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artly inspired by 13P and Andy Bragen’s Theatre Company in New York and The Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis, The Pool was created and replicated by playwrights who seek to see their work professionally realized outside the confines of the institutional theatre. The reality for playwrights is that their plays might not fit the specific needs of producing theatres in a given season—or ever, for that matter. Could we take matters into our hands? It’s hard to produce your own play, but what if we produce one another’s work and run the three plays in rep? What if we pass the model, insight, and support onto other playwrights who wish to stop waiting and start making?

I remember sitting across from Lynn Rosen and Susan Bernfield in a diner in Chelsea. Both are playwrights I know and admire. Over omelets, I found myself agreeing to enter a venture with them to produce one another’s work the following year. We talked about how much money we would have to raise. We talked about insurance, Equity, and rental spaces. I kept hearing myself say yes out loud, but everything in my being was saying no. My mind told me, “This is impossible. It’s too much to take on. It will fail.” But there were Susan and Lynn saying, “we can do this,” so then I was saying, “we can do this.” And then we did. We produced 39 performances of our three plays at The Flea a year and a half later [November-December 2017].

- Peter Gil-Sheridan, The Pool 1.0
The Dramatist Online, September 2023

Amelia French: Thank you all so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. I want to start—surprise, surprise—at the beginning. Before you signed on for The Pool 4.0, how did you hear about it?

Pia Wilson: I’m working on a musical with Lynn Rosen [The Pool 1.0]. We’re co-writing the book together for a musical [Rattle the Cage] about the second wave of feminism, and she was talking about the Pool Plays. She asked if I’d be interested in doing the Pool Plays. And I was like, “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Then a few months later, she was like, “Hey, don’t you think you’d be interested in the Pool Plays?” And I was like, “Okay.” I knew I wanted to, because Mona and Vickie and I had gone to see some show at TFANA [Theatre for a New Audience]—I think it was a Tennessee Williams show—and we were talking about producing and how American theatre would benefit from playwrights producing and doing different roles in the theatre. And then, once Lynn asked me again, I was like, “I think I do want to do it.” Then I asked Mona and Vickie if they wanted to do it with me.

Amelia French: Great. Vickie?

Vickie Ramirez: I first heard about it at New Dramatists. Everybody was talking about 13P. Lynn was there, and the discussion switched to the Pool Plays and how impressive, what an accomplishment it was. I thought, “Wow, that is so brave and ballsy of you all to take this upon yourselves.” And then I moseyed along, continued the usual way, writing and hoping somebody would pay attention.

Years later, we had that conversation and Pia asked me. And I was terrified but said yes.” It’s pretty exciting.

Amelia French: It is exciting. And brave. What about you, Mona?

Mona Mansour: When I was at New Dramatists, I believe Kate Cortesi [The Pool 2.0] was doing the upcoming iteration, and doing a great job of spreading the word. So I went to go see Emily Zemba’s play, which is funny, because we later went on to write a play together for our theater company. All three plays were in rep at the New Ohio, and it was so cool to see Emily’s work and to see what felt like a strange and fun and wonderful play. David Greenspan was in it, and she had a cast of maybe ten? It was pretty incredible.

Then when Pia asked me [to join the Pool cohort] a couple of years later, I was at a point where I wasn’t really feeling motivated to write for the pipeline of American theatre. I was like, Well, this will force me to write something new.

Amelia French: Very cool. Pia, I’m curious why you said no the first time Lynn mentioned it. What was going through your head?

Pia Wilson: I had produced a couple of plays, and I produced the first play I did when I was blissfully naive about theatre. I helped produce my play Turning the Glass Around in 2014. And then, when we were out of the Emerging Writers Group in 2008, 2009, I had produced short play festivals. I loved the memory of producing, but I was like, “I know I don’t love producing producing. It’s hard work. I don’t think I want to do all of that.”

Then I got inspired by the idea of doing it. Development was going away, and I was like, “Something’s got to change. And if we want to do theatre, we need to start producing.” So, that’s what got me back into the mindset of wanting to produce.

Amelia French: Beautifully said. Vickie, do you have experience producing as well?

Vickie Ramirez: I did a lot of downtown theatre when I started out. [In] Native Theatre, you kind of produce. It’s community theatre in the city. Everybody wears multiple hats, and it’s very much “We’re putting on a show” energy. That’s about the closest I got. What I love about producing [is that] so much of writing is about connection. You write with the hope of sharing your vision with people. When I start, I can see it vividly, in my mind. But that powerlessness that the pipeline creates—that “I hope, pick me” energy—it’s not conducive to creativity. Producing, takes that ephemeral hope and translates it into a tangible reality.

There are so many bells and whistles around traditional pipelines. When Pia asked me to do this, my first instinct was no. I was a coward. After all, it’s a lot to tackle. And, my age group, my cultural background—not having access to a traditional theatre—there was an implicit expectation to wait to be asked. And I have to thank the younger generation because they’ve empowered themselves to take ownership and make things happen. Seeing their example made me say, “Okay, I can do this, because the young people do it all the time, and it’s exciting to watch.”

Amelia French: That’s not an easy thing to do. Mona, you mentioned a sort of disillusionment, coming up against a creative block and not feeling inspired to write. How has that changed? Has it changed?

Mona Mansour: The three of us did a day of excerpts a little while ago [March 6, at IATI]. I had written my play, ROUNDUP, with the actor George Abud in mind, so to get to see him read with Tina Benko that day was phenomenal. It was fantastic to control the lead-up to the presentation, and to know we were sharing our work with the public to drum up interest, of course, but also because it was a joy to hear all three of our plays in concert.

The pipeline itself has changed so much since the pandemic: losing the Lark, Sundance, and then for me, finishing up at New Dramatists… a lot of things are gone. And I think those things gave you a certain proximity. The Lark’s thing was always, “We don’t produce.” But you would do your work and gather energy around a project that way. I think a thing like the Pool Plays is even more necessary now that every theater’s resources are diminished.

Vickie, what you’re saying about self-producing is also something that, even seven years ago, when the golden era or whatever we want to call it existed, sometimes a play gets out of your hands to a certain degree, the marketing of it, or whatever. And I think that’s partly what the initial impulse was. I don’t want to speak for Susan or Lynn or Peter [Pool Play co-founders], but if you go, “Well, if it’s the cast that I really want and I can pick the director and we’re making these decisions, what would that look like?”, I think that that’s a question that we should keep asking ourselves, because a play can get lost, I think, on its way to production.

Amelia French: That’s absolutely true. How has it been working together, or in tandem, the three of you?

Pia Wilson: Well, we’ve known each other for so long. We know each other’s voices. And I knew that they had brilliant things to say. I’ve always loved and admired their work. And they’re my drinking buddies too, so I was anticipating the post-show—

Vickie Ramirez: Essential part of the creative process.

[Laughter]

Pia Wilson: They also know my work and the evolution of my work and will encourage me to go for what I want as opposed to what I think we can afford, or cutting things down just to fit whatever the moment is. And I appreciate that, too. And friendship. I mean, things are easier with friends. I know people will be like, “Oh, you can hurt your friends’ feelings,” but if there are no intentions to hurt anybody, then you can of course work with friends. Why wouldn’t you work with brilliant people and have a good time, too?

Vickie Ramirez: It’s been pretty amazing. I am so grateful for Pia and for Mona, because I’m leeching that forward energy from them. I’m an energy parasite; I adapt to the space. It makes me a great lieutenant. And it’s been fun! We’re being so intentional with every choice that we make. And at first I didn’t think about that when we were looking for space. I was looking for a deal. Remember when we were all talking about space? And I’m like, “[There’s] this great little space and this great deal. We can get it for nothing.” And everybody nixed me immediately. “Vickie, that’s uptown. We’re not uptown.” Because these are things we need to consider. Are we taking our audience way out of their space? And does the neighborhood energy match our work?

I didn’t even think about how space can impact and affect what we’re creating. And it does. We found a brilliant space downtown that suits us exactly. So, that was a teachable moment And administration! Oh boy, it’s like having a day job again. Digging through the paperwork. We’re learning. Garlia, our producer, is amazing! She’s helping so much. We decided early on that we’d better get our ducks in a row with a producer and a fiscal sponsor, because there’s so much we don’t know.

Pia Wilson: I think downtown is such a part of our story because we met each other through the Public’s Emerging Writers Group. There are bars we used to hang out in—I talk a lot about bars, but I don’t drink that much. That’s a lie.

Vickie Ramirez: No comment.

[Laughter]

Pia Wilson: But that’s where we used to hang out, and Mona had a brilliant play at the Public. It feels right to be down there. And the theater that we have, IATI, is great, too. It was a wonderful feeling, and we got our communities together. That’s another big part of what we’re trying to do, and it all just feels great.

Mona Mansour: It’s the downtown of it all, because that was where we hung out after our Emerging Writers Group at the Public— and the theatre that formed a lot of us was there. What’s been hard is the actual fundraising, the money part, not so much communication with actors or being able to work with a director. I’m working with this fantastic director, Ryan Dobrin, who I met doing the 24 Hour Plays, because we want to work together. It’s that simple. That’s been great.

I think what we couldn’t have predicted [was] that there would be so much uncertainty in the States. With everything happening nationally, politically, globally, you ask, Where do the arts fit? There’s a million causes that are really, really important.

My theatre company Society just closed a show [ENTANGLED: 12 Scenes in a Circle K Off the I-40 in New Mexico] and it feels like it is more important than ever to do theatre that can be a conduit for people to sit together. [With] smaller, indie theatre, I think you can experience things that haven’t had to be vetted by someone who’s like, “What’s the back end on this?”

There was a time when the cheapness of New York City allowed for all kinds of stuff. And we have the Brick. We have the Tank. There are these incredible places.

But I also feel like—particularly when Pia, Vickie and I had our day of excerpts, I was like, “This is exactly why I wanted to do this,” because we got to introduce each of our plays and—as Pia and Vickie said—our communities to each other. It’s very rare that you get to work in concert with another playwright who has a play in that season. When playwrights get to do that, something really interesting happens. If I were running a venue, I would be like, “You guys are going to be in a season together in two years. Your works don’t have to at all relate to each other, but you should know each other.” We’re not encouraged to do that. We’re part of a gig economy as playwrights.

Pia Wilson: To what Mona was saying, I don’t have to write Black characters that are familiar to white people or have to sit in a certain place to be understood, and they can paint outside of the lines. During rehearsal, my actors were talking about how I always write complicated characters, and Mona and Vickie do as well, and so they don’t have to meet certain criteria to get on the stage. They don’t have to be 100 percent likable. They just have to be understandable and a joy to watch.

For me, part of the Pool Plays and part of self-producing in general is to allow myself a certain amount of freedom. Now, in an ideal world, playwrights would just have a group of people they can call upon, and we would let playwrights have conversations and do their work. The system has been breaking down for a long, long time, and I believe part of that was intentional, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Vickie Ramirez: I think that is the key: we’ve gotten so far in our expectations of what theatre is. There’s so much of a structure, a rigidity to the form. And it’s a living art. How brilliant to have playwrights in the same space together. And no, our pieces don’t have to match, but they are in conversation with each other. And that conversation also happens with the audience, that connection. And when you have to jump through 74 hoops to get an audience into a space, that’s a problem.

But that’s this producing model. We don’t need a super complex production. We need a clear space, a close space so we can connect with our audience. I’ve told this story so many times, but when Standoff was produced in L.A. at the Autry; the first night they had mainly the community come out, the Indigenous community. And the play is a dark comedy drama about land claims, and the Natives were in the audience, and they were laughing their butts off, having a great time. The next night, the audience was general,  and the play changed. I was waiting for my jokes to land and instead,  I had people weeping. And I was, “What’s—oh, you’re taking it—okay.” Watching how that same conversation hit the different audiences, made me understand that it really is about the people in the room at that moment.

That, to me, is theatre. I love a gorgeous set. I love an incredible soundscape. I love fantastic, elaborate costumes.  Design elements are more people in the room with more layers to the conversation. But theatre started with a bunch of people sitting around a fire, somebody getting up and weaving a story. Theatre is a spectrum. And that’s what the Pool Plays is about.

Mona Mansour: I never heard about enhancement money back when we were in the Emerging Writers Group. I have been very fortunate, and I’ve had some productions and things, but I had not heard about enhancement money the way you do now.

Wallace Shawn or María Irene Fornés, both wrote some strange plays that changed the form irrevocably. And it’s not to say that’s not happening—Wallace Shawn, I think, has got a play running right now. But if new work has to bring enhancement money with it, and go through each institution’s hoops, I worry about the form. I’ve read some really crazy, epic, beautiful plays in the last couple of years and I’m like, “God, I wonder if someone would do this.” Like, angry climate change plays that are “unproduceable.” What happens if no enhancement money goes toward that work?

With full respect, I get that artistic directors have to raise money all the time, but it does feel like this treadmill that everybody’s on. And you think, “Are national subsidies the answer?” Well, that’s not going to be the answer. God bless if somebody has a rich brother-in-law or uncle. Great. Art has always been that way. But I do think the ecosystem of New York is not the best fertilizer at the moment for newer work, because it is so expensive just to live here.

What can we do? I think us having these conversations and thinking even more outside the box for venues or modes of performance, cohorts that maybe don’t exist yet, it’s a start. In New York, too, it’s survival, so you’re just fucking surviving, not necessarily processing how it’s all going. We don’t necessarily have these kinds of conversations with each other where we are directly invested in each other’s work. That’s the other thing about the Pool Plays: I feel very motivated because I want Vickie’s and Pia’s work to be done.

Vickie Ramirez: Likewise.

Mona Mansour: I actually have gotten much more comfortable talking to possible donors, because I’m just like, “Look at the three of us. We’re giving you a season that we’ve picked.” I remember Lisa Kron, who was a bit of a mentor when I first got to New York, talked about how artists don’t always realize they have agency. So, how can we shift the ecosystem? I don’t know the answer, but I feel like I do want to make it easier for Pool cohorts that come in the future.

Pia Wilson: Yeah. To touch on enhancement money, it breaks my heart not only for myself, but I feel like our generation has faced dire economic climates, so we know to a certain extent what to do to fight it. But younger writers don’t have the same ecosystem that we had. We had Sundance Theatre, we had the Lark, so we could develop a play until the system got back up on its feet and they stopped doing so much Shakespeare or solo shows or Sam Shepard revivals or whatever.

But younger writers don’t have that to fall back on. And they don’t necessarily have the community that we used to have. And I think that’s something playwrights have to do as well, get back together and start having more conversations and not put rules on ourselves, because I think when we get together we tend to do a lot of that. We should get together and talk about how we’re going to reshape theatre so that it moves and it takes back its place as a conversation starter and a cultural creator.

Amelia French: Beautiful. Yeah, it really seems like that the infrastructure is designed to disenfranchise us as writers. And there can be such a scarcity mindset, because resources are scarce. Funding is scarce. And that’s not a way to create a career in theatre. Speaking of roadblocks and obstacles, would you say that in this experience it’s money?

Mona Mansour: Yeah.

Pia Wilson: Yeah.

Vickie Ramirez: Yeah.

Amelia French: Just money?

Pia Wilson: Just good old-fashioned money.

Amelia French: Yeah.

Pia Wilson: I mean, everybody’s got to eat. The people who own the spaces or have a mortgage on the spaces, they’ve got to get their rent. And costs go up. The cost of materials has skyrocketed from when we first started ideating around what we were going to put out together or how we were going to do our pool. Tariffs. Incredible nonsense. Just madness. It just upped the ante on what we had to bring about. And frankly, our communities aren’t oil barons. My community is used to making a dollar out of fifteen cents, as we say. But what if you can’t even make 50 cents out of the fifteen cents? How are you going to be like, “Give me that ten dollars that you’ve got marked to buy bread.” I can’t do that. So, who do I turn to? Who can provide us what we need and at the same time has the sensibility to support artists as opposed to trying to control artists? You can’t just get somebody with money; they have to be respectful of artists and want to support what we’re doing.

Vickie Ramirez: I agree 100 percent. I think the problem is that for so long, theatre has been perceived as an elite institutional thing, and folks don’t see why it’s necessary to the health of a good society. But a strong cultural life really is, because that’s where people come together and see themselves reflected. I think part of the reason why we are in the straits we are is that people don’t feel connected. That doesn’t happen with theatre. If we can get you in the room, you’re in the room with others, you’re sharing space, you’re listening to ideas, ideas that you may or may not agree with. But you’re together in a room sharing an experience.

That’s also, I think, the reason why a play is never finished until the playwright is dead, because the more the show goes on and the more you have the audiences there, the more you have different directors, different actors coming in and creating upon it. The conversation is ongoing. It’s that beautiful sort of connection and creativity.

And I think the problem is, essentially, [that] we don’t value that in our culture. We don’t value those moments of connection. But it’s what soothes that edge, what makes people less afraid to talk to people who look different or live differently or present differently.

Mona Mansour: I also think that, again, the wider landscape is we’re headed to a time where allegedly, apparently, certain oligarchs will own great swaths of American cultural output. And it remains to be seen how much AI will or won’t do; we know what it does in terms of tearing people limb from limb. But in terms of our creative selves, I think maybe at times we’ve worried a little too much about it.

There’s just a lot of shit out there—the fact that all these networks are possibly going to be owned by this father-son, all of that. I think it’s not about micro communities, but it is about being in the room. For some people “shiny” might equal a show starring a celeb and recouping the investment, but I don’t know what gets made if that’s the first and most important order of business. The kind of transformation you’re talking about, Vickie, is something that happens over time. There’s a wonderful person we’ve been in conversation with, Jill Matichak, and she was talking about when she was on the board of the Magic [Theatre], and she said people would come because it wasn’t expensive and would say, “I know I’m going to see something interesting no matter what.”

I mean, off-Broadway, if I’m not wrong, now can be $200. Can I afford it? I could, maybe a couple times a year? But that means it’s a special event in my life that I’m only going to do at certain times. And then how risk-averse are you? To have a healthy ecosystem, it has to have more stuff that [makes] you say, “Whoa, that really made me think. I’m mad at that play, but it made me think about something,” and not, “Well, that was a fifth of my paycheck for the week.”

And are we crazy to have this conversation in New York? Maybe. But I think at times New York did have more of that. And getting playwrights that are of all different ages and levels involved in these conversations is important, too, because there’s a range of playwrights. There are playwrights out there who are making a living from theatre.

But I think what we’re talking about is a robust ecosystem. And it’s creating work that, as Vickie said, doesn’t have to go through 74 hoops and/or get enhancement money. Because Amelia, as you’re sitting there thinking about writing a play, if you’re like, “Well, this is the one that’s going to get me that enhancement money,” that’s not where the best work comes from.

Pia Wilson: Right. And it’s easy for me and Mona and Vickie to say, “Don’t worry about being produced at the big theaters,” because we have been and we’ve had institutional support. But I think a lot of younger writers are heartbroken because they think that a show at the Public is going to make their career. Or the Roundabout, or Second Stage. “If I could just write that play that unlocks the door…” That’s not true. What makes a playwright is writing plays and then producing them. So, The Pool is an opportunity to get your plays up on their feet. You make the road by walking. You’re not making your career just by doing some Hail Mary and trying to raise money to maybe get a theater to consider you. Don’t worry about all that. Just be delusional and naive and write what you want to write. That’s the only thing we have.

Amelia French: So, what’s next for the Pool Plays for the three of you?

Pia Wilson: Well, we’re going to raise more money. And it’s going to be so easy this time.

Vickie Ramirez: Yep.

Pia Wilson: It’s going to be like a duck to water. And then we’re going to put our plays up. It’s going to be amazing. Right?

Vickie Ramirez: Yeah. I mean, we have our designers. We have our directors. And we’re working with our casts to accommodate their schedules.  So, our aesthetic is in place. And we’re giving ourselves the grace of a little more time to pull together the funding. I think we thought, “Oh, we could turn this around in a few months,” and it takes longer. Especially in this climate, it takes longer. But it’s not a question of if; it’s a question of when. So, we’re giving it the grace, the respect of the time that is needed.

But we’re taking all these moments to keep the promotion going, and talking it up as much as possible. Also, Mona’s been doing something amazing. I’m putting words in your mouth, Mona, but she’s been talking with a lot of people. And we had a conversation with a producer about the Pool Plays as it exists, like maybe we need to expand it, because everybody does this job from scratch every time they take it on. I mean, Lynn and Susan and Peter have a handbook that helps. And they open with sharing all their information.

But everyone starts from scratch and it’s so hard, and so much work, we’re wondering, “Is there a board that we could develop or something?” So, for the folks who take on Pool Plays 5.0, maybe we can leave something in place to help them go forward.

Mona Mansour: It goes back to the conversations that people can have, and being in the room, as Vickie says, with people you don’t know. I would say the one thing I’ve taken away from this experience, too, is I do not think I’m an arts leader, but I want to speak to more people about this kind of a thing, because I think that ecosystem can allow for so much growth—growth that’s hard to quantify. And that’s the difficult piece.

Pia Wilson: There’s an actual active plan against theatre and other cultural institutions. Any fascist regime is going to get rid of the artists first. That is something that we have to fight and mobilize against. I think when people are having conversations about democracy and saving democracy, whatever brand of democracy it is, and we can get into much more radical conversations about what democracy is, but I’ll leave that to another day. When you are having those conversations, you have to include the arts, whether they are saying things that you like or not.

Mona Mansour: A hundred percent.

Pia Wilson: It is the job of the artist to push people forward and to have a better community and a better society. You cannot do that if the price of entry is too high. That is why society traditionally keeps artists poor; because they can’t push too much when they’re worried about how they’re going to eat. And there’s a certain reverence attached to being poor. People expect spiritual people to be poor as well, and they align poverty with telling the truth. So, there are cultural rivers and streams that keep us in a certain place. And when a fascist comes along, they’re going to double down on that. And that’s what we have here.

Mona Mansour: And in fascist countries, there are histories of people finding ways to perform. People have been doing plays in apartments in New York or whatever. And again, I think it goes back to not waiting and saying, “Let’s do this,” because I think if people look at the history of American theatre, one of the things that I was told was when the NEA shifted from funding individuals to funding institutions, institutions started to get much more nervous about what they were putting on their stages.

Years ago, I had this play about debt and it was about my mother, and it was going up at this theater, and they called me maybe a month before rehearsals with concerns, and I said, “Wait, tell me what the concern is.” And they said, “Well, the marketing department doesn’t know how to market your play,” because it didn’t have a happy ending.

At that point, I had sent them every draft because the ending had changed a few times, but it still was not going anywhere good at the end. And now, if that happened to me, I believe I would say,  “the DNA of that thing is not happy at the end. It’s just not.” Looking back, I wish I had maybe said, “I don’t think you guys are the right fit for the show. That’s not what it is. And if it’s the marketing department that’s worried about it, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Pia Wilson: I said in The L.A. Times, when they were doing an article about Black playwrights, I had a marketing person talk to me about a play—at a Black theater, mind you—“What is going to make white people come out to see your show?” And I was like, “Hold your tongue, Pia. Count to ten.” And then I was like, “I don’t frankly care. They can come to see human beings on the stage or they can not come. That’s not my concern.”

Vickie Ramirez: Yeah, I think we’ve all had weird marketing conversations. But I can’t believe they wanted to change your ending, Mona, it’s the whole point of the play.

Pia Wilson: Yeah, and the whole point of your play, it should be what you want it to say. I don’t get it.

Mona Mansour: Pia, it’s interesting about white people because, having written The Vagrant Trilogy, I did want white people to come. Many Americans can’t pick out countries on a map. So they have no idea about Palestine. They have no idea about Lebanon. Looking at it this way, I’m like, “I do want white people to come, because you’re the ones who do not care that your tax dollars are ending up over there.”

Vickie Ramirez: Yeah. Exactly.

Pia Wilson: I love for white people to come to my plays, because I believe that the audience actually understands a lot more about our plays than the administrations at theaters think they do.

Mona Mansour: That’s right.

Vickie Ramirez: A hundred percent.

Pia Wilson: They assume that certain audiences won’t get my work.

Mona Mansour: And that’s a big problem. I think it comes down to who’s in the room and makes the decisions. And like you said, Pia, the institution maybe trying to guess what an audience can and can’t grasp somehow. And it goes also back to, how woven in your life is theatre? If you know you’re going to see a play every week, like Jill said about the Magic, you can say, “I didn’t love that, but I know there’s something interesting. And it didn’t cost me what would be four meals out on the town.” It’s crazy when you see things like celebrity-driven off-Broadway houses where they’re like, “We really want to bring theatre to more people”—for $220.00. What?

Pia Wilson: Another thing that’s great about The Pool is that I get to work with actors who don’t have to be celebrities to get a role, and they can showcase the artistic ability and fantastic acting skills that I know that they have, and they have fewer opportunities to get now that we have to have celebrity-driven productions further and further down the line. Pretty soon it’ll be off-off Broadway that you have to have somebody famous.

Vickie Ramirez: Theatre is not about celebrity. It’s about the living art. It drives me crazy.

Pia Wilson: I think the same thing is happening in film. You have to package it a certain way. And the Oscar winners are going to TV to work because film has been squeezed. The audience is not there, they say. They blame TV or whatever the reason is. The reason is you used to be able to get a ticket for $10 or less to go to the movies. Same with theatre. You used to be able to get a $20, $25 ticket to go see a show. It didn’t matter if it was great or not. You were able to go to the theater. The reflection of society is in whether people can afford to go to entertaining things or not. And if you want a class of people who does not think, you want a class of workers who does not think, which has been a stated objective, then you’re going to shut down the avenues of inspiration and thinking.

Amelia French: 100%. Thank you for saying that, Pia. Thank you all so much.