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[0:01] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome back to Talk Back, the Dramatists Guild conversation about the theater world we see and the one we want to see.

[0:08] Christine Toy Johnson: I'm your host, Christine Toy Johnson.

[0:11] Christine Toy Johnson: The entire theater industry has found itself confronting a very specific access challenge this year.

[0:17] Christine Toy Johnson: Most theaters have been forced to close in compliance with state and local quarantine guidelines.

[0:23] Christine Toy Johnson: So many traditional boundaries have been broken.

[0:26] Christine Toy Johnson: The fourth wall has been replaced with a Zoom screen, and the audience with a chat room.

[0:31] Christine Toy Johnson: And artists are exploring different avenues for getting our stories told.

[0:36] Christine Toy Johnson: We are storytellers and world builders who cultivate our audiences across platforms, old, new, and yet to be born.

[0:44] Christine Toy Johnson: And so today, I'm excited to speak with two Renaissance artists about how they're thinking about work, audience, and opportunity outside of the brick and mortar theater model with its traditional subscriber base.

[0:58] Christine Toy Johnson: My guests today are playwright and actor Nikkole Salter and playwright and TV writer Bianca Sams.

[1:05] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome, Nikkole and Bianca.

[1:07] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you so much for joining me today.

[1:09] Christine Toy Johnson: Will you please start us off by introducing yourselves, Nikkole?

[1:14] Nikkole Salter: Hi, my name is Nikkole Salter. I am a lovely human being.

[1:19] Christine Toy Johnson: Yes, you are.

[1:22] Nikkole Salter: And an artist of the theater.

[1:26] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you. Bianca?

[1:29] Bianca Sams: Hi, my name is Bianca Sams. I am an actor, uh, recovering actor, I guess. Uh, term playwright and TV writer. I'm currently living in LA, and I'm excited to be here.

[1:40] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you. I would venture to say you are also a lovely human being.

[1:44] Bianca Sams: I hope so.

[1:45] Christine Toy Johnson: What are some ways to get our stories into the communities that really need them that we might not have thought of before?

[1:53] Nikkole Salter: Sure. I like to frame my statement by saying largely I think our society thinks about our contributions, our theatrical contributions as serving a function of diversion and entertainment.

[2:08] Nikkole Salter: And I think that thought removes from us the very foundational understanding that what we do is provide a service at a very base level.

[2:20] Nikkole Salter: But I think that there are many ways to render that same service. I am a playwright and an actor.

[2:28] Nikkole Salter: And a couple of many of my plays actually have been targeted for use outside of the traditional theatrical space.

[2:38] Nikkole Salter: I have a play called Lines in the Dust that was used by the Newark Education Roundtable for a couple of years as a springboard for the conversations that they were trying to make about education reform.

[2:51] Nikkole Salter: And they would engage the work in their classrooms, in their office spaces, at their conferences, and it was great.

[3:04] Nikkole Salter: Um, where they used the scenes as the basis for the discussions about growing into manhood.

[3:10] Nikkole Salter: I found those experiences amazingly gratifying. Both of them paid me, but they were very much outside of the traditional space and system that we're used to engaging.

[3:22] Nikkole Salter: And I became really excited by the possibility of expanding my circle of service as a storyteller.

[3:31] Christine Toy Johnson: How did they find you and your play?

[3:34] Nikkole Salter: I think the trajectory for Lines in the Dust moving to the Newark Education Roundtable happened from someone who saw it on stage.

[3:43] Nikkole Salter: The trajectory of Carnival, they found me through word of mouth.

[3:50] Christine Toy Johnson: So going forward, how would you think about finding additional places that might need to really hear your story now?

[4:00] Nikkole Salter: That's a really great question, Christine. Um, as a part of the council of the Dramatists Guild, I'm really engaged in an initiative trying to do just that, kind of forge a pathway for alternative delivery systems for the services that we render.

[4:16] Nikkole Salter: Um, I think a lot of it takes an entrepreneurial spirit on behalf of the artist him or herself.

[4:21] Nikkole Salter: Um, again, most people are used to engaging us in a theatrical space, so they're not really looking for us to be outside of that space or to provide any service.

[4:30] Nikkole Salter: During the Cleveland TCG conference, there was a man, an actor, who performed a one-man show that had something to do with domestic violence.

[4:42] Nikkole Salter: And after he performed snippets of his show, he began to tell us how he transformed his career as an actor outside of New York City.

[4:51] Nikkole Salter: He and his partner had moved to Iowa, and he was feeling down about himself and the direction of his career.

[5:00] Nikkole Salter: So he started to volunteer. And in volunteering, he ended up performing monologues for, I think he was working initially at a convalescent home.

[5:10] Nikkole Salter: And they loved it so much that he actually ended up writing a monologue for one of the residents based on the resident's life.

[5:18] Nikkole Salter: And they liked that so much that they asked him to come back and do that for more residents.

[5:23] Nikkole Salter: They liked that so much that they told other convalescent homes and asked him to do it there.

[5:27] Nikkole Salter: And before you knew it, after about a year or two, he had developed a network of service organizations that would commission works from him.

[5:36] Nikkole Salter: And he created his own little tour throughout the Midwest.

[5:40] Christine Toy Johnson: Wow.

[5:41] Nikkole Salter: Soliciting information from the people he was looking to serve, crafting storytelling that would allow them to process what they were looking to process and delivering that right back to them specifically.

[5:56] Nikkole Salter: Not to mention having the rights of the work to produce and show elsewhere.

[6:02] Nikkole Salter: And he toured like a regular theatrical season from like September to April or May every year.

[6:11] Nikkole Salter: And it just blew my mind the paradigm that he was living in as a functioning working artist.

[6:21] Nikkole Salter: And it expanded my mind about the possibilities of having a career, but it also reminded me about the importance of rendering service.

[6:33] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you.

[6:40] Bianca Sams: I mean, she makes such amazing points.

[6:43] Bianca Sams: I find it interesting that we've had this real cultural shift, right?

[6:47] Bianca Sams: Where there was a time in which theater or any kind of art was seen as community building or relationship building.

[6:55] Bianca Sams: You could use it as activism, a learning tool. It was very political, like it was all these things, it's live theater.

[7:02] Bianca Sams: And then, you know, now it's seen mostly primarily as this separate thing over there, either rarefied or only for entertainment.

[7:11] Bianca Sams: And I think there's something interesting about how that paradigm works that makes it feel like you have to go to a place in order to really engage in theater.

[7:22] Bianca Sams: And what Nikkole just said, what I thought was really interesting is that like this artist for themselves found a different way in part because they went back to theater as it was, right?

[7:31] Bianca Sams: Theater as community building, theater as activism, theater as bond building instead of just entertainment.

[7:39] Bianca Sams: And so that to me is very exciting because there's so many different ways in which you can make connections with people via theater.

[7:45] Bianca Sams: So I'm very intrigued by all the different ways in which you can reach people, either on the basis of which she was talking about, or even through new media.

[7:56] Bianca Sams: So I'm fascinated.

[7:58] Christine Toy Johnson: So that's a great segue to another question I have about alternative spaces that we're finding to do theater in, especially right now.

[8:10] Christine Toy Johnson: Our theaters are closed, we're not able to have our audiences with us, which are such a large part of the equation in doing a theatrical work.

[8:21] Christine Toy Johnson: And I wondered if either one of you has seen anything interesting in the last couple months that you'd want to speak about.

[8:30] Nikkole Salter: I've seen some interesting growth and adaptation of the use of the Zoom medium for the rendering of a theatrical presentation.

[8:39] Nikkole Salter: I'm thinking of the presentation done by the Lab of Our Lady of 121st Street.

[8:46] Nikkole Salter: Um, I can't say that I thought that it was so theatrical, but I thought it was interesting how much attention they paid to the way in which the camera was being used to create or not create a sense of space and time.

[8:59] Nikkole Salter: There are so many things out there, and weirdly, it's been very difficult for me in quarantine and because of the way in which the speed at which TV moves, right?

[9:10] Nikkole Salter: Working in TV, I felt like I couldn't really watch TV as much, but there are so many other short content or alternative ways in which story was coming to me.

[9:20] Nikkole Salter: And in that process, I found a couple cool things about either how artists could create careers for themselves and exposure for themselves and sort of heighten their stories, um, but also how I was receiving stories.

[9:34] Nikkole Salter: So like quickly, I would say um one of the things I found really fascinating were two people who've done things on like Instagram and Twitter.

[9:42] Nikkole Salter: There's um a lady named I think Sarah Cooper, who are doing these sort of one-woman lip syncs of Trump, which are super theatrical.

[9:50] Nikkole Salter: Um, it feels like theater because it's just so she's like doing impersonations in a way that doesn't feel like regular film and TV.

[9:58] Nikkole Salter: Like it is on film, but I could totally see this on a stage as a sort of like um with bridge and tunnel or other one-person shows where like they're impersonating somebody else and it's heightened and it just feels different, right?

[10:12] Nikkole Salter: The kind of story she's telling.

[10:13] Nikkole Salter: Um, there's also I want to say a woman named Mary Neely, who's doing these sort of one-woman again on like social media musicals, right?

[10:22] Nikkole Salter: Like she's singing to herself in all these different costumes and things, which feels fun and theatrical, but also felt small and relatable enough for me as a viewer, but also as somebody else who's in quarantine currently by myself.

[10:36] Nikkole Salter: Is it the same as doing regular traditional theater? No, but it felt very theatrical.

[10:42] Nikkole Salter: Um, but even outside of the visual things, what I find um I've actually gotten into more I used to love radio plays and I've gotten back into them.

[10:50] Nikkole Salter: So there's a lot of narrative story um where it is forcing the audience to think of it in their head versus actually seeing it, which to me also feels more theatrical, right?

[11:01] Nikkole Salter: Like the problem with plays that are being filmed is that like it's neither one or the other and that's that weird sort of in between.

[11:08] Nikkole Salter: Um, but I think radio plays what's exciting about them and kind of going back to that sort of 40s, you know, when that was a thing is that it allows the audience to use their brain to really fill in the story uh the way that I think you kind of have to even in live theater, right?

[11:25] Nikkole Salter: Because it's not you can see the stage. You can see the props, you can see the things like you can tell that it's not in fact real.

[11:33] Nikkole Salter: We have to suspend that, you know, the suspension of disbelief.

[11:36] Nikkole Salter: And I think there's something about radio that kind of gets me into a similar state of disbelief because I have to hear it and not see it.

[11:44] Nikkole Salter: Um, that I find really exciting.

[11:47] Nikkole Salter: I think one of the silver linings we've discovered is that because we're recording our stories, they actually have an opportunity to reach more communities because we don't have to be all in the same geographic location.

[12:06] Christine Toy Johnson: So Nikkole, piggybacking on what you said in the beginning of this conversation, can you think of ways that we can reach our communities in these particular circumstances?

[12:24] Nikkole Salter: I think where there's a will, there's a way. I'm torn because part of what I enjoy most about theater storytelling has to do with the ritual that transpires among people when they're in the same space. Right. And the witnessing of something transform in real time in real life before your eyes, our platform is that brick and mortar place. And the relationship to our story has to the public is through that place, and they only know us through that place. So just as you can name a filmmaker, or you can name a novelist, or most people can name their favorite social media comedians and or storytellers, most people in our public cannot name a playwright. Right now, the way our industry is structured, it doesn't support that, right?

In our industry, we're a commodity being bought and sold by producers and owners of theatrical spaces. I feel like if I am to be made to make a comment on the matter, as of my understanding stands now, it definitely is going to feel more grassroots-y, more entrepreneurial as an endeavor than we're used to as playwrights specifically in the traditional conventional sense. Because conventionally, we don't engage anyone. We look for representation. Well, this is not the way it actually works, but in theory, this is the way it actually works. You have representation who solicit on your behalf, and then there are people who read the work, and then they come ask you some questions about it, then they decide to produce you.

You're almost not even involved, you know, in the sale of your own work, theoretically. I feel like you have no control over guiding your work to the people you even want it to go to because you're going through the theater and they have cultivated the audience that they want to have, the audience that supports their theater. So even when I think about my work, one of my laments is looking into the audience and seeing majority white audiences, majority older audiences all the time. Because when I'm writing my work, I'm not thinking of them at all. Not at all, if I'm being honest. So it's like, hmm, I wrote this play with these other people in mind, this conversation I wanted to have with these people in mind, but in order to get my work produced, they don't have access to those communities.

And some of them don't want access to those communities. So you know, I feel like you know, start with who you are and where you are and what you want, and start to blaze your own path because there's not a pathway for that right now.

[15:45] Christine Toy Johnson: Right, right. Thank you. Bianca, now you're writing for very, very large audiences right now, right?

[15:55] Bianca Sams: Yeah. Even beyond that, for me, it's the way in which theater engages story, which is completely different than the way film and TV engages story. And I think that's why I it doesn't um so example, I um I heard this play, the one of the not first, but like modern audio plays, I would say, that I um had this wonderful experience with was when I was in London, I heard Spoonface Steinberg on the BBC as I was walking to class. And it was so riveting and it was so theatrical and was so amazing at this monologue and you know, like of this girl who's dying and sick. And then I saw it live, and the experience was different, but it was very theatrical in the hearing of it, and it was different, it was theatrical in the doing of it.

But both of those versions of this play were theatrical, right? The medium in which you got it sort of switched sort of the way I was engaging with it, but it still felt like a play. Um and recently, like I said, I've been listening to a lot more of radio plays for myself, and there were a few there that I was like, okay, this is clearly a play. Like even though it's in a very different medium and I'm not watching it and I'm not seeing, you know, I'm not experiencing it with other people. It is a play and not just a podcast, where it's a play and not just a different kind it felt like a play. Like I felt like I wanted to eventually see this on stage, and I would say those ones were Half-Life of Marie Curie, which I think they had also staged, and then there was an audio play, and it felt like, oh, I could feel the sets, I could feel the actors, I could in a different way that I feel like TV is meant definitely, I feel like far more as entertainment.

Film is meant definitely far as more as entertainment where you can kind of sit back and not fully engage um the story in the same way. Whereas there's something about theater that I think is more intimate, just in the way you have to tell the story, the how deep you can go into these people's character, how deep you can go into their emotional lives, which to me is the biggest thing that makes film and TV different. So no matter the medium, I think that's really exciting to me. Another one that kind of sort of mixed things was like Evil Eye and um what's the other one? I think it was Life After Life or Life Ever After. And they kind of mix mediums, like where they had a lot of soundscapes and a lot of other things that felt like a weird in-between, but like also still engaging and still, still, I would say for Evil Eye, for example, is the most that pushes it.

So for me, what I think is exciting about having alternate ways in which people, or theater doesn't become a destination, right? It's sort of like religion, like you don't want it to just be in this house, like it shouldn't just be a destination, is that it can get to the people that theaters might not be engaging, right? That somebody in India could be listening to my play, somebody in Africa could be listening to my play, somebody in New Jersey could be listening to my play in Texas. That like this thing can reach people in a way in which, like, to me, the thing that's interesting about TV is that I'm in people's living rooms, right? I'm on their phones, I'm on their tablets, I'm in the plane.

That people can watch the story wherever they are, which I think is exciting. And the thing about theater is it's become a destination, right? It's a place that you go to. Um, which if you can afford it, that's great. If you can't, it stays there. Um, but what's exciting about the different ways in which we can now use as artists new media, we can reach people who might not come to the theater. We can reach people who might find that's too expensive or away from them. Um and it really allows the playwright and the artist to have more control and say over um their work and how it's presented to that audience. The ability to shift the paradigm, I think will be powerful for artists.

[19:53] Christine Toy Johnson: So let's talk about a combination of all of these things. I've been hearing about people talking about creating a world for their art. To me, it feels like they're sort of satellites of storytelling that draw focus to the main event. I think that this is happening currently. I mean, um, on a commercial level. Right, Nikkole, people are looking very much to extend the life of their work and the rights of their work beyond the theatrical medium to include as many other things as any say film would include. So, like I have a play called the commission that is not complete by Wooly Mammoth, um, called Game Over. And it was uh my attempt, or it is my attempt to converge all of the benefits of gaming with the benefits of the narrative theatrical story.

And one of the things that the theater was really excited about was the opportunity to um merge those forms. So we actually produced a game, a video game that people can play um irrespective of the play, but it would encourage you to see the play. And if you go to the play, you'd be encouraged to play the game. And if you game, you might want to cosplay. And if you cosplay, you might want to, you know, like it just kind of continues to ripple out beyond the actual thing itself. I think in the old school thinking, this world of your work lived mostly within the cinematic world where there was like merch, you know. So there's the soundtrack, and there's the posters or or the figurines, the little action figures, or you get a deal with McDonald's, and now your cartoon character is now having a life in the world of toys and children.

I feel like that's sort of the same thing. And maybe we're looking at ways in which um you can riff off of one piece of intellectual property um along all of the new technological mediums in perpetuity without stepping on the toes of the ones that existed before, you know. The play is still a play, the novel is still a novel, the movie is still the movie, the merch is still the merch, the game is still the game. I think that's nothing new. We're just having more people and a lower bar of entry to being able to do something like that.

[22:34] Christine Toy Johnson: That's so fascinating. It's almost like you've already created a franchise, right? For your characters in your play. Really interesting. Bianca, do you have anything to add to that?

[22:50] Bianca Sams: Yeah. I'm really excited about um going back to something Nikkole said earlier about really engaging and looking at um other ways in which you can be of service, uh, but that are opened up now that we're in COVID and using technology more so that you don't physically have to be there. For example, I have this, um, I have a cycle of military plays, and there's a friend who uh works at um different, you know, military bases and does um things, and we had considered maybe, you know, trying to do the play for soldiers, like some of these things. So one of which is like Rest on Bone, which talks a little bit about PTSD um and middle sexual trauma and like using it more as a tool for also talking about therapy.

[23:36] Bianca Sams: But now that I'm in LA a lot more and doing TV a lot more, it was impossible to do because I'm physically not capable of doing the talkbacks and doing the things that you know she wanted to build something around.

[23:49] Nikkole Salter: Whereas now there are electronic ways in which now you can be there, right? You can still do this thing. Um, and I can again engage people in different places across the country, and it still feels like theater we're all there and it's happening right in front of them. We're all experiencing it at that time for that time.

[24:11] Nikkole Salter: And so it's not the same as film or TV where it's like once it's edited and there's no mistakes and um you know it's been all made glossy. You know, the thing about live theater on Zoom, it's a weird medium. It's definitely different. It feels far more like a working rehearsal than it feels like a full play. But when you're engaging ideas and not just um the performative nature of a play, I think it can be really powerful.

[24:38] Bianca Sams: So to me, I'm really excited about the ways in which um, just like this gentleman did with uh retirement homes. Can we find a way to create platforms or seminars where part of it is performative, right? We can do a play, we can engage the ideas in the story and watch actors viscerally go through this, because I think emotion is what can help people on different issues move.

[25:04] Nikkole Salter: Um, and then have, you know, a specialist from the country or have people in that community have conversation either with a playwright or with a therapist or with somebody else and like create entire um events around theater as activism, theater, as community building theater, as um just learning. And so that's really exciting to me that like because we can't go to a physical place, I think it is sort of breaking the chains of this narrative that theater is just this box, right?

[25:40] Bianca Sams: Or even breaking the chains of the idea of gatekeepers, right? The fact that my work to get into the theater has to go through so many other people before it ever gets to the audience. And and sometimes, like Nicole said, outside of even my being able to have a say about it. So the fact that we can do this on our own, I could figure out how to do things that, you know, 10 years ago I would not have been able to do.

[26:06] Nikkole Salter: So I think new media can be a freeing thing, particularly for playwrights, uh, because they can take a hold of their own narrative and show the world their work the way they want to show the world their work. And so I'm really excited to see what people do. I'm really excited to see how COVID really switches the game up because it might be a year or two before we're ever able to be in a physical theater together again so this is gonna be a very transformative time and I'm very excited about it.

[26:38] Bianca Sams: I think I want to just add to that I think that um the people of the world in general who may have been apprehensive about engaging any industry really virtually um they have been taught by COVID that they can a lot can be done in this virtual way. Do we miss the live experience? Absolutely do we miss the energetic experience that only being in the presence of other people can bring absolutely but can we keep it moving? Absolutely and this has taught us that's great.

[27:18] Nikkole Salter: Thank you and I I'm hoping that we can uh take all that we're learning now and and help bring all of our work forward as we do get back into uh spaces together Nicole got a really great point about when she created her play she created all these different um versions of it um we consider them IP and so it's like there's a video game and there's the uh web book or there's an online piece and I I personally find that interesting in part because it's so much of what they do in LA right you try to take one thing and then make as many different products out as if you can that you can make money off of but I think um there's a way in what she talked about of of creating things that deepen the story.

[28:07] Bianca Sams: That they're not just they don't just have to be the t-shirt and the merch. It actually you're engaging the story in a different way and you're deepening your um connection to that story because if you are a gamer, you can play the game. And if you're not a gamer, you're like, oh, I understand gaming differently because I played the game before I got here and I have a little bit of more understanding about this world.

[28:48] Nikkole Salter: Um I love the idea. I I'm a weirdo, but I love I love when theaters do the either talkbacks I enjoy because you can engage the artist, but sometimes they'll do these things where there are videos that give you behind the scene things, or people can go before the theater and really talk to the actors or see how the makeup is done.

[28:48] Bianca Sams: Um I love the behind the scenes because it helps the audience really I think deepen their understanding of all the shit that goes into making theater um and making shows and and they could have more respect for theater artists because I think there's a lot of time where we sort of negate that. So I I love the idea, particularly in theater, really moving that stuff that they do all the time in TV.

[29:14] Nikkole Salter: Um and finding ways to think of your idea outside of just being in the physical space, which now that we're in COVID, I don't think we have an option, right? Um we have to find ways to to think outside of the box, think outside of the space, think outside of the chairs, think about reaching people while they're, you know, outside in their backyards or digging in their gardens, or kids who are at school in their living room, right?

[29:43] Bianca Sams: And so we're thinking about story that way, and and what I love the idea of a video game if your play is about that, right? Or um I think other shows have sort of engaged that. So I'm I'm excited. I think it's I think that's such a great idea of like how can we move these things that are happening in other places that consumers slash viewers are used to seeing and move that also into the theater space.

[30:07] Nikkole Salter: And what kind of money? I'm sorry, it sounds crazy, but not. I mean, like theater artists need to make more money, right? And oftentimes we're not the ones who are. We're only getting ticket sales. So the more things we're doing outside of that traditional thing will also, again, make the difference between uh a playwright who already doesn't make enough money being able to survive longer because they found different ways to tell that story.

[30:31] Bianca Sams: Also, then you can flip that IP and come to Hollywood, uh, where it'll make that same thing will make even more money. So I don't know. I'm I'm all about the flipping IP thing. Bianca, you're a genius.

[30:44] Nikkole Salter: And I too believe we should make more money. Yes.

[30:48] Bianca Sams: Yes. Um, but I also wanted to add just for the tape, if you wanted to include it, that this idea is not foreign to the theatrical world. We just don't think about it as maybe being something we can um monetize. But I'm thinking of how many education departments I've worked with in my with my work at different theaters who transform the work into curriculum, and the curriculum goes into schools, and the school pays for that.

[31:14] Nikkole Salter: Um so that does happen. We just don't think of extending it, and maybe we will now with new media.

[31:27] Bianca Sams: Are there any resources that either one of you um can recommend to anyone who might uh want to delve deeper into this kind of work?

[31:38] Nikkole Salter: Um anything at all that you found helpful?

[31:44] Bianca Sams: I think that you asking that question makes me say that there should be more resources for this kind of work. And maybe that's what this time and period is going to amass for everyone.

[31:56] Nikkole Salter: Because I honestly can't think of anything.

[32:00] Bianca Sams: I think it depends on what they're trying to do. If they're trying to do podcasts, then or radio plays. I think there's, you know, uh YouTube and plenty of other places you can find that information and probably some books.

[32:16] Nikkole Salter: Um if you're trying to I mean, it's I think it's harder if you're trying to do the thing where you're gonna do a play. You can't see me doing air quotes. If you're going to do a play and then try to videotape it, I think because of the because of COVID, it's probably easier to find um ways to do podcasts or ways to do radio plays or ways to do short films, which there's plenty of information online.

[32:41] Bianca Sams: Literally, I learned to do lighting via YouTube because I had a cooking show for a while and I just kept watching YouTube channels about where people placed, you know, lights and then basic editing and things like that.

[32:52] Nikkole Salter: I think it's thinking about it outside of the box, but part of that is going to be about what people want to do, like what is your focus, what is your end goal, and then move backwards from there. If it's service, find a place to do service. If it's, you know, get your work out there, find a way to get your work out there.

[33:07] Bianca Sams: And it's really about user needs, um, what the playwright wants, and um, I want to see it. So please go and do it.

[33:16] Nikkole Salter: Um, because we'll be inside for a minute.

[33:20] Bianca Sams: That's wonderful. Thank you so much.

[33:22] Nikkole Salter: My thanks to today's guests, Nikkole Salter and Bianca Sams. Visit them online at NicoleSalter.com and BiancaSams.com.

[33:30] Nikkole Salter: Next week, for our final episode of season two, we'll be discussing the concept of radical hospitality in the theater.

[33:38] Nikkole Salter: With my guests Charles Randolph Wright and Robert Barry Fleming.

[33:42] Nikkole Salter: Talkback is a production of the Dramatists Guild of America.

[33:52] Nikkole Salter: Robert Prine mixed our show.