As Robert Egan retires as the leader of the Ojai Playwrights Conference after 20 years, he reflects on the organization's past, present, and future.
Speaking via Zoom from his book-lined study in the converted farmhouse in Great Barrington, Mass., that he is transforming into an arts colony with his wife, Michelle Joyner, Egan was finishing some projects before returning home to Southern California for his final OPC Summer Conference and New Works Festival.
Guirgis painted a picture via email: “First of all, OPC is plush. They fly you, feed you, the writers meet at a beautiful poolside library each morning with plenty of breaks to catch a dip in the gorgeous, LARGE, Spanish-tiled swimming pool or play a set of tennis. You eat, sleep, work and play in an environment that is like a first-class spa or wellness retreat. No one wants to leave. And under Bob’s leadership, everything is about the writer and the process.
Art that “refracts” rather than “reflects” the world is what Egan is after. “You don’t want to re-create the surface,” he says. “You want to refract it, disturb it, so people are seeing the deeper dynamics.” “We brought in artists like Chay Yew, Luis Alfaro, Diane Rodriguez, Luis Valenzuela, Lee Richardson, Victoria Ann Lewis, John Belluso, Brian Freeman, Lisa Peterson, Oskar Eustis, and the work we did reflected all those committed people,” Egan recalls. “We became the most diverse theater in the United States of America, and it was the thrill of my professional life.”
He speaks ardently of his friendship with Bill Cain, “the most produced playwright in OPC history” and a Jesuit priest “who understands that there are new gospels being written every day and we’re just not listening to them.” And he extols Baitz, his colleague for almost 40 years, for his “commitment to imagining a better America for all in his work.”
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