This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome to Season 7 of the Dramatists Guild Presents Talkback, sponsored by the Dramatists Guild Foundation.

[0:07] Christine Toy Johnson: I'm your host, Christine Toy Johnson. This season, our theme is Forging Ahead. I'll be talking to theater makers across different disciplines, all innovators in their own right, who are challenging the status quo and forging pathways to build the creative lives they want to live. Here we go.

[0:27] Christine Toy Johnson: In this episode, I'm talking to Cheryl L. Davis and Jacqueline Reingold, celebrated playwrights and television writers, who have taken on the mantle of advocating for the inclusion of women writers over 50 on our stages. They also talk about how TV writing rooms are so different in their approach to this topic.

[0:47] Christine Toy Johnson: Cheryl is a multiple award-winning librettist, playwright, television writer, and practicing attorney. Some of her honors include the Ed Kleban Award, multiple WGA Awards, and multiple Emmy nominations. She has written for such television shows as Law & Order SVU, Days of Our Lives, and currently Beyond the Gates.

[1:08] Christine Toy Johnson: Jacqueline Reingold is a multiple award-winning playwright, TV writer, advocate, and teacher. Her plays have been produced around the world, and her TV writing includes The Good Fight, East New York, Grace and Frankie, Smash, In Treatment, and currently Best Medicine.

[1:26] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome. I'm so happy to see you here today. Jacqueline Reingold, Cheryl L. Davis, two amazing multi-hyphenate artists, writers, advocates for inclusion. And thank you very much for coming and joining me today.

[1:40] Christine Toy Johnson: So I think I explained to you that this season is all about process, and that is an intentionally broad word to use because I'm very interested in investigating what that means for different people, how your work is affected by the current events and or your current inspiration. And so I wanted to start because you both do so many things and write in different genres, a lot of theater and television plays and musicals. Cheryl, you're even an attorney, so there are just so many things. I'd love to start with you telling me a little bit about your origin story in so much as how it led you to be here today, doing all of the things that you love. And I know we don't have all the time in the world to do this, and you could speak all the time in the world, but just if you could give me a little bit of that, and I'll start with Cheryl.

[2:38] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, sure. Actually, I feel like my origin story kind of sets up the origin for a number of different ways that I've gone in my life because I started out as a very passionate reader. I have always loved books, love words. I'm a very wordy person by nature. And I remember being in elementary school and I'm also a Virgo, so I'm very organized. But I remember going very methodically through our school library and I loved history. So I was going through the biography section and I was looking for books about, well, first of all, black women. And then I ran through those and said, OK, books about women. OK, books about black people. And I was always trying to find myself in something, some representation in what I was reading.

And the fact that I had to go through this and try to think, I love figuring out what are these stories that I'm not reading in my everyday life, in my school, et cetera. So then that's another thing that kind of pans out into what I do for the Authors Guild. I'm very active in terms of fighting book bans and getting representation out there for writers of color. And likewise in theater, like women's stories, women's color stories, now aging women's stories. What are the stories out there that aren't being told regularly that we are searching for that we shouldn't have to search that hard for?

[3:58] Christine Toy Johnson: Right, right. I think that it's so interesting to look at all of the different ways that you are cracking open exclusion. And Ty Defoe, the wonderful writer that we know, who serves on the Council of the Dramatists Guild as well, talks about narrative justice. And I'm very struck by how we are finding that we need to look towards that and illuminate that more and more. And also I want to thank you for serving on the board of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund as well. We'll talk about that some more. Jackie, wow. I just want to say Cheryl does so much that every time I hear her talk, and she didn't even mention half the things she does. So she's amazing, and I'm honored that we are working on this project together, that she can find time for it. It's extraordinary.

[4:51] Jacqueline Reingold: I grew up a theater kid wanting to be in plays, wanting to be, you know, a dream. I was going to be some famous actress. Fortunately, quite quickly, as an adult, I figured out I wasn't very good at it. And I started to write plays. I wrote a play. It got a good review. And I thought, this is easy. I want to do this. I love this. It's the best review I ever got in my life. And yet I had a career early in my, I guess in my 30s, writing plays and getting productions at little theaters and development and commissions and all that. I never made it into the, at that time, it was very difficult for women. There were very few opportunities at the, like, big boy theaters. Most of us didn't get there.

And then at a certain point in my late, in my 40s, everything stopped. And I thought, oh my goodness, I guess my plays aren't good anymore. The theater is no longer, you know, every opportunity, they all went away. So I went into, became a TV writer at that point. In my 40s, suddenly, playwrights I knew had become TV showrunners like Warren Light, Teresa Rebeck. And I started to have a TV career, which was not my goal. But I was very grateful to go somewhere where my gender and my age were actually appreciated and my writing was valued and compensated. And then at a certain point, there was the creation of Honor Roll, which we can get to. And it became clear to me that it wasn't my writing I didn't, that kind of ended my theater career. It happened to so many women our age. And we started to organize, which is how we ended up in the beginning of this project.

[6:34] Christine Toy Johnson: So when you refer to this project, please tell our listeners who don't know what that is, what you're speaking about.

[6:41] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, we're speaking about, it's actually a collection of plays on a website of 50 plays by women over 50. And this all started because, as Jackie was mentioning, Honor Roll, we can get back to the history of that. But one of our projects that we were doing was we were going out and talking to artistic leadership of theaters and asking them, why aren't you producing more plays by women playwrights over 50? And we're not mean about it or anything. We're kind of like, how can we help you produce more of these plays? And a lot of the response was like, what are these mysterious plays and playwrights of which you speak? And after enough of that, and then people are asking us, well, do you have a list?

Are there plays? How do we do this? Said, OK, clearly there needs to be a list. Got something like The Kilroys, where we can go like, here. Here are these plays of which we speak. So then that's how we came up with the idea of actually putting together a aforementioned list.

[7:39] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah, I think I have found all through my advocacy life, too, when you're faced with, well, we don't know anybody. Are there any women writing plays? You just want to, instead of screaming, which you would like to do, you create something that helps them. I want to go back a little bit, because for those of our listeners who don't know about Honor Roll, can you tell us about how that started and what the journey has been?

[8:08] Jacqueline Reingold: So in 2018, there was a Facebook rant that Brooke Berman posted, which was something along the lines of, where are all the women playwrights of my generation? They are gone. They are disappearing. And suddenly there was like this incredible response. I still have it. It's 40 pages that happened within a few hours. And we were called, I think of it as we, everybody. We were called the submerged or submerging writers. And everyone, all these names came up. Where's this one? Where's this one? And it became clear to us from just that post, there was a need to investigate this. A Facebook group was created, not by me. I don't even know who did it. But I somehow was appointed an admin of this group. And then Lucy Wong and I were both appointed admins of this group suddenly. And Honor Roll was born out of that.

[9:07] Jacqueline Reingold: Well, what happened? And any woman over 40 can actually join Honor Roll on Facebook. You still can. And we started to organize slowly. And over the years, we created an executive committee that Cheryl and I are still on. And we raised awareness. We published books. But it's a very grassroots group of self-initiated action. So each member is responsible for taking action. There's no structure. There's no staff or anything. And at a certain point, Cheryl and I decided and we noticed that although we had done all that for five years, we're not seeing an increase in productions in New York theaters, which is what we are from New York. So we focus on New York. So that's when we decided we would visit every theater in New York City and ask them what was going on.

[10:01] Cheryl L. Davis: There were more than a few.

[10:02] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah.

[10:03] Jacqueline Reingold: Did you start with the non-profit theaters, the off-Broadway theaters? How did you choose?

[10:09] Cheryl L. Davis: Really starting with the non-profits and off-Broadway. We approached anyone that we thought would be willing to meet with us. But we started pretty much from those, our most immediate connections. Like EST, I think, was one of the very first ones. That was our first meeting because we were both involved there.

[10:22] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah. But so, yes, and reaching out to groups. And there were people like, hey, I know you. Will you meet with us? And then there were like, we had to be more formal introductions to those of which we did not have immediate connections. So, yes, it's reaching out to literally everybody.

[10:36] Jacqueline Reingold: And we've been to 30 theaters over three years. And then once we started talking to them, what Cheryl said is true. But also initially we thought, well, maybe we'll create a list from these theaters. They will recommend to us plays that they haven't produced for one reason or another but that they love. And then when we go to the other theaters, we can tell them about these plays. But we kept asking them and they kept saying, I mean, many of them said, we can't name even one play by an under-recognized woman playwright over 50. I mean, of course there are a few well-known ones. And we love them and we adore them. And those are basically the women who became well-known, the very few when they were younger.

But the idea is that, you know, when we were younger, as I said, there were very few opportunities. Because of sexism. And now decades later, though we were part of the fight to create gender parity, and there is thankfully more inclusiveness in theater seasons. But now we're like seen as old or as failures. We are not famous. So we don't get produced now. Obviously if we'd been any good, we would have had the same careers as these other women.

[11:54] Cheryl L. Davis: There are so many parallels in fighting for cultural inclusion and et cetera, et cetera. And I think what I'm interested in also is the conundrum, really, if you will, of exposing ageism by exposing something that's very vulnerable to a lot of people, which is their age. It's a vicious circle, right, of how do you illuminate the problem without exacerbating it? I guess that's my question.

[12:31] Jacqueline Reingold: Well, it's actually interesting because in connection with the list, there were some women who we approached and said that you've been recommended or your name has been mentioned for this list, and we want to let you know. Do you want to take part? No, my agent doesn't want me to be on this list of women over 50.

[12:52] Cheryl L. Davis: Yeah, we did find that. And it was sad, and yet we understood it at the same time because it really can harm your career if anybody knows you're over a certain age.

[13:03] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah, that's another problem, right, that we are dealing with. How do we own all of the parts of us that are being marginalized? I want to go back to asking about how you approached the people you spoke with. Interestingly, APAC, the Asian American Performance Action Coalition, of which I'm a co-founder, started in a similar way, a Facebook post saying, Hey, who here has auditioned for a very prominent off-Broadway theater? And people immediately chimed in. They were 10 years out of one of the best.

[13:49] Jacqueline Reingold: In America, never been seen, etc., etc. And so we also started by gathering to explore what was the problem, what we thought it was, which is that we were underrepresented in New York City theatres, which turns out to be, of course, true. And then also looking at the non-profits and going to build relationships. And as you are doing, which I so admire, not only the initiative, but the diplomacy with which you address the problem. And that's always been my tactic, too. A lot of people like to dismiss it as not having enough teeth. I don't care. It's my particular style, and I'm gathering yours, too. But I wonder how, first of all, how your inquiries were first received, and what surprised you about the ensuing conversations?

[14:48] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, we don't know whom you speak, was a little surprising. What was not surprising was the pushback of that we don't have enough money, because we all know that New York theatre is already struggling, non-for-profits, generally speaking. But that was an initial pushback that we don't have enough money to be able to support all the plays by all the various underrepresented groups.

[15:16] Jacqueline Reingold: How did you reply to that? How do you reply to something like that?

[15:19] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, that's really not an excuse. Essentially, people support the work that they deem is worthy of support, and we would say, what can you apply for grants, etc.? Oh, funders won't underwrite this. Funders aren't interested in works by women over 50. Also, we have learned as we have gone, as well. Probably our earlier meetings, Cheryl is wonderfully tactful, and I am not always. I have learned to hone my approach a little bit after I got some horrified stares like, how dare you talk to me that way? So I had to learn, which hopefully I have. But yeah, everyone said we don't have the money, and then we always say, well, we don't understand. What does that have to do with anything? It has nothing to do with anything.

And we don't know these plays. Can you give us these plays? Well, now we have. And just to make clear, we didn't choose the plays. We asked theatre artists across the country to choose the plays so that we are not responsible for the play selection. But other things, you know, we heard. What was interesting was many people would say, oh, my God, I never heard about it. Of course women were excluded decades ago, and now those women are being excluded because they are older now. Of course, what a great, you know, it never occurred to me. And then we would notice they did nothing. So we would walk out thinking, yeah, we win. They got it. And then they did nothing. And we would follow up, and then we would never hear from them again. So that's also part of why we are doing the list. We did the list.

[17:06] Jacqueline Reingold: And what has the response been so far in spreading the word about the list, besides the pride of the writers?

[17:16] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, I think that this podcast is an example of the fact that the messaging is getting out there and the list is being more and more circulated and more and more people are aware of it. People are starting to do like reading series of plays from the list. Some of the playwrights listed have been approached by theater companies saying, we want to read your play that is on this list. We certainly got a lot of press for it, and it has raised awareness. I mean, our hope, and you can go, you know, it's 50 plays by women over 50 with number 50 on each. It's a really great looking website, and it tells you where you can read these plays. So anyone who loves to read plays, unproduced plays, they're there. So we have received a lot of press for it, and list number two is coming out in January. We have 100 plays, so another 50 will be out soon. And there's a reading series. There's three plays that are going to be read soon, which is really exciting.

[18:19] Jacqueline Reingold: And the playwrights are from all over the country, right?

[18:23] Cheryl L. Davis: They are. And it's interesting because it started off, it's kind of like mnemonically easy, 50 plays by women over 50, but then we had so many plays that it became two lists. And even then it was more, some people we had to disqualify because they were either really very well known, or they wanted to disqualify themselves. And the website also gives you information about how to reach the playwrights, a little bio, and all of that. So I think that's really fantastic. And it tells the story of how the list came about. And it was all designed, no money went into any of this. We are all volunteers. We're volunteers. The web designer, Carina Sirota, was a volunteer. It's beautiful, actually. We're proud of it.

[19:11] Jacqueline Reingold: I think it's so empowering when people come together and fight the good fight together. One of the things that you mentioned earlier I want to circle back to because I think we don't really talk about this very much, about how it's possible slash probable to internalize the feeling that, oh, perhaps I'm just not good enough because I'm being excluded from certain access. And I wonder if you've talked about that with other people, how it's come up in conversation or not. Maybe we're starting it now.

[19:50] Cheryl L. Davis: I don't think I talk about it very much, but I certainly do it all the time. I think all those creative artists, you get so much rejection on a daily basis that you kind of think, maybe I'm not as good as I think I am. But I think that was really one of the things that Brooke's rant did was you realize, oh, it's not just me.

[20:10] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah. Well, Jackie, when you mentioned that you were seeing that your plays weren't being produced as much and then you turned to a really fantastic journey of television writing, but that you were wondering, well, what's changed? Maybe my plays aren't...

[20:28] Cheryl L. Davis: Yes. And in that rant, somebody named me. I was named and I was like, oh, my God, I'm one of them. And there were so many women that were named that are either not writing plays anymore because at a certain point, people give up after so many no's. Or they went on to do something else, to teach, to do TV, to be a novelist, to do something completely different. And that's a shame because those were writers I admired that I thought the world of them and I'm like, oh, they stopped writing at a certain point. It's quite sad. It's very sad. I think also to not hear the perspective of those women and the experience that has come with their lives.

[21:14] Jacqueline Reingold: One interesting and unexpected thing that we did hear from some groups that have like emerging playwrights units or reading series or whatever is that they said that, well, they don't have much money to offer so that these women wouldn't be interested in taking part.

[21:31] Cheryl L. Davis: They just assumed that.

[21:33] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah, they assumed that, oh, well, they wouldn't be interested in playing with us. Have you asked them?

[21:38] Cheryl L. Davis: Of course, the reality is that when we came up, you didn't get paid for anything. We're the ones who are used to that. We don't, you know, it's quite different now. Wonderfully, you actually do get paid something. But back then, you know, so it's an odd and wrong assumption. We were also told, because a lot of these theaters, they have all those emerging groups and that's where they get their plays from quite often. But there are only young people in those emerging groups. It's code for young.

[22:10] Jacqueline Reingold: Right.

[22:11] Cheryl L. Davis: So, and they will, they admit that to us, you know, and then when we ask, well, why, you know, why? Well, the other response we heard, which was surprising, well, those young writers would be uncomfortable if someone older was with them. And we thought, wait a minute, where does that come from?

[22:31] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah, and then when you asked to elaborate, what did they say?

[22:36] Cheryl L. Davis: They just stood by their claim.

[22:38] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah.

[22:39] Cheryl L. Davis: Oh, interesting. But imagine you said that about, it was all a group of men.

[22:43] Jacqueline Reingold: Men.

[22:44] Cheryl L. Davis: And you said, well, the men would be uncomfortable if a woman was there. But it's okay to say that about an older woman with younger people.

[22:53] Jacqueline Reingold: Wow. Dislike. Yeah. I also wanted to ask you about the subject of people choosing what they think audiences want to see. So, I think there is an assumption that goes along with what you've just been saying, that people aren't interested in stories by older people or more experienced people, what more lived experiences. And then you go to the theater and you see the demographic of the audience. So, I wonder if that's come up in conversation.

[23:30] Cheryl L. Davis: Oh, we always mention that, that I think that the Broadway League some years ago discovered that the majority of Broadway plays, I think, or tickets, are bought by women over 40, over 50. We are the ticket buyers. So, it kind of makes sense to say that, well, wouldn't the people buying the tickets want to see themselves represented on stage? And some, I mean, we say that all the time. And one response we heard was also quite surprising. Someone who said, oh no, audiences don't care about who the playwright is. They only care what they're seeing, the age or gender of the actors on stage. And we did not agree with that, but we heard that.

[24:13] Jacqueline Reingold: That's interesting. So, the assumption that even if the playwright might be writing...

[24:21] Cheryl L. Davis: Maybe it's like a young man writing about an older woman, then it's like, oh, that's all they need. Kind of ignoring the fact that an older woman's voice may add something different and color the portrayal of that older woman.

[24:36] Jacqueline Reingold: I wonder about how that conversation... That conversation is not aging well. Let's be serious, right? In the fact that we have had more expanded... We have expanded the conversations around authenticity and cultural appropriation versus appreciation. So, I wonder if that has come up, that sense of... Look, I'm not one of the people who believes that you could only write about your own lived experience because obviously we research, we meet people. But I do think that there is something to be said for bringing your life experience into a play.

[25:15] Cheryl L. Davis: Authenticity.

[25:16] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah. And I wonder if that came up at all when they would say, nobody cares, which I don't buy.

[25:23] Cheryl L. Davis: I'm not sure we argued back. I think we were so surprised when we just started.

[25:26] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah, I don't think, clearly.

[25:28] Cheryl L. Davis: I don't think we argued back.

[25:29] Jacqueline Reingold: We made the bird look.

[25:30] Cheryl L. Davis: What we do say... Because we, of course, love young writers.

[25:35] Jacqueline Reingold: Yes.

[25:36] Cheryl L. Davis: But we are just talking about having an intergenerational approach to every season. And if you are not including, which I have to say many theaters are still not, if you are not including these women writers who are over 50 in every season, you're not serving those younger writers for that dialogue, and you're not serving your audience, and you're not serving the art form. So, we try to present it in that sense. And also, when we go to every theater, we bring some statistics. We look at what they have done over the past, let's say, three, four, five years. So, we are knowledgeable, and we see what they are producing. But it's a really interesting question, and I still don't know the answer. Why does the theater skew so young in terms of writers? Because we do not find that in television, right?

[26:29] Jacqueline Reingold: No. Well, I wanted to follow up with that, because... Can you speak, each one of you, about the shows that you're working on most recently? I know you've got multiple Emmys and...

[26:40] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, nominations.

[26:41] Jacqueline Reingold: Well, multiple Emmy nominations, and you both have written for many shows. So, I'd love to hear a little bit about the shows you've been writing, and how you're... Shifting the conversation a little bit, the general tone of the Writers' Room honoring experience, and also how you're able to bring your playwriting process into the room.

[27:03] Cheryl L. Davis: Okay. Well, I can talk about going back in time, starting with Beyond the Gates that I'm working on now, which I'm having a blast on, by the way. But our Writers' Room is... We do skew kind of older, because I think that's one of the things, when Michelle, our showrunner, was reaching out to start her new show, she was kind of looking for who has some experience that I can bring to this room to start this new show. And so, we look around in our virtual room, and a few of us are of the same age, and there are some of the younger generation coming up. But that was also...

[27:37] Jacqueline Reingold: As a potential concern in connection with soap operas as a whole is that the soap opera writing community I think skews generally older and there was actually one of our former now story editor is gonna be starting a writing program with CBS for soap writers. People are starting to realize that, huh, there's gonna be the pipeline is gonna have to dry up because our writers are aging. We need to get new sources of writers and they actually I got wrote on to As the World Turns back in like 2008 because the same woman was doing a program for Procter & Gamble, which was then producing soaps. I guess when Procter & Gamble fell out of the soap business that program also ended, but the recognition that there is a need to train up the younger writers in the younger generation, otherwise what's gonna happen?

You're gonna hold your hands and say like we have people who are writing who don't know how proper structure, don't know how this stuff should play out. But so you are actually working in those intergenerational rooms right now?

[28:31] Cheryl L. Davis: Yes, right now. Yeah, and we've got like young writers assistants who are, it's great to see them kind of come up and get these opportunities and they're on the ground floor and they're reading our stuff and saying, seeing how we're edited and saying like, oh, so wait, I shouldn't do it this way? This way is actually more clear or whatever. So they're actually in the room and my ability to learn, which is a wonderful experience too.

[28:55] Jacqueline Reingold: That's fantastic. Yeah, and Jackie, oh, well right now I actually had thought because I spent a number, I've been in a lot of TV shows and I thought, okay, I want to do, and it's fun and it's great because you are well paid and you get a pension and you get health insurance and this matters, you know, this is important. And playwrights, as we all know, are not particularly well paid, at least I was never. So anyway, but currently I then got an offer, much to my surprise, from the wonderful Liz Tichilla, who is also a playwright, to write for the second season of Best Medicine, which is a wonderful show and has wonderful New York actors on it like Josh Charles, D.D. Khan, Frank Wood, Cleo Lewis, Jason Veazey, so all these wonderful New York theater actors.

And the room is, we have a couple of younger writers, but it's mostly people who are not, you would call young, and they bring all their experience and talent, their chops and smarts to it. And I've been in other rooms, I spent some years, about six years working for the Kings on The Good Fight, and again, they hired people that, you know, it was always a mix, always a mix of women and men, a gender mix and an age mix. I never found anybody, you know, which I had found in the theater doors closed because either I'm a woman or because I'm older. It was the opposite, it was the opposite. But maybe it's also who hired me, the Kings, Marta Kaufman hired me. I mean, these are mature people who appreciate mature writers in addition to young writers, so the mix was always present.

And frankly, my joy is playwriting, so I am eager to get back to playwriting because that's what gives my meaning to my life and makes me feel most alive, though TV writing is super fun, you know, it's true.

[31:18] Jacqueline Reingold: And just because this is a podcast sponsored by the Dramatists Guild Foundation and it's part of the Dramatists Guild initiatives, I just wanted to throw in there too for people who are listening about the difference between when you're writing for television and you're a WGA, you're part of a union, and so that's why you can get your pension and insurance. And playwrights own their copyrights and so we don't have a union, we're not allowed to collectively bargain for that. It's so important to say that when you're a TV writer, not only are you not writing in your own voice, you also don't own your work. You are hired, you know, so it's an extremely different craft. And they are both crafts you have to learn.

[32:02] Cheryl L. Davis: Yes, also one of the things when you're writing on a TV show, you get used to being rewritten by somebody else.

[32:12] Jacqueline Reingold: That's true, that's an important part of the process. And when I wrote for Law and Order SVU, I mean, I already knew it from writing for soap, but Warren essentially said, you're gonna be rewritten. It's nothing personal, it's just come in knowing that you're gonna be rewritten.

[32:24] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, I wonder also, it's very different in that you are writing, you're writing in a room, you're not probably writing your own personal story in the television episode, right? So that must feel different to be rewritten, not like saying, oh, we want to change your family.

[32:46] Jacqueline Reingold: No, there is a certain, I mean, I love my TV writing and I take great pride in it, but it's not the same pride of ownership as my plays and musicals because again, I feel like I'm writing the voices of the characters that have been developed by other people and my job is to give as much life and humor and fascination and energy to them as possible. And I can certainly, I say, well, I hear her speaking this way and somebody else may go, no, she doesn't speak that way, she speaks this way. And I go, okay, fine, then she speaks this way and I will in future scripts try to have her speak more this way and less that way.

[33:23] Cheryl L. Davis: There's also one of the fascinating things about being involved in a show from up on the ground floor from a soap opera is because when we came in, the showrunner had written the first five episodes and from that point on it was assignments to the rest of us. So we kind of, we have a little clue of how the characters sound and who they are, but a lot of it, especially since in the early days before we had seen, we didn't know what cast was, we hadn't seen a lot of these people perform, we didn't have voices that we could hear in our ear to write for them. So we were kind of like writing on the fly and it felt a little bit more like playwriting in terms of like I'm coming up with some of these voices and beats and energies out of my head. And now it's much more like, okay, we know who the cast is, we've heard these voices, we're kind of like more in a groove now. We kind of like, okay, now we know how she speaks.

[34:15] Jacqueline Reingold: And I'm sorry, I don't know the new show, but it does, how many episodes per week?

[34:21] Cheryl L. Davis: Oh, five. So that's a lot of content.

[34:21] Jacqueline Reingold: It is, and a lot of characters.

[34:28] Cheryl L. Davis: It is, and it's a lot of the characters we already know, but we also come up with new characters. And then we have weekly writers meetings and if there's a new character mentioned in this week's breakdown thing, okay, what do we know about this person? What is she like? So I can try to write, try to figure out who she's gonna be. It's also by the time we're seeing it for writing the script, we don't know who the new actor is.

[34:50] Jacqueline Reingold: Right, right, yeah, we're kind of like, let's just figure this out.

[34:54] Cheryl L. Davis: Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting. There's also a lot less for me for TV writing, you know, it is, there is a formula that you have to follow, you know, there's a, you have to have a cliffhanger at every act, right? The scenes are very short, the stories are created by a group versus, you know, when I write a play, I can write, I write whatever I want, you know, what is compelling me, that's the importance of it. Of course, you don't have to write a certain page count or you have to write, you could, I mean, the only rule is that it's compelling to the audience, you know, hopefully that's it.

[35:30] Jacqueline Reingold: How do you balance all of the things that you're wanting to write right now? The things that are paying you, the things that are not paying you yet, how do you find that you can balance all of those things and your advocacy? Because I don't know if we have time to really get into it today, but I do acknowledge the pain of advocacy and the burnout that can happen and the cost of it on your personal resources because you care so much about fighting for the greater good and it does cost something. Again, I probably will have to do that next season, but yeah, but as we're sort of wrapping up, because I want to be mindful of your time, can you give any advice on how you're balancing all of these things?

[36:24] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, you can't. I mean, the truth is that you can't, you can only do what you can do. So while I'm writing on this TV show, it is a full-time plus job, so I honestly, I don't have time to write plays. Some people can do that, I'm not a person who can do that. But when the job is over, then I will write plays and I squeeze the advocacy in all the time. I mean, because I can do it at any moment and I just do it.

[36:50] Jacqueline Reingold: And I'm pretty much the same way in terms like it depends on your life and your personal schedule because, yeah, I'm writing for the soap opera, I have to write a script a week. I am also an attorney in the General Council of the Authors Guild, which I'm doing that in a part-time basis, but still that's a time commitment. And I find that my time for playwriting and musical writing, which calls to my spirit, is much narrower and it's more like when can I take creative time away from the soap to do that? It's like we had like a five to six week hiatus in the summer where I did get a lot of writing done, but unfortunately, I was working on musicals with other people and they were like, okay, great, you can work on this musical, these two musicals during these five weeks, and then I didn't, that meant I did not get any time to spend on the play that was just me. So now I'm trying to think about when will I find time to work on this play.

[37:47] Jacqueline Reingold: Do you find that sometimes they are living in different compartments in your brain?

[37:54] Cheryl L. Davis: Oh yeah, yeah. I used to be, when I worked at my law firm, I would be working on a brief and I would find like, do they're working on something and then like in this section of my brain is like, oh wait, I came up with a new scene for this. Then over here and then come back to the brief. So I find like they're all in different sections of the brain.

[38:12] Jacqueline Reingold: Yeah, that's so good. As I want to wrap up with one final question, what can we all do to help promote inclusion and solve the problems of the world? Go.

[38:32] Cheryl L. Davis: Well, I know what I do. One thing is that anytime I get a phone call or an email asking me to make a donation to a theater or to subscribe to a season, if it's on the phone, it's quite easy. I ask how many plays by women over 50 are in your season, especially under-recognized. And usually the answer is none. And then I say, well, I'm not donating and I'm not buying a season ticket unless and until they are in every season. So that's something everybody can do. And you know, you can approach any theater at any time and tell them what you want, these plays included. If everybody did that, it would make a big difference. I remember one time I was doing that when they were calling me for a subscription for an unnamed major nonprofit and I made a comment about the lack of women playwright representation and the person on the phone got very snippy with me, like we keep hearing that.

[39:32] Jacqueline Reingold: Also, we are hoping that because we spent about two years creating this list and then we're gonna go back to visiting theaters in New York and commercial producers and foundations, but we hope the list inspires people in their local communities to do the same thing so that more local playwrights can get produced by theaters in their city or town. So that's something you can do. You can do this. We're just two volunteers. It's not like we're an organization. We just said we're gonna do this and we did it.

[40:16] Cheryl L. Davis: That's wonderful. Thank you, thank you for all of it, all that you do and all that you are. We really are so indebted to you. This podcast is supported by the Dramatists Guild Foundation, a nonprofit organization that fosters playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists at all stages of their careers. DGF supports these writers with financial grants, free space to create new works, and career resources and programs. If you are a dramatist seeking support or are a lover of theater who wants to support the future of storytelling, visit DGF.org or follow @DGFound to learn more. The Dramatists Guild Presents Talkback, sponsored by the Dramatists Guild Foundation, is produced by me, Christine Toy Johnson, and edited and recorded by Bruce Johnson.

Our theme music is by Andrea Daly. We're distributed by the Broadway Podcast Network. Special thanks to the Dramatists Guild, and just a reminder that you can also view the video versions of these interviews on Spotify and YouTube. As always, to be continued.