there were three levels and there were three different stages where bands would perform and they had like some larger bands, some smaller indie bands and then sometimes they would have jazz quartets but there was a life in that space that was really exciting and I think that was the most exciting thing about that space was the audience was probably between the ages of 16 and 55 and I think what helped that a lot was that tickets were rarely over $15. Those are two things that are really interesting to me is to create a disposable income theater in which you're basically going to spend the same amount that you would to download a record, meaning $10, $15, something like that. My dream space would be a place that has a box theater, a film space and a rock and roll space and that you have the intersection of those three different audiences constantly cross pollinating with each other like when you come out from a film you see somebody lining up for the theater piece and maybe there's a bookstore that's also a coffee shop. I think the Royal Court does a really nice job of creating a lot of culture in their building. I was just there a couple weeks ago and they have a great bookstore, a great cafe, there's writers in the space all the time like talking and writing and people. There's just a real volume there of people and youth and older people and anyway that was really exciting. The thing that I would do in terms of programming is I would assign artists to curate each space so there would be a rotating curator so for instance Anne Washburn would be the film curator and she would select her three favorite films that she would show on a Saturday night and then I would ask someone like Richard Maxwell to program a theater season where in our black box space he would be able to install either his work or the work of someone he admired or someone he would commission. Then in the rock and roll space we would have somebody curating that, some other interesting artists like a novelist or a, you know, like Lou Reed or someone. I just think like curating each space is a really interesting thing because then nothing gets stale or nothing gets too one dimensional in terms of somebody's taste. I think there's a really interesting variety possible. In the theater space what I would do is I would want to have enough money where I could actually pay for a resident company and so actors would get paid $50,000 and they would get benefits and they would be devoting themselves to at least three weeks of a development piece and ten weeks of a run so they could go off and do TV and film and do other things but they would have to give us ten weeks of a run and three weeks of development. It's not a lot and then they get insurance because I feel like the other thing that happens in New York at least is that all the great actors that you come up with who you develop your work with, they can't afford economically to be in New York and do theater anymore so they wind up going to the west coast or they start doing film and TV and you're constantly begging them to slum in the theater again. So I would try to figure out a way economically that it would keep those people interested in continuing to do theater because we want to have kids and we want to have sofas and stuff. So that's basically it. The other thing I would do and then I'll shut up, the other thing I would do is in the black box space three times a week led by a writer, there would be writers writing for three hours on the night off or the dark night and maybe at three available hours on Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday people would come and write in the space like we would have desks and we would have 50 people and then someone would lead a writing session or workshops or pedophysics so there was work always happening in a space because I think it's sad when spaces just are museums. I think it's sad so I would try to keep a lot of energy in the space going. Are there places set up or does that happen spontaneously? When I was there they were doing a 100 word play festival and I was talking to the literary manager and three or four tables kind of sectioned off it was their youth writing group and they were doing 100 word plays and there was a big bulletin board with like cards on it and they were just like writing and you felt writing happening which I thought was really really exciting. I mean it's interesting because at New Dramatist that's always been a dream was to get more writers writing in the building and it was simply reconfiguring, I mean in addition to life on it was reconfiguring the library with different kinds of desks cups that are movable within the kind of living room furniture we have, reconfiguring what was a classroom space that was once a sort of long, very ornate table we created more modular furniture and we have people writing in the building all the time, often writers within given certain rooms together because they just want to write in the company of each other so I think that seems like a great achievable idea for the spaces that we already operate. Thank you very much, it's just wonderful to hear from all of you. I'm curious to know in addition to the curatorial model, would that change annually? Yeah, basically I would assign curators and then I would hand off, I would start the whole thing and start the building and then I would take the first three curators for the first season and then I would step down as the overall curator and I would produce I would just help be an administrator and then that would rotate. I just think rotating is good. Thank you. In addition to that I'm curious to hear if I think that's a question too and you've certainly been on the decision side of things like how would you program, how would you choose the writers for your not dinner, non dinner theater, how would that work and then we can hear from others as well, the programming aspect of it. You're welcome. I really like this idea of rotating. I mean I have a little list in my head of plays that I think are fabulous and have been done or people I think are fabulous and would love to see up. Do you want to say something? Oh, no because I would end up leaving someone off and then I would feel tragic about it. So there are a lot of really and some of the people who aren't done and it would just be great to give them a chance to do it in that sort of way and with that audience and some of the people who haven't been done yet and are fabulous and all of that. So no I have a list that I would go through but I like very much this idea of rotating, curatorship and shifting vision because I feel like you know you do eventually, you get worried programming. So I think having different voices coming and having it shift is great. I would steal from all of these ideas. Oh, I'm just laughing at the word. I think it's so true and it's just interesting that there's some people who will program theaters for 40 years. I'm going to a 40th anniversary choir for a nurse instructor and it's a big responsibility and also it's scary. I think it might be fun to rotate. We should all rotate. Yeah, I really respond to what you were saying about comedy and comedy in theater and yeah I think it would be great to create a theater in terms of programming the authors that were all sort of somehow committed to the idea of comedy in the theater in their own particular way and I think it does feel, yeah I agree with what you're saying about comedy is often being reduced to sitcom maybe because that's an easy way to describe it. The energy electricity that can be created through comedy is a great thing as is drama and all the rest of it. But to create a theater that can create comedy and just sort of explore the idea of that you know that is neither sitcom nor farce or whatever to sort of to explore experiment what else it is and what is this primate sound that we make when we laugh and it's universal. Every culture has it I have read on the original. I don't make it. Just the fact of that and to make it sort of a research and development institution for what makes us laugh in the theater in a great way. How do you find artists? I think one, it can't be in the traditional way that playwrights and artists get quote unquote great or work. You have to go out and see stuff and bring people who haven't necessarily arrived or like I said in the traditional, they won't get here. They haven't figured out how to get to a new dramatist or a new manifesto. They haven't figured that out. So are you that place that can help them get themselves launched? Do you sit and have discussion when we go out and do workshops and they usually bring you in to do either your writing or show people how to do theater. Half of our workshop also is how do you survive doing this? What other networks exist besides the regional theater world or even just doing New York? Are there performance spaces? Are there colleges? MP and the National Performance Network has a network of places you can travel. The network of ensemble theater for ensemble theaters are you empowering artists that way to be able to not necessarily need the traditional way of working and to survive and be an artist nowadays because it's hard. You cannot just rely. If you get produced one year and you feel very happy and very full of yourself, we all know next year you may not get produced. So how are you or if you happen to do a show that gets a bad review and is your career over or are you finding other ways to continue to work that when the quote-unquote bigger theater is finding you, you already have figured out what your aesthetic is, how you work, who you want to work with and how to be able to function and move around the country as an artist and be able to teach and train how that works. Besides just the usual, this is how you write and play, this is how a theater ensemble works. As we all know this is much more that goes to that with an Asian and without an Asian. How do you have a career to be able to function and move around without having that type of access? I have a question to ask the panel on behalf of Todd London who's the artistic director at New Romance and my colleague he wrote, because we've been having this conversation so he texted me, I think it was five texts in the question. Where he says, I'm posing this to you, historically playwrights have led theaters and the arts. Currently TV interests, huge budget shows to the leadership of writers, yet theaters do not perceive playwrights as serious choices to run them. They do not perceive them as leaders of people as directors are or as fundraisers as producers are. They want to ask about your writing and your solitude and how can you focus on the work of others. Even playwright artistic directors tend to be directors also. How do you address that and what can you as playwrights do together to change these perceptions and then to the fields, how can the field work with the managers and boards who made these decisions to open up the thinking about who can hold a leadership position in an organization or an institution. Well I think yeah, I would love to run a theater. One thing that I think we're really good at is reading plays and we know the mechanics of plays. We know how to interact with audiences. Whether we direct or don't direct we understand the culture of the theater. It's astonishing to me. I know that Richard Nelson when I worked with him, I taught at Yellow Way for a year and he was the chair and he talked a lot about this very subject and he thought part of it was he was talking about being employed by a theater beyond just being a writer for hire coming in to do your play to actually have benefits. He talks a lot about comparing the salaries from the artistic director if you really compare it to the playwright who comes in to do one show for a season it's pretty remarkable what the difference is in terms of percentage of income and benefits and all this other stuff. But he was also talking about leadership in theater and I loved the way he talked about writers should be running theaters. And not just like I know Richard Maxwell pretty well he runs the University Players and it can come off like a vanity thing but he does a lot of community outreach. He produces his work but he also produces other people's work now. He goes into prisons, he goes to McDonald's and he finds people who are interested in making theater. He does really interesting things with the community. I think it's not done enough. I think playwrights should be running theaters and I know that Lee Blessing at one point was up for the job at the O'Neill and I thought it was a tragedy that he didn't get picked. Here's a man who had been at the O'Neill 12 times. He's a great teacher. He teaches at Rutgers. He's one of our American's playwrights. He's worked with everybody you can imagine in every theater you can imagine. He's worked here several times and why didn't he get selected? I don't know. They chose a very talented young director to run the place but I thought why not have a playwright running the National Playwrights Countries. I think it's really important. I wish that someone would give me a chance. I was thinking about that too and I think in some of the things that Greg, you have said in our email discussions about today and this topic that have been said today, I wonder to there are ways, again pointing out the way that Actors Theatre created an advisory committee of playwrights in relationship to the artistic director search. I wonder if that's also where else can artists be within the organizations in addition to the productions and when they come into, when they're hired to come and work on a show. Can they, are there board positions for them? Are there selection committees that can, where those skills and insights be used within an organization in addition to just the show on which they're brought into work. So have there thoughts about that? I mean, Anne too, there's the TTA from all over. Sure. I'm myself, I'm not a good leader. I'm a very good structure but I know many playwrights who are very good, strong leaders. I think a lot about Shakespeare writing for a theater in which he had a financial stake. So I think some playwrights totally ready and able and willing to lead. Other playwrights maybe involved in structuring and in a kind of a shareholder situation, I think is also a really positive way. I think the, I mean, we have in storefront theater in Chicago, the distinction between a writer and a performer and a director was really blurry. You know, people were neither one or the other and all together. And I don't think it was maybe a product of where we were coming from but it didn't occur to us to make that distinction. And you would have, you know, it could be problematic because you'd be in rehearsal and an actor would stop the rehearsal and start to give notes and whatever. That was our culture. But yeah, I think part of my experience having the opportunity to work in professional theaters or theaters that are better funded or institutional theaters is that there is a real importance in making those distinctions that I didn't occur to me should be made earlier. And so I think you know, it's like that spectrum thing, like everybody's not entirely gay or straight kind of thing. It's sort of, there's a lot of gray area in between, I've heard. So, you know, we're kind of totally male and totally female, I kind of think. And I think directors there is something in the wiring of good directors where they are natural leaders. And there is among other qualities where it is easy for them to move from one department to the other in terms of just a big production. And there is something about playwrights that is, you have to be able you don't have to, but you find yourself in a room alone with your own thoughts for hours on end and you have to be able to sort of do that which is a little hard. So I think they are, there is something to the difference between the pure playwright and the pure director, but I don't think I think we're all sort of in between directors, playwrights, director and stuff. And so maybe maybe the label is a little bit of a barrier sometimes. I think because I ran a space really early in my career before my company even was developed because of running the space early when we left our space and I really just focused my attention on the company, when I started to deal with other theaters and agents and artistic directors, I was able to have a conversation with them in a way that a lot of them weren't expecting to have. If you're sitting there and you're talking about budget and you're really, really engaged with them in budget conversations. It's a different conversation you're having with someone when they're negotiating with you, when you can really sit there and break down their budget, but they're like, no, no, no, no. Why is that there? So I think as we've gone on and moved on, I think what we have managed to kind of carve out is because of having that experience of running my own space and having to fundraise and having to interact with audiences. So when I'm out as just an artist, my brain is still in that mode anyway. So we were just in Victory Gardens in Chicago. I knew that besides the usual way that they were going to promote, that we had to go out as my company. So every poetry spot in Chicago we hit because we knew we had to kind of go bigger than that. We were flooded Facebook and Twitter. We had to assist in being a presence in Chicago because Chicago, especially Victory Gardens, they were very sort of traditional theater audience. And my aesthetic and what my company does was shocking to some of them. It's funny when you walk out and you start doing something and within the first two minutes of opening your mouth, someone's running out of the room. You're like, wow. Like two minutes like, oh, shit, no. Did I curse? I'm sorry. But I will say because we were out in a bottom of a variety of different ways. There was a whole crop of people that came from the green mill to see the show that would not have come to see the show at all. There's a couple of hip hop radio stations we hit late at night, two o'clock in the morning. We hit it just to kind of do it. That came to see the show. So when we're standing on stage and we're looking at the audience, it's an interesting diverse group of people. And that's how I feel theater should be. So you got half the room that's laughing at something and the other half is looking on while they're laughing. And you got the other half that's looking and they're going while they're laughing. But it's this weird, eclectic group of people in the room who've paid a variety of different prices to sit and enjoy theater. And I personally think artists as much as they can be involved in decision making processes and seeing how the mechanics of things work. Because when you're asking for stuff, like I want this to happen now. And if you have no concept like to do this it impacts this, this, this, this, this, this and this. If you're not thinking along that line, you know, you can't really I feel truly impact what's going on. So it works on so many different levels. And I think running a theater being involved in that only helps the art. And to be able to help other artists coming up behind you to be able to tell them do this, please oh God, don't do that. Something that could come up in the drama this once, which is that the majority of those writers had never seen a production budget, nor even thought to ask to see one. So that was, I think to the point here, just being able to be familiar with that vocabulary is, it seems to be pretty critical in terms of how that interface with the production and the institution. Okay, five minutes. Thank you. I want to make sure, so let's take this five minutes. Are there questions that you would like to pose to this esteemed panel? I think these are great ideas. Okay, here, yes? I just have a question, I guess, for just everybody. As a playwright, do you find yourself kind of trying to find the pulse of pop culture? Or do you kind of try and see your own kind of trends happening in the theater community or regional trends that you are creating for yourself and my company? We're focused on the work, whatever the work it is. But we also are very conscious and I make sure I have young, young people connected to us and older, older people connected with us. So it's a whole spectrum of people that's all thinking about how to move forward. So we're working on something that's a traditional theater piece. I'm also thinking outside of the box, how can we connect like, you know, I keep saying Facebook and Twitter, but it's like Facebook and Twitter, what other ways can we impact in the way that younger people are receiving information and how they're responding to things. But I also make sure I've got my older heads there who are like, from a traditional standpoint, we need to do this, we need to do this, we need to do this. And so it's a whole team put together. You need to be aware of pop culture. It's there. You can't just act like it doesn't exist. And I think a lot of the problems with theater is we kind of ignored it or where you can see people trying to play catch up. And you're sitting there, you know, I can't say how many times I've gone to a theater where the theater itself has a hundred people in the room and then right next door is a space, kind of a multi-space that you're talking about and there's 400 people floating around. And the theater is sitting on, how the hell did that happen? I have no idea how to get that people who are in that space in their theater. So I think you have to think on all those levels to move forward. Do you mean in terms of when you're writing the play, are you gauging? Yeah, just kind of are you, I guess, gathering ideas or trying to connect on a certain pop culture level or are you trying to work? I guess it really depends on the work, true. I feel like the part of your brain that writes is not, in terms of the part of your brain that produces that thinks about what to do with this play that you've written can try to connect in this way. I feel like the part of, you know, if you're connected with pop culture as an individual, you may write a work which turns out to be connected or you may not. I feel like actively thinking about, oh, theaters are doing this kind of play or there seems to be this kind of thing and then trying to write a play that would be pretty deadening. I think that's a good question up here, gentlemen. Thanks. So I just perceive in this country a kind of lockdown on public space. You have to get a permit to have a birthday party at the park now, for example, if you're more than 20 people. And a lot of, especially on a little stop down, it's crazy to do, to try to do theater outside or in a more public assembly form. And I heard it in everybody's ideal theater kind of like more about controlling an indoor space, how to get your space and controlling and kind of privatizing. I'm just wondering if you have any experience in sort of making public spaces accessible bringing theater out rather than getting people to make. I have absolutely no experience. I mean it can be great. There's a company in New York called Downtown Art and they do site specific stuff. They did a show, I think it was called the Waste Makers Opera that began at the site of the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory and that building still exists, very close to Washington. Yeah, I mean that's a great idea to think of public spaces as being an additional stage for the company that you have. You know it's hard though to do something outside. It can go south, it's very hard to do it, but it can be thrilling when it's good. I think if you're collaborating with people who also do outdoor things, like a lot of community centers not artist groups, but community centers, things like that use outdoor space to have things for kids and things like that and we managed to collaborate with some politicians in the neighborhood who are progressive and they have things set up and they can give you quicker and easier access to going on to a store front people, have access to do things like that. I think if you include them in what's going on, you have easier access and the polls are just trying to run up there and just kind of plant your flag in the west end. I just like it when the audience is really close because the illusion of presentation is lesser. If it's really happening right there then it's really happening and then maybe you'll have to rush the stage to make it stop. That's why I like small spaces. I started to work in bigger spaces and it's really cool. It's really awesome and you make more money. I think there's magic in the small black box. What do you say? We're going to wrap it up. I just want to thank all of you for being here, being attentive to and part of this conversation and all of those guys too. I want to thank Amy Wegener, Sarah Lenny, Meg Fister Emily Rudick and the rest of the ATL team for putting this together. I want to thank this amazing group of people with the idea to talk about the ways that artists can be a part of your organizations and institutions. Produce their work and pay them, get them benefits, put them on, get their thoughts, get their insights. They had a lot of amazing ideas as evidence this morning. Thank you.