 Welcome everybody back to Seagal Talks here on HowlRound. And so great of you to listen back in. So wonderful of HowlRound to host us again. It's been quite a journey so far after a break in August and between September we are back now with our Seagal Talks. We will do three of them in the week, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. For those of you who were able to listen into our earlier Seagal Talks, they were quite astonishing. We all learned so much listening to artists and how they experience this time of corona. And they are as we do know, so close to the moment experience in the moment, but also anticipating the future. And they have been on the right side of the history of progressive justice and of social issues. So since times are changing, things already have changed. It is important to listen to them. Now in Seagal Talks we will focus also on the political of our work. We will talk to producers, curators, thinkers, philosophers, academics about their work. We will also talk about the Seagal's plan for a 2022 city-wide festival, the New York International Festival of the Art, the one Martin Seagal once created, and the work leading up to it in all New York City parks. And we will slowly get there and learn from our participants and find out what will be the very best that we can do again. Thank you for tuning in and for listening and again, howl around. It's a great, great honor to be on the program. And I learned so much and we spoke to over 150 artists in 90 sessions. They were from almost 50 countries, between 50 and 100,000 people listened and to the talks we were stunned by the reactions. And it is also a sign of a changing landscape and we have to find out and we have to really listen and to monitor the scene. With us today, we have an extraordinary, how would one say, a worker in the vineyard of the theater or so someone who is a, if Casca would say the land for messa, someone who surveys the field and puts it together as, my friend, I'm honored to say in my colleague, Marvin Carlson, the Sydney E. Cone, a distinguished professor of theater, comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies. He has taught theater at the Graduate Center CUNY for a very long time. Together we created the Arab Stages Journal, the online for over three decades. He has created the European Stages Journal, also online at the Segal Theater and his research interests include traumatic theory and Western Europe and theater history and traumatic literature, especially 1819 and 20th century. And he is best known for his books as theories of the theater at Cornell, The Haunted Stage at Michigan Press, Hamlets, A Shed of Mirror, Theater and the Real and the latest one, 10,000 Nights. And I think I even have a copy here for 50 years, Marvin went obsessively to the theater for over 10,000 plays. He holds the world record most probably, the Guinness Book Record if there would be an entry. And so of course we are interested to know what is on Marvin's mind? How is he experiencing this time? What does he think about theater performance at the moment? And even so I say, this is about listening and radical listening. Now I talked so very much. First of all, Marvin, welcome to Segal Talks. I'm very nervous to be starting again. So it's great to have you with us. Where are you now? I'm in the den of my lovely Victorian home in Ithaca, New York. I started out my profession teaching at Cornell and I was there almost as long as I've been at CUNY, but not quite. I was here for 20 years. During that time, my wife and I bought a lovely Victorian home which has been our second home, our summer home ever since. And when CUNY closed down, obviously the thing for me to do is to come up here and join my wife and my dog in Ithaca. So I've been here ever since. That's where I am. Yeah, I know your New York residence is just across from the Graduate Center. So you can make it in under 60 seconds from your apartment to your desk, which is quite something. So Marvin, how is that time for you? How are you experiencing this? Well, it's a difficult time. I think it is for everybody. And I don't want to claim any special agonies, but I do think that professionally and socially, theater people certainly suffer as about as much as anybody, maybe as I am, certainly better off than many people are health-wise or financially, economically, which of course I'm very grateful being able to retreat to a lovely home like this. There are many wonderful things, but in terms of intellectual, cultural, social, emotional life, it's hard. And as I would claim, a kind of special problem for theater people because professionally, we're so closely tied to the living presence that not being able to go to the theater at all, not being able to meet with people and talk about the theater, not being able to in fact do but our lives are based around, is very hard. And by saying our lives are based around, that I have been an actor and director, but I'm primarily a theater goer. But as you say, Frank, I'm a obsessive, I think the word you use, and I think it's a good word. I'm obsessive about theater when all of my adult life, I have gone to the theater at least three or four times a week. I counted up a number of years ago and I have averaged over the years, about 250 plays a year. So that is several thousand. And of course, when all that stops, it is as traumatic for me as I'm sure it is, though maybe not financially so much, thank goodness, as for the actors, the people who do this, what do we do now? And so at the beginning of the first several weeks, I think I was just simply wandering around thinking, what do I do now? There's a story, a New England story about the guy who lives in an isolated home in Maine and really about the only connection he has with the outside world is that every hour, a hoghorn goes off in the neighborhood. And one night it breaks down and there's no sound at all. And he says, what was that? I feel that way about the theater. What is that? There's nothing going on. And that was very hard. I think my first big personal project was to figure out how to structure a life without theater. And my solution was to structure my day as well as I could so that I had other things that gave the day a kind of a shape. I think the two most important, well, you'll wonder, did I watch Zoom and so on? Yes, although I find Zoom troubling. There's wonderful work going on on Zoom, but every time I watch it, I think what it's not. So I have a kind of a troubled relationship to Zoom, although, of course, I do watch it. Frankly, I enjoy more watching old movies. They are what they are and they're not a kind of a substitute for something else. But I have two big intellectual projects. I have wanted for a number of years to study Chinese. And so my first couple of hours each morning are working on Chinese, which I feel good about. And there's no danger of running out of material or time on that. And then the other major intellectual thing you've already referred to, and that is not my most recent, but what A recent is a kind of theater going autobiography the 10,000 nights, which I, where I go back and write a short essay about the experience of going to the theater each year over a 50 year period from 1960 to 2010. When I finished the book, which I loved writing, loved thinking about and working on, as much as I loved it, it really never occurred to me that at some time in the future, I might want to add to it. It seemed to me it kind of formed a unit of 50 years. There didn't seem, I mean, obviously interesting stuff went on, but there didn't seem to be a particular reason to extend that. However, sitting around thinking, what am I going to do now with my free time? The thought then not surprisingly came back to me, especially since, well, it's been exactly 10 years since I did that 50 year survey. So there was a kind of logic in saying, why not add another decade? The book is divided into decades anyway, decade 2010 to 2020, and make the book the 16 years of theater before the play. And that's been my major intellectual project over the last several months, going back, choosing again, as I did the first one play from each year and writing about what that play meant to me and to the theater culture of the time. So those are the two big things that I've used to occupy myself. I do it on gardening, which gets me outdoors, a little bit of high English is easier to do upstate. That's sort of been the main focus of my work. Yeah, that's so very impressive. And what do you think? I mean, of course it's a change, but what do you think from looking at the field of theater for five decades now, six decades, what will be different? What do you think will happen to theater? The hardest thing in the world is to predict the future. And I think particularly now, everybody is trying to think, people are generally agreed, whatever we end up with after this session, it's not, we're not going to return to normal. You never do that anyway. Things move ahead, things change. The theater as much as anything, even the same play, we in theater, you and I and others that are theater aficionados, know just perhaps better than anybody that when you do Hamlet in the 60s, it's not the same as when you do Hamlet in the 70s or the 80s or the 90s. The play means different things then. And so I think in theater, we're particularly aware that the art changes and the way you think about the elements of the art change, but in quite unpredictable ways. And so I would, I feel like many mean danger of history. I can look back on the wreckage of the past, but my back is toward the future, not because I wanted that way, because that's the way we're built. And so I guess what I would, the only thing that I would say with as much assurance as I have of anything is that what I consider to be the essence of theater really, in which what we've given up is the living presence or the living co-presence of the audience and the actor. That is something that we've had in this art from the beginning and all around the globe. It's what we've lost now largely, but that will come back, the particular way that it will come back and the kind of versions that it will have. I've talked to some people who have said, well, this is now proven that we can get along without living theater. The theater and the future will be something that is more sophisticated and elaborate than Zoom, but it will be essentially digital. The living body, as we know it, is now sort of we're moving beyond that. I couldn't disagree more. I think as long as we are human beings, the one thing I'd be sure of is we will continue to entertain each other by telling stories and we will do it in the physical presence of each other. I think those are absolutely essential. Now, what form that may take, as I've looked at the 60s, as I've looked at the 2010s, the teens, whatever you call them, as opposed to the previous five decades, I think the most obvious change, particularly in the United States theater, but in the Western theater in general, has been the greater involvement of the audience, immersive theater, all kinds of interactive material. And that's moved to a central position in the last decade that it never had before. So here is a really quite unexpected elaboration of the theater. And I'm sure we'll see other quite unexpected elaborations, but even, or maybe especially, the immersive interactive theater, if anything, is a kind of extreme manifestation of what I talked about before. And that is the co-presence in the same space and time of the performer and the audience. If anything, immersive theater is a more extreme form of that. I think once again, you could say, well, all theater, in a sense, has suffered from its virtual extinction during the COVID epidemic. But if anything, immersive theater, even more so, because everything about immersive theater is challenged by not allowing people to get together. Now, I never did, I really have never gone back, actually, to answer your question of what do I see about looking over, well, I have to it as an extent. And that is that the theater is constantly changing and adapting to the surrounding social and cultural years. During the 60s, the theater everywhere, or certainly throughout the way, but to a significant extent in Japan and other places as well, it's very politically oriented, very much oriented toward that. So the things that are now going on or that are going on in different periods, in the 70s and 80s, and the society was very much concerned with identity, with the rise of feminism, with the rise of the Black theater and other ethnicities following gay and lesbian theater. All of those obviously reflected what was going on in the society as well. And me, the decade of the 70s in particular, to some extent the 80s, have a different flavor and experiment in different ways with material. And that will obviously continue to be the case, that the theater is very closely tied and always has been to the things that are occupying the culture itself. But once again, that's hard to anticipate. Once you've made the general principle, we should say, well, we can assume that the theater is gonna be tied closely to its culture as it always has been. But since we have no idea how that culture will develop or what the concerns or problems or challenges, that will be, then it's very difficult with any specificity to think, what's the theater going to do since it's so closely tied? Yeah, yeah, we'd say quite an unusual situation we really don't know. I mean, already in life, we somehow know we don't know, but now we really don't know what will happen and the big, big changes also till the end of the year. There's no vaccination. Spoke was Melanie Joseph this morning. She said, what will happen all? If the unemployment hell runs out by December for all the actors and musicians and people who work in and for the theater, millions, two millions. So it's quite challenging and still if there is a time where art and theater has something to say, it should be now. Well, exactly. And the problem is worse in many ways, the particular problem we're talking about in the United States and anywhere else. And that's because our major theater is a commercial theater. And it is, it surely is the worst possible combination economically, that is the theater is dependent on its economic success. I'm talking about the major theater, the Broadway theater because things get somewhat different when you get into smaller venues, but the main theater when the theater is both financed, well, theater is expensive anyway, no matter where you do it and what culture, it costs something to run up. There's a lot of people, there's a lot of material woods and so on. But that is combined in the United States with a long tradition of the state not supporting the theater as it does in Europe. And so even now as we speak, if I were in London or Paris or Berlin, I could go to the theater. Theaters are open, the big theaters, the main theaters in the country, the national, literally at this moment, I don't think I'm not sure the national opens, it opens within the next, within this week. The, as you know, the Berliner Ensemble and the Deutsches Theater have already been open for more than a week. The Carter de la Vie in Paris opens this week. This would be the equivalent of big Broadway houses or Lincoln Center or the Brooklyn Academy opening. Are they even thinking about opening? Of course not. Because the way that all these theaters are opening and this is perhaps a temporary measure, who knows? The way these are all opening, as you know, is by remodeling the theater so that you could have social distancing even within a major theater, the Olivier in London. The major stage of the national theater is reopening with a one man show and with the seating reduced by two thirds. There's only one third seats left. And they've taken out all the rest, as they did at the Berliner Ensemble. Well, if you're running the Brooklyn Academy or you're running the Majestic Theater on Broadway and somebody comes to you and says, we can reopen the theater, just take out two thirds of the seats. Well, who's going to pay for this? And the answer is nobody and therefore it won't happen. So, I mean, it could happen if let's say you decided, all right, we're going to reopen Hamilton, but it's now going to cost $3,000 a seat. You could do it that way. That's not very likely to happen. Though I guess anything is possible. And of course, that would mean only having, let's say 300 or 400 seats in the house, take all the rest of them out. That's the present solution. Now, it may be that indeed looking on into the future that theater spaces will be conceived in a different way that we will socially distance in our theaters. I rather think not. I think that there is something not just about an audience and they're feeling of being a crowd, a group. It's like a political rally or a sporting match. The crowd's feeling as the crowd is a very important part of the experience. Anybody who's ever done a comedy in a theater with a Sparks audience, even they may laugh enthusiastically, but it doesn't work. You've got to have a big audience. We've seen that with the late night comedians like Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert who are now doing one person things in their office or their home. And they were terrible the first week or so. And they knew they were. And they said, I don't know how to do this without people laughing and responding. So I think that this dispersed audience is not going to last. I don't think we'll necessarily go back to Sardine-packing Broadway model of theater. We may have a little leisure leisure, but I think having been part of a crowd is a part of the experience. I might just say a word or two, because it's relevant to this, about the fact that I went to my first live theater in since March two nights ago. Here in Ithaca, a very enterprising young man, Samuel Bugellan is his name. He's been associated in New York with the New Ohio Theater and with the Lark Theater. He has, and his colleagues have set up an experimental theater called the Cherry Arts Theater here in Ithaca. And this week they opened, they've been doing Zoom performances and they this week they did their first live performance. And I could talk more about it later if you wish. But right now I will only say that it was done out of doors. The characters were masked and the audience was limited to around 40 people. And they were, we all set out, we were encouraged to bring chairs though they had some. And we set up our chairs in little chalk circles that they called pods that were eight feet apart. And I love the performance, but still the audience didn't quite work. It was a comedy, the audience enjoyed it, they laughed, but it wasn't a real audience. It was a lot more satisfactory than any Zoom production I'd seen for me. But there still is another part of the dynamic that isn't quite there. Yeah, I know this is definitely very different experience of the moment of reality and of the arts. I guess one could get used to it, but if one knows about things, then that's what we miss once we are confronted again with new forms on your realities. Many think of you, Marvin, as the foremost historian of theater in the world through your work, your collection of real theater experience, but also looking back over centuries and also the involvement in European theater, Arab theater and American theater, of course. Is this period we are in, do you think there's anything that can be compared to work? Is there something where you feel there are parallels that could be drawn? Well, Frank, I thought about this. And of course, one can always draw parallels with certain part of the experience, but as a historian, I would say within recorded history of the theater, there's never been anything like this. I had a colleague email me from India a few months ago and said, how often in the history of the American theater has the New York theater been closed and literally not available? And how does this compare with those times? Well, there's only been a very few times. In 9-11, the theaters were all closed for a few days, but the Broadway theaters were back open in a few days, less than a week. The some off-broadway theaters never reopened. Again, this party goes back to commerce. That is, many people were afraid to go back to the theaters, obviously, in the weeks right after 9-11, but the city of New York felt that it was critical to get the entertainment industry back on its feet largely because of the largely to attract tourists. And so the city of New York and the state of New York put a lot of money into supporting the theaters, the big Broadway theater, so they could open their hurry. And they did open very quickly. There have been a few other times during a few major storms, not during the wars. There was an anchor strike which closed the theaters, you may remember, 30, 40 years ago. The theaters in Europe or elsewhere in the world, and this is a parallel that would have immediately come to mind, I think, have been closed because of the plague. As you know, during Tate Twitter's lifetime, the theaters in London were closed several times with the plague. And you would think, well, all right, that's kind of a parallel, but it is kind of a parallel. But as I've thought about it, it occurs to me that something I talked about earlier, that is people love to have other people act out stories for them. Even if it's just a single storyteller, this is almost universal. But a live reenactment or a live telling of some story is something people love to have. And when the theaters in Europe were closed during the Black Death, the Great Plague, theater did not cease to exist. What happened was you went off, as people do in the camera with a group of your friends off to the country, as I am right now in Ithaca, where you were out of the city and presumably out of danger, and then you brought in traveling companies like Shakespeare that were out on, I mean, when the plague was ravaging London, Shakespeare didn't look for other work. He and his company went out and toured around and went to country homes and castles and so on, like the traveling players in Hamlet. So theater in previous plagues, the shutdown has never been total. Even when the years after the fall of the Roman Empire, when all of the theaters in Europe were almost all of them were closed down, destroyed, the actors dispersed and so on, what little evidence we have suggests that they didn't all go into some other line of work. They went out like the traveling players in Shakespeare's time. And the only theater we have, or we know about in Europe in the next several hundred years is precisely that. People wandering around and traveling companies from place to place. And that went on during plague years as much as anywhere else. But that's not true now. That is because of the way that the dangers and the quick spread and easy spread of COVID, nobody has tried and wouldn't try and wouldn't be allowed to do it if they did try to set up traveling companies to sort of go around from town to town. They would be seen rightly as potential spreaders of the virus. So this is new. We've never had a time when the theater, not only, and of course, the other thing is the global reach of it. Even the black plague didn't go everywhere. Whereas the COVID is every continent is under lockdown. So in all of those ways, this is different as far as theater is concerned. We've never had anything exactly like this before. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is stunning. And as we also learned, mosques are closed for the first time in thousands of years, 2,000 years. There will be a vaccine. We all know nothing lasts forever, whether the good or the bad. So there is a big fear that things will go back to normal or how it was. And that wasn't already working or is connected to the problems we have. What do you think of the current state, let's say pre-COVID of New York theater? Was it working? Was it, is that the best way to organize it? What's your evaluation of someone who has really seen so much? What do you think of New York theater? Well, I love any theater. So the New York is not my favorite theater. And I think there are many changes I would make in it. The amount of talent in New York is astonishing. It's unequaled anywhere or, well, maybe really unequaled anywhere. And by that, I mean, really the producing talent. The choreographers in New York and the choruses are as maybe better than anything in the world. But, and there's certainly a competitive with anything in the world. The actors, the scenic designers, all of those artists, and the playwrights in so far as they work within a rather restricted boundary. And then we get into things, I don't like as well about the New York theater. For one thing, we are really the only advanced theater culture in the world that runs its theater entirely on commercial grounds. Well, it's major theater. And there are, of course, nonprofit theaters. Though even nonprofit terms kind of a joke in the United States. They're still very economically oriented and economically dependent whether they want to be or not. And I think nobody who is involved would deny this. So theater ought to be state-supported the way that art museums are. That would allow a greater variety of theater, a greater sense of experimentation and, and the other thing, and would connect into the other thing that bothers me about New York theater. And that is that, not surprisingly, it's very conservative. And I don't mean politically conservative, but I just mean, I mean, aesthetically conservative. There are, you don't take major chances very much in the New York theater. And that is, again, an economic question. One of the side issues of this, I'm not sure how much this is economic and how much it's cultural. And that is that the theater, the New York theater is not as engaged either with political thought, which is the obvious thing, but just intellectual thought generally. If you want to play that makes you think, you're better off going to a British play. The British theater makes you think in a way that the American theater ends up to. And that's both generally and specifically in terms of, in terms of the particular crises. That is, over the past decade, when we used to have theater, when I would go to Europe, the Germany or to France or to Eastern Europe, one major play, one significant play out of every three dealt with the refugee crisis and immigration. How many major New York plays have dealt with this? Now you might say, well, it's a bigger question in Europe, but it's one of the major questions of our time. I've seen a number of plays. Well, we're really quite a number of plays in Germany or elsewhere in Europe dealing with environmental issues and climate change. Occasionally in New York, you will get some play about that, but not in the major theaters. They just are not interested in these kinds of social and these kinds of social issues, especially if like immigration or climate change, they're politically controversial. Then the New York theater really won't go nearer. So all of those things I find as a kind of, well, again, I would use the word conservative, but not in a political sense. I wish in New York were in a New York theater. It's not the theater's fault, or the producer's fault, it's the fault of the system. And I think these things may be connected together, but maybe not. And that is that in Europe, in England, in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Spain, in Eastern Europe in general, certainly in Poland and so on. But within the culture, the theater is important. The theater is something that a culture intellectual person is interested in. In the United States, you and I, Frank, are interested in it. But the general public, even in New York, does not consider the theater an important part of American culture the way a German does. You, having been in both cultures, will know this. And I don't know to what extent that is due to, I don't know what's caused an effect. I mean, that in fact, the US government does not really support the theater. I don't know which comes first, but we are in a culture that historically has not regarded theater as central, the way it is regarded in Germany, for example, or in Poland or Europe. You have only, for physical evidence of this, you have only to go, let's say, a town the size of Ithaca, 30,000 people, maybe 50,000 when all the students are here. A town this size would have a permanent resident theater in Germany. I mean, well, as you know, well-equipped, what do we have? Well, we have Samuel Gellin, thank God, and his little Terry Arch thing. There are a couple of other community theaters and it's very nice to have them, but they are just little community theaters. So even on the most local level, you could see the difference between American theater and theater elsewhere. So that would be my complaint. It's been a bit of a dire tribe, but obviously I feel very strongly about this. No, no, no, of course, it's now exposed also that, as you say, that system, that way that's produced, you know, that the form of course defines, in a way, the content, the way things are done for you. And also if you, you know, compare it, you know, say it is essential, why is it essential to you? Why do we need theater? What do you think, as Marvin, what's, what's, why are you interested in it? Oh, well, it's a hard question really. I mean, it's sort of like saying, why do you enjoy listening to music? I mean, I'm a human being. These are things that hit me on a number of different levels, and some very intellectual and some not intellectual at all. I think the most honest answer, why do I keep going to theater, is that one time in 40 or 50, there is a moment when theater, where I think this is it. This is why I'm a human being. This is what I'm doing in the universe. And it's only once in every 50 or so years or so. For that experience, I've been to 100 shows, to get that once. It's only happened to me maybe a dozen times in my life. And I think people have found, people who are music lovers have, could say the same thing about, I think the arts in general. Now, again, you're talking really about, in a way, my religion, I might almost say. But to give you an honest answer, that's the honest answer. To give you a more rational answer, I would say that I've always been interested in storytelling and like a lot of people in theater, I came into theater by doing, I started out acting, I loved acting. I don't do much of it anymore, but I did play Andrew Jackson off of Broadway about 10 years ago. It was great. I love directing. I love the idea that you can be a collaborator with Schiller or Shakespeare, and make that work for other people and give them a kind of experience like that. All of that, I just, I'm entertained. I can't think for a pleasanter way of passing an evening than to go to a theater where you get all your senses stimulated and your intellect as well, where all your emotions are stimulated. It is one of the most complete aside from life itself, spiritual, emotional and intellectual experiences you can have packed into a short amount of time. That's what it is for me, it's all those things. Yeah, and we, as you pointed out in Europe, we think the access to healthcare, the access to education and the access to the arts, to theater is a basic human right, actually, what people are fighting for in the streets for everyone. Yes, yes, yes. Do you think you spoke about the forms that perhaps don't work? They don't produce that aesthetic results. You love somewhere else, even so a lot of, I think, smaller companies, as you know, and you are such a big supporter of it in New York, make the challenging plays, but don't make the ideas visible. It's just thinking by doing. You see your brain working on stage, but the support is just, it's heartbreaking to see the conditions and it's shocking. But do you think we need a new political theater in a way? Do we need something? And this is the theme of it now. So the political part of us, we are in the election year. Do you feel that theater has to re-engage? We accuse politicians that they lost the vote or they are no longer interested. What about theater? Have we also lost sight of, you know, the everyday person, the bus driver, the worker? That was for breath so important that everybody, to communicate ideas. Do you think it has to be a re-thinking of it or is it already happening? No, I'm not sure I understand the question, Frank. Will the political come back? Well, this is a tough question because it involves what you mean by political. And so let me start by taking, well, what may be a not very useful response to your question, but one that I think is the most honest answer I can give. And through that, let me tell you a story. Some years ago, right after indeed, the process was still going on when the Soviet troops were leaving the Baltic states, I was with a group of theater people that toured Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and there were still Russian tanks in the eastern part of these countries, but they were essentially independent. And what we did in addition to visiting, going to see theater, obviously we also spoke to theater directors about now that the Soviets are gone, what are you gonna do? And I'll never forget a particular interchange, just within Latvia, where at the National Theater, we were back in the kind of green room speaking to the director and he said, well, we're thinking about doing Neil Simon. And Janelle Rinald, who is a very politically oriented theorist and critic, who's written a lot about the British political theater, said, why on earth with your public and your interests, would you think about doing Neil Simon play? And he said, we're tired of doing political theater. We wanna do something that's not political. And Janelle, bless her heart, said, you couldn't do anything more political than Neil Simon. So that's by way of saying all theater is political, even doing non-political theater is a political action. So I have to say that to begin with, but that's not really the question you're asking. I think, and that is you're really asking questions about, because I'm part of it, because I've already brought this up, in the traditional sense of the word, that is what we might call engaged theater, rectian theater, or theater, like a lot of European theater, whether it's rectian or not, that directly raises political questions about the climate or immigration or whatever. Should we have more of that? Yes, of course we should have more of that. I don't think as long as the American theatrical system continues in the way it is, and I think it will after the pandemic. I don't think that will change the theater's economic or cultural position in any way. I don't think so. I hope that the pandemic will change in some very basic ways, some of our political assumptions, or economic assumptions, or assumptions about things like healthcare, for example. I hope, and I really to an extent believe that those were changed. I don't see anything, any reason that theater will, however, and that's partly because the American public at large recognizes that the healthcare system is broken and sees that it is important to fix it. The American public at large does not know whether the American theater is broken or not, and does not care. I mean at large, there really is no feeling that we really ought to have a theater that's more relevant. And so you'd have to make a culture change, and the COVID is not in any way, as it is with healthcare, working to change people's opinions about that. I'm not saying it should, I'm just saying it isn't. And there's no reason you should expect it to. So I guess the, I think there is a struggle that the arts in general and theater in particular have always had in the United States, and that is to encourage the general population to feel that the arts are as important as any other human activity. There is a certain understanding of that on a low level, that is to say, I think everybody feels it's nice if their children have painting classes and bring home drawings that they can put on the refrigerator and maybe play a musical instrument, that's wonderful. But when they become adults, they really tend to then feel, well, that's great for children and for leisure time, but it's not an essential part of one's life. That's obviously not true of everybody, but it's true of enough people that we don't have any push for a national theater or government supportive theater or whatever. We don't have enough push. I mean, nobody, it would be really quite utopian to have some group of people in a town the size of mythic or even damn good or Syracuse to say, we really ought to have a European style theater in this town, a really big theater and an opera house. We really ought to have those as any German town would have. Yeah. Yeah, it's quite stunning. Often they seem like two stars, different planets. They communicate in between and shuttles when go back and forth, but there are such vast differences. Well, talking about theater and you talked about these moments, if I look at your 10,000 book, in the 60s you wrote about the living theaters, the connections, Zero Mostel and Bancroft, Peter Brooks Marasad, Bretton Puppet's Fire, Hair, Jean-Louis Beveau, Kotowski, in the 70s it's Ron Coney, the Manhattan Project, Nushkin, Charles Ludlin, Foreman, George Strehler, Sherban, the Squad Theater, Peter Brooks, Conference of the Birth, the Wooster Group comes in later, the Mabou Mainz, it's called Harbor, Thomas Langhoff, the Market Theater, and then we have Reza Abdo, the Split Bridges, Anadewea Smith, Kushner, Tadashi Suzuki, Karen Bayer, Carol Churchill, Julie Tamer, Paula Vogel, and the 2000s you have, Moises Kaufman, Stephen Sondheim, Big Arts, Flickr, Leo Brewer, Stahlhaus, Iwo Vanhove, Castellucci, Remini Protocol, Signa, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and the Passion Place. You talked about some of those moments, which maybe to share with us, some of them, so we get an idea of what inspired you and something to look for. I think you're right, like in sports, how many bad games we watch, in between games, but sometimes something happens. Yeah, for that great play, do you remember the rest of your life? Yeah, it's true. So what are those moments? Which ones did you, did you? That's a great question, Frank, and let me however put it off for a moment, because I went to go back into 10,000 nights for just a moment, and then I'll go back to the question, which I want to do very much. Obviously, when I was putting together the book and decided to choose one play each year, this was the hardest part of the book, to say, okay, what is the one play from this year that I'm going to write about? Some years, it was difficult to think of a single play, that was that important. Other years, there were six or eight plays, and I had to figure out where I would go with it. The same process has obviously taken place when I thought of the last 10 years, and I want to just indulge myself a moment and tell you what the 10 plays are. Oh good, yeah. Other people can say, what kind of things are you thinking about now? I think that in a way, and this was true with the first book, there are certain plays that almost have to be talked about. They are so emblematic of an era or so popular, so much talked about, even if they're unpopular, that they have to be one of the, they have to be the play for that year. And I think only one of the last 10 years as that kind of play in it, and that is Hamilton. Hamilton has to be the play for that year. Oh, there are, and I would say, very close to Hamilton, not only because of what it represents, or not only because of its popularity, but also of what kind of theater it is and what it influences, man, and that is Sleep No More, the first immersive theater. Those two I started with in their particular years. And I'll just read you the list. I'll have it. Yeah, please. 2011, Sleep No More. 2012, Who Gards the Blood Knob. 2013, Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, it's a post-electric drama. 2014, I remember Mama. That already was set because I had included that in the- Say again, I think it got cut off. I remember Mama. Mama. That was the epilogue of the first book. 2015, Hamilton. 2016, Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. 2017, Game Scrug, Supremacy, and many of you all consider that an odd choice, but some of my others were also. 2018, Non-Fabris, Mount Olympus. 2019, The Jungle at St. Anne's. And 2020 is us playing. So, just to give you an idea, I think one thing I might say generally, and I didn't think about this until I put it all together, is the importance, at least in my theater experience and the way I think about theater, of the rise of immersive theater. Four of these are immersive theater productions. And others have an underground relation to that. In they are examples of what we used to call total theater. There's a kind of, this is a negative word, but theatrical overkill that's been operating in the last decade. And I find that really quite fascinating. Now, you can match your question. Yeah, there have been several moments, some of them very big, some of them rather small. And I guess I can say, I know that when they happen, because, and this is an experience I'm sure that you have had, I'm sure everyone has had under different stimuli. And that is, I find it very close to what T.S. Eliot talks about as the religious experience of what he calls the moment in the Rose Garden, where there is the moment of, he says the intersection of the timeless with time, where time stops and you're totally into that moment. For me, it's almost literally, people talk about a chill running down your spine. That is almost literally true. There's a kind of trembling. And it comes into my mind almost in words, this is it. This is the reason I do this. Now to an example or two. Certainly one such example was at the end or near the end of George O. Strahler's production of King Lear. He did this inside a circus tent, that is the backdrop of the stage was a huge canvas that covered the whole back of the stage. And the main at playing area was a circus circle with sand in it. And everybody was, all the characters were in clown type costumes. It was a very dark clown show, but it was a clown show. At the, all of this went on inside the ring and various kind of clown routines were used. When Lear comes in with the body of Cordelia, the stage was quiet. There were people on stage, but everything was kind of frozen. And the curtain, the circus tent, so we were all inside this huge tent that covered the entire background. A sword was pushed into the canvas from behind, just erupting out and down so that a slice was cut open. And it was as if the sky was being slid open. That had been the backdrop all the way through. It slid it through. And Lear came through the crack carrying Cordelia's body. That moment was such a moment. It broke open the whole universe somehow. And I suspect many people felt that. Some of the others are a little more virtual, but not really. Another moment, much less, almost calculatedly non-theatrical that had the same effect to me, was when Sir Lawrence Olivier was doing a long day's journey and tonight at the National Theater of Great Britain. He brought that show to New York. And there is a moment in the first act, I believe it is, that is normally a kind of throwaway moment. And Olivier made it into one of these kinds of moments. And you may or may not remember, there's a conversation he is having with his son at the kitchen or dining room table. And they've gotten really very, very personal and revealed things about their hidden lives to each other, which is sort of the whole play that they've never talked about before. And in the midst of this, they've been talking about, you remember an important part of the play is the miserliness of the old actor and the reason that his wife is addicted to drugs is that he tried to save money when she would feel, take her to a doctor or butter on drugs. But he's wasted the family's orphan buying worthless land and so on. So this motif about his miserliness is run through the play. And in the midst of this very emotional scene, he stops his son and says, do you mind if I turn down the light? It's a little too bright in here. Now, it's a great symbolic line about just, they're getting in emotionally too deep. But it also shows he might be able to save a few pennies if he turns out the line. Okay, it's a wonderful line and a wonderful character line. But the way Olivier decided to do this, was really quite astonishing. He didn't walk over to the wall and turn a switch or pull a chain from the light to turn it off as is normally done. He climbed up on the table and reached up, lick his fingers to unscrew the light. And that's the way he turned it off. However, just as he licked his fingers and started to reach up to unscrew the light, he felt the light hitting him from very close. And suddenly the actor in him came out. And with that light on his face, he turned out to the audience, just looked at us. And suddenly we saw he had not only turned into Tyrone, the actor by the light, but he'd also turned into Sir Laurence Olivier. This was Laurence Olivier showing us what the theater was. And in both of these cases, all kinds of echoes go out that are very hard to articulate because they are, I mean, they are visual, emotional. And they're highly symbolic. They're not just symbolic of Lyriuk's suffering or Olivier's miserliness. They are also something about be aware that what you are watching is something the theater does and does it better than anybody else. There is something and I said, this is it. This is why I go. I can give you others, but those are two very clear examples. Yeah, no, they stand for the other ones. And I understand, I mean, in a recent interview in this Egyptian magazine, you said, Zoom is not theater, you said it's something different and it's right and it will once, it will be available, Zoom might be an additional way of other things, but it's not going to stay in that sense as a form. Yeah, Marvin, really, really, and thank you for sharing and for tuning in. And we have all the respect for your work over the decades, the generations of scholars and artists, Bola Vogel was one of your students, many of artists and scholars you have produced and we all know you have students who are already retired and you are still going strong one more year with us and bring all the experience. And this is quite a reminder to say that in the history of theater, the current moment is unparalleled and that is quite something to really think about it's good for why we need it and finding ways to create that closeness, perhaps an outside these system that will not change as you said, they are engraved and reflect also the morals and values of a society or as Jean-Luc Nancy, he said, he underbroke the value of the value. He said, he said theater, but also of life, you have to say, when do we open up or not? What's the value of the value of life? We know it has one, these are big, big questions. So this is a door you opened in the curtain, you also now cut open and into the next round of the Segal Talks where we are finding out what needs to be done, what should be done, our idea of creating was all presented in New York at 2022 festival, but also including the parks, everybody organizations to do that, what you said, immersive experience, including audiences and participation. That's not just a lip statement, but it's really a deep engagement as many, many companies are doing that already. Here at the Segal Talk for this week, tomorrow we go to a Budapest to Hungary and we will hear from Andras Furgash, the great Alaslo Upor and the young student, Milovits of the closing of a legendary institution, the theater and film school in Budapest, the closing of the current model that government is going to privatize it or already has it, will fire everybody and end an openness, we see it free and liberal way, the one that you are longing for. So it's also quite an ask for help, for support for our colleagues in Hungary, the country as we know is moving in a direction that I think is dangerous. And there's also a question the values of the enlightenment, of the ideas, that very basic ideas of democracy. And Friday we go back to our friends from Lebanon, Sahara, Asaf and Deemamata, right after that big explosion. We thought to talk to them also together with Hal Rao and they say it was too close, they couldn't really, but now we get an update from both of them. And also to see if there's a way that perhaps New York theater with all the complications we have here, the route is worse in what is happening there, it's shocking and if there is a way to show our solidarity. And then going on, we will talk to New York producers and the people who run the parks or communities who do already great work and there's so much already happening, nobody needs us, perhaps we can combine them also in the creation of a festival. Someone said on the Seagull Talks that the Avignon Festival, the great festival, perhaps the greatest in the world at the moment, was created after World War II. I think there should be a great festival celebrating life in the city of New York and artist contribution. We have to really work for that. And Morgan Jeunesse said if Joe Pab would be alive, he would do work in the parks. He would engage people, he would show work there. He was the one who said, when I was a young kid coming from Poland, my mom sent me to the library and I got a Shakespeare book for free. If I had to pay for it, I never would have gotten the book out. And then he said, Shakespeare should be free or the theater should be free. That was his basic idea. And I think we have to go back in our steps and reinvent and I invite everybody to participate. So, Marvin, thank you really for being with us. I want everybody also about your book, but the short history of theater and small book, there's an overview on global theater, how also theater in Asia, Europe, in Africa, there's quite I think a brilliant collection of thoughts and hints and reflections on the incredible kaleidoscope of theater and performance, 1,000 year old traditions and new developing forms. So Marvin, thank you. And I hope we didn't help you back too much from your lunch. Say hi to Pat and we hope to see you whenever we see you when CUNY is opened again, our building is closed. It's incredibly hard to get in. It's quite a devastating time for everybody, also for students, but I hope that also our talks will help to create some meaning and to find some solutions. Thank you all really, really for listening to us, audience, members. I know there's so much and much, much more in the fall than and we started, we started right away in March over four months with daily programming and how around for hosting at Andy Lerner at the Segal Center and all the best. I hope to see you again soon. Stay safe and stay tuned. And really thank you all for participating. It means the world to us. Thank you.