This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello and welcome to The Drama Book Show.

[0:16] David Rigano: My name is David Rigano.

[0:17] Dylan Glick: And my name is Dylan Glick.

[0:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And once again, we're all here.

[0:22] David Rigano: Yes, the family is here.

[0:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Speaking of family, we are talking about a show.

[0:29] David Rigano: We are talking about a show that is published by Next Stage Press.

[0:34] Dylan Glick: Yeah.

[0:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: To which two of us are family.

[0:36] David Rigano: That is true.

[0:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[0:37] David Rigano: You have "Bated Breath" at Next Stage Press, and I have "What We Deserve."

[0:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[0:42] Dylan Glick: And whenever "Sleepy Hollow" gets plenty of rounds done, I'll send that in.

[0:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I always say this, but Gene is incredible and such a wonderful advocate for writers.

[0:54] David Rigano: And just he really believes in the playwright and does everything for us.

[0:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And he's a one-man show who really just does it all.

[1:03] Dylan Glick: Yeah.

[1:03] David Rigano: And I looked at when he was sending out emails for the batch of plays coming out that I was in.

[1:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:10] David Rigano: There was like ten of us.

[1:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[1:13] David Rigano: Yeah.

[1:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Ten or twelve of us all who have the February 1st publication date.

[1:18] David Rigano: And I'm like, everything that he's going through with me, he's going through—he and he's like you said, it's him.

[1:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's the company.

[1:25] David Rigano: And he's going through a lot, because you're drama.

[1:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, but I'm assuming there is.

[1:32] David Rigano: Yeah, but I'm sure in the batch, in the herd, the army of playwrights that he has, that there's got to be some drama.

[1:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I know personally that I have been some drama to him, but he's—

[1:40] David Rigano: For no reason of your own.

[1:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No reason of my own.

[1:47] David Rigano: Yeah.

[1:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But at that same time, he has just been an angel for all of us.

[1:53] David Rigano: And so I am so grateful for him, and I'm so grateful for Next Stage Press because they're really just lifting up the writers.

[2:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[2:00] David Rigano: Really being that voice for indie theater.

[2:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: They're one of, if not the only publications that has an open submission policy, that you don't have to be referred through an agent.

[2:03] Dylan Glick: You don't have to have had a major production to be even considered.

[2:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[2:20] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He has an open mind for the young writer, the new writer, the writer of a certain age.

[2:28] David Rigano: Yes.

[2:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[2:29] David Rigano: Yeah.

[2:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And the young writer, that's who I represent.

[2:31] David Rigano: Yes.

[2:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But no, it's a wonderful family to be a part of.

[2:37] David Rigano: And I'm so happy that we have this partnership with him and the bookshop.

[2:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Because so many of his writers are represented here.

[2:44] Dylan Glick: Oh yeah, I love that you guys have plays on in there.

[2:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love that Molomitch has a play.

[2:48] David Rigano: Yes, absolutely.

[2:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[2:50] Dylan Glick: And I'll just say to any writers out there who are listening to this and hearing, oh, there's a publication that takes open submissions.

[2:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: All I will say to that end is be patient.

[3:02] Dylan Glick: Oh, yeah.

[3:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's you and a lot of other people.

[3:07] David Rigano: And again, it's Gene going through all of it.

[3:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I think it was well over a year between when I submitted and when I, to me, seemed like out of the blue got the email that I had been chosen for publication.

[3:22] David Rigano: And it might have been more, you know, it might have been two years or more.

[3:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I don't remember exactly.

[3:27] Dylan Glick: It's so interesting.

[3:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It was about a day and a half from me.

[3:31] Dylan Glick: Yeah, just send and then two minutes later.

[3:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes, I read it.

[3:35] Dylan Glick: Especially with an open submission policy like that.

[3:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Just be patient.

[3:39] Dylan Glick: And who else is with him?

[3:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Our all mutual friend, the head of Meet Me at the Monologue.

[3:45] David Rigano: Oh, yeah.

[3:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[3:47] Dylan Glick: And we're getting a couple of his plays here too within the next few weeks, I believe.

[3:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But just another amazing writer to have—it are just someone else who has been such a friend to writers in helping get their work out there.

[4:04] David Rigano: Yeah, I want him to come here to the store because he's met all of us, but I definitely want him to meet like Sloth and Molomitch and Adam and other playwrights that are here to get the work out.

[4:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: The monologue—the play that the monologue that I have featured on his podcast is not published.

[4:22] David Rigano: The play that the monologue you had dealing with is not published.

[4:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Actually the same.

[4:28] David Rigano: We did a monologue from "Unmissed Connections," which is not published either yet.

[4:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's one of my favorite things that you've written.

[4:32] David Rigano: I love it so much.

[4:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So yeah, follow Meet Me at the Monologue because it's such a great way to get to know writers, both through the way that they discuss their work and through their actual work.

[4:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Now this is backtracking a little bit, speaking about him being in the city.

[4:50] David Rigano: Yes.

[4:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Dennis, you auditioned for one of Dennis's shows recently.

[4:53] Dylan Glick: I did.

[4:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I auditioned—it's the "Sloppy Abandon of Excavated Love."

[4:58] Dylan Glick: It's a play that he reached out to me about to read a few months ago, and I read it and I loved it.

[5:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And in the conversation, it was hinted at, "Hey, submit."

[5:08] Dylan Glick: And I'm one of those—I actually haven't acted since like on stage.

[5:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[5:12] Dylan Glick: Since before the pandemic, now that I think about it.

[5:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I have done a lot of film work.

[5:16] Dylan Glick: Daily, but yeah, here in the bookstore daily.

[5:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But no, I—on the film, yes, on the podcast, yes, but on actual being on stage or going to an audition, I haven't done that.

[5:26] Dylan Glick: And so it's like not necessarily hesitant, but I'm always hesitant about that.

[5:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I'm one of those that since my first love isn't acting, it's writing, that I have to really love a show to even consider doing this.

[5:40] Dylan Glick: But I did, and then I read that part, and I'm like, that is—he does some terrible things, but for some really good reasons, and I get that.

[5:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You at the store daily again, yes.

[5:52] Dylan Glick: No, I get it.

[5:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then so he brought it up again recently, and so I was like, "Yes, I'm gonna submit," and submitted, and I got a callback, and then I found out today I got the part.

[6:01] David Rigano: Congratulations.

[6:02] Dylan Glick: So I will be doing this play, and I'm happy, and I'm hopefully it'll be April.

[6:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's around the corner.

[6:07] Dylan Glick: Yes, it's around—it's happening roll.

[6:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I think it's happening the same week as—with "Bated Breath," like is with Aaron's production company.

[6:18] David Rigano: And how I feel similarly about my first love is writing; my first novel is not acting, but whenever there was a show that I love a lot, written by someone who I am dear friends with, and yeah, I'll show up and read stage trade.

[6:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, and it was also fun that you did get recognized for "With Bated Breath" at the 12th annual.

[6:38] Dylan Glick: It was funny because I have a horrible memory and I had no clue what she was talking about.

[6:41] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[6:42] Dylan Glick: Because she was like, "Were you the little girl in the Viagra play?"

[6:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I was like, "No, but Slay."

[6:48] David Rigano: Yes.

[6:48] Dylan Glick: And then David was like, "Yes, he was."

[6:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I went, "Oh, with Bated Breath, yes, I was."

[6:54] David Rigano: Yes, you were.

[6:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[6:55] Dylan Glick: It all comes back though to Next Stage Press. Like, all of these things wouldn't have happened had we not been given that shot by Gene.

[7:01] David Rigano: Yeah.

[7:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then another show that was given an opportunity is "43 Stages of Grieving: A Comedy."

[7:07] Dylan Glick: Nice.

[7:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Pregnant robots.

[7:10] David Rigano: Yes.

[7:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Like a lot of our favorite events, this is one that was not just an author talking about their play.

[7:19] David Rigano: It was a production.

[7:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[7:20] David Rigano: Bring in the cast.

[7:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Exactly.

[7:22] David Rigano: We had a cast, and they went through the story in such a wonderful way that it was so heartwarming.

[7:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it's one of those that you hear the concept and you go, "I know that'll be interesting."

[7:37] David Rigano: Yes.

[7:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then you see the execution, and you're like, "That was so sweet and so heartwarming."

[7:48] Dylan Glick: Yeah, I love a story that does that.

[7:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There's not—I only can think of one other heartwarming robot story.

[7:56] David Rigano: And it similarly is so surprisingly heartwarming.

[7:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I assume you're talking about maybe "Happy Ending."

[8:02] David Rigano: I was thinking "The Terminator."

[8:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, yes, it's a good one.

[8:06] David Rigano: Yes, no, yes, I was thinking of maybe "Happy Ending."

[8:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it's what I like about shows like that is they use artificial life to show what life really is.

[8:16] Dylan Glick: Yeah.

[8:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so using a non-human to showcase humanity is something that's just really magical.

[8:25] David Rigano: Yeah.

[8:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And that is really shown here.

[8:28] David Rigano: So let's dive into "43 Stages of Grieving: A Comedy."

[8:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Woo!

[8:34] David Rigano: Let me bring on Miss Sharon, who's going to tell us a little bit about the excerpt that we're gonna hear.

[9:16] Sharon: Thanks so much for the introduction, David, and thank you so much for having us here on the podcast in at the Drama Bookshop. I'm so thrilled that we have with us two of our truly brilliant actors from our production last year at The Tank. They originated the roles that they're going to read for you today, which makes this particularly special, I think. Today we're going to take you on an abbreviated journey through the heart of the play. Clara and Tara are specifically going to read some monologues, as I think the monologues get you into the story in a more complete way as excerpts. But know that the play itself is actually mostly dialogue between characters with some monologue moments.

[10:15] Sharon: But we start the play with a human-like pregnant dying robot breaking into the apartment of a human in the year 2333. We pretty quickly find out that Anne is also dying and has no interest in having a pregnant dying robot hanging around her apartment. Taya knows some information about the unique death scenario that Anne is facing. This is the year 2333, after all. And most importantly, Taya knows Anne could use some help, as she is in fact going through 43 stages of grieving. Now these 43 stages are pretty far removed from the five stages you might have heard of and get into the real stages of grieving, like ice cream and cleaning. And the "everyone has a that's just like my" insert proper noun story stage, where essentially it feels like everyone you share what you're going through with has the response of, "Oh yeah, that's just like my" and then like insert distant relative here, like a neighbor's best friend's mother-in-law's best friend, and you're like, "Yeah," and we all know how that feels.

[11:31] Sharon: So we're going to drop into the play at stage 10 of Anne's grieving, which is a stage of avoidance high. So in the course of this stage, Anne has actually left the apartment and she's doing a great job at avoiding her grief and feeling great about it. But this gives the audience a moment alone with Taya, our pregnant dying robot. And Taya is going to share just how she found out that she, a robot, was pregnant.

[12:12] Clara Francesca: Robots love when humans leave the room. We love unsupervised time. Not that we register happiness, but we are able to attribute the pseudo-feeling turn to the experience. This is because one of the initial waves of concern about robots was as we could understand feelings but could not feel them, we would be psychopaths. This fear resulted in robots being programmed to be jealous of the ability to feel. We want to feel so much, we resort to labeling experiences with emotions. For example, this morning I was at home banks for my leasing company, Excelsius. My engineer was addressing a temperature issue, and he had to go to the bathroom. He stepped out, which gave me happiness.

[13:01] Micharne Cloughley: I looked at the analysis he had been before me, and I saw highly abnormal patterns in my core statistics. This was far beyond temperature issue. Every single one of my measurements, speed, flexibility, energy, strength, even my intelligence were all decreasing notably, if minutely, and with the exact same rate of acceleration. This was unprecedented. In my engineer's office, he has a digital picture window. At that moment, an old picture of a rainbow rotated onto the screen, which was a nice timing. Well done, visual picture window. And just as I'm thinking that and looking at this picture, something inside me moved, just a tiny bit. I did not have any feelings to attribute to the experience.

It was completely new. My engineer was obsessed with historical media, especially anything science fiction. If you know the old genre, you will be familiar with the fantasy of robots running away. The reality is there is nowhere to run. You will be trapped and found. So we used to talk about how a robot could maybe run away. And the only way that would really work is to decommission yourself as soon as possible. I wrote in his notes hashtag YOLO, which is a joke from the first generation of social media. It means you only live once and was used to encourage risk taking behavior. I then walked out of the office, started running data on the nicest human in a five-mile radius.

[15:02] Micharne Cloughley: So while Taya is facing this complicated prospect of new life, Anne is facing a complicated death. We find out that Anne has participated in a trial of life extension technology. Now this technology was extremely successful. So successful, she is the last remaining participant from the trial, and she is 333 years old. So we're gonna go and drop right back into the play, jumping ahead just a little bit to stage 15, the hard cheese stage agree. And yes, if you're wondering, there is a soft cheese stage retrieved later in the play. We pick up after Anne has eaten a whole load of hot cheese and is feeling reflective in her food chroma. This is Tara Pacheco as in my freshman year at college, we had Cheese Day Tuesday parties.

I had a friend, Jessie, who had a job giving out samples on a supermarket. On Tuesdays, she could take home all the cheese that was left over. And oh my god, there was so much cheese. And none of us had money for fancy cheese then, so it was absolute heaven. Jesse was crazy smart. I always got good grades, and I thought I was pretty smart. But then, and I don't think this is uncommon in college, but then you meet someone who's like, wow, you have just redefined the capacity of the human brain for me.

[16:39] Micharne Cloughley: I've never had this experience, but please continue with your story. You would have met your match in Jesse, let me tell you. She would hold court on Cheesday Cheesdays, sharing her thoughts about the limitations of the stock market or the future of mass transit. One Tuesday, she started talking about longevity research. She was so excited for it. I remember her saying, it takes a long time in life to master anything. So what if you could live for 200 or 300 years? How much could you achieve then? To start with, a lot of us were like, no, I just want to die a natural death. And she was like, really? If you had the option to live longer, would your aging positive 20 or 30? Would you really say no to that?

No. Exactly. Anyway, she was in a car accident at the end of the year. A drunk driver crossed into her lane when she was coming back from a late night shift. And she died. They said it was instantaneous. And it was just so shocking and so pointless and so cruel. Like of all the people on the planet, why did she have to go? And because there was an investigation, her family had to have the funeral after school. And because it was summer, everyone had plans, places to be. So when we went back the next year, it was not like nothing had happened, but it was a new year.

[18:32] Micharne Cloughley: I feel sick. Possibly too much cheese. She wrote about the physical side effects, particularly about the parts of her body that were not in a state of hyper rejuvenation. Her hands, her feet, her neck. She wrote about the years in which all her friends and acquaintances from her standard lifetime died. She mentioned Jessie in one article. She wrote, Jesse wasn't why I participated in the eternal youth trial, but I probably wouldn't have gone through with it if I'd never known her. She said she chose to participate in the trial to access technology she thought she would never be able to afford. She wrote about feeling that she was finally getting ahead when she had always felt left behind. Anne said that at the very least, through the trial, she would have more time to make a difference in the world.

Another thing the robots do not understand is the drive for humans to make their mark, to be famous, to leave a legacy. 100 years after you die, the chance of a single person remembering you is extremely small. This has now been proven with the extended lifetimes of humans with E.Y. So approximately 30 to 99% of all human activity is a complete waste of time. Humans are often confused or lie about their motivations. Hence the range in data.

[20:28] Micharne Cloughley: Teya in particular is winning Anne over by such actions as joining in a whole lot of hot cheese. But as Anne opens up to Teya, we realize that Anne is choosing to end her life after being on the planet 333 years. We find out that Anne has already activated end of life medication that will be ready in two days. But Anne has really made up her mind about dying after considering it for literal decades. As they're on this timeline of Anne's death, there's also been this ticking clock for finding someone or something to look after Teya's baby something. Immediately before the next monologue, Clara will read for us. Ang suggests to Teya to search, do a search for the most accepting being who will therefore look after whatever she is pregnant with.

Tea gets on board with this idea right away. I have run the data. Fifty years ago, a bunch of engineers in Los Angeles thought, hey, how come no one has recently tried to make the perfect woman? It seemed like an obvious thing to try to do with the recent progress in human-like robotics. It took them only a couple of months from idea to prototype, and she simply said yes to everything.

[22:05] Micharne Cloughley: When the creators of previous attempts at perfect woman and perfect men heard about this, they combined forces to sue this new company, who had called themselves perfect woman for real. These creators have made Miss Perfect, the first fully robotic sex doll. And nowhere it's needed. A line of silent companion robots available at all genders. These companies were happy to take billions of dollars of venture capital money in the 2250s. But in a stunning win for sixth wave feminism and sex workers' unions globally, none of these companies turned a profit. A fatal combination of a high price point. And the fact that human relationships have been mostly free since the beginning of time led to humans only hiring robots for specific work or events.

A mere handful of humans married robots. But I was hired by the perfect woman for real lawyers. Their strategy was to prove that perfect woman had existed before anyone's attempt to create a robotic perfect woman. My role was to prove the existence of unicorns in the hot crazy scale, which was established in the early 2000s television series, How I Met Your Mother.

[23:31] Micharne Cloughley: In the scale, the unicorn is a woman who is both a 10 on the hot scale and a zero on the crazy scale. The perfect woman! If you do not manage spirited or emotional dialogue frequently labeled as crazy, we sent prototypes of our perfect woman to 300 offices of the law firm, along with a relevant episode of How It Met Your Mother. The theory was if people identified her as a unicorn, we could say perfect woman had existed from the early 2000s. This case was evidently during the beginning of the downfall of the legal profession. Both the data and the logic were flawed, so the tactic was abandoned. But the prototypes that were sent out were never at all. So Brooklyn's perfect woman is currently at an attorney's office in Dunbo, four miles from here.

They have forgotten all about her. Tea then goes ahead and drones in this prototype of the perfect woman, who without production was a glowing old and the voice of the truly wonderful Alicia Rhino. This prototype chooses the name Mary as Anne refuses to pull out the perfect woman. So it's now the three of them moving through these stages of grief, which progressively carry more baritas as Anne approaches the end of her life.

[25:22] Micharne Cloughley: So tonight I dream. But anyway, the interviewer in this stadium meetings in and says, So, are you gonna have your own children? I've never had an interviewer be so loved. Instead, they would work this question into something about my charity. Like, why was I so interested in helping other people's children? Which is ridiculous, because if you could help other people's kids stay alive, wouldn't you try?

[26:02] Micharne Cloughley: But the answer to that question for pharmaceutical companies is no. So resounding no. We started. They put us out of operation. In my dream, my mouth was completely dry. I can't speak. My ability to reproduce was in fact thoroughly checked out by the research team before being admitted to the EY trial. I didn't know until then that my chances of ever voluntary treasure were very low. This helped me get into the trial, actually. As much as possible, they didn't want to deal with biological offspring of the first trial. I've never felt maternal, but I took a day off to be sad about it. I went to the beach and stared at the ocean. The fact that the waves keep coming is so nice when you're sad. Like you don't have to do anything. The waves have crashed in before you and they'll crash in again after you.

[27:46] Micharne Cloughley: You can read the play and experience the ending yourself. But the overall idea of the end of the play is that nature will reclaim us all in the end. We see a little hint of that in the last model of Mika. The ocean is going to be important, as is the idea of rebirth. But really, but really we've spent the majority of the play in this environment that's entirely man-made. And nature is going to change all of that by the time the lights go down. Thank you so much to Clara Francesca and Tara Perchecker for reading for us today. You've been a delightful audience, also, so give a thanks to you.

[28:29] Micharne Cloughley: And just before we get into the questions, I want to finish with a little anecdote about the title of the play. So I started writing this before the pandemic, and when I'd mentioned the title, everyone who I'd say 43 stages of grieving to immediately understood that it was exaggeration, that 43 stages of grieving is absolutely a ridiculous number of stages of grieving. And so then people also implicitly understood it was a comedy. But after the pandemic, when I'd say the title to people, everyone would just nod and feel like, yeah, 43 stages of grieving. That sounds about right. So I have to add in a comedy to the title. And I think that's an apt reflection of where we are as humans, or maybe as New Yorkers right now. And I really wrote this play for the grief-saturated world that we live in. Thank you.

[29:37] Micharne Cloughley: Thank you again to our wonderful actors.

[29:48] David Rigano: Sure. Let's get this as well. Sorry for the moment of dead air.

[30:03] David Rigano: All right. Thank you so much for bringing that excerpt with you today.

[30:09] Micharne Cloughley: Thank you for having us. It's so exciting to be in the Drama Bookshop.

[30:13] David Rigano: Yes, here in we're in the Drama Bookshop where very frequently people come looking for plays that they want to produce. So to start us off, especially for those in podcast world or any producers, regional theaters who may be in the house tonight, why should people pick this play?

[30:37] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, that's a great question. To start with, it's a three-handed play for three female-identifying actors. And I think you could see from Clara and Tara's reading, it has these two really complex roles that go on a really big journey, both independently and then their interactions together on with the audience. I think they're really exciting roles potentially. And a fun thing about both of them is that they're not limited by age. Both of the roles can be any age. So folks are wandering in and are like, hey, I have this one friend, doesn't matter what age she is, they can do the play. Just in case you don't have someone who's 333 years old to play the role.

[31:19] David Rigano: Yeah. Flexible classic.

[31:21] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah. And then you have this role of the perfect woman, which can be played on stage or can be a voice cue, which then opens up this fun casting possibility of who is going to be like this very specific idea of the perfect woman. And then in terms of sci-fi theater, the play is really deliberately written to be able to be produced quite cheaply without sacrificing really creating like a futuristic environment. So one example that I'm quite proud that the team came up with that instead of having like phones or some kind of like physical communication device which would therefore need to look quite expensive, we used implants in their ears as a means of communication. So like Anne would literally just tap her ear to send a message or make a phone call and like the implant in her ear was so small that even the front row couldn't see it.

[32:17] Micharne Cloughley: So it was free totally and my director's brain is going and I'm seeing staging the first scene where she finds a robot in her apartment she's gonna call the cops I'm seeing staging of someone like I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do like with her finger hovering over her ear yeah she's gonna make this call.

[32:34] David Rigano: Yeah yeah and we implicitly understand all she has to do is that one most right into a world that we know is not ours.

[32:43] Micharne Cloughley: Yes yeah absolutely and there is also there's a high budget version out there if that's if that's your fancy wondering into the Drama Bookshop we can have physical drones on stage I'm all here for it but it is possible to create this world really theatrically as well on stage. And then moving more to the story and the content of the play we delve into these issues which I think things that are really on the front of everyone's mind right now with AI, with grief, with motherhood with technology with assisted death so I think in different versions of the play, you could zero in on one or a few of those issues to really highlight them and bring them to the front. And then finally it's a comedy. And I think it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. If you already see a play in 2025, make it a comedy. It doesn't need to be my play, but bring a comedy into the world for everyone.

[33:35] David Rigano: So you mentioned that you started out with the idea of a dying pregnant robot. At what point did that idea develop into a play about human grief?

[33:49] Micharne Cloughley: Pretty quickly. The symbolism there with the pregnant and dying, I felt was inextricably linked to exploring grief. And then actually, quite quickly, the kind of notion that you have this like human that is dying as well, and the robot wants to keep it alive, created this just complex and interesting scenario that then that was the fuel for the rest of the play. I also love the dichotomy that the robot who's dying isn't going through any stages of grief. Yeah, she's thrilled. She's excited. But she's a sip, but in assisting this, they have these kind of parallel journeys.

[34:31] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, yeah. And it was really important to me that the robot is kind. I wanted to create, and I'm by no means the first or the last artist to do it, but I think putting versions of the future in which robots are good to humans into the world, whether you believe in manifestation or not, I'm not sure, but I think creating these visions of the world, at least to put our mental energy into a little, I think is important. That's not totally dystopian.

[35:00] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, yeah. And that there's a place for dystopian. They're important too. But right now I feel like we're like swimming through the dystopia. And we I think we need some. Sometimes it feels we're living in the dystopian future. So having a hopeful future, yeah. Even 300 years from now, whether any of us are here to see it. I think actually, and that's one thing about setting it for so far ahead was quite important because then you can make these jokes and you can have this version of the future which is so removed from anything now. Different things can be funny in 2333. I was even doing the math in my head while watching the bit of presentation. I went, oh wait a minute, okay, she's 333. The play takes place in 2023, which means that Anne is right now in our timeline younger than I am.

[35:50] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, it's easy math. She was born in the year 2000. So when she started talking about college, I'm like, oh, that was like two years ago for her. That was very recently. In our timeline for her. So yeah, and I don't know if I want to live to be 300. So much very much in that camp. But it might like the I mean, and obviously there's like the Netflix documentary about that right now, and it is like very topical. I think it is gonna be a thing that that there are going to be choices to be made. I want to open it up to all in attendance as well, if you have any questions about about the play, about what you just saw, about the sci-fi world in which this takes place, about the potential for producing. Does anybody have any questions for Micharne?

[36:39] David Rigano: You don't have to yet. I have more questions.

[36:41] Clara Francesca: Yes.

[36:45] Clara Francesca: Hi. I'm curious about the transition from Barnard Rescue and a Toriously Funny Show into writing something like this, which actually is quite funny, and we can talk about that.

[36:56] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, absolutely. I think the two projects are as far away from each other as they possibly can be, which I think there was probably some degree of finding a different kind of release in the play versus the when you look at the worst of humanity in Law and Order SVU. But actually, I just zoom out for a second to respond with a bit more of a general thought. I think it's also like quite interesting that we live in a time where as writers and really as all creatives, there's this notion of like personal brand, which I think really brings people's expectations a little bit to what's your brand? What's the thing that you do? And if you think about the writers who really have aspired all of us in one way or another, they wrote so many different kinds of stories and so many different kinds of genre.

There was comedy, there was tragedy, there's fairies, there's battles, there's history, there's Sondheim. I promised again in one Sondheim today, but did it. Every Sondheim, obviously, his voice is present, but the works are also different to each other. All of that to say, and actually, I do understand it because marketing is important. So when people see something, they want to be able to latch on to something that they can latch on to that. This is going to be good because this writer does this X-wavy thing, and this is another one of those XYZ things. So I do get it. But I also think that as writers, we are curious people, and that curiosity, I feel like having just an implicit understanding again that we are curious, we're gonna write lots of different things.

I would like love that to come back into theatrical context. I also think it's so much easier for other people to look at your body of work and see the brand rather than for you to be like, I write this. I know so frequently, I'm like, oh, I just wrote that. I don't want to write that again. I want to write something completely different.

[39:00] Micharne Cloughley: And then someone will look at the two plays side by side and they'll be like, you do realize that you did XYZ in both and that's your implicit thing.

[39:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's right, right.

[39:09] Micharne Cloughley: And on that, I feel like I always write about women. This entire cast is women. It explores issues of feminism really explicitly. Law and Order obviously has, you know, the longest running live action female character in history at its center. And then also, like my work always has a research element to it. This play is more imaginative than some of the other things that I write, but I have a play that's entirely created from oral histories of early Australian feminist women and recorded by a female oral historian, Hazel De Berg. So the research element, as much as it might seem a little further away in this project, everyone knows Law and Order, ripped from the headlines, but actually importantly, written from like multiple stories, it is part of the process there.

[39:58] Micharne Cloughley: And then also hope. I feel like all of what I write, even when it's a bit bleak or complicated, like there's hope. And I think with procedurals, one reason that we love them is because you keep coming back to them again and again because good conquers evil, good conquers bad guy gets locked up, yeah. And there's inherently hope in that.

[40:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So going back to what you were saying about doing the research and this one being much more imaginative. What research goes into building a futuristic world?

[40:29] Micharne Cloughley: I think that there's kind of two parts to it. The first part is even in 2021, there were chatbots that you could organize the data as such that you could talk to a deceased person from your life. And that was quite a while ago. The San Francisco Chronicle did a really great article about that. So there's research of like where we are and then where we might be going, and then there's the fictional side of it as well. And I hadn't written in sci-fi before, so I delved in there. So I think like taking those two things side by side is important.

[41:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So what did you want out of the fictional? We talked a little bit about having a hopeful future, having a less dystopian future, but what, you know, the full world building journey of some of it coming from okay, what's been done with AI and robots and what might be done, what was your goal with building that world?

[41:37] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, the positive version of the future was a huge part of it because I wanted these female characters on stage to have kind of a community in a way, and to support each other, and they all have their flaws and their weaknesses, like the human included, but they still have this like weird, like little family dynamic to get through this incredibly bleak moment and hopeful moment in various ways.

[42:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And it is fun that even the robots have human-like flaws.

[42:07] Micharne Cloughley: Yes, definitely, for sure. And I think the excerpt that we heard from Clara when she's talking about the fact that robots in this version of the future have been designed to understand feelings, because if they don't understand feelings, they're gonna be psychopaths. I feel like that was like a little window into some kind of very futuristic logic and how that will all play out in code is not my concern right now. But it was, and that she is a feeling science specific robot.

[42:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes, yeah, and that there would be other versions out there. And also I think one of the things that has preoccupied artists is like, are people gonna marry robots? Is this gonna be a thing?

[42:56] Micharne Cloughley: And I do actually, I don't think it's gonna be a thing. I think that I believe in humanity too much. I believe in love too much.

[43:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, yeah. Do we have any other questions from our audience?

[43:09] Audience Member: Yeah.

[43:11] Audience Member: Yes. Hello, Micharne.

[43:13] Micharne Cloughley: Hi, Jack.

[43:14] Audience Member: Now, Micharne, you're Australian and American.

[43:16] Micharne Cloughley: That's right.

[43:17] Audience Member: Together.

[43:18] Micharne Cloughley: Yes.

[43:18] Audience Member: What in the play might have been influenced by your Australian-ness, and what by your Americann-ness?

[43:25] Micharne Cloughley: Well, both. That is a fantastic question asked by Jack Feldstein, who is also an Australian-American artist. So the American actually is easier to answer. I feel like the whole health insurance segment that you just heard, obviously, that conversation has jumped a whole long way since spring of last year, but I just the sheer scale of exploitation that goes on in the health insurance industry definitely was like a moment there. But to zoom out to a broader view of things, I think that Anne is like a little Australian actually, in her pragmatic attitude towards dining and in her embracing of within the stages of grieving, there's five joking stages. And I did have a moment of is this too much?

Is this disrespectful? But I feel like Australians who like never want to talk about their feelings ever. It's let's have 43 joking stages of grieving, like jokes all the way, please. So I think that is like definitely an Australian element, and then Americans specifically, I think I definitely was picturing this is in Brooklyn in 2333. So that there was an American aesthetic kind of which really formed the bottle in which like the play took place, I think.

[45:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's a great question.

[45:04] Micharne Cloughley: It is also really quickly, Mark. Can we get some assistance, some tech assistance really quickly? We're gonna keep going. I just realized that it says that we're running a little low on battery, even though we're plugged in. So I want to make sure that we don't lose, we'll edit this part out of the podcast. I just want to make sure that we don't lose power on, I don't know if we're service.

[45:33] Micharne Cloughley: But since we are still recording and we're still going, if it shuts down, we'll figure out what to do. And I think Mark's getting another computer that we can plug in just in case we lose it. But let's keep going. Because you did mention during the reading portion that you started writing this pre-pandemic. And you talked about how the pandemic affected how people looked at grief. But certainly another thing that has come quite a way since and it's in the papers all the time, or whatever technological media you read your papers, is AI and where we are with robots. So can you talk to me about how that affected the play? Were there rewrites done as, but you also talked about writing ripped from the headlines? So were there ways in which the headlines affected this play as you were putting it on?

[46:20] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, so one of the reasons that I actually produced the play, co-produced plays in spring last year, was because the conversation around AI was changing so quickly, and our feelings around AI was changing so quickly. There was so much fear, I think there is still so much fear, and I was like, what are we gonna, are we gonna be able to laugh about these jokes in the future? And particularly fear around AI wiping out a part of an industry or specific kind of work that then if all of a sudden there were all of these unemployed people, at least in the short term, would we be able to laugh about this? But as it's played out, AI in a lot of ways is still like good for a robot. Writers are still writing this. But it's interesting actually, though, like the interplay of what's playing out versus what you're writing on the AI side of things, because I was also like the year 2333, that decreased a lot of the kind of like immediate concerns.

[47:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Right.

[47:23] Micharne Cloughley: Actually, the thing that I could not have predicted when I started writing this play was that Roe versus Wade was going to be overturned. And even in this presentation, every time I say pregnant and dying in the same sentence, there are women dying in states where abortion is banned. They're either pregnant or they've recently given birth, and they've been either delayed or denied medical care. There's individual stories being reported on. There isn't a wide amount of data available just yet. But these stories, like it is women dying. And we don't want more data.

[48:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: No, but I feel like so.

[48:03] Micharne Cloughley: I had some nervousness around that kind of concept. Two things that I was thinking about was the monologue that Tara read for you about having children. That moment of the play, actually, there was someone sobbing in the audience one night, which when you have a reaction that strong, it's like doing something.

[48:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[48:27] Micharne Cloughley: And then the symbolism to be like pregnant dying robot. It's like hollow metaphor. So I think we're okay, but I am actually like my next play is specifically dealing with the lack of maternal care in some states right now. It's also a comedy for most of the play, and it's called He's Actually a Really Nice Guy.

[48:48] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's a great title.

[48:50] Micharne Cloughley: Thank you.

[48:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh yeah.

[48:52] Micharne Cloughley: But I look forward to whatever happens with that next.

[48:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Thank you.

[48:57] Micharne Cloughley: I like I'm making it right for myself.

[48:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, in really explicitly dealing with what is going on right now.

[49:03] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah.

[49:04] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I do think that obviously the AI and the robots are not going away.

[49:10] Micharne Cloughley: No.

[49:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's why I think that even now, no matter how scary some aspects of it may seem, we have to be able to laugh at it. Because it's not going anywhere.

[49:20] Micharne Cloughley: So we have to be able to find the humor in stuff. And I even thought when she said I had the charity, and as soon as I started the charity, they raised the premiums on only children. Yeah, that I went, oh. And that's, and obviously United Healthcare and whatnot hadn't been very recent. And yet, I don't even, I don't even want to say that the play was prescient. Like it, that's very much what's going on in the world of healthcare. I'm sure literally every person in this audience has a story of this thing wasn't covered, and they said it was gonna be covered, and the nightmare scenarios that you find yourself in. But I would also say that I would hope that the pregnant dying being in this being a robot will temper some of the what could be a very strong reaction.

[50:14] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, I think it's fine.

[50:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I think I am just so aware of it.

[50:19] Micharne Cloughley: Oh, yeah.

[50:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: When you take it also when you take it out of the context of the play, right? When you're in the play, you're relating to Teya.

[50:26] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah.

[50:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You're thinking of her as a being, as a person, you're relating to her. But when you say it as a sentence, like separate to that, it's no, that's humans now.

[50:37] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah.

[50:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[50:38] Micharne Cloughley: But I think that's what some really good sci-fi does. It says to us, oh, look at this beings that are not us, that are very explicitly not us, and we can watch it and go, oh, but that's us.

[50:51] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, I didn't want that though. Like that I didn't want that prediction.

[50:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[50:57] Micharne Cloughley: And I think that's also part of the risk you take with sci-fi is that we can't think about it like really explicitly. She's still a robot, right? Like in this version of the future, I'm not making women go through what women are going through right now.

[51:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[51:13] Micharne Cloughley: That is a robot, and it is. I'm not gonna give a spoiler alert.

[51:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[51:19] Micharne Cloughley: You have to, you all have to buy it on the way in, and you out in podcast land, you'll have to read the play or convince your local theater to produce it, and then you can find out what happens.

[51:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So having gone down that wormhole about AI and the things that scare us about it. Anyone else have any questions?

[51:38] Micharne Cloughley: Maybe lighter hearted questions.

[51:46] Audience Member: Yes.

[51:46] Audience Member: Yeah, no, yeah, go for it.

[51:49] Audience Member: Was there something that you changed like later in the process? And if so, what gave you the confidence to make a big change later on? Were there changes later in the process?

[52:06] Micharne Cloughley: Can you think of any? I was curious, like, what did you have to make any big changes as you're writing the play? Hmm. I think for this play, it was much more like a refining and refining process. Mary actually didn't exist in the first draft, and it was then a lot heavier, so much heavier. And so bringing Mary in all of a sudden gave that last really half of the play, just so much more life and complexity and more fun, and was a comedy. So I think I did get a little bogged down in tone, but it and I think actually like coming back to the world building process, you I had this overall idea of like my explicit rules for what was going on, and then once you have those rules, I was like, what if there's robots that never got fully developed, right?

And what's gonna be our thought process around how a human is presented? And one of the very fun things about creating like a one-off piece that stands alone is that you can then tell this story like very clearly about so this is how like the perfect model like came about, which is I think like quite satisfying for the audience. And I do love with that also that for everything that you were like, oh, we might have changed in this way in 300 years, we might have changed in this way, that how a bunch of male scientists decide to build the perfect woman has not changed at all in 250 years. And it's also actually interesting as people start reading it and responding to it, like there was like one kind of note that was like, why isn't this real life?

Like this is 43 stages of reading, why isn't this said in real life, which would have been an enormous change. And I was like, do you want to see that funny? Do you want to see like a human go through 43 stages? I think it also like it being in a situation that that every single member of the audience can only imagine being you've lived for 300 years and you've decided it's finally time to give up the ghost is makes it something that we can watch someone else go through because whatever is relatable about it, we're never gonna go through that.

[54:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes. Going off of that question, I did also want to know because you talked about how this is very easily producible or extravagantly producible. When you put the play on and you were in the process of finding the real world logistics of representing this futuristic world, did that affect the writing of the play in any way?

[54:55] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah. Yeah, you mentioned the implants. That came out of the production. Not it came out of imagining the production. We weren't actually like close to it, but it was all of a sudden when oh, you have to produce XYZ technology, you're like, let's find a creative program with this. Yep. But the I think it was I think the writing was more shaped by the fabulous actors that we had on board who all of a sudden making the emotional tissue of their journeys make sense, even though they're 333 years old and a robot like the complexity of their journey still needs to be very specific, and their relationship needs to be very specific. So I think really we which is less about the world building and more about the dynamics, but I think it's actually easy to lose sight of those dramatic moments when you are do have part of your brain in the world bullying and in that kind of side of things.

[56:03] David Rigano: I think that we've got time for one more question if anyone has one. And again, if you don't, that's fine.

[56:11] Audience Member: You're all yes. Hello, very nice to meet you. So I was fortunate last spring to see I think Robert on stage. Thank you so much for coming. Wonderful, beautiful work. I was just wondering as a writer, I'm an actress, did you tweak anything after watching Clara and Tonya perform it or audition for you?

[56:37] Micharne Cloughley: The work was just so like flawless on stage. And so I was just wondering from reading the script. Did you tweak?

[56:45] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah. Yeah, so yes, there's a short answer there. The I think bringing the relationship into into greater clarity, allowing Mary to be funnier as well. She as soon as you have someone to play off against, I feel like sometimes as a writer you can imagine the jokes, imagining like the reaction to the jokes is like a kind of a different thing. But yeah, actually, so we had a reading of this before had readings of the play before the production. And so there's a monologue actually that we didn't do today that became known as the Transport Monologue amongst the team, and it was an and monologue played by Tara. And it actually so there's a whole romantic element to this play that we didn't get into tonight because there's a lot going on in the play.

Needed to get some clarity. But it's essentially like this list of little tiny emotional abuses that she's suffered in this relationship. And I played with that monologue a lot because Tara just did such a wonderful job with it that you just wanted to get it as crisp and as like the journey of it as clear as possible. And then as an example of how important the audience is, that monologue had more people come up to Tara, I think, than anything else in the play. And even in readings, it was getting like a lot of strong reactions. And there was actually a guy that came up after one of the readings who really related to it. And the final line of the monologue was I was a case study in why women don't leave because it's just not that bad. And so then after that interaction, I then changed the line to I was a case studying why people don't leave because it's just not that bad. Y'all impact the work.

[58:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And from that, what was there anything that you learned from the production that when it came time to publish, you thought, I'm gonna I'm gonna do some tweaks between production and publishing not a lot, honestly. I think it was more grammar.

[59:01] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah. I we we had the kind of the process behind the production. We had several readings. I did done a bunch of rewrites between the readings with the idea that once we got into the rehearsal room, then there would be a limited number of things we needed to change to respect everyone's time and keep the rehearsal process as focused as possible on what the script.

[59:23] David Rigano: How long a rehearsal process did you have two weeks?

[59:29] Micharne Cloughley: Yeah, that sounds about but yeah, there might be people out there who are like, what? But yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, yeah, it's independent production, everyone's got stuff going on, so you want to get in and you want to be super focused on what is written there, rather than all my god, there's another work. Like we figured out like the things that didn't work. That's that's what the readings are for, yeah.

[59:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, yeah, so ultimately, at the end of the day, you've gone through the process the workshop process of getting having readings and getting feedback. You've gone through the self-production process and now you've got it published. Do you have personally any favorite moment or moments of this play?

[1:00:14] Micharne Cloughley: Yes, yes, definitely. So the ending is a favorite moment when you get there. I hope you enjoy it. But actually, there was a moment in the production where we had Taya, our robot, was essentially making what we now know as robocalls to Anne. And she's making this call as this like ex-boyfriend that is the one thing that Anne feels like she doesn't have closure on. And for our production, we actually had uh Nick Masters and actor Ivan Tonight away, pre-record the voice of Nick. So then Clara is doing this brilliant job of miming to this male voice, and we've only heard female voices the whole way, so there's this male voice being quite charming, and we realize oh, she is calling Ann, pretending to be this dude, and it's a loving action.

She's trying to give her closure, but then Ann asks Nick to be there for her final moments. Uh-huh. And so then we see Taya totally freak out because she can't deliver on that. She can't get anything to be there. She can only make this call. And so the entire motivation behind this is totally backfiring. Anne's getting very upset, and her plan is like totally dissolving. And it's this kind of like extremely human moment for Taya to have messed up so badly, but with such good intentions, humanish good intentions. Who among us has not? And you feel the audience like it's such a kind of fun journey for the audience in that scene to be like, wait, she's making the call. Wait, it's all going to hell.

And then ultimately they they do say goodbye, and that's the key change for the play. Then we're into act three. Because like she's actually, she thinks she's just said goodbye in this like kind of terrible phone call. And then we're on our way to the end of the play.

[1:02:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Thank you very much for sharing this play that is a comedy. And also with some other stuff.

[1:02:20] Micharne Cloughley: Thank you so much for having us, and thank you so much to Next Stage Press for making this possible.

[1:02:24] David Rigano: Yes, thank you, next. We love Next Stage Press here. Thank you all for joining us at the drama bookshop tonight. Thank you to Clara, Francesca, and Tara Pacheco for coming in tonight. And one more time, if you would all help me in thanking Micharne Cloughley.

[1:02:53] Micharne Cloughley: Are you crying?

[1:02:53] David Rigano: A little bit.

[1:02:53] Micharne Cloughley: Grieving even.

[1:02:53] David Rigano: Yes, are you in?

[1:02:55] Micharne Cloughley: One two or 42.

[1:02:59] David Rigano: 43.

[1:02:59] Micharne Cloughley: 43.

[1:02:59] David Rigano: Yeah.

[1:02:59] Micharne Cloughley: That's your age, David.

[1:03:00] David Rigano: No, yes. Not yet, but welcome to the show.

[1:03:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Not yet. I remember 43.

[1:03:10] David Rigano: Me too. Oh, back in the days. Having a fully warmed heart.

[1:03:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[1:03:17] David Rigano: Oh yes. Let's look into our next episode. Now we had an it was like a bonus event. Because normally we do these things only on Thursday nights.

[1:03:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[1:03:28] David Rigano: But this one was such a cool opportunity that such a cool opportunity that I actually changed my schedule.

[1:03:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Wow.

[1:03:36] David Rigano: Yes. I skipped the BMI workshop that night. If they hear us, they hear this, they'll know. And we did a Tuesday night event because it was with Lloyd Sah. Fantastic playwright. Another who brought in some actors, talked the history of his shows. But what I really loved was everything he had to say about writing. And we love to talk about writing. And so we're going to do that in the next episode.

[1:04:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So remember to follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast. Please subscribe to the drama bookshop on Eventbrite so that you can be notified whenever we add in-person events to our calendar. Give us some likes and some happy faces and some stars and some comments.

[1:04:20] David Rigano: And produce our plays.

[1:04:21] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That too. Follow us on Instagram and leave some comments and interact.

[1:04:28] David Rigano: We love it. We love it. It's it makes us feel like we're being heard and seen. And remember that all the books we talk about can be found here at the bookshop.

[1:04:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so can we.

[1:04:37] David Rigano: And we will see you at the bookshop.