Community Gathering on Zoom - register with the bright red reservation box to receive the Zoom link. These gatherings are a service for the theater community and are offered free for TRU members; we ask that non-members help keep us running by buying a ticket, making a donation or joining as a member.

 

In the room: Ralph Sevush, Executive Director of Business Affairs & General Counsel at Dramatists Guild of America; and Cheryl Davis, playwright, TRU co-founder and vice president, and General Counsel for the Authors Guild. Stephen Colbert was cancelled. Under pressure from the FCC Chairman, Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel's nightly show. Before that the NEA was pressured to limit or eliminate funding to organizations that applied for support for programs that focus on amplifying Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. A Trump Executive Order declares that sexual identity is exclusively determined by birth, effectively nullifying the spectrum of human identity we have grown to understand. Women's rights to their own bodies have already been uprooted, and gay marriage seems next on the hit list. What are the ramifications for artists, particularly the writers of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild and even TRU? Are there effective ways for us to keep making art, and retain our artistic integrity and our lives as we know them? We'll be looking at all this a few days before Banned Books Week. Yes, really. Is it possible for us to fight back against these attacks on the First Amendment — and if so, how?