 Okay. Okay. Well hello to everybody who has come back for the talk and hello to the CalRound audience. We are here at the 37th annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and we are talking to three of our playwrights, T.D. Mitchell. This is the screen, also known as the Hunter screen, and Philip Howes, on a topic called Translating the Untenable. And we have Amy Neeler, our executive director, and she's the director of moderating. And we're just going to, I'm going to let you take your way. Okay. Yeah. But come sit up close so we can hear each other, so I suggest. So the idea of this panel came about just actually choosing and reading the work for this year's festival. And, you know, making the hard choice really in a lot of ways. A lot of the theater we see today is, tends to be safe, especially in the mutual theater circle. And playwrights' foundation is a place where we allow playwrights to be, not allow them, but we celebrate playwrights who are writing work that isn't necessarily safe or tenable. But that used to be a theater, in a sense, to poetically reflect back some of the more difficult human interactions that will be basically weird about 247 on our email feeds. So we thought maybe we could get these three playwrights to talk a little bit about how they each approach the complexity of very, very difficult, possibly traumatic situations without, say, re-traumatizing the audience or the actors for that matter. And in fact, sort of investigating and interrogating traumatic human interactions in a way that gives it sort of the beauty of poetry, of theater, of theatrical poetry. So I just wanted to, you know, give each of these playwrights a talk a little bit about that. Isn't that, yeah, it takes a question for the audience. Oh, I'm sorry. No, please, please, please. He will start by introducing me to TV Mitchell. So your play talks about sexual trauma in the military sense to MS. The military sense of the recovery movement. Terminology itself actually experienced safer, years safer then. It's in terms of trying to translate it For me, it really starts with the research process. Because I'm very much a research-based writer. Directly portray any real person in my work. But I do interviews with a significant number of people who have gone through experiences that ultimately inform my characters and their stories. In terms of the question of how do you not wish to traumatize your audience with traumatizing the actors, you actually have to go further back with that. And how do I interview survivors without having that interweaving process to traumatize them? How do I create a safe place for them? And have them feel comfortable sharing these very interesting stories. It's a privilege to be given that trust, but it also creates for me a lot of pressure because I feel a great sense of responsibility to these people for entrusting me. So how do you use the medium of theater expressions, these ideas, or poetic ways? What would you say? Well, what I chose to do in my plays, I found a great myth that I thought posed an interesting question that's also posed in the temporary dramatic narrative of the play. So I used a myth that I just think we are as humans a storytelling culture. It is certainly how the Greeks taught morality through the earliest forms of theater. And ideally, theater is not me telling an audience how to feel. It's hopefully an exchange of energy and an exchange of questions. I'm not here to answer any questions for you. I'm hopefully here to present the same questions that I struggled with in the course of writing. So I think it's harder to create poetry in my play. That's interesting. So TD Mitchell wrote Young Things right here as a language. We're going to be seeing right after this. How about you? I need a hundred screen. Elizabeth was probably just watched, but this is good. So I do a lot of research, you know, and because I want to, and I'm going to ask the audience to go through something, and I actually asked the audience to go through something serious. I feel like I need to understand that world and its stories. You chose a structure that was quite fragmented and that is not only is it nonlinear, but it also takes place in several different places and among several different groups to leave this story. What did you choose that for? I chose it on purpose because I have this writer in me that loves to support story structure and wondering if could we tell the story by passing it through when the audience followed training by watching the film or do that. But I also think her play is an expert. I also think the fragmented quality of her work so reflects the fragmented emotional state in so many characters from there. I think it was not that linear. I don't think it would bring the writer true as much. I think that in their experiences, their emotional state is fragmented. Also, when I was writing it, I found that the most true thing when I found that silence is inability to be expressed in so many characters, you just can't get the words out. When I found that, I feel like there is also a kind of distancing that I am able to achieve as the viewer and the audience through the fragmentation and also by being forced to different story lines. You get very upset or triggered by somebody's behavior when they are doing what is happening, suddenly you are fooled or you are in the child's world. And then you are reflecting those two worlds against each other and it is kind of a distancing where you are not emotionally engaged or so deeply that you can't think. And I think that was very effective, a way to think about broken people like you, Mr. Howells. We haven't seen a bottomable yet this weekend. So how do you approach it? I don't do research, not initially. I typically will have women in on the play. Sometimes long enough to stand. And then it will sort of work very quickly at first. And then I'm like, wow, what is this? And then I'll do some research and rewrite the play and screw it up and then I'll rewrite the play and fix it and turn it back to you. You can't fix the play but you don't turn it back to you anymore. But you know, all along the way, sort of searching for what are the kernels of truth, what are the moments of grace, what are the things that are most pressing about the storytelling, about the story on Time to Tell. And I think that in this case, this play, I think it really converges as a tragedy, which, you know, TD brings up the Greeks. And, you know, it's true, I mean, there are some similarities of these three plays. I remember reading that during the Euripides' life, most of his life, that the war was at war. The publication was happening during his life and well after it. And that's what he wrote about. He could, we were writing, at least this play seemed to me about the present moment, which is that. And so, yes, I don't know if I would call it that. I mean, there's a lot of trauma involved, but to me the frame of it, but these two plays, too, I think one, two, they're very different structures and the stories couldn't be contained inside of the traditional narrative, which is why they emerge and how you see them during this festival. Yeah, and I think that's really exciting. I mean, the characters in your play, in particular the adults, are very desperate and they deal with the opposite ways, you know, which is, I love how the focus isn't necessarily on their desperation. The attempt to make meaning out of every single moment and make every moment count. And the attempts at normality among the traumatized, among the desperate are those moments that I think we agree that it's also very American because, you know, this idea of aspiration, the desire to achieve. Any impossibility in the American way. Yeah, yeah, or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, the characters, I think the adults in search for something and in search of something, there's a lot of country. There is a lot of country. And still, still binding. Maybe material things that we do have access to, in the case of the characters in my play, is language. And so then they use language very... The interactions with certain things, besides the individual, the important roots of the individual that was actually born, they would cut a dog in half, a dog in half, and they would march the soldiers through to recognize that they have done this thing and now it's over. It is now. Questions? Yes. T.D., I'm really interested in what made you take on this subject and why do you believe it's one of them, right? So for those of you who haven't seen it yet, don't spoil it. T.D., part of my... I haven't seen it either. But you know about it. It's about four generations of military women in one family and they all have been Marines. To back up and answer the first part of the question, what happened is an earlier play I wrote called Beyond the Seventeenth Parallel dealt with the Vietnam War Conflict and veterans in temporary time, about the time that we, just after me, invaded Iraq, and veterans in their families and their memories after this chunk of time. So I was doing a lot of veterans in their meetings here and some in Vietnam as well. And I kept encountering people who said, oh well my wife also served or my daughter was there and so I thought, oh gosh, I really want to interview these women and find out what this is like. And as I talked to these women, I realized that women needed their own play. I realized that the experience in the military family was in some ways different for women than it was for men and that they really required its own exploration. It wasn't going to fit into that other play. It needed its own space and its own time. I considered for a while which branches to look at. The two primary reasons I chose the Marines, one has to do with the history of the Marine Corps in our country in our various battles and the history of how the Marine Corps integrated and then decommissioned women during various conflicts through history. So we had the Marineettes in World War I and of course we have some previous to that history of women sneaking into the Marines. So I looked primarily for what historically did each branch offer in terms of the history specifically of women of service. So there was that and then there was also the fact that when I did one of the earliest interviews I did for the play was with a scientist who was heading up the first ever US based study of US service women and post-traumatic stress. And so we did an interview about Pat and she, you know, overall you've got 15 to 16% of the total forces for female but in the Marines only about somewhere between 6.5 somewhere around 6.5% are female and overwhelmingly the women the young women signing up for the Marines had already experienced a previous trauma and many of them were signing up with the idea that they would be toughened beyond all hurt or harm and instead they actually put themselves in the most vulnerable spot of the... Yes. Hi, I'm just wondering what was your visceral experience when you realized this should be a play? Your idea. How did you know, yes, I wanted to be a play about your topic? For me it's a non-comfortable thing. I mean, I call it the itch and it's this, it is this unsettled feeling it is this itchiness where I I usually try to abandon it two or three times Yeah, you're doing this. I don't want to do this. This is too big, I don't dare who am I to do this and it's something that I don't feel full of control of so actually it's a it's this level of irritability and discomfort where the only way to make that discomfort and chill out a little is to start writing this rule. Yeah. Yes. Wait, wait. What? It's a sequential. For me, I think it's also a compulsion of feeling like I don't get this out and see it on the page and I just I feel a little unbalanced like the world this needs to be out. It's a bloodline. Yeah. Just a part of these words and the sensations of how I'm taking in all the information, so to speak you know the beginning of the Iraq war and things that have asked me philosophical questions about these things that I just have to do and don't feel an outlet for me to explore these questions that I have. Yeah, same. I'm writing almost every day and so it's not always toward something oftentimes it's just all this stuff and then I'm like you know there's something there like sort of I'm I mean you can be surprised I think too as it starts and just being open to that I think is also really important being open to both the writing process like the ritual and routine of the writing and then the possibility that something may reveal itself to you. Yes. These particular plays that you're involved with how long roughly did it take you to actually come to this? So for me I've been working with these materials since 9-11. Oh wow, okay. But I really felt like I need to find the appropriate vehicle to express it and eventually it emerged that I have to express this little cycle of plays just everything I'm looking at will be contained in play in one play. And so it's been a while and then sitting with it and really steeping in the source material or the writing of the play and then leaving it alone it just takes my whole life. This one? Yeah. Sometimes it does have this inevitability like every single moment it's led up to me writing this play. I wrote the first draft of my play two years ago. I've periodically looked at it but there have been other things in between, sure. That's right. Yes. When we started out the clock it was about how you get what you have the research and all the stuff that you know is special and how you get across to the audiences. And the audience usually in the world brings stuff that's spliced with humor. You know the humor can do a lot of exposing really, really nasty things but in more plays you didn't use humor so I was trying to think what could you use that made me pay attention other than having a theater and I was thinking, I can't tell if you can tell me what it is that you think you put there that allows me to get sucked in. See to me there is humor. It's just very, very very neat. It's I love dark humor. It's also as a performer in this and I've done a number of these in many places ten hours with six people to do this kind of play. The last thing you find in like week three or four of rehearsal is the humor. There's a lot of it. We were sitting there watching going, oh damn that was a funny. We just missed it. So it's actually written, it's actually in fact someone beautifully set up but we just blew it. A lot of times just not a lot of times. Some plays just are one play sheltered in place very, very funny play. It's meant as a kind of comic sort of play that it's still funny as a reading but this, as you say this play, I mean there's also just the difficulty in a play like this really all of these plays but I think in particular your play and December your play in a reading so these readings of these plays are really rehearsals. They're really giving the playwrights the opportunity to kind of throw this play up in a room and listen to the actors a lot of rewriting is happening a lot of cutting is happening new pages coming in and out and so the actors are actually every day encountering new material and so for the audience it's an interesting process because in some ways it's not really for you even though you're necessary to do this process it's like later when these plays are staged they will be for you and right now you're kind of for us you're our spies you're our unique you're for us in some ways you're doing a service to us by responding even just we learn so much so this is kind of exchange and so it's interesting that you ask that question because that's something for Elizabeth to really think about as she takes her next steps scene shifts scene shifts and that helps in being involved and visual stuff that right now in this time, present time they're doing it rather than talking about it that also draws me I think there were some parts like in the children's play it's hard to know what they're doing because they could be climbing or something and the play comes out of the moment for them and it is very happy it sounds like they're talking about it but it is actually happening and that was a hard thing when we have to pick and choose what stage direction really needs to be read in terms of describing the action it can very much break up the dialogue for them to see if we have the narrator jump in and say by the way this is happening over here in this other part of the stage and so it's very, it can be tricky to know what of those to leave in because the audience action absolutely needs to use their imagination and know what this looks like here versus what is more important to hear and it's intended to be low verbally, trying to buy things like that so that could be a bit of a issue but I do think you're right with what you're asking is what technology what it is that they do is I know all the research is what you do that helps me get it because I search by crazy trying to get it with you and with your plan what I quite helped me get it was when I went into paragraphs as soon as I read that and I wish I could put it ahead of time it's like I'm supposed to be here and it's supposed to be sort of destroyed and I'm supposed to have a lot of questions and this is the way it's supposed to be and just flowing with it I'm not good I don't flow so so this stage is going to flow it's like whoa I don't know how to do that but I did search and I think that's harder if you're a theater person than when we have a different field for theater then audiences just comes in because they want to be abused or entertained so how do you get those that is for sure and there's only so much of that I'm willing to do because if I did more it would be the claim that I wrote and so it's a difficult ratio of time during the retreat it was decided that she should have this translated into Polish because the Polish will love it so except I think I think there are a few of us that do you want to speak to anyone? No I was just going to say I mean I think that I mean I would offer that there's something about the experience of watching the play which is the reflection of what the artist is trying to do also so perhaps it's possible that some of the frustration you've got of what the artist wants you to feel and that's okay that's okay similarly I think in the culture there's something Poland you would think that we were in North California Poland has come up so many times you know sort of what we as Americans perhaps allow like my play like you know if you come and see you might be like am I supposed to laugh you know like is that I don't know if I can laugh at that but you can you know I think that we experience a kind of apprehension or don't allow ourselves to laugh there's a sense of singing permission and it's hard it can be hard as the playwright to ensure that some picture in the front of the play gives the audience that permission gives the audience that clue so I hear it you can laugh at that you can go yeah that other part and that's cool so it's tricky to know how to include that permission well that actually it almost bounces off that I think about this stuff too as it deals with really dark materials in fact how conscious you are in the process of I need something here to give the audience and the actors a break sort of whether it's through humor or through a switching perspective or whatever or like that just comes as part of you know do you find yourself thinking about that consciously in structure like oh we you know we need a breather for me the story comes out naturally I'm pretty much worthy I think the first thing that was the first thing that came out was the last bit that you saw I didn't give myself permission I was like yeah this is it and get ready I'll get here you have to live with this you know and I don't think about giving the audience I think for a humor that comes out is a dark sense of humor it's not for everybody but I've heard throughout you know people kind of like I would hear these little tidders and they would be like oh it's not really funny but I think we discover at least for me we discover it from the director and the actors and watching you guys you know I've circled around for years even doing things that actually you're part of the research and development you know that are helping us figure out how to modulate our plays and it's much less about what is said in the talk about afterward what's the most helpful thing sitting in a room with a community of people all having the same experience all you know having the exchange of energy with the words and the performers on stage and just feeling how the room shifts and feeling you know when I'm listening to the play but I'm also very aware of all of you and I'm aware of where people are shifting getting a little uncomfortable and whether that's good uncomfortable or bad uncomfortable and those things tell me more than anything I think it's so useful I think we have time for one one or two questions Yes, I'd like to ask a more general question at what point does a play become unsafe and does it need to stay safe for the rest of the play or become safe at the end has it lost its unsafeness I'm thinking specifically of Clive Wernth Park which has a very unsafe second back but has this nice Wernth Wernth Park What do we mean by safe exactly well we're talking about plays being safe or unsafe I suppose taking risk as theatre making it uncomfortable or edgy or not necessarily uncomfortable or edgy but taking risk specifically taking theatrical risk in telling in the story that it tells or how it tells it or what the characters do or what it's meant to to engender the audience Well the good news is that that I think one of the things that makes theatre art is the fact that it is an unsafe experience anything that happened up here anything to go wrong and I think some of us as audience are yeah we may be rooting for it all to go right but isn't it always also a magical moment when something goes wrong and you see how it's dealt with so I think it's that I think it's that lack of safety from the get that's part of the appeal in terms of when a play is safe or not safe I I don't know I really don't know and I think it's also going to be so different for the individual as well because I know there are certain parts of my play that will feel very unsafe for certain audience matters and other audience will be safe or unsafe in the realm of American theatre when it gets political and when it gets produced but that's a whole other sexy weekend and it's only something to discuss next year exactly we had a question it's not a process question you know you need a certain momentum to do writing actually so she's asking about how a writer can keep momentum going when researching but really very difficult issues or such as I just generally say a but you know about the depression I don't always but I've gone through periods where by nightmares where I just have to walk away from play in one case about two years so so I'm trying to get better at that very same I don't have the answer I just know that for me sometimes I don't know like I work this is a cycle of plays I'm in the middle of a second play and it's even darker and funny and no very good but yeah but I found myself being really beautiful like and I just realized I need to get this stuff away and I'll go for a walk or I'll play with my kids you know my kids are great for keeping it real like getting back like once for dinner totally refocus it's also been really helpful like I felt really alone and it's nice to come here and realize people are feeling really supported throughout the a lot of things you know that stuff other people's kids um that was a joke you know Ben Franklin used to use the smoke pipe and Mike Angelou wrote the hotel room in sort of solitude and then you know most writers I do exercise and then a lot of writers do meditation so I think there are a lot of things that sort of help stave off the depression and I might be I'm not joking because I'm a writer myself I'm thinking too also just in terms of the material like approaching the actual material looking for the thread of hope looking for the statement that you know to keep bringing you back to it a sense of responsibility for the future is going to tends to be what holds me back the thread of hope I don't really have in the play really dealing with stuff there is no thread of hope and that's how it feels and coming together in a room and being able to talk to people with no one the silences of the play the inability to express the feeling about the situations the material it's not like we aren't aware really what we do about it actually she'll have a final question I mean I would also share that I think you know these plays that have stayed previously are about the present moment and if the play is still then it's and you've written more than 30 pages of it or more than 50 pages I mean it's like it's hard to abandon it's hard to abandon I've done it many people I'm sure have done it but there's something about the urgence I mean if it's still urgent with you if it's still swirling around if it's if the questions are still haunting your dreams then it's you have to you have to get back in the sandbox with it I mean your play since 911 and the end of this material I mean I think I said this yesterday I write the hope that I have actually that's just what is the hope is that I hope that this play is unnecessary when I finish it it would be wonderful we didn't need this play that would give me that's the hope so far it hasn't materialized so I'm going to go through the cycle one last question I don't even want to ask that question I hope everybody can come and see all of the plays because they each tackle these difficult issues in completely different styles and we'll leave you feeling different ways and the question I was going to ask is a sort of overly simplistic question that is leading towards getting you to look for that what do you want to leave your audience with and I think writers are often not thinking about that and probably shouldn't think about what you want to leave your audience with if you want to just write your play that's something you want to say but sometimes you know sometimes very specifically with little computers trying to get people to get up and march out and change the world other forums are trying to get you to laugh at it so you can just deal with it sometimes it's I want us all to just be able to have a moment of admitting we all fill up what's about this thing and so I actually if you want to answer what you're in your board questions Howard Baker said that I want the audience to know what I'm trying to tell them I'm going to say mystery we are going to wrap this up because our play that will be read at 4pm needs to get in here right now