 All right. Jamie, do we have all the groups back this time before we start? Okay, so we're going to do exactly what we did yesterday, except that you'll say different words. And so with four minutes, each group can sort of nominate themselves to come up as they're ready to go. So who wants to get started? Hi, I'm Gita from the Brick Group C. We mostly had a very interesting conversation about audiences' experiences with shows that maybe we felt are not super successful. And first of all, maybe it's a show that we were like, ooh, it wasn't that good, but an audience can love that anyway, and that's totally valid. But also how to engage them. You know, it's okay to not like something. It's okay to go to the theater and not love it, and how to encourage audiences to have that experience and talk about it and let that be okay. That maybe not have a talk back with the artists where people are telling the playwright everything they hated, but to have the audience conversation and have them converse with each other or with the theater staff and make that totally valid and hopefully encourage them to come back and see something else and have that experience and let that experience be that experience. We also had some very bold aspirations. One of them was to get TV writers to write about theater on television in a positive way, not as a joke on a sitcom, on friends where they go see Joe's play and it's so terrible. Like, how can we get theater on TV that people can go to the theater and be like, oh, I went to a play last night. It was pretty good. Or, you know, some kind of way to involve that. So the national conversation about theater is not a joke. This is very, very bold, very bold. We talked about having playwrights more involved in the experience of crafting the marketing materials of the show and how to involve them about the message on a more intimate level. We talked about everyone getting on the new play network and how exciting that is for both organizations and for playwrights. So I'm going to create two accounts tomorrow. Morning. We talked about crafting great taglines that can sell out a show, even a classical show, if you really have a bold tagline, like, trust no one or hell is other people, and it can have nothing to do with it, but it helps sell tickets. Hey, you've got to get people in the door, guys. You've got to get people in the doors. We also wanted to figure out how to bring English language plays to non-English speakers, maybe using technology, incorporating that into the show in some fabulous way that we didn't figure out yet, but we will. And working to find the right audiences for playwrights, like, if we have a new playwright and the play is very specific, you know, there's people out there who that might speak to and, like, how we'd love to find them and get them in the theater and create a relationship with the playwrights. Yeah, so that was mostly it, you know, talking about communication, like, we're here to communicate, like, how to really communicate with people better. And we aspire to balance, and we aspire to bring the two half-priced ticket booths in Boston to life and make them really exciting and engaging and wonderful. And I think that covers our aspirations for Group C. My doppelganger. I have to start with an important announcement. I found some glasses on my chair, and I don't know who they are. They might be Nancy and Burnett, but I'm going to put them on this table, and so at lunch, if you're missing glasses. Just a little bit of detail. Okay. So, group, I can't see them anyway. So Group E started with an interesting challenge, and that challenge was talking about individual aspirations and separating them from our institutional or, like, organization goals. And part of that was, like, wow, maybe we have a super healthy work-life balance. And then the other... That was irony, like, we totally don't. And then the other half of that is, like, we're here and we're, like, in this brain-trust think tank situation, and so maybe we're just too far-steeped in, like, the theater-job conversation more the way we are and, like, what's the person I want to be. Okay, so we started with identifying the communities that we want to reach and how to create genuine relationships. There was a talk of bridges yesterday, the talk of two-way bridges. How do we go out into the neighborhoods and the communities and, like, be real people and be neighbors and fellow citizens? How do you, like, recalibrate what you already have as far as engagement is concerned, so you're not always adding things? How do you evaluate the existing systems and, like, traditions that you have and say, like, wow, I actually don't have to do that anymore. It's more effective and more impactful if I spend time doing this, being, you know, awesome, responsible, genuine engagement, which is this. So we want to stay true to who we are, so, like, maybe you aren't the most excited about Twitter being in the seat next to you and so, like, how do you find a good middle ground for that? How do you, like, not completely change what you believe as an artist or as an institution leader to, like, further engagement? And then, okay, this is my favorite one. So, like, how do we chill out, right? Like, how do we chill out our spaces? Like, how do we make spaces our lobbies, the spaces in front of the theater, like a place you want to be, a place you want to go? How do you, like, bring people into the theater and them a list of knows, right? Like, and a little bit about, like, how do you bring people into the theater and allow them to be who they are, not ask them to act like the people that are already coming to your theater. And then, okay, so then re-evaluating the standing rules and structures that we have to be part of the 21st century. So, like, how do we put, like, how do we not make the theater a place where the audience comes to worship the artist? Like, how do you put the artist and the... Ooh! It wasn't me. So, how do you put artists and audience on the same level? Like, how do you really build a community between those two entities? They're in the room together. They might as well acknowledge it. And part of that is, and this is a scandalous part, so be ready, stop the livestream. How do you do something like bring equity rules into the 21st century? How do you... How do you make those restrictions realistic and how do you make them... How do you encourage engagement by changing them? Great. So, Group E was awesome, and thanks, guys. Hi, I'm Lisa Millette from City Lights Theater Company, and I am speaking for Group D. I couldn't remember our letter. An absolutely lovely group of people. Okay, we too had the issue of separating our personal from our institutions, I think, in a way, but it felt okay because that's what we're passionate about, and we were also trying to answer this question in terms of engagement. So, we had some really interesting things come up, though. Okay, one was... And I'm assuming that all of us, if it wasn't super personal, what we're saying is that we'd like to be leaders in this charge and really advocate and rally for these types of changes and get behind them with everything. So, we had... There was an idea about a desire to create greater capacity for producing new work. So, basically to fast track it a little bit more, so playwrights weren't sending things out and waiting forever and ever and ever and maybe never hearing back, but making it possible for organizations, for institutions, to making it easier for them to produce it so that it can just get done more often and quickly. We had one that was getting community partnerships in place before actually producing the work because there was an understanding of how important that was. So, not compromising in that way and finding a strong community partner and then moving forward with creating the work. Okay, so it'll be weird if I talk about myself in the third person, so this was mine. I aspire to find a bigger platform to be able to share some really great ideas and things that have been really working for my small yet mighty theater company. I feel like I have some things that have just hit it out of the park, but I'm in San Jose in a hundred seat warehouse and so things like coming to this and trying to have these conversations is something that I aspire to, so thank you. I was the one who has the parties every night, so that's the kind of thing I can't say enough about how beneficial that's been to the organization. Okay, this was a great one. Not being contained and held back by money, by the bottom line of the work, and we still have to get butts in seats, but carving out time to be able to dream and think big and have big ideas. Trying to get theaters to move away from training their audiences that new work is small, precious, and off-center. So, trying to find a way that the theaters start training their audiences the opposite, that it should support a more robust body of work that's new and just start acting like that's normal. And the wonderful quote from this one was also like larger bodies of new work, so more symphonies, not just duets and quartets, which I thought was great. Okay, one was to resist the urge to follow the go small or go home. This one kind of broke my heart. Fight against that desire to be marketable for your plays to work because if they're small and they don't cost as much and they're not as big of a risk, maybe you'll do the work. That stick to your dreams and the stories that you want to tell. Another one that the American theater embrace the multilingual nature of the country. And also any way that we can encourage a larger pool of actors of color because that is also sometimes a blocking point for producers to produce new work that have ethnic actors because it's harder. Let's see, let's see, let's see. Ah, okay, bringing the new work community, writers and producers, anybody that's doing new work together more to help each other instead of thinking about your own piece of the pie, but really invest in the ecosystem of new work from top to bottom and trying to strengthen it together. Implement new ideas around accessibility to theater in regards to childcare. And, you know, like I have two kids. So finding all those interesting ideas how to make that work, this is a great one. 70,000 10th graders in New York make it possible for them to see a play. There are 70,000 10th graders in public schools. Make sure every single one of them can see a play. Think about accessibility for theater for all walks of life, not just kids and teens. Is it too late for a 45-year-old that wasn't exposed to theater? So not ignoring, we always say all the old people go to theater but there are some old people that don't. So just making sure that we're inclusive in our outreach. I love this one. Harness the energy and engagement that people have for sports and bring it to theater. Yeah, whoever does that, you're a rock star. And then we had one sort of general run that sort of seemed to float to the top from our group and it's find ways to do what seems impossible. Just do it. Just find a way. If you love it and you're passionate about it, don't block yourself with I can't because, because, because, because, just find a way. One of those old people she just referred to. I'm Julie Henrikus from StageSource. So we again had the same conversation or the same issues about separating personal from institutions but we went with it and sort of got a little more boots on the ground, I think. Community, large versus small, recognize what that is and where you are and how that influences what you do. Who's in your neighborhood, literally? What's the business next door? How do you interface with them? How do you invite them into your process? And how do you connect with them on not just, on their level and not just say come see us but what do you do and maybe how can you help us do what we do? Open the doors to your theater. Open the doors to your theater. Open the doors to your theater. Get staff there when the audience is there so that you can have conversations. Understand that there are bandwidth issues for everybody working in theater. So how do you use other people to help do engagement? Like how do you have your boards invite playwrights out to dinner or how do you sort of leverage other people who actually are enjoying that opportunity? Remember that people want to have an experience with somebody when they go to your theater. Acknowledge that and try and make that. Test your assumptions all the time. Service orgs. I run a service org so this was me. How did we use them to help foster collaborations to do some of the infrastructural work and to offer support and reward impulses for the current day audience members. So if people want to take a selfie, let them take a selfie, get a tag with your theater, have them posted on Facebook and use that to help do your work. Group B. Group B is breaking the mold. We're going to pass the mic and we're each going to speak for ourselves and summarize what we aspire to. So I aspire to generosity towards the theaters that I work with in finding a way to make it clear to them that we are collaborators and that I'm not asking for more. I want to be a part of the process to give more that I have resources that they need and find a way to work with them if they haven't thought about that before and generosity towards the audience in rethinking my relationship to the audience all the time with every play in the myriad ways in which that can operate. I aspire to all those things too. My personal aspiration is to find better ways to make a home in the communities in which I work instead of just living in the communities in which I work. I aspire to ask more questions of everyone, of my staff, of our audience and of our artists and particularly to do that earlier in our process so actually as part of our development process of new work to begin asking our artists while we're developing their plays how they might be interested in engaging with our audiences so we can start building into our budget for that production money and resources to begin that engagement early. I aspire to partner with more organizations as a way to share responsibilities and resources and to expand the reach of our artists' diverse voices. We had a team member who had to leave a little bit early but we wanted to share her voice as well so Rebecca aspires to expand the definition of risk at Schubert Foundation to be more inclusive of the different ways artists, institutions and audiences define risk. I aspire to hold up the respect, curiosity, delight, accountability and love that I find and give in my deep personal relationships as the aspirational north star for the respect, curiosity, delight, accountability and love I'd like to find and give to the audiences and communities I live in, work with and serve. This is going to sound very simple now. I aspire to be braver in implementing the next practices instead of just the best practices. My personal aspiration is to move beyond the logistical challenges of my geographical situation and be a more generous and more engaged audience member at other theaters around the country. I aspire to seek a balance in the distribution of the funds that I'm honored to manage in an equitable manner, cultivating new relationships while respecting existing ones and doing no harm to those and being mindful in the context of this meeting of thinking of artists, audiences, communities, theaters and honoring the plurality, the variety, the diversity of all of those. Nice work to you. We are group F. F for fun. Fantastic, fabulous. I'm Deb Clapp. I'm Dayfina. And the first thing that we wanted to talk about was it's sort of like chill out but also the exact opposite which is we aspire to be Disney in that we would design the entire experience of people who visit our theaters from the time that they buy a ticket which can be so unpleasant all the way up until they leave the theater. So we feel like that sometimes we say, come and see us, come and see us. Keep your blinders on because we don't want you until you get to the fun stuff is how we put it. So that's the first thing. This was brought up earlier. Hopefully it sounds a little bit different but the idea just to be braver overall to be more courageous and how that also shows up being a woman, being articulate in the work. Laura mentioned that again. And this came up, this idea of thinking about leadership. This was brought up the other day in our small group like where are the leaders are they here but sort of reframing and knowing that we're all leaders and being brave and recognizing our own leadership and also part of that managing up, managing around but not devaluing ourselves. We're all here for a reason, we're leaders. So let's be brave. Something else that other people have mentioned was around creating an experience in which people can be social. So for whatever that means we are totally cognizant that there's a lot of tension around this issue but that we really need to, that people really want to be social and coming into these spaces doesn't mean that you shut down your sociability but that we should, as somebody else said, encourage that more. It's hard to go towards the end because I feel like this is brought up too but just being more of a community member, being a citizen and that has two takes. One, there was a striving for wanting to know who's in our community, et cetera but also how do we think outside of the arts what are the other ways to engage within our community civically and also not to see those things as separate. I feel like there's this sort of unspoken kind of privilege in how we talk about reaching the community that feels like we're separate. So how do we see ourselves as one of the same? We are the community not thinking like we're above it. Mark and I were talking earlier about this idea of oh, we're going to work with the community and they do work in the school and the prisons and this idea of we're better than sort of shows up. So part of, I'm going to do two at the same time. The other thing is a personal goal for me is how do we continue to look within ourselves and to see the space that we're taking up because I think that we go straight to the audience but we don't do our own internal work about our own viewpoints and what we're bringing forth when we walk into a room. Along with that we talked about designing playwrights and playwrights' residencies and the playwrights' interaction with the community and being, you know, sort of really careful about how we do that but allowing the playwright to actually be a part of the community and even, you know, I can't remember his name from Fitchburg, but Nick, what Nick said, you know, some of the projects that they're working on just allowing playwrights to do that in our communities if they want to but also understanding that sometimes they don't. How can we be our own ringleaders? Like, how are we a ringleader in our community? So Laura Jackman was also talking about maybe starting a group of like five to ten or fifteen playwrights and experiencing each other's work. How do we sort of, we were talking about how we go to theater alone a lot. So how do we think about just friendship and how do we bring, how are we a better friend and how do we bring people? We are ringleaders so let's not forget that. So we love you. I love you. Look, we, I have an imaginary friend right now. Creating fandom. We, you know, talked a little bit about video games and it goes to the sports metaphor as well. How do we create excitement around plays and even, you know, going six months or a year out in front of a play to try to talk to audiences about the play and really generate excitement about them. I love the gentleman who said, not talking about best practices but next practices. I would love, we talked about this in our breakfast so how do we come out of this and maybe think about phase three as, are there certain framing questions we can ask? So anytime a theater is working on any project there's a list of things which, you know, just framing the way we think about it and that is always community-minded. Maybe they're not best practices they're just investigative questions to help us think about the work more thoughtfully. I think that's a good place to end. End of play. Thank you. Hey, I'm Jeremy. I work at the Playwright Center. I agree. Thanks. So, yeah, so I'm probably the last person. So, yeah, to everything there. Also, Davey and I can't wait to have six theater dates with you in the next month. I'm really excited about that. I need a friend. Let's be friends. Okay, great. It's done. And that's all we had to say. Thanks. So I think we sort of at the end of the day kind of summed it all up in terms of kind of what are like, but core values kind of that we would like to practice out in the world and tried to use as many words that avoided the same words that we all say and don't always practice. But I'm going to say all of those exact things right now. So these are sort of the spirits of generosity, authenticity, both to ourselves and to the people that we work with and who we serve and who we collaborate with and who we show up to after our kid is sick and they take care of us and say, please go home early. So the third thing is empathy. How do we practice empathy for the greater world and move outside of both ourselves as artists or ourselves as parts of an organization? Self-kindness. Practicing really intense levels of self-kindness. I don't have to tell anyone why in this room because you all do it underpaid for a living. Altruism, which I think a lot of people have spoken about. Again, just the idea of thinking beyond ourselves and just our institution or just the art that I'm making in that moment. Perception shift. How willing am I at any moment, I think as we were just talking about here a moment ago, to change what I think at next practices rather than best accepted practices. Storytelling, let's not forget. I think people were using the words experience and that storytelling is why we all do it or anyway why some of us do it and I think why people come to it ultimately if they're not dragged by other people. They want to come for an experience for the idea of hearing a story in a different way than maybe they've heard before, which is the new part. This was actually mine but we spoke about it a lot I think is the loss in the American theater of focus on process rather than on product and what would it mean if we sort of walked away from here kind of in the end of this thinking about how do we always have... how do we sustain process and the value of process going forward and trusting that the process will take us to the end point rather than only deciding we know what the end point is in the first season planning meeting and then saying well we have to get there so let's just do that. Better listening to each other and to audiences. A spirit of non-competition and I think Keenan as he always does kind of I put this last which is embracing the potential of the future which I think is next practices it's the idea of hey what's happening at OSF and what are you guys doing with that project oh that's really interesting I've been looking for the key to figure that out or wow Playwrights Horizons you're doing this incredible thing with Club Thumb where you have this thing, they want this thing you recognize them they are now offering more things to more Playwrights now how can they give back so thinking about what sort of the potential of the future is and how we're artists we are the ringleaders right we're the leaders, we're the visionaries and that we don't just need to sit around and wait for some other motherfucker to give us the space we're all doing it we're already here, we're already in this room we're already risking, we're already doing all the things that all these studies talk about so let's just step up to the plate and do it I think we talked about that did we get all the groups so we're going to take lunch and lunch is out there and I know we're just running a tad behind but I think we should take our full 30 minutes for lunch because we've earned it and so 30 minutes for lunch so about 10 minutes after one we'll reconvene here