 And thank you for your time, and if we could give them a welcoming round of applause. Thanks. Well, so this particular panel is looking at why some of our local theaters here, some of them large, some of them mid-sized, some of them small, are wrapping their heads around this kind of work and why they're approaching it and what particular challenges and rewards there might be in presenting and tackling work that has to do with the Middle East in some way. And thinking about this, you know, just today, and kind of almost so many days, the front pages of our newspapers are dealing with the Middle East in some way. It's driving our world, the issues that are playing out in the Middle East and the way that those issues resonate in this country. It seems to me that almost the question is not why are theaters tackling plays that are dealing with the Middle East, but how can you not? And yet there are some, you know, I think there's some real challenges and maybe some reticence that some theater producers have in tackling this kind of work and maybe for some real reason. And yet in the panel that we had just heard an hour or two ago and we're talking about challenges and the kind of risks that people are taking in presenting work that's dealing with issues in the Middle East when you hear about, well, you know, my parents were taken to jail or, you know, this person had his fingers crushed by the police or, you know, you've been shut down because the censors have come in and stopped to play. I think the whole context of risk is maybe brings up, there's a kind of different, the whole different dimension that we're talking about and yet nevertheless those challenges and those risks are real and probably the rewards are real too. And so we're going to be hearing from the artistic directors of four very different kinds of theaters here in the Bay Area about why they are taking the risks to present this kind of work, what are the particular challenges around presenting it, approaching the work, preparing your audience, following up with your audience, getting your right artists on board and how are they planning maybe to continue to do this work in the future. So that's just kind of setting a context for what we're looking at. One of the other things that we heard from this morning with Dr. Dabashi was, you know, he quoted the San Jose Mercury News and he was, you know, mentioning about the cycle of tragedy and the way that that sort of, it's a stereotype and it sort of marginalizes the experience of the Middle East and it seems like perhaps for those of us who are not of Middle Eastern descent the Middle East, we understand it in kind of frames of enormity. There's an enormity of tragedy which was, you know, represented in that comment from the San Jose Mercury News. There's sort of an enormity of hope and inspiration that I think many of us around the world are seeing in the era of spring. There's sort of an enormity of intellectual and faith foundations as the three great monotheistic religions, religions hauled by billions of people across the world come from this place. And all of the sort of wonderful acts of compassion and humanity and terrible acts of war and violence that spring out of all of that these frameworks of enormity that maybe those of us who are not of Middle East would be sent to look at the Middle East and that's our framework. And I think that one of the things that we're seeing today and that the works that these poor companies have presented is ways that we are able to understand the Middle East, yes, with those lenses, yes, inside of those frames, but inside of those frames are neo-syncratic individual human beings with lives of their own. And it's providing us with a way of understanding the world, understanding the people in the world, understanding the people in this country in a way that reveals the full humanity and not a stereotype of a hero, not the stereotype of a victim, not the stereotype of a prophet. And I think that I'm really interested in maybe exploring some of that aspect in the conversation today as well. So I think what I would do is we've heard the names, but I think that some of you will know these companies really well and some of you may not know these companies much at all. And so I'm not going to make any sort of assumptions as to whom you know and whom you don't know. So I'm just going to ask, moving from my left, if these artistic directors could say a little bit more about their theater and a little bit more about the work that they're going to, that they will be referencing this in the conversation. Some of it's been in the past and some of it's still coming up. Hi, I'm Cary Kerloff, the artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater, which is a producing organization and also a school. And I was just thinking about sort of this material and mostly what I have learned in my years at ACTS from our students and one of my favorite students is an actor named Omar Metwally who graduated quite a few years ago now, and it was with Omar that I started the quest of looking for Middle Eastern plays. And I'm going to talk about today from our end is a play by Wajdi Wajd called Scorched, en son vie, which was written in French, but he's Lebanese and premiered in Montreal and we did last season of this. Good afternoon. You guys awake? Yeah. It's just so big in here. My name is San San Jose. I work for a place here in San Francisco called Intersection to the Arts and very specifically I work with the resident theater company, Campo Sanpo. And we create all the work for more than 15 years doing that. And I suppose we're going to talk specifically about a piece of work. There's a young writer that we work with, by the name of Shadi Fawahamdid. And I think, yeah, more than I would say about things, I think the individual storyteller and personal history becomes very important to the way that we approach any topic or any question. I'm Marisol. I'm the artistic director of Coyote Fire Theater. And we're a movie theater. We do new work and we've been around for 15 years. And we really work with playwrights, commissioning, developing and producing the work. And in particular, our first Middle Eastern thing, was just down this summer, by Anas Hassan Paneering, who is Swedish Tunisian. And that's called Immigration, and we're active by the one movie every night. All right. I'm Michael Butler. I'm an artistic director of Center, Wrapping, Almond Creek, which technically it's in the Bay Area, but I think it is on the ninth ring of salad. It's so far out there. Center is a resident company of the lecture center for the arts. And interestingly, we are a city program, so I'm really here representing Parks and Rec, which is technically what I am. We have no tradition of doing even new plays, let alone Middle Eastern plays. So we are producing and directing Yusef El-Gindy's, the one of the playwrights, work that you can see this afternoon, Pilgrim's Musa and Sherry in the New World, which is just one of the Steinberg Award. We're doing that as part of our off-center series in the spring. And so this is, I'm just on the beginning of my adventure into this world, and I'm really happy to be here, because it's going to be a very great learning experience for me this whole weekend. So thank you for that. And I think what I'd like to do is, you know, rather than like interview Kerry and then interview Sean, then just moving down the line, I'd like to kind of throw out the questions and then ask, you know, make sure that each one of them is responding with kind of a hopefully creative conversation that's also occurring here at this table. And then we will move on to the next question and the next question and we'll wrap up that portion of it around 205 to 10 and make sure that we've got plenty of time for Q&A and also just to hear from your experiences and thoughts around this in a good 20 to 25 minutes of that towards the end of this session, so just to kind of lay that out. The first question that we had in front of us as we were looking at it is like, you know, why do this kind of work? And, you know, maybe it's because it's on the front page with the newspaper, but maybe there's something else. So maybe Kerry, you were mentioning that it came from someone that you, from a student in the MFA program. Maybe, I don't know, maybe talk a little bit more about... Well, the question you asked is really the better question, which is why not? You know, we spend our lives, we're just talking about this, you know, having discussions about diversity in the American theater, which usually means the same three plays and the same three cultures. And, you know, this represents an enormous part of the world. It's amazing to me that it's taken us this long, but theater always goes out of individual relationships. You want to work with specific artists. They lead you to other artists. People tell their own stories. I started my career as an archeologist and stuff, so, you know, I studied Zewer and Babylon and Assyria, and I love that part of the world. I came back to it through lots of different people, but starting with Omar, I got to... I worked in Canada a lot and heard about this playwright who had come from Lebanon when he was 18. And so I went to Montreal and started looking for these plays. He's written this tetralogy, so there are four of them, and they get weirder and weirder. I mean, they are really surreal, dangerous plays. But Scorch just knocked me out. I mean, it's a Greek tragedy by the Middle East about twins searching for their identity, and it was made into quite an amazing film, actually, last year. And once I met him, Washti, who's a very magical, particular kind of writer, I just wanted to sort of keep going down that path, and I'm sure one of the things we'll talk about, it depends on, you know, if we're talking about plays written in English or not. Translation is a big issue. A really interesting question. And how you find translators for work from all over that part of the world is particular. But this one really captured my imagination, and I brought it back to Scorch, and we have a trustee who's Lebanese, Lionel Tariff, and this meant a great deal to her. And we started to just read more and apply it more and more people. It's a big community here, you know. As you start to put the feelers out, more and more people come into the mix and say, that's part of my story, you should make sure you know this, and you should talk to that person. And then you start casting, and there's a huge pool in this country now, a Middle Eastern actor. So I was really committed to that, to making sure that around the table was a kind of rich world. So there was an Egyptian actor, and an Iranian actor, and a Syrian actor, and a Lebanese actor, and a Greek guy, and this was the president. Well, speaking of translation, Marisa, that makes me think of the invasion, which was originally within Swedish. Right, right. So tell us a little bit about that. What were the processes, journeys? Yeah, so, you know, well, actually, this is funny, because I actually heard about this work from reading an article in the New York Times, about, you know, the title was something about, like, a openly political playwright, and I was like, yes, who is this? And he'd only been done in the U.S. once, in New York. And so we were really excited to be able to do this work here, and he was incredibly, I mean, he's, I think, we're sort of living, everyone, like England or... Sweden and Paris. Right, okay. Sweden and Paris. So he was very, very open with us about, yes, speak your own, and do what you want, and the translation, so he speaks fluent English, but he chose to have it translated by an American writer. And he talked about that as being important to him, so that it kind of carried an incredibly relevant, like, of-the-moment piece that really uses the kind of, like, vernacular and slang of the characters in the world. And he felt like, he said that he, he felt it would be a bolder translation if he didn't do it himself. And so I think that he has a very close relationship with this writer, and also translated one of his novels. And it was interesting, because in our audience we had him, I was so startled that we had not only a great representation of folks from the Middle East come out, but also folks from Sweden who were Swedish speakers and had been reading his work, and were really excited to see it staged. Great. So, Sean, what brought you, I mean, I know that a lot of what we do is based upon the relationships with the dollars and the audiences. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting and thank you so much for having this particular panel of folks. I think in creating work, especially new work, you know, for us it's always trying to reflect the world that we live in. And so there's kind of a non-specificity to that. And I think there's obviously this whole, these past few weeks have been filled with people clearly working from the inside. If we look about this subject matter we're clearly working on the outside of it in terms of that. I mean, I think it's just part of each of us, it's the United States, right? So each of us has to cleave our place into the storytelling map or narrative that this country allowed at a certain point. And so just like any other movement, I think the world has to wake up and it's just going to have to tell more and more stories that way. So we've certainly never went into thinking what we tell a Middle Eastern story that we're not capable of. I think also our expertise, if we have one, is not looking at things politically or historically in that sense. So it has to become very personal and the personal then hopefully be political in that sense. And so it's interesting, I guess, just to sit up here and try and invert the equation of how we approach it. At the heart of any of the storytelling Brad was saying is the human experience of it. That's what we want to start with. And then I think I'm a believer in the more specific you make the storytelling oddly enough to the more universal it becomes. And I think in our case working with this young man, Sharif, he worked with us for a long time and he saw how other writers told stories about their own past, their own histories, their own memories, their own struggles. And it's also hard for us to be representative of international things. Our group Composanto, which is very squarely grounded in San Francisco, frankly, and grounded in being the strange citizens of this United States, which ends up having a lot of swimming through a sea of several different migrations. And I think in seeing these paths and seeds of other people's works, whether it's Chicanos or Black folks or Japanese, whatever it is, how have you got to the place that you got to? And I think he saw his own story and his own past in that he's Palestinian so I think that also has a there's something hyping in that for him in terms of homeland, history, identity, all of that. In a weird way, I sound so general about it, but I think that moment that you sit in a theater, especially when you grow up in the United States and for many of us, you don't see yourself reflected often enough. I think the moment that you see yourself reflected in any kind of refraction where you go like, listen to that, listen to that August Wilson story about this guy telling a very particular story in the 1940s, but it's about his grandmother. I relate to my grandmother in that same way, if this is not too much obstructive. I mean, that's kind of the moment that I had to be interested in doing theater and I think for us, Shadees had that story and so he came into it in many different ways, trying to tell stories and ultimately the strongest story he had was to tell a story about him and his father and his mother in a lot of ways and so I think you do that and then you put it in the hands of the people that know that story, that's interesting. Really not from Omar who's also part of our company as well as Jerry's and he directed that and I think there's something cool about the growing legion of stories that this country is built with and the fact that these two younger men were able to lead us, a company still very young ourselves, but into a new era of story telling and that's why I'm most excited to be on the panel, it's actually the part where we get to look out and go like and what else, and what other stories are there, and what other stories are there when we first started the thing we did play by the guy, Tavio Solis and if you would categorize him a Chicano writer and so I think it's easy to go like other Chicano plays I think we very purposefully set out to tell stories that reflect the world we live in if you live in the Bay Area, that's a lot of stories so we're never going to get the one hundredth of them, but the ones that speak the truest and the loudest are the ones who want to be part of telling and Sharif knows that story so I think it's less that his play is more about his voice and the voice that he's in is a part of the generation of people it's just, it's a weird bottom of the mountain thing that we're all in because we're trying to tell many many stories for many many people and the way that the United States works is that most of the land has already plotted out to people so it takes these ways for people to be like oh, now they're being lesbian stories, oh no black folks are telling stories, oh no Latin people are telling stories, oh no Asian-American folks are telling stories so I feel sort of oddly faker up here now retail Middle East and so I don't remember of course that we do that I think we work with people that live in this world pretty honestly and if you broke it down, yeah Sharif's post in there was one in Amara Egyptian so in that way, yeah but he ended up, he wrote this play his first play that got produced called Habibi and so beautiful and so honest and I think it could be in any play, festival or book about you know experiences or Middle East experiences as far as I could tell it moves me in that way so Michael, I am interested in asking you this question because you're going out on this limb for the first time and as you were saying it's not really something that it's usual for a center rep to be doing and so maybe talk to us a little bit about how you found this play and why and why now and so it's here there it is yeah in some ways the risk for us is not so much doing a Middle Eastern play but doing a new play and maybe that's a good thing in a way that in some ways where the bigger focus is on you know we've launched this it's part of this off center second stage program that we inaugurated three years ago because I was really feeling the need to have an opportunity for myself frankly and for our audiences to you know entertain how we contact with new work work that doesn't have to be as frankly just sell as my tickets because I have to upstairs so it was a little crazy to do that in 2009 but I thought it was a really good opportunity to do the same kind and did it without any budget or staff and sort of has to pay for itself so it's a really interesting it's still kind of a commercial venture in a weird way but definitely the focus is to do new work the play came to me because I don't have a literary department actually so it's always like a weird sort of personal recommendation based kind of way that it happens David Bichette and actor in Seattle many times in our play right we've encountered this but I think with that festival I said yes and you know I talk we talk to people all the time that's a good idea to do recommendations and he recommended it he just loved the play and he really spoke to me about it as a beautiful new play and I responded to it as a great play but frankly also feeling that having an opportunity to have a conversation about this issue felt extremely important and that anything that could let people even if they don't have a conversation I just think about the developing empathy and understanding for this situation was really important and I like the play so much because it's basically a romantic comedy that uses that genre and that powerful attractive story to explore a kind of culture clash between the expectations between the map and the recent balance so it was appealing to me on a lot of levels and that's basically what led to what's so interesting and truly I'm asking this question for the first time we all meet on the phone and rehearse before we got here so all of these questions are real they're not rhetorical and so I'm really hearing them which is really interesting and maybe really gratifying that I'm not hearing from any one of these artistic directors that was like gosh we really felt like we needed to do something Middle Eastern so let's go find something I'm really hearing that it's about these stories these playwrights we want to reflect the world and this is obviously a huge part of the world so why wouldn't we do it as Kerry was saying I think that's really interesting and yet or maybe and along with that as you found yourself going down this path and given the complex histories of the Middle East and the passions and the volatility and frankly it's not the sort of history that's been out there with I don't remember it and I did get a chance to see it in New York my name is Rachel Corey and I think we all saw what happened with that company in New York and you know the decision to pull the play for a while and then they got beat up for that and then they did it and just like there are unseen perhaps landmines and I wondered if you found any landmines along the way or afraid of any or weren't afraid just went full steam ahead I don't know if there's something different about this kind of war or not I think there will be for me any new play is going to have this set of challenges that will win them down the possibilities title is so important and I really like the title but it's long I'm sure you've heard this before I mean once you've read the play I think you really love it but you know so I think it will the good will and the natural ambassadorship of this play will that takes a little longer but I really believe it's going to have a potentially a profound effect on you the people that see it and will spread and will do its thing to change how people not really believe or think but affect some sense of their regard it's interesting we don't have any landmines but I think what Sean is saying it's such an important question to always be asking ourselves is the question of what I call authenticity of voice and what that means as a white Jewish artistic vector to be very thoughtful around and be aware of what can be easily cultural appropriation or what has been in our history of this country cultural appropriation as we do work by all sort of folks who are not our only subject position and so I feel very grateful for Torange and Golden Threads support and everyone because I think that in our pre-production of the show we had a lot of conversations and a lot of we had to be really honest and open to each other about casting about choices around having a resident artist from Proud of Fire who has played a Middle Eastern character before at a number of different times but who himself is not what that meant and just being open and being able to listen I know everything so I'm going to do this play and that feels very important for all sorts of work that we do and not to shut the doors and say I can't do anything outside my own subject position because that's scary and that would be appropriating but also to sort of say when I do let's be thoughtful and ask a lot of questions and engage in ways that feel scary and important so I mean I think landlines don't usually come around political issues or manufactured cultural issues so I think no in that sense and I think it also speaks to it's easy for me to say because I believe it because what we do we're interested in telling stories that reflect our world which is sort of safe in a certain way but that can only exist if there are then groups like Globe and Fred like in order for us as a whole ecology of us trying to tell stories we actually need both of the muscles working at the same time so therefore it becomes easier for me to sort of say like yes of course that's another story in the sea of stories that needs to be told and at the same time it's just like our identity the same time that I say I'm a person of color and at certain times I have to be like shut the fuck up can't be always talking about how I'm a person of color I just have to be a person at a certain time I think for the whole storytelling that has to happen for us as whatever community, society, the world and so for us we kind of have the easier task we're telling a story that is a honest, heartfelt, honest imaginative, crazy story but like landlines it's very lightweight I think that there I think it's harder if you're taking on something political and it's obvious in this you know the culture that we live in that Middle Eastern things have a sort of this layer over it right now so I think it's obviously harder for people and it's harder in a smaller degree for people that are attacking that a little more head on so for us I'm laughing looking at Joan Holman thinking that landlines my first year here doing the hope in the woods and getting practically arrested by the Catholic Church so Middle East was so easy where I've never in my life been picketed and attacked and bombarded as I was by that play but we had fun right Joan that was the landline because it was sort of deliberately provocative I mean you know it's so deeply dependent on the play the family plans you know and family is family it's a hugely particular whether it's a Greek family, a Jewish family a Turkish family, a Iranian family and the circumstances I'm thinking about Monument Source work it's both very particular both universal because it wrestles with intercultural and intergenerational issues that we all wrestle with you know good writing is sort of good writing you know writing minds are just as Marissa says if we had done Scorched and just passed like our company yeah that would have been terrible and but you know I always think the fun of making theater is every play you do whether it's as a writer or director or producer it's like a journey into an unknown world so the best thing you can do is say to people who know that world you take me, guide me what do I pack, what do I eat what do you work, who do you want to go with you so every journey is like that I mean it's just like Kerry said the one day you wake up and you go uh oh I better cast some Middle Eastern actors in the United States and then you put yourself to that task and go oh it turns out there's two million of them okay great I shouldn't trip about that that's gonna happen all of us that live in boxes are getting put in boxes the more and more we bust out and say oh there's actually a million stories about a million people and a million people can tell us so let's do the really good ones and the ones that really need to be heard by people and that continually is a process that hopefully we go through each time whether it's with Shariitra, Shikhande and Yuzuko what are you working on right we'll work with our writers that might need pieces so so Michael it's your ramping it's your ramping of your audiences for this production are there different or new things you are planning to do or worrying about or hoping for we're actually looking forward to not letting the audience sort of encounter the play really freshly on it but it is gentle the play is gentle in that way and the character says good writing is good writing immediately aware that you're in the hands of a good writer it's inventive and it's humor and heart and surprises and and then character and relationships great characters a very engaging relationship that begins in the novel that draws anybody in and then all the other stuff is sort of in support of that or that's driving that's driving it so I think it's kind of great in a way to not come to this particular play to see a story about culture crash it's a story like the doctor said in the keynote that the bilingualism that is kind of roomfully happily deliberate but with some kind of really joyous embracing of this new adventure it's a story of this Egyptian immigrant trying to encounter America and make it here and relate to that that's deep enough of a story I think what's so interesting that I'm hearing from the panel is that there wasn't a particular foreboding about approaching this work necessarily and there wasn't really an experience of landmines as people were saying along the way or in a particular way of taking the audience by the hand and having to usher them through or shepherd them through in a different way maybe not what people assume in great practitioners here and elsewhere around the country which is also really encouraging with that in mind this might be a good time to kind of open it up and extend the conversation out to you all for both questions and comments and maybe sharing of your own experiences with this with producing work that deals with the Jews coming from so we need microphones Thank you so much I am Radia, I'm from Syria I'd like first to thank you for all the effort you are to produce the theater play I have questions that if you follow the image or the plays they were before the Arab Spring and after the Arab Spring from what we have really article in the news most of the production or anything missing about the Arab you find something have changed, the perspective have changed I have noticed that the appreciation and respect for Arab people or the Middle Eastern people have changed so do you think that has affect you vision or even your audience how that affect your job do you start to pick different subject and do you think as I don't know if I'm right that I have seen that even the theme itself in the play I found a lot of things speaking about for example before the repression of women, how much their religion affect women, how they see us in general and suddenly I found a lot of politics came up and started to see another thing happening so do you think that affect you have you noticed that and your audience how they receive this thank you I think what you speak to is that now like a sort of new generation that is almost a hunger and a kind of on the world stage that I think I feel at some level that we need to be kind of pushing actually a demand for more Middle Eastern work on stages and again and not to taunt for her work and her vision that is pervasive here I don't know it kind of brings up the sense of like this should be a directive for all of us actually yes, yes, yes, it's the stories and they're relevant on the law but it's also it's pressing I think so immediate and important to all of us particularly in the world of the Arab Spring I mean I think it's a great question because it's a great question for us in the world right and I think as practitioners or creators of theater pieces for like witnesses and form of witness and journalists of sort so with us it's like that times three in terms of its delay like an event will happen it takes like three years for it to land into our consciousness about how it affects our culture and then we can start responding creatively to further the dialogue in some way so I think to initially answer your question for sure, for sure, yeah I think every one of us in the world feels a little bit more like that since since all of the events have happened and then how will that affect the work? I don't know yet too because in the United States we're so like you know we look down things so much it's going to be hard to sort of go like look back at a child and there's the rest of the world and how is that going to affect you all and so I don't know how that's going to affect the rest of the the way we tell stories I would imagine too it'll happen quicker in movies and TV right? I would think that only because what you say is exactly I mean it's in the zeitgeist and sometimes we don't even know what's in the zeitgeist we hear it, we read it we don't even really consciously know this is something we're thinking about and then you read something and you think that's what it is for me one of the most puzzling things about studying the Middle East is to try to understand tribalism what is that? what does it actually mean to look at this Alawite, Sunni, Shiite situation in Syria which you it's in your DNA and all we can do is parse it what is that? because we ostensibly live in a culture that is a culture of law so what Washti was trying to do in Scorched I suddenly realized was this question about Vendetta so how does Vendetta work why is Vendetta such an ancient thing and why does it follow tribal lines and why where does the law intersect with it which is of course what we've tragedy about but what I realized in telling Washti he also loves Greek tragedy because the question that the Greeks tried to ask and we as Americans are so naive we think if you just let people have free elections democracy is going to happen we somehow don't get it look at our own democracy why don't we get what a messy difficult process is but we don't seem to get it and so this question Vendetta and tribalism can actually be interrupted by something that has a different kind of representation is huge and the question of women of course is even huge because from much of the Middle East women have so much less access to voice and education so I think those things that's what drew me if you want to look at the sort of bigger political things that Irish people were writing about I would love to work more on that because I think so it's so hard to wrap our heads around time I think Karen drinks up a great point too though obviously the breaking down of Walls and hope of that is beautiful to all of us then it butts up against our theories around law and structure and anything messy it becomes much more difficult there should be a million stories right now about kind of running constantly about Gaza Strip and Mexico right now is not where the most contention and actual real life drama has been going on for years and years and years and we can barely read it in the newspaper so in order for it to get into our stages it's harder but I agree too again with Karen that it's in the air so it's going to sooner or later it's going to pull back down and it's going to come into someone's story political stuff is hard I'm talking to an audience of people that know that much better than I so it becomes very that's where the landmines is and it becomes an interesting thing hope becomes a beautiful thing May I ask a question so I just want to shift the conversation a little bit and focus on you've talked about international and work in translation but Habibi is an American story and Pogrom is an American story I'm interested in your perspective on why more Middle Eastern American plays are not being introduced and how can we help to make that happen sorry I'm a baby there's a baby over there what do you want me to do I will put myself to that task too there's not enough space I think part of it too is like working two muscles at the same time we can over here look at the big scope what are the stories what is the world telling us to do and then there needs to be enough rattling in the cage can you tell a fucking story can you tell our story can you tell our story we're here can you tell our story okay you're not going to tell our story can you tell our story and then we get like 50 of those stories you go like she's really good you can tell her stories next so part of it we have to work in this kind of unconscious concert together you go like will you continue to write and tell your stories and then at the third stage we'll tell those stories together I don't think well certainly none of us up here are situated in a place that says let's focus on this as the type of story telling I mean it's the thing with any group any minority right we have to speak loud enough until you listen to us if you're not going to listen to us then we're going to speak louder or we're going to tell it to each other and when we're going to tell it to each other long enough that you're going to come in you're going to become interested after a while I would just hope more I mean it's not like it's not happening I mean we take our cue from you like we reorient every year there's many many voices every every year I think about what do we need to you know do this and you know the the component of I mean it sounds so corny maybe it's naive I don't know but the love and understanding that the play has and it's calling for you know maybe that's subversive to like make us think when we kind of explain we watch it oh this is just a play about young lovers trying to make it and then oh no it's actually got all this other stuff but now I'm hooked in on this very human story maybe that's I don't know the answer to the question why there isn't more I'm not qualified into that but just thinking about my own experience of why I chose this play I mean let's be honest now most of the American theater does the same three plays you get Middle Eastern plays they talk about plays like women or anything you know I think you've done an amazing job I mean I think it's about getting names out there over and over again so that people start to get familiar with the array of possibilities you know I think people don't replays anymore in this game you know what I mean you sung some with Lucky if anybody ever reads anything I don't know why so it has to do with keeping that pot boiling as you have as actors who want to do those plays are ambassadors and say you want to work with me here's what I want to do I mean very often that's how a play gets done all kinds of different cultural plays it's something you trust says read this you know and after 3,000 plays sitting on your desk you read that one because that person you know and so partly just you know finding ways to make sure that the work you do gets out there, gets published gets seen you've laid a huge amount of traction just here and it's happened around the country in a relatively short amount of time you know it is a really ridiculous thing that you know it took 50 years for African-American plays to get produced and they all have their little fashions a little fashion in Asian-American and now that sort of disappears or something and partly more and more it will just be American stories and there are a multitude of American stories and performances to tell them but it's partly I think in this country just familiarity do you know what I mean it's like realizing your neighbor it's like gay marriage is going to happen no matter what anybody pretends up to the contrary because everyone eventually is going to have a neighbor who's gay and they're going to like it you know it's familiarity they want them to get married then they're not the other anymore you know the Middle East has been made in Western culture for so many thousands of years that that is a really that's the big interesting challenge about the Middle East is and I don't even like it that we call it the Middle East they're totally different cultures I hate that you go to Turkey it's one university you go to Syria it's a different university you go to Lebanon it's a totally different mystery you go to Iraq so I'm not even sure that's so helpful and I want to say too I mean what was interesting with the invasion was you know it was Americanized and that the translator had originally or had written it to me in New York because that's where it was done first but everyone was like let's make this about the Bay Area and so we got permission from the playwright to just change a few words here and there to make it relevant to us now in terms of locations and I loved that I loved that choice because it felt like we can't even push it off to the North like well these things have to work on the West so it was so so timely us now here in San Francisco and that does seem extremely important both things seem important but to cultivate a sense of our own engagement and culpability now here Everett Hi Before I ask the question I just I did the recommendation and I looked at the odd person who was selected inside and outside the question it is you feel like an artistic director it feels like on the artistic side there's a hunger and interest and sort of great support of a lot of those writers you know B, C, R, C certain writers come up I understood it when you said to your teams I'm going to do this at least in play what was the reaction from the marketing people and how were sales I mean and I don't that's the real question because I actually feel like until Middle Eastern plays start selling well then we won't make that next step because we want we want to make it so that it's not as big as this in a way and I know a lot of artists think that way but you counter it when you bring the play out and your marketing people go you know or not I'm just really curious about how that reaction happened I'll be really honest with you it wasn't it didn't go that well great yeah it's just awful how sort of reductive it gets down to you know the names of things it's just hard and there wasn't any real resistance it's just wow that's going to be difficult the play and the name of the play I'm sorry but this is the truth this is the guy we used to thinking in terms of ticket sales yeah that just strengthened my resolve obviously we need to do this so it's terrible it's good to be honest if not us anybody else can I follow up on that one a comment person I kind of want to get back to the land mines and Rachel Corey question cause I it's hard for me to believe that that gorilla is not in the room but I want to tell you five years ago before 9-11 Mideast only had one mini in this country and that was in real in Palestine and the conflict there it wasn't just land mines around you it was bombers aimed at your head if you took off that subject which I was part of a group that did that in the late 80's and with enormous war I mean every Jew and Arab in the Bay Area saw the play about Israel and Palestine because they were full of so much tension about it they wanted to you know they really flocked but it's enormous it's hard for me to believe none of you has mentioned a show that goes there or that goes to the US role in Iraq and I'm pressing the question of whether there are not boundaries there are not things that would come at you if you touched this region in a more dangerous way I think you're absolutely correct and I think that's probably it's not consciously unconsciously why we get what Terry said that it's easier to come to a place to commune if you're talking about a personal story that's about family absolutely for sure I mean I think there's that on the one hand and then on the other hand I think how many people outside of you are armed and skilled to write those kinds of pieces I don't know that answer because I don't know those writers I suppose that's not a soft folly that's more just what I'm cursing you guys out here may know more people that are ready it's hard enough to get a story in the newspaper which printed about it so I don't know how you would get people to produce those play I hear you because of what I'm saying on that and I don't know and I think that has this trickle down then who are the people that are skilled and crafted enough to write a skilled and crafted piece in response to that that furthers the dialogue I think it's a great question a question I have no answer I'm trying to think, we're about to do this play by George Walker that's really scabrous called Dead Metaphor about an American Sniper who comes back from Iraq and I have no idea what the response is going to be I mean it's not news that none of these veterans can get jobs in this country when they come back and snipers are the worst in terms of employability because they have what they call the eye and that gift which has allowed them to rise in the military and kill at long distance with the incredible precision means they are pariahs when they come back to states and I wanted to do this play because George Walker is such a troublemaker and such a fantastic writer sort of in the Joan Holden vein I think he's a writer who's probably been very much I don't know I have no idea how that will land and you know in the Bay Area we pretend that we're so we're not the ones sending people to Iraq so we can be very liberal about it it's not our science mostly seriously you know we have had this project called Theater of War and we've had two MFA students who are in Iraq right now and when they came back and did this project it was absolutely amazing because it was all for the point of theater of war is that it's for veterans and so you do a big collaboration where you get people into the audience who are veterans that's a whole other question of who we license our wars out to in this country and the rest of us let it go by so you're absolutely right I mean we haven't even started producing those plays from an American point of view let alone an Israeli point of view there's a wonderful, there are a bunch of Israeli writers writing like Mati Lerner's play the death of Yitzhak of Rabin which we worked on which the Jews in this town hated it's very very critical of the Israelis he's an amazing writer he has enough trouble getting his plays done in Israel now you know so I mean part of the question is we are incredibly culturally myopic in this country you know about all kinds of other cultures in the Middle East you know I suppose in the Middle East we should be less myopic because we're so involved but I mean we just did a Finnish play at ACT and everybody was like what a what? from where? I mean it's Finland you know where was that so difficult people thought that was incredibly peculiar so you know on the marketing front I would say they enjoyed the play and so they really wanted to do it they're much more nervous about other things I like that's another question I wonder given your respective experiences about programming what do you think has happened not so far as the question of staging in the Middle East in terms of the location of theater namely there is a place called Z-Zone and people come here they're invited on a Sunday or a Friday to come here and watch their theater or given a contemporary political event such as Tahir Square Tahir Square was not just a revolutionary space it was a theatrical space people were just going here to perform poetry, play, drama, etc. we had something of that it was a chaotic part in New York that again was an occupying state you had an audience the play went to the audience the audience coming to the play I suppose something like that must have happened in Oakland that I suppose now in our part of the world in the Arab and Muslim world we have a tradition of it that theater went where people were grocery shopping so you had performance on Friday of Thursday evening people went to the cemetery for loved ones to stage Tahir right there on the cemetery I wonder if something also here we have situational theater scientific theater there are a number of seminars of changing the idea of theater I just wondered even this particular moment in this theater whether this idea of theater here is the play that is happening you will go by the ticket and you come I mean last night I saw some fantastic plays but there were like 12 and a half people sitting in the audience whether that means to be perceptual or not I'm completely with you I think we're in the midst of weighing and experimenting trying that very idea I think absolutely and it's not so far from why we would ask the question like where are the Middle Eastern writers I think it's in that same arena meaning if the people are there don't we need to bring the story to the people and then the people bring the stories back to us and yet absolutely we talk about classes racist issues you know perpetuates it as much as any place where we have this hidden set of rules and agendas and obviously economics playing into it so only a certain number of us are going to go to that thing or once you're in that thing then only you go and then we do that silly thing where we only create for each other I'm absolutely with you I think we're trying to do that right now we're going to do our own next year two things in theater spaces and the rest all along spaces from our space on the mission and up sixth street and up market and gallery hotel lobby cafe street corner I think that's right I think there has to be something in there right and in the way that you're saying in a basic historical outchemical way there's obviously something there that's what we're trying to create in this weird way in here but it's the same idea but then in the moment that we are in time absolutely also I think the fact that people don't want to sit in places like this obviously speaks to it that's such a beautiful thing that you just said that is both very cultural specific and very much of now it isn't an American tradition because we're founded as a country where people didn't want playhouses anyway and you had to hide out to do theater because theater people were prostitutes and renegades so we don't really have a tradition of public quite that way I mean that is such a beautiful way to put it when you just said that you know on this Thursday night everybody said market and then that's what they do I'd love to see that tradition created and that would be a very particular new way of saying this is what it means to be American you know that it isn't just a commodity that people are going by but actually it is something that a community could do in public together I don't think that's particularly a tradition in this country no I think about the micro that's been doing it for years and years and years and going into the park but that's a different thing because that's saying we as this company are going to go into this park and it's so amazing which is there are times in the week where an audience is going to be in this place at this cemetery or now this audience of everybody on Thursday night is going to be in this market so let's figure that and let's go there that's kind of I have to think about that that's fabulous yes I see a hand I guess my question is about the line of audiences I'm not exploring but it was so late we got great audience responses and it's very encouraging for us and you know we had I mean we're a really we have a lot of audiences so it's a different beast however we had a great run and we were able to sell out and I think that I feel that there was a place at the table for a lot of different audiences particularly young audiences and who felt invested and felt that they as Sean alluded to saw themselves on stage and the Swedish was I think a lot that's an area you described that doesn't apply to the thing of the review comes out and then you're packed and you the newspapers could die tomorrow I don't think I'd see any difference but actually word of mouth old fashioned real word of mouth is still the most powerful tool and I depend on it enormously and it actually works I love it actually I actually feel like there's a real conversation going on within between them and us it's pretty great I was really happy during the Scorch to see who did come but I was also unhappy at who didn't come in the sense that it did really well as our political and because of Lila Tariff on our board and other Lebanese friends of mine and Iraqi friends of mine I tried to figure out groups and ways and there are people who knew about it but theater is such a marginal artwork marginal thing in most people's lives that by the time four weeks have gone by and it's done people in their communities and their schools that are just hearing about it if it's not something you're already looking for and forget that they're not reading it chronically they're not thinking about going to up play so it is a really different thing different kinds of audiences and where do you go how do you build those bridges we tried to do lots and lots of post play things early on with lots of different kinds of people and that encouraged them to go out and find people to come back but as with anything you have to do a lot of it it doesn't help to do it one time I know this is now watching Electra because I do a lot of Greeks and the first time we did Greeks I got these letters from the audience before they even saw it saying Greek traffic and when did you see it they think it's people in slips or something walking around I don't know what they thought now we've done a lot of it and now they're like they know it's fierce and argumentative and litigious and loud and complicated and big women doing dangerous things now they turn up but that's eight plays lighter that's the problem they just have to be mad it's volume I mean you have to do enough I need to reach out more than once for us having one show it's like great let's keep going because it's not like I remember eight years ago when we did this one show I hope you guys will come back okay we have just one more question Hello, I'm Roberta Levento Hi first of all I just want to follow up on what Carrie just said about more is more in this stupid situation and I want to thank everybody on the panel because what you revealed is both your ease and your comfort and thoughtfulness but also some of the questions that do contextualize presenting this work both here in a beautiful liberal community like San Francisco and nationally where some of the issues are more complicated and the nation is struggling like the NEA has a program to bring a Pakistani company into a rural community in Nebraska and the veterans issues and the Israeli-Palestinian issues and the funding issues the fact that there's less money given to Middle Eastern exchange than any other international exchange in the entire US foundation and government budgets and it's so strange so there are issues of funding there are issues of marketing there are issues of translation there are issues of building some kind of a community of allies and many many many many thousand million kudos to Golden Thread Productions for being one of maybe three theater companies or is it five I don't know but I mean it's a very small handful of companies around the country who are developing the artist, developing the work discovering the connections just this morning new people that were meeting so theater cap orders we have a tiny role to play in that but I just wanted to say a big thank you to everybody to Derange for doing these reorient forms and to say more more more so how is more more more going to happen and if there's some kind of theater cap orders is big on collectivism and you know staying in connection to develop more more more so that there's national advocacy for funding for raising these questions because you guys have now had this positive experience and many companies around the country would not feel so comfortable and so confident and so you're now you know you're now people who can share those stories as well as I would be there so I just wanted to say thank you last closing comments come see the play I just said okay I'm throwing down Mike because I love Roberta so much you know and I didn't go I was a bad girl and didn't go last week to the TCG fall forum on diversity because I never want to have that conversation again because I thought supposedly said forget these general conversations at TCG you're not allowed to go to the conference unless you let's say the fall forum was just on Middle Eastern drama you couldn't go until you read these ten plays everyone can read some plays on the play but you have to read the plays and then you're going to go and talk about those specific plays no general conversation about wouldn't it be nice if there was inclusion but something really specific and then we do a whole one with Roberta on Ugandan work and we really wrestle with those incredible artists that we've been collaborating or then we do Finland and Swing but I don't know any other way around it I think it's a huge problem you only get to know other cultures by either going here, reading the material meeting somebody who works on the material and committing to doing it yourself I don't know any other way to do it it's trench work that's how it is right that's how international collaborate that's how anything happens it's one-on-one but you have to make the commitment and we spend we waste untold hours at all of this time I don't even need to be looking at you but TVN is a good time if we didn't do this it's like we weren't allowed to even permit ourselves for the next five years to do conferences where we had general, no conferences are marketing ever again and we don't have to talk about social media and we don't have to talk about inclusion we actually have to learn something how about we make a commitment to that that's what it is today well thank you thank you Brad, thank you to all the panelists who are very helpful working the panel last round of applause thank you, have a very brief 10 minute break I invite you to stretch your legs as more of a coffee but please be back in 10 minutes which is when we will be presenting the Middle East America New Plays Initiative award, followed by the use of LED's staged reading and a little later tonight the