[The
following article was published in the Washington Post Magazine on 7 April.
It’s a sort of companion piece to “How great plays are
(eventually) made” by Jessica Goldstein, which ran in the “Style” section of
the Post on the same day and which I republished on 5 May on ROT. It
seemed to me that the two articles ought to be read together so I’m breaking an
unwritten rule I made for ROT by
posting two articles taken from another publication in short succession this
way. If you haven’t read Goldstein’s
article about writing new plays, I recommend turning back on this blog and
doing so. ~Rick]
About three years ago I did something that only a puffed-up fool would do: I wrote a play.
For three weeks I was maniacal about it, and when I dropped the final curtain I
nodded my head knowingly—this baby was a winner: All I had to do was get the
script into the right hands, and before I could belt out, “There’s no
business like show business,” audiences would be filling the seats,
laughing and applauding riotously in the dark.
Thus began my tale
of what Eugene O’Neill might call a lunatic’s pipe dream, a story of innocence,
hope and crushing neglect. But it’s not my story alone. You need only read a
day’s worth of the yearnings on LinkedIn’s playwriting group, scan the entry
rules for hundreds of play competitions, or study the stiff-armed guidelines
for submissions to regional theaters to realize that other pipe-dreaming
playwrights-to-be are having their own egos stomped. Yet, we keep coming back
for more, knowing full well that the odds of getting a play produced are about
the same as getting killed by a falling coconut (that’s one in 250 million)—or
at least it feels that way.
Writing a play, or
many plays, was a dream I had secretly nurtured since childhood. As long as I
can remember, I was drawn to the theater’s stock in trade: hotheaded
confrontations involving complicated people. George and Martha hollering
loose-lipped invective at each other in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was
strangely comforting—it reminded me of home. By the end of high school I’d read
most of Western drama since Aeschylus. Following my undergraduate years, I
tried a doctoral program in dramatic literature at the University of California
at Berkeley but dropped out. Theater people were, well, too dramatic for me.
So I went into
journalism and happily skipped around the world, with stints in Beijing, Hong
Kong, New York and Paris. When I landed in Washington, I volunteered as a Helen
Hayes Award judge, which sent me to some 40 productions a year—the good, the
bad and the fantastic—and the more I saw, the more I wanted to write a play.
But a beginner like
me can’t just sit down and turn out a three-act gem peopled with a full cast of
fascinating folk. I had to start small. My play, I decided, would have just one
character. I had to get comfortable creating human life on the stage, moving my
single figure around and putting words in his mouth. I figured that in the
cash-strapped universe of the theater, a one-person cast upped my chances of a
production. Of course, the one character then hogging the stage had to be
someone recognizable and captivating. I knew just the person to carry my
dreams.
* * *
Oscar Wilde was a
27-year-old whippersnapper in 1882: a bright, flamboyant intellectual, a
graduate of Oxford, a published poet, but still far from the brilliant novelist
and playwright he was to become. He’d written one play, which hadn’t found a
stage, and spent a good deal of his time promoting his philosophy of
aestheticism. On Jan. 2, the young Irish aesthete arrived in New York to travel
coast to coast lecturing on art and beauty. He had a secondary reason for the
trip: He was in America to serve as a living advertisement for a new Gilbert
and Sullivan comic opera called “Patience,” a satire of the cult of
aestheticism featuring a poetry-spouting character supposedly modeled after
him. The opera was running in England to full houses, prompting the producer to
mount a production in America and to pay Wilde to be the living embodiment of
the ridiculous Reginald Bunthorne. Wherever Wilde went, reporters flocked to
him for interviews, and his witty bons mots filled the pages.
In my play, we go
with Oscar when he calls on Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. We see
him lecture students at Harvard and Yale and speak to burly miners in
Leadville, Colo., where he declares:
Here in the deep
mine shafts of the Rocky Mountains I have found my True American.
But his trip was not
all lightness and laughs. Behaving in dandified ways offensive to rough-hewn
Americans, Wilde was pilloried in the press. The Washington Post printed a
caricature of him in an aesthetic pose, head slightly cocked to one side. Above
this was the drawing of a Wild Man of Borneo, a monkey-like creature, in a
similar pose. When Wilde’s business manager complained, the paper’s editor
responded in print. In my play, Oscar recites the editor’s reply:
Mr. Wilde is the
emasculator of ideas. His example would turn our young men into drawling asses
and our maidens into puling idiots. For this we warn both classes to keep away
from him or, if impelled by curiosity to look upon him, first to submit to
something in the nature of an intellectual vaccination.
The young wit
shrugged off the insults; he, in fact, enjoyed the attention, quipping:
“Ridicule is reputation.” Meanwhile, he pursued a fervent, ulterior motive:
getting his first play, “Vera; or, The Nihilists,” produced in America.
The moment I
stepped on American soil, Wilde
tells his audience, I was brought before the customs inspector and told to
open my luggage, as it was widely believed that I slept in lace nightgowns. Of
course he found none, and then he inquired of me, Had I anything to declare?
No, nothing, sir, but my genius.
* * *
Gilbert’s critique
was succinct: “Extremely well written, but there are too many references to
characters who people don’t know,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I enjoyed the
second half more.”
Lescault gave me a
thorough analysis both in an e-mail and over breakfast. “You have taken a huge
subject, a larger-than-life subject, no easy task, that . . . and shaped it
into an engaging performance piece. Well done,” he wrote.
But were these
bighearted people accentuating the positive, ignoring the fatal faults of the
work? I celebrated my first reviews but knew I needed an array of opinions. I
had to find readers with serious clout in the business. I sent Oscar in all
directions. Even a partial list of recipients is long and varied: a lecturer in
theater at Georgetown University, the dramaturge at Studio Theatre, the
Baltimore Playwrights Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Centre Stage
New Play Festival (S.C.), the Shaw Festival (Ontario) and the Gersh Agency, a
talent and literary agency in New York and Beverly Hills. Searching out my
targets took more time than writing the play ever did.
I also tried people
I thought I had a special connection to, for example, the wildly successful Ken
Ludwig, author of “Crazy for You,” “Lend Me a Tenor” and other award-winning
Broadway shows. He had written a piece for my section of The Washington Post,
Book World, that discussed his golden rules of playwrighting [sic], and soon afterward we had a
friendly e-mail exchange about the best theater memoirs. I later wrote to him:
“I’m at a loss as to what to do with Oscar at this point and would welcome any
thoughts.” I sent my plea in December 2010 and am still waiting for a reply.
On a fool’s whim, I
sent a note to the Capital Talent Agency, though its Web site clearly warned it
handled only actors and designers, not writers. But I liked the work of Jeremy
Skidmore, a much-honored director and the agency’s president at the time.
What’s more, Skidmore had directed “Gross Indecency,” a play about the legal
trials that Oscar Wilde endured for his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.
Skidmore surprised me by agreeing to meet for coffee. When he appeared in his
office lobby, he looked more like a student than a talent agency president; in
fact, I learned he was studying for his MBA at American University. Skidmore
and I talked theater, plays and Oscar for an hour; he was gracious and engaged,
and I left Oscar in his loving care. He promised to let me know what he
thought. I’m waiting to hear from my pal Jeremy, too.
Ditto for other
people on my list. Some sent perfunctory acknowledgment notes, then went dark
on me forever. I had a lot of theories about why the world was ignoring Oscar:
that the play is historical; if it’s not current, it’s not cool. That it is a
one-person play, which is not a “real play.” That it isn’t shocking enough: no
incest, pedophilia, rape or torture. Or maybe the play just stinks.
How easy it was to
spiral down into the dungeon of despair. But I had a secret weapon, a woman of
power and prestige on the Washington theater scene. I had met Beth Newburger
Schwartz through her daughter, a close friend, and had spent time at her
remarkable spread on the Potomac and talked theater and politics into the
night. She was so astute and kind and encouraging that my wife and I began
calling her our “mother by choice.” Newburger Schwartz was an accomplished
businesswoman and former adviser on women’s issues in the Clinton White House;
now, among her many undertakings, she was vice chair of the board at Arena
Stage.
When I sought her
out on Oscar, she answered with a warm, open-winged embrace. She read the play
quickly and loved it and put it in the hands of the Arena’s then-associate
artistic director and new-play guru, David Dower. My thoughts were swirling: Let’s
round up a director. A stage designer. The ideal actor. By God, it was time
for a casting call.
Of course, the glory
of theater is that it never delivers what you expect, onstage or off. First,
Beth relayed to me that the play was under consideration for Arena’s new play
series. Then it was supposedly on Dower’s desk. Then, at an Arena open house, I
nervously introduced myself to Dower. As I described the play, I was staggered
by the blank look in his eye, his urge to step away. Months later Beth conceded
she was as baffled as I was by the Arena’s intricate dance of play development.
She could inquire, suggest, even offer a script, but in truth it was all just
an act of blind faith.
* * *
Amid all this rejection,
the theater heavens opened, and a goddess—by the name Venus—smiled upon me. A
little background: In 2008, just before America hit its financial iceberg, I
sold a nonfiction book to a small publisher who soon afterward panicked and
tossed my manuscript overboard with several others in the hope of staying
afloat. The book told the tale of a young woman in Paris in 1889 who killed a
man, then claimed in her defense that she was hypnotized by her con-man lover
to undertake the crime. I was never entirely happy with my first draft, so now
I had time to rethink the story. My pondering took the shape of a one-woman
play, “Hypnotic Murderess,” which I sent to the Venus Theatre in Laurel,
because its declared mission is to set “flight to the voices of women.”
If Oscar, which I
believed was a far better play, was as exciting to directors as an open grave,
what were the chances for this one? But the Venus’s artistic director, Deb
Randall, swiftly wrote me back, swiftly read my play and, to my breathless shock,
swiftly scheduled it for a slot in a 2011 three-play series focused on
historical women.
Someone had told me
the Venus was housed in what was once a small Chinese restaurant; the theater
sat about 40 people, mostly on benches, looking at each other across an open
space that served as the stage. Everything about the production of “Hypnotic
Murderess” was low-budget, but the young lead, Kelsey Painter, played the part
magnificently.
To reach the Venus
Theater you travel north on Interstate 95 beneath signs pointing toward New
York; on our drives to the theater, my wife and I liked to laugh: Yes, my play
was on the way to Broadway. “Hypnotic Murderess” ran four nights, no reviews,
no buzz, nothing. But I was produced; I was a playwright. This had to help sell
my first love, Oscar.
* * *
Newly inspired by my fantastically minor success at the Venus Theatre, I shot Oscar off to a play contest for which he was perfectly cast: Spotlight On: A One Person Playwriting Competition. There were 325 competitors from 32 states and 14 countries, from which 20 semifinalists were selected. I wasn’t one, but I comforted myself with Oscar Wilde’s witty disdain for those who shoot to the top:
I do not doubt
there is something vulgar in all success, Oscar says in the play. To be a great literary figure, to be a true
genius, one must fail . . . or seem to have failed.
Eager to learn
something from the competition, I wrote to the organizers begging for insight
into what could make the play better. Their reply is coming, I’m sure—it’s in
Godot’s knapsack.
* * *
As all playwrights know, silence onstage is powerful. But in one’s personal life, it can be deadly. Frustrated and impatient, I decided to trade on my relationship with my surrogate mother, Beth Newburger Schwartz, the Arena board’s vice chair, and send a note directly to Molly Smith, the Arena’s artistic director. Less than a week later, she wrote me a genial note saying she’d be happy to have Amrita, the Arena’s literary manager, take a look—Amrita, no last name, as if I were already a member of the family. And off Oscar went to sit on another desk, at another theater, with fresh hopes. Now, at least, I wasn’t waiting on Godot. I was waiting on Amrita.
* * *
I was learning a lot about the mysteries of the theater, but I needed to know more. So I signed up for a seminar called “So You Wrote a Play, Now What?” offered at the New York offices of the Samuel French company, the venerable play publisher. Here was my chance to hear the scuttlebutt on breaking in as a playwright from Abigail Katz, the literary manager of the Atlantic Theater Company, an off-Broadway theater co-founded by actor William H. Macy and the king of cursing, playwright David Mamet.
Katz was the closest
I had ever gotten to a working New York theater professional, so I ambushed her
before the seminar with my 30-second elevator pitch on Oscar and asked for her
gut reaction. Oscar, I quickly discovered, was of little interest to her
because, as an ensemble company, the Atlantic has little room for one-person
plays in its programming. She pointed out the structural challenges of the form—one
person engaging an audience for 90 minutes—and thumped the table. Tell a story,
she said. Make it visceral. Make it dramatic. “It’s theater, you know,” she reminded
me.
The seminar was held
in an unglamorous library at Samuel French. Hundreds of the company’s slender
paperback plays lined the wall, which I took as both inspiration and mockery.
The dozen participants were young and old; one was a high school girl who was
getting an avid, early start in a world she loved. Others had had full
productions and festival readings.
“There is no secret
formula,” Katz told the class about getting produced. She encouraged us to make
noise, get exposure, become a DIY playwright—mount our own readings and
productions. This was a revelation to me: Using crowd-sourced funds, a
playwright can play producer to bring to life a full performance or, on a
lesser scale, pay a director and actors to do a reading. By the end of the
three-hour session, my original view of the road to Broadway had crumbled.
* * *
Back in Washington, I remembered an article I’d read
about “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins.” The playwrights, twin
sisters Allison and Margaret Engel, had both been journalists. “Red Hot
Patriot” was their first play, and, like Oscar, it was a one-person show. Their
story was my story, except for one small difference: their turbo-powered blast
to success.
The Engel sisters piloted “Red Hot Patriot” onto the stage
in 10 months, “a land-speed record,” as Margaret has described it. Instead of
throwing their play onto the heap atop the desk of an unknown artistic director
or submitting to contests and festivals, the sisters began talking about their
play to everyone they knew, hoping someone could interest a theater and get the
script to Kathleen Turner, their dream actress for the role. The play quickly
was blessed by a series of “happy accidents,” as Margaret told me on the phone.
Margaret, who is executive director of Washington’s Alicia Patterson Foundation
for journalists, had also been managing editor of the Newseum. A colleague had
put the script into the hands of his father, who was on the Arena board, and
the father put the script into the hands of Molly Smith.
“We had breakfast,” Margaret remembered, “and she said, ‘I
read your script and want to do it.’ ”
Two weeks later, Allison, who is director of communications
at the University of Southern California, had lunch with a friend who serves on
the board of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way. When the
friend asked who Allison was hoping for in the lead, Allison mentioned Kathleen
Turner, who also happened to be on the group’s board. It didn’t hurt that
Turner was a longtime admirer of Ivins’s.
“Two weeks after Molly Smith said she was interested,
Kathleen Turner said she was interested,” Margaret recalled, still seeming
stunned. “I know what happened to us is not normal.” The play got a further
boost when esteemed director David Esbjornson took it on and vastly enhanced
the original script. “Red Hot Patriot” opened in Philadelphia before heading to
Arena last year for a successful run.
“Theater,” Margaret told me, “really is pushed by stars, so
if you have anyone who has a connection to an actor who you think would be
right for your play, definitely use it. That makes shortcuts happen.”
And if you don’t have connections, as I do not, what then?
Margaret had more wise counsel: Seek unorthodox ways to get your script to an
actor—don’t use their agents, who more often than not are dead ends. Discover
the actors’ interests, what committees they’re on, who associates with them,
and go through them.
I began thinking of who could play Oscar, and before anyone
came to mind, Margaret had an idea: Why not put a woman in the lead? A woman
playing Oscar Wilde! Suddenly my play blossomed in my mind into something
wonderfully avant-garde: With a woman in the lead, Oscar would now be edgy and
contemporary. Portrayed by a woman, he could emerge as fashionably new wave.
And now I am fixated on the perfect woman for the role: Anne Hathaway, clever,
radical and mesmerizing, she could be the embodiment of a modern Oscar Wilde!
Now my forefinger taps my temple with an urgency: Who knows Anne Hathaway? Who can
put the script in her hands?
* * *
A few months ago, my mother became seriously ill. My wife and I rushed out to Los Angeles and were shocked when doctors informed us that there was no hope. With my sister, we began an end-of-life vigil by her bedside.
Almost a week in, my wife and I took a break and went for
lunch at Jerry’s Deli, an old-fashioned place across from the hospital. We had
a grim meal in a fog of impending death. I was so heavy-headed I at first
didn’t comprehend the e-mail that hit my BlackBerry under the subject line:
“your plays (Baltimore Playwrights Festival).” Inattentively, I opened the
e-mail and read: “Hi all, I am pleased to advise you that your plays have
qualified for a reading for the Baltimore Playwrights Festival.”
In my daze, and unaware anymore where I had sent Oscar, I
had no idea what this note meant. As I read on, I realized that the festival
was informing a handful of lucky playwrights that their work had been chosen
for a reading in 2013.
I found it impossible to enjoy the moment, a moment I’d
dreamed of for years.
Then the playwright in me, the silly survivor, poked through
the darkness, and I began imagining the Broadway version of this moment. I saw
it as a musical, a tear-jerker with a smile. . . .
I take my news across the street to my mother’s bedside. I
look down at her almost comatose face, her arm bruised from the Dilaudid drip,
her lungs sipping the smallest of breaths.
I lean over her: “Ma! Guess what?! It’s my play! They love
my play!”
For the longest time, she lies motionless. I lean closer,
watching, hoping for some reaction—a tiny nod, perhaps. And just as I’m about
to give up, sadness slumping my shoulders, the Broadway finale comes.
My mother pops her eyes open and whips her head toward me. I
stumble backward in surprise: She’s all made up, lips painted, hair done. Music
sweeps over us and crescendos in a merry tune of fantasy. She leaps off the
bed, her sheet slipping away to reveal a sequined evening gown. She grabs me,
and we go dancing through the hospital corridors and out into the happy
California sunshine, fancy-stepping and singing at the top of our voices.
Alas, that show has not hit the boards. My mother died an
hour after the news came from Baltimore, and I set about getting the rabbi,
calling the mortuary, wondering when the shock would wear off.
Now I know where Broadway endings come from.
[Steven
Levingston is the non-fiction book editor of Washington Post Book World. He’s worked for the Wall Street Journal, International Herald
Tribune, the Associated Press, Sunset Magazine, and the China
Daily and has had stints in Hong Kong, Paris, and Beijing. He’s published
two books, The Whiz Kid of Wall Street’s Investment Guide and Historic
Ships of San Francisco. He’s a graduate of the University of California at
Berkeley and Stanford University. In an
odd coincidence, the first play Levingston discusses above, the one on Oscar
Wilde, sounds remarkably like a project I did back in grad school in 1986,
posted on ROT on 12 May 2011. Titled
“‘Nothing But My Genius’: Oscar Wilde Discovers
America,” it was a course project in the adaptation of non-dramatic material
for stage performance and my partner, Brian Drutman, and I drew on the
aphorisms and sayings of Wilde to compile an “illustrated lecture” of Wilde’s 1882
visit to the United States.
[Getting
a play staged is, as you’ve just read, a tortuous path, full of heartbreak and
occasional elation. Mostly it’s a slog.
I’ve been in the position, not of Levingston but of the people he asked
to read his script or help him launch it.
I can testify that that’s also a tough slot to fill. If the playwright is a friend or someone you
care about, it’s hard to be honest at all times. Even if the writer is someone you don’t know
well at all, it’s still difficult to tell brutal truths. Encouragement when it’s not entirely
warranted is just as hurtful in the end as revealing problems with the script.
[Because
I was engaged on the fringes of New York theater starting in the mid-1970s, my
parents asked me to read a play by an acquaintance in Washington, a man I
didn’t know at all. I was supposed to
offer advice about finding a theater which might produce it. The play was so thoroughly Jewish in both
content—it was about a Bar Mitzvah, as I recall—and diction that I was sure
that no one outside the faith (and even many in it, if they were Reformed or
secular Jews) would know what the writer was talking about. Its appeal would be very, very narrow and the
play would be hard to sell to general audiences, much less reviewers. (I also recall that the writing itself wasn’t
terribly good, but I focused on what I saw as the easier, more concrete
problems.) I passed these comments on to
my parents to relay to the playwright, explaining that if there were any
interest, it would have to be from a company devoted to Jewish plays and themes
with an audience versed in Jewish custom and life; in fact, I said that the
play was the kind of thing that a synagogue might put on for its congregation. In New York, there were then the Jewish
Repertory Theatre and the American Jewish Theatre, but their focus was on plays
with Jewish themes, mostly secular, that appealed to general audiences; I was
sure they wouldn’t feel this script “met their needs” (as the common phrase
is). I believe the playwright dropped
the effort after my report.
[In
my early days of trying to become an actor (and, later, a director), I worked
for a small Off-Off-Broadway theater east of Chelsea. After I acted there in several plays and let
the artistic director know I was interested in directing something, he called
on me to take over a production in trouble—a compliment, I thought, since I’d
never staged anything outside of school before—and then he asked me to direct
one of his own adaptations, something he’d never let anyone else do before
then. I’d gone my own way after a few
seasons and the theater moved and eventually closed, but I met the artistic
director on the street near Carnegie Hall one day and he’d heard that I’d been
doing some dramaturgy work—reading scripts, assessing them for the playwrights,
and advising theater companies on selections for their seasons. He asked me to read an original play he’d
written so I took it home and did so. I
could barely get through the script—the man had a very idiosyncratic way of
expressing himself, using words in ways that differed from their usual
meanings, and it was hard to decipher what he was writing about at all. Just as difficult was the subject matter,
which just didn’t seem rational: he’d posited a social situation that didn’t
seem likely anywhere in the world, much less in the U.S. I felt obligated to tell him what I
thought—he was a pro, after all, not a novice or a dilettante—so when we spoke
on the phone, I leveled with him. “Okay,
thanks,” he responded. “Just throw the
script away.” I was stunned. On my say-so, he was just going to abandon
the whole play. Maybe my opinion wasn’t
worth a damn. He wasn’t going to try
again somewhere else? What had I
done? I felt terrible for days, but I
never saw or heard from the playwright again, and the feeling eventually wore
off—though, clearly, I’ve never completely forgotten it.
[Ultimately,
a friend who writes musicals asked me to read a libretto on which she was
working and offer my opinion. She’d been
adapting an H. G. Wells novel, one I didn’t know, and it was fairly interesting. I gave her some notes, which I think were
well received, and then I don’t remember if she asked me if I knew a composer
who might be interested in collaborating or if I volunteered, but I recommended
another friend who wrote music and lyrics for the theater. My marriage-brokering at first seemed to work
out, and the composer wrote several songs for the playwright, and they seemed
to be negotiating over style and tone, when all of a sudden, the playwright
informed me that the collaboration had collapsed and the two were no longer
working together. Eventually, the
scriptwriter set the play aside and I don’t believe she’s worked on it
again. (I’m still friends with both
artists, fortunately, and they still know one another, but they don’t have any
substantial contact.)
[Finally,
one (sort of) happy ending. I got to
know an older man, a neighbor in my apartment building who’d become a
playwright in his later years. (He’d had
a varied career, including working in radio.)
When we’d gotten to know each other a little, he asked me to read a
script of his. I took it home, but I was
a little afraid to open it because I didn’t know what I’d do if I didn’t like
it. (The truth is, more new scripts are
bad for one reason or another than are good.)
Well, I finally did read the play—I had to: I told the writer I
would. I loved it. I liked it so much, I told him I’d like to
direct it myself if he’d let me. I
explained to the playwright what the various methods of producing a play like
his were, assuming an Off-Off-Broadway showcase, and the likelihood that some
theater company would take the play and allow me, a total unknown, to direct it. He decided to produce the play himself, even
after I described to him what that would entail financially—he’d never see the
money again, I warned him—and logistically, with no established theater or
production office behind us. We’d have
to do all the work ourselves. He wanted to do it that way and retain control
over the outcome, succeed or fail. I set
about recruiting a producer, designers, and a stage manager; we found an
acceptable theater to rent for the production and a rehearsal space; we
published the casting call and I contacted some actors I knew who were right
for some of the roles; we held auditions and cast the play. Long story short, we mounted the show and,
like Levingston, got no reviews or professional attention, but we put up a good
production and the writer was pleased.
Some of my theater friends, who all came to see the show, of course,
thought less of the script than I did, but all agreed (at least in my presence)
that the production was excellent by Off-Off-Broadway standards. The playwright went on to write several more
scripts, some of which got readings around the city, but “our” play was never
picked up or created any buzz in the business.
It had been a fabulous experience, however, with the writer, the
producer, and me putting together the whole independent endeavor, and I remain proud
of the effort and the results—even if I’m the only one left who remembers
it. That’s the way it often is in this
business.]
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