 Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Okay. So, a confession. I've been thinking about you. I know some of you already, personally, and some people I feel like I know because I really admire your work and I'm incredibly excited to meet you. You come from all over the country. There's writers here, some performers, writer-performers, artistic directors, theater people, the Mellon Foundation, HowlRound, and all of us are here together. And it's great to be here together. Thank you so much for bringing us here together. So, I've given this talk to undergrad playwrights and to some graduate playwrights as well and to a few other groups, but this is the first batch of professional playwrights I've shared this with. So, I'm feeling a little pressure. As I imagined you when I was putting together my notes for this, I worried a little. I mean, this is a tough crowd, right? For one, everyone here is cooked already. You're not in the recipe phase or in the mixing process or wondering if you're a muffin or a roast. You're all working and making your way in the American theater. So, I worried. You all know already what you know about the theater, why you do it, and what you want from it. And what I'm going to do this afternoon is just admit to everyone that I've become uncooked, that working with a theater company in Minneapolis has changed for me why I make theater what I want for it and most everything I thought I knew about it. So, I've just begun my second residency with 10,000 Things Theater in Minneapolis and here's a bit about the theater for those of you who don't already know about it. So, 10,000 Things Theater founder and artistic director, Michelle Hensley talks about being a young director out of graduate school and faced with the usual career path. You try and assist famous directors, you try and direct readings, you knock on the door and you wait for your career to start. She didn't see much future in it. So, she decided to start with a play she loved and to imagine who would truly care about the story that the play told. The play she loved was Brecht's Good Person of Szechuan and Michelle was living in L.A. at the time and she observed that most people she knew didn't really seem to enjoy going to the theater. They went because someone they knew was in the show or maybe someone famous was in it or maybe they were even making theater as a stepping stone to film or TV. But she had a play she really loved and she wanted the audience to truly care about it. The play's big questions about how we maintain our humanity and our goodness in times of poverty and hardship. We're actually questions she thought that people living in society's margins might understand in a real way. It was the early 1990s and there were lots of people living in the street. So, she found a willing homeless shelter in Santa Monica. The actors rehearsed and they brought their small set into that shelter and they performed the play for a group of 30 skeptical people. Michelle tells this story a lot better than I can but once the audience figured out that they weren't there to get anyone off drugs or to preach, they began to respond to it to connect to the intelligence and heart of the story with their own experiences and they made the play come alive in a way that Hensley and the performers had never experienced before. So, she moved the theater to Minneapolis about 20 years ago and has since then brought plays that ask big questions and tell complex human stories to people who typically don't have access to the theater. 10,000 Things performs three plays a season for people who typically don't go to the theater and because many of them are having their first experience with theater, the 10,000 Things aims to just blow them away. So, we use the very best actors, the very best directing. We tell big stories and there's lots of high theatricality. One obvious thing Michelle figured out in her search for non-traditional audiences is that rather than try to bring people to us, it makes more sense to go to them. So, the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of barriers to going to the theater. If you haven't gone before, it's expensive often, mostly. It's usually in a building not in your neighborhood. You have to sit in the dark. You have to know how to behave. And one of the great things that 10,000 Things has done with Michelle at the helm is to figure out how to remove some of those barriers. So, when we perform by necessity, we don't use a stage because that would really limit the number of places we could go. We perform on the floor with the audience seated in a circle like this, kind of action right in the middle, seated in a circular square around the action and the lights are on. So, everyone sees one another. The audience can watch the audience. We can watch the play. The actors can see the audience. In fact, the audience is, you know, a hands length away. There are minimal sets and live music. Let's hit the next one. Yeah. So, minimal sets. So, this is the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Just the hand. And then let's go. We take the same plate to four to six prisons, 10 to 12 low-income centers including adult training and immigrant centers and community centers, tribal colleges, chemical dependency centers and shelters. And then the play goes for 12 to 16 performances. So, like a month of performances to a paying audience. Let's hit the next one. There's the paying audience who sees the play the same way that the other audiences have experienced with all the lights on. And this audience is theater savvy. They're, you know, from the traditional theater Twin Cities audience and they come to see our work because it's high quality. And then there are always a few sites where the two groups mix, non-traditional and traditional. So, let's say the Sheila Wellstone Center, a shelter for battered women and their children. People from the paying audience can sit next to the people who are at the center or at a homeless shelter. A business executive will sit next to a homeless guy. And the play, the watching of the play brings people together in laughter and in imagining and in ways that, you know, very little else does in our society right now. So, the 10,000 things audience of everyone is an amazing entity, especially when you have the privilege to see a play with a group of people who are completely investing in the story. So, I'm going to tell a few 10,000 things audience stories. So, this is a recent female, all female Henry IV at a women's prison. And the women are completely blown away by the range of power they see represented. And then we take it to a men's prison and the men encounter women playing them and they're completely able to see themselves in the parts that these women are embodying. So, let me say that again. In a men's prison, the men get to see themselves reflected through a female incarnation. I'm aware as a woman that very, very rarely do men see themselves, see their struggles, their behaviors, their fights, their desires reflected through a female lens. But as women were constantly asked to see stories through the lens of a male protagonist. But this shift and the fact that the shift occurred was extraordinary to witness. The music man directed by Lyra de Besson, watching young immigrant audiences ache with the love story, how the broken family dynamic really resonated in the women's prison. Here's a great story about the women's prison audience. The women love the play and we know it because their vocal, they laugh, they talk to the play. And at the end, after a rousing standing ovation, a woman with tears in her eyes turns to me and says, it's not easy loving a player. Boom. The music man cracked wide open. There's lots of amazing stories about the things Michelle has learned after 25 years of making theater in this innovative way. And you can read about them. A little product placement in this great book called All the Lights On Which was published by HowlRound. So I started working with 10,000 things in 2007 when I won a commissioning contest that the theater sponsored with the Playwright Center. Michelle wanted to produce new plays for one she was getting fatigued with all the misogyny and the old ones. But she found that many of the new plays she came across were written for the theater going audience, which means the upper middle class. So even many of the plays she admired that dealt with big subjects like poverty or race, often did so with that upper middle class lens. A play that illuminates poverty for a privileged audience won't necessarily work for an audience who actually lives in poverty. They live it every day, so they don't especially want to experience a gritty, realistic depiction of it. The commission contest was called What Story Would You Want to Tell if You Knew Everyone We're Going to Be in the Audience? And this felt to me like a really radical question for a playwright to answer. I mean, other than writing for children's theater, I'm not sure we are consciously asked as playwrights to think about the audience when we're coming up with an idea. And the commission wasn't just asking a playwright to speak to one audience, but too many to a whole spectrum of people. And when I began to imagine the place I'd already written being performed in a shelter, in a prison, in an immigrant center, in a chemical dependency center, and for a traditional audience, it became really difficult to see how the work could reach all those people, maybe some of them, but certainly not all of them. And to be completely truthful, prior to this contest, the audience had not consciously played much of a creative role in either my process or the stories I decided to tell. For one, I didn't know a specific audience necessarily as I was writing, most plays are speculative enterprises. And the only audience I knew felt generic, the audience that goes to the theater. I mean, it's hard not to notice, right, that we're always having talk backs and we're surveying them and we're discussing the audience and they're celebrating them or be moaning them and that we're worrying about them. But the audience that I knew from theaters like the jungle in Minneapolis or Playwrights Horizons or small theaters in Chicago, LA, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, they were all people I wanted to connect to the work. I wanted to transport and engage and make that audience think about something, but I really didn't want that audience to tell me how to write my play. I mean, I think I'd unconsciously absorbed some assumptions about the audience. One, that it was considered pandering to the audience if I thought about them too much. I mean, was I supposed to give this homogenous upper middle class audience what they wanted or what they needed? In a recent survey by Theater Development Fund, 70% of the Playwrights surveyed said they didn't write plays with the audience in mind. And what surprises me a little bit about this is that I think actually that Playwrights, at least those of us who are trying to get produced, are unconsciously at least thinking about the audience. But that the audience is the audience who tends the theaters where we hope to get produced. So for a lot of playwrights, that might mean play theaters in New York or Lord A theaters where the audience has a certain means. So that's why I think there aren't so many plays out there with the spectrum of class concerns. Why often plays deal with subject matter implicit to that upper middle class perspective. And I think it's also maybe why contemporary plays are getting smaller and more economical. It's because of the needs of producing theaters, which we've also absorbed in a kind of please produce my play way. So there are actually people who go to the theater who are not upper middle class. That's true. I believe that to be true. And many of those people are students, theater students and certainly those of us who make the theater. And ironically we're the ones who kind of can't afford the ticket. And it's hard to watch a lot of theater without beginning to judge the aesthetics of the play at hand. What's the set design like? What's the acting like? What's the directing like? So rather than judging the characters for their action, those of us who go to the theater tend to have an aesthetic reaction to what we've seen. This includes I think all of us and certainly our paying audience. For me it's rare when I'm able to get past all those aesthetic, everything I know about the theater and actually allow something in the story to connect with my life, the life I'm living in a real way. And then I think there's the way we as writers have been conditioned to think about coming up with ideas. I think we tend to shroud it all in a bit of mystique and mystery. Like the muse might be offended if we just tell the truth. Which is that, you know, ideas are coming to us because we're looking for them. Every writer I know is constantly trying on ideas like their little sweaters, you know, to see if they're going to fit us. And the process is something I think we tend to work on privately rather than openly consider. So if I was going to win that contest, what story would you tell if everyone were in the audience and I really wanted to win? I was going to have to get over any idea that the muse would be disturbed if I shifted the way I come up with an idea. Oh, and the reason I wanted to win? Well that's because 10,000 things in our community is considered to be one of the very best theater companies around. They hire the very best actors, incredible directors, they pay a wonderful living wage, and the work they do is imaginative, incredibly well done, and a very high artistic caliber. I wanted to write for this company. So the way I answered the question, that hard question, was the first time anyway, was to approach it practically. What stories do work for an audience composed of everyone? So I'd been to see many productions of the theater, but I'd not, I'd been to see many productions of the theater, but I hadn't had the benefit of seeing one play, you know, in all the different venues, so all I had was the production history to go by. And as a company over the past 20 years or so, they've produced very successfully Shakespeare, the Greeks, Lorca, Calderon, Brecht, Faunas' play, Mudd, Afra-Benz, The Emperor of the Moon, Lisa DeMors, Anna Belaima, musicals like Little Shop of Horrors, The Unseen Couple, Molly Brown, The Music Man, Man of La Mancha, and more recently, contemporary plays including Doubt and Will Powers play The Seven. So what is it about those plays that do work for so many people? Well, it seems as if the plays that work this way are set in made up worlds. No one can be an expert on the details, because we kind of have to make them up together when we watch it. There's always complex situations, and big questions, language-based storytelling, clear stories with often ambiguous endings, and characters who face complex moral challenges and come from many walks of life. So there's a character range in the play that's indicative of society, you know, not just the upper middle class audience. So in each 10,000 things production, I noticed that the characters in the play felt like they're part of a human family. The casting of the plays at 10,000 things reflect the people who watched the play, because we want our audiences to see themselves on stage in roles they may not have seen themselves in before. Hensley's a master of what she calls colorful casting, and so 10,000 things plays are cast so they're racially diverse and gender imaginative. This is Mary in the Library and in Harold Hill, and then Bottom in the Horn, and Tatiana in Midsummer. So plays require that require a great amount of cultural specificity, often don't work for this theater, who has to play for so many different kinds of people. Shakespeare can be populated with lots of different actors who let us understand the story differently than when it was first played by all men for example. And Shakespeare was writing for a theater that invited people in from different classes, right? So the groundlings, you can totally see that in these in those plays. In the Greeks also they had vast, you know, civic theaters for like 10,000 people. So it seems as if at least in those two examples the presence of an audience that from different classes did in fact have an effect on the story. So the plays all feature characters from different classes and they tell big human stories. So as I tried to come up with that first idea for the contest, I realized that everyone being in the audience would mean I'd have to think differently about what kind of story would work. For one, there needed to be characters in the play that our audience members would relate to. So mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, poor people, rich people, crazy people, fools, struggling people, liars, cheaters, truth tellers, innocent bystanders. My idea ended up being a jazz improvisational retelling of crime and punishment called Rascal. The story about a student who commits a crime and doesn't really understand why and then is redeemed kind of miraculously by love ended up really resonating with all the different people who saw it. Even as 10,000 things can't do realistic plays about urban poverty for their audiences, Rascal's poverty resonated because the world of the play was blurred and exaggerated and so that like in the original it presented the absurdity of the inequity. Since that production of Rascal I wrote an additional play for the theater and then during the first residency I wrote three, all of which were produced and I'm in the process now of devising the next play with a group of veteran 10,000 things audiences. So I've actually been thinking about this big spectrum of people as an audience over the course of six plays and over about nine years. So the biggest thing that working with 10,000 things has changed for me is my connection with the audience and actually the audience itself, who they are, how I think about them and what my relationship is to them. So this audience of everyone is present now as I begin to find the idea for a new play. I mean we always have to start with something right that engages us as a creative person that grabs our heart and our gut and sometimes those ideas that engage us will work for everyone and you know sometimes they won't. So whether you're a playwright, let's see the next one, or a director who wants to work with the company, you start with a story meeting with Michelle and you pitch the play in terms of the questions the play might raise or the territory it might cover. So you talk about why this play might be interesting to all those audiences and we always talk about it in terms of the questions it raises and we try and imagine different audiences engaging with the questions. So okay here's an example, I might go into a meeting with an idea I really love and I think it's going to work for everyone. So I'll say what about a retelling of Don Juan comes back from the war but it's not about death and misogyny but about how we return to a changed world, a world populated by women and then I have to consider and talk about how that play, that story might connect with other people. This could be a story that resonates with incarcerated people who re-enter society. It could intersect with immigrants who are coming to a new place and having to navigate a changed world filled with women in positions of power. Or it can find connections with veterans or with rural communities who are returning veterans home and then I go away and I write the audiences and all these experiences in my head as I begin and the more encounters I have with the audience especially with my own work the clearer I feel about how to approach the writing. So I might see the young Somali immigrant who with tears in his eyes announced that the actors had told his story after seeing forget me not when far away or the women at Hennepin County who demand to speak with me after the play ends because they want to know what the character John Plowman does next. The play ends. What does he do next? Does he end up finding love? And so I ask them what do they think he does? What should he do? And their response is this well I think he should take care of his son help him find his way in the world. That's the right thing for him to do. And I agree. In another play called Dirt Sticks there was an amazing moment in a women's prison. There's a character H. Adams playing called young Henry Wand who finds a baby that's been abandoned by a river. So he finds the baby and in 10,000 things the baby is just in like a cardboard box under the seat. So he finds the baby and he's like oh babies are a lot of trouble I don't know what to do with this baby. And then he says I'm just gonna put this baby back where I found it. And he goes with the box to slip the box under the woman's chair where it's been hiding and the woman and the woman next to her won't let him. They say son it's not right to abandon a baby. And the actor in the moment has to spend a good amount of time convincing them that he has to leave the baby there for the story to continue. So so I see the incarcerated women who identify emotionally with stories feeling for the characters understanding their situations how they laugh till they cry how they shout at advice. I see the incarcerated men whose faces bloom with laughter that's it watching Steve Epps adaptation of Il Campiello and I always remember wow laughter you know it's such a bomb. So let's just stop for the slides for a while. So I see the moments very very clearly also when the play doesn't connect and maybe it's with the traditional audience or maybe it's when we're in a day shelter and the disorder of the day shelter meets the play and the chaos wins or here's a good one we're in a locked down psychiatric facility with one of my plays we've never performed there before and we walk in and we encounter an audience completely medicated. They're unable to respond in any noticeable way except for one woman's wildly inappropriate laughter every 45 seconds or so there are in fact as many excruciating stories as there are exhilarating ones but often the excruciating story gets mitigated so like after that show you know that excruciating lockdown show the psychiatrist and staff come up to us and they go oh my god we've never seen them so connected and so absorbed um sometimes it's just excruciating but it's always humbling I'll tell you that to bring a story to people whose lives are difficult who feel marginalized and powerless and there's always an amazing thrill and heart surge when we do feel the connection but it is always you know just a play it's not going to pull anyone out of poverty or give anyone a chance against a racist policeman but for a moment anyway the theater as Michelle says makes us all a little bigger so all these experiences have changed for me the assumptions that I have about the audience and I mean it's obvious right an audience composed of everyone is is different than an audience who goes to the theater and pays for their tickets the biggest assumption we make is that the non-traditional audiences know more about their life experiences than we do and those experiences often include poverty discrimination abuse and a sense of powerlessness we've noticed that these audiences bring to the consumption of stories a great ability to empathize they seem hungry for stories and for joy and for wonder and they're really suspicious of easy answers and sentimentality they always engage with Shakespeare's language with great relish here's a great Shakespeare story this is from an early production of measure for measure and it's one that's referred to in the company as the Shakespeare epiphany so an experienced Shakespearean actor is doing his first 10,000 things play it's measure for measure and he's playing Angelo and we're in Dorothy Day which is a drop-in day shelter I mean it's incredibly chaotic spot it's like a train station and he's agonizing on stage about his relationship with Isabella he says what's this what's this whose fault is it the tempter or the temp dress and then a homeless woman who's sitting right by him just looks up at him and says I think it's your fault shithead and then a man in the back shouts oh just go ahead and fuck her and the whole room erupts and the actor goes oh my god I've completely lost them I don't know how I'm gonna get this room back and then he realizes that all he has to do is just say the next line not she not she to sigh it's a conversation it's a perfect response and so our epiphany was that Shakespeare wrote actually expecting the audience to shout back at the actors so our audiences love having conversations with the characters and often they judge the characters on their actions so they'll tell a character he's a liar or they'll suggest to a character that she hit her cheating man with a broom this is a good story in a recent production of a play of mine there was a scene where a cheating husband breaks up with his drunk and mistress and he does it really quickly he dispatches her without much respect or kindness and we're in the men's prison and the men scream out to him hey that's not cool don't treat her like that many of the audiences will enter the story using their own experiences and systems of truth reckoning and bullshit smelling so the play has to be big enough to be able to fit their experiences and it really has to be stretchy enough to accommodate them and it really has to feel truthful emotionally the other assumption I work from is that we're always going to be surprised we can never really truly predict what in a play is going to work where including with the traditional audiences we can often be wrong and while I can outline and list and try hard to articulate all these assumptions that go into the imagining of an audience let me try to explain how they live in my head when I write so less inactive demographics and more inactive empathy having these audience members in the imagination is for me just about making space for them so our art form you know is filled with imagining we ask actors to play characters who are not who they are as people we ask audiences to imagine lives other than their own and as playwrights we imagine lives and characters and stories very different than who we might be or what our experiences have been we write our plays as outlines for actors and collaborators to come in and fill the empty spaces so I make space in the play for the audience when I write and by hopefully creating a world they want to enter characters who amuse and engage them and a story that will surprise delight and move them the audience will come in and inhabit the space that's been created for them and then the play finds itself stretching if it's flexible enough open enough and big enough the audience begins to inform the story so what that means at Ten Thousand Things a play changes I mean wildly based on who's watching it so you know in a typical performance report the stage manager might say the audience was a little quiet today or you know lively audience tonight but at Ten Thousand Things our performance reports are kind of astonishing glimpses of how you know we can see a play change its meaning and connect with different audiences in really different ways so I've moved to a really strange disconnected sense of the audience as a monolithic homogenous group of people who've seen so much and are there to judge me and my aesthetic choices as a playwright to the idea that the imagining of an audience can itself be a creative act it's a summoning an invitation a place at the table so I allow them to be present in my mind as I write not as judges but as guests I give them a seat at the table of my imagination and then I go for it with every bit of my brain and heart and knowledge of how the theater can entertain us transport us and move us the second thing that's changed for me is the work itself so the audience is the idea of a story being processed, received, and enjoyed by a wide range of people really does something both to the idea excuse me to the idea for the play and the way it's going to be told so I feel it as a kind of viscerally like an interior call to action to summon something that's deeper and more complicated and then I might have on my own and somehow putting this big audience into the mix begins to inspire the play to take bigger chances it makes it more ambiguous more ambitious more active it clarifies the why of the play why this play it also changes the stylistic approach of the play nobody can sit on a couch to figure something out if that makes any sense so rather the characters are making mistakes they're plotting revenge they're looking for love they're finding hope they're in search of desire and they're activated when they talk so here's one thing I've really learned from writing from these audiences plays with easy answers don't work well for people whose lives are very difficult it's our traditional audiences who can't stand ambiguity they want it to wrap up with a bow but for people who've lived their lives on the margins of society the question the play asks has to be big enough to accommodate not knowing an answer how do you undo the past what do you do a fate curses you and says you will be a monster what happens if you come home and everything is different how do we reimagine what our family can be let's do the next one there's a permeability of action that comes about because the work is so close to the audience so now I also consciously consider when I write how the language of the play summons an engagement with the audience and rather than think of how small the play has to be in order to be produced I've been able to think expansively about how many characters can people my worlds because this theatre produces in such a highly imaginative way my plays can have lots of characters in them in one recent play 45 women let's go to the next one oh no in one recent play 45 women were rendered by five women let's go to the next one by changing wigs it was kind of like a kind of an amazing thing to see all those wigs anyway all the actors and directors who work for the theatre talk pretty openly about how working for the theatre has made them better artists and the reason I think for an actor is connected to veracity so like you're playing Hotspur you're in a men's prison and you are performing for guys who have had real fights about territory and power and you know what you got to go in there and find something that's going to make them believe you right so it makes the actors who work for us incredibly nimble and flexible directors who work with the company and there are a handful of amazing directors who do I think that working to tell a big story in a clear way with urgency and action makes them better directors and for me writing for 10,000 Things has made me a better artist because the process has just simply strengthened every technical and theatrical muscle I might have the ability to condense and create conflict and structure and get that story moving and tell that story it's forced me to think in terms of action unlike any other thing and you know what in rehearsals when there's something I really love and I think oh this is really good this is really great but it's making that first act too long or you know I don't know if somehow the action isn't clear I just cut it because all I have to do is imagine the audience getting restless or worse just losing their attention so it's galvanized for me what I've always suspected about the theater that it's somehow most powerful when it asks the people watching it to use their imaginations so the muscle of the imagination is sorely underused in our culture right now and the ways in which we it can forge a sense of collectivity well that's the world I want to live in as an artist so when you see a 10,000 things show in particular in a non-traditional venue you're aware that there's a hunger for story for the stories we tell if they work and that they really do matter to people's lives the feeling of being a playwright and having the audience be hungry for her story is a feeling unlike any other and the thing that's cool about this work is that it's an exchange we give them a story and they give us a glimpse of why stories matter they give us generously their laughter their tears and their insights so I've had a transformative experience writing for 10,000 things I've moved from worrying about a career to realizing I have a job and I want to suggest that being a playwright for 10,000 things has made me useful for the first time in the same way an electrician might be or a nurse I want to do my job well and to do it well for this particular theater company means I have to write plays the 10,000 things audiences will respond to that will move them engage them and intersect with their life experiences which are often as vivid and complicated and dramatic and tragic as anything in the Greeks or Shakespeare and finally the process of writing and seeing the work in so many contexts has shifted for me what success means success feels like it's completely measured with every performance and it's looked at in terms of the run of the overall play did the play reach people in different ways and how become questions for me that are directly related to the idea of what success is does the story hold its audience what do the comments tell us afterwards how does the context shift the play and is the shift interesting when the play goes to the traditional theater going audience and it does sort of for that last month who pay for their tickets which is for the most part composed of the people you expect to see at the theater can sometimes feel like the rules are back to the usual but something has happened to the play well it's been performed in so many places it's as if the play has on it the dust of all the other audiences who have seen it so for the traditional audience the act of seeing the play carries with it the whiff of where it's been before so the story gets reframed by that lens oh a person in the audience might think I bet the women in the prison really saw how much this play is about second chances and by the time the play goes to the traditional audience it's been seen through nearly different nearly 16 other contexts and it has been changed by that so I want to end with some hopeful fiction for our future and a final question so let's hit the last slide American playwrights began to think about audiences not as they are but as they'd like them to be most of the theaters in our country join theaters like 10,000 things the public old globe cal shakes Delaware Shakespeare theater the light fantastic and figure out ways to share the wealth of theater with people who aren't wealthy instead of trying to just reach the audience that comes already to the theater we think as a field more creatively about barriers and access the American canon expands to include plays that can connect with audiences that exist now and new audiences who don't have access or the privilege required to go to the theater these plays are big smart big in heart and scope and written by contemporary playwrights who want their work to create an exchange and a connectivity a way in which we as a human family can engage in the stories we see on stage by considering them through the lens of a wider lived experience our theater is what it is now and more and so my final question is what story would you tell if everyone were in the audience thank you two hours is about what we shoot for yeah most actors in Minneapolis really really want to work with us and we work we have this the same actors who work at the Guthrie work for us so we have a sort of veteran core of 10,000 things actors and we look for actors who dig that you know I mean you have to want to have that exchange that's right yeah Michelle you want to answer that and it's a theater that has no overhead Michelle's really I mean you really should read this this book is great but she just made the decision that she wants the money to go to the artist not to a building so we rehearse in a in the basement of a church in the neighborhood and you know we don't go to an office we work from our homes so we're lean and mean okay sure yeah I mean we have we always have live music and usually it's our music director who is like a one-man band he can play hundreds the music is super important because it functions actually has lights in a weird way it helps you you know helps the director kind of move the attention it's very important sometimes there's more musicians sometimes there's a band music's really important yeah yeah that's the second definitely an evolution you know you learn by doing I mean it's you know and it's such an incremental emotional intuitive you know it's not something I can chart out or you know it's what has worked what hasn't worked what what being in the audience makes me think about what makes me feel what it makes me feel yeah it's really changed yeah no yeah yeah being in the audience yeah I mean I I just am everyone is yeah I do I mean I I'm there and I I'm now teaching at the Shakopee Women's Prison I've been able to sort of bring in a group of people so yeah it's really wrote that where it's no it's cool no I know it's great I was at Shakopee teaching a yeah yeah no I know yeah and so they especially Shakopee which is a you know they're there for a long time the women I feel like you know I went in to teach a class in the spring and you know they don't know my name or know anything and I'm sort of talking and about 10,000 things and how I write for them and then they recognize they've seen the plays I've done and they had you know they had comments and they loved them and it's very cool okay yes I did no not yet I think they're people are just getting off the but I think that would be great right if the if this network of people could do my plays and your plays and everyone's plays instead of not just Shakespeare yeah you know they're just sort of launching yeah yes and it's really because of Michelle I mean Michelle's been this kind of we we call the movement the 10,000 things theaters we don't know what it's going to be called yet but but more and more people are kind of signing on I mean all you have to do is come and see it I mean truthfully and you're like oh wow it's really good it's really cool yeah yeah will power yay yeah