A   R O U N D T A B L E   D I S C U S S I O N
 

with DeLanna Studi (Native Voices), Kevin Lawlor (Great Plains Theatre Commons), Adrian Centeno (Seven Devils), Melia Bensussen (O’Neill Playwrights Conference; Hartford Stage), Jeremy B. Cohen (Playwrights’ Center, Ojai Playwrights Conference), and moderated by Goldie Patrick

Goldie Patrick:  So, we’re talking new plays. Yay! Such a complex topic. I would love to start the conversation with a really simple question: what is a new play?

DeLanna Studi: At Native Voices, we define new plays [as] plays that have never been produced. They can have a workshop. We’re also open to this being the very first draft of a first play someone’s ever written, so usually when we pick our festival of new plays, we choose one that’s very beginning, one that’s mid-level, and one that’s almost ready to be produced. We try to do different levels.

Kevin Lawler: I know that some playwrights may have had an early production, but they’re still really working the play and won’t put it away for a while; they’re really rewriting and trying to get it into shape. So, I don’t know – institutionally, we say “not a professional production,” so there you go.

Adrian Centeno: Yeah, I’ll say that, as an institution, Seven Devils operates with very similar guidelines to what DeLanna described with Native Voices. However, I’d like to give a more personal answer, and to connect the point that Kevin made. I really loved John Lahr’s book on Tennessee Williams, Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, and in that book, Williams describes the essential need for productions in the development process. How can a playwright evolve without productions? That’s essential, and it can be really hard to find spaces where a production is viewed as essential to the development process; a space that says, “maybe you need a few productions before you really know what the play is.” 

We don’t have a lot of spaces like that in the American theatre right now, which is to our detriment. And I’ve heard that from playwrights many times as well. And, to give a shout-out, I think it’s great what NNPN [National New Play Network] is doing with the Rolling World Premiere. That’s been so beneficial to many wonderful artists I know who have [gone] through the RWP process. And to link all those thoughts together, I’ll say from a personal perspective, to me, not as an organization but as Adrian the individual, a new play is something where a playwright is actively committed to process, whatever that looks like and at any stage. So if this is your fifth production and you’re still in the room working scenes and rewriting things, that’s – in my heart, that’s a new play endeavor.

Melia Bensussen: I’m going to say yes, yes, yes. As an individual, I totally agree. Institutionally, speaking for the O’Neill, we follow the same guidelines. Hartford Stage had this great experience where we collaborated with the Huntington and Kate Snodgrass, an extraordinary playwright and teacher. We did Kate’s play as a new play at both theatres, which is to say we had close to full rehearsal periods at both theatres even though it was a co-pro. And the play grew so much from having a full rehearsal period at the Huntington and then a full run, and then a generous rehearsal period in Hartford before that run. And it was amazing how much the play grew. I wish we could do that for every play, but speaking as the new very grateful AD of the O’Neill Theater National Playwrights Conference, yeah, those are our similar guidelines.

Jeremy B. Cohen:  I love that, Adrian. That’s so beautiful. Thanks for sharing that. DeLanna, for Native Voices — for the two different festivals for young writers versus sort of less-young writers — are they the same beginning level, like this is an early draft for both of those?

DeLanna Studi:  Are you talking about about our Young Native Playwrights program?

Jeremy B. Cohen:  Yeah.

DeLanna Studi:  They will be creating their piece in the room with us as we move along through eight weeks. It’s a free program starting this year. We’ve done it in the past, but we got this wonderful grant from First Nations Fund, and so we’re able to bring it back. So they’ll be actually creating work in the room, and most of them are brand-new playwrights who have only thought about writing a play or a story, and they’re Native children across the United States and Canada in grades 7-12.

Jeremy B. Cohen:  Awesome. That’s my plug. I knew the answer. I just wanted to get it into the article because it’s so awesome.

DeLanna Studi:  You’re the best, Jeremy. Thank you. That’s what we’re doing. It’s different.

Jeremy B. Cohen:  So yeah, I guess like Melia, I’m kind of thinking about this from two different perspectives from two different organizations. One is Playwrights’ Center, where I’ve been the Producing Artistic Director for fourteen years. For Playwrights’ Center, we [think] a lot about the artist human who is making the theatre and also about the work itself, thinking about how to create more artist-scaled, human-scaled practices around developing work.

We produce 75 workshops a year at Playwrights’ Center, and while I am not in 75 workshops a year myself, I am in 150 conversations with playwrights about, “how are you doing, what’s up with your mom, talk to me about that health insurance, let’s talk about why that commission got stalled, how do we help you move through navigating a career block moment where there’s this opportunity that’s actually not right for you and what are you going to do because we need the cash,” etc. I think there’s a human-scaled piece of it, and new work for me is metabolized within that process of taking care of that. 

More newly, thanks to Adrian and DeLanna, I’m trying to figure out my Ojai Playwrights Conference hat, and that I would say is probably more play-centric. I inherited a process that was a very different process in terms of how plays get chosen, and this year, for example, we had our first open submission process. So, this was the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to send a play into Ojai Playwrights Conference, which has never happened before. It meant that instead of getting about 300 plays a year, we got over 1,000 plays, much closer to what Melia and her staff are dealing with at the O’Neill, but that was a big “holy shit” moment. The decision was truly about access because we don’t ask anyone about themselves at all in the process. We don’t ask them to do an artist statement. They just say, “Hey, I’m X, here’s my play, go with God.” It’s also about making sure that we’re not asking more of people –more labor, you know, because gig artists have to spend a lot of unpaid time applying for everything under the sun. We wanted the floodgates open, and this was our way of trying to remove as many barriers as possible.

I feel like I am seeing how and from where writers are writing, given our world right now, coming from different places in their heart or their spirit or their mind or formally, tonally, content-wise. New plays for me are a class. I am learning about theatre by reading all these plays right now.

Goldie Patrick:  Thank y’all for those answers. I don’t believe in perfection, per se, but that shit was perfect. 

So, I think the relevant capacity of me helping with these questions and moving through the conversation is my background. I’m a cultural worker [and] a dramatist, and I also work at the Dramatists Guild Foundation, [where] I run their grants and programs. I have a lot of empathy and a lot of shared experience, and also some new.

With that, when we talked about new [work], we talked a lot about time and development as a descriptor for new. And now I’m interested in content. How does content play a role in consideration of a work as new? To give a concrete example, are there times where you read a play and you go, “I’ve seen this before.” And, in the conversation of evolving audiences, is there a space where the audience is considered, or the institution is considered producorially? Or actors are considered — this has too many actors or this would be hard to cast? I think it would be helpful for dramatists to really know what other creative components go into consideration when folks are looking at what makes a play fresh or new or the right choice for their new play festival or showcase.

Kevin Lawler:  There’s not necessarily a specific type of content that we would be looking for [at Great Plains Theatre Commons], but we do use the word “courageous,” feeling that the playwright has gone so deep into whatever world they’re exploring that you can feel the courage of that journey. That’s one of the key things that we look for.      

Adrian Centeno:  Seven Devils has an interesting relationship to community. First, it exists in McCall, Idaho. There’s a community there of, I wanna say around 3,800 people in the general area. When we do public presentations, all our events are free and open to the public. There are no passes, no tickets, nothing like that. The space holds about 150 people, and every night it’s full because the community has come to view this space as a public utility of sorts. I’ve seen teenagers bike up to the theatre, ditch their bikes in the grass, walk up to the box office and say, “what’s playing tonight?” So there’s this longstanding community-based relationship of, “let’s go see what’s happening at the conference.” It’s really exciting to us.

With that in mind, it’s not the only factor, but we absolutely do consider what kind of dialog a piece can have with McCall, and what can McCall, this wonderful and beautiful community, offer this piece in conversation? Our readings are followed by a public talkback, and the community offers so much valuable feedback. I think we’re demystifying theatre in some ways by inviting people into this process, and if people have a sense that they understand how we work and that perhaps they can participate in this, too, I think it broadens our national theatre audience. 

DeLanna Studi:  Adrian, you gave me chills. That’s incredible. So, for Native Voices, we discovered that a lot of our Native playwrights, when they get commissions from other theatres, they usually are told what to write, and it’s usually about the geography of the space the theatre occupies. If I’m in Missouri, I want you to write a piece about the Missouri River or the original inhabitants of this land. Our Native playwrights don’t normally get to dream and write about what is actually in their hearts and minds. And so Native Voices, when we do our full-length call for scripts, you can write about anything. And what’s fascinating about that process is the community tells us what stories they want to hear.

One year we got a lot of MMIW [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women] stories because that was what was weighing heavily on a lot of our different communities. Sometimes it’s indigenous futurisms, and it’s really amazing [that] they dictate to us what they want to hear. For me, it’s kind of how I keep track of what is the pulse of Indian country, you know, what is affecting us, how can I better serve my community, and what stories are our people wanting to know?

Now, speaking in Native Voices terms, ideally we would be able to cast this out of the people that we have locally who have been part of the Native Voices family, and our Native Voices acting ensemble is not just made up of Native people. It’s made up of anyone who’s ever been on our stages or anyone who wants to be on our stages, because a lot of our playwrights do write non-Native roles. That’s always one of the conversations that we’ve been having, to go a little bit deeper, is what is an Indigenous play. Like Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, a lot of people would argue that’s not a Native play because there are no Native actors onstage, and a lot of people would argue it is a Native play because it has Native content and it was written by a Native person. At Native Voices, we like to play around with what exactly is a Native play. If you are a Native playwright and this is the play that you’ve written, it’s a Native play.

But ideally, we’ll cast it out of our people. And because of our budget, we ask for people to limit it to under seven characters, or if they have more characters, how can we creatively double this? Especially if they come into our festival of new plays because we want to be able to fly everyone in and actually be in the room. But if it’s something that we really love and there’s no way we can shrink that cast down, then we will do a first look via Zoom. It’s not the ideal way, but at the same time, it’s how we can get these words heard and seen.

Goldie Patrick:  I love that you said that, and it makes me think of what Adrian said in terms of the production process being so helpful, and even Melia, the example of what happens with the co-pro, how it grows. Because when you write a play and you write nineteen characters because you have nineteen voices in your head, you think it’s a good idea until you get in the room and you realize that five of those people are actually one character. And it is laborious to have that many actors, and that’s not just your director being particular; that’s the process, that’s the production. There [are] so many throughlines that are being built here from your different examples. I appreciate it. 

Melia Bensussen:  I think part of the enormous privilege of the campus that is the O’Neill is that we’re housing and feeding people, and everyone is together in this very commune-like experience. In selecting, we’re trying hard not to be limited by cast number for exactly the reason you said. It’s part of the journey for a playwright to see those bodies on stage and to think it through. And given our location, there is a wealth of acting talent available to us. Would we not pick something because it’s hard to cast? No. That might be true of my producing sensibility in a regional theatre model of how many bodies onstage and all those questions, whereas at the O’Neill, idealistically speaking, we hope not to have those concerns. I’ll speak utopian language and then the budget cuts will happen and I’ll be like, “yeah,” but there’s a balance within the eight scripts we’re picking that we could do one with ten actors for that playwright to learn whether or not they want ten bodies on that stage, as long as we counter with a smaller play.

The ideal for the O’Neill right now in my first year as artistic director is to give the playwright the freedom of staged readings. There are limited production elements, so it is about how many bodies are speaking. I’m thinking of actors and playwrights together creating a kind of prophecy onstage, that it’s about the extraordinary power of actors matched with the gift of language from a playwright. That’s the force, that’s the event — and hoping not to limit the number of bodies or type of bodies that a theatre piece requires to channel the voices.  

Jeremy B. Cohen:  One of the things that we’re wrestling with at Ojai is that we moved from a 150-seat theatre to a 450-seat theatre, so there’s about 300-400 [audience members] per performance. The audience matters as part of the process because it is useful for writers to hear the thing out loud in response to living heartbeats and laughter and tears and all the things. What’s working rhythmically and what holds stage time, the spatial dramaturgy. It was interesting because I got a lot of feedback from folks about the curation of the first season, having favorites, this is what I liked, this is what I didn’t like, are you going to be doing plays like X all the time. In some ways that’s about content, but I actually think it’s much more about form, which I think is the most challenging for many audiences. 

That, and: there is a centered audience-dramaturgy about expectation and capitalism that then colonizes what a new play event is…because it’s owned. It is fully capitalized around the currency between anything I’m thinking about as an artistic curator – I’m passionate about the play, I’m passionate about the questions in the play, I’m excited about what doesn’t work about the play, etc. In the case of OPC, I’ve got eight or nine colleagues who are at the final point of reading these plays who are currently championing these submitted plays they’ve fallen in love with. Theoretically, I make these decisions, but there’s really a cohort of other artists who are really in there with me, who are really throwing down for plays. Because I most recently came from Playwrights’ Center, I naïvely went into last year not thinking as extensively about how an audience thinks or feels about a play, especially because I’ve made all the tickets free. So, I have real questions about the audience and their relationship to our work at OPC.

DeLanna Studi:  This sparked so much excitement in me because this is something Native Voices has been dealing with. Native Voices, for the past – oh my gosh, it’s our 30th anniversary this year. I mean, I’ve only been here for four, so I can’t claim all of it, but I’m very excited and–

Melia Bensussen:  You get blamed for the failures, so take the successes. That’s what I say. 

Goldie Patrick:  Hell. Yeah. 

Melia Bensussen: If it doesn’t work, it’s on us, so 30 years, bravo you.

DeLanna Studi:  Thank you. But we are housed in the Autry Museum, which is a predominantly white institution, and the Autry Museum has similar donors that have occupied theatrical spaces since the beginning of time. So, Native Voices has created a Native dramaturgy course where we teach people about the differences of Native or Indigenous storytelling and how it doesn’t really fit this Aristotelian mold. How do we break that mold and how do we deconstruct it and how do we learn the language to talk about this different form of storytelling as being equally valid and equally interesting? 

When we do talk-backs, we invite different Native dramaturgs onto the stage to talk about the process, and sometimes our talk-backs happen before the show so the audience is somewhat primed about what they’re gonna see, that it might not fit the structure they’re so used to, but also given some context about why we tell stories this way.

One of my dream projects is what I call the cross-cultural dramaturgy course where we get different dramaturgs of color to come in and talk about their different ways of storytelling: why it’s valid and why it doesn’t fit this mold. Why do we have to adhere to the structure that was created without any of us in mind? I want to have those conversations, and I feel that’s a way to educate our audiences about how these new stories may not be what they’re used to, but there’s some beauty and intricacy in the way that they’re structured. So, how do we create the appreciation of these new forms of storytelling, which are actually probably the oldest forms of storytelling in the world?

Melia Bensussen:  How to watch the play, what it means to make a play, what is a play… how do we teach an audience and celebrate the craft of playwriting and the uniqueness of form through each writer’s voice? I love what you’re doing, Delanna. Just kudos.

Goldie Patrick:  You said dramaturgy, and I did a dance because that has been, [in] my experience, one of the most fundamental aspects of play development. 

I’m thinking about the reader who has their subscription to The Dramatist, and they open it up, and they’re like, “Oh my God, I’ve applied all these places. I wanna get there. I’m gonna make it next year.” 

How do we shape the expectation of participating in a conference? I think there is the idea that if you go to the O’Neill then you’re going to Broadway next. If you go to Ojai, you’re on your way. Everybody’s gonna see your work. What would [be] a healthy expectation of participating in a conference?

Melia Bensussen:  You’re there to make your play better. These are not sprints. You’re in this field for the long haul. You’re in it to hone your craft, to learn from each other, to learn from an audience, to work with your dramaturg, your director, to have extraordinary actors contributing. Come for the gift of time to work. I know that’s disingenuous because I know everyone is trying to build a career, so I don’t mean to sound naïve. But it’s not the ShopRite of the American theatre where you’re going to come fill your shopping cart with the three plays for your theatre. 

I guess I’m saying two things. One is when you’re at the O’Neill, work on the play. And then I think institutionally we are trying to figure out [if we] can get you a second workshop. Can we get a production with another theatre? Can we help you, in Adrian’s great words, keep working on that new play because we know that it’s not done after a week at the O’Neill? So it is something we’re curious about investigating; can we figure out either a second workshop during the year at the O’Neill when the campus is quieter during the academic year, or is there a way to help support new play work at a regional theatre? 

Jeremy B. Cohen:  I want to flip the paradigm for a moment here, because the power of playwrights in community with one another is everything. For example, last summer, there were two playwrights at the conference, Ngozi Anyanwu and Mathilde Dratwa, who really connected, as people and as artists. Separate from the conference, a new fellowship opportunity at [The Old Globe] was launched, and they ended up going back to playwrights they had worked with previously to nominate other playwrights, like what Playwrights’ Center does with the Venturous Fellowship. They had worked with Ngozi previously and they asked her who she wanted to nominate,  and Mathilde won a $25,000 fellowship, all because Ngozi said, “this is my person. I met her, we spent time together working on her play. I want to advocate for her.” 

I’m just wanting to remind us that while there are so many great leaders at organizations right now, to me, when artists intentionally choose to foster a community of other very powerful artists, the power lies within the individual artist, not the institution.

Adrian Centeno:  I love that, absolutely. I think that actors are used to being together in theatre spaces, but as playwrights, directors, dramaturgs… so often, we are tasked, at least by title, as the one representative of our craft in that room. I don’t get a lot of opportunity to talk to other dramaturgs, and I hear the same thing from playwrights all the time, like, “God, I just wanna talk to other playwrights and have space to say, ‘how do you work?’ ‘How do you approach the first page, the last page, everything in between?’ I wanna know.” 

One of the benefits of the conference model is that a lot of us try to make intentional social space for artists to talk to other artists while they’re in process. I think that’s so important.

I’m also a deeply holistic person when it comes to the theatre. Some of the best advice I ever got was from a director who said, “After this play’s over, don’t rush out to go do the next play. Take a cooking class. Learn how to knit. Ride a bike somewhere. Do something so that you have this new experience you’ve never had before, and you can bring that into the next room you’re in, and that will enrich your ability to be present in the room with others.” That’s probably the most important piece of advice I ever got, and I was lucky I got it young. So, there’s a part of me that thinks watching the sunset reflect against Payette Lake, or walking through Ponderosa State Park, just being present in that space and community, I have to believe that that contributes something, too. Not just the people in that space, but the majesty of nature. 

Melia Bensussen:  I love that, Adrian. I feel that way about the ocean at the O’Neill. Like, how can you be at the O’Neill and not go in the water? And just to second the importance of community, we’re hoping to have eight playwrights again this summer for the first time since before the pandemic, and the fact that there are eight playwrights in residence for four weeks together, I think, is one of the greatest gifts. And it does connect to the fact that we need to build individual resilience in each other and in ourselves because it is a long haul. Whatever we can do to support the human at the core of the creative process serves the art form.

Adrian Centeno:  Absolutely. We’re people first, right? We need that support from each other. That’s another way for us to move forward artistically. 

Melia Bensussen:  And the O’Neill adds designers into the mix because playwrights [don’t] get to talk to designers early enough. In my experience, designers are brilliant dramaturgs as they’re physically solving the play and seeing things that none of the rest of us see. I’m working now to create more opportunities for designers and playwrights (without necessarily a director’s involvement) to brainstorm the physical world that that playwright needs to make their vision possible.

DeLanna Studi:  That’s one of the things we do at Native Voices for our festival of new plays; we hire designers to read the play and then to sketch up costumes, the set, the lighting. So, even if the play doesn’t go past Native Voices, which we always hope it does, the playwright has an idea of how it’s seen by others, which is, to me, very exciting. 

I remember when I had my first play developed by Native Voices, before I was artistic director, it really made me envision the world I had created, and it made me realize that my play wanted to be bigger than what I was wanting it to be. I feel like writing is a very solitary act. We’re in our silos, it’s very lonely, and I feel as a person of color we’re not taught to dream big. We’re taught to dream within these budgetary restraints, especially if we want something of ours produced. To have these people who, you know, they’re not emotionally invested in my play as I am, obviously, but to have them see it as a bigger thing made me want it to be bigger. They made me believe more in myself than I was at that moment.

That’s what’s great about these workshops, these convenings — any time you can get a group of writers in the room together, they’re building community, they’re building network. It’s easy to forget that you’re not alone in this process. 

My experience as a newer playwright is that it was through these conventions and these workshops that I was able to build other relationships, similar to what you were sharing with us, Jeremy. People started recommending me for things, things I would not have applied to because I didn’t think I was qualified, but they saw something in me that I didn’t see. You will get that email from somebody [and] it’s like, “Hey, did you hear about this opportunity to submit your play?” or, “I think your play that you submitted last year at Ojai would be great here.” It’s still this network of us helping each other, and of course it’s fun to be like, “Hey, I’m about to work with this director, do you know anything about [them]?” and then people chime in. But it’s your own little support group, which I think is so essential, especially in this very solitary world that we’re creating. 

Goldie Patrick:  I hear Emmanuel Wilson of the Dramatists Guild always talk about wanting dramatists to feel empowered, to realize that they can ask for the thing they need, they can advocate for what they believe is right versus wrong. They have a power that sometimes they are either unfamiliar with or timid to use. And what I’m hearing in this conversation, which is just making my heart so whole, is the power of community. That part of our strength is when we are in community, and that community is being built at these conferences and these workshops and these cohorts. 

But it’s also creating camaraderie for advocacy to say, “when you do that conference, make sure you get X, Y, and Z.” Or, “make sure you go in the water at the O’Neill. It was healing for me.” 

Kevin Lawler:  I would venture to say that if you asked almost any playwright who’s been through GPTC how important the community was as part of their experience, they would rate it just about as high as working on their play. It’s an immensely powerful part of the experience. We also try to provide an experience of radical hospitality for the people who gather there. And hopefully part of that is the idea that we’re not just trying to race as fast as we can through checkboxing all these things so we can get to a production at a theatre. The process is really beautiful and it can be (and hopefully is) a really soulful part of your life as an artist. 

Goldie Patrick:  Oh gosh, I love that.

Jeremy B. Cohen:  Another thought about artists advocating for other artists: my vocational life includes sitting and listening and guiding and facilitating amazing artists fighting with each other about plays. That’s kinda my job. It’s my bet that, if you’re trying to get into places like New Harmony, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, etc. you can guarantee that their Artistic Director has had, like, fourteen arguments with people just wrestling through who’s going to get the opportunity. Having the privilege to read through all this beautiful work is a job filled with joy, but people text me after these conversations where we’re deciding on opportunities and they’re kind of hurting. Because there is some real labor; saying ‘yes’ to some artists necessarily means saying ‘not right now’ to others that they may really have loved. I just want to say that out loud. I haven’t met anyone who is coming easily to these decisions. We fight hard and you should expect that rigor from us.

Melia Bensussen:  There’s always a sacrifice that has to happen, and don’t give up on us, those of you submitting because I know from my very limited experience with just two summers at the O’Neill that it matters that you care to submit again. It matters that you worked on the play some more, that you understood that — for reasons that had maybe nothing to do with your play but had to do with the mix of that particular festival — it didn’t work out for you. I want to echo what you said, Jeremy. It is painful, and some people cry when the thing they’re advocating for doesn’t get selected, where our souls break a little or a lot because we advocate as much as we can for a certain voice and then realize that for any number of reasons that this beloved voice needs to be just put aside for now, that it’s temporary. Again, it’s a long game. These are short periods. Each session, each summer, each festival any of us program comes and goes. There’ll be another one. There are other places. I mean, it is about tenacity.

Goldie Patrick:  Thank you for bringing that up, Jeremy, because that is valuable for people to know. I think there is a veil [over] the adjudication process for plays. And that if you don’t make it, you are not a playwright or that your play isn’t strong. There [are] so many factors that go into the selection process that I appreciate you saying that, Melia. I appreciate you echoing with the idea that this is a long haul. I’ve been rejected so many times, I forgot that I applied to stuff when I get rejected. I’m like, “oh yeah, that’s right.” But the learning in that is that I’m a writer regardless of if I’m accepted. The writing can’t be contingent on having a place accept my work or validate it – you know, the writing is the work. It’s long. I have applicants that’ll go, “can I get notes on my piece?” No, not because we didn’t take them, but you don’t need our voice in your head. You don’t know us. Every voice can’t validate your work. We could give you really strong notes, and they could not register with who you are as a writer and what you actually need to work on. So instead of holding the value on somebody’s opinion or someone’s scoring of your piece, know that your piece made it to this point and continue to write it, ‘cause it’s gonna take four different productions, right Adrian, for you to even really know what it’s about.

Melia Bensussen:  I don’t think anyone should give you notes who’s not working with you. I mean, that’s philosophically something I think because either you’re inside it or you’re not.

Goldie Patrick:  And it’s the process. 

Kevin Lawler:   I’ve had playwrights approach me before and say, “What are your thoughts? Can I get your feedback or your notes?” If I have anything to say, it’s really just to ask you questions and listen to your responses to them at this point. A single, well-placed question is more useful than a page of notes, [in] my experience.

Jeremy B. Cohen:  I want to mention something that the amazing Director/Playwright/Actor/Artistic Leader Khanisha Foster has been thinking about dramaturgically and has challenged us at OPC to think about. Part of this job of assessment is staying honest and clear and consistent as we respond to work we’re reading. Not solely “do I like it?” nor “is it good?” (whatever that means)… but maybe “is it right for this opportunity? Do we have things that we can offer this writer and this play in this period of time that are a good match?” But part of what Khanisha talks about is when we are assessing plays for whatever opportunity, what are the factors, that determine if we’re going to say yes and invest our time and resources into a playwright and that play and that opportunity? And what are the factors where bias shows up in other ways? “Why did I say yes to that play but not this one?” Because none of them are 100% complete, or they wouldn’t need play development. And I think it’s really critical.

It doesn’t redefine dramaturgy, but it rethinks how we question what we question, which for me is getting at the questions of unrooting some systemic bullshit that’s in all of these processes that we all inherited and yet are working to not perpetuate.

Goldie Patrick:  We’re talking about the changing of the guard. A value has shifted, and there have been so many things that have shifted both inside our industry and inside society. We as art makers can’t afford and shouldn’t want to ignore the shift and the evolution that it forces us, even if that’s uncomfortable. Even if that means that what your organization has been doing for fifteen years has to change and look different now because these questions about bias, lens… the value of objectivity comes into play. Diversifying the conference is a whole different thing now. We go through a list and go, wait, did we get everybody? Did we get the communities? And sometimes the answer is no because we’re not in community with them, and they are not present here, and we can’t pretend that they’re here. We have to do the work of figuring out why they’re not.

Kevin Lawler:  I did wanna let people in the Guild know that I’m not the person that makes the final decision on what plays go in each year. I took myself out of that process a while back. So, it’s not a one-person sort of pinnacle that decides how a play is gonna go in, and we emphasize diverse views and a diversity of people who are looking at what plays come to GPTC every year.

Melia Bensussen:  I think that’s probably true of all of us. It’s not a one-person process. I am a voice, but there is an extraordinary literary team, there’s our executive director, there’s our production team, and there’s a group of readers as well, so there’s just many opinions and a diverse group of voices, which is what leads to what Jeremy’s describing as the pain.

The only other thing I would add, Goldie, don’t judge any of us by one season, because choices are being made in consideration of a longer journey. For theatres across the country, for all of us in play development and producing, look at everyone through a three- to five-year lens. Resources are so limited for all of us at all times that any one snapshot is not going to capture the institution’s goals. Give us a wider lens through which we’re analyzed for all our work because it’s too hard to get it to contain multitudes in one snapshot.

Goldie Patrick:  Thank you, Kevin, for clarifying that a team does the work. I think sometimes when people have work, they think they take it to the boss and they’re like, “You’re the executive, you’re the artistic director, put my thing in.” And that’s simply not how anything works. 

There are [also] budgetary realities that go into the work, and we have to sustain these conferences that we love, that we wanna be a part of, and we can’t just expect them to, poof, appear and sustain [themselves], ‘cause the money is something we don’t know. 

Kevin Lawler:  The money. It’s a massive battle to raise it each year. We lose a lot of sleep worrying about if we’ll make budget. There’s just two full-time people running Great Plains along with four amazing part-timers. It’s an incredible battle. It’s a battle of love that we continue to fight.

Adrian Centeno:  Thank you for sharing that. 

DeLanna Studi:  I wanna thank you all. I’m usually the quiet one who speaks at the end, so thank you for creating such a safe space where I felt like I had permission to talk. This has given me a new life today.

Goldie Patrick:  I’m truly inspired. I feel like my responsibility and my inspiration is to go do something about it.

Melia Bensussen:  Goldie, you inspired us. Your energy and voice made this. Thank you for your generosity in every way.

Goldie Patrick:  Received. Thank you very much. It’s been a joy.