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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Welcome to the Drama Book Show! My name is Mark-Eugene Garcia. Tonight's episode features a remarkable panel presented in partnership with the League of Professional Theatre Women, moderated by the League's President, Lynne Godfrey. The conversation brings together playwrights, authors, producers, and historians whose work preserves and expands the stories of women in the American theatre. Our guests include playwright Jenny Lyn Bader, playwright Michael Angel Johnson, author and performer Lynne Godfrey, theatre historian Alexis Greene, and playwright Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder. Together they discuss artistic perseverance, mentorship, representation, ageism, recovering women's stories from history, and the challenges and stories of building a life in the theatre. Whether you're an artist, educator, historian, or simply someone who loves theatre, this conversation offers wisdom from women who have spent decades creating, documenting, and advocating for the arts. Enjoy our conversation. Please help me in welcoming our moderator for the evening, Lynne Godfrey.

[1:30] Lynne Godfrey: I've got to negotiate this. How are you? Good evening, good evening. Thank you very much for coming, and it's cold, and I'm glad. I hope you're going to be a little warm now. And now I'm going to introduce you one by one, the ladies of the League of Professional Theatre Women that we've gathered here today. Is that good? Yes. All right. Is that good? Perfect. Okay. All right. Okay. The first one would be Miss Alexis Greene. Yes. Wait. She's coming. Let me say something about her first. Okay. She has written and edited numerous books about theatre. She is the author of two biographies, Lucille Wattel, the Queen of Off-Broadway, and the most recently, Emily Mann, Rebel Artist of the American Theatre. In addition to writing and editing books about women and theatre, Greene's career spans acting, theatre criticism, and teaching. She holds a PhD in theatre from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has taught at New York University and Hunter College. Her newest book, Shakespeare Theatre Company, is an illustrated history of a classical theatre and will be published in 2025. Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Alexis Greene.

[3:17] Lynne Godfrey: Whoa. Okay. It's a delicate balance here. There we go. There we go. All right. Okay. You're welcome. You're welcome. Now, I'm going to shift this to me just a little bit. Is that okay? Still good. Okay. All right. No. No. Okay. All right. Now, David. This is not my instrumentation. If you want, you can. Oh, you know I can. Yeah. Now, I'm in my element. There we are. Thank you. Thank you. The next lady is Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder. She was the founding producing artistic director of the Empire State Youth Theatre Institute. Oh, can you hear me now? Oh, you want the theatre book. Oh, okay. All right. Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder was the founding producing artistic director of the Empire State Youth Theatre Institute, established as an amendment to the education laws of New York State in 1974. The Institute served more than 9 million young people, their teachers, and families in all 62 counties of New York State, performed off and on Broadway at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, in Russia, Canada, France, Italy, Israel, Jordan, Sweden, and England between 1994 and 2010. Patricia is a recipient of an Emmy Award, holds a PhD from NYU, is a trustee of the Children's Theatre Foundation of America, and is VP of the League of Professional Theatre Women. Miss Patricia.

[5:41] Lynne Godfrey: You know, one of the things that I want to say is some of these women I've known a long time, like I know Patricia Snyder, which is over 20 years, and then some women I met this evening, and so this next wonderful lady is one that I've just met, and she's just delightful. Her name is Michael Angel Johnson. Michael Angel Johnson's plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Amherst, New Haven, and other places across the United States. The Price of Solitude was a finalist in the National 10-Minute Play Contest at Actors Theatre in Louisville. We are proud to present Michael Angel with the honor of special presentation at Comedy. Yes ma'am. What is going on? We're just getting Patricia into the seat. It's hot. I'm sorry. Oh, right. My legs are too short. Well, I tried to ignore it as long as I could. I think I deserve an applause for that. Okay, I'm going to go back a little bit. All right. All right. Now, her plays were produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Amherst, New Haven, and other places across the United States. The Price of Solitude was a finalist in the National 10-Minute Play Contest at Actors Theatre in Louisville. The Apartment earned Michael Angel the honor of special participant at the O'Neill Theatre Center, and Water, Touching the Rock to Screenplay was an official selection of the London Independent Story Project. She has worked with the 52nd Street Project and Malibu Mines and is an Associate Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and formerly at New York University. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. Ms. Michael Angel Johnson.

[7:57] Lynne Godfrey: I'm going to let you get up on that seat first before I start again. Thank you. I'm here, okay. All right. We're good? We're comfortable? All right. And our final panelist is a lovely member of the League of Professional Theatre Women that I have met while being a member there and now president, Jenny Lyn Bader. Jenny Lyn Bader's plays include In Flight, None of the Above, Excuse me. I wrote it and I can't remember. Let's see what I wrote. The Whole Megillah, and the audio play True Tree Confessions, which stars Kathleen Chadwick in the role of the tree. Her awards include the United Solo Fest documentary, One Woman Show, a Lark Fellowship, for which she was nominated by Wendy Wasserstein, and the O'Neill Center's Edith Oliver Award given to the playwright who, in the spirit of the late New Yorker critic, has a caustic wit that deflates the ego, but does not unduly damage the human spirit. Jenny Lyn is represented on off-Broadway now. Her play, Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, about the arrest of Hannah Arendt in 1933 Berlin, just had its New York premiere at 59 East 59th Street Theatres and has moved to WP Theatre this week, which is playing through mid-January. It's in its second or third performance tonight, correct? Third performance tonight, Jenny Lyn Bader.

[10:02] Lynne Godfrey: Here we all are. I'm going to move my little thing so I don't sit down on my own first, and I thought what we would do at first would be to talk about, since we are talking about we women, we are the artists, we are women, we are the artists, that there is one time, I think, in all of our careers where maybe we said, I can't go any further, it's not working, and what did we do to get past that, or did we never get to that point, and why didn't we? So I'd like to ask all these ladies to answer that question, and then I'll probably interject a little bit myself, but first, why don't we go to Patricia.

[11:07] Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder: Sorry for that awkward entrance, but my legs aren't too short. The theatre that I had the opportunity and the privilege to produce for was one that was for children, but it was created by government, and so there were times in the history of the theatre that were very difficult for me to understand how government functions. Because the theatre that I was producing artistic director of was created by government, it gave me pause throughout the history, but the thing that kept me going was the fact that it was for children, and teens, and young adults, and the thought of letting them down, because my dream was to introduce every child to the arts, to the theatre arts, which is a marriage of all of the arts, and that's what kept me going. I couldn't disappoint them, so that's the answer.

[12:32] Lynne Godfrey: Why don't we go all the way down there to Michael, who's an angel. Thank you.

[12:40] Michael Angel Johnson: Okay, yes, we're good. There's one there, also in front of you. David, could you use that? Yes, why don't you pass this one back here, that we're in that straining with that one. Yeah, and then we can get rid of the pesky stance, and then we can use this mic for this side. Yes, thank you. Thank you, David. For me, there was a point when...

[13:07] Unknown speaker: Not hearing you, Michael Angel.

[13:10] Michael Angel Johnson: I think you got it right up to your chin. Can you hear me?

[13:15] Unknown speaker: Yes, I hear you.

[13:16] Michael Angel Johnson: People were saying that I didn't fit in a box. They didn't like the topics that I was writing about, and it was a bit discouraging, and what really kept me going was I was writing about historical women, and I was having so much fun learning about them, learning about their lives, learning about the time periods they lived in, and I thought, if nobody wants to read them, that's okay. I'm having fun, and that was really it.

[13:50] Lynne Godfrey: Okay. Jenny?

[13:56] Jenny Lyn Bader: Historical women, because I write a lot about those too, and also biblical women, and I find that when you write about real women who are just brilliant and fascinating and relentless, sometimes people will say, oh, can't you just make her a little more nice and vulnerable? But if they're actually historical and biblical women who existed or have been mythologized or written about before, they are much more accepted. So, it's a very interesting dynamic. In terms of giving up, I love that you asked, Linnea, the one time. I think all of us think of giving up a lot more than one time. And I think what keeps me going, I think, first of all, I have a misplaced optimism. I don't know where that comes from. Second of all, community. This community we have here and other communities that I try to be a part of and forge. And then really, dedication to the creative process itself. Because if you're, like you say, Michael, if you're just worried about is it going to be produced, is it going to be seen, is it going to be published, then there are always going to be setbacks and disappointments. But if you're really focused on the process itself as much as the product, that can keep you going.

[15:12] Alexis Greene: Thank you. Thank you so much. Once upon a time, I would have imagined that I would be sitting up here and talking about this theme. I am a woman. I'm an actress. Because that's how I started. That's what I wanted to be when I fell in love with the theater. But that didn't work out. And for any number of boring reasons. And actually, I'm glad that an alternative became real. Largely because of the women's movement of the 1970s, I became educated and dedicated and committed to interviewing and writing about women who are artists in the theater, especially the American theater. Here's a copy of one of my first books. I loved talking to women in the theater and listening to them and letting them talk about how they create, how they struggle, how they overcome the challenges that women in all branches of the theater encounter. I strongly believe that it is important for journalists and biographers and all of us who read books and articles to write and read about women in the theater. And one of my most recent books, the biography of Emily Mann, demonstrated to me finally how on the right path I finally was when I avoided being an actress. I'd written two biographies and one was about Lucille Ortel, who was not alive at the time that the estate asked me to write this biography. And after I had written it, I thought to myself, I really would like to write about a woman who is with us today. And meeting with Emily Mann and sitting down with her and letting her remember about her own struggles and her own attainments and her emotions was just a wonderful, vibrant experience. And I recommend that all of us, can you hear me now? I recommend that all of us who write or read just keep doing that about women in the theater.

[18:34] Lynnie Godfrey: I guess it's my turn now, huh? I didn't avoid being the actress. I'll just say, when David was introducing, one of the things that I thought about is to tell you that I started singing at three, I started acting at 18, directing at 19, producing at 30. And I remember there was a time when I thought my world was just acting, and I had an opportunity to be up for a very important role, a role that I thought I was absolutely right for, and I was right. But they didn't hire me. They didn't hire me, and I was writing with my dad, who was with us at the time, and I was telling him about it, and I thought, I'm just never going to fit. It's not right. There's not anything with someone that looks like me, that sounds like me. And I began to cry, because I was going to give up. And my father, sorry, my father looked over at me and he said, Godfrey's don't give up. Godfrey's don't cry. He said, you will have things to cry about. When I'm not here, you'll cry. When your mother's not here, you'll cry. But the things you do for a living, you keep doing those things. And so, every time I get to the point, and yes, Jimmy, there are many times, when I get to the point of why am I doing this? Every time I'm in the curtain, and I hear the introductions, and I go, what in the world am I doing here? I remember what my father said, and that's what gets me through.

[20:45] Lynnie Godfrey: Thank you. So, now we know that you came here to hear us talk about our hurdles, and how we have gotten past them, but do you have any questions for us? About where you are, and maybe how we can communicate something for you at your time in life.

[21:15] Audience Member: My question is, could the sound department turn up the amplifier, so that we can hear the context? We hear occasional words, and that's very nice.

[21:25] Lynnie Godfrey: I don't know. I don't know. I think David is in movement now. Real close. Like that? Real like that. Oh, okay. So, you have to kiss the mic.

[21:41] Lynnie Godfrey: You have to kiss the mic. There you go. Thank you very much, Laura. Thank you. Alright, now, is that the only question? You all are satisfied with life? You have all the answers? Everything is going well? You don't think about anything? Yes, David.

[22:01] David Rigano: I have a question, because I think there's a lot of times when anyone from a marginalized community writes that sometimes audiences, or maybe more so producers, expects the play to be about whatever marginalized community. As women writers, how do you feel you, A, represent yourself as a woman in the field, and B, just try to represent yourself as a writer, without feeling the responsibility to represent your gender with your writing?

[22:51] Jenny Lyn Bader: Come on, somebody. It's an excellent question. I'm just going to say I absolutely agree with that comment, and I have definitely struggled with the fact that sometimes people want women just to write about being women. I was once asked to audition for an essay anthology, and I wrote a piece about the decline of heroes among my generation, and everyone else in the anthology had written about being a woman. And I think it was expected, and they were surprised that I had a different kind of theme I wanted to write about. And sometimes I feel the same thing with my plays, that they'll have the women's slot at the theater, and they'll want that slot to do a certain thing or perform a certain thing. So, yes, I definitely wish that didn't exist, that women are expected to write about being women, and men are allowed to write about everything. And I hope that is, I think that's been changing, but I really hope it changes more.

[24:03] Michael Angel Johnson: From my perspective, I think, as a woman, as a black woman, I'm always put into a category. Certain things are always expected of me, and I'm so aware of that. At the same time, I'm amused by it, because I realize how limited other people are. So what I have to do is trust my process and trust my writing. I do a lot of things wrong. I have no sense of direction, blah, blah, blah. But when it comes to writing, it's real for me, and it really inspires me, and it makes me feel more powerful. So, I don't care how other people look at me in that way, as long as the writing is strong.

[25:03] Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder: I think that, of all of these women, I'm not the writer, but I have a book. And it's like, when people think that I'm a dancer, like, you have in your midst here a major Broadway dancer that is sitting down in the third row. And when people see us walking together, maybe, and they think, oh, two dancers are walking. And I go, no, she's a dancer. I'm a move-weller. These are writers, and I'm a write-weller. And I have to say that when approached to write the book that I have written, which is storytelling, I think that is the most important thing. And I have to think that people think your story is supposed to go one way. There's only one story for people who look one way. If you look one way, then you have a successful childhood, you have successful relationships. But the story doesn't necessarily have to be told that way. And the story that I tell in the book that I've written is a story that I think gives hope to people who are not regular. I'm not a regular person. I don't fit into a category. And I want to be able to say to anyone, if you don't fit into a category that is already there, don't give up. Make your own category. And I think that's what writing did for me. Now, will I ever write again? Maybe. But these women will always be writing. And that's what I look forward to.

[27:01] Alexis Greene: Any other questions?

[27:03] Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder: Well, I am a producer, not a writer. But I felt that the work that the Theater Institute Company did was significantly important that I needed to do a history. It was also a theater created by government, as I said earlier, that needed to be recorded. There needed to be a record so that people knew how it came about and why it ended. But I have to say that there's a similar, you talk about being women writers, the same thing applies to being a female producer.

[27:52] Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder: Back in the late 60s, and even worse, if you want the audience to be a young audience or a family audience, and one that has education as its main focus, to use the theatre as a catalyst to teach across the disciplines in school, which is what we did. And I remember one day, because I had produced a show on Broadway, handing a study guide to one of the Shubert Organization owners. And he said to me, Pat, you don't understand. You're not for profit. We're commercial. We don't do study guides. So back in around 1996, we were doing a production of A Tale of Cinderella at Country College. And he came to see the show. And I heard that he was in the lobby. So I grabbed a study guide and I rushed out. I rushed out and I said, oh, but you do study guides now. So I think that it's being persistent, and not letting them cut you off at the knees, or how shall I say, not listening to you because you're a woman. But that was true of the women who came before us. And each time, it gets a little easier. So I hope that the young women who want to be writers or producers will be persistent and continue and not listen to the foolishness, which is just insecurity on everybody else's part. I think that most of us would agree that we're living in a world at the moment, and we're living in a country that is, how shall I put it, you know, that is, I'm sorry, yes, full of challenges to women, for women. Also, people are challenging what we read, what we write, what we see in the theater. And therefore, it is very essential that we keep writing and reading what women are creating. And we keep going to the theater and seeing the plays that we have created. It's especially essential, especially for the next four years.

[31:06] Gwendolyn Alter: Fabulous. No, yes. Fabulous. I will stand up. I don't know if the podcast also wants our voices from the audience. I'll include your question. Which case, okay, I'm not going into my mouth in here. Anyway, my name is Gwendolyn Alter. Hello, I don't know if most people here. I'm currently writing the first ever biography of Irene Cornets. I'm just sharing that because it's going to be a good question. It's going to be hard, but we're working on it. Anyway, but my question is mainly to Alexis, although I'm interested in hearing from everybody who's engaged in the process of recovering women from history and the particular challenges that it creates. I will say that I'm also a feminist theater scholar, as you can imagine. And we all know that recovering first stories, as we said, it was a real goal of the feminist theater movement in the 1980s. I think at this point, we need to go a little bit beyond that and think about what is above and beyond just the recovery process, which we know is fraught and ongoing and ever evolving and always needs to be diligently maintained. However, I'm also interested in thinking about how these questions of recovery affect the form and the structure of the stories that we write about these women. So I was interested particularly with you, Alexis, if you had thought about how your biography of Emily Mann has shifted due to who you're writing about in terms of the structure of the book or how you chose to share that story as the author of this biography.

[32:27] Alexis Greene: Now, that was the loneliest question. Say that last part again, because I really do. How does her biography of Emily Mann shift? Say that.

[32:39] Gwendolyn Alter: The question is how, with all the history, how do we think about recovering the histories of women in the theater, both in terms of form and content? How do we think about recovering the history of women in the theater in both form and content is the question. Yes, and how we write those stories, yes.

[33:01] Alexis Greene: Here you go. I think, I mean, congratulations that you are writing this biography and just an important woman to write about. I think that everyone, all the women who create art in the theater can deserve biographies, including producers, who the best producers are artists themselves. As I approached writing the book about the biography of Emily Mann, I was particularly interested, at least in the beginning, about the challenges she faced as a child, as a young woman growing up in a town in Massachusetts and then going to a college, which it was a women's college, but it was somewhat subservient to Harvard University, to say the least. And then what were her challenges? She was raped. How did she, in a theater, how did she overcome that? And how did it feed her art? And how did it feed the way she dealt with the people who would work with her, whom she would hire? And I found it rather frustrating that when the book came out and people liked it, but neither the publisher nor I could get the New York Times to review it. Journals that were authored by and published by women reviewed it, and scholarly journals reviewed it, and so forth. What does that say? What kind of a comment is that about what we're still dealing with in the world today? You will learn about your woman, and some of what you learn about her will lead you to what you probably want to emphasize or find out more about.

[35:12] Michael Angel Johnson: Yes, questions, questions. Yes, and then yes. To join on this, thank you for writing about Fornes and Lortel, and keep, you want me to, yes, keep coming a little bit. Thank you for writing about Fornes and Lortel and keeping those women alive by writing about them, that Lortel is not just a name on a theater or a plaque at the Players Club, the Lortel Lou that she donated to the Players. I'm curious about also Jenny Lyn Bader's beautiful play about Hannah Arendt, and what it was like for you process-wise in trying to get into the mindset of a woman. You've written a number of plays that are fiction, but this is a woman who actually lived, and so what, did you feel a sense of responsibility, or what was that in telling her story?

[35:59] Jenny Lyn Bader: Thank you. Yes, a huge amount of responsibility, and actually a lot of guilt. Anytime I would think about, maybe I should make the story a little more dramatic, but then I would have to change what really happened, and unlike you, I'm not doing a memory, it's not. I really prize accuracy, and I really love it, and it really underpins everything that happens, but you also have to think about the drama and deviate from the mystery at moments, so that has always been a struggle for me. I was very lucky with Hannah Arendt in that she wrote a tremendous amount. She wrote more than 30 books, and at first, because the play takes place when she's 26 years old, I was restricting myself to the stuff that she was writing in that period, and I felt she hasn't had the ideas for these other books yet, but then I started to realize that not only do people in their 20s sometimes have a lot of ideas that they're going to explore later on, and they don't have time to write yet. Sometimes you have some really great ideas at that age, but also the particular events of the play, her arrest in 1933, actually probably did precipitate some of her greatest ideas. She coined the term totalitarianism, and there she was, arrested by the Gestapo, and she thought of the finality of evil, and all of the things that she later wrote about, so I started to really give myself license to look at her whole oeuvre as a kind of playing field for my research, so that was a revelation for me.

[37:39] Michael Angel Johnson: Wonderful. I'd like to hear Michael Angel answer that, too. Excuse me? Edmonia Lewis. Mine is a little different, my approach. Edmonia Wildfire Lewis, she's the first, how many of you know about her, but she's the first woman of African-American heritage and Native American heritage to earn an international reputation as a sculptor. She went to Rome around 1865. Just that factor blew my mind away. Can you imagine going to Rome 1865? Wow. As a woman of color? Edmonia Wildfire Lewis. She has a stamp. Yes, it just came two years ago, yes, and what was intriguing for me was she did this wonderful pieces, but one piece is called The Death of Cleopatra, which she did in Rome and was missing for decades, and this fireman was looking at basically a garbage heap, doing an inspection, and the way he said he saw this one thing that was like a goddess, and it was the model. It was her piece, Cleopatra, Death of Cleopatra, and when I read that, I just became obsessed. I wanted to know everything about her, so I've done so much, so many different things on her. She's inspired me for years, and she really keeps me going. Just her fortitude. At one point, she was a student at Oberlin College, and she was attacked, and horrible things happened to her. She was accused of attempted murder, and the great-great-grandfather of Langston Hughes defended her. I know, I know, I just go down and rub it whole and never come out. So, what I do is inspired by the person, and I take these moments, and hopefully I try to dramatize them, and I just find it amazing, the past, what these women have done, and I want them to inspire me and other people. So, I'm not as good.

[40:22] Jenny Lyn Bader: No, I'm not good. I don't want you to get the misimpression. Mine is also inspired by it, but I just feel badly about it.

[40:29] Michael Angel Johnson: All right. We had one. Yes.

[40:36] Audience Member: Yeah. I'm easily done for me. Selfishly, this is directed towards Patricia, but I think, for all of you, you're all very accomplished women, and you have risen over the years to have seen various touch points in the industry. Selfishly, I know some of the answer to this on your end, but I think with where theater is now, in the commercialism of it, and with all the different genres that you women do write about, produce about, how did you make decisions as time has changed and as you grew to decide what you were going to produce, who you were going to write about, and why, knowing that you were going to have to find an audience, and as your own success became more prolific and your name became synonymous with something, how did you decide that this is something that was commercially viable or that you wanted to write about?

[41:42] Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder: Okay. I have to do a little spin on that.

[41:48] Lynnie Godfrey: Because my journey is a little different from theirs. And I have to say that as the theater changed, watching it, being a baby of the time when there were five black plays on Broadway. And when I was in college, I thought I'm gonna always work and this is always gonna be great. And then watching it change over, you make an adjustment. There has to be something in you that says, this is what I have to do for a living. This is art. I am an artist and I have to make an adjustment to what is happening now. But at the same time, I have to open up the minds to people who are very narrow, who are narrow minded, who think. We're not creating stars anymore, we're creating ensembles and we're creating shows. And then so you have to be, that's where the indies came up, producing things. Or you create an ensemble that goes out and finds work that is not the most commercially accepted right now until the audience sees it. The thing is for me is that I don't trust anyone but you. I don't trust someone sitting in an office that says, this is not gonna sell. I say, let me put it in front of an audience and let the audience tell me that it's not gonna sell. Because they're the ones who are gonna pay for the ticket, not your friends who come in free and sit and produce the show. Okay, I'm done.

[43:30] Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder: I'd like to approach it from a different point of view because I worked for a young audience to develop audiences for the future. I looked to writers to find the best possible writers that I could put before a young audience. So many young people are introduced to such drivel. And my philosophy has always been let them reach. All right, anybody got anything else to say? David, where are we? Oh, we got five. Okay, yes. Set a question about specifically with mentorship. I feel like I grew up at the New York State Theater Institute as a kid and I know what that had, those mentors that I hold so dear to me and growing up in that. And I'm now on the other side of that where I'm teaching and stuff and I'm trying to mentor students that are vastly sexist and racist and involved all over the place and wonderful. It's wonderful and eclectic. And I'm just so curious how you thought about your mentors and how you think about mentorship in general in theater. I know it's a white question, but I'm just curious.

[44:57] Lynnie Godfrey: I have to say, I don't wanna monopolize this, but I have to say there's a program that we're starting now in the league called Big Sister. And it's called Big Sister, sorry. And what we have noticed is that there are a lot of theaters run by women, some men, who are having issues with trying to get up off their feet. And so what is happening in the league is that we have, as you can see, a roster of really brilliant members. And so we hold panels with these young people to help them develop where they can be in the next step. And that's what Big Sister is about. It is about helping people. It's about looking around, taking what you have, and seeing how you can give it back to somebody else. That is, for me, what mentorship is and what it will always be while I'm sitting in this office.

[46:16] Alexis Greene: Yes, I think it has to do with giving a little of yourself to those people who are coming along in the same profession and not being selfish or self-absorbed, giving them everything you can possibly give them while still doing your own work. I was fortunate, so many things happened to me by chance, but I was fortunate to have been introduced to John Hausman, who was one of my very first mentors. And he took me under wing, introduced me to people here in town, and he would come to Saratoga in the summer with the acting company, which is where I lived. And the first acting company, our house was like a clubhouse to them. And John cautioned me about having a theater with government. He actually wrote the foreword to Hallie Flanagan's federal theater book, Arena, on federal theater. And he didn't wanna scare me, but he told me that the job was gonna be twice as hard because of politics. So he really prepared me for what I encountered. So give everything you can to the young people around you, and I'm proud of you. You've had a production, and you... God bless, Liz.

[47:35] Lynnie Godfrey: If we have time for one last one. Jumping off of David as an adjunct. Okay, so you're all successful women, highly accomplished. However, you found your individual niche as voices of women. Now that you are here and this is where you are in your life, could you please just respond to one thing? You've overcome to a degree whatever biases there would be for women, but now I imagine, taking out a limb, reflecting back to me, that you are all now faced with the final frontier of bias. I mean, if you wanna respond as women of color now dealing with the idea. Everybody's always looked down this way. Of course, there's nothing but isms in my life. There's age-ism, there's color-isms, there's jealous-isms. What you do is what I, my grandmother who lived to be 96 and her mother who lived to be 110 told me. Wow. They said, age gracefully. Act your age. Don't try to be anything that you aren't now, and bring beauty to that, and let the beauty within show. So as far as age-ism is concerned, if they say it's just a number, because I can still do the damn thing. Every day. Every day. So it's just a number. Color-ism is a whole different thing. It's an establishment, and it's in our history, and you have to deal with it in its subtleties and in its horrible stages every single day. I thought by now, when I was a little girl, and I experienced Martin Luther King's assassination and John Kennedy's assassination, that when I got grown, that all of this would be gone, and it's worse than it was when I was a little girl. Wow. Okay. So you have to deal with it. That's all. You don't give it power, but you have any of the isms. You don't give them power, but you deal with it.

[49:45] Oscar: Yeah, and I just want to add to that that representation really matters, because a lot of the isms are not just about those of us who are writing or producing. They're about what characters people want to see, and one of the most shocking things I found out when I was looking into women versus men writing plays, a friend of mine who's a male playwright, the first play he had trouble getting produced was the one that had two female characters. So it's not just the voice of the author. It's also who's on the stage, and how are we representing them, and if we're having ageism both against older people and younger people, we should make a commitment to representing a wide range of ages respectfully and non-stereotypically in our stories.

[50:35] Lynnie Godfrey: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And I feel that I know that I'm a stronger writer because I'm older, and it's, as you said, it's important to deal with the age of different characters and pieces. Organically happens. I'm not saying you have to do this, but I've been doing more screenplays lately, which is really shocking to me, and the screenplay of mine that's getting the most attention has two African-American female sculptors. One woman is in her 60s, and the other is 30, and because I don't have that much of a history in screenplay writing, a friend said, do a short screenplay. It's a 20-minute piece, and one of the things people have been writing to me is saying we would like for it to be longer because we're interested in these women. Nice. I'm not sure I want to do that, but I'm done, I have to think. But it's just, again, it's just, we get older, and again, I just feel as a writer, I know I'm so much stronger, and you just keep going forward with that.

[52:02] David Rigano: Thank you. Do you want to do the last, your wrap-up? Well. And if you have questions that we may didn't get to, we're gonna have a little signing, so you'll have a little bit of time with the authors and you can maybe ask something one-on-one when you go home alone. I think we're gonna have to ask something one-on-one when we're doing the signing event, but I know, Liddy, that you had a wrap-up question.

[52:31] Liddy: I just, I wanted to know what we, what each of these ladies, in a sentence or two, wanted to leave you with. Wanted you to go out the door, thinking. Is there anything that, you know, why don't we start with you, Jamie? Where's that mic?

[52:55] Jamie: I just want to say that what this panel made me realize is that the way to overcome setbacks is to take things that seem really not like opportunities and see them as opportunities. I think I've been working with two writers. I live in a small town. What I keep telling them and telling myself, I realize, I think it's important to enjoy the writing. I love writing. I'm not so happy when I have to meet people sometimes, but they're writing this out. I'm thrilled, and it brings me real joy, and I think that's really important. Take a child to the theater.

[53:41] Lynnie Godfrey: And I think, as I said earlier, to leave you with that we need to write and read what all of us have written and need to go to the theater and see the plays we have written, and defy, really defy any attempts to shut us down, whether in whatever ways people are going to still try to do that.

[54:23] Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder: I think I'm gonna say what Lloyd Richards said to me when I studied with him, and he said, if you do not see what you want to see, create it. So never stop creating what you have not seen. It gets better from here.

[54:44] David Rigano: Woo! And we are back. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Drama Book Show Podcast. Special thanks to Linny Godfrey, Jenny Lyn Bader, Michael Angel Johnson, Alexis Greene, and Patricia Di Benedetto Snyder for sharing their stories, experiences, and insights with us. For more information on the League of Professional Theater Women and their ongoing advocacy, membership, and artistic programs, we encourage you to explore their work as well. Remember to follow us on Instagram at Dramacast, follow our Eventbrite to find out when our next event will be at Drama Book Shop. And remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the Book Shop, and so can we, and we will. See you at the Book Shop.