(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Forum 360" on PBS Western Reserve.

I'm Stephanie York, your host today.

Thank you for joining us for a global outlook with a local view.

Recently, Eric Mansfield has been creating a buzz around his playwriting.

A news reporter, an anchor veteran, and a US military veteran, the now assistant vice president for Kent State's Communications and Marketing is finding yet another career in playwriting.

Today we will learn about how Eric got into playwriting and how he has been able to see his plays come to life on the big stage.

Thank you, Eric, for joining us.

- It's great to be here.

Always great to spend time with you, regardless.

- Yeah, right.

Next time, breakfast, right?

- All right.

- Okay, so if you would, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your background?

- Sure, I grew up in Akron.

I grew up in North Hill and went through the public schools there, had a really good education, I believe.

I went to North High School, married a girl I went to grade school with.

So we're that couple.

- We love Lisa.

- We're that couple, Lisa Mansfield.

Some in the area may know who she is.

- Yes.

- She's been very active in her service as well.

Went to the University of Dayton and joined the Army right after high school so that I could pay for it.

And was fortunate to stay in the...

I never thought I'd be able to stay in the Akron area.

I just figured I'm gonna have to go out and around, but I was fortunate that wanting to go and become a journalist, I got a job out of college at channel 23 in my hometown, and was able to come back here, and then eventually to channel three.

I did broadcast journalism for 20 years, concurrent to being with the Army.

So I went to places like Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina, and things, and was fortunate to get home in one piece and keep my family and my job.

And then, 10 years or so ago, my kids were growing.

I needed a change.

I retired from the Army, got out of TV.

I've been at Kent State now for about the last almost 11 years.

- Oh, wow.

- But I've always been a storyteller.

I enjoy telling stories.

I enjoy observing people and seeing the stories that they go through, the journeys they go through.

Five or six years ago, I decided to try playwriting, and now that's where I spend my free time.

- Well, we're really glad that you stayed in the Akron area.

- Thanks.

- Akron is very lucky for that, and your wife, 'cause she does a lot of public service as well.

So, when you were a broadcast journalist, I wanna go back just a little bit because this is all how you got to be where you are now.

Broadcast journalist in Akron, Ohio.

- Sure.

- What was that time like?

- When I first started, it was pretty overwhelming because all you had was the six o'clock news and the 11 o'clock news.

A little bit of morning news, but there wasn't the internet.

I mean, a newspaper drove a town.

Radio reports on the hour were important.

If you wanted the sports scores, you really did have to stay up till 11 o'clock and watch the sports time.

So there was a lot of pressure there and a lot of things to learn.

And I'm out with the two-man crews and the big cameras.

and the big recorders.

- Oh my gosh.

- Like you're hauling a giant VCR on your shoulder, and you're running from story to story, and you're coming back, and you're literally dubbing the tape over.

We didn't cut the film to the floor as they say, but still you were using that raw tape, and then every day you had a new challenge to do it again.

And Akron is an exciting news town.

I mean all of Summit County really is.

There's just exciting things that happened here.

When I moved on to channel three, I was only 24 years old working at a bigger market.

They still kept me in Akron, and I was glad for that- - Which is great.

- Because the stories here were interesting.

You never knew what was gonna, not just the crime, but just the people and what people go through here and the community.

So it's been a great experience.

- And you also have a 20-year military career?

- Yes.

- Tell me about that a little bit.

I joined the Army when I was still in high school.

- Really?

Okay.

- Yeah, I was 17.

I knew I had no way to pay for college.

My parents had not been to college.

I'm an inner city kid and I had the Ohio National Guard, which offered some college money.

So I joined when I was 17.

And when my friends first went off to college, I went off to the Army.

So I ended up starting college a year later, But I did Army through college and helped pay the bills.

- And it's interesting because we'll see some of your experiences come out in your place coming up, right?

So you've made your name recently as a playwright.

- Yes.

- I mean, you really have.

How did this even come about?

- Well, my kids all did community theater.

And Lisa, she was the managing director for a time at Weathervane Playhouse.

So I got to do some fun things with my kids on stage, and I was a storyteller at heart from my days in channel three.

Playwriting is live storytelling.

You'll be writing for the stage, and I think television is what really has set me up for success as a playwright 'cause, every day, I wrote copy for the anchors to read, for the morning anchors to read, for me to read.

So I knew what things sound like out loud.

I think that's what people struggle when they first start writing plays is, what is this gonna sound like?

And I already kinda knew that, so it helped me jump into the stories a little more.

And as I watch my kids perform and I get to perform with them sometimes, I'm like, "I could write these kind of stories.

I've met enough people that I think would be interesting and I'm gonna give it a try."

- Okay, so you're thinking about doing this.

- Yes.

- And you're at the Kent State University doing your job, which is a big job.

You're vice president of marketing and communications, and it's a big job.

how do you fit that in and where do you start and... - Well, the military in me has me up at 5:30 every day.

So I'm up, I'm moving around, I'm exercising, but my mind is very active.

So I start to write a scene or a few sentences.

When you think about a play, that could be a hundred pages long.

It takes a little while to write, it really does, to map out.

for many people, they write a sentence, they erase a sentence, they write a sentence, they erase a...

It's hard for them to keep moving.

And for me, just knowing that I had the deadlines of television, you write it and you get it done.

So I write scenes and I sketch things out, and my mind's constantly going.

The more I read plays, the more I saw some more plays, the more I saw the structure and how they go together, and tried to find what my sweet spot is.

But mostly it's I'm up early, I'm by myself.

My mind's good.

I start writing.

You write a scene today, a scene tomorrow, next thing you can write a play in 30 days, maybe 90 days for a full length play.

- Wow.

- And then you've gotta hear it and get people to read it, give you some feedback.

Even if my plays had never been produced, it was still storytelling for me.

But to start to share them with theaters and have theaters that wanna produce them and then start to win some awards, it has definitely taken off much faster than I anticipated.

- Crazy, crazy fast.

- Yes.

- So let's talk about like the first play you ever wrote.

Has it ever seen the light of day?

- Yeah, the first play I wrote was called "Love and Reserve."

And it was military based.

It was based on a couple.

I wanted to write to explore the theme of what do military couples go through during a wartime deployment.

I had been through this.

Lisa had been through this.

and through the stories that all of my friends had told me about their relationships and some of what Lisa and I had been through, I started to craft this story.

But then I had to think, how do I make this story interesting?

And my thought was, okay, what if the wife's at home, and she's watching the news, and she sees there's an attack at her husband's base camp?

- Yes.

- And in real time, this really happens.

They'll shut off communications 'cause they're sorting things out and these poor families.

We saw this play out in real time a year and a half ago, when we left Afghanistan, and there was the bombing that took place.

And all those families, for 24 hours, didn't know if their loved ones had survived.

So if I create that tension and then I thought, well, then she goes to sleep, crying herself to sleep.

How does she learn about her husband?

What if I have his vision of him just visit him throughout the night, a past, present, and maybe future version of him?

- Oh wow.

- Kind of a hat tip to "A Christmas Carol."

- Yes.

- I sketched this out, and then we learned how they fell in love.

We learned what it's like to be in the military, and then we learned what the future could be like, and yet you keep giving clues as to whether he is dead or alive.

She gets more information.

And then, eventually, it's gotta end.

So, eventually, there's gonna be a knock at the door, and you're gonna find out whether he survived or not, which is what every family member cringes at.

So I got this together.

I did a reading in my living room, invited over a couple of friends to play the two parts, the husband and wife, and some friends, maybe 10 people to sit on the couches.

And we just listened to it, and they did it.

It had a great sound to it.

From there, I refined the script a little bit and started to share with some people in the theater industry.

And then I started sending it off to just get some feedback, and it won from Arts in the Armed Forces, which is Adam Driver, the actor from "Star Wars" and other, his group that supports military.

I sent it to them and it was named a national semi-finalist in their annual awards.

- Your first play.

- My first script.

- And I thought, oh my goodness, this is wonderful.

Awards are great, but now what?

And then Rubber City Theatre here in Akron was willing to stand it up.

The COVID delayed the launch of it, but it debuted in November of '21.

They brought in an Equity actress from New York City who was wonderful, and it got great reviews in the newspaper, had four different media reviews, and we had just really good feedback from that.

So that told me I'm at least onto something.

- Yeah, I would say so.

- In that first play.

- Did it get picked up anywhere else than Akron?

- The business side of playwriting is a whole nother set of hours.

It's making contact with theaters, pitching to theaters.

So many theaters post-COVID are just doing "Sound of Music," and what I'm saying is they're doing things that are tried and true.

They don't have the money to spend on big marketing.

If you do one of my plays, you gotta tell people what it is.

- [Stephanie] Sure.

- So I do understand that and that takes a little bit of time.

But I've been trying to pitch it to theaters, especially those in other parts of the country that are near military bases.

- [Stephanie] Perfect.

- It's a cast of two.

- It's in one setting.

It could easily be done around Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

- Sure.

- And it's a good drama and it's a good love story, so I'm hoping it's gonna get picked up some other places, but I haven't had as much time to put into that because I'm still trying to write and write some other plays.

- Right, so how many plays have you written?

- I have written, in the last 36 months, more than 20 plays.

- What?

- Yeah.

Yeah, now some of them are shorter plays, one acts and that kind of thing, but I have eight solid full-length plays.

- [Stephanie] Wow.

- In just less than two years, I will have had six plays produced for paying audiences in eight different theaters in four different states, and it's really taken off.

- And your six plays are six full-length plays.

- Yes.

- So six of your eight full-length plays have been Produced?

- Yes, will have.

- Will have been.

- I've got some that are coming this year.

So I feel like I'm onto something.

- Is this usual?

- It's not.

I've met playwrights.

I was in upstate New York.

I had a play produced in the fall at SUNY Brockport for two weekends up there.

They did six shows of it.

And I met another playwright up there who was having a play produced, and he'd been writing for almost 20 years.

This was the first time even a short play of his had been picked up.

And he just, like many playwrights, you write for yourself.

It's not how you pay the mortgage, but it's also connecting with theaters and having a script that's in a good format.

'Cause so many theaters, they get approached constantly.

Do my play, I've got an idea.

Do this.

And so, you've gotta give them time to read things and see what's a good fit for them 'cause, again, they gotta pay the bills, they gotta keep the lights on.

So when they do "Sound of Music," you can't be offended.

You just keep sending to other places.

- Do you think any of your plays are like high school worthy?

And when I say worthy, I mean like, there's a certain niche for high school plays.

- The language and violence in mine is pretty tame for the most part.

I tend to write modern dramas that are set on a certain time.

So like "Love and Reserve" was gonna be, timeframe, she finds out before she goes to bed.

And when the sun comes up, we're gonna know the resolution.

- [Stephanie] Wow.

- So you're kind of there.

I think they could be done by high school groups or college groups.

I've had several done now by college organizations, which makes you feel good.

They're always looking for challenging things, but you've also gotta educate yourself about the business.

If you're at a play with 20 characters, you're gonna have a tough time getting it produced.

- Yes, that's a lot of pay checks - You gotta think through.

You gotta think, am I writing a play or am I writing a movie?

And I have written some film scripts as well.

In fact, a short play of mine's been adopted as a film.

It's being shot next week in Cleveland.

I was at the rehearsals last week.

It's an exciting short play, but that's been adopted into a short film I'm excited about by a group in Cleveland that read it online, and contacted me, and said, "We wanna make this into a film."

But anyway, you need to write things that can actually be produced.

So if you're gonna have spaceships coming down and people being beamed up, you gotta understand it's gonna be challenging for some theaters.

But I think good dramas that people sink their teeth into, the audiences will enjoy, and that's what I try to write.

- I think they will too.

So I'd like to remind our viewers and those who may have joined late that we are here with Eric Mansfield, and we are talking about playwriting from inspiration to production.

So let me ask you.

You have a play coming out soon or gonna be produced soon.

- I have a play that opens in September called "Baron of Brown Street."

It's based on a real story of an Akron man who was set on fire by some...

He was homeless and he was set on fire in the middle of the night by some street punks who beat him up.

He survived.

Then when they were sentenced at court, he went there from the burn unit and forgave them.

And many of us in the media had a chance to interview Lenny.

I'd like to think that I can forgive people who do me wrong.

I think it would be very difficult for most people to say if someone literally poured fluid on you and set you on fire that you could go and just forgive them, and he did, but yet he really struggled to forgive himself for the life's mistakes that put him under the bridge.

This one afternoon that I spent with him just really stayed with me.

I developed it into a play called the "Baron of Brown Street."

And now it has picked up, recently won the Jean Kennedy Smith National Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center, second place, which just I sent it on a whim.

And it got picked up by some east coast groups that did readings of it.

But it opened in September at Rubber City Theatre at the University of Akron for two weeks.

- [Stephanie] Wonderful.

- And then it will follow up in October at Market House Theatre in Kentucky.

- [Stephanie] Wow.

- So I'm sending it to some other theaters and seeing who wants to do it, but it's a true drama.

It's a story about self-forgiveness, which a lot of people struggle with.

I think that's one of the hard things, Stephanie, is people wanna tell you what the plot is as opposed to what the theme is.

So the theme of this story is self-forgiveness.

It's just being told through this homeless guy.

It's almost like "Titanic."

People wanna tell you it's about the ship sinking.

No, the movie is a love story.

It's set on a ship that's sinking.

So I think as I approach playwriting, I find more success when I look at the themes I'm trying to explore and then put that into some kind of a setting that would be interesting as a story.

- Totally interesting.

So, do most of your ideas come from experiences you had?

- Yeah, I wrote a play that opened last year at the Civic theater with Millennial Theater Project called Whitesville.

I had a great pickup Kerry Clawson wrote about at the Beacon Journal.

We had some other reviews.

I was really pleased with how it came together, but I spent a lot of time with police officers and a lot of time with people in the community.

And the murder of George Floyd impacted people significantly, but I felt like my white friends and my black friends were going through different experiences, clearly, like much of America.

So I thought, how do I get, how do I explore the theme of white and black audiences coming together?

So I wrote a play about a mixed race, police family.

White cop and his wife who had adopted two black kids, and then George Floyd happens.

So you've got a police family.

You've got a mixed race family.

And in the three days that the play takes place, the dad is on one side of the uprising in their town and his own kids are on the other side, and mom is caught in the middle.

But through that, can we have honest debate in the family home about racism?

And it made me feel really good to write it, and now it's been picked up, and I'm pushing at some other places, but it comes from the experience of just spending time in the Akron area with the people I know.

- What kind of feedback did you get on that?

'Cause it is pretty hot topic right now.

- You know what, I had some really good feedback early on from people about offering help, and a lot of playwrights wanna just keep their idea themselves.

I was writing characters 17 and 18-year-old black teenagers.

I'm a 54-year-old white man.

How am I possibly gonna be able to get their dialogue genuine, get their experience genuine.

So workshopping it with people who don't look like you, who aren't the same age as you, who have different experiences than you, help you to modify the language there.

I had written the line in just the first draft.

I've written the line for the black son to tell his white father, "Cut it out."

And the actor I had reading it who was a young man in his 20s, who was black, he says, "That is not what he would've said to his dad."

I said, "What would he have said to his dad?"

And I'll just let you think about that, but in the tense of the moment, it wasn't cut it out.

So in getting that as a player, getting that feedback from people, it helps you refine the scripts and make 'em more authentic.

- Right and more powerful, I would imagine.

So your wife was portrayed as one of the characters in that first- - Mm-hmm.

- Right.

How did she feel about that?

- There are things in the play that are definitely she and I.

There are definitely things that are other military couples.

There were other army wives that came to the audience and they connected with Lisa.

So they could appreciate what they had gone through and what they had heard, and what that piece of it was like.

So I think it's one of her favorite plays that I've written because she has a personal connection to it.

And that what made it so gratifying were the army wives that came up afterwards and said they finally felt heard in a new way that they have not been represented before of just how challenging it is to be part of that 1% that's out there that's military families.

- Wow, so she didn't feel like personally invaded 'cause I could see how some of her feelings might have- - You know what, she and I spent time with the actors who played the two parts.

Wonderful young actors, very talented in their twenties, but neither of them were military.

And I think Lisa spending time with...

Her name was Paige Felger.

She's wonderful actress in New York, and she was here.

and being able to share with her what it was like as a real military spouse during Iraq really helped Paige on stage to come to those emotions and find those feelings.

In many ways, Lisa's like an executive producer.

I bounce every idea off of her.

I have six more ideas that I wanna work on.

And so I say, what does this sound like?

She'll be very blunt with me.

- [Stephanie] A true partner.

- I write a lot of female leads.

I feel like they're more complicated.

I feel like they're more interesting, but of course I don't come to that from that life experience.

So I will ask Lisa, "How would a woman say this?"

Sometimes she just looks at me like I've got three heads.

"What are you asking me about?"

I said, "Well, I've got this idea for this female protagonist.

I want her to say this or feel this."

And then she'll set me straight of whether I'm on the right path or not.

- That's awesome.

So you kinda hinted at the business part of this and how complicated.

Give me an idea of what it takes to pitch your ideas.

How many places?

Time, money, everything.

- Well, there's a lot of playwrights that really just, they struggle with, okay, how do I get this somewhere?

They're kinda shy.

First you gotta get over being shy.

You've gotta just be willing to say, "I've written something.

I think it's worth producing."

Second, you've gotta be able to make the pitch short and sweet.

I've written a drama, there's six actors, and this is the theme and topics, and I'd love to share more with you.

Then you've gotta really go out and do it.

Last year, I submitted a hundred submissions in a single year.

I was challenged to do that by a playwright friend of mine named Michael Oatman from Cleveland, 'cause I started sending it out.

He goes, "You should set a goal."

I said, "What?"

"Send a hundred."

"Like a hundred?"

"Yeah, send a hundred."

So, every Saturday, I send to two new theaters.

- Oh my gosh.

- I'll send one of my plays.

You gotta understand they're getting pitched all the time.

If you get a chance to have a conversation, and the more you can develop relationships with local plays or local theaters about your plays, the more they might have interest or they may have interest and wanna work with you to write a play specific for what they want to examine.

And then you gotta get thick skin.

I keep a big spreadsheet and I've got the rejections in red.

So you get rejection, rejection, rejection, and then somebody suddenly wants it.

And that's great.

So now I'm finishing a play that we'll have a public reading at the Main Library in Akron, in their auditorium on July 6th.

It's called "Trial by Fire."

It's about, again, a local topic.

It's about a young woman put on trial for using banned books in her classroom.

She's a teacher.

And what's really at stake there?

It's set here in Ohio, a lot of my plays are, but it's a big topic of discussion right now across the country, are banned books.

So I'm looking now...

So I started sending just even the draft out.

I have a theater in Los Angeles that is interested in wanting to know more.

They've read it.

They wanna read the updated version.

I don't know if they would wanna premiere it or not, but the fact that they have interest tells me I'm onto something.

- So I hear banned books, it's a hot topic and all that.

And I think, (Eric chuckles) I think, oh my god, banned books, this is a hot topic 50 years ago.

- Yes, it is.

- Have we not progressed?

This isn't really about playwriting, But when I hear that, I think this really isn't a new topic.

This is an old topic and why are we still talking about it?

- No, and you're right.

These old topics do come back around.

I look at old plays and how they examine these things, but I'm a big fan of Aaron Sorkin.

Of course, he wrote "The West Wing," "The Newsroom," but he also wrote "A Few Good Men."

He did "Kill a Mockingbird," the recent version of it.

So he's a playwright at heart, and he talks about the villains or the dark side, allowing them to make their case before God, and that's how you balance a story.

So if you think to the movie and Jack Nicholson, Jack Nicholson's character is convinced what he is doing is right.

And when you write that, it helps you balance.

So I try to follow that theme.

So even with banned books is to create a character on the banned books side who's trying to make the argument of why they believe in their heart this is the right thing to do for society, and I think that'll make things more engaging for the audience, but those are the topics I'm exploring right now are those kinda things that are happening.

I've got another play in concept about toxic masculinity, which is becoming more and more a debate on the college scenes is- - What is that?

What do you mean?

- That's a good question.

What is toxic masculinity?

It's this idea that men have to compete against each other and that some men don't know how to really connect with women, and I'm sure I'm gonna misstate it.

- Sure, that's okay.

- But it's a concept that I have and I'm gonna set it in a college art class where you come in and you paint live people, where there's six men there, and they're expecting that this week's edition is gonna be this young co-ed that they get to paint, but it's not.

It's a much older woman that shows up and they end up in this huge debate and argument.

So I've got that.

And then I've also started on one based on, and I usually write modern stories.

It's a modern topic, but it's set in real life.

The youngest person ever executed in America was 14.

We executed a 14-year-old in the late '40s in South Carolina.

He was a black young man who was accused of killing a white girl.

Very quick court case, and they electrocuted him, and he wasn't even big enough to sit in the chair.

They had to bring like phone books in to get him high up in the chair.

- Oh my gosh.

- But there's stories I've read on online about how in the last hour, these two guards sat with him for the last hour at 14.

So I kind of used that concept and say, I'm gonna write this play about what that hour was like, counting down for the audience right up until the actual execution of it.

But it's to examine the death penalty.

I'd like to believe there was a young guard, an older guard.

They were debating the death penalty, while this 14 year old kid is there.

and to let the audience see the clock ticking down, and to see where that argument and debate goes, 'cause the death penalty is still a debate today.

- Absolutely.

- As a journalist, I witnessed an execution, which I wrote about in a play called "Witnesses to the Execution."

That was produced in New York, and I'm very excited about where that play has gone, but I wanna examine the death penalty.

This will be the first time I've written about something that is set in modern day, but it's still a modern topic.

- Wow.

- So, not every theater wants to do those dramatic plays, but I think they wanna do things that get an audience coming.

for me, I just want the audience to still be talking about it when they leave, not whether they liked it or not, but whether the topic resonated with them, and can they go home and talk to friends and family about what it made 'em think.

- Right.

Crucial, I think, actually.

What's next for Eric Mansfield?

Is this gonna become your full-time I wanna produce plays and turn into movies and what?

- I'm finishing my MFA, master of fine arts degree.

I already have a master's of public relations, but I'm back.

So Monday nights I'm in Cleveland, at Cleveland State, and I'm working with many in the Cleveland arts scene.

So I'm trying to expand and find new homes for some of these, but I've got new ideas.

- Of course you do.

- I have finished a few film scripts that I'm working with a few people on, but that's not as much of my passion.

I don't really wanna move to Los Angeles and become a- - Right, please stay in Akron.

- Live on a couch and write for a streaming series.

But I've also started a mystery novel, which is something I've always wanted to do.

I go to Kelleys Island every summer, and I see thousands of people reading John Grisham and everything.

- [Stephanie] Yes.

- So I wanna write a mystery set on Kelleys Island.

I think that- - Love it.

- I read they have 250,000 visitors a year.

And if you could read one, you would know all the places on the island where this is happening, I think there'd be some commercial interest in it.

So I've sketched out this story.

I've written the first few chapters.

I've not had a book published, So I'm going down those roads, but I still have a full-time job.

- I know.

I mean, really, how many hours in a day?

- 50, 60 hours a week at Blue and Gold at Kent State, which I love and I love the people there.

So it's just what I'm doing in the evenings and on the weekends, but that's what's next for me, finalize these last few plays and continue to push them out, and then try to work on this book to about maybe the next 24 months.

- Awesome.

So three things that you advice for people who are thinking about playwriting.

What would you tell them?

- First of all, get on Facebook and find the many, many writing groups that are out there 'cause they're very supportive, and all of them started with that single page or single idea.

And writers are very supportive of one another, so that's what I've definitely found.

They'll read each other's work, they'll give you feedback, and they can give you a start.

So first is define that support group.

The second is to just write, allow yourself to write, and what I mean is don't constantly edit yourself.

So you sit down to write a story.

Joe went to the store.

Joe bought a pack of cigarettes.

A bad guy came into the store.

Joe stopped the bad guy.

The police came and arrested the bad guy, and Joe's a hero.

Now you at least have a full story.

Don't stop on that first sentence and keep rewriting it.

Just write it down.

And then third is to watch more plays.

Go to the theater and watch what made me interested here.

The great thing about going to the theater is you're not on your cell phone for the most part.

We're all bad at that.

I'm as bad as anybody.

I'm watching sports, I'm watching a movie, and I get distracted by my phone.

But when you're in the audience and the actors are 10 to 50 feet away from you, you're more engaged.

What is it that made you interested there?

And if you can channel what those ideas are, those senses, it'll help your writing.

And then you'll start to get real ideas and become a better playwright.

- Great advice.

So thank you, Eric, for a great discussion about playwriting and all the behind the scenes actions it takes to see a play come to fruition.

This has not only been enlightening, but entertaining as well.

And we are lucky to have you in our community and can't wait to see what your plays do, see 'em on stage and beyond.

So I'm Stephanie York.

Thank you for joining us today on "Forum 360" for a global outlook with a local view.

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