 I just want to say that I did say last night do not go to Chinatown and eat dumplings at 2 a.m. you'll regret it today so if you did that I'm sorry. So welcome this morning it was such an amazing day yesterday and thank you all for your deep engagement in this convening we are lucky this morning as Susan noted yesterday the really the the impetus for this whole program came out of a couple of really important pieces of work one of course was Todd London's outrageous fortune but the other that we'll hear a little bit about today was David Dower's Gates of Opportunity and so we are you know really here because of that work and so he has David has graciously offered to have a conversation with us this morning just to kind of harken back a little bit and talk about where we are now so I'm gonna hand you want Mike or do you yeah all right I'll do it that way and I'll sit here so he can see me this alright Travis can you hear yeah okay good morning this yeah this was it was something to hear you yesterday Susan remind me of the the work that we've all done and it's a lot of us and it didn't take much to say you can have the mic for 15 minutes I said yes right away even though the the schedule is it's early for everybody so we'll try to be lively I wanted I want to do a little bit of context and then I really need you all to to jump in the main thing that we want to talk about this morning less about for me it's less about the stuff that I that it gates of opportunity happy to talk about any of that if any of you participate in that I can't remember so we'll talk in detail but how many of you have read outrageous fortune yeah most of you good and how many of you participated in the data collection and outrageous fortune yeah so you remember what was happening when you were being surveyed and interviewed so I want to start this morning you know there are any number of ways to talk about the beginning it's interesting that we're here just a few days after Zelda past in so many ways there's a beginning there in Zelda's work and Margot's work prior but I think we if we start from 2002 really quickly some of you may have even been there in 2002 TCG hosted with the support of the Mellon Foundation and with the support of the Duke Foundation hosted convening in Portland called New Works New Ways and if you participate in that just a couple so let's start there really quickly and the goal of this morning is to lay out what you're you're actually in a continuum of work that's been going on since well before 2002 but but really where I came into it in a focused way was in 2002 so I know I can talk about that some of the rest you can bring in the earlier history but you're in a continuum and the really important thing for me to convey to you is that we are all delegates to this much larger question and Todd was on it without rages fortune how do we change the economics for playwrights in the American theater that question has yet to be answered and this is yet another step in the inquiry and Zelda Fitzhandler to just talk about her for one second one of the things that she said to many people including me at various points she when she decided to leave arena she'd been there for 40 years and she decided to leave arena to go take over the program at NYU tish and I asked her why how did she know that was the moment and why I had just left the Z space and wasn't certain that it was the right moment and Zelda's answer was that she wakes up every morning with a set of questions that are burning for answers and if the once the institutional context that she was in was no longer the most effective place to answer urgent questions it was time for her to move shift her context to where the urgency could be supported and so she went from producing theater to training the next generation of theater artists because that's where the urgency was for her and in a lot of ways the urgency hasn't changed it hasn't changed for the economics of playwrights it hasn't changed because there is a program it hasn't changed because you guys have grants it hasn't changed we're still in the urgency of those questions and this is the context in which we are pursuing those answers and so it's important for me that this morning what we talk about is what can each of us do what is needed what's the opportunity to move the inquiry forward when we first started this particular program which came after a lot of other work the foundation really set it out and Susan laid it out a little bit yesterday there was a panel of people that the foundation was asking to help nominate theaters that could move this inquiry forward in the first round and then it became an open application in the second round in the first round what the foundation was was asking was how do we how do we ship that needle how do we shift the economics for playwrights generally and who are the best advocates delegates to that question and it was a pilot program and what and the success and those of you who are repeating now congratulations to you and thank you to you because some part of the success comes is documented by the fact that there's so many of you who are now repeating in it that inquiry is active and making progress and you guys have moved the needle some yourselves and now there's a whole new group and a whole new set of communities and I'm so sorry that we don't have Alaska on the map we'll figure that out but there's a whole new set of communities that are at work on it in 2002 when Mellon and Duke and TCG gathered people around new works new ways the question there was how do we get out of the current model and the and the whole it's creating around new work and the people who make new work and what new ideas are there about how we could support the creation development and dissemination of new work in the theater in in this country and it was a contentious meeting it was a challenging meeting and one of the problems that we had at the outset in that meeting was that the frame was still the same frame even though the the conversation was looking for some the new works in the new ways the conversation moved between the producer and the playwright the producer and the playwright and to a certain extent there were some presenters in the room so it moved between producer presenter playwright as if those were the only available models and there were a number of people and kirsten you were there and Polly was Polly was there so Carl was there and that's where Carl and I first started our work together and we kind of realized that there were about a dozen of us in the room who that left out we were development centers we were places that artists in general but playwrights in particular were being able to sort of design their own approaches and that these were the new approaches and it took a minute it was a contentious minute for us to get into the conversation in the new ways and in that moment the Mellon Foundation being in the room and the Duke Foundation being in the room they started to ask questions how many of you are there who are working in new new ways how would you even organize yourselves how would we even know how to support this effort is it an organized effort what is it and what we realized was it was primarily in that dozen there were a handful that were New York organizations but there were also communities nobody thought of at the time where these ideas were popping up they weren't on the map and so we weren't organized and we didn't have an agenda we didn't have an idea we didn't have a trajectory we didn't have an inquiry we were just trying to sustain our institutions and trying to support the artists we were working with I was focused on the Bay Area the playwright center had a dual focus both Minneapolis bringing writers to Minneapolis but then also functioning as a as a national service organization new playwrights was there Lark was there here was there and in that meeting was the first time we saw each other as possibly a movement or a network or something other than isolated people serving the producing organizations and if you remember the tenor at that time and it's somewhat talked about in outrageous fortune we were all including us and not just the producers and presenters we talked about you as my playwrights those of you who are playwrights in the room and we would argue over who made Sarah rule no no no Sarah rules my playwright well no no we made clean house well there were these four readings before clean house ever had a production yeah yeah but we did it and and the institutions argued over ownership and if you were on the foundation side at that time we were totally exposed as that every grant that came in said I made Sarah rule but we didn't see it we didn't talk and so we didn't know our underwear was showing and we were trying to create a movement we were trying to make a case each of us for our individual organizations as the place that made Sarah rule and I only say that because she was the one at the time that came up the most and and in part of the gates of opportunity conversation Sarah talked about that like how awkward it was to have to say every time someone called her to say did ex theater make you yes and she would say yes because she wasn't sure if she said no that she'd ever have another chance to work again right I mean every playwright in the room knows if you if you dare to tell the truth in a circumstance like that you are risking your career that's one of the pieces of the needle we have to move we have to be able to tell the truth and we have to be able to ask questions and expect the truth and so in 2002 we weren't telling the truth and so what came out of that was and I'm gonna name another person who hasn't been named I don't think yet is Olga Garai she was at the Duke Foundation at the time and the part of the contentious moment and this is like a self-serving story part of the contentiousness of that moment was that I asked a question that was really not appreciated and I got kind of slapped down by the moderator and I was embarrassed I'd never been in a national conversation before so I was very embarrassed and I left and I was leaving the conference because I thought well I just you know took a crap in the middle of the room and the whole country and and now my career is over so I guess plus I paid to be there myself as most of us had we didn't have the infrastructure to travel in that way and but Olga came and got me and she pulled me back in the room and so have a lot of gratitude for Olga Garai because I was on my way out of not just the conference but out of the field when she stopped me in the lobby and so what proceeded she asked me a question that then led to this work she said well who's the tribe like if I'm a funder who would I even support am I gonna have to do the work of finding those organizations that are focused on artists on playwrights myself you guys don't know and so I spent the rest of the day and a half trying to figure out who in the room it was and we had a dinner something you I know you were at the dinner you might have been at the dinner yeah we had a little dinner table to ourselves to talk about it and that led me to this place of realizing that I was working in San Francisco I was focused on San Francisco artists a lot of them playwrights a lot of it was creating new work and I had no idea how they were gonna move from San Francisco into the field I say this because just about that same time Peter Noctrieb showed up at the Z space and I said hey why you know here's here's a space you could be a resident playwright here I didn't know what it was and then we had a little grant I think it was $1,500 from something called the Ternus all project which is like the sunflower project and I just thought that was enough for him to live on so here and and there were four there were four that year and he was the only one we ever saw and he came in many days and sat on the floor we didn't have a desk we didn't have anything he sat on the floor at one point he sat on a on a the backseat of a van that we had pulled out and put in there as a couch with his laptop and he started writing and and in that moment was where I realized I don't know what to do for him from here like I we don't produce plays how do I connect him how do I connect anybody who takes me seriously and one of the things about the what's underneath all of this is if you if you need more than yes from any of this work if you can't keep yourself in motion on your questions both institutions and artists then you're going to struggle but if you can just take a yes and move forward and and go and ask the question when you need it and take the next yes and go that's what Peter was able to do I said here sure you can have a couch said okay and then he started from there and he was writing plays and then he asked for room to read the plays okay room to read the place that's easy all along the way all he needed was a yes he knew what the questions were that were in his way and he wasn't done and he's not done I'm sure I ask you but so the the motion that we got into there was how do we connect our institutions to something larger so that we're not in our individual contexts and just you know fighting with each other over which playwright we started and so I asked at that time to try and answer Olga's question I asked is there a way that I could go meet my colleagues around the country because I don't know how to create a path for the San Francisco playwrights I had a sense that there wasn't new works freeway somewhere because I could see the same six writers you know everywhere I have the sense that there was a you know super highway but that maybe there wasn't an on ramp in San Francisco and maybe it was my job to build one so I wanted to go find out where there were on ramps and where there weren't on ramps and how they had done it and so I had a small grant from the Mellon Foundation to spend six months on the road I went to 15 cities that's what Gates of Opportunity is based on and just interviewed and the reasons called Gates of Opportunity was I was trying to figure out I knew I was a gatekeeper in San Francisco there were several of us it wasn't just me but there I was one Lisa Steiner already was one before she was even at the Z space so I knew we're there were gates in our communities and it was our job to keep them and they were the Gates of Opportunity for other people and how to what kind of health what was the state of health what were the challenges that the gatekeepers were facing and how did the gates open wider what was trapped behind them and how do we how do we open and sustain those gates so that's basically what you see in there Todd was doing outrageous fortune at the same time and he was really focused on the economics of playwrights both of these projects had the support of the Mellon Foundation and it was because the Mellon Foundation was asking similar questions about how do our resources how does our energy contribute to the forward progress in our field and it I want to pause here for just a moment Susan ticked off a list yesterday of the ways in which the Mellon Foundation has been asking this question for at least the last 15 years about how do their resources serve the common good and part of the common good that they're focused on is the American theater that's part of the common good that they're focused on but they have been very focused on the American theater and they have been stalwart in investing in the inquiry and this inquiry has been about economic justice for artists in the U.S. that's a big phrase but the economy of being an artist in the theater in the U.S. their resources are intellectual resources capital and convening power your resources are your creativity your institutional context these are your resources they are your experience your expertise your years of service these are all commons resources and it's not for nothing that HowlRound is in the middle of this program HowlRound is a theater commons and all of us who are engaged in HowlRound are asking what resources do we have to contribute to the common good and what do we need from the commons in order to continue the progress toward economic justice and artistic excellence for artists what do we need and what do we have Mellon knows what they have and they have been stalwart and they are also very modest about it and so they don't stand up here in front of you and tell you the amount of money they've invested the amount of times they've convened the the hours and hours and hours of research that they put into everything that they've done and they really just tick off the list of programs like you know they were the parties we did the National Theater Project how many anybody here been involved yet in the National Theater Project another yeah you guys have Polly and Carl and Lisa are on that panel another huge effort right not the NPRP the NPRP focused on playwrights that left out ensembles that left out devised work it left out touring work and so another program parallel program the National Theater Project focused on ensembles focused on touring work focused on devising you guys are the cohort that are taking the inquiry forward that's focused on playwrights I repeat myself and repeat myself there because I'm hoping that it will come through this is not a gift although it is a gift in the truest sense this is not a gift this is does not make you special it does not solve your lives this is three years for you to be part of this effort to create an economic model that works for artists to create the circumstances understand the circumstances that lead to community based practice impact in your local community artistic excellence in the field this is a large set of questions you've been asked to help us answer and the important flip here is if you think just think about the money I think in the press release this round and I and I'm not going to ask them and I'm not even going to look at them but I think the press really said it was five point eight million dollars this time look at how few people are in this room is that investment actually enough to do what we're all trying to do move the needle for economic justice and artistic excellence and a quality of life for playwrights and sustainability for institutions focused on new work is this room the answer is that it are we done no we are all delegates to something much larger much costlier the Mellon Foundation isn't going to do it themselves bless you for trying to you're carrying it this long and and one of the things that's happened in the last couple of years is that partners are starting to show up there are other types of programs that are residency based and some of you may be involved in them they are not necessarily coming from the Mellon Foundation the needle is shifting some but it's this cohort the next three years I think are going to be determined as to whether we're going to be able to sustain as a field I'm not speaking for the foundation I'm speaking as a member of the commons whether we're going to be able to sustain playwright residencies as one of the answers five point eight million dollars is an important investment and it's an important injection into research and you are the scientists you are carrying out those studies and you're the ones who are going to tell us learn for us and help us understand what we're up to and how to sustain it and which parts are working and which parts aren't there was and I think Louise I think you were one of the you participated in that maybe will there was playwright residency activity prior to all of this TCG did two different residency programs anybody have one of those did you have one of those yeah yeah that's right yeah okay so Jack did you guys host any of those no okay so TCG had a MetLife program and a program funded by the NEA and they were both focused on playwright residencies and those went away and for many reasons some of them having to do with the particular structural issues of contracts with the NEA nothing to do with success but one of the things that they taught us was well they taught several things one of the challenges that those programs had was there was a very light residency requirement but it was a requirement had to be measured in the number of days and that number of days proved to be really problematic to do a report particularly if you were really only giving a residency for one play which often was the case in many of those cases unintentionally it led to the playwright running a program like a playwright's lab or the education program I don't know if either of you got in that boat or will but but all of a sudden for your twenty five thousand dollars you were being asked to run the education program of the theater and not having time to write so there were things that got learned each round of that about how much money does it take how long does it take is it one year is it one project is that a residency so three years became the next thing and I tell you I made a correction myself that didn't prove to be entirely correct when we started the arena residencies we actually took we had five of them at the same time to try to see if what happens in density maybe it's density that's going to actually matter instead of everybody scattered all over the place and you can't feel each other what if five writers were on the same staff and trying to move the needle that way and we took out the residency requirement and arena at that point was a had just called itself this named the building of the Meade Center for American theater and we were trying to understand what does it mean to be a center for the American theater well maybe we can create a residency in a center for the American theater that's just about your life as a playwright and doesn't matter whether you live here or not and so those first writers could or didn't have to spend time at arena they were residencies to just be a playwright in the American theater the most successful of those is really Karen Zacharias I mean Karen is now one of the most produced playwrights in the country she was resident at arena arena did multiple productions I think they're on their fourth with her now and she's still in many ways a resident of that theater without the Mellon support but others we're so light that they didn't even touch and so that didn't work either going that way the time the length of time three years was better than one and the money was better in terms of being able to sustain somebody's focus on a residency for a period of time and their role in the institution was maybe better but there were still things to learn and so that's where the NPRP then picked up and said well let's go back to this notion of multiple sites around the country let's keep what we learned about the number of years let's keep what we learned about the salary let's keep what we learned about their role in the institution and the first cohort did not as Susan said yesterday the first cohort did not ask for a prior relationship between the theater and the playwright and one of the things we saw the struggle was how do you actually then embed that if you don't have any relationship if you like each other's work and that's the extent of your relationship but you haven't been through production together you haven't been through development together you haven't shared of you haven't been roommates if you haven't done that it's really hard in three years to make up for that so you'll see that many of you around this room are actually working in your home communities but even those of you who aren't working in your home communities are working in play artistic homes that you had for years prior that became the next iteration that's the next set of things that we're asking here that I won't go on except I want you guys to reflect back and especially some of you who are in the second round but I I'm going to come back to this thing that I'm going to ask each of you to commit to on behalf of the commons I'm going to sit here as a member of the commons and ask each of you who are now privileged by this three years with this support to commit to making a contribution to the commons as part of this and the contribution we need from you is learning curiosity truth doesn't do us any good if the reports that we share with each other are full of lies what help is that that selfishness that's not commons based practice so I'm gonna sit here I'm gonna ask you to be able to be fierce tell the truth help us learn help move the needle for playwrights how do you have you are the playwrights job other people have the director's job other people have the designer's job other people have the ensembles and the actors the institutions touch them all but you know less than the playwrights are part of this process now you have accepted the cash I'm asking you to accept the responsibility and to become a member of the commons make a contribution to the commons and even what we learn that we wish we hadn't we'd learn we'd known in advance even what we think of as failure if it's failing forward you know this we're in the arts there's no such thing as failure as long as we're failing forward I was quoting somebody earlier how many watched Obama's speech I loved one of my favorite lines of the whole convention yes of course we made mistakes of course we aired that's because we tried we're trying together all of us are here trying together nothing is done nothing is settled and if we don't do our job we're the end of it and think of all the writers behind us and all the institutions around us that need to understand how to do this big responsibility but I think we're up to it so questions comments I would love to hear comments about things that have worked or haven't worked but then also questions from from you guys of each other or of me about what I mean by saying I'm sitting here asking you for this any comments thoughts Louise you've been in it for so long meet all these people who've been running their nonprofits for so long one of my jobs has been to also help people transition out of their fields so this is something that I wake up in the morning sometimes crying about because I think that I work with a small company in LA and I've been with them for 20 years and one of the things I'm trying to help my artistic director of that company do is to move on so change is the one constant in our field right it's the only way that we're able to make our work it's the only way you can move on to the next production it's the only way that you can stay fresh and you can stay alive in the business of art right so I think one of the challenges I'm finding is I'm going a lot to meet a lot of older people way older than me who I am trying to help transition so I guess you know one of those big moments that pop pops up for me is how do we keep re-envisioning the field how does a field keep changing how do we allow ourselves to be part of that change and when is that wonderful moment when you know it's time to sort of move on so I think I really wrestled with that for the renewal right so you know do I still have sort of viability here is there can we still make change right and I just want to throw that out because I think that's super important is those those most important moments in my life as a playwright have been the moments where I don't know how to move on so I've had great mentors like Irene Forna as like Todd London like Gordon Davidson even right I think Gordon looked at Che and I and asked us to move on in a very beautiful way he didn't know how to say it in the right way I think right because he had been in it for 30 years right but I think in some way it's like I'm thinking about this a lot how do you know how did not lose the the sense of change and how to not lose the nomadic quality that I think is what makes us so extraordinary right are there other questions on people's minds as you enter this things that didn't occur to you but that you would be trying to answer through this period um we the residency we're about to begin with Lauren one of the reasons she's not here is she is two months into her second child and her first child is 20 months old and we've made a commitment over the past couple of years to become a much more family friendly arts organization for whatever that means and we're experimenting with a lot of different things and have any of the residencies so far had playwrights who were wrestling with being new parents not just parents but new parents specifically and is there any documentation Lauren and I can look at because I mean we're immediately we're immediately finding challenges that we're wrestling with in terms of number of days she can be in the office what is a what is a 40 minute commute both directions mean to someone's life and so anything that's already been written we would love to be able to get our hands on if any of you experimented with it we'd love to talk to you about it because we're gonna do our best to document what it means for us doing it but any guidance that you got any stomach blocks or triumphs you've had we'd love to hear about we're gonna take time for that those some of those questions this afternoon and get into them so I want to make sure that you know we made space for that so it's a great question probably only have another I don't know what time it is so we're right okay anybody have one more thought you want to add into the to the room a question you want to contribute Jack yeah I do no I mean I think as we go on to this that there's now 18 of us that every 18 months we become a cohort and other than that we're 18 different organizations with residencies and so what is what can we do collectively to move the idea of a resident playwright and its value to an organization forward so it ripples to 18 more in three years without funding from melon and it just becomes an institutionalized thing and then how do we take these 18 playwrights as and make and make sure that their work without their agents or each of us as artistic directors is there something we can do collectively to see their work be disseminated and produced by theaters everywhere not because it has the validation of being part of this cohort just because we have made some effort for everybody's work to be part of the American canon yeah production we know matters and and how do we move the needle on production the other thing I just want to say it and then I think I should stop but to that Jack and somewhat to Louise's comment and Jason the we're in a different era and our elders and our people who have been in their roles I'm going to look at Sam I'm going to look at Jack even Ralph for the time that you guys have been leading and there's probably others with similar time Michelle up a lot of that era was physical infrastructure was the infrastructure buildings institutions things set in place what's now is the virtual infrastructure and how round exists in and can knit this group together in ways that we can't do if we have only relying on physical space we can be knitted together in communication in the virtual realm and I would encourage you as we go through the rest of this day to think about what is how do we use that platform how do we use our proximity to each other through the internet our proximity now is values and and our ideas that's our those are our we're joined there more than we are by zip codes and so how do we use the infrastructure that's available to us to this generation to move the thing forward Susan you had a comment and then we're done I just want to build on Jack's comment for a minute because there's 61 other theaters that applied in this round and I would say 60 of them were competitive so as we're thinking about building this network this commons some way to gather them in one of those theaters had been in the first round had been very close to the finals didn't get it and said it was a large theater this is so important we're going to fund this ourselves didn't happen applied again same theater same same playwright and I'm waiting for that to happen but for the theaters that couldn't possibly afford to do that on their own at this time how do we bring them into the conversation make them part of the tribe okay thank you all for your time this morning thank you for joining us on this journey and we continue so have a great day