Good evening everyone. Good evening. Thank you. It's good to see you all. My name is David House. I'm the executive director here at Arts Emerson and it's a pleasure to welcome you this evening to the colloquium. Akiba has given me my marching orders. I have a couple things to do, but first I want to thank you all for being here, for being a part of this community. You know Arts Emerson, you know the Play Reading Book Club, but just to remind you that part of our, much of our work is dedicated to making sure that the arts belong to everybody, and that means everybody. People who've always felt welcome and those who may be new, and part of the work is really dedicated to making sure that we're lifting up narratives that connect our communities together, and the Play Reading Book Club holds a special place for us at Arts Emerson because it sits squarely and at the heart of who we are and who we want to become. And it wouldn't be possible without your patronage, without your support, without your coming out to the various book clubs. Akiba's going to go into a much more detail, but I did want to take a moment to say that it's critical for us to make sure that when we are engaging community that we not only stand in these beautiful theaters and these wonderful temples of culture, but that we are extending those temples into the communities whether they be in Co-Hacid where we've, Co-Hacid, not Co-Hacid, Situit, they all kind of blur a little bit and I shouldn't say that, but Co-Hacid or Situit and also, you know, Dorchester to Newton and and and beyond, knitting those communities together then bringing us all together to celebrate who we are as individuals, but also who we are and redefining who we are as a community. And so it's our pleasure to be here to host and to to engage with you in this conversation tonight's discussion and presentation. I'd also want to acknowledge our staff members. You all know the folks who work more directly with you. You've seen some of us on stage talking as I'm doing now, but you don't always get to see some of the other staff members. So for the Arts Immersion and Office of the Arts staff member who are here, if you can just stand up and so we can all recognize you and thank you and Julie, that includes you. I can't see you. Yes, there you go. So we are a staff of around 49 and moving in many, many different directions and so it's nice for you to meet some faces and if you have a moment, thank them for what they do and I'm sure they'll be thanking you as well. The work that we do at Arts Immersion would not be possible without the incredible sport of Emerson College, but also the support of so many individual donors. Many of you are here, but also institutional funders that deeply believe in our work and our ambition. And that spans from local foundations here like the Barr Foundation, the Boston Foundation, but also we have national funders and ones here today. And I'm just going to thank the Doris Duke Foundation. Jeremy is here, just waiting here. Jeremy came up from New York to be a part of this evening. So again, this work we don't do alone. We are very interested in partnerships and and thrilled to have the support of the Doris Duke Foundation as well as other foundations. So with that, it is my great pleasure to welcome my colleague Akiba Abaka to sort of take us through this evening. And I also want to thank her and the entire engagement team. Kevin is somewhere and Nicole's not here for their leadership and for their drive and their passion for bringing us all together and doing the important work that they do for Arts Emerson and for the city at large. So Akiba, I'll turn it over to to you now. Good evening. You are looking so fly in your summer. You all are giving me summer evening at the theater. I am digging it. Everyone is so beautiful. Thank you. My name is Akiba Abaka, and I am the audience development manager here at Arts Emerson and it is a pleasure to be with you today. And thank you very much, David House, who's now off to, is he off the Slades yet? We have many of you have seen born for this. And so a local establishment is throwing the cast a party. And so we, we at Arts Emerson, we always have a ton of things to do at the same time. So thank you very much, David, for speaking. I just want to quickly go through the rest of the evening. I'm going to present a PowerPoint on PowerPoint review. It will be bullet points and I'll talk a little bit about what's projected onto the screen. In addition, I'm going to welcome Aiden Lindholm, who has been a teaching artist with the Play Reading Book Club. For two years, he started working with us. And I'll talk a little bit about him when we make those introductions. But as you can see, he's a very good teaching artist. And as you heard the response. And following, we're going to do something a bit different than we've done. This is our fourth colloquium. I'll talk in a minute about why we do a colloquium every year. But this year, usually we have members of the program speak on a panel about their experience. But this year, we're going to do something very different. We're actually, I'm going to engage in a conversation with our artistic director, David Dower, about institutional commitment for this type of community engagement over time.  Following the dialogue section, we'll open the floor to Q&A and then join us in the Randall lobby for a few small bites. And I think lemonade or something, something summer to drink. So that is what we have in store. So I'm going to start by positioning the Play Reading Book Club inside of Arts Emerson's larger audience development objective, which is to build demand for the theater among citizens of Boston, not just demand for theater at Arts Emerson, but demand for theater in the arts at other institutions in Boston. And why do we want to build demand for other institutions in Boston, including dance performances, film performances? Because we believe that more consumption of the arts leads to more consumption of our arts. So we share the wealth. And that's actually one of the reasons why we're doing the colloquium this evening, and why we do the colloquium every year. It's to share what we've learned. And so we are a part of the, earlier David recognized the Doris Duke Foundation, and we're a part of a current grant initiative called Building Demand for the Arts. There are about 25 of us, Jeremy, across the United States that are using different models towards increasing demand for the arts. Some of our cohort members work with artists directly. We tend to think of our, we do work with a lead artist, Daniel Beatty, you'll see a lot of his work throughout this presentation. But we also believe that the audience is the main group. So we work with audience cohorts. So I'll just give you our theory of change in a nutshell. My colleague, Sarah Brookner, you know, I think she really mastered the nutshell of our theory of change. And I kind of stole that from her and try to put it on a few bullet points. Essentially, we believe that if you make an authentic invitation and host and welcome people in authentically, we start with the welcome. And as I said, it is an authentic invitation. We reach out to different communities through the work that we do on the stage and through different community partnerships. We then, when we invite new audiences in and new audiences to us, that's very important to note. When we say new audiences at Art Summerson, we don't mean people who are new to the arts. We mean people who are new to us, because the arts have always been in our lives, whether it's that church choir, or that school play, or that neighborhood footlights club. You've always been going to the arts, right? So new to us, or we're new to you. And then we incubate. So we have a series of activities and programs in what we call our engagement incubator, including the Play Reading Book Club, including Citizen Read, public dialogues, iDream, and a host of other programs, which will be displayed in a moment. And then we message, we say thank you. And we say, come back. We then invite people into seeing other performances in our audience, to be more deeply engaged in our audience, seeing performances that are featured in our season. Because typically, when we're approaching new audiences, they're new to us. They're not aware of our season. Our season is kind of weird. What are all these plays from these different countries? What does this mean? What does this have to do with my life? So after experiencing a program in the engagement incubator, people are typically attracted to what's on stage. And then there's another message, value. This not only matters to us, but this matters to you. And this is why it matters. And then we believe that in a cycle of going through welcome, incubator, message, audience, message, audiences then become mavens. And mavens demand more. Mavens are the ones who are in this room this evening. Trust me. They are here, and we all work for them.  Let's see. And soon we expanded to engage in audience demand building work to fill yet another. Let's see if I can do that again. I'm not here. Can you hear? You can. Oh, okay. Okay. I didn't think about the sound. I'm so sorry. So you are committed to connecting community. What do you say? Here we go. Communities from all over Boston through stories that okay, we're going to try this one more time. Art Simerson began in 2010 with a commitment to activate our downtown venues, filling the voids of Boston's theatrical landscape. We did this first with international programming and soon we expanded to engage in audience demand building work to fill yet another gap here. I really feel that it's important that our audiences understand that this is your theater and that you truly think of these spaces and these stories as shows and spaces that belong to you. We are committed to connecting communities, communities from all over Boston through stories that reveal and deepen our connection to each other. And as an institution, you can't actually connect those communities unless you're in the community, in relationship with the community, knowing in the community and connecting their stories with another story. Some fell on good. So that's just a snapshot of some of the different activities in our engagement incubator. You saw there the welcome to Boston cast party, who many of you probably have attended. Also our community curators program pictures from our welcome from our play reading book club and just different ways that we're out in the community and working. So I want to talk quickly about the why for the play reading book club. Why did we start this program? Why does it matter? Why is it necessary here? So I'll share a short story that very few people, some of you may or may not know. Many years ago I was a, I ran a theater company in Boston and I was, we were doing talk backs and I remember we were still in our early 20s and I remember somebody from the audience saying, who's that August Wilson? Is he a friend of yours? Does he go to your school? We're 23 and the man has two Pulitzers and like 10 Tonys. So he's not our friend and he does not go to our school and it and it dawned on me that the theater company was primarily a, it was a black theater company and it dawned on me that a huge part of audience development was that people needed to know the playwrights and they needed to know the stories. And this was also happening at the time when Oprah had these book clubs and she would like put her name on a newspaper and it became a book club. Anything she, she put her name on people were buying and, and this was a part of Oprah's book club. And I remember being in a gypsy cab and the gypsy cab driver showing me his book and he said, this is Oprah's book club. That's why I bought it. You ever read this book before? Let me tell you about this book girl. You got to read this book and I remember thinking, hmm, Oprah got the gypsy cab driver and this was way before Uber and Lyft and before Jitney became sophisticated. This was back in Dudley Square when it was really Jitney driving and this man was reading a Oprah's book club, Oprah approved, Oprah sanctioned book. And I'm trying to figure out how to get black people to go to the theater, right? And I'm thinking, what if you had book clubs that read plays that would familiarize people with our playwrights and the stories in the African-American canon? And so, you know, I'm dreaming this somewhere in the early 20s. And years later, I get to Art Simerson and I meet this amazing, you know, gentleman, David Dower, a bit of a mad hatter, a dreamer, and I told him about it and he said, sure, write it. Let's see what happens. So that's, so that's, so that is the, the kind of where this whole idea started. It really started from being in the community and seeing the community that could benefit from just a bit of the practices and knowledge around going to the theater. It serves Arts Emerson because we are international in scope.  These plays are not typically plays from the American canon. Some of the stories are not from the American canon. So with us being a theater that presents international work, being able to study the play beforehand is extremely helpful. And those who were a part of, anyone who was a part of in the eruptive mode in any of those book clubs, would you disagree or agree with that? So and, you know, so it does help being able to have an opportunity to study the place. We are very much committed to increasing dialogue around themes around race and people coming together. And that is a part of what we see is helping to to heal the city of Boston's narrative of being a segregated, historically racist, currently racist city. So it is very important to us that we're adding, we're additive to the dialogue of the city. We believe that we want to place the diversity of the world on stage and the diversity of our city in the audience. And what we're finding is that the book club is helping us to accomplish goals of integrating audiences. So if you're going to do something like this, it's more than just getting people together and some laced potato chips and a script. You have to be intentional in your design. You have to infuse, you know, I think back on when I was in college studying my favorite era of theater, the Greek theater. And I used to think, well, how did they know to go to that mountain? At that, like, how did they know to go to that theater? How did they know? How did they get people to come see Oedipus Rags? How did how did that happen? Right. And you think about these things. And so there was always the myth. There was always the passing of the myth. And so the book club kind of takes from that practice of infusing audiences with the myth. We start with the story. We make it accessible. We make it accessible in every way in the way of cost, in the way of location where the book clubs are held. We work with people who have different levels of ability to attend a theater and we work really well to to make the theater culturally accessible. Literary, I don't know if that's a word, but accessible in its literacy. We make it communal. We make it fun and we make it educational. If you come on a Saturday to Dudley Square, if you're on a Wednesday afternoon over at Alston BCYS, people, you always hear them saying, I'm going to class. A lot of people even think of the book club as a form of adult learning. So in being intentional in our design, think of a show of the month club where a group of people pick, you know, what's the show we're going to see this month meets a book club, your regular book club with your potato chips and your soda meets a table read. And what's a table read? Anyone in the room knows what a table read is? Want to shout it out? Yes. And that is the big part of what makes this program successful. We actually take a practice of making theater to the audience. It's the first thing that a company does is they sit around a table and they read the play out loud. And then a guy or a person with a funny sounding title, a dramaturg or a great director or playwright will sit and dissect the play and go through the play bit by bit to help the actors and the designers to get prepared to present the play. These are the things that audiences don't see. And we, through the table read, were able to provide that experience to the audience. We make sure that we are creating an environment where people can meet new people, see great plays. We select the plays that have really challenging scripts. We don't choose the easy plays. We choose the ones where you're going to sit around the table and do the work. And we also provide knowledge resources and tools so that participants can become more savvy. Knowing that when you think of coming downtown, the first thing you think of, I don't want to drive down there. Well, we are located between two train stations.  And so we provide this information because a lot of times people don't think that the theater is actually even accessible in the city. Because we think of coming to the city, it's congested, it's the evening, it's just not accessible. The tickets are too much. I don't want to deal with that box office. I don't want to pay the fees. Well, guess what? You don't have to. And here's how. So we provide all of these information. And then through working with teaching artists, participants receive in-depth exposure to the text of a play. Again, they receive tools and resources on how to navigate the theater. We do something called a theater cheat sheet. We also have, in some sessions, people share their tips on how they hack into the theater in a legal way. That happens in a few sessions. And I actually pick up tips, too. And also, because it is a communal environment, most of the times people in the book, well, there is one specific book club that now they're lifelong friends. But for the most part, people in the book club have never met each other. And I just want to point out a huge tool that we use. I'm going to show my cards. We use vulnerability because people have never met each other. You're sitting around a table with a script, with a story that you may or may not know. And now you're going to read out loud in a character or not in a character. Or maybe you don't read that well. Or maybe you have an accent. But we all enter the play together. We face the stage as we face each other. And that is extremely important in leading us to our third bullet point there, around social connectedness. That shared vulnerability, the moment we enter the play, puts us in a place together. Puts us in a position, in a mindset, to work through whatever is going to happen in this story and where it is relevant to our lives. Another really successful point of the program's design is that it is neighborhood based. Later in the slides, I'll talk a little bit about where we've been in the past four years. For those of you who may not know, our lovely city of Boston has a history of being segregated in its residential neighborhoods. And that was, by design at one point, that history has changed. But where that has served this program is that we started to play with the notion of, what if we put this play in this neighborhood, will people follow the play? Would people cross neighborhood lines to follow the play? Who's going to cross neighborhood lines to follow the play? Who's going to get on that number 66 bus in the dead middle of winter to get to the conversation that is not the most familiar to them? And that's a huge part of the intention. That was not accidental. Actually, in the first year, we started at Roxbury because the fellow's Athenaeum had a $5,000 grant. But in that first year, I started to dream, you know, I'd love to see this in Newton and in this one. And then one day, people are going to start jumping all around the different neighborhoods. And that started, that has started to happen. So keeping it out in the neighborhoods, but also recognizing the neighborhood that we are in. We are in downtown crossing, the theater district. And so we started one here actually in this very room. And that allows the theater to place itself in the citizenship of the city. We're not outside of a neighborhood. We are in this neighborhood as well. We are in a neighborhood as well. So we have one on campus. The program is facilitated by a teaching artist. As I said, we provide hospitality. Food is always key. Make sure there are snacks. Make sure there's lunch. If you keep people out for more than three hours in the middle of a Saturday, please feed them. If you bring them out on a beautiful Monday evening of the summer, make sure you got something for them to drink after your presentation. These things are important. We encourage and we foster dialogue. And we also, through our curriculum, aim to demystify the theater going experience. We worked with a researcher, Julie Carpanita, who we saw earlier in the audience to create a logic model. And in the interest of time, I'm gonna try to just say what we hope. We hope that if we created this activity that provided these opportunities to engage with the text, meet new people, that eventually we would build an audience where audiences feel connected to each other, have access to diverse conversations and see themselves as relevant in the theater and the theater as relevant in their lives. And so you can read the slide as you see it, but I'm gonna move through these slides a little bit faster. We plotted this out on a logic model and then we started to see, is this what's actually happening? And so before I go into showing you a snapshot of what's actually happening, I wanna say one more thing, especially to our colleagues in the field who are experiencing this presentation through HowlRound. And David Dower and I will talk about this in a few minutes. Originally, the Play Reading Book Club started in the Seats Lab. And the Seats Lab is a program of Art Semerson where we utilize uninvented seats. At the time, we have, let's say we have about 200 actual seats in our theater. But currently, we're an eight-year-old company and we have the market reach of 100 people to fill those seats all the time. So what we did is instead of turning the lights off on those other 100 seats, we used them as for research to learn about different patterns of audience going and how we can invite people in. So this program started there. So when we say it's a Seats Lab program, it means that we comp those uninvented seats and we run programs to them and comp the tickets or offer free tickets. And so as I said, it was piloted by the Fellows' Athenaeum Trust Fund. And originally, the staff of the PRBC, myself, and assistant and the teaching artists, and two assistants and the teaching artists handled everything for the program. And the program was really hidden from the public. You had to know somebody who was in it or you had to know somebody who knew somebody who was in it. It was because it was research, kind of R&D, trying to figure out something new. As we've moved from the, when I say from the margins to the market, this is a program that's a research program and now we're moving it and making it more accessible to the general public. And in doing that, in the past two years, we have moved the program to become a program of our engagement, Incubator. It's a key program in our Building Demand Initiative. It's a part of our Civic Engagement Suite.  Those are all our Engagement Incubator offerings and the book club is there. It's fully visible on our website. As a matter of fact, some of you might have accessed this event on the homepage. It is also promoted and fully supported by our marketing department. And just wanna give an extra shout out to Jen Falk for her work and just really elevating how we present ourselves in a promotional way. In so doing, it's on the homepage.  We have an email blast. It's mentioned in the newsletter. Basically, if you see Art Samerson, you see this program. And that is very intentional in our moving it so that it's accessible to all. And also, those of you who were in the program in the first year may remember reaching out to me or me reaching out to you to get you that com ticket. And this year, more so than any other year, the box office actually took over managing tickets for the show, for the program. So it's fully managed by our box office and fully managed by our guest experience departments. And I really enjoy being able to just connect people directly to the box office.  Call the box office.  And a lot of people don't call me. My phone doesn't ring, I miss y'all. All right. So I wanna go into the numbers over the years. In four years, we have engaged 217 participants. This is inclusive of our youth programs in the middle schools and high schools. I'll talk a little bit about that. We have studied in depth 15 plays. Each play takes between 15 to 25 hours of study and commitment. Oftentimes we leave play reading book club members in the theater and lock up and go home because they're not leaving. We have been in actually 11 neighborhoods. I forgot situate and I think it's because situate's not in Boston. Over the years, Roxbury, Newton, Cambridge, South End, Matapan, Downtown Crossing, Austin, Mission Hill, Hyde Park, Charlestown and the South End. And situate, which is on the South Shore. And so I wanna show, some of you may not be able to read this and you don't really have to. Just look, kind of think of the words as dots. And if you're seeing more dots, then we're going in the right direction. And if you're seeing less dots, then we need to do a little bit more work. So this is a snapshot of our audience patterns through the audience view, which is our box office interface. We are looking in this chart at where our audiences are, what our audience members are doing before and after entering the Play Reading Book Club. So if you look at season 14-15, which is when the book club started, and then before that between 2011 to 2014, you'll see some patterns. There's a key on your, on your right. And I'll just, I'll just pick out a few, a few points. And let's see if, I don't have a pointer and I don't think the pointer. Can you all see that arrow at all? No, don't worry about it, you don't have to. So each row represents a patron, okay? Each row represents a member of the book club. Good, thank you, David. Our Vanna White of the evening. So each row represents a patron, and I'm gonna start with the top two rows because the top two rows are the two most, and I'm not gonna name them, I'm not even gonna put them out there, but these people see a lot of theater, they see more theater than God in this town. And they really do, and they're both in this room and I'm not gonna call their names. So the top row, and I won't say who's who, represents two members of the book club who were heavy consumers of arts emerson offerings and arts offerings, even before the book club started. And so you can see they've always been coming. And then you can see that the nature, that they attend, you know, these are what you call the culture seekers. So something like a play-reading book club is right up their alley. It's what they're looking for. It fits inside of their pattern. And then if you, yeah, yes, yes, yes. Yes, what's supposed to be yellow, yeah. Even for somebody who's already going.  Ds mean discount, C means comp, okay? You do not need to be rich to enjoy a lot of theater. A lot of theater is accessible and affordable. And some people know where those con tickets are and they know where those discounted tickets are and it's okay to seek them out, because I surely do. I call the box vendor and try to get tickets to Anita Baker. And you know, I'm okay with them telling me no, but I'm gonna ask. So, you know, it's not about wealth as access and this being something for people who have expendable income. These people are moving through our season even before the book club and figuring out how to do so and not take out a mortgage. And so you wanna look, if you look at the roles where there are zeros. Zeros. Three up from the bottom. Three up from the bottom. You'll see a patron who enters, you know, in the first four years of Art Somersen. The first three years, no engagement. The fourth year, one engagement. The second year, the 50 or 14, 15, they are, I'm sorry, you said third row from the top, okay. So, two engagements in 13, 14. And then three engagements in the first book club year. And then eight engagements in the second book club year. Four of those eight engagements being book clubs. And so you see a pattern of the play reading book club enters and then you start to see people consuming and experiencing more and more offerings. Both engagement activities, discounted tickets, full price tickets. So it's not that people are only looking for the deals. People are also buying packages and they're also buying full price tickets. The package at Art Somersen is similar to the subscription at traditional regional theaters. So, and if you wanna engage with me more about this, I actually have all 181. You know, I tried to find a sophisticated and elegant way of presenting this data, but we don't have that capacity with our box office interface at this time. So, I just wanted to just give you a snapshot. So, just wrapping up my presentation, I wanna talk about some areas of note. Adapt, the book club has really allowed us as a company, as a department, an engagement department to, there have been adaptations of the model of the book club for other engagement programs and activities. Some of you might have experienced the Citizen Read in the, this season, it was in the winter in February, Citizen Read where over a thousand people read Claudia Rankin's Citizen in preparation for seeing the white card. That is one adaptation of the, or inspiration or influence of the Play Reading Book Club. Some of you are also maybe a part of a really, really, I don't really think it was too much inspired by the Play Reading Book Club, but this is, I've never seen this done before. It's led by my colleague, Kevin Becerra. It's the Detroit Red Residency.  And they're actually creating this story about Malcolm X's time in Boston. And if I know Will Power, this one's gonna go very far. Will Power is a playwright. The neighborhood design also influences audience integration. I talked about that and we'll talk a little bit more about that. And one of the things that we're noticing is on, you know, among different ethnic groups, people are saying that they're enjoying diversity of dialogue within their cultural or ethnic or racial identity and between other cultural or racial identities. So for people, African-American people, many of the members have remarked, if you're a part of the deadly group, because that was the first group, that group has people of African descent from continental Africa, from South and Central America, from the Caribbean. And people are expressing to us in emails and one-on-one, just being able to speak to black people from all over the world about a subject matter, a play that matters to them. And that bit of diversity, having a time around the room within your own culture or within your own ethnic group to hear different perspectives, hear different sounds, you know, one comment I read, being able to hear different accents coming out of other black people's mouths, that matter to them. And, you know, that may sound small, but it's not. It's very, very big because the practice of race and racial divide was internal and within cultures, and it was also between cultures. So these are some of the things that surface, that people say that matter. And between cultures, people are learning, I remember one person who actually went out to Alston and Brighton to study, I always called the beauty queen of Linaan, with inside of Alston and Brighton, and if you know the city of Boston, I told you we're a place-based city, that's one of the traditional Irish community, as well as South Boston. And this one person wanted to actually study that play inside of that experience, even though they were not from that experience. And so we keep hearing these stories all over the years. And there's something that is happening when people are able to find a place to study and experience cultures in a recreational setting. And also another area of note is I've learned that there is a spinoff of the Play Reading Book Club among some members who are in the room, and they are, they're awesome. They're a little arts-emerson audience, members just going all over to other theaters and asking questions and getting, in to see plays and demanding more in dialogue. Actually, I hear from my colleagues in the engagement departments at the Huntington about y'all, and I love it.  So, you know, it's been a great program, but there's always room for growth. We're only in year four. I remember when I told David I would work here, I said I'm only gonna work here for five years, because it's gonna take that long for something to happen. I'm really happy that it's that one, I've not, I kept my job, that's really good. He hasn't asked me to leave yet. But also that in four years, we've seen some significant growth, but some other areas of opportunity, you know, there's always a need to reach out to millennials and Gen Xers. But I do wanna say something about the, actually I'm gonna save that for the conversation later. The program to keep it cost efficient and fun, we do have to keep the numbers small. You know, we run the program between 10 and 30 members per book club, because if it's too expensive, then we cannot expand. We cannot do more plays each season. Currently, the program is rather affordable cost between $3,000 and $3,500 per book club. And some of those book clubs, we subsidize and some of them we receive grants. We are working to continue developing the curriculum and to incorporate prior participants in teaching artist training. I'm laughing because this actually happened last year. Some of our members actually attended the day long teaching artist training. And we did a mock book club at that training and that was so much fun. So where do we go from here? This year we are going to be engaging in an expanded partnership with the Boston Public Library. Also with MECCO Incorporated, which was a federally funded program to help integrate schools in Massachusetts. We piloted the MECCO partnership at Situat High this spring with Mr. Joy. It was extremely successful. And so we are looking to expand upon that program. And the Play Reading Book Club will be used as a teaching tool in Emerson College's theater and community course. And finally, this is not the most elegant or beautiful presentation slide. However, we are actually gonna do six plays next season. This is called expansion because we've never done more than four, but we think that we could do six actual scripts. I don't know how many oscillations of those scripts, but we're gonna tackle six scripts in this our ninth season. Do look on our website. You don't need to call me anymore. www.artsemerson.org. And you will see when these book clubs go live. I'm so excited about that. But somewhere between the second or third week of August registration will open for our fall and spring book clubs in the 2018-2019 season. So that's the four year review. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your attention. I'm gonna move right along into a brief presentation by Aiden Lindholm. And Aiden came to Emerson College, came to Boston two years ago from Kansas. Kansas in America, right? Kansas, yeah. Because I always say he's from Arkansas and I never get it right. So I practice saying Kansas tonight. He's from Kansas. And so that's somewhere in America where they have like straw and corn and they don't have a lot of theaters. And this is what he told me. And, but he had this amazing passion for making theater accessible to his in his rural upbringing and his rural lifestyle. He'll talk a little bit about this. And I remember when he in the interview just spoke passionately about wanting his friends to love theater. And it reminded me of me wanting my friends to love theater. And so I thought, hmm, what if? And then he said he lived in Roxbury. And I said, ooh, I know what's about to happen.  Well, I think first and foremost, we have to give Akiba about an incredible round of applause. She brought me on this past semester in the summer, a little bit of it to do some coordinator work. And I've been doing teaching artists work before that.  And my God, that is so much work. So, I mean, Akiba is just killing it. And it was a pleasure to work with you over these past two years. So again, thank you so much. So Akiba said, well, yes, I am from Kansas. She had said I was from Arkansas for a while there. It's confusing. We call it, we call it our Kansas. Right, right, right. So yeah, so I came to Boston two years ago from Kansas. I was raised on a farm to novelty. Creates good conversation with Uber drivers. But I had always, no, that's not true. I had a passion for performing and I never saw theater except for maybe like, you know, you know, Christmas Carol every two years at the community theater done by old people and little kids. And it was always awful. And so my love for theater wasn't established because I saw a good theater. And I grew a certain anger towards the theater that it wasn't welcoming to all. And mind you, I grew up in probably the widest place you could possibly imagine, the widest place.  And, but I had this feeling like my friends hated theater.   You know, we're making $80,000, $90,000 working on oil rigs. So it hit me hard. But I wanted to show them that theater and the arts hold something within our society because I really felt that it did. I felt that it's a way for us to discuss civic issues, for us to examine who we are as individuals in ways that's not like shoving it down your throat. You know, like we're examining it together. And as a community, and I don't know, it's just something about it that made me love it. And I wanted to find a way to make it accessible. So after graduating from KU, never left Kansas, came here to Boston. And I was like, oh, we're going to the big city. And my parents were like, well, be careful. You're going to the big city. And I didn't have much money and came here and when I said that I was coming to the big city, everybody from Boston is like, this isn't the big city. But it's big to me, it still is. And the first job I applied for was the job for a teaching artist for the Played New Book Club.  And it worked out. And I got a job. She's like, well, I'm going to put you in Dudley. I had no idea what that was.   Emerson College, I don't mean to break the bubble. I know it's affiliated with this company. It doesn't do a real great job of providing a master's degree to students that want to do community work. It hasn't, I mean, it might have before I came here, but since I've been here, it did not. It would have been, it's a very expensive school, mind you, very expensive. So if I would have gone here and not had this opportunity to work with the Played New Book Club, I would have had zero, zero work in the community unless I did it on my own. So this Played New Book Club, by utilizing teaching artists, is not only giving poor students like myself an ability to work and make good money, pay us well, but it's also giving us the experience that we need to be leaders in the field in the future. And also gain like 40 odd grandmothers at the exact same time. Because I have, and I love it. It makes me so happy, it makes me so happy. So at the end of when I'm getting ready to graduate, and I had, I graduated, so I don't wanna hold the suspense. Thank you. I graduated, and to graduate, you have to either do student teaching or thesis, but I went down the track to do community work, right? So that's not the usual K through 12 route. And there's only a few of us that actually finished that program. And so I did the thesis, and the thesis that I did was on the Played New Book Club. And I wanted to examine, well, what is this program? How does it function? How does it work? And even more so, I wanted to examine how do groups exist within audience development programs? There's a whole bunch of research on audience development, but the majority of the research done on it is focused on numbers. Like, oh, this many people came in, this many people bought tickets, and then that's how they gauge success. I thought, well, I'll mix my experience in education, along with audience development, and examine how do we look at audience development programs as educational tools, right? And how is the group functioning? Well, I mean, the good majority of that didn't actually come to fruition. And that's kind of how research works. But that was the goal. And so I came in and I interviewed roughly eight members, and we focused explicitly on St. Joan in Hamlet, the Played New Book Club, because I wanted to see if there was any correlation between knowledge of theater and one's willingness to engage in conversation.  And so therefore, I'm not gonna say anything, right? And that's a trend that's consistent along all educational research, that if you don't know a lot, you kind of sit back because you're intimidated by those that know a whole bunch. And I was like, you know what, I got something here. I'm gonna find out something that is going to be groundbreaking towards this audience development program. Like, you know, well, it might be working well of bringing people in, but like, are all people actually engaging within these groups? And it turned out that yes, they were very much so. And that the way that individuals were sharing knowledge and speaking to one another completely juxtaposed everything that the educational theories had previously found. And so it was absolutely fascinating. And beyond that, it also showed that the Played New Book Club is extremely effective in meeting all three of its goals. I shouldn't mind you that I did this research while working for ArtsEmerson. So that's something to note. But I think with that, it was really hard to examine this research in such a way that's cold and stairwell. You know, it's when you do a lot of research and you read a lot of research, it's very cold. It's like, oh, well, here are the numbers. Here's what the people are doing. And that's that. Take it or leave it. That's how it is. And while I was doing it, I kept thinking, like, I'm writing this paper and I just feel so gross. I love these people. And they brought me into their community. When they could have very easily been like, my god.  But no, they brought me in and I owed a lot to them for that. And so when writing this paper, I kept deliberating about how am I going to possibly find conclusions that are resound or something big. And I found that the overwhelming conclusion is, is that this program functions well because it brings people together and that's just it. It brings people together to talk and to explore art as a community, which is why I fell in love with it in the first place. And by seeing that and by participating within that, I had a hope that theater can be good again. And then we initiated a certain fire within me to go out and continue this work because it's possible. And theater doesn't have to be stuffy and boring because I can guarantee you that the conversations we had and the shows we saw were not stuffy or boring. That's for sure. And so that's really all. And I'd like to thank everybody that I worked with and audios, I guess that's all, thanks. I wanna move into our third section of the presentation. And this section will be a dialogue with the audience and a conversation with David Dower, our artistic director. And what we're going to be talking about is, it's been four years, Am I good? Yep, okay. It's been four years and we're talking now about institutional commitment. I called the Play Reading Book Club small batch community engagement. And when it comes to impact, we often think that impact is numbers, big groups of people. And the book club in a given year reaches maybe 90 people in a season. So that's very small. There are some, when you go to an audience talk back, you'll have half the audience will stay. So the numbers are very small, but the amount of time they commit is a lot. And so the question is a question of institutional commitment over time and what does that do for this type of community engagement? So I just want to kick off the dialogue and it's not really an interview, it's just David and I talking like we often do kind of musing about the work. But I want to start by saying, so remember when you first saw the proposal? Yes. And you came into my office and you said, you wanna do what over with five plays? I can't see it. Tell me what you're thinking. Has everybody been through a book club here? Everybody's been through. Okay, so this is why I said this because Akiba came into my office and she said, look I've designed this thing and people are gonna meet on a Saturday and five Saturdays in a row for three hours at a library and they're gonna talk about this, they're gonna talk about a play, they're gonna read it to each other, they're going to go see it together, they're gonna talk to one of the artists in the play, a director or an actor or playwright at the theater and then when they come back to their neighborhood, their library, wherever they're seeing it, then they're gonna perform it for their friends and family. And I just thought there is no way any of that's gonna happen, five weeks in a row, three hours at a time on a Saturday and just the amount of work that was gonna go into making that try to happen and then who was gonna actually give that much time to this event and then one of the great things about Akiba is that that just didn't mean anything to her that I said no, I didn't even say a formal no, I just said I don't believe it, this is too big, you have to scale it down and she said okay fine and I think he went to four. Yeah, we went from five plays to four, that was the scale down. And she proved me wrong which happens regularly in working with Akiba, one of the things is that there's a lot about vision at play here and there's a lot about, ArtsEmerson has a very unique position in the theater world because we opened as a very large organization in the sense that we have three theaters, one of them's 1200 seats, one of them's 600 seats, one of them is you're sitting in the 150 seat black box, we began at what we call scale, we were huge right out of the box and we didn't have any audience, so we didn't have anybody that we had to bring along if we wanted to make changes, we didn't have anybody to serve in terms of who the audience was supposed to be and so we've been making up the audience, all, you talk about small batch audience development, we've been crafting this audience very intentionally to become the audience of the contemporary city of Boston. The ArtsEmerson was opened in the very year that the census documented that there was no longer a cultural majority in this city, that we are all minorities in the city of Boston now but the narrative of Boston doesn't tell that story at all and the way we live with each other and the way we move through our lives is very segregated as if there were a cultural majority and then a bunch of minorities, well there isn't anymore and so we wanted to make a cultural institution that actually lived in the truth of that, built an audience that experienced that every time you come to the theater and created connection across those differences where we could actually start to change the narrative of the city of Boston to reflect the one we live in today. So for me, this program, small batch, is actually, its impact is more than the number of people who buy tickets, it actually doesn't have anything to do really with the number of people who buy tickets, it comes as a consequence and those people who are buying tickets and thank you all for those of you who are buying tickets through the book club at this point, that's about an investment in the shared vision, the vision that we played out is a vision that people have also desired and you guys are investing in what we do with your time and your energy and your dollars and that investment is what powers us and so it's much more than the number of people in the seats as a result of this program, it's about the shared investment and the energy that comes from that. Thank you, you know, the first year of the program, I was very mischievous, I knew I was worried because I thought, I gotta, so he said yes, Dudley gave us this $5,000, I had to make this work or it didn't work. I only said yes, I only said yes to submit the proposal. Oh yeah, he only told me to submit the proposal. That's the Dudley, the fellow's Athenaeum would be similarly surprised and say, yeah, no, this isn't gonna work. And they loved it, okay. It was the last, if you know me, I gotta work on this part. It was the last proposal to arrive at Dudley, but it got there in the nick of time and the program manager for the grant actually became a member of the book club from reading the proposal and she's not here today, but usually she has, she has some guests visit from out of town, but she actually joined the first book club and has been a book club member just from, she's like, can I join, is that okay? She's the administrator for the grant, she doesn't vote on the grant. So it's interesting, because in the first year, knowing my lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely theater company that we, and back then our slogan was intentionally different, very ArtsEmersonous, entirely ArtsEmersonous, which means that we were really doing cutting edge, foreign, very foreign, foreign in subject and foreign in our origin plays. And one, so sometimes being David getting arguments. And one of the first, no, it never happens, but it happens. And one of the first little tiff we had was when I said, you know, we have to do more than put black people on stage to get people to go to the theater. We, it's more than just seeing who looks like you on stage. We have to build inside of people an appetite to see theater no matter who is on stage. This is something David came to ArtsEmerson believing and something that he has said years in, for all these years to all of us, he says it's all about the engagement. It's not just about the cast.  And I thought, oh my God, we don't really do that. We only have one Irish play per season, if any. We have maybe one or two black plays per season, if any, and I haven't seen. We've only had just the puppets, right, Kevin? We haven't had a lot of Italian, you know? So we're not that kind of company. We curate, as I said, the diversity of the world, but it's a large world. So what happens when you don't see your culture on stage and you're gonna stop coming? So in the first year, I was a little mischievous and we started with the trip to Bountiful. Sisley Tyson, Blair Underwood, Vanessa Williams in this play that was original Broadway hit presented with an all-white, I don't like the words black and white, but I'll have to use it for the purpose of context, all-white cast. And that was a, you know, that was an intention in the design. And then the next play was Breath and Imagination, a play about a black opera singer from Boston. But then the next two plays, Tristan and Esalt from Ireland and Ulysses Umbodel from Israel. And remember, this book club started in Roxbury. Roxbury for our television audiences, Boston's Harlem. So, I'd love to talk about what you discovered or what was the most surprising aspect of that season that you noticed. The first season? Yes. That people did all four plays. All of them. That the group, actually, I thought it was gonna be a problem of trying to keep the book club alive. And those of you who are in Dudley, thank you for doing that work for us on your own. It actually became the opposite problem. We couldn't get any new people in. Yeah, because they kept coming back. And I didn't know that people would repeat. We didn't know people would wanna come back. Yeah, and particularly when you guys crossed from breath and imagination into Tristan and Esalt and you were studying, I think, the libretto to the Wagner opera, which wasn't even the thing we were presenting. I was like, oh, this is, that's the end of that. We'll see them later. And then into the Israeli play. And I have to say the best audience for that play from Israel, it was a play about a man who sailed to Gaza on a raft of bottles to bring books to the Palestinians. And he was arrested and he was gonna be kept in jail unless he renounced and promised never to do it again. And he wouldn't promise never to do it again so they wouldn't let him out of jail. And the best conversation after that play was the night the book club came. Even for the playwright, he was astonished at how his play resonated, particularly in Roxbury. But in Boston in general, he was so shocked at how open the play was to connecting to the experience of people in Boston that that talk back went on and on. He didn't wanna leave. The playwright didn't wanna leave. He actually asked me for another date with this play reading book club. I didn't tell y'all, but he wanted to see you guys again. I'm so sorry, but he didn't wanna leave. He was so amazed that people would just devour his play in that way. He said this is what he had dreamed of. Is there anyone in the audience who was a part of that first season that may wanna, yes, actually, I'm gonna start with Cardina just to talk about that experience. Because I know you loved Ulysses on Bottles. Would you mind just giving us a very brief, whichever you feel that you'd like to talk about. But remember, we keep it in tight. Yeah, dude, share it. Please. Do you mind coming to the microphone so they can hear you on the live stream? It's right here. I'm sorry, we didn't have a cordless for you, so we just asked people to come to the mic, please. You can turn it around so you can face the audience. I was very skeptical. When I saw Fyze, I thought to myself, I like plays, but I don't know if I like them this much, to give up five Saturdays. And so that's what I was thinking. And I think the only thing that got me to go, and I never imagined, I said, well, maybe I'll be five of us here. You say, I said, well, that's okay. If it's just five of us, that's all right. I never, well, I will tell you, that first day, going into that room, and there wasn't a seat to be had. It was a small room, it was 20-some people in that room. I was shocked, I have to say, that there was that much interest among black people for play reading and that we're willing to come to five consecutive Saturdays. And it was the dead of winter, it was the winter of our safety tent. It was the dead of winter. Yes, it was a tough winter. Great discussion, and that sold it for me, really. And so I just want to say that. I'd like to have other people talk. Great, and speaking of that winter, thank you very much, Kareena. I just want to go into something that happened on that first day. And if she is up for it and would like to come to the mic, I'd like to ask Joan Landcourt to come to the mic, because I remember the first book club and I was still relatively new to Art Semerson. And the thing about when you come to work at Art Semerson, the first person you meet after human resources is Joan Landcourt. And so, you know, and here she was, in Dudley Square, coming into the library. And I was like, did they send her down here to watch me? Oh, what? They want to see my program go fair, huh? Well, I'm going to fix them. And she's in it and she is a member and she's participating. And then she sends an email to David and Rob, Rob Orchard, our founder, saying how grateful she was to be able to have a group. And I'd like her to finish her statement if she wanted to share. And I'm picking, well, you know, it's more for, you know, Joan, it's more about your why, why you ventured. She lives in Brookline and she gets on the bus every week on this long bus ride from Brookline to Roxbury to come to seat, to be in her Roxbury book club. She's also been in the South End and the Newton book club, Newton being closer to her home. So she's following the play, but she's going all over the city seeing different plays, but will not leave the Roxbury book club either. And I just want you to hear what Joan said she was looking for. And then I want to segue into another part of the conversation. Yes. I think what I was looking for was a group of people that really wanted to talk about plays. And what was totally thrilling about the Roxbury group was the diversity of experiences and perspectives. I think the first play I was maybe the only white person in the group, but the, you know, everybody else, as you said earlier, came from Latin America and the Caribbean and, you know, African American. And it was just fascinating to hear the very different perspectives that everybody brought, you know, from their lives. And I just couldn't imagine anything more exciting because it opened up every play in a way that, you know, made it a thousand times more than I could ever appreciate just by myself and things I'd never thought of, you know, perspectives, ideas, like, ooh, where did that, you know, how did they come to that? And so I just won't leave. So I asked Joan, thank you very much, Joan. I asked Joan to comment because in the arts there's definitely a push for diversity, right?  And so there's the audience diversity and there's audience integration. And that's happening through the dialogue, through the conversations out in the book club. And so I wanted to venture into that because one of the things that we're noticing is that by audiences traveling to different neighborhoods and as you may notice, the majority of book club members are from the baby boomers generation. And a lot of times arts organizations will say we want to get young people into the theater. That's audience development. But do you see a value in reaching and engaging in deeply engaging people of the baby boomer generation, especially when we're looking at conversations around race? So I think the thing, Art Semerson is a slightly different organization than most cultural organizations or theater organizations specifically. The effort that we're trying to make is to transform a city. And so for us, and like I said, we didn't start with an audience already in place.  And so we're not in a place that many theaters, often people talk about, oh, it's important to get the next generation into the theater, and it is. And we do that work in other ways. It's not necessarily the primary goal of a play-writing book club, although we do it also with the book club. But for us, we're building this audience from the ground up. In most places, their audience is aging. If somebody tells you, well, I know my audience, my audience is getting older, and that's why we need younger audience members. They're thinking about the ecology of an institution and the life cycle of an audience. We're actually talking about the audience as the activists that are gonna transform a city. And so we need all those people. And that doesn't matter what age, what economic status, or educational status, or what neighborhood they're from. Ideally, from many neighborhoods, sometimes we do a thing here where we have people put their zip codes on. I don't know if any of you have been to any of the zip code performances. And you actually can see that people are coming from every zip code in the city when we do that. And that's the kind of stuff that matters to us. So I think while it's important, we are now several generations in this country into a time when arts education has left the schools. And so you've got, not only do you have children who are growing up without any experience in the arts, their parents have none, and now their grandparents have none. So that is three generations layers of lost to the arts. So if we're gonna be working with the Baby Boomers, we're working with those grandparents, and we are saying, make this matter in your community, in your lives, in your family's life, in your work life, and make this connection important to you. So for us, we work with all comers, but I think the main difference is that because it's not, our audience is aging problem, it's actually we're building, we're organizing a community of action. We are especially grateful for the engagement of the Baby Boomers population. And if there are those who are older than Baby Boomers, forgive my lack of knowledge of what that generation would be called, forgive me. What I wanna do now, thank you, David, I want to open it up to questions and comments from the audience, but I do wanna take a comment from another book club member, Sumru, surrounding this subject, because I was talking to Sumru about something that I'm doing all this research and I'm pulling all the data, I'm looking at everything, trying to decide what goes on the PowerPoint. And we were thinking, and I'm looking and I'm saying, you know, the value of having, working with seniors and not saying, oh well, you know, audience diversification and audience development, it's about getting young people in the room, it's about getting millennials, millennials, millennials, is that a lot of the plays that Art Semerson and some of you may be engaging with us through our race blog, deal with race and difficult conversations and for many of our, in the Boomer generation, they're actually the generation that lived through legal segregation. They are the generation that experienced, you know, the laws that kept us apart. They are the generation, it's interesting when we were in situ at Aidan and myself and I remember going to David and almost crying and saying, I feel like we're getting ready to do a freedom ride in the South Shore. You know, and it was just like really scary because we had to really be prepared to take a play Mr. Joy about a little urban girls experience in her neighborhood into situate, a hamlet of the South Shore, a little bit north of the Cape, of Cape Cod, where a lot of the residents in the past 30 some odd years were people who had left the city as a result of busing. So we think about race, as I was looking through it, a question, it just dawned on me, what if our, a big question that Kevin, my amazing colleague Kevin says that comes from the white card comments and I hope it's a joke, but I hope it probably isn't a joke. It's somebody saying, one post that came saying I wanna meet a black person. Yeah, that's not a joke. In that facilitation for those of you who saw the play, the audience was asked to put on a card one thing you were committed to doing as a result of having seen the play that could most change your own experience or that you were committed to around race. And what the most common theme in those cards and the audience was predominantly white for that show here, we were partnered with another organization that has a slightly different audience demographic than we do.  And when you think you, the kind of diversity that we live in in the city, what we actually are as a community and that the first step that a person could make is just, well, maybe I could break out of my silo. That was astounding.  And it made me think, what if our parents had black friends and Asian friends and what would have happened if our parents' generations were friends or had space, talk spaces outside of work, outside of school, where they could socialize. I shared that with Sumru. And I remember you had a comment regarding that if you feel up to sharing that comment, if not, we can just open up the Q and A. Okay, wonderful. Excellent. So at this time, there are microphones on either side. If you wish to engage us, we'll take a few comments and then we'll continue the conversation in the lobby. As I said, there's a lovely reception awaiting us. But I'd love to just engage any questions or comments, observations, affirmations, negations, qualifications that you may have. And Jeremy, I would welcome you also to ask any question you have of anybody in the audience. Akiba and I won't speak. Yes, yes. Thank you very much. So my name's Elizabeth and I'm part of the best group, the deadly group. And I came on the third play. I started with the third play. I had no idea what it was. It would come up in our meetings because I'm part of the Friends of the Deadly Library. And I happened to run into Parmi in the restroom the day they were doing a trip to the Balafu, the reenactment. And I said, oh, what is this all about? And since I've become a member, I wanna say it's really great that you then push her idea aside because I think one of the things to have that vision to engage people who may otherwise not come to the theater, to come to the various plays that we have come to, we wouldn't be here in this room. I've saw plays that I would probably look at the flyer and then it would go on my recycle. And I remember seeing Ulysses on bottles. I remember just sending new salt. I remember quite a number of plays that were not in my genre, but now I'm really pretty much open to seeing anything as long as it doesn't go against my values. Yes. And I think that's important that we expand our horizons. But for me, I'm gonna stick to what is, I'm comfortable because there are some plays that don't really mesh with me. But this whole play reading group atmosphere, we become friends, we hang out, we do other things together. And I've gotten a whole new circle of friends from the play reading group. So it's really good that it's expanded around the city because it's just bringing people together that may otherwise not come together in a room. Thank you very much, Elizabeth. Thank you, Elizabeth. Any other comments or questions? Yes, Julie, we welcome you, especially questions and comments. I have a few comments. Yes. And they've kind of been touched upon a little bit here as well. Hi, I'm Julie. I'm working with Ars Emerson as the evaluator, helping to evaluate several of their civic engagement programs, including the PRBC. So I'm the person who writes the annoying survey that you have to do again and again and again. And part of what I, two things that have been mentioned and one that maybe is connecting in my mind in a way that it hasn't previously. The first is this really, really key outcome of social connectedness, which is what's being articulated here and what is demonstrated when we see the results of surveys and when we talk to people anecdotally. And for me, the reason why social connectedness is important is not just because it's nice and it feels good to feel socially connected, but because it helps to build the evidence base for why arts actually are a part of community well-being. I come from a public health background, so I feel like it's really important for arts organizations like Ars Emerson to begin to contribute to the body of work that's saying that culturally dense, rich artistic engagement with social connectedness actually has outcomes far beyond just feeling good and making friends. They have health outcomes. There's socioeconomic outcomes. So these are really, really important things. And that's why we measure it and that's why we ask about it, because if we can have more data that we can, that Ars Emerson can leverage to build this evidence, then that's a really, really important thing for the arts and for the world. So that's just like one thought in my mind. And then the other is just I wanted to sort of say that I know that the burden of having to do surveys and the same survey over again if you've been in the club is really cumbersome. But part of why we do it is so that we can have really the larger our sample sizes, the more we can say, and the more time we spend collecting the same data, the more we can build our evidence. So that's why we collect it. I do welcome feedback at all times about the survey. If the way things are worded or don't seem right, or please just like email Akiba or email me. I can even share my email, because I think this stuff is super, super important and really valuable. So that's all I want to say. Thanks, Julie. Thanks, Julie. I'm glad you pointed that out. And just going to make a quick comment. In the years prior, we always had an evaluation. And this is a message to our colleagues in the field who are doing this work. And everything that Julie said is the reason why not only should you have evaluations, you should put a lot of time and energy into the administration of those evaluations. They are not secondary. They are not ancillary. They are primary to your work. And so we in the first two years, if I say first three years, we would make sure that we did the evaluations both online and in hard copy. And then this year, we became, and I'm going to speak. As I said, we use vulnerability. So I'm going to speak to my own vulnerability. We became lax in the administration of those evaluations. And that is definitely something that impacts when we look at our data over time, we're going to see that gap in the spring of this year. So I want to just say, again, to my colleagues in the field, if you have to hire somebody 10 hours a week or five hours a week to make sure that those evaluations are complete, you need to do it. It's extremely important. I just want to, David. I just want to say one quick thing to the room. We keep referencing our colleagues in the field. We are also the host here at Emerson College of HowlRound, which is an international platform for communication around nonprofit theater in the world. And it's focused on commons practice. And so one of the things that HowlRound supports is people sharing information across the world about projects that are happening in their city. So there's a camera at the back, and people are watching us from who knows where and around the world. And that's why we're saying hello. I know that we're crushed for time, because I ordered y'all a cake and everything. Yes, I did. Get to the cake. We're going to get to that cake. I think y'all are going to like it. Now we're going to do a lot more talking in the lobby, and I see some hands. But before I take the hands on this side of the room, I'm doing a very PRBC facilitator thing, which is, is there anyone on this side of the room that has been a bit more quiet and that may want to share something that's on your heart? If there any, if there, just, I just want to make, I want to give space to anyone on this side of the room if they'd like to speak. There is a mic over there. And there is a mic. Yes. Thank you. Hi, I'm Jack. I had the pleasure of attending one reading. It was in Newton. It was for three sisters, check off. And I found myself wondering how we could take the magic that the 20 or so of us were able to generate and spread that message.  I think we had two or three family members and two or three friends come and we had put some time into a presentation. We did mini readings from the play. We had some folks that had Russian cultural backgrounds that brought in various food and other items. And what I felt like we were doing, because we were so excited by it, was presenting a marketing outreach for people to go see three sisters. But there were two problems with that. One, not enough people came. And two, the run was already pretty much over. And I just wondered whether you've changed at all or thought at all about the model, because I would love to have seen us be able to, with more publicity, get the message out to more people and sell tickets for your show because it's all about outreach. I'm just curious. Great. I'm gonna answer this and then we're gonna wrap and head into the reception. Can I just say one quick thing, Akiba? Yes. The play that the gentleman is talking about, three sisters, was actually performed here in Russian. Just in case you think we're giving you all the easy shows. He was studying a three-plus-hour play in Russian. Yeah. Read it in English and watched it in Russian. It helped because there were people, as much as Parmi participated in that book club. So you're right, Jack. It was also only here for a weekend. So in the second year, we actually decided that we would only do plays that had at least a two or three-week run. And I just wanna say that that experience with three sisters and Newton, because we did get that feedback from those evaluations. Because of that, so this never happens, right? But at Art Samerson, it happens where the community and the engagement informs the curation on stage. So if you notice, since I think that was season 14-15, our shows have long runs. As a matter of fact, right now, we have born for this, that's running for a month. We don't do as many shows with short runs as we used to. We used to do, so we're doing... Because the audience is growing. The audience is growing. And so when we select plays, we try to select plays that have longer runs. The showcase has been a definite challenge. At Dudley, this year, we finally got it right. When we did, and funny enough, in the eruptive mode, the toughest play, listen, you'd cut me in theaters in my DNA, that play was hard. And the showcase had about 60 people attend. So that is definitely something that we're working in. With our marketing department, actually it was successful because our marketing department supported it and put it on the blog and got it out there. So it is an area that we're working on. The same challenge happened Nancy in Brighton as well, right? So we are working on that. At this time, I get a sense, I don't have my watch on and so I'm nervous and I'm sure I'm rightfully so to be nervous that we're over time. So I would like to thank you all. Thank you very much, David, for your commitment. Thank you all. And for always engaging with the community. And for just being a really great collaborator and also a mentor. I really admire you and I'm very grateful to work with you and for you at Art Somersand. At this time, I'd like us to just to tell you thank you and if you're gonna leave us, thank you for being here. And if you're gonna stay, there's cake and lemonade in the lobby. All right. Thank you all.